Welcome to the second Spittoon Podcast! Featuring readings by Ben Thompson, Rianka Mohan, and Nathan Bennett. You can stream or download from the media player above, and the texts are printed here for you to follow along.
Ben Thompson worked as a manual labourer, music teacher, peace-activist and computer programmer before moving to China at the age of fifty to study Mandarin. Drawn into the world of Chinese television and film acting, he stayed for over ten years and played foreign devils in more than 70 television series and films, most notably the 8th Lord Elgin in the CCTV drama-documentary Yuanmingyuan. He was active in the Beijing Actors Workshop and wrote several plays which were performed in the Peng Hao Theatre; Peking Roulette was also performed in New York. His previous book is Screen Acting in China (2013). He has been a Spittoon regular in Beijing, and last December he published a new book of poetry, White Tulip.
Joanna
There were yellow flowers on the mountain
And peach blossom, speckled pink
Presided over by the lofty trunks
Of a few arboreal antiques
You, beautiful when angry
Are always angry, therefore
Always beautiful, you sat
On the top of a wall like a cat
With your little red shoes
Pulled tight against your hips,
Toes towards me
As if to say, ‘look,
My feet are still bound.’
Water Village
For ten empty aching years
Out of sight, not out of mind
You’ve slept beyond the realm of care
While, left alone, I’ve become strange
With dusty skin and white hair
Last night in dreams I seemed to see
As in your youth, your clear brown eyes
You did not speak, but from your tears
I knew that, sleeping in that place
Beyond the moon you dream of me
Rianka Mohan is a Beijing-based writer. She was one of the fiction writers at Spittoon’s megacity event in December. She has moderated panels at the Bookworm, the EU-China Literature Festival, CultureConnect, and the 2019 Neilson Hays Literature Festival. Before China, she lived in Bangkok where she was Arts & Culture Editor for The Expat Life magazine and wrote a monthly music column for Bangkok 101. She spent 15 years in New York working as an investment banker and is happy to be shifting gears and pursuing a long-held dream of writing fiction. She has nothing published yet.
God and Lucifer
The two men from Yuzhou sit across from each other in the teashop, ignoring its bustle. A pot simmers on the table between them, its steam rising like a shroud. The younger of the two, his fierce brows furrowed, looks out the window at the flowing river, occasionally lifting his cup in his slender palms to sip tea. From time to time, he steals a glance at his companion. The older man sits engrossed in reading a newspaper. His long white hair, neatly caught in a ponytail behind him, sparkles like sunlight upon water. The young man cannot resist a smile. His master’s hair, with the luster of mutton fat jade, looks too healthy to belong to an old man and a keen eye would have noticed the incongruence. Yet, the younger man observes to himself, the mortal and middling occupants of the cafe pay no heed. He frowns as he takes them in – the plodding people with their vacuous chatter and their shabby lives. He returns to look at his companion. He cannot comprehend his calm in their midst, when he, himself, can only perceive their futility.
“What is to be done?” he breaks the silence.
Without looking up from the paper, the older man says, “What is, is.”
“You are suggesting again that we do nothing?”
“I have never suggested that. Would you say all this is nothing?”
The younger man sighs, looks out at the river again. The first of the fishing boats has arrived and there is a sudden rush of activity along the bank, as people hurry to inspect the fish, haggle over prices, and get the best of the first haul. The fishermen swagger upon the deck, lording over the rest as they display their catch. The man in the café notices a boy of ten on the fringes with his money held fast in his scrawny hand. The boy struggles to make his way past the adults, and several times gets pushed further back than where he began. Undaunted, he perseveres in seeking an opening and finally, he is rewarded. Creeping past tall legs, he reaches the front. However, the fishermen are now serving people at the other end of the long boat. Nevertheless, the boy smiles to himself and wiping sweat from his brow, scrutinizes the fish before him.
The younger man forgets his tea, absorbed in watching the boy.
The boy carefully puts his money in his shirt pocket and with his little hands, picks up a fish to examine it. Imitating the adults, he prods it to check for freshness. The fish looks very good and he shouts up at the fishermen but his tiny voice is drowned out by the din. At this moment, a man standing behind him sees the fish in the boy’s hands and grabs at it. He fails in his attempt as the boy holds fast with all his might. The man glares and the boy scowls back. The man opens his mouth and his words, inaudible to the man watching the scene from the café, seem to affect the boy like a slap on the face. He recoils, drops the fish. The man, emboldened, continues to shout and the crowd’s attention is rapidly diverted to the confrontation. The fishermen are called over to intervene and they walk across to the side of the boat where the boy stands. Their angry expressions and unwillingness to listen to his pleas make it evident to the man in the café what has occurred.
