Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization - Softcover

Alexander, Jan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1947548042 ISBN 13: 9781947548046

Verlag: REGAL HOUSE PUB, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Ming, born in a bleak outpost of Sichuan province, finds an unexpected glimpse of the world beyond when she meets a talking monkey with golden eyes and supernatural abilities&;the immortal Monkey King, with whom Ming&;s destiny is inextricably intertwined. Determined to become a writer, Ming finds her way to New York, but to make ends meet she goes to work for a crime ring and returns to China on the lam. Hope arrives in the form of her American friend Zoe. Together, they travel to the village of Ming&;s birth, where the clouds writhe like phantoms and the rain never stops, where Ming and Zoe join forces with a certain down-and-out immortal who has an ambitious plan to save the world from capitalism run amok. When a nation of tycoons and financiers suddenly and inexplicably decide that the key to happiness lies in sharing one&;s wealth and pursuing a contemplative life, nobody suspects the newly formed tech company run by Ming, Zoe, and William Sun. Hyper-capitalist China rapidly becomes a paradise for artists, thinkers, and lovers&;a rollicking playground where the air is clean and the strangest words you can hear are, &;I can&;t afford it!&; But it&;s a short-lived Xanadu once human nature begins to intervene. In Ms. Ming&;s Guide to Civilization, as in life and politics, every action provokes an equal and opposite reaction.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jan Alexander is the author of the novel Getting to Lamma and co-author of the nonfiction book Bad Girls of the Silver Screen. Her short fiction has appeared in 34th Parallel, Everyday Fiction, Neworld Review, and Silver Birch Press. She has written about business and travel for many publications and taught Chinese history at Brooklyn College. She lives in New York.

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Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization

By Jan Alexander

Regal House Publishing, LLC

Copyright © 2019 Jan Alexander
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-947548-04-6

CHAPTER 1

Ming Cheng was born in the cruelest place on earth — a village that sprawled through six green hills, so far out west in Sichuan province that the maps had no names for what was there. The village lay beneath a dome of clouds, with rain that could bite right through her clothes. Hardly anyone came through and no one left; a bus was supposed to pass through town once a week, but many days it couldn't get through the clouds and was forced to take another route.

Ming's town was called Yang Guang, or Sunshine Village, and everyone thought that was a mean joke. Mama and Papa said the sun used to shine there, though. They could tell, from the deep gorge where the Tuo River ran, that a million years ago the rains had made a mighty river. Then the sun had dried it out, then the rains had come, then the sun, then the rains had come again and carved a deeper riverbed, then the sun again and then the rain.

Mama and Papa had named her Xiao Ming, which meant "Little Bright One." They told her she was their bright little pearl, but Ming had a shard of mirror, and the mirror told her that was a joke too; she was an ugly girl, with grownup teeth coming in rotten. At least she wasn't a monkey.

There was a monkey hiding in the village, Ming knew — a monkey that could talk. She was only eight when she first saw him, and she kept it secret. If she'd told anyone that she'd met a talking monkey, the people would have called a struggle meeting, dragged her up the fourth hill to the amphitheater, put her on the stage and pitched stones at her. "Enemy of the revolution, you believe in the olds, the superstitions!" they would have jeered.

Things were supposed to be different now that Mao Zedong was dead. He'd died the same year Ming was born, 1976. Chairman Mao had sent Mama and Papa to Sunshine Village because they were scientists, and the revolution needed them to help make silicon products for the Chinese army. So in 1969, they'd boarded a train from Beijing with at least a thousand other people, carrying just one suitcase, Mama pregnant with Ming's big brother Han, not knowing where they were going until the train stopped in the Sichuan city of Chengdu and a local Army sergeant stepped on and called out their names.

The revolution still needed Mama and Papa. But now the people of Sunshine Village would watch their new leader, Deng Xiao Ping, on television, urging them to get rich so that they'd help make China strong and glorious, and they knew that somehow the new ways just couldn't get through the clouds that surrounded them.

