The Adventures of Mimiko Cat

By Carrie Chang

“The Adventures of Mimiko Cat,” is a comical romance about a waif that lives a comic book existence in a raving madcap world, a leftist saboteur journalist who keeps flying back and forth from Soho to Shanghai in search of love and the quintessential affair. As a devil-may-care feminist, she finds that the bitchy acumen within her fighting with her desire for “shallow men” and their misfit lingua franca, from the bedroom to the pillory. A spell-binding adventure about raw language, feminism, passion, and symbolic emotions in a meandering world of time, space and everything, this novel borders on hysteria, and lets you see the Asian American heart inside out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369418093

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 © 2024 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: 03/11/2024

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

859111

Dedicated to Val Mih

While Mimiko broadened her shoulders, and took a puff of the fake bubble-gum cigarette, the folks were all out to get her, and she just didn’t know it ; silvery muscat lining around her oriental halo was choking her lovely ambience, and there was severance princess stride at her bejeweled feet as she stood at the foot of the hungry yellow divan, hoping someone might paint her as a ridiculous southern figure with a hamish toque of joy; it made no sense to be ripping eloquent on a summer’s day, when the courtly shadows of the Sung Dynasty duly haunted her in the recesses of her better mind, and there were drab sickly green costumes with sixteen feathers hanging in her musty closet in Soho; like arabesque heads of glory, the invisible white cabbages in her kitchen had been haranguing a long time about the way time moved so slowly, like a quixby fleurs, unraveling with a lifespan that was thespian worthy of the scenes from birth to death. Little green leaves, with white glitterspont, bloomed through the athwart ears, as if the whole thing don’t matter. What made her tick was the eminence of the fearless August nights in Manhattan, when the misfit wheels began somewhat turning, and choleric joy found its high source at last.

You have fifteen days to get that hair well-spun as Rapunzel and then it’s out the door to native California, said Mrs. Liu, Mimiko’s mother in San Francisco, who never found fault with her daughter, but often carped affectionately with her on the phone, begging her not to be so bizarre, and outspoken.

Mimiko shuddered out of plainspoken goodness and held the long morning drape up to her face, a chartreuse-dyed drape which was shrouded with all sorts of fussy white diamonds and heart anatomy, little blue hyphens that made the amoeba eye go bazoo, the silk flossy throb of it all melted uniquely against her skin and made the henna in her hair go batty; it was the forever feeling of gold rubric stitched onto the royalist drape that made this tiny anteroom in Soho so ultra-dimensional, so puckered with seaweed, and full of mod philosophy; could it be after years of suffering as a waif-in-longing, dominated by silly Asian American parents of pulchritude, she had managed to escape to Soho, where the vogue new age Venetian element thrived, and fantasy preserved her as a bon vivant that would find those new loony charms. Just like the nine golden rings she wore on her savage fingers, and her toes, she would count all the way from yut, yee, sam…..to gow, and declare herself free and liberated from that childhood nonsense per se.

Just like that Stopping Through the Woods balderdash she’d been forced to memorize as a child, she took the road less traveled, and could opine for hours about how an iconoclast like herself was juiced up on dangerous metaphors, and talkative lips, failing to see the point of Jung’s most compelling lectures of psychoanalysis, the point of the unleashed mind, and being the proper Lady. On a dais as it were. Sometimes, as in childhood, she had the paranoid feeling that some Robbin Hood was watching her from the corners of the room, juxtaposed with airy chesire cats’ mustaches and all that acid drug trip. Strange bouts of moonshine could be detected in the wrinkled wry eyes of the tall aunties dancing in the walk-in closets in her dreams, telling her that it was all an inviolable cause of Confucius’ eyebrows, raised in alarum at this unbending feminism; ‘bout jook and book, it was what they thought pronouncing their silk feathers dyed harmonium blue, some fairytale number that made the gut purr and purr again….

