Jordan Dotson

Writer

about

Looking Back at Hong Kong

October 28, 2021 By Jordan

Looking Back at Hong Kong Anthology Book Cover

Amidst the reshaping of Hong Kong’s social, cultural, political and ideological landscape, how do we reenvisage a city that exists in our memories? For those who have left their hometown—or the place they once called home—the question, “What does it mean to be a Hongkonger?” marks a constant shift between conflicting realities, identities and perceptions. Beyond the act of remembering, how do we reimagine our relationship with Hong Kong in the present and the future?

Beyond honored to see my work featured in this brilliant anthology from Chinese University of Hong Kong, about a place that I miss, alongside luminaries like Xu Xi and Jennifer Wong who are the English voice of the city (as it is, as it was).

I lived in and on the edge of Hong Kong for fourteen years. It’s a kind of home that would never let me call it such. It made me grumpy. It often caught fire. It gave me an endless well of stories, and to be considered a Hong Kong writer, even in this tiny fleeting way, is a rare and surreal reward.

Looking Back at HK is available now from CUHK, and will be on Amazon via Columbia University Press in Jan. 2020.

Filed Under: Stuff I wrote Tagged With: Hong Kong, Jennifer Wong, Xu Xi

Blue Snow

July 9, 2020 By Jordan

Art by Giuseppe Milo

Blue snow. They’d taken her to see it as a child, that magical weather born from the Min river that floats up, not down, past the cypress and past the peaks and eventually paints the sky. Snowflakes that choose not to fall.

I wrote this story some years ago, and was honored to see it win a small flash fiction prize in Hong Kong. It grew over time, and to see it published today in Issue 41 of Literary Orphans, an exquisite magazine partially dedicated to what Yasunari Kawabata called “palm-of-the-hand stories,” is an even greater honor.

Thus, my sad little three-minute tale: Blue Snow.

Filed Under: Stuff I wrote Tagged With: Blue Snow

The Unicorn King

June 2, 2020 By Jordan

Cover art by David Huntington

Truth told, it all started with the fish-market children. All summer long they’d assailed Black Tooth, begging he teach them his secret technique for smoking cigarettes in the rain. Whenever a typhoon squall would rise, they’d gather beneath the umbrellas on the pier, wait for the boatman to light his Marlboros, then squeal and applaud as he kept the embers glowing amid downpours like great iron sheets. The trick, he’d told them with the air of a magician, was seeing all the spaces in between.

…honored and irrationally pleased to see my story, The Unicorn King, appear in Spittoon Monthly. Spittoon is a remarkable arts collective with multiple publications, beautiful design, lucid criticism, and localized communities around the world. I wish more literary magazines aspired to these heights.

Filed Under: Stuff I wrote Tagged With: The Unicorn King

Flower Pot

November 26, 2019 By Jordan

At six o’clock he rises, creaking, and says “How are you?” to the flower pot on the table. It is empty. Outside, smog saddens the day. The tram’s copper bellchime sounds through the balcony, and this is a bad Tuesday, he thinks, though it is Wednesday. He checks the clipboard, then wanders off to water your Aglaonema.

My very, very short story, Flower Pot, was recently published in decomP Magazine, for which I am grateful. Very short stories can be very fun, but I like them best when they hew close to prose poetry.

Filed Under: Flash Fiction, Stuff I wrote Tagged With: decomP, Flower Pot

Chiaroscuro

September 10, 2019 By Jordan

Chiara’s father had a bright face once. In the sapphire dusks of the garden in Naples, her father had the smile of a saint. But now he is smudged, and he falls asleep on the couch with his mouth wide open. Sometimes he wears a mask.

Absolutely charmed to see my story, “Chiaroscuro,” appear online in Scoundrel Time, where it was edited by the luminous Karen E. Bender. Scoundrel Time is a wonderful magazine. You’d generally be a better human for reading it.

Filed Under: Stuff I wrote Tagged With: Chiaroscuro, Scoundrel Time

Chinese Poetry

July 31, 2019 By Jordan

Dinghao squatted on a flat stone ledge, peering out over the swamp and the town and the torchlights that flickered in the darkness like a zodiac of doom.

