The inaugural issue features new fiction from China, guest-edited by Howard Goldblatt. Chinese authors include Li Xiao, Wang Yi, Zhang Hong, Zhu Lin, Ma Yuan, and Yang Zhenguang.

Also in the issue are views from twenty-one American authors on the state of the self in contemporary American short fiction; stories by Joyce Carol Oates (“Cave of Ten Thousand Sacrifices”) and Ann Beattie (“Nineteen Years”); poetry by American authors; and selections from chapbooks by Michael Hannon and Gene Frumkin.

The Hawai‘i work in this issue includes photographs by Wayne Levin, works by Hawai‘i poets, notices of books written and/or published in the islands, and commentary by Hawai‘i fiction writers.

Spring–Fall 1989 (vol. 1, nos. 1–2)
212 pages

“He followed me into the Field of Ghosts. I hit him with a rock. It caught him on the forehead and he went down. ‘He must be dead,’ she said. ‘He was still on the ground when I left. I killed him.’

Dou Gua thought she heard a swish. The whip that Dou Bao used to herd sheep hung behind the door, its thongs snaking quietly down the mud wall. She knew by experience that that was how it sounded when it skimmed past her ear; she felt a muscle on her back jump. Actually, nothing moved. The oil lamp had crackled, sending off a spark and causing the shadow of the whip on the wall to flicker.

Not a hint of expression on Dou Bao’s face.”

—from “Moonlight Over the Field of Ghosts”
by Yang Zhengguang

“The name ‘Little West Lake’ was a misnomer. Unlike the legendary scenic West Lake, the place where we met was nothing more than a deserted pond, rimmed with a variety of bushes, wild grasses, insects, rocks, and snake-like moss. In addition, the university agricultural station keeper’s guard dog kept barking. Altogether, the area seemed wholly different from the rest of the campus, where birds sang and fragrant flowers bloomed. We were told that the area had never been developed because it was the burial site of scores of former professors who had died to preserve the university in the days before liberation. Due to its desolation, most students never ventured there during their university days.”

—from “The Outsider” by Zhang Hong

“It is not something that holds me up.
It is something heavy that fell from the sky—
I was swimming and seized it.

Now I can barely keep my head above water
and manage the thing—
I believe it is something that holds me up.”

—from “The Gift” by Michael Hannon

“It’s the size of the Cave of Ten Thousand Sacrifices that frightens Mrs. Cochrane initially. A small cathedral you might say. Awesome, and so silent. Clearly a sacred place of echoes, jagged rock formations, a small galaxy of stalactites like ten-foot icicles, thick conical stalagmites so bluntly phallic in shape the Mrs. Cochrane feels vaguely embarrassed—hopes Deborah won’t comment. The ceiling is about thirty feet overhead ridged and serrated like the inside of a great mouth. There is a royal throne carved from granite, there is an enormous altar to the god with the unpronounceable name—so many h’s, q’s, z’s it sounds like a muffled sneeze—there are numerous ‘sacred’ objects against the cave’s knobby walls. Impossible not to feel terror here, or its residue. The very whiff of madness.”

—from “Cave of Ten Thousand Sacrifices"
by Joyce Carol Oates

  

Surfing Series, Number 13
photograph by Wayne Levin

Wayne Levin has had shows in Paris, Tokyo, and New York, and his photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Arts in New York as well as in Hawaii at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Contemporary Arts Center, and the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. In 1984 he was awarded the Photographers Fellowship of the National Endowment for the Arts, the only Hawaii photographer ever so recognized.

 
About the guest editor: Howard Goldblatt teaches Chinese literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he edits the scholarly journal Modern Chinese Literature; he is also editor of Worlds Apart: Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences (M. E. Sharpe). His recent translations include The Butcher's Wife by Li Ang (North Point), Market Street by Xiao Hong (University of Washington), Heavy Wings by Zhang Jie (Grove Press), and Outcasts by Pai Hsien-yung (Gay Sunshine Press), and his translations of very short Chinese fictions have been appearing recently in Harper's.