Summertime on the Island of Pain consisted of hot days and cold nights, but with the Autumn came a drop in the temperature that tested…
Three voices. One literary house.
Tag: Shanqui Jian
Mother Ruth and eleven of her most senior meditation students set out on an extended wilderness retreat in the mountains and forests far away and…
“While the heart is awake, the ego is asleep.” Bitter old men in ancient temples have always found a way to elevate human beings into…
“Forgive me, Great Mother, for I have sinned. It has been several lifetimes since my last confession.” In 1839, before the First Opium War, the…
The northernmost island of Shanqui Jian was the Island of Pain, with its mountain peaks, high-altitude steps, and cable cars. It held the university campus,…
Mama Muni was the university’s librarian. She was forgiving and sweet, sharp-witted and patient. She was a matron to even the older women in the…
In the Book of Genesis, man is made flesh by God. In the Garden of Eden, woman is made from man’s bones—and it is she…
Rebecca waved her arms and it wasn’t working. Rebecca wasn’t even her real name. It was something she had found in a book. Mei knew…
Mei Lubaba was awake before the sun, before the cows, before the milkmaids and the farmhands. She was awake before the roosters, the housemaids, and…
In the fall of 1920, the first cars came to the islands of Shanqui Jian and to the streets of the Walled City on the…
Mei’s journey to the Walled City began when she was sixteen, on an old Riwoche with solid knees and a pleasant disposition. She remembered hating…
In 1909, a year after Mei Lubaba left her father’s farm, slavery was officially abolished on the archipelago near the East China Sea that Mei…
In 1893 a man named Herbert Wells uncovered the mysteries of time travel for a universe that would eventually forget his middle name. Little Mei…