The Wounded Muse: A Novel - Softcover

Delaney, Robert F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1771613270 ISBN 13: 9781771613279

Verlag: MOSAIC PR, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Qiang returns to his homeland of China from Silicon Valley to find Beijing undergoing a chaotic transformation in the lead up to hosting the 2008 Olympic Games. Wrecking balls are knocking down entire neighborhoods to make way for new structures more in line with the government’s vision of a modern China. The tumult inspires Qiang to shoot a documentary about the loss of affordable housing, which draws the attention of public security officials. When Qiang is suddenly arrested by local police, it falls on his friend Jake, an American journalist who admires Qiang and his work, to try to figure out how to end the detention. With few options, Jake enlists the help of those he’s not sure he can trust. Dawei, a Chinese itinerant Jake befriended years earlier, returns to Beijing in the midst of a cat-and-mouse game Jake is playing with the authorities to retrieve a memento that has suddenly become extremely valuable. Dawei becomes ensnared in a plan to force the authorities to release Qiang, and Jake must then decide who survives. Based on real events, Robert F. Delaney’s The Wounded Muse takes readers to a city and country undergoing a transformation on a scale previously unseen, where in the shadowed wreckage of forgotten communities people are pushed to psychological extremes to secure their position.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Delaney has been covering China as a journalist for Dow Jones Newswires, Bloomberg News, and South China Morning Post since 1995. Many of the themes for The Wounded Muse, Robert’s first novel, were first developed in Route 1 to China, a collection of short stories that won Robert “First Runner Up” in the University of Toronto – Penguin Random House Creative Writing Competition in 2012.

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The Wounded Muse

A Novel

By Robert F. Delaney

Mosaic Press

Copyright © 2018 Robert F. Delaney
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77161-327-9

CHAPTER 1

BEIJING

June, 2006

Qiang squints as he checks the framing on the display of a camera resting on Jake's head. Facing a condemned housing block with just a few units still inhabited, Jake is a tripod. Qiang wants the right balance of human activity and dying daylight, divided about one-third from the top of the frame by the building's roofline. Lampposts along the footpath and light fixtures around the entrance have already been harvested for scrap metal, leaving holes and gnarled wires springing out like petrified eels. Trucks roll along the street behind them, heading to or from an onramp to the Third Ring or the neighbourhoods on the other side where more five- storey walk-ups await the wrecking ball. There's no stopping anymore in this area, now a dark patch slated to rejoin the fabric of the sprawling city in a year or two when glass towers will rise from the mulch of recent history.

Several hundred metres away, another building like the one Qiang and Jake are facing is now rubble. A jackhammer sends shock waves through the air like artillery fire as workers decimate the last piece of foundation. The air is a fog of diesel fumes and concrete smashed into an ultra-fine powder.

A breeze picks up. Hot and dry from the Gobi Desert many miles to the northwest, it pushes through the city, a reminder that Beijing, despite its large and ever-growing scale, is just a small, man-made interruption in a vast, arid plain. Jake can feel desert dust mixed with minerals from the demolition site accumulate around the hairs in his nostrils and scrunches his face, which does nothing to loosen the invasive material. In the meantime, he will focus on other cravings. Perhaps a mojito tonight instead of red wine when he and Qiang head to one of the bars in the Embassy District. Summer has kicked in and it's the season for other avenues to intoxication. Besides, the only way to make red wine enjoyable in this heat is to drop an ice cube into it. That's what his Aunt Tracy, back in Kentucky, would have done. So Jake won't.

"How's it look?" he asks.

"Getting there," Qiang says quietly as he makes micro-adjustments.

Jake senses Qiang's concentration, as tangible as the camera on his head, so he focuses on the institutional blues and greens inside the still-inhabited apartments in case Qiang needs help remembering what was where. White, pastel blue and mint green had been the only colours available for interior walls until about a decade ago when wealth sprouted in the form of brighter hues that stand out in a cityscape coated in soot and desert dust. Restaurants began dressing their walls with large format photos of tropical coves, English gardens or North American autumnal landscapes. Standard issue water thermoses and washbasins churned out since the Cultural Revolution in dour maroon-tinged metal and white enamel gave way to colours inspired by new wave British pop from the 1980s.

