Sun-Town

By Carrie Chang

A tale of diaspora in which the small town gals found their ultimate beat. In this rag-time melody of beat-prose and surreptitious word-play, simplicity bedevils the young Chinese girls of California small-towns, leaving them upbraided by their parents, who can do no more than witness their descent into a netherworld of tattletale games and raffish jealousies. On the beat and path, a carnegie midget named Toomly spies on the children of Sun-town, watching them Zumba-dance behind a tan-bark fence. The town beauty Dora Foo howls for more devastation in the night and prays for poetry to come back to the world. Where there is warmth and familial quirkiness, nothing under the sun can harm the two families of the Lius and the Wongs, who train their spoiled daughters to be uniquely high-minded and free-spirited; gone are the Old Ways of the Old Country and resplendent are the new fairytale customs of this free-spoken America. A sumptuous read for the season of liberty and fast-paced enjoyment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796097351

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 © 2020 by Carrie Chang.

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: 04/07/2020

Xlibris

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(This work is

dedicated to my wonderful sister Sand, who bedeviled us all)

Come, leather light

of sun-town houses, shining

In their lovely blue-bell blouses,

Frowsy eyes, and bold-faced louses,

Shrinking into derby sinks, with

Kisses from the svrinkheart shrinks,

Let us go to the places where we

do not want to think, of love,

and death, and beer-foam stink,

of boba bubble, glutinous stink,

Ricelet vowels, inanimate prose,

Dreams to say I’m one of those,

Flowers which are not a rose…

Some days, I was just a person

With three toes.

In the fluid grey patches of the cursive light of early September, the clamzoid flowers of Sun-town shimmer in their little oceanic patches of beastly wonderland, wracked dementia on the faces on the passersby of that fine town from all the beauty and secrecy that’s seen in the flora and fauna of the digital Early-ville, the rowdy presence of congers in that shapeless isle of blue sunlight and verisimilitude that’s been blooming in the swampy eyes of idyllic lovers and righteous families, those who come to make their mark there on a Sunday afternoon, where the green curlous pith of the cherry trees in their orchards grew out with an otherworldly strata of the cosmos, and the finger-puddings in the unicorn windows, of those bland-faced edifices morphed into royal being, lucky sign-posts of a futuristic yesteryear where whodunnit mysteries were solved by the tricks of uber-beings who are never slack with curiosity or mayhem.

Like the star-like hibiscus, webby, and intrusive, sorely glittering with all its chief respects to Aambhaland in front of a saintly house painted like a pastel pink milk-can, and protected from the wild storms rapt in ancient, worldly sorrow. White, airy, brusque petals which rotate through the glass windows, where Mrs. Georgia Liu can be spotted, making a pepper beef noodle dish smacking of grade-A nostalgia. "What have I, have I, what have I done to deserve this?" There she goes, wildly swinging her pander hips, as she stirs in the thick marinara sauce, shocking the severe goldfish in the Clifton bowl with her googly eyes, and seeding her surreptitious thoughts with a bevy of old-fashioned prayers, for the twinning worlds forthcoming in the crude reflection of the laughing water in the glass. There is especial candor in her dark, graceful fingers, which grip the chopsticks, with a wry sizzle. A clap and a thunder about her stun-gun of a wet spatula, which sifts through the A-vegetables like so much lop-sop, or winning divinity of life. That’s high heaven, she thinks, to be cooking in a soft cloud of muted seraphim and five-spice retort, always soughing out the thick mildew of the old cranky heart, and getting right down to the bottom of it, the sumptuous grease puddle in the hot wok, where all things matter, ever so deeply, with a bit of abrupt confusion.

There were silly serpents on the gold ceiling mocking her for her chief happiness, and accession to plenitude, for the the way she chopped raw onion with such lavish sentimentality, as if the overt color were pure jade thrice over and faux rambling ocean in the warding light; who cared if the white succulent rice were a trifle flat like a drizzle of unsaid words, or the beef stew stunk of many days of warbling the wrong lyrics to an old Erasure song that made the plantains sprout new wings of perverse ancient glory! The gist of it was that the meal had to be served just right on queue for those nasty brats who would bang their Flintstone fists on the wooden dining table, demanding their ji-ji fan; chicken rice and goopy ambrosian soup being defined as their food d’’accord! And with such villainous mouths of their spoiled kind!