“What now?” Coffin Maker Wang whispered.

With a coolness to his gaze, Dinghao turned to the opposite direction, looking out over the illucid darkness and the landscape that stretched for miles.

“Now,” he said. “We walk.”

Eunoia Review is a Singapore-based online literary journal committed to sharing the fruits of ‘beautiful thinking’, and one which just did me the great honor of publishing my very long short story, “Chinese Poetry.“

Filed Under: Stuff I wrote Tagged With: Eunoia Review

A Conversation with Death on the Subject of Love

February 8, 2019 By Jordan

Today I will see the first sunrise of my life, Shanyang said to himself as he limped past a sewer grate belching hot fumes.

Honored to see this story of mine appear in Volume 18 of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. I think the title is probably better than the story.

Filed Under: Stuff I wrote Tagged With: Quarterly Literary Review Singapore

Talking Magic

August 25, 2017 By Jordan

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

…Mark Twain, from Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

For those (like myself) who still read Twain with a kind of absorbing awe, and also those (not like myself) who read academic writing, I’m quite proud to point to this month’s issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, which features a lengthy work of mine titled “The (Magical) Voice of Community in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger,” in which I argue that Twain was America’s (and perhaps the world’s?) first magical realist novelist, and also that magical realism itself is little more than…well…how southerners talk.

Filed Under: Predicates and commas and whatnot, Stuff I wrote

A perfect image…

July 8, 2017 By Jordan

In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators.

…from Cormac McCarthy‘s perfect novel, The Road.

Filed Under: Prose Porn, Stuff I wrote Tagged With: Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Drunken Boat 21, Hong Kong, and my latest story…

April 16, 2015 By Jordan

It’s always a tremendous honor to see things you’ve written in print. In this case however I’m particularly proud. To join writers of such deep and thoughtful conviction, in a dialogue about a city I love but to which, ultimately, don’t belong, is humbling.

Drunken Boat 21, Hong Kong Folio, edited by the resplendent Sreedhevi Iyer, and my very short story: The Protester.

Filed Under: Stuff I wrote Tagged With: Drunken Boat, Hong Kong

No One Waits In The Rain

May 24, 2014 By Jordan

*Originally published in MaLa Literary Journal, Issue 3, June, 2013

Shanyang wasn’t a slow walker, no not at all. Typically he rolled down the sidewalks at a reckless pace, falling forward more than walking. He was lucky his feet were always there to catch him. Everyday he barreled this way along the six city blocks separating the bookstore where he worked and the two-room apartment he shared with four other twentysomething migrants. There was a theater along the way, a very nice one, all things considered, that occasionally featured signposts for bad versions of Shakespeare. There were nine convenience stores, two of which had pretty sales clerks. There was a splotch of tar on the fourth block shaped like Italy, real city spit, and five traffic lights that had never once turned green. But Shanyang never could have told you any of this, disregarding the tar stain, whose map-like qualities he felt proud for recognizing. Everything else was just token scenery. Always rushing downhill, chin to chest, it was generally only things like sidewalk splatter and cigarette stubs that spoke to him.

In fact, if you asked Shanyang to draw a map (of his commute home, not Italy – he would’ve nailed that), it would only feature a single straight line. It probably wouldn’t even reach the proper destination. Most likely it would end on block five, devolving into a whirlwind of calligraphy and daydreaming pencil trails. It would almost certainly tell you to look to your left, and go on to describe everything and nothing you might see with photographic detail. Everything because it was the only thing he looked at, every single day, on his walk home from work. Nothing because the only thing he looked at…was her, the girl in the qipao.