“Thief!” they are pointing and yelling.
The boy shakes his head violently, reaching into his pocket for his money. But his earlier tussle with the man has caused more than the loss of the fish and his hands come up empty. Seeing this, the people around him grow angrier and the fishermen jump off the boat, their strong bodies towering over the shivering boy. He shields his eyes to hide his tears and shaking his head furiously, he looks around for escape. But he is hemmed in by a crowd of onlookers. The people that had earlier surrounded the boat are gathered around the boy, unsympathetic to the last.
The man in the café turns to his companion, frustration writ large upon his face.
“To them, you bequeath this world!”
Silence from the older man meets his statement. He remains as he is, reading his newspaper, unperturbed.
Outside, the boy is beaten by the fishermen. The younger man’s face darkens.
He can no longer see the boy, hidden from view by the circle around him. He turns his gaze instead to the boat, which lies unattended, gently swaying where it is roped, laden with temporarily forgotten fish. The motion of the boat is interrupted by a lone woman, who from the other side soundlessly sneaks onboard. The man watches as she gathers fish into a bag with great speed. When it is full, she hands it to another woman standing by the side of the boat, who serves as lookout. She fills three more bags full of fish and manages to clamber off the boat with them just in time as the crowd, satisfied, turns back. The women slip past unnoticed and the man in the café soon loses sight of them. It is not long after that that the fishermen discover their loss. They commence shouting and wailing so loudly that it is heard even within the teashop. A sudden hush descends as conversation is suspended. Some customers step out to see what the matter is. The younger man continues to stare out the window but his mind is decidedly elsewhere.
At length, he turns back to the table, realizes the pot no longer boils and his tea is long cold. He raises his hand to order more.
And from behind the newspaper that separates them, his master permits himself a smile.
Nathan Bennett is a thankfully former English teacher, now an editor for a magazine. He brings poetry and fiction to Spittoon reading nights because, when one goes to a potluck, it is best to bring something to share. He has been in China for five years. His favorite book is Moby Dick. He also puns mercilessly with little or no provocation.
The road-weary, travel-worn salesman dropped to his hotel bed with exhaustion. Pounding the pavement took its toll: he immediately fell asleep and didn’t get up until the next morning. His sweaty business suit still sticking to his skin, he groggily dragged himself into the shower, turned on the hot water, and began to scrub wearily.
Sometime later he realized that he was still wearing his suit and removed it. He restarted the process of showering, and much to his satisfaction, achieved greater success. Because today was his day off, he decided to turn the shower into a bath, and as he got settled into the warm tub, he fell asleep once more until the faint chill of expired bathwater suggested consciousness as an alternative plan for the day. He let the water out of the tub, toweled himself off, and shoveled himself into the natty hotel-provided bathrobe hanging in the bathroom.
As he shuffled back into the main part of his hotel room, his stomach growled. Somehow or other, the bleary-eyed, bath-wrinkled salesman transferred himself into a fresh suit of clothes, pulled on his shoes, and checking his pockets for his wallet and his keys, he tramped downstairs to see what was on offer in the diner by his hotel. The diner had a special that day on bacon and eggs and a daily offer of bottomless coffee. He later remembered that, whatever else, he had the coffee.
When he got back to his hotel, he decided to explore the place a bit: he scaled the stairs, he prowled the hallways, he returned to the lobby. All the coffee he had at the diner began to work on him. He didn’t really want to go back up to his room, so he looked for a restroom somewhere around the lobby. He found one door down a side hallway. It didn’t seem marked in any particular way that indicated it to lead to a restroom, but it was the most promising thing he found. He opened the badly-sticking door, fumbled for the light switch, and he nearly fell down what he was surprised to discover were stairs. If the coffee hadn’t woken him up, the basement was surprisingly not much help – until he noticed the gorilla.
There was only one thing worth noticing in the dingy basement: a large cage holding a mangy, flea-bitten gorilla with a sign in front which read: DO NOT TOUCH THE GORILLA. He looked at the sign; the gorilla looked at him. He looked at the gorilla, the gorilla glared at him. A little unnerved, he went back up the stairs, turned off the light, closed the door, and went back up to his room.
