Dim Sum Days

By Carrie Chang

Helen is obsessed with gods of destruction in Chinatown, and hereditary fracas in the cosmos, the genealogy of muses, who laugh and cry in the passing of time and the sublimation of her “dim sum days,” gorgeous days spent staring at the clock and painting canvases that reflect the coming of the Great Muse, the glorious idolatry of the Chinese sub-culture she loves and detests, the dark men she’s come to see as both familiar and foreign. Seeking out the planetary whiz and the mulberry pipe, she’s just a fraction of her worth, until she meets Edward Yee, the missing piece in her life story. Together they ransom the bird-cage and make the moon shine until it’s just an itty bitty splice scone on a plate amidst a bee-bop hol-iday jazz tune that’s worth the pleasure. “Dim Sum Days” is a contagious work about love and art, holiday trolling and passionate inter-locking, the cosmos at its most vainglorious struggle. Read it with your trisket har gow on a Sunday after-noon while the junk ships are floating across the Kowloon River, the fantasy never-ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781984582980

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.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-9845-8299-7

                eBook            978-1-9845-8298-0

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: 06/08/2020

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Contents

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Part II

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

(This novel is

dedicated to my wonderful uncle IJ Chang, who

often took me out for dim sum in New York at XOXO!)

PART ONE

Chapter One

On basque, dapper days I will go there, to Double Happiness Café, battling my depressive agues with two meager pep pills in my outstretched hand, the other reaching out for an occidental teacup filled with a pearly effeminate glow that wants for positively nothing. What will the smug, Toisanese waiter show me but a dining table by the alcove of the oval-shaped window, blinded by the fractured oncoming light, where the dim sum sits like a quiet ensemble of kind friends waiting to be gobbled down with salacious vim: when with patterned, outstanding joy, the oily, fetid snouts of imaginary swine will play an inimitable role in beating down the coy, jolly misfits—to ooze with maudlin contempt in the soldered afternoon, on a lazy Sunday by the ginger-scented wallpaper, mostly off-color and subtly peeling in the cheesy background, the infinite chartreuse whorls of puffed animus smoke twisting and turning to no palpable end.

Peeled oceanic shrimp, in a layer of pink delicious gauze, worth dynastic, dynamite words a-plenty, are definitively gauze bonnets in steel trays made proper and proper in the raw, candied lights of the lost, reeling centuries buried in my dark cherry bosom. Severe bamboo chopsticks flying in every possible direction, a sepia look from old Mrs. Lew’s sun-dial face to make you wince doubly in tow, these are your dim sum days, the enlightened snare of weathered nooks beneath the windy towers, on elite serving chairs too short for fairytale bumscum words, the kind of abbreviato times you’ll only dream about in your frantic days of sometime, fantastical youth—-a savior’s fantasy of serendipitous days too numerous for the counting.

The vision of white bao, creamy, blurred at the rough, biblical edges, signaled like a royal lady’s muff to me, in my plain, swanky, weatherby clothes. These too, I take in my undercover, over-sized raiments, and seethe risibly in caked makeup, pretending to be a girl up-in-arms over the famous victuals of the establishment of the Mother Country. What truly brings me in transit to this infernal mystery, at this peculiar time of the noisy chirping night, to be a surviving member of the phony rococo set, dining in precocious high-style of those philosopher-gourmands who are yet to come into super being? Whose precious lord signals the thrumming beat of the old brass gong on display, and lights up the boxy green emerald lantern with the signal of fleshly, upturned thumbs, chasing away all the swing-back ravens in the electrifying, cold gusts of the universal spring-time fest? Where in God’s mercy have all the children gone?

I pen my torrential stories with a wry, generous eye, and see that there’s only sweet togetherness in the mad ruckus of these crowded C-town villas by the raging sea, damned cities filled with the thirst of villainy and heightened romance, and theatrical vogue art, just like some denouement of bliss which vexes the silhouette of my younger days. Why attempt to put it all together like this, in these nocturnal hours in the kitch, with the hidden looks of the duly affected, and the cries of the woebegone in the ornery late-night pitch?

