Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction - Issue 2

By Jason Erik Lundberg

This issue of LONTAR presents speculative writing from and about Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand.

Inside these pages, you’ll find: a metamorphic love story near the Korean DMZ from award-winner E.C. Myers; a cautionary tale about Singaporean elitism from Tiffany Tsao; an examination of the illusory facets of love from Victor Fernando R. Ocampo; a haunting and beautiful evocation of a fantastical Vietnamese floating market from Eliza Chan; a brand new supernatural crime tale from bestselling author John Burdett; and speculative poetry from Jerrold Yam, Tse Hao Guang, Ang Si Min, Shelly Bryant and Daryl Yam.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Math Paper Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9789810903022

Book preview

LONTAR

The Journal of Southeast Asian

Speculative Fiction

Issue #2

Spring 2014

Founding Editor

Jason Erik Lundberg

(USA/Singapore)

Poetry Editor

Kristine Ong Muslim

(Philippines)

Publisher

Kenny Leck

(Singapore)

Art Direction

Sarah and Schooling

(Singapore)

Submissions

LONTAR welcomes unsolicited fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and sequential art through our online portal located at lontarjournal.com. We accept submissions on a rolling basis.

Distribution

LONTAR is published and distributed by Math Paper Press in Singapore.

For information about how you can carry LONTAR, please contact Kenny Leck via email at [e-mail], or via post at BooksActually, No. 9 Yong Siak Street, Tiong Bahru Estate, Singapore 168645.

Contact

Please send any general queries to [e-mail]. Do not send submissions to this address as they will be deleted unread; please use our submissions portal instead.

Disclaimer

LONTAR is not associated in any form or fashion with the Lontar Foundation. While we admire their ongoing work to translate Indonesian literary works into English, our mission statement is very different from theirs. We wish them well in their endeavors.

All pieces copyright © 2014 by their respective authors

ISBN 978-981-09-0301-5 (print)

ISBN 978-981-09-0302-2 (ebook)

Editorial: Sophomore Segue

Jason Erik Lundberg

Welcome back! To my relief, LONTAR has proven to be not just a flash-in-the-pan, here-today-gone-tomorrow venture, as, sadly, so many new magazines and literary journals find themselves to be. Issue #1 was launched in October 2013 at BooksActually in Singapore, to much excitement and merriment; I have to deeply thank the following people for stepping in and pinch-reading for the contributors who could not make it to the launch—Patricia Mulles, Alvin Pang, Wei Fen Lee, JY Yang and Adan Jimenez—and to Ang Si Min for being the only author in attendance.

Some quick housekeeping: in the editorial for issue #1, I mentioned that LONTAR was a quarterly literary journal. As is evident in the span of time from the release of that issue to this, the journal's schedule is unfortunately not so frequent. And although my original ambitions were to make this a quarterly periodical, the practicalities of the situation took priority, and so after much discussion, it was decided that LONTAR would be released on a biannual basis instead, one issue in the Spring and one in the Autumn.

This second issue of LONTAR showcases speculative writing from and about Korea*, Singapore, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. Showcased are a metamorphic love story near the Korean DMZ from award-winner E.C. Myers, a cautionary tale about Singaporean elitism from Tiffany Tsao, an examination of the illusory facets of love from Victor Fernando R. Ocampo, a haunting and beautiful evocation of a fantastical Vietnamese floating market from Eliza Chan, and a brand new supernatural crime tale from bestselling author John Burdett; as well as speculative poetry from Jerrold Yam, Tse Hao Guang, Ang Si Min, Shelly Bryant and Daryl Yam.

Once again, I have to thank my co-conspirators for helping to bring this issue into existence: poetry editor Kristine Ong Muslim, publisher Kenny Leck, and art direction from Sarah and Schooling. To contribute content for future issues, please visit the submissions portal at our website, lontarjournal.com.

* Although Korea is not a part of Southeast Asia, for our purposes, it shares a special connection, in that it is still under-represented as a setting and culture within speculative fiction; this goes the same for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

The Tiger in the Forest Between Two Worlds

E.C. Myers

E.C. Myers (USA) was assembled from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published short fiction in a variety of print and online magazines and anthologies, and his young adult novels, Fair Coin (winner of the 2012 Andre Norton Award) and Quantum Coin, are available now from Pyr Books. He currently lives with his wife and a doofy cat in Philadelphia and shares way too much information about his personal life at ecmyers.net and on Twitter at @ecmyers.

