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Post by NZBC on Oct 31, 2014 16:00:09 GMT 12
When I realised it was you - Short Story Competition winner We received more than 300 entries for our Short Story Competition, which made deciding on a winner difficult for our judges. New Zealand Listener books and culture editor Mark Broatch and author and creative writing tutor Adrienne Jansen selected When I realised it was you, by Heidi North-Bailey, as the winning entry. When I realised it was you By Heidi North-Bailey When I realised, I was thinking about Shanghai, caught in the way we stepped out onto the Bund into that sudden flash flood. Remember? We ran through it like children, laughing. Your gloved hand was warm. The green of your scarf whipped my eyes and I didn’t care as we skimmed over the smooth concrete. The whole city flowing under three inches of water. You kissed me in that rain. It’s a postcard I carry. I close my eyes and you catch me. Pull me close. Your eyelashes are dripping with rain. I smile and dip my head back, just for an instant. Behind us, the pink streak of the Pearl Tower rises unsteadily in the driving rain. Around us, the press of people. Hello, they were all saying. Hello. Finally making it to the tower, the lift to the 40th floor, an icicle falling off the edge of the building as we went past. A perfect dagger. We were going up so didn’t heed the danger. I should have seen it coming. But all I could see was you. I’d almost forgotten about China. It was my mother, after she’d dropped me home from the dress fitting today. Sifting through my pile of magazines she called to me in the kitchen, “You’re fatter than you were in China.” “What?” I scrubbed lipstick off her cup. “Fatter – don’t frown, think of the wedding pictures. You can see it in your face.” She held up the photograph she’d found. I dried my hands and went over. Took the photo casually. Only once I’d retreated back to the kitchen did I allow myself to study it. I traced the girl’s cheekbones, her smile. “Do you miss Asia then?” Mum flipped her Air New Zealand magazine shut, looking expectantly at me. I couldn’t look at her, it was too personal. “I miss the food.” These are the things that go around my head. Imprints. Sitting on the windowsill in the blue-grey dawn, heat already curling the edges of the day back. Breathing in the thick aroma of overcooked vegetables. Watching men swim out into the pretty, polluted Red Flower Lake. Faded orange buoys tied to their backs, bobbing along behind them. You sleeping deeply in the uncomfortable bed beside me. And I must’ve been smiling, thinking of you then. “Just the food?” Mum arched her eyebrows. My smile snapped shut. “Where’s Daniel then?” Mum asked. I was wondering too. I forced myself not to check the time, “Working late.” I lied, pulling a chicken from the back of the fridge. “Well, best be off.” She stood up, slipping the photo smoothly into her purse. “No point reminding Dan you’ve put on weight.” Mistaking the look on my face she softened, reaching across the bench to me. “You’ll still be a beautiful bride.” In the silence she left, my stomach contracted. Seven forty-five. I turned the oven on, knowing I didn’t have time to cook, but starting anyway. Knowing too I’d blame you for not telling me where you were. Pushing down the fear that this time you just wouldn’t come home at all. I ripped open the chicken, my mind replaying last night’s fight. You were doing the dishes when I came in. “Dan, why’re you using that tea towel to dry the dishes?” “What?” “That tea towel is for hands. This tea towel is for dishes.” This unaccountable rage flew up inside me, sucked out all my air. It was a lie about the tea towel. I’d used it myself to dry the dishes, guiltily, only last week. But it had become important to me, suddenly, fiercely. “Sorry,” the stiff ridge of your neck. I turned away, furious, wanting a fight. Something real. “It’s easier. To agree.” You said later in bed, “You always have to win.” I felt sick. I felt like saying, Isn’t this what we used to laugh about, swear we’d never turn into? Instead my words shot into the pillow, “Do you actually want to marry me?” “Of course I do.” Your voice setting concrete. You were gone when I woke in the hard bright morning. I text you my apology. You replied saying it was normal, pre-wedding nerves. And I believed you. Until I saw the photograph. You and me. Teaching in Shanghai. Back before our lives began. I close my eyes, and see you catch me. Your eyelashes are dripping with rain… And that’s when I realised. I loved you then, I mean, really loved you. This time I saw the icicle detach from the building. Plunge 37 floors. The serendipity as the woman looked up, jumped aside just in time. I saw the icicle hit the ground. Shatter. I saw everything. And I knew. You were wrong, Daniel. I could lose. I could lose you. Last updated: 31 Oct 2014 asianz.org.nz/about-us/20th-anniversary/short-story-competition/winner-north-bailey
