Raycious Life

By Carrie Chang

Raycious Life is a tale of two cities, a lumbago breeder of Chinese women and glorious hairdos, and a breathtaking novel of ennobling beauty and upheaval. Set in both Hong Kong and bustling New York City, this bustling story tells the riveting tale of six Asian American bratlings on the trail of action, hot sex, and gossip in a cosmopolitan sphere of everlasting change. Going with the Tao, they find their nose rings shining in the dark, their tattoos dyed in sweet henna, and their Chinglish lingo separated by lost syllabi of the most perverse kind, beating them down under the Asian American sun. Told in the voice of Trudie Wu, Raycious Life borders on hilarity and morphic laughter, descrying the hot days and nights of a group of young Chinese wayfarers in the midst of ra-ta-ta yuppies who must decide for themselves what makes sense in this fast-moving world of cynicism, happiness, and everlasting passion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984536549

Carrie Chang

Carrie Chang was born in 1970, in Syracuse, New York. She attended Stanford University, UC-Berkeley and New York University, obtaining her B.A., and M.J. and M.F.A. in English and journalism and creative writing, respectively. She worked as an Asian American journalist in the arts/political field for almost a decade, creating her own magazine, “Monolid,” and lives as a writer/poet in the Bay Area. Her favorite pastimes include swimming and painting.

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Copyright © 2018 by Carrie Chang.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018907365

ISBN:      Hardcover       978-1-9845-3652-5

                Softcover         978-1-9845-3653-2

    eBook              978-1-9845-3654-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/21/2018

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Contents

PART I

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

PART II

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

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21.

22.

23.

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32.

This novel is dedicated to my uncle IJ Chang, who lived a good Christian life.

PART I

1.

T HE MANY DARK-SKINNED people mill about with tiger-ruby rings on their dusty fingers, sharp blue diamonds in their filigree eyes, some anxious poodle stride in their precious amble, looking for a fair elongated smoke in the filthy air. I see them smile gainfully and swear they’ll never leave the likes of Kowloon Bay without leading a charmed life, wearing their spiciest cream-colored lipstick, and their shiniest hose, using their most hip vernacular on the dint of the ocean harbor walk. It’s not the veering yellow sunlight that makes them look so spectacular or so particularly moribund in a peculiar way, it’s just the riveting sorrow in their vernacular speech that flatters them and makes them capricious puppeteers of their own strange behest, riddlers bathing in the vivid light of adders and quick-fix shamans called horly.

What smacks of sheer perfidy is their phony alien accent, their guilty cuspy brows, and their will to connect to another saintly world of beyond the final caste. It’s enough to take them to unearthly planets of another guise and stars of dark futura, where those simple harbingers of pain will speak to them of forever after and after. Some plainspoken obloquy and chameleon beauty marks of the passing crowd, which wither away like a sly weed of sorts. It’s just the rude diamond in the buff for them, the dragon-hornet which makes them speak in various pidgin dialects like sweet foppish angels, yearning to be bought out most winningly. The gleaming red seams of their hottest disco pants are stitched silver and their mops of ebony hair grow rather wicked in the faint blue ether light, one bang and two bangs cut off in the roiling, ephemeral wind.

Shrieking with cheap shreds of pride, they plod on, svelte dark fingers tapering across their Pacific jackets, dreaming blithely of the half moon. By no means miserly, they dream of that pitch and torpor in the open inveterate sea, and head to bustling super-malls where the glowing neon stripes of the haute couture look like fresh baby banana strands fizzing on the hot sizzling wire to the core. It’s not to say it’s a completely altruistic vision, a formal outpost where you can be anyone or anybody as if you were an astro-angel. It’s an intimate soul place for so-called afterlife and vision, where czars meet czars, and queens meet queens.

If I were to tell you how a raycious life begins, I wouldn’t know where or just how to begin, or how to go about bemoaning the realm of movie stars with their tapered pink glossy nails and their gutsy mediocre smiles, indeed how to descry the state of the new electric nation. We were moving with that eslite touch of day-glow joy, spiritless and wandering in all due sensation, bit for bit. It was that singular mod element which vouchsafed it for me, that fog-laden triumph in the wind: my fabled outpost ensconced by decadent visions of triumphant desire, some thing-a-ma-jig in the parachute of my lungs.

2.

