Asian Pulp Read online

  ASIAN PULP

  Edited by Tommy Hancock and Morgan McKay

  Published by Pro Se Press

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters in this publication are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. No part or whole of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing of the publisher.

  Copyright © 2015 Pro Se Productions

  How Pulp Saved Me © 2015 by Leonard Chang

  The Oriental Hair Poets © 2015 by Don Lee

  “The Oriental Hair Poets” first appeared in the anthology Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane (Akashic Books)

  The Celestial © 2015 by Naomi Hirahara

  The Master Of Tea © 2015 by Kimberly Richardson

  Hatchet Man © 2015 by Percival Constantine

  China City Flame © 2015 by William F. Wu

  Bret Khodo, Agent of C.O.D.E. © 2015 by Gary Phillips

  The Sushi Bar at the Edge of Forever © 2015 by Calvin McMillin

  “The Sushi Bar at the Edge of Forever” first appeared in a slightly different form in Hawai’i Review

  Bones of the Rebellion © 2015 by Mark Finn

  Dead Weight © 2015 by Dale Furutani

  Filial Daughter © 2015 by Steph Cha

  Ghosts of August © 2015 by Henry Chang

  The Face of the Yuan Gui © 2015 by Sean Taylor

  The Curse of Cloud Castle © 2015 by Gigi Pandian

  The Twittering of Sparrows © 2015 by Amy L. Herring

  Lotus Ronin © 2015 by Alan J. Porter

  The Opium Dragon © 2015 by David C. Smith

  All rights reserved.

  CONTENTS

  HOW PULP SAVED ME

  by Leonard Chang

  THE ORIENTAL HAIR POETS

  by Don Lee

  THE CELESTIAL

  by Naomi Hirahara

  THE MASTER OF TEA

  by Kimberly Richardson

  HATCHET MAN

  by Percival Constantine

  CHINA CITY FLAME

  by William F. Wu

  BRET KHODO, AGENT OF C.O.D.E.

  by Gary Phillips

  THE SUSHI BAR AT THE EDGE OF FOREVER

  by Calvin McMillin

  BONES OF THE REBELLION

  by Mark Finn

  DEAD WEIGHT

  by Dale Furutani

  FILIAL DAUGHTER

  by Steph Cha

  GHOSTS OF AUGUST

  by Henry Chang

  THE FACE OF THE YUAN GUI

  by Sean Taylor

  THE CURSE OF CLOUD CASTLE

  by Gigi Pandian

  THE TWITTERING OF SPARROWS

  by Louise Herring-Jones

  LOTUS RONIN

  by Alan J. Porter

  THE OPIUM DRAGON

  by David C. Smith

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  HOW PULP SAVED ME

  by

  Leonard Chang

  — :: —

  I come from a long line of criminals. My paternal great grandfather was allegedly some kind of corrupt landowner in Korea, the story never clear but the implication strong; my grandfather was an opium smuggler who would disappear for weeks into China and re-emerge in Korea with drugs to sell—often my father as a child had to go in search of him; and my father—ah, my father, whose nefarious and secret dealings wouldn’t come out until later, a former Korean Navy SEAL who emigrated to the U.S. and worked for the wrong people, but I plan to write quite a bit about his alleged mobbed-up connections in New York City one day. Right now it’d get me in too much trouble.

  That’s why crime fiction and all its incarnations appealed to me: I had violence and grit from my father. Yet from my mother’s side: scholars, artists, teachers. My mother introduced me to Twain, Dickens, Hawthorne, Faulkner. A deep love of reading and literature. And when I began to seek out fiction that spoke to me, I searched for that union of opposites, a disastrous union in the form of my parents, but a beautiful hybrid in pulp crime fiction: the literature of criminals.

  The Yin and Yang of my parents, the ebb and flow of soft and hard, day and night, silk and grit continued throughout my adult life. I studied philosophy, and though I enjoyed the ideas, I found something missing in the world of analytical reasoning and syllogistic logic—I missed the human element, the connection of people and emotion and family, the excitement of life—and one evening while browsing in the used bookstores I rediscovered the crime section. I read The Maltese Falcon and saw something new: existential underpinnings in the words of Hammett. The “Flitcraft parable” in the novel (which I won’t recount here because if you haven’t read that novel, shame on you) revealed the irrationality and absurdity of life. This was philosophical literature at its most compelling.