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Post by NZBC on Oct 31, 2014 16:04:41 GMT 12
Mana - Short Story Competition finalist Four stories were shortlisted as finalists for the Asia New Zealand Foundation's Short Story Competition. This was one of them. Mana By Mary Elsmore-Neilson Broken punga scratched, pushed, gripped my hair in the dark. Hard piko piko poked, snatched my singlet. Shattered light guided me, but not the me I had been, through the bush to the sighing waves, the gentle tinkling of rinsed shells. In front lay smooth sand – a pale princess path, soft for my bare feet. Marama, what mum called it, was so close and heavy that it rested on the water. Last night, dad called it “Super moon”. The pain came back – rose up up, tightening my insides, so I couldn't breathe properly. I ran to Rona-whakamau-tai, she who controlled the tides. Mum named me Rona. Mum was gone away because of her sickness. I crouched down, let Rona bath me, whisper and wash me clean like the shells, splash my hands and face. Shivering, I crept back into the bush, nestled in aruhe like weka birds, pretended I was warm with Mum. Dad and Rae were in our nice campervan, on a nice holiday, but now I knew why she was mean to me and why dad gave her the biggest ice creams and the new jelly shoes. On the second night of our nice holiday, animal grunts woke me. I looked down from my hi-top bed at the large darkness, swimming in the squashed moonlight. “Dad?” I cried. “What do you want?” He sounded all furry and deep. “Where are you and Rae?” “We're here. Nothing to worry about. Go back to sleep.” “What are you doing?” “Rae needed a cuddle, didn't you Rae?” Sounded like a tiny mouse. I said, “I want a cuddle Dad, like Rae.” “Not now dear. Tomorrow, after our swim and fish and chips. Go back to sleep.” Warm, wet, I screamed. Sniff sniff, it was soft and tickly with little, smiley brown eyes and a pink mouth that woofed. “Mana, Mana.” He disappeared, then came back, all busy, sort of talking to someone. I stood up. A brown laughing face with criss-cross lines looked at me. A singing sort of word, “Sayonara,” fell from her no-teeth mouth. White flowers, with sunshine middles and straggly petals grew on her red dressing gown. She took my hand, tucked it into her warm one. The little dog jumped up, wagged his feathery tail for fun. “Mana,” I called, and he walked beside me to a little shed with a fire outside. The Sayonara lady sat down, like squatting at school. The lady poured brown water into a tiny bowl where blue fish floated around the outside-top, then pretended to drink it. She passed it to me. Strong and hot, it tasted tangy and good. She went inside the shed and came back with another dressing gown of blue shells. I put it on, and we sat there as she sthingyed rice from the black pot into my dish. “They always eat rice in Asia,” said Nanny Brown, when we used to stay at her house in Kaitaia. Once she told us to be careful about things some men did. Sun danced on the pink silvery whole fish on the grill. The lady gave me two sticks. “Chopsticks – you eat like this.” I tried hard to make the food stay and not slide away from the sticks. I used my fingers a bit which seemed okay. When we finished she showed me inside her shed. It was clean, nice, not like the campervan but wooden, with only one bed and a chair. On the wall hung a square picture with white clouds on pale blue streams inside bamboo. This word, Serendipity, marched across the clouds. Underneath were easy words I knew – “finding something good without looking for it”. I knew what they meant as I looked into the old lady's face creased around her no-teeth mouth. The S-word was hard. Rae would know it. When we played brides, I held her train, same as the sister of the princess who married the handsome prince. The old lady pointed to the bed. I climbed up and Mana jumped, snuggled in warm beside me. Next thing a roar rattled, droned through my head. I went under the blanket. Tears wet me everywhere, then the old lady came and a fresh sea smell, like gulls sailing high, wrapped around us. She held me, rocked me saying “This Air New Zealand plane. Fly three times week.” A crumpled photo with three smiling faces lay on the box beside her bed. She held it up. A tear dropped out of her eye, rolled down her cheek losing its way until another caught it up. “My family gone. Your family gone. We be together. Catch fish, be happy till we fly away.” Last updated: 31 Oct 2014 asianz.org.nz/about-us/20th-anniversary/short-story-competition/shortlisted-eismore-neilson
