Daughters of Hui (eBook)

Novellas & Stories (1996)

Xi Xu (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
144 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-8792-8 (ISBN)

Infos

'Your name or your person. Which is dearer?' In answer to Lao Tzu's ancient riddle, DAUGHTERS OF HUI offers a novella and three stories of four Asian women, all surnamed Hui. When first released in 1996, it was named an Asiaweek best book of the year, and was extremely well received. One reviewer says it presents 'Asia as it is today, gritty, modern, confused.' This new EBook edition allows readers worldwide to continue to engage with these original and dynamic women's stories by one of Asia's leading English language writers, known for her crisp, uncluttered writing style.

XU XI ??? is author of 16 books of literary fiction and nonfiction. An Indonesian-Chinese from Hong Kong, she is one of the city's leading writers in English, and has edited four anthologies of Hong Kong English literature. For many years she lived along the flight path connecting Hong Kong, New York and the South Island of New Zealand. She now resides in Northern New York State. For more information visit xuxiwriter.com or follow her on FB, Instagram, LinkedIn, Bluesky @xuxiwriter

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"e;Your name or your person. Which is dearer?"e; In answer to Lao Tzu's ancient riddle, DAUGHTERS OF HUI offers a novella and three stories of four Asian women. All are surnamed Hui, and share at least a casual connection with Boston and New England. And all share that particular Hong Kong world view, one that roots into a past not well understood while reaching out to a future that "e;speaks too many languages."e;Who are these women? And who are the men who so often fail them? Xu Xi's world knows no boundaries except those of the heart. These daughters of Hui are the antithesis of the exotic Asian heroines of so much Western fiction. They drive toll ways and pick up strangers. The silence ghosts of a hundred generations with adultery and divorce. And even in their suicides they are self-possessed, just "e;a body in a hotel room, with the exact cash payment next to the hotel bill."e;When first released in 1996, it was named an Asiaweek best book of the year, and was extremely well received. Reviewers say it presents "e;Asia as it is today, gritty, modern, confused,"e; recommend it because it "e;goes boldly where other, perhaps overly-sensitive authors fear to tread,"e; and appreciate its "e;crisp, uncluttered writing style that tackles taboo subjects for Chinese women, like sexuality, adultery and seduction as an art form."e; This new EBook edition allows readers worldwide to continue to engage with these original and dynamic women's stories by one of Asia's leading English language writers.

Textauszug

1

The Monday afternoon Rosemary picked up Danny hitchhiking, his van had a flat tire. A snake coiled around his neck.

“Is it poisonous?” she asked.

“No, but it’ll squeeze you to death if you let him.”

She had recognized her former student, a tall pale figure, standing along Route 9 midway between Amherst and Northampton. Leyland, she remembered, as she slowed down for him. Halfway down last semester’s roll call computer printout - a Hampshire College student.

But a thirteen foot boa! In her eight-year old Toyota Celica. What would Manky say?

As she drove, the reports of the recent Tiananmen Square massacre dominated the news. She could feel him watching her as they listened to the radio.

“Rosemary Hui.” He let her name rest on his tongue, as if luxuriating in its shape and sound. “You’re Chinese, aren’t you?” His voice was deep, almost a bass.

“Yes,” she replied.

“I hope you have no relatives in China.”

“No. Only in Hong Kong,” she said.

He did not raise the subject again, much to her relief. Since the start of the Tiananmen episode, she had found the China events painful to discuss. Everyone she knew, all her friends, colleagues and even her students, seemed to expect her to have a lot to say about it. It was not a subject about which she trusted herself to speak.

They stopped at a light. Rosemary felt the summer sun warm her elbow, propped on the window edge. From the corner of her eye, she peered at the snake, which hung in a double loop around her passenger. Why wasn’t she afraid of it, she wondered. Was it because its handler appeared calm, making the danger safe?

The news reported that a still unknown number of students were dead or seriously injured. She switched off the radio, and tried to quickly brush away a starting tear, hoping Danny wouldn’t notice.

“I was going to go to China,” he said. “To Tibet.” He gazed out the window as he spoke.

That surprisingly deep voice again. Too rich and sensual for such a boy. Rosemary recalled his apologetic face the day he sat in her office last semester and said he was dropping her course. And how she had tried to tell him it was okay. She heard the same apology in his tone now. “You still can,” she responded.

“Perhaps.” He was silent a moment. And then, “I think my snake likes you.”

She kept her eyes on the road. “Why so?”

“It’s trying to say hi.”

She glanced at her passenger. The snake had unwound itself from around him and was slithering towards her. Its head was almost at her shoulder. She drew back, startled by the proximity of this sleek reptile, imagining, for just a second, that she could feel its breath on her cheek. Danny yanked its head away, and placed it against his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“That’s okay. I wasn’t really scared.” But she felt a knot tighten in her stomach as she said this.