She was always there, at exactly 7:14 PM. Everyday her blue parasol resting on her shoulder, balanced on the silk threads of her fingers. Everyday her sharp little chin weighted down (Shanyang could certainly identify with that feeling), making her watery eyes look even bigger, even rounder. Everyday legs crossed and tucked beneath her, everyday tiny lobeless ears peeking out from her long black hair like moonbeams, everyday wearing the same dress that was born long, long ago, in a time when music and art and fashion were all the same. You couldn’t really say that it was the dress Shanyang noticed, but you couldn’t say it wasn’t either, because they were inseparable, this girl and her qipao. It wasn’t the embarrassing kind of qipao foreign girls put on for wine tastings and charity dinners at downtown hotels. It was a genuine, jazz-era Shanghai qipao. And a stunning one at that. Blue like a dirty sapphire. Gold trim so ornate it was almost tacky. And everyday, every single single single day, Shanyang glanced to his left for five infinite seconds, maybe less, to make sure she was still there.

And she was always there, sitting on the same marble bench in front of the same theater beneath the same four year old-signs for The Tempest. Shanyang thought she was a statue at first – some sort of ludicrously elaborate promotion for an upcoming show, some sort of darling advertisement for a play people would only pretend to pay attention to. But then, on the fourth walk home after he first noticed her, she sighed. Oh, how she sighed. It wasn’t until he arrived at the next block that he realized how the girl’s slight expulsion of breath had made him hold his own. She stole my breath, he thought, more than a little confused.Afterward he wondered, just maybe, if she was a hostess at one of those massage parlors Hong Kong businessmen go to – and a really nice one at that, judging from the quality of her dress. But that couldn’t really be correct, he soon decided, because those hostesses probably get dressed at work. Either way though, she was always sitting there, still as a statue, and everyday Shanyang’s walk home took a second or two longer.

After a week and a half of pretending not to notice his little statue girl, Shanyang realized that he hadn’t quit thinking about her for days. At least two or three times he described her to his roommates over a dinner of UFO instant noodles. As striking as a fish walking down the street. A breathing anachronism (Buy a dictionary, he said). So lovely she made you wish you’d read more poetry. Day in and day out, she fluttered around his head like a glowing blue moth to a plain white candle.

As he pondered this strange development, Shanyang had an epiphany, maybe the first of his life. It might have had something to do with a book he was reading, something pulled from the expansive and poorly organized import shelf at his store (which was, after all, the entire reason he’d applied for the job). Or perhaps it was a book he’d already read, he couldn’t really say for sure. All of a sudden though, he had the very pure realization that this must be what love feels like. Her inky blue black hair, her skin like clean notebook paper, her back like the spine of a dictionary – he loved everything about her. She was his Juliet, he decided. His Cosette. How to translate Cosette into Chinese? he tried but couldn’t remember.

On the twelfth night after he’d first noticed the girl in the qipao, Shanyang climbed to the roof of his apartment building and wrote a poem. He dangled his unwashed and permanently brown feet over the security wall, searching the stars for some clue to immortal beauty. The stars were quiet, but he wrote anyway. Five characters across, four lines down, he plucked a handful of words that fit perfectly into the Tang style. And for a moment, he was satisfied. But the more he read and reread the poem, the less he liked it. A thousand years of literary tradition might not be enough to do her justice. The rhymes, the parallelism of his characters, they paid homage to the wrong hands, he thought. He saw her own, soul-white hands, ever-folded, resting like a book on her lap. Like a book he’d read cover to cover, all through the night, then immediately turn over and read again. In the end, those were the exact words he chose, and structured though they were in eight lines instead of four, she was in them, and her quiet loveliness was wild and free.

Two days later, Shanyang almost wished he hadn’t found those words at all. Fresh from the walk home, his head still swirling in blue typhoon pirouettes, he stepped out of the shower and found Dufeng, his heaviest and least likely to have showered roommate standing on a cot, clearing his throat.

“Chrysanthemum petals don’t fall during the night…” Dufeng closed his eyes in mock sincerity, hand to his heart. His other hand clutched Shanyang’s poem, holding it aloft like a torch. Their three roommates fell back laughing on their own cots, one spitting a mouthful of UFO noodles on the floor at Shanyang’s feet.