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Post by NZBC on Oct 31, 2014 16:08:06 GMT 12
Garden of Eden Park - Short Story Competition finalist Four stories were shortlisted as finalists for the Asia New Zealand Foundation's Short Story Competition. This was one of them. Garden of Eden Park By Nandini Ghosh My father discovered social networking when he was eighty-seven. His quivering fingers didn't navigate the keyboard as smoothly as his grandchildren's did, but he persevered. He mastered email, though he preferred to write letters with his tortoiseshell fountain pen. Ashokan lion stamps glared from powder-blue envelopes in the cardboard box where I collected his correspondence. I gave Dad a laptop when I visited him in India three years ago. I hoped he'd connect with family all over the world. It was to him to save him from loneliness. "Look at my machine," he told friends. "It's from my son in New Zilland." I taught him to email and introduced him to social media. A flurry of Internet activity ensued on my return. I sent photos of my wife and children, uploaded the kids' artwork. I made friend suggestions for relatives in Europe and America. My nephew posed in cricket whites on his grandfather's timeline. Dad chatted with aunts in America and nieces in Norway. He loved simultaneously exchanging information between Wisconsin, Oslo and Auckland. There were jokes, links to songs and images of my mother smiling through dense foliage. Monsoon charged air wrapped me in its wet warmth, as I remembered Mum's embrace, the velvet of her cheek. I imagined she was still alive. My brother posted a picture of Dad at the cricket at Eden Gardens in Kolkata. It was an old photo with a tea stain on the corner. Underneath, a string of comments grew. I suggested Dad return to Auckland. The cricket may not be as good at Eden Park, but it would be nostalgic for him. However, the frailty of old age was marking my father's bones, making travel difficult. Dad's fingers, deformed by arthritis, found it difficult to punch computer keys. Late last year, he lost patience with his "machine", and that was the end of his cyber-experience. His accounts remain active, and people post messages on birthdays and festivals. He never reads them. I get a warm feeling when I recall how serendipity knocked on my office door last month. My supervisor only just caught me as I left one evening. “Can you spare a minute?” He pulled a folder out of a drawer. “Robin can't make the Indian meeting. Can you go?” Dad was sick. I didn't have enough leave to visit him. “I'll go,” I said without hesitation. At my desk I clicked under the koru logo: Air New Zealand Asia...Rest of world From: Auckland To: Kolkata Via Hong Kong I flick through the in-flight magazine as we taxi along the runway. Stroking my finger over the familiar koru I find I'm too emotional to read. It's too late. My father died two days ago. After the meeting, my brother and I will pour Dad's ashes into the Ganges. Two Bengali brothers side-by-side, with sandalwood tikkas on our foreheads. At 33,000 feet, I contemplate my father's experiences as a young man in the 1950s. He left India, set sail for a new life. Sailed on a sea of hope towards his home for the next 27 years. My brother and I were born here. It was home until the family scattered again like glass beads. My parents had missed their homeland. I imagine father disembarking. He carries a leather case covered in stickers from previous ports of call. He locates a post office, sends a telegram home. I visualise him finding his way. He shivers after the cocooning warmth of India. Does the fatty tang of fish and chips turn his stomach? Or is he too hungry to care? Traffic lights, Lemon & Paeroa. Are these experiences comforting or alien? Dad reaches Auckland and his flatmate lends him his spare coat. It has holes at the elbows. Two Bengali brothers looking out for one another. My father works in a restaurant to finance his studies. The cost of phone calls to India is prohibitive. His parents don't own a telephone anyway. I visualise the blue paper, thin as a dragonfly's wing, on which he forms the words for his letters. His mother writes every week, though her feelings lose their intensity