T HERE ARE CAPTIVE equations written on the brim of a lady’s floppy sun hat, the ribbons happily falling about in primitive colors, as to triumph the new day coming. Her navy blue polka-dot costume is a testament to the hypnotic, labyrinth-like affairs of the Chinese cosmopolitan city, in which leftist politic leave their salacious mark and rise to the thumping fore. Trivial assumptions about her ritz pearls, and manifold turtle-chocolates in her slender obvious hands make her shoes go clickety-clack on the musty streets where the cool bohemians live and breathe with passion. There is some earth-shattering vanity in her Coco perfume, stinging to a rising pitch. How could the very likes of her stupor bones endure the struggles of the infernal day till the very end?

I remember that fated time that Garth Lin climbed up the gilded golden stairs of the Swan Hotel in faraway Tsim Tsa Tsui looking tan and nonplussed as usual, carrying his trendy green motion backpack, poignantly sighing out loud with a dark hint of the cradled stars in the flash viridian sky. Garth cherished not a word of the gimme-five crowd, and spoke a rapid forget-me-not Cantonese which indeed drilled deaf ears, and then took each treasured step into the air-conditioned entry hissing merrily to himself, the intoxicating remnants of some stultified lyrics from a popular Erasure song that had been on the PM radio that very same day. The winsome doormen, whose bland features resembled his ever so slightly, frowned a bit, on seeing him, and yawned rather obscenely, waving nervously, and fidgeting and finding him somewhat repellent, singled him out with a baleful almond eye. It just happened to be Garth’s sorry luck to be stuck in crazy Hong Kong on a stopover to the Beijing center to see old friends and comrades in the super Mainland he hadn’t seen in so many umpteenth years.

What drove Garth truly mad was the esoteric beauty of the people here in outer Kowloon, where the outré materialistic rush of money was in his flowing dark veins, and the reigning claptrap of many dialects was in his pricked-up ears. It was as if he were in Hong Kong for the first time, stuck in a vat of regal air-glue, pat on the stretch cinch line with only fifty bucks in his folded coat pocket, and staring at his Rolex watch to see the patient hours roll away in a quiet, painful whist.

Tick-tock! The glossy ribbons on the slimmish belt of the maitre d’s coat unrolled with a ghastly overture in the outcast light and made him roll his large, jerky eyes with a quick, unflounced zap. As if everything fresh and delightful was as it had been since he’d been here five years ago, when the trapezoidal-shaped bricks seemed like golden zigzags and the fresh, smanker smiles of the populace looked less plastered, resembling arcs of Arcadian pleasure. A marked chalky adieu to all that ballyhoo now, it seemed at once to be sure.

Your bags, Madame, hup-ho, the large bell-hop with the seedy, calculated smile addressed to a jaded woman passing by with a spreckle of polka dots on her dress glaring like jump-rop hologram, as if to express some planetary guise of the sweet inner-life of the endangered species of our kind at its best.

That’s so deep, my friend. The rowdy people of Hong Kong are looking so verily hot tonight, but all I have is fifty bucks, and the believer’s right to kvetch! Garth confessed, at last, looking fully starched, and heading straight out of the translucent sliding doors, and past the posh lemon sward-patterned cushioned seats. There was some willful exasperation in him, some beatific gift to another causation of pride when he examined himself, not to mention some trumped-up hubris, invigorating his entire being. The feeling was like floating upwards in mid-air, satyr-like, smug in full army mettle as if to effect a pose of a new forged identity in the full raycious bloom. How utterly ethereal he felt, how lofty, and even incandescent. He even knew the parlous sentences of the Tao Te Ching by heart!

It’s this thing to be remembered, and not blown away by the locusts, he pronounced sadly with a serious face, walking straight into the bakery, looking seriously wounded as he stumbled back and forth in his black giffy leisure suit with wild ecstatic grief. The loud sound of confused murmuring awakened him in his ears, and all was the thrum of downcast dialect, some cantankerous, inch-by-inch black taboo words seeping into the base of his coolish, wisdom head. What was left of his simpy childhood Cantonese was simply that, an embroiled ocean of forgotten honor, some fragmenta of joy he could usually tap into at his own patient will. Why now the jumble of pseudo-magical words were fragile, unduly foreign to him at once, vociferous pangs of gibberish and frank abuse, an all-knowing alarm to his growing sanctity. The ephemeral world shuddered beneath his cold-kettle touch and Garth could hear bells ringing in his ears. It was finally enough to be merely glowing, Chinese-American, spelled out, in one heavy inveterate breath, and not just peter-pater, a certain matter of forthright elegance shouldering him from that petrified glare of the many forthright dozens.

Why if it’s a question of being out-of-sorts, I confess I’m the one, he chortled, looking blustery as ever. Before him was the glass counter which harbored