******

Mimiko thought that it was not for nothing that the wending rows of flossy ribbons entage on the drapes in the room emphasized her femininity, that the harsh, winter trees in the Monet betrayed such enduring vigilance of the betting hours, where the friends that knew her best declared that she was out at sea, and full of high hat jimbo, dancing in outer Manhattan like a modern serf of the waning hours, and feeling a monkey-organ playing in her ovaries; those were the days when no one knew her other than sheepy Jones, the barista down the street, who’d pay fine compliments on her fishbowl haircut and declare her the most extraordinary, weepy little thing in the district. She was, after all, at 180 pounds, just a wee thing, crocheting threads that seemed to dance out of the top of her head; as an anhuinese geimlich, she knew no other qualms than to put on the blue bonnet, and to put her monstrous thumbs into her Italiano noodle dishes, singing those moody blues, and faithfully sipping her nai-cha drink like a HK goody; what could it mean, years of living as an international goddess, schlepping from plane to plane, and seeming the picture of a tinsel suitcase covered with all sorts of colorful postcards. Other 30-something dames had spent their time this way, masquerading as high-class journalists with a quint for beggary and a case for full-time alarum, driving away the fengshui of their abominable overseers, and choosing the most suitable pen-names for their tableau and by-line. She was Crystal Liu, born in Canada, and had chosen the name Mimiko Cat as a ponce nez pseudonym which smirked of a feudal sort of thrifty anxiety, singing ballads and ballads of that new eastern theosophy which would turn the heads of those urstute pipsqueak editors, and keep the Rotterdam moving. A little spring on the toes, and she could feel the rows of Amsterdam tulips blooming in the window, like arch-enemies in a love-fest where razzle-dazzle was truly everything. She remembers, she remembers, the hotel in Shanghai, where she slept fitfully years ago, before her Transformation, and admits that time is sorrow, and the plane tree curls most begrudgingly like a semaphore waiting for the kill. Sour dishes, like the ruby edamame, and brown karmic fish were served and hush-hush wake up calls left her to devour the salty faces of her compatriots in the swirling mist. Which and Whom? And to whom to I owe this earthy kiss? The night-time source of all that venom had made her proud, but she was only a courtier of sorts, and wore her velveteen bolero jacket with griffin sleeves with a hint of surrey, hinting here and there against the tide of that goodness which had struck the people as a lucky penny. Pure luck it had been that she had struck up friendships this way, looking into their damp eyes for a hint of darkness. There had been so much to say, like tea-kettles moping together on the red-checkered table for utter compassion, and the opinionated hoopla of the brigadiers bordering on conceit.

She had not been enamored of those sleepy passions before she passed from petty bauble to petty bauble, foisting upon those ideas of brilliance to make the balloon sail up in her head; there were the squirmy, inimitable personages she had met during her two-day stint in Pudong, that made the whole enterprise go batty, some juiced-up revenue she had found in her coat pocket that was easy to confer. Michael Anders, the irate Eurasian architect who seemed so shallow that he had rockets coming out of his head; Michelle Wong, the fare-thee-well creaturina who courted wisdom by making time fly with so much shop-a-shop that her bags busted with outgoing splendor; Wellington Fen, the seventh-degree engineer who was so burned out from posing as a nouveau riche love of the queen’s balustrade, that his nose appeared squirrelly and rather blue; and then there was Mimiko, with her squire of petite babushka pens scribbling nonsense on wrinkled napkins in the sweet cocktail lounge, waiting for the behemoth of her intrepid friends to appear like shadowy cotton candy in the doorway.

Mimiko felt at once spurned by Michael, as she always did when she saw a single male outsider sit close to her at the dining table, fiddling with the chopsticks and cutlery as if the whole world depended on this merry insider complex to be divulged, his savory teeth watching her as her soft paisley blouse shuddered; she after all had been brought up as a shy, impeccable child, and disregarded the time, saw Michael welter after salty chia puddings with an air of odious grief, admitting that this too, was disharmony, meeting a semi-attractive wormy, waif in a bar in Shanghai without getting that actuary thrill; too much to say it why Michelle sneered when she failed to make eye contact for the second time, and left her feeling nervous. That was random goodness on the chopping block, thought Mimiko nervously, who looked to Wellington for proper solace; good old Wellington who was sitting there yawning in the corner of the table with a corning pipe and a yagu of beef looking truly nonplussed as if the whole thing were a bunch of yarny. There was nothing to bitch about if you wanted to say men were men and women were women. The light has gone out of your eye, whispered Wellington to Mimiko, who fussed in her chair and decided to forgo chitchat the way a baby cub gives up its sharpest talons in the fabled jungle. Michelle, who was a raving maniac, dug into the blue mound of rice, and gave a horseradish laugh in the air, breaking up the ozone layer. Her blurred, contemptuous face shone like a keen arrow of delight. As a Chinese blondie, she had