as the lines of Bengali script travel across the world. Dad chats to Abdul-Aziz, the Pakistani waiter. Abdul-Aziz has a wife and child back home. He has another wife, a Kiwi woman whom he refers to as "Bhhalarri". Valerie keeps Abdul-Aziz warm on icy nights. She saves him from loneliness. As we come in to land, vibrant squares of farmland fluoresce in yellow light. My brother will arrive soon. I check my phone while I wait. There are messages flooding onto my father's timeline. He gets messages on birthdays and festivals. “Rest in peace.” “Remembering a wonderful Uncle.” “Always in our minds.” He'll never read them. Last updated: 31 Oct 2014 asianz.org.nz/about-us/20th-anniversary/short-story-competition/garden-eden-park-shortlisted
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Post by NZBC on Oct 31, 2014 16:12:08 GMT 12
Singing Japan - Short Story Competition finalist By Bronwyn Watkins When I first posted pics of us on Facebook, Yumiko was stricken. They were just happy selfies of us drinking hot sake, but the evening hadn’t ended well with her being 50 kilograms and Japanese. We were at an izakaya, still waiting for the umami-laden food we’d ordered to accompany our drinks, when I found her out cold, her hair making a shocking black halo spread out under the toilet door. She’d been more interested in the salarymen. The memory shamed her – lucky she had taken a shine to me at language school. We often met on Fridays, texting our positions throughout the Osaka party district until she spotted conspicuous me. Veering into eateries through traditional noren parted fabric curtains, finding seats at long cramped communal tables. "Kanpai," we toasted the raucous men. I smoked their cigarettes and laughed with them, enjoying Yumiko’s perfect face in modest hopeful repose, and the men’s shiny happy Buddha ones. Yumi needed to get married and have a baby before she turned 40. I was 40 and didn’t need either. Just another gaijin enjoying the set-apart nature of egalitarian Japan. As in set apart from the rest of Asia. "That is my life,’ Yumiko said on another such night, pointing to a movie poster of Bridget Jones’ Diary glued to a wall, also covered with sex workers’ machi. "He’s gone and married Yumyum, Yumyum,’ I sang in a street, pumping Friday night pedestrians. We were looking for a karaoke parlour. “Yumyum?” "It’s a comic opera, set in Japan,” “I rike.” “Good. Then we’ll sing it,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t be insulted when she saw it. She wasn’t. Yumyum smoothed my way through all baffling things Japanese: the din of a pachinko parlour; the exacting way to don a kimono; macabre temple ceremonies where relatives pick through cremated ashes with chopsticks for their loved one’s bones; juku cram schools still tutoring kids at 11pm. And kallaokay. She’d pay for us at the desk, hiring a room for an hour. We nearly always bought another one when the beeper went off because we had so much fun. We fell in love with the sound of our own voices: Elic Crapton for her, Chumbawamba for me. I’d been knocked down – the reason I escaped New Zealand. The smell of smoke and air freshener never deterred us from those dark grottoes. We’d find our soundproof room down a corridor of similar rooms where thumps and flat shrill singing escaped through doors opening and closing as fast as a love hotel’s. “What’s a love hotel?” I had asked another time as we passed a doorway decorated with pictures of hearts surrounding a coy cat and dog holding paws. “Can hire room by hour.” “Why?” She looked at me guilelessly. “Get away from kids?” I knew about communal sleeping and low Japanese libido but where did the national obsession with good health fit? Kyoto on the bullet train was all about food for her and geisha for me. At lunch we were served seven meticulously prepared courses. Perfect morsels served on thoughtfully selected beautiful lidded pottery. Delicious art all for NZ$25 each. “Would your mother be pleased if you were a geisha?” I had tried not to stare at the white-faced anachronisms emerging with tiny steps through sliding wooden doors onto their special street. She nodded and smiled through bulging cheeks. No enlightenment there then. “What’s this wine?” “It prum,” she said, knocking back another. When Air New Zealand started flights to Osaka, I talked her into a holiday in Hawke’s Bay. My turn to interpret Western ways for her. Vineyard lunches were a peaceful revelation. “No people!” She loved the quiet, the greenness, and our unprocessed unpackaged food. She had grown up to be suspicious of us, she told me. “I thought it would be scary,” she said, eyes wide, mouth open in an expansive tipsy epiphany. “Serendipity eh? The traveller’s strongest ally,” I told my beautiful kind friend that I never expected to make. When I heard that Yumiko had died “on a bus”, I thought it must be a mistake. No! Not possible. Was she run over? Was she drunk? Yumyum had a heart attack. I still worry that she was alone at the time. It didn’t make sense but it seemed like inscrutable Zen – her short life being absorbed leaving no remnant. She hadn’t turned 40, except on Facebook. I’ve asked them to memorialise her since people keep writing birthday greetings. It doesn’t matter. I would know her names if I saw her in heaven. Last updated: 31 Oct 2014 asianz.org.nz/about-us/20th-anniversary/short-story-competition/singing-japan-finalist
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Post by NZBC on Oct 31, 2014 16:16:16 GMT 12
Milk - Short Story Competition (highly commended) Milk By Glenda Kane Wang Li cannot feed her baby. It is no one’s fault, just a glitch of nature; a tiny reminder that a twist of fate can render 100,000 years of human evolution useless. The baby cries, and Wang Li’s heart aches. Her instinct is to feed her infant and his instinct is to be fed. Advice is at hand. The health professional knows that Wang Li feels failure, so she is gentle in delivering her counsel. Sometimes, when we cannot produce our own milk, she says, we must seek it elsewhere. Wang Li’s baby is feeding, and relief sweeps Wang Li’s body like anaesthetic. This baby will survive now. He will grow, and learn, and smile, and climb. He will run, and cry, and fall, and fly. This food nourishes his body, his brain, his soul. And hers. * Vernon King cannot feed his cows. It’s no one’s fault, just a glitch of nature; the longest drought in living memory. No rain, no grass, no hay; no milk. The beasts’ lips brush the burnished earth, seeking sustenance where only dust grows. Vernon King must call the bank; must beg for alms; cut spending to the bone; cull. He looks skyward; exhales. An Air New Zealand jet, silver against cobalt, glints at 30,000 feet where the clouds should be. * Wang Li cannot leave her home. The first typhoon of the season is raging. She has enough food for a week. Her baby’s supply sits on a shelf in a cupboard, sufficient to last six months. She is taking no chances. Her baby cries. Quickly, she prepares his meal. He quietens as he works the bottle, eyes closed, fist tight around her middle finger. She sees the whole world in his face. * Vernon King directs the driver as he reverses the truck. It’s the cleanest big rig he’s ever seen; mud’s a rare commodity around here. Bales of hay are off-loaded. They have cost a small fortune, but Vernon knows his cows will spin this straw into gold. He found it for sale in an online search. Others clamoured for it, but the down-country vendor remembered meeting him once long ago, and sold him the lot. This serendipity will save his cows’ lives. Vernon’s, too. * Wang Li picks up her baby. Where do her days go? He’s so big now! He eats; he sleeps; he grows like bamboo. Her love for him inflates her insides. Is there such a thing as too much? Might she burst? He wriggles and gurgles. She holds him cantilevered in her arms, searching the universe of his eyes. He smiles. She grins, lays him in her lap, and begins to tickle him. He smiles again, open-mouthed this time. She tickles him more. He laughs his first laugh. Transfixed, Wang Li watches as her baby’s chuckle rises through the air and winds around the column, along the ceiling and out the window that she’s left open a crack. It is caught by a gust of wind, a wispy tail of the tamed typhoon, and lifts skyward. It splits into particles that spiral south, over the belching volcanoes and glistening rivers of South East Asia and across an indigo ocean, before slowing and dropping towards a land at the bottom of the earth. * As he surveys his cattle in the dust of this desert day, Vernon King’s nostrils are teased by a tiny tickle of breeze. He looks up and sniffs. Deep in his bones, some ancient instinct stirs. Rain is coming. Not for a while, he knows. But it’s not far off. He can smell it in the air. He breathes in, then out. For the first time in many months, he smiles. Last updated: 31 Oct 2014 asianz.org.nz/about-us/20th-anniversary/short-story-competition/milk
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Post by NZBC on Oct 31, 2014 16:18:38 GMT 12
Sum's Shop - Short Story Competition (highly commended) Sum’s Shop By Bobby Shen What’s in a sign? Settled deeply in the shadows, haunches on flaking polystyrene blocks, the mighty sign of Sum’s Shop reclines against a wall. Approaching the sign, glints of the golden lettering – wild, broad‐brushed Chinese characters – catches the light from the storefront in a subdued glow as if saving its brilliance for another time. It wasn’t really all that long ago that the sign sat in a similar predicament on the floor – could it be five-odd years ago? – before being hauled up high and fastened onto the cream‐yellow wall behind the counter. Its arrival even before that point was a journey unto itself. The sign was ordered and crafted in Mr Sum’s home city of Guangzhou, China, fashioned in the prized Suan Zhi timber native to Southern Asia. It contained accents of pure black, flecks of Te Kore, the dark embodiment of potential, that of all creation. It was lugged all the way from mainland China to the Westernised port of Hong Kong, in preparation for its long journey in the clouds. Within the cluttered void of the cargo hold, it was stowed in a cocoon of material: robust plastic sheets, scratch‐resistant padding, polystyrene packers, a sturdily constructed plywood box, and even a lucky charm for safe travels. Still, Mr Sum sat in his economy class seat white-knuckled with nerves, homebound on an Air New Zealand flight. The sign was fated to be installed visible from the Balmoral street front, to be seen by all, albeit deciphered only by Chinese readers. Modest but tasteful decorative carvings breathed life into the wood’s dense surface. The very aspirations of the shop were carved into being – timeless ornamentation to a classic piece of hardwood. “It wouldn’t do to see the wood overworked,” Mr Sum said every time. For a humble little shop, it would do. Mr Sum stood leaning on the edge of the counter, his mind reminiscing, hopping from one memory to another, as he idly admired the sign. “Sum’s Shop” – a name built on the ego? No, in a moment of serendipity it had arrived in a dream one night, absurdly implanting the idea into his subconscious; the manifest of a dream, resulting in a dream. Not that “Sum” was ever a singular thing. The whole family backed the idea to get Mr Sum out of his decades‐long job as a Chinese herbalist: prying and leveraging, lifting and nailing to get him to commit to this impassioned path. The idea was – and this was premeditated endlessly before Mr Sum told anyone – a wonton shop that did only one thing to mastery. The wonton noodle soup. When he finally leaked the idea out to those around him, no one was particularly blindsided. As the chief cook of the family, he had the skill. Having owned a Chinese takeaway in a past life, he knew what he was doing. And his passion for simple, home‐style Guangzhou cuisine couldn’t honestly be matched. There was heavy debate about what constitutes a great wonton, though. Mr Sum, forever the traditionalist, didn’t like the idea of the fragrant shiitake mushrooms or the rogue prawn being a part of the recipe, much to the dismay of the younger generation. “It’s all in the soup,” he parried at such occasions, “the soup is what brings it all together.” Balance, seasoning, warmth – to achieve this, the ingredients are cooked together at a low broil for hours on end. In Cantonese, the term is ‘fire backed’, and to not have enough is distressing to anyone with an appreciation for such a soup. Similar patience was required in setting up Sum’s Shop. At first, the whole endeavour felt like a gigantic flop. Sweat and tears seasoned the soup of the profitless venture until gradually, imbued with the enriching qualities of time, it stood wobbling on its own legs of merit. Mr Sum still felt a rush of adrenaline as his mind continued to wander over the last few years of “success”. The countless hours of mis en place. The familiar burble of the soup boiling. The delighted faces of international students and locals alike. Sum’s Shop was his last word before retirement, the final shot at the fulfilment of a dream. “Success” tasted almost as good as his soup. Mr Sum still thinks that he owes the success of the shop to his grand sign. The wood, rather than lightening, is now several shades darker, unperceivably inching its way to New Zealand black. The accents of the wood can barely be discerned, but the lettering boldly holds the name true. Looking down at the sign once more, Mr Sum furrows his eyebrows deeply: he had not a clue where to now put the thing. Last updated: 31 Oct 2014 asianz.org.nz/about-us/20th-anniversary/short-story-competition
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