Ming saw the monkey twice — the first time, in the pagoda. Except for the Red Guards who'd destroyed the old idols, nobody had gone near the pagoda in over a hundred years. Villagers said pale-haired foreign devils lived at the top of the pagoda, nine stories up, waiting to swat you with X-rays that would make you shrivel down into a tiny pebble. Ming wondered, though, if she might be able to convince the foreign spies to whisk her away, outside the wall of clouds to some faraway land with beautiful flowers and lots to eat. So one day after school, she crept up to the doorway, trembling all over, but she made herself peek inside. There was only a thick blackness and a strong animal scent. Then, suddenly, she saw two fiery golden circles staring right back at her. With the light from those golden eyes she could just make out a monkey form.

"Are you the Monkey King?" she asked. The golden eyes were just like the ones in her old picture book, the one about the myth of the immortal Monkey King. Even Mao Zedong had turned out to be mortal, but the Monkey King, born, or so the legend said, from a stone egg, had reached the highest form of enlightenment. He had trained his mind so that his spirit could come back from the heavens; on earth, he could transform himself into seventy-two different shapes, from monkey to man, or from butterfly to gnat. He could also somersault across oceans and fly like a bird.

Papa had read stories to Ming about the Monkey King and how mischievous he could be. In one story, the Monkey King got drunk on peach wine and stomped all over a banquet table. But he also protected the powerless, and he could fell a greedy warlord with one forward kick. What Ming loved most of all, however, was the ancient myth that the stone egg from which he had hatched was located somewhere along the cliffs near Sunshine Village. Papa told her another tale, about how the Monkey King had flirted with many ladies, but his true love was a poor peasant maiden named Zenia, who had lived in Sunshine Village. There was an old superstition — not that anyone believed in superstitious old stories now — that the chilly rain was a curse Zenia had put upon the village when she was deprived of her Monkey King's love.

With those golden eyes practically daring her to believe in some terrible feudalist myth, Ming glanced behind her, terrified someone might have seen her venturing toward the old pagoda. When she turned back, the eyes and the monkey form were gone. She shivered, the winter chill biting through the holes in her jacket, and her stomach let out a savage growl. Sometimes when she closed her eyes, she saw pigs, tigers, and monkeys flying — Mama and Papa said these were hunger visions. Of course, this monkey, these eyes, had to be one of those visions. It was the last week of January and the pound of pork that Sichuan State Sunshine Village Silicon Works Enterprises had provided on the first of the month was long gone. Mama's vegetable patch lay beneath a blanket of snow, and all they had to eat was the rice Mama boiled three times to make it puffy.

As she walked home, Ming composed a poem in her head. "The monkey's golden eyes of fire / A land beyond the clouds, much higher."

Ming spotted the monkey again just a few days later. She was walking the long route home from school — the one Mama and Papa said she must never take because she might get lost in the pine grove, or fall off the cliff. Ming took the forbidden route whenever no one was around to see her turn into the pine woods, because getting lost seemed like a good way to have something exciting happen. A massive stone Buddha sat on the cliff; some sculptor in the nineteenth century had carved it from granite, smoothing the big round thighs and belly, and the flowing robes. For some reason, the sculptor had left the face incomplete, leaving a pocked slab of stone instead of a mouth to chant and eyes to guard the river. Beside the Buddha was a dark black hole of a cave. The earth could swallow you up if you went in there, people said.

The clouds grew darker as she wandered through the pine forest, and a rain began to fall. Ming sloshed through fresh puddles down toward the Buddha. She opened her mouth to swallow raindrops and felt them tickle her throat. But they dissolved into nothing long before they might have reached the empty space that was her stomach. Then suddenly the monkey appeared from nowhere, leaping up to sit on the Buddha's shoulder. Ming stared at him, transfixed, wondering if she really was crazy.

"Do you have any peaches?" the monkey asked. His voice was deep, sending out sound waves that she could almost feel like a palpable force against her skin. Tears filled his eyes as he said the word peaches.

"What do peaches look like?"

"Or a banana?"

Ming had seen a bunch of bananas once in a movie at the village cinema.

"Modern Chinese...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: REGAL HOUSE PUB
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1947548042
• ISBN 13: 9781947548046
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 291
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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