Even so, something about that gorilla called out to him. He tried to heed the warning on the sign, but he could not turn his thoughts away from that gorilla there in the basement. He wasn’t sure what about that ugly old ape that attracted him, and nothing he tried really ever pushed the gorilla out of his mind for more than a moment. He used the restroom, disposing of the reason he opened that door in the first place. Rather than dissuade him from going back, it removed the door as a mental obstacle. He tried to read, he tried to listen to the radio, he tried to think about his next sales campaign; he could think of only one thing: the gorilla.
Telling himself he only meant to explore the kitschy art in the lobby, the salesman found himself downstairs once more, poised before the door to the basement with the hazy mind and clarity of purpose of a cigarette store customer ten days into his eleventh attempt to quit. He opened the door.
He went to the gorilla like an ambivalent mosquito to a nudist colony. The DO NOT TOUCH THE GORILLA sign beckoned like an invitation to original sin, but innate caution of fleabag apes held him back. He looked at the gorilla; the gorilla looked at him. He held out his hand; the gorilla came fully awake. He extended one trembling finger and the gorilla quivered with God knows what primal emotion! He touched the gorilla.
The gorilla’s screams followed him up the basement stairs like hellhounds straight from the abyss, baying for the soul of the transgressor! He slammed the basement door SHUT! He bolted to his room! He listened at the hallway before he slammed his own door: silence reigned in that upstairs hallway. With delirious relief, he closed his door and fell on his bed.
Through the twangs of the mattress springs he could hear a pounding coming up from below with horrible speed. Fearing the worst, he ran to his door and looked out into the hallway. He glanced toward the staircase, and he stared directly into the face … of the gorilla! Its eyes were wide! Its blood was up! He slammed and bolted the door, barricading it with all the furniture he could shove up against the hotel room door which, as the salesman sized up his situation, might as well have been a banner waiting for a football team to come charging through it.
Throwing open his hotel window, he looked down into the alley behind his hotel. His only chance to escape was the dumpster below his window – the overflowing garbage bags would break his fall. Just as he landed in the squishy, smelly mass of garbage, he heard the gorilla burst through his barricaded hotel room door. He frantically swam through rotting noodle soup, waste paper, and used restaurant supplies as fought his way out of the dumpster. He looked up; the gorilla looked back down at him. He took off down the street, running, hoping not to find himself at a dead end, as he heard the gorilla land in the dumpster behind him.
How long could he evade the gorilla? Would the gorilla catch up in minutes, or in mere moments? Not even having a split second to look back, the salesman sprinted so fast that he aired the garbage smell out of his now stained and tattered clothing. Anyhow, he hoped and prayed for the gorilla to have a sinus infection – animals can often track by smell.
Left, right, left, right, through a store, under a bridge, over a fence, through a park, over the canal – the salesman fled from the gorilla he could no longer see but was sure was behind him. He rounded another corner and there was something black and hairy – a man in a gorilla suit twirling a sign for a local store! Just as he began to laugh with insane relief, he spun around and saw the gorilla trundling toward him.
The bus came that very instant and he jumped onboard. However, the gorilla was right behind him! He ran to the back of the bus and dove out the rear door just in time for the bus to drive away with the gorilla onboard. Apologizing desperately, he kicked over a bicyclist and stole the bicycle. He pedaled as fast as he could away from the bus.
For perhaps fifteen minutes, with speed born of adrenaline, terror, and despair, the salesman rode on. At last, out of energy, short on breath, and long on hopeless fatigue, he collapsed on the sidewalk at the end of a long street. The gorilla was waiting at the other end of the street.
It took the salesman a couple of dry gasps to notice. He nearly choked. He rolled over on his stomach and began to claw at the ground, spitting cotton and with screaming frenzy could barely drag himself toward escape. The bicycle pinned him in place. The gorilla trundled down the street, moving in for the kill. Hearing the thudding coming up behind him, the salesman found some extra spurt of energy and flipped one leg out from under the bicycle. Still, the gorilla came on. The other leg came out more easily. The gorilla was twenty feet away! He flipped over on his back, cockroach-like, in a futile attempt to fend off the gorilla. The gorilla stood over him. It made a deep, great ape shriek of victory. He put up his hands to block his face. The gorilla poked him in the shoulder.
“Tag! You’re it!” And the gorilla ran away.