The country women in their half-hearted twill swinging friable won ton dough by the fated clock with butch oleaginous lips now warble incessantly, lisping illicit posse names of their erstwhile lovers while the good thick smoke turns brazen, holy crimson in brilliantine patches of deeper understanding. While the swarthy alpha men, playing automatic bingo, by the very second, so oft to find ill-fated liberty in the pendacious whorl of the silent chrysanthemum nights, dares to live out their wildest odd-ball fantasies with a gusto, as the piano organ begins to chime at will.

Observe how the well-spoken monks, in their weathered, rough-and-tumble gowns, walk jauntily about with bleary-eyed consternation in the old mystic temple by Kearny St. calling out the flamboyant names of the risen dead in their true sobriety, the dancing gypsy music will summon me to a new plateau of imagination, where all things seem soporific, as if gold is giving birth to silver, and the righteous cosmos beyond. That’s when the celestial body of temporal ashes will rise in various hors skors hues of the passing night, sullying the sharp crazy air with the electric fine capers of the evanescent dream-world, and you’ll see naughty eastern children in their vertical castle nooks, spoiled, downtown children who call to regret their favorite bed-time stories with an inveterate sigh of long, long ago. There go the topaz-colored people in their high cause for alarum and foolhardy bliss, their winning banditry, shining by the deft, opportune angles of the velveteen stars in the precious sky hanging divided from above.

Sought out by the staid delirium of decade age-old Buddhas of the extemporaneous miracle-wheel, they are ahem quiet as the thumbprints on the splashy sidewalks of all that humanity, and often sizzle in their simple flat bosoms, like the quantum peacock lashes of their lovejoy eyes speaking for the lost pico jewels in the jetsam world-at-large, innocent eyes which see you fumbling for lost idioms in your dreadful sleep.

***

Dim sum days, like some famished holiday keeper in the hot veteran fracas of the mentoring crash of the sticky lollipop sun, when the fast-paced oceanic crowd will slowly wind up their automatic bling watches to three o’clock in the balmy wet afternoon to keep those illegitimate souls from creepy spider-webs sinking too fast downwards into the many green sub-sun rays of the floating post-generational planet. Where in god’s name can you find me surrounded by beatific, autumnal faces which are fading into the empyrean past of the fast-moving centuries with an angelic flourish, a touch of manic fire that sets me apart from the outré-beings on the earth? What sort of basso profundo voices could these be, teasing me wantonly in each in like turn, eerily lurking at the proper fenetre like watery paper ghosts of old-fashioned humble torture? Of a galvanizing vanity that sends sound men packing outside the immediate neighborhood for shelter from the oncoming storm of roses and wuthering black rain?

With ivory-fanged teeth and shy, nonplussed expressions, the revenants of my kind lurk from the imperial gates of Chinatown proper and speak freely of their queer, outlandish ways, the dreadful scoop of door-stop manners on-the-pry, and old tyrants deposed on the score. Why, it’s the universal mass upheaval of their interior lock-step which shocks me abruptly, and reminds me that I owe them that much more, a sudden largesse of a diamond-shaped sum, a number which is at doppelgänger odds with their meager wits? No doubt confronted with the truth, they speak some stumbling lingua franca—-rites from pagan spring—-the bitching, alabaster moon and stars—-and walk parallel, shoulder to shoulder with me, tasting my florid palette of sheer absurdity which splices three ways like the cold maiden rivers of my youth.

Why should these host of neo-platonic, bum aliens matter to me in the least, I think peevishly to myself on each occasion, stirring my cradle of chicken-soup in cozened reflection of worth? I am nothing but a sampan creature of silly dishonor, some rockabilly flower blooming straightaway in the white midst of things utterly foreign, a daft, irredeemable creature of my own making, a woman of scant beliefs and sixteen sorrows stitched inside the whispery heart.

I eat my stringy maifun noodles, and speak of nothing more than the usual comings and goings in the fatal dark, the fait a complait of tea stains on the modish, stuck-on-you wallpaper—-the sub-elevated streaks of pewter rust on the warpish tea-kettle by the burning stove blowing soundly into the lonely she-bum night—a solid keeper of the see-saw earth I know too well. The Hawaiian parlor-punch tastes too much of the pervasive stink of the usual tongue-wagging, and the grey shag carpet beneath my two big feet puckers up with the usual bass tremor of overseas wretchedness and cool remorse, like a ferry hound-dog sneakily following me.