  I began to read more Ross Macdonald than Descartes. I studied Chandler and Hammett more closely than Kierkegaard and Sartre. Then I discovered that Camus, before writing The Stranger, read and re-read James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, and in fact modeled his emotionless, deadened prose on Cain’s work, and it all made sense. Here was the union I was searching for.

  But it spread beyond crime novels: I found kinships in Elmore Leonard’s Westerns, in Asimov and Heinlein’s Science Fiction—action, love, ideas, other worlds, other lives. It was escapism from a difficult life, catharsis in lives I wanted to live, redemption in characters told so unabashedly authentically.

  The ebb and flow continued as I became a writer, struggling to find my voice. I wrote about race, about family, about violence, and also struggled with my familial legacies. My own family fell apart with a divorce, friends dying unexpectedly, and I became enmeshed in a crisis of faith and art. I asked myself what was the point of this, of anything? My philosophical quest re-emerged, and again I found answers in pulp. I picked up a novel I had read before, Richard Stark’s first Parker novel, The Hunter. Stark was one of Donald E. Westlake’s pseudonyms, and I always found comfort in the purity of his characters and his prose. Parker says in a vengeful moment, “I’m going to drink his blood, I’m going to chew up his heart and spit it into the gutter for the dogs to raise a leg at. I’m going to peel the skin off him and rip out his veins and hang him with them.” It made me smile. Purity of emotion splayed out on the page. The character of Parker was singularly devoted to his quest, and the cleanliness of this line appealed to me. This entire novel made sense to me. Something here was important, and I needed to know why.

  I began researching pulp fiction, particularly noir pulp, trying to understand why it appealed to me so deeply. I found that the emergence of noir in the 1920s mirrored the emergence of Modernism in post-World War I—in the same way Hemingway was trying to write in a decimated post-romantic and post-abstract world, clarifying his prose and his characters in this new frightening modern era, Hammett was similarly responding to the previous aesthetics. No more drawing room mysteries with endearing amateur sleuths solving puzzles; this was a hard world with hard criminals and the detectives were often as transgressive as the criminals themselves. Moral lines blurred. Life was complicated in art as it was in real life. And this new style of writing was called pulp because of the inexpensive paper it was printed on, intended for a mass audience—literature for everyone.

  The full emergence of this sensibility crested after WWII, when veterans returned shell-shocked, unable to turn off the brutality of the war, when America had suffered through depression and then worldwide carnage, and crime and capitalism emerged hand-in-hand. Pulp fiction emphasized a more seismic shift away from the classic
al stories and unambiguous morality to the labyrinthine and arbitrary new world—a world of grit, of night and shadows. As Borges said, “The night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.” We search for the purity of the experience to help understand it.

  The world of pulp fiction was a world that I understood—it was a reaction to trauma, both as art and as catharsis. Personal trauma. Emotional trauma. Physical trauma. National trauma. This is why I responded to it, why I immersed myself in it. And why, whenever I was in a personal and artistic crisis, it saved me. Fiction is a reflection of and commentary on life, and I needed to find a reflection of and commentary on my life.

  That there weren’t any Asian Americans in the pulp I was reading wasn’t a problem (or if there were Asians they tended to be dismissible stereotypes)—no, not a problem at all, but actually an opportunity. I’ve always viewed writing as providing myself with more reading material. I write what I can’t find out there. Why not have a Korean American act as a private eye, and infuse in his character all the traits I wanted to see but haven’t? Why not write about Korean American gangsters, criminals, and detectives? And this is where we, as writers, all began moving toward: writing about people we want to see on the page, in lives and stories that speak to us.