“Bastard! Give it back!” Shanyang tackled Dufeng on the cot, ripping the sheet of paper from his hands before leaping backward as his towel fell to the floor. Exposed as he was, his damp penis trying its best to hide behind a hedge of fur, Shanyang didn’t pick up his towel. He just sulked back to the bathroom, dripping wet and naked, trying not to let water stain the page. Towel or not, he’d never felt more naked.

“You’re writing poems about that massage whore!” Dufeng rolled around on his cot. “You’re writing poems…about…a hooker!”

Their cackles bounced like stones tossed across the cold bathroom tile.

Days went by. Shanyang buried his suffering, his persecution on her behalf, beneath a sea of silence. Everyday he glided by, only a strong whisper away from the only beautiful girl in the entire world. At night he rolled around in bed, imagining stories upon stories to explain the color of her dress, the serenity of her loneliness. During the day, he flipped through the English books he was shelving, stealing names for her. He scribbled them on the back of his hand, crossing some out, underlining others, whispering those that were elegant enough, literary enough. Isabel. Sabina. Junan. Naoko…he liked Naoko. He began filling the margins of his own books with her new name, crossing out the lead characters and replacing them with the name of a girl whose swallow shoulders truly could carry the weight of the world’s words. Oh Anna Karen-in a-in a…in a what? How feeble, she was. All those Elizabeths and Janes, all those pitiful women. Daisy became Naoko. Bovary, Bloom, Bart…all Naoko. Hanna became Naoko, and Shanyang the Italian thief creeping noiselessly around her secrets.

On the morning of the twenty-fourth day after he’d first seen the girl in the qipao, Shanyang slumped through the door of Book City. He didn’t bother to brush away the water trickling from his long, poet’s hair. He didn’t even bother to pick up his feet. He just turned and stared back out at the rain falling in knife-edge sheets against the glass. For three weeks, he looked forward to work each day only so he could leave. He only took the job for the discount it earned him, it hardly paid enough to keep him reading anyway, and he’d thought about quitting every day since he began. Every day, that is, until twenty four days earlier. For twenty four days he got to leave, and the sun shone, and he knew for the first time in his life he had some purpose, whatever it was. He’d written six poems and didn’t care what his roommates thought. He’d slept little, and felt more energetic because of it. But on that day, the world outside the window was dripping into the gutter.

He wiped his nose on his sleeve. She wouldn’t be waiting on him. No one waits in the rain.

Even when Xiaoshu, the pudgy sales clerk who consistently smelled like 7/11 fish balls, came galloping out of the rain and smacked face-first into the swinging glass door, Shanyang couldn’t even manage a smirk. When the rail thin Sichuan girl from the China Mobile store next door offered him a sticky meat bun at lunch, he just sighed and walked away.

What’s his problem?

Heartbroken over a girl, I guess.

Really? I thought he was gay?

No, just a poet.

Even on the walk home, as water seeped through the hole in the bottom of his only right shoe, Shanyang didn’t pick up his pace. He decided that, for once, he only wanted to write about rain. How could he run from it?

As he sloshed down the steps of the theater block underpass, Shanyang decided he wouldn’t even cast his usual sidelong glance. The bench would be empty, he just knew it, filled with rain. But very quickly, that emptiness changed his mind. Maybe, because she isn’t there, he could be closer to her than ever. For the first time all day, he smiled, knowing there was a place for him to sit in the rain, a place to wait. How very poetic, he thought.

He rounded the lychee tree-lined promenade, the walls of performance flyers and marble arcades where old ladies played badminton, and started toward the rain-whipped plaza he always hid from. He kept his head down, knowing it would take exactly thirty-two steps after the cracked-green, unhinged recycling bin. After twenty-eight steps, Shanyang finally looked up. And he froze.

He didn’t mean to freeze, he just did. There was nothing else he could do. Standing there, sniffling, eyebrows scrunched together, he was acutely aware that the bench, her bench, now closer than it had ever been, was the only dry bench in the city. For the first time in twenty four days, from beneath a blue umbrella, the girl in the qipao looked up.