It’s been six foul nights, since I’ve lodged here in old Mrs. Lew’s attic in urbane Chinatown of San Francisco as a young suburban woman of the lost oceanic straits, living it out as a fancy dilettante artist of the mod twenty-first century, unbeknownst to her own quiet expectations. With trolley dim sum as my only real pleasure, I travel the dusty back streets of Chinatown in my only spare time, and randomly espy all the spacey tall lights, poke at the nubby fire hydrants and desperately ask for internal clues about this oriental bailiwick of sorts, mulling over my innocence, which hangs about me like my good middle name. Why, the stuff of this holiday circus pageantry is to me the lost territory of dervishes on fire and angelic cherubs who want to be hoodwinked by the stitched cuff; what’s deep is their love of unforeseeable conventional religion, and their superior fetish for six-inch, steaming sub-gum rice plates to be consumed with a whallop, their ceaseless ardor for futuristic time zones on the sodden planet, and their frantic hallelujahs to the crying eastern world-at-large.

Ho bingo! I will say to myself, rather despondently, yipping that I shall paint oh-so clownishly, and dig into the parakeet body of my native bok choy animus, if only to be humiliated by paying another month of painful rent on the dot. Unless I confess it’s the sullen beat of the heavenly muses that makes this thing stink— quaintly eking out of the arduous, difficult years, that is difficult to stomach completely, just so a squeamish jade pillow crying into the bit ache of the velveteen darkle. A sickly boondoggle of the right inveterate stupor, under the trapezoidal shadows of the shady willow tree, which covers everything up with a sudden whist and a trill.

***

Chapter Two

It’s almost nearly August when mother calls up and says I’m a good-for-nothing two-shoes. Some antediluvian brat she bore out of the foolish arcade of mist and perturbed, ratso clouds who can’t make deep strides in the hazy world of letters and fast money, the way other kids can, those harpy Thumbelina dragon-children of such quiescent mirth who grew up to be doctors and lawyers and rule the random universe with an iron-thumb of tyrannical disbelief on their own daring reality terms. It’s her old-time senility that I find truly endearing, the funny Cantonese A sharp warble in her clamoring, ungodly voice which leaves me well nigh hysterical in the night, giggling neurotically with a pash of starry helium inside, despite her loud chastisement that rings equally in my ducky smucky head, super hollow to the mushroom ears sticking out of the nauseating core. She tells me to soundly chop the round-headed bok choy from the starry fluid center to the noisome wavy sides of the purple ecru leaf, and to savor the surly dictums of the present life, not to eat too much crazy dim sum, despite its rich, tantalizing quality, and to believe in its shavering tint of outright, sinister joy and medium white fantasy.

Save it for special occasions, Helen! she says rather reluctantly to me, sighing noisily on the phone, with a crackle and an easy innuendo, sympathizing with me about the high-cost of stylo, wooden paintbrushes, and the simple fact that my messy canvases all look very much the same, like coxcomb thumbprints melting properly into the stigmatic cosmos-at-large, the travesty of the dark ages. Like the ovoid nose of the dog emperor.

How lovely my aesthetic is, she comments with a sarcastic pash which disarms me at once with a few ghetto-like wisps of pure consolation, to speak the simple truth of the matter. With some fine flounced words, she gives me that muted confidence that has been flagging all month long, as the real-time butterflies in my velveteen stomach turn round and round, saying I’m nothing but a peachy acolyte of two intersecting rivers, a lollygagger borne in j-walker plaid; how her rowdy, dogmatic words keep me on perfect edge, like some mad psycho-driver of the age, who knows the temptation of the gods is to live, sleep, eat and love like a weathered child your whole life long!

"Eat the har gow, or steamed shrimp dumpling when you fall into those incurable passions of the broken heart!" she gushes alive, and somewhat girlishly at that, soothingly reminding me that the worldly taste of steamed shrimp has urgent mystical qualities which may cure one of soulful depressions, and propel one to dissolve into the thin ridiculous air, and go poof! Then you’ll really thank your cunning ancestors for that little piece of squishy cut-up meat, she adds albeit humorously, tsk tsking me with a maternal