  And here we’ve arrived, with me introducing ASIAN PULP, an anthology that I would’ve sought out and kept as my Bible had it appeared when I was first a struggling student, then a struggling writer, then an adult searching for answers. Although I’ve found a modicum of peace and harmony in my composition of opposites, I look forward to further entertainment and insight within these pages. Perhaps even answers. I hope you find some too.

  THE ORIENTAL HAIR POETS

  by

  Don Lee

  — :: —

  This was her, he figured. The poet. That was the first thing Marcella Ahn had said on the phone, that she was a poet. She was, in fact, the über-image of a poet, straight black hair hanging to mid-thigh, midnight-blue velvet pants, lace-up black boots, flouncy white Victorian blouse cinched by a thick leather belt. She was pretty in a severe way, too much makeup, lots of foundation and powder, deep claret lipstick, early thirties, maybe. Not his type. She stumbled through Café Pamplona’s small door and, spotting Toua, clomped to his table. “Am I late? Sorry. I’m not quite awake. It’s a little early in the day for me.” It was one-thirty in the afternoon.

  She ordered a double espresso and gathered her hair, the ruffled cuffs of her blouse dropping away, followed by the jangling cascade of two dozen silver bracelets on each wrist. With exquisitely lacquered fingers, silver rings on nearly every digit, she raked her hair over her shoulder and laid it over her left breast. “Don’t you have an office? It feels a little exposed in here for this type of conversation.”

  Actually, this was precisely why Toua Xiong liked the café. The Pamplona was a tiny basement place off Harvard Square, made to feel even smaller with its low ceiling, and you could hear every tick of conversation from across the room. Perfect for initial meetings with clients. It forced them to lean toward him, huddle, whisper. It didn’t lend itself to histrionics or hysterics. It inhibited weeping. Toua didn’t like weeping.

  Besides, he no longer had an office. After Ana, his girlfriend, had kicked him out of their apartment, he’d been sleeping in his office, but he’d gotten behind on the rent and had been kicked out of there, too. These days he was sacking out on his former AA sponsor’s couch.

  “You used to be a cop, Mr. Xiong?” she asked, pronouncing it Zee-ong.

  “Yeah,” he said, “until two years ago.”

  “You still have friends on the force?”

  “A few.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  “Complicated,” Toua said. “Shee-ong. It’s Too-a Shee-ong.”

  “Chinese?”

  “Hmong.”

  “I’m Korean myself.”

  “What is it I can do for you, Ms. Ahn?”

  She straightened up in her chair. “I have a tenant,” she said in a clear, unrestrained voice, not at all inhibited. “She’s renting one of my houses in Cambridgeport, and she’s on a campaign to destroy me.”

  Toua nodded, accustomed to hyperbole from clients. “What’s she doing?”

  “She’s trying to drive me insane. I asked her to move out. I gave her thirty days’ notice. But she’s refused.”

  “You have a lease?”

  “She’s a tenant at will.”

  “Shouldn’t be too difficult to evict her, then.”

  “You know how hard it is to evict someone in Cambridge? Talk about progressive laws.”

  “It sounds like you need a lawyer, not a PI.”

  “You don’t understand. Recently, she started sending me anonymous gifts. Like candy and flowers, then things like stuffed animals and scarves and hairbrushes and, you know, barrettes—almost like she has a crush on me. Then it got even creepier. She sent me lingerie.”

  “How do you know it was her? Maybe you have a secret admirer.”

  “Please. I have a lot of admirers, but she’s not one of them. I know it was her.”

  “Well, the problem is, none of that’s against the law, or even considered threatening.”

  “Exactly! You see how conniving she is? She’s diabolical!”

  “Uh-huh.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Why do you think she’s doing these things?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been nothing but charitable toward her.”

  “Although there was that minor thing of asking her to move out.”

  “Look, something really strange has been happening. I got a high meter read warning from the Water Department. The bill last month was $2,500. You know what that amounts to? She’s been using almost ten thousand gallons of water a day.” She dug into her purse and produced the statement.

  “This is grounds for eviction,” Toua said, looking at it. “Excessive water use.”