With meaty ankles and ironic, cuspy brows, like talkative children from another machiavellian planet, they would toss the corn-on-cob on the floor, and tickle the flirty violets in the centerpiece of the table with pointed fingers, doing a nice random circle round the Oolong teapot until the whole checkered tablecloth would be covered with dark betelnut stains and stale remorse. Remorse for long, balmy days in Sun-town, when bleeding viridian colors of the sunset would drench them in their fairytale undoing, and their hide-and-seek emotions would soon fall under maybilly branches of the trees in the great backyard, where the nymphoid angels would sing all day long of those nectar, wee fruits, and the delectable lives that little gnome people live on in the squalid holidays such as this one, when the eighth notes that were flying out the kitchen window sounded so operatic, and so square, as if they were manufactured by the Invisible Sound Factory, inc. High sass notes so coloratura heavy that they made the swaying yew trees in the backyard clump with deprivation, and duty, and while the sagging clouds overhead made a hullabaloo of the whole thing in quiet symphony.

Of course, this was all in Mrs. Liu’s mind. The kids had not returned from school, and she still had the whole house to herself, a house full of shivery brambleberry knots, and paper lanterns, and hi eq paisley couches which were covered with precious cream-white doilies; there wasn’t enough real light in this haunted, merry edifice, this unquiet house filled with flam-flam ghosts, and cum-cum deliberate voices…she was always meekly turning on lamps and adjusting round dreamy light-bulbs so that the luck-luck pillows in the study room den shone with most pugnacious gold thread, imported Singaporean gold thread so expensive that the rest of the house looked dank indeed. There was, of course, that singular pencil peacock sketch with rubicon sea-shells pasted in it, that Meredith had put together in grade school. She was very proud of Meredith, the artistic one, the one that was bullied by all her mean chums in her class, who cried a good deal like a teensy Ling-Day Yu being suffocated by muffled roses.

I mean what could it possibly mean? Crying like that on a winter’s day? Exclaimed Mr. Liu, an electrical engineer who hated illogical displays of illustrious emotion, for all their much ado extravagance and idée pomp of extreme hilarity. As he then folded up his creased newspaper, with its many calculated stories of the day, he declared this year the worst and the best ever, and hotly contested that any progress would be made in the arena of science for all the liberality of the overseas people. There was an aphoristic spider running up his conquerer’s nose which looked duly ornamental and its bitsy proud; I now leave him behind the stiff ornamental door where he sits doing his madman equations with stunning alacrity, burning yellow-lined notebook paper like a hound-dog in a savant-genie’s coat. What are men, but strange congers behind strange doors?

As Mrs. Liu adjusted the awkward position of a dazzling pumelo in the gorgeous fruit-tray, her damson butterfly hair flummoxed into the weepy oceanic air, and her camisole burned ether blue. There was no telling when her two daughters, Meredith and Cassidy, would get home, after playing hopscotch for hours, and she did some hocus-pocus with the bananas, apples, and oranges in the wavy crystal bowl so that the whole thing resembled a tall pyramid of heavenly dimensions, suffuse to the touch, and sufficiently fragrant to the naked burning eye. There was no telling when the whole thing would tumble and crash! Like a stumble of newly-washed dishes! Or a bone-red butterfly in the tepid soup!

And just then, she heard the door-bell ring, and the mysterious shuffle of feet at the front porch. It was as if a gong had just been announced, and the whole world was suddenly hushed, as she rushed to see who it was, she could feel the gaudy jade necklace around her neck, growing brighter, brighter, like precious lava hands reaching out to her from the heavenly cosmos in space. The cosmos was not that far off, if you thought about it, it just nudged you from the precepts of the mind; she could think about the diameter of Mars and Venus all day from the crowded venue of