There they were, two sides of a movie screen. Two actors, two audiences. They were just there. And there they were. And she was there. And she was there. And suddenly, Shanyang realized that he was scared to death. His eyebrows popped like broken guitar strings. His eyes scrambled from side to side. He watched himself toe the oily puddle beneath his shoe, shifted his weight, began turning very slowly in hopes that he’d just disappear behind a perfectly angled sheet of rain. His feet were moving of their own accord, and he wasn’t sure why, or how. And there wasn’t a thought in his head, no sound anywhere at all, not even in the violent beating of his heart.

And then there was.

“Do you need an umbrella?” said the girl in the qipao.

Just like that, at the bell chime sound of a completely normal, completely unremarkable female voice, a universe of rain drops slowed to a quiet stop. They hung there in the air, spinning on tiny diamond pivots, and all the world was waiting for them to fall.

“No…ummm…no thank you.”

And again, there they were. Silent for a few more unusual, but for some reason that Shanyang would never figure out for the rest of his life, not terribly awkward moments.

“I think you do.”

With her free hand, the girl in the qipao folded her dress at the waist, lifting its gold hem a few inches above the murky stream sliding away beneath her feet, revealing exactly the pair of delicately embroidered slippers Shanyang had imagined. He didn’t notice though. He was drunk with the sight of her ankles. For some reason, their fine, bone white curves made him think of violin music. The girl in the qipao stood up and brought them closer to him.

“Thanks…thank you.”

They walked in complete silence, shoulder to shoulder. One block slid past, two, a hundred. A thousand city blocks, a thousand cities could have floated by and Shanyang never would have known. They were blanketed in office buildings that had no name, in sidewalks and street lamps that weren’t there, that couldn’t ever be there, not in the silliest of stories. Shanyang would never remember what that day looked like ever again. All he’d ever remember were two pairs of feet, tip-toeing through rain puddles, side by side.

As they approached the footbridge that led Shanyang home, the girl in the qipao broke the silence.

“You know, I’ve seen you before.”

And all the world’s rain remembered to fall.

Twenty minutes later, or a few lifetimes in Shanyang’s mind, the two of them were standing in the alleyway leading to his apartment. They’d made very small talk, mostly her asking where he worked, where he’s from, how he managed to deal with such messy hair. Shanyang could hardly answer at first; he was too worried about his wet clothes rubbing against her dress. But as the cars and red lights, alleys and convenience stores passed by, he realized that the girl in the qipao talked, amazingly, like a girl, and the words fell out of his mouth easier than they ever had. Once or twice they even laughed, him like a soaking wet poet, she like a bird. But as they stood there beneath a lamp post, itself aching to flicker on, a hush fell between them. Shanyang didn’t want her to see the crumbling walls of his castle, so he just nodded, biting his lip.

“Well,” she said, “I’m going on past. My home is four blocks away. Thank you for talking to me.”

“I should thank you…for the umbrella. I guess…I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Probably not. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

Shanyang’s eyes doubled in size and he chewed his lip twice as hard. “Oh, okay. When will you get back?”

The girl rubbed the back of her hand and smiled. “I’m not. I’m going back to my hometown. To get married.”

Shanyang didn’t bother getting out of the rain as he watched her walk away. He couldn’t muster any thoughts at all, not the tiniest specter of a feeling, only moving occasionally to wipe away the rain pooling in his eyes. When the blue flame of her dress finally burned out in the distance, Shanyang turned and looked up at his bedroom window. He knew his cot, new books, a notepad were all waiting on him.

No.

He turned and ran down the alley, toward the girl in the qipao, toward the purpose he finally had, whatever it was. 

Filed Under: Stuff I wrote Tagged With: MaLa Literary Journal, Short Story

Learning to Dance (at the top of the world)

January 26, 2013 By Jordan

 

Late last summer, I had the opportunity to make my first visit to a tiny, chilly little place on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau called the Seng Girls Home. The Seng Girls are one of many amazing projects supported by Captivating International, a small organization of incredible, amazing, supremely dedicated people I’m incredibly fortunate to know, and they did me the honor of allowing me to write a short essay about the experience on their blog.