The first thing Bong-hwa noticed about the woman across the enclosure was her hair. It was the color of copper, aglow in the afternoon sun. A gust of wind swept her long, straight tresses behind her like a pennant.

She wore a bright gaeryang hanbok, the modern version of Korean traditional garb. The chima-jeogori combination of a blue wraparound skirt and gold jacket looked natural on her, though most young women favored Western fashions. She was a paradox, both classically Korean and utterly alien at the same time.

More startling than her appearance was the fact that she was looking at him, while the rest of the crowd was focused on the twelve hungry tigers in the enclosure below.

Bong-hwa faltered in his presentation. He covered by hurling another raw chicken down to the animals from his perch. Kaesong, the alpha male, leaped and caught the whole carcass in his mouth, eliciting gasps of delight from the assembled tourists. Camera flashes went off.

Feeding time at Seoul Grand Park Zoo was always a big draw; Kaesong's arrival had brought international tourists in droves, with double the usual number of South Korean visitors. Everyone wanted to see the last Korean tiger captured in the wild, on loan from North Korea's Pyonggang Central Zoo.

Bong-hwa resumed his narration. Kaesong is our largest Siberian tiger, at over 272 kilograms, he said. He requires six-and-a-half kilograms of meat everyday—though he'll eat more if he can get it. His voice boomed over the loudspeakers.

The woman was still watching Bong-hwa. He imagined what it would be like to run his fingers through her thick hair, warmed by the sun.

Embarrassed, he forced his mind back to the instructional monologue, punctuating it by tossing bloody hunks of beef to the tigers. When his bucket was empty save for an inch of gore, Bong-hwa went off-script, bolstered by the woman's attention.

"Sadly, these majestic animals are nearly extinct. Once revered as the embodiment of the strength and spirit of our people, not a single tiger is known to remain in Hanguk outside of captivity. He waited a moment for the murmurs of his audience to die down. Some still hope that tigers may survive in the Demilitarized Zone, but evidence has yet to be found."

His manager would probably complain about his tiny act of rebellion, but Bong-hwa wanted to wake people up more than simply entertain them. He switched off the microphone and searched the dispersing crowd. The woman with the copper hair was gone. He felt a dull ache, as though he had lost something important.

*

An hour before the park closed, Bong-hwa always inspected the tiger cages. He enjoyed his solitary walks around the grounds, especially in the brief spring months before monsoons drowned the country, but today he felt as restless as his animals.

When he spotted the woman, relief replaced his anxiety. He realized he had been looking for her all along.

She was peering through the bars into the tiger enclosure, leaning her elbows on the railing, chin on cupped hands. Her striking hair reached below her waist and tapered to a point, swaying in the gentle breeze.

Bong-hwa wiped his damp palms on his khaki shorts and approached her. She didn't acknowledge his presence, other than a slight twitch and wrinkling of her nose. He must still smell like raw meat; the stink lingered no matter how much he washed.

He braced his hands on the railing. You shouldn't lean so close, he said, grateful that his voice didn't betray his nervousness.

Are the bars for his benefit or ours? she said. She spoke with a thick, unfamiliar accent.

Bong-hwa frowned. Both, I suppose. He was surprised to see Kaesong lounging on the other side of the bars, tail twitching idly in the dirt. That tiger constantly prowled the boundaries of his habitat, as though searching for a way to escape. He hadn't been born in captivity like most of their animals, so he'd had a difficult adjustment to his new environment.

Seoul was originally surrounded by a wall to keep tigers out, for our people's protection, Bong-hwa said. But now we build walls to protect them from us. From extinction.

A man-made diorama is no substitute for natural forests and mountains, she said.

Her vocabulary was as unusual as her accent. She pronounced some words strangely. Bong-hwa's eyes widened as the dialect suddenly clicked.

"You're from Choson," he said.

She straightened and faced him.

Until recently, she said.

Bong-hwa had never met a North Korean. After defectors from the communist nation passed the naturalization program in Hanawon, they usually tried to fit in, but everything about this woman stood out. Perhaps she was just enjoying her newfound freedom.

He bowed in greeting. I'm Park Bong-hwa.

"Good to meet you, Haoche. He blinked at the archaic honorific. I am Chon-ji," she said, bowing lower than he had.

Chon-ji? Chon-ji was the name of the crater lake atop Baekdu Mountain, at the border between North Korea and China. It literally meant Heaven Lake.

I was born there, she