Search All Winners

Book Mansion was overwhelming. China’s largest bookstore occupied 172,000 square feet and carried 230,000 titles. Bestsellers included Chinese titles such as I Was an American Police Officer; I’m Only Raising You for 18 Years; Chinese-Style Divorce; and Harvard Girl, a memoir that revealed the parenting style that made her stand out from her Chinese classmates and gain acceptance to the school. That book was in its sixty-third printing.

Downstairs, Monica’s Story lay between Bill and Hillary Clinton’s autobiographies. A boxed set about Göring rubbed shoulders with What’s Behind Jewish Excellence? Translated American titles ranged from the predictable – The Da Vinci Code, The Atkins Diet—to the surprising—Henry Rollins’s Get in the Van, and a Woody Allen collection whose Chinese title promised MENSA Whores. An entire floor held English-learning materials. Love English taught pickup lines and pillow talk, including cultural hints such as “‘I’m bored’ really means ‘Do you want to have sex?’”

Prancing down the building’s stairs, Hui concentrated again on the boy who had stopped returning her calls. Acknowledging another’s pain obscured one’s own. Hui wasn’t ready yet to accept that. From the window, Meng watched her granddaughter walk up the tree-lined street. The old woman’s longing was like that of a child, featuring prominently in her eyes, which captured that spirit from her youth. It would have been easy for anyone to picture what she had looked like back then, if anyone had been there.

I don't trust nobody

             but the land I said

I don't mean

present company

of course

you understand the grasses

hear me too always

present the grasses

confident grasses polite

command to shhhhh

shhh listen

What you type and submit appears to you attributed to You. What he replies and enters comes from Partner. There is, as it turns out, a lot to say while watching Partner look at you watching. He is, to begin with, in a room of some kind, particular, contingent, “real.” With art and clocks and books and pillows and cigarettes and mail and daylight, or lamplight, with a bed or desk or basement sofa, with doors you can ask him to open, bags he may or may not empty, of content you may deduce about. The bottoms of his socks are dirty. You give it to him that his socks are dirty, that his door is ajar, that his grin is telling. “Partner: Are you for real?”

Am I sitting here amid boxes of chicken and snow-peas, beef and broccoli, gooey rice and the remnants of an eggroll dabbled in mustard and duck sauce, scribbling the thoughts of a madman? Or am I merely depraved? Are these the thoughts of a neurotic? A psychopath? Or am I just more honest than most? Smarter? Am I daring greatly? Or have I been cursed for violating a sacred trust older than Yoruba legend and Nippon lore? Am I the victim of the gods’ own jealous wrath? Eat of any tree in the garden, but you are damned if you eat of the fruit of the One Tree. Double-damned if you enjoy it. Triple-damned if you can’t get enough.

Damn.

Time moved both fast and slow, and neither speed synced up with her fears as she stood at the head of the line. The tellers looked too chipper for a Monday morning. Did they even have money on Mondays? she wondered. Shouldn’t she have come on a Friday? She couldn’t remember why she opened the stickup note, just that she did, and that her boyfriend, the first and only boy she’d ever dated, was the one who had penned it: This is a stickup. Give me all your monie.

The misspelling stopped her.

“Next in line,” a teller called.

Knowledge herself had quit school in the ninth grade but she couldn’t believe that he had misspelled money. “What kind of an idiot can’t spell money?” she told me. “How fucking stupid do you have to be? And if he’s that stupid, how stupid am I for robbing a bank for him?”