  “That’s what I thought. But it’s not that simple. It could be contested as a faulty meter or leak or something, even though I’ve had all that checked out. She categorically denies anything’s amiss. You see what I mean? She’s trying to play with my mind. What I need is evidence. I need proof of what she’s doing in there.”

  Ten thousand gallons a day. Toua couldn’t imagine. The woman had to be running open every faucet, shower, and spigot in the house 24/7, punching on the dish and clothes washers over and over, flushing the toilets ad nauseum. Or maybe experimenting with some indoor hydroponic farming, growing ganja. “I guess I could do a little surveillance,” he said, giving the water bill back to Marcella Ahn.

  “Round the clock?”

  Toua laughed. “I have other cases. I have a life,” he said, though neither was true.

  “I own another house on the same lot, a studio. The tenant just left. You could move in there for the duration.”

  “You realize what this might cost?” he asked, trying to decide how much he could squeeze out of Marcella Ahn.

  “That’s not an issue for me,” she said. “I want to know everything. I want to know every little thing she’s been doing or is planning to do, what she’s saying about the situation and me to other people, what’s going on in her life, a full profile. The more I know, the more I can protect myself. Your ad said something about computer forensics?” Business had gotten so bad, Toua had been reduced to stuffing promotional fliers into mailboxes, targeting the wealthy demographic along Brattle Street, where people could afford to act on their suspicions, infidelity being the most common. “Can you hack into her email?”

  “I won’t do anything illegal,” he told her.

  “You won’t, or can’t?”

  “Anything I get trespassing would be inadmissible in court.”

  “Would it be trespassing if I gave you a key?”

  “That’s a gray area.”

  “As are so many things in this world, Mr. Shee-ong,” Marcella Ahn said. “I don’t care what it takes. Do whatever you
have to do. I want this woman out of my life.”

  * * *

  Marcella Ahn, it turned out, was something of a slumlady. The house in Cambridgeport was a mess, a two-bedroom Cape with rotting clapboards, rusted out chain link, the yard overgrown with weeds and detritus. The second house was a converted detached garage in back, equally decrepit. Toua spent two days cleaning it, getting an inflatable bed and some furnishings from his storage unit to try to make it habitable.

  The studio did, however, provide a good vantage point for surveillance. The driveway and side door were directly in front of him, and a couple of large windows at the back of the main house gave Toua a view into the kitchen through to the living room. He set up his video camera and watched the tenant.

  Caroline Yip was an Asian waif, five-two, barely a hundred pounds. Like Marcella Ahn, she had spectacular butt length hair, but it was wavy, seldom brushed, by the looks of it. She had none of Marcella Ahn’s artifices, wearing ragtag, threadbare clothes—flip-flops, holes in her tee shirts and jeans—and no makeup whatsoever. She was athletic, jogging every morning, doing yoga in the afternoons, and using a clunky old bike for transportation, and her movements were quick, decisive, careless. She chucked things about, her mail, the newspaper, dishes, flatware, never giving anything a second glance. Her internal engine was jittery, in constant need of locomotion and replenishment. Despite her tiny size, she ate like a hog, slurping up bowls of cereal and crunching down on toast with peanut butter throughout the day, fixing mammoth sandwiches for lunch, and stir-frying whole heads of bok choy with chicken, served on mounds of rice, for dinner.

  During one of those first nights, after Caroline Yip had left on her bicycle, Toua entered the house. From what he had observed, he was not expecting tidiness, but he was still taken aback by the interior’s condition. The woman was an immense slob. Her only furnishings were a couch and a coffee table (obviously street finds), a boom box, a futon, and a few ugly lamps, the floors littered with clothes, CDs, shoes, books, papers, and magazines. There was a thick layer of grease on the stove and countertops, dust and hair and curdled food on every other surface, and the bathroom was clogged with sixty-two bottles of shampoo and conditioner, some half-filled, most of them empty. No photos or posters adorned the walls, no decorations anywhere, and there were no extra place settings for guests. She didn’t need companionship, it appeared, didn’t need mementos of her family or her past, reminders of her origins or her identity. She was a transient. Her house was a functional dump. Her attention resided elsewhere.