By the time saturated colours began to re-appear in Beijing, like desert flowers after a once-in-a-generation rainstorm, the residents of the building Qiang is now documenting knew there was no point in repainting. The neighbourhood was marked for demolition. Just inside the Third Ring, the area would surely go to the most well-connected developer. It was just a matter of time before a work crew would make its way to this district to paint the character [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] onto the walls. Demolish.

Wherever it appears, the character serves notice that residents have about a month to take their subsidy for an apartment somewhere beyond the Fourth or Fifth Rings. And so most of them do just that, leaving behind the street life that had teemed there for decades, if not centuries, where the business of eateries and shops housed in rough plaster and brick structures spilled onto the sidewalks where kitchen workers washed cookware and plates, peddlers sold everything from plastic combs to alarm clocks to mobile phone cases and barbers equipped with scissors, a wooden chair and a dented metal basin trimmed hair.

City planners have been doing much to make the migration more palatable. Giant machines are burrowing under the city, grinding out a dozen new subway lines to make life beyond the Fourth ring more livable. So, drawn to new residential towers with elevators, reliable heat and running water, few of the residents would have felt much fondness for the rigged and ramshackle lives they abandoned. Felt even less for neighbours, the troubled minority, who were left surrounded by darkness, satisfied enough with the work unit housing that had defined their lives.

Jake now wonders about Qiang's documentary subjects. Each unit still inhabited its own little diorama containing the story of a retired bureaucrat or state worker, each one a decision to defy authority. They remind Jake about the combination of choices, determination and luck that landed him here in Beijing, living his own life of resistance half a world away from his roots.

Qiang's lens has brought this understanding into focus. For more than a decade, Jake had watched with detachment as these communities disappeared, wondering only what gleaming structures would take their place. What new dining option would open its doors to a population that's come to expect nothing but new. Nearly twenty years after 1989, the last spasm of a very bad century, the chaos has dissolved into perfect, modern buildings. Each a promise of comfort and beauty in exchange for dreams of things less tangible.

Jake met Qiang a year earlier. A friend gave him a heads up that a newbie was relocating to Beijing and asked if Jake would be kind enough to introduce Qiang to some friends, maybe a place where he'd get a chance to talk to some reporters? Jake obliged and took him, literally and figuratively, to the centre of the city's expat social scene, the semi-annual soiree at the penthouse apartment of a Swiss banker.

"This is history," Qiang said to Jake as they looked down from the terrace at a pile of rubble that would eventually become the third stage of the China World Center. "Usually, you need a load of academics to make the calls on what constitutes a new era but anyone with eyes knows this is a new world."

The first two China World Towers, flanking the five-star China World Hotel, had marked the easternmost extent of central Beijing. Developers have since moved further out, jumping the Third Ring and pushing more residents out beyond the Fourth.

"Someone needs to document this with the right lens," Qiang said. "To the Western press, this is like Mordor. To the state press, this is the rebirth of civilization."

Qiang's conviction moved Jake. Others might have seen it as righteous self-possession but Jake took Qiang's declaration as a sort of grounding. He saw someone so embedded in a cause that everything else about a wealthy banker's party on a Saturday night, atop a building in the centre of the most important city in the world, meant nothing. The quips about a moronic U.S. president, the ironic phrases emblazoned on t-shirts, "The Revolution's Children Now Run the Show", paired with fine linen blazers and converse sneakers, the puffs of hash and Blondie's Heart of Glass thumping through the sound system all seemed trite.

Qiang had made sense of the economic growth and industrial output numbers, always orders of magnitude ahead of anywhere else in the world, that Jake had been writing about every day. He apparently didn't have eyes...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: MOSAIC PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1771613270
• ISBN 13: 9781771613279
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar