By YUNHAN FANG
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
By the summer of 2009, I found I was thinking less and less about the Wenchuan earthquake the year prior, in which 87,000 people had died, my father among them. That year, on the day of Xiazhi, I met a girl called Thirteen. We spent the night together, having sex and talking until the sky turned the color of moonstone.
BY K-YU LIU
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
The rumor was there was a backdoor into the best running camp in the capital. To get your kid in, there’d better be something wrong with their mind.
Mother drove me to the facility with a note from Dr. Chen in her purse. For four hours, roads splintered and strayed under our wheels. Eventually we arrived at the far Northeast corner: cornfields and silent cranes, tired grey apartments, willow trees bowing their listless branches.
By JIANAN QIAN
This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.
Alex dislikes the security check in Shanghai’s subway stations, from both an ideological and personal perspective. Being American, he hates any intrusion on privacy. And today he’s carrying a black dildo in his backpack, wrapped in a wine tote bag with a Spanish brand name on the outside. Still, he worries the X-ray man might stop him for inspection.
He touches the student ID in his jeans pocket. Back in college, George—his Chinese teacher whose toupee once came loose—had told him that the Chinese respect Ph.D. students.
The man lets him pass.
“Xie xie,” Alex thanks him.
It’s not rush hour. He finds a seat and places his backpack on his lap. With his uncombable hair sprawling out in all directions, he looks like the photo of Einstein that appears in Chinese high school textbooks. Not that Alex would know about that. His destination is the west side of the city, a five-star hotel. A sex class will take place in one of the suites and he’ll be one of the models. It’s his first time participating in the sex industry, and the thought brings a smile to his face. However, the young woman sitting beside him seems uncomfortable or offended by his presence, and moves to another seat.
By RUONAN ZHENG
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
1. May 2021
At an assignment in Xinjiang, I am covering a rising female photographer, club-hopping with her and her boyfriend. Amidst glittering disco balls, fast drum beats, and fake US dollars tossed around by a random rapper, I am introduced to a guy who used to work for Vice China, making short documentaries. His exact greeting was: “Send my best regards to the bosses; I too graduated from there.” We exchanged our WeChats, and he pulled off some crazy dance moves on the floor afterward. I didn’t hear from him again but have enjoyed the hikes and mountain scenery posted on his WeChat Moments ever since.
“Graduated” is a word many ex-employees of Vice China use to describe their experience after leaving the company. Our time there felt as if we were a bunch of undergrads taking wacky tequila shots in the office, then still coming in hungover the next morning because there was nowhere better to go. Near the end of Vice China’s existence, Simon, one of the OGs who had worked for them since the beginning, reminisced about an end-of-the-year company cruise party, recalling those times as a dream. Back then, he did a little bit of everything—editorial, commercial, social media. There was always stuff to do, partnerships to form, and, of course, money from advertisers to spend. All the alcohol we ingested and the battles we fought with clients were preparing us for life after, in the cruel outside world.
The allure of working at Vice was very real for a twenty-something, especially for a Chinese kid. The Western influence took root and prospered at Vice China, which opposed everything a normal job in China entailed. To be recruited meant becoming part of a cool-kid club, access to a social currency, a guaranteed adventurous time.
This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.
By JINJIN XU
I try to feel this is home 1
I don’t think
I am a foreigner 2
I was not supposed to be living 3
Editor’s Note
For the rest of the world, China’s 2008 Summer Olympics—with its $40 billion budget, dramatic “Bird’s Nest” stadium, and the lavish spectacle of its opening ceremony—marked the ascension of a new economic superpower onto the modern stage. Since then, new generations of Chinese youth have grown up into a society constantly rippling with changes, inundated with globalization, technology, and consumerism.
Beijing, China – The national stadium built for the 2008 Summer Olympics & Paralympics
Today, the West views China with curiosity, suspicion, and a sense of enigma and threat. Chinese literature translated into English is still predominantly written by older authors from the period of World War II, Maoism, and the Cultural Revolution. This leaves the up-and-coming generation of Chinese artists, now dealing with wholly different lifestyles and a wholly new set of concerns, all too often neglected.
This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.
By WU WENYING, SU SHI, SHANGYANG FANG, YUN QIN WANG, and CAO COLLECTIVE.
Translated poems appear in both the original Chinese and in English.
Table of Contents:
Kevin Dean speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Patron Saints,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. Kevin talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which follows a young American trying to find his place in Cairo, while the city roils with political uncertainty after the Arab Spring uprising. Kevin also discusses how it feels to write from memory, what he tries to capture when writing about place, and what projects he’s working on now.
New Poems by Our Contributors MORRI CREECH, ELISA GABBERT, ANNA GIRGENTI, and GRANT KITTRELL.
Table of Contents:
The Others
By Morri Creech
The children that I have never had follow me, late, through the vacant corridors.
They whisper there is still time, time for the quarter moon to nock its black arrow
This event has passed, but you can watch a recording of it below, or here on YouTube!
Join The Common for the launch of Issue 28! We welcome four esteemed contributors who happen to be local: Disquiet Prize-winning poet Iqra Khan, MacArthur Fellow Brad Leithauser, environmental economist James K. Boyce, and fiction and essay writer Douglas Koziol. Issues will be available for purchase. We’ll have brief readings, a short Q&A, and lots of time to mingle!
Left to Right: Iqra Khan, James K. Boyce, Douglas Koziol, Brad Leithauser
Iqra Khan is a Pushcart-nominated poet, activist, and lawyer. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at UW Madison. She is also a winner of the 2024 Disquiet Prize in poetry and the Frontier Global Poetry Prize 2022. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Southeast Review, Adroit Journal, Swamp Pink, The Rumpus, among others. Her work is centered around collective nostalgia, Muslim credibility, and the Muslim burden of becoming.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.