I hope you’ll take five minutes to read the essay (reprinted below), check out Captivating and the Seng Girls, and consider sponsoring one of these awesome little ladies for a minuscule bit of money. They’re incredible people, and they’d love you for it.

Learning to Dance (at the top of the world)

 

Qinghai is a strange place, an unsettling place. If anything it’s an ecstatic place, yet not in the diluted, everyday form of the word that makes you think wildly happy (though that’s entirely true as well). It’s ecstatic in a literary sense – a place where ten thousand times a day you find yourself beyond the confines of your own body, watching yourself, unable to quite comprehend that you are where you are, that you’re doing what you’re doing, that you’re seeing what you’re seeing.

Epiphanies snowball on top of each other there, until you’re filled to bursting with some grand sense of adventure and importance. Or, perhaps, the exact opposite. At least that’s what I’d imagine the Seng girls would tell you. Amongst so much wind and snow and time that feels slower and thicker than mud, what’s so important? It’s only people like you and I who feel beyond themselves when looking up at such a sky, huge, vast, and bluer than blue, with clouds rolling across it like great wooly sheep. It’s only us, regular people, who feel awed by the strands of prayer flags mingling with the wind. It’s us who feel compelled to take pictures of the chilly, terrifically unamused yak.

Yet you don’t realize this at first. At first you feel, very superficially, the sense of time beyond time that can only exist at such altitudes, the nobility of those hairy yak. But you will. You’ll realize the silliness of your epiphanies, of your grand, poetic realizations, and it will most likely come the first time you look around at dozens of smiling, girlish, tomato-red faces and realize: they’re not even cold. Much like the yak, the Seng Girls aren’t amused by the storybook landscape. They aren’t impressed by bullets of hail or the Milky Way frosted in stark relief beyond their bedroom windows. No, they don’t really care. While you’re shivering in the wind, you watch them and realize they too are shaking, but for a very different reason, as if there’s something inside them fighting to get out. It’s that moment when you fall completely in love with these girls, when you realize that they can carry and tolerate an incomprehensible voltage of life, and that, really, this vibration inside them comes from a singular place: they just want to dance.

Truthfully – they just want to dance. And they do. As often as possible. Inside, outside, in the rain or sun or snow, they dance. No matter how dirty their shoes are or how infected the windburn on their faces, they dance, and when you walk into a room and one hundred and twenty of them stand up until you sit, or when they drape three dozen silk scarves around your neck, or when you stumble out of the frozen mist of your sleeping bag and find twenty of them sitting at desks in the snow, reciting vocabulary words in three languages, and again they all stand up until you’ve passed, smiling and smiling and smiling, you can tell that really, they’re all thinking about lunchtime, when they get the chance to dance again. That’s when Qinghai stops being impressive. That’s when you climb back into your own body, when you start to focus, when you feel a sense of conviction balling up in you like twine and forcing you to act. In that moment, you’ll extend your hand, you’ll offer to help. You’ll realize that the stories you wanted to tell your family, the pictures you wanted to post on Facebook, were as fleeting as the weather. You’ll want so very desperately to help these girls, to give them an even greater voltage of life to tolerate, to make a difference.

Yet…that too will pass. It can’t help but pass, because still, these girls aren’t impressed. Yes, you’ll help. Yes, you’ll help them find more medicine, better plumbing, new door hinges…but they won’t be worried. You’ll realize that where they are, together, with friends and teachers who adore them…they smile. Constantly, desperately, as if doing so will tame the weather and split the skies, they smile. And then you’ll look around and realize how very big a very small person can be, how small you might actually be yourself, and how you will always be, perhaps, some sort of cliche, no matter what you do, unless maybe, maybe, you can figure out how to dance.

Then, the Seng girls will be impressed. And they’ll smile. And in that moment, you’ll have made all the difference in the world.

Filed Under: Good ol' fashioned rant, Stuff I wrote Tagged With: Captivating International, Seng Girls Home