GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | FICTION

ao An found his attention leaping from one bizarre scene to another. A colorless barbarian woman, whose plump body was squeezed by her fantastic costume into an odd, unnatural shape, embraced a man in full view of passersby. Two men rolled in the muck of the streets, throwing punches and grunting like swine, while their drunken companions goaded them to more ferocity. Packs of hungry dogs and one dazed mule wandered unattended and unclaimed.
    These glimpses of a half-civilized society excited him in a way that more ancient cities like Canton did not. Who could be free with centuries of custom and duty hanging on one's shoulders like cangue? His entire life had been spent struggling against whatever authority--clan or class or empire--sought to turn men and woman into oxen. A rebel's life had suited him far better than tilling a tiny plot of earth, and so he had risen from peasant to soldier to general in the Taiping army. He had commanded thousands of men, only to lose his power at the massacre of the Taiping army at Nanking. And from that fall, he had fallen farther still in Gold Mountain, where he was once again an ox, a gu li rough man. And yet, he told himself in wonder and delight, one might rise again in this barbaric land where all were outsiders and as clanless as he.

ASIAN AIR ISSUES FORUM | CONTACT US

© 1999-2003 GoldSea
No part of the contents of this site may be reproduced without prior written permission.