Danny had shifted and was leaning against the car door. The snake had circled its way around him, and its tail was an inch away from the gear stick. She glanced at him. Leeang jai, a beautiful boy, although she hadn’t thought so before. There was an angular precision to his New England features. These were softened by the grace of his movements. He could be a dancer, the way his body seemed to flow into the too small passenger seat. She saw him dart out his right leg, winding his ankle in a swift, neat movement around the snake’s tail to draw it away from the stick shift. He gazed steadily at her as he did this. Rosemary found herself blushing under his scrutiny.

They did not speak again the rest of the way.

She dropped him at the Sunoco off Route 9 near Haydenville.

“Thanks,” he said as he closed the door. “Hope I see you again.”

She watched the snake slither down his body as he walked away. Her skin reacted, not with goose bumps, but of something much lighter, less prickly, smoothly dry. She wondered if he knew the effect he had had on her, and thought that he probably did. Only the tiniest pang of guilt recalled Man-Kit, her Manky, who inspired such absolute fidelity.

Driving home to Springfield, she switched PBS back on and listened to the jazz program. Charlie Parker playing How Deep is the Ocean in his surprisingly languid yet sharply curving tones made her think of the snake. It took a little more than half an hour to arrive at her apartment complex.

Man-Kit was hunched over his computer terminal when she entered. Even when deeply absorbed in his work, he always managed to look neat. His broad and rather flat face was smooth and unlined; the only wrinkles that creased his features appeared around the edges of his eyes when he smiled. Rosemary still marveled at how tidily his straight hair fell into place just above his neck. From time to time he would toss his head back, brushing away a lock of hair that fell across his forehead with the back of his hand.

The same jazz program she had been listening to blared through their sound system. She went over to kiss him, and saw that he was in the middle of one of his top speed computer chess games.

“Hey, Rosa-M. So are you ready to kill the kids yet?” he asked, his eyes still glued to the screen. They spoke to each other mostly in English, with occasional Cantonese phrases mixed in. It was something they had done since they first met in Hong Kong. While his left hand manipulated the keyboard, his right hand hovered over a timer, which he struck with a rhythmic regularity.

“Almost,” she said. The swiftness of his moves made her dizzy.

“No mail.”

“Good. I’m sick of bills anyway. Any calls?”

He never took his eyes off the screen. “Nothing important.”

“By the way, did you hear ‘Bird’ just now?”

“Huh? Oh why, was he on? I guess I didn’t .”

“Okay. I’ll go cook.”

She smiled as she walked away. Funny, but once he would have been the one to ask if she’d heard ‘Bird’ and been beside himself if she hadn’t noticed. A warm, slightly maternal feeling overtook her. Manky, her Manky may have lost some of his youthful figure - ever since his thirtieth birthday he seemed to have become a little softer, rounder - but he was still the only man who commanded her entire being, the only one who counted on her completely.

Rosemary put away her papers and books, and clipped up her long hair into a ponytail. From the kitchen she heard a slap on a table, and an exclamation of delight. Man-Kit had won yet another game. He appeared in the kitchen, jogged past her, circled back, spun her around away from the sink, and lifted all five feet of her off the ground. She pulled off his glasses, kissed him, and hopped out off his arms, giggling. He left her, then, to finish making dinner, grabbing a Coors Light from the fridge as he went out.

Later at dinner, she told him about Danny’s snake.

“Was it edible?” he asked, at the end of her story.

Man-Kit loved snake soup, a delicacy of their cultural cuisine Rosemary could have sooner done without, along with dog meat and monkey brains. She had spent her childhood up till age ten in Malaysia, on the island of Penang, her mother’s birthplace, and felt that the infusion of Malay culture made her somehow less Chinese than him. But, as he often teasingly reminded her, she was one hundred percent pure blood Chinese, even if she was part Hokkienese from the lazy tropics.

“Well, I wouldn’t cook it for you,” she retorted, as she placed a plateful of fried noodles on the table.

“Look,” he said, picking up several strands of noodles off the serving platter with his chopsticks and waving them in the air, “snake, snake!”

She gave him her school teacher look. Handing him the bottle of chili sauce, she sat down to dinner.

Man-Kit ate hungrily, quickly, the way he always did. He ate Cantonese style, the bowl close to his lips, shoveling food into his mouth with his chopsticks. Rosemary picked at the noodles. Cooking always made her feel full. Unlike her husband, she did not like to eat as soon as the food was ready. He insisted that dinner had to start when the food was piping hot straight from the wok, the steam still rising from it. She preferred to wait, allowing the aroma to build up her appetite.

But one thing they both agreed on was chili sauce. Rosemary had converted him to her love for spicy foods, and now, he used chili sauce the way Americans used ketchup - on everything.

They ate in silence.

After about his third mouthful, he said, “So tell me more about the snake man. Was he a charmer as well?”

He laughed at his own joke, and she made a face.

“Nothing to tell.”

“Was he a good student? What grade did he get?”

“I.”

“I?”

“Incomplete. He wanted it, even though I told him not to bother. My only one to date.”

She could feel Man-Kit gnawing away inside her. The terrible thing about their closeness, their incessant togetherness, was that he controlled every square inch of privacy within her. She had liked the closeness at first, even insisted on it, while he had tried to distance himself. Now, after seven years, after he had given in to her insistence, she was...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 14.1.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-8792-8 / 9798350987928