H.A.L. proudly presents: Kelly Tsai live in the ‘Hai!

Read about this past event at: http://shanghai.talkmagazines.cn/blogs/2011-11-01/evening-kelly-zen-yie-tsai

The H.A.L. crew is very proud to present our next feature, Brooklyn-based bad-ass Chinese Taiwanese American performance poet Ms Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai in  her first ever performance in Shanghai! As part of the infamous HAL BARd Fight series of hard-hitting literary events, we’ve lined up five of the baddest female poets Shanghai has to offer, including SLAMHAI! winner Susie Gordon and loose canon poet Andrea Fassolas. The evening will also premier the first installment of Shanghai Erotica winner Dena Rash Guzman and Jerimiah Whitlock’s film adaptation her story “Dan Orange of Shanghai,” along with a  screening of her video poetry created with Viv G. All in all, not an evening for the faint hearted.

We take Girls on Top very seriously, so drinks are free for all early birds (get it?), courtesy of the Rabbit Hole.

The Rabbit Hole (408 Shaanxi Lu/Beijing Lu), 8PM, Saturday Oct 29th.

Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai (察仁义)

Spoken word artist Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai has been featured in over 450 performances worldwide at venues including the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the House of Blues, the Apollo Theater, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and three seasons of the award-winning “Russell Simmons Presents HBO Def Poetry.” The author of Inside Outside Outside Inside (2004), Thought Crimes (2005),No Sugar Please (2008), and the CD’s Infinity Breaks (2007) and Further She Wrote (2010), Tsai has shared stages with Mos Def, KRS-One, Sonia Sanchez, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu, Amiri Baraka, Harry Belafonte, and many more.  (www.yellowgurl.com)

Pretty Fly for a Laowai II – MC Susie

by S. C. Gordon

They say I’m
Pretty fly for a laowai
But they don’t know shit,
Cos I’m the flyest of them all.

I’m the word bird,
Maybe you’ve heard.
I write rhymes that’ll hit you
Verse that’ll shit you
Like a dog that bit you.

When I hop up outta bed,
Turn my swag on.
Trippin’ through the neighborhood,
Put some tunes on.
Got my bling, got my swing, do my thing.
Got my waiguo huzhao,
Xinjiang shaokao -
Drop it like it’s hot,
Rappin’ on the spot,
Spinnin’ rhymes,
Doin’ time.

They say I’m
Pretty fly for a laowai,
But they don’t know jack,
Cos I’m the flyest mothafucka of them all.

shanghai surreal – a boy in a cafe…

by Susie Gordon

It’s mid-afternoon at Boxha Café on Fuxing Xi Lu. I have, like every other laowai, my pill-white Macbook, an overpriced notebook, and a long-cold latte in front of me.

In walks a boy – a little European boy of eight or nine, alone, his backpack over one shoulder. He sits down at the table next to mine and takes out a folder, a calculator, and an iPhone. An iPhone. He’s nine years old.

With a wave of his hand and an imperious little cry of “Fuwuyuan!”, he beckons the waitress and orders a milkshake. Then, he proceeds to open his folder, slides his little thumb across the screen of his iPhone, and starts to access his emails.

When his milkshake arrives, he barely looks up from his travails to acknowledge it. His iPhone rings. He takes a slurp of his milkshake and answers it. He’s speaking business Mandarin to whoever is on the other end. Like a miniature Donald Trump, he sweeps his hair off his forehead and chatters away about his property portfolio. He’d bidding on a shikumen conversion on Jianguo Xi Lu. He finishes the call and slurps his milkshake again.

I go back to my own work but watch him in my peripheral vision. He’s emailing. Making notes.

A few minutes later he has David Laris on the phone. It’s cheerful camaraderie between the two of them as they discuss their latest venture (by the sound of it, a wine bar on Guangdong Lu with a Bund view).

His milkshake finished and his work complete, this Lilliputian entrepreneur packs his things away in his Toy Story backpack and leaves. I watch through the window as he digs in his pocket for his keys and unlocks a white Vespa. He drives away.

lost in the pr

by S.C.Gordon

I’ve been missing for thirteen years.

I don’t like the word ‘missing’ because it implies a sense of continuity which defeats the object of my going.

At first all I wanted to be was dead, and it was only the grey haze of confusion that clumsied my fingers and stopped them from tying a noose.

Some people think I killed myself. They come up with all sorts of reasons why. Interestingly, none of them have been anywhere near to the true reason if I’d decided to do it. It would have been easy, it really would. But I didn’t have the wherewithal to do it. Suicide requires a certain heroism,  a surety that nothing will be as great as what’d already been – an arrogance that anyone will really care.

Continue reading…

Hitotoki: The junction of Wulumuqi Lu/Yuyuan Lu

by S. C. Gordon

Time of story: Midnight

It’s raining. Wulumuqi Lu stretches behind me and beyond – a wet black ribbon. The rain is a blizzard; the trees are full of it. At the junction of Yuyuan Lu I stop at the traffic lights and remove my shoes, tucking them into the basket on the front of my bike, under the bright yellow spread of my cyclist’s raincoat. (It is more of a costume than a raincoat. Or a plastic niqab. It covers me completely, apart from my feet. I have tightened the toggle above my nose, so my field of view is a narrow slit under the inbuilt peaked cap.)

I touch my bare feet to the glossy tarmac as I wait for the lights to change. A man on a scooter pulls up beside me and stares. For once, the stare is unaccompanied by a muttering of laowai. He has no idea I’m not Chinese. My eyes are hidden beneath the peak of my canary-yellow disguise. My only strangeness is my bare feet.

It’s a rare anonymity. It’s liberation. Maybe it’s only the masked ones, the ones who are disguised, who are free.

The lights change to green beyond the fuzz of the rain. I claw my toes around the pedals and push on.

Xiao Wang’s Day at the Expo – A Field Trip Report

by S. C. Gordon

Name: Amelia Margaret Fieldman

Age: 16

Trip Report

My name is Amelia Fieldman, and I live in Gruenberg, Vermont, with my parents and my kid sister Lily. The trip co-ordinator from Swan Tours has asked me to write this report as part of the experience.

To be honest, I’m not really sure where to start. Lily is sitting beside me right now, scribbling away, but she’s much more eloquent than me, even though she’s only twelve. In any case, she sees the whole situation differently. For her it’s fiction – something she feels removed from, as if it had happened to someone else. For me it’s horribly real, and I hate it. If it was up to me we would never talk about it, but Mom and Dad wanted us to take the trip. Continue reading…

Mer-People and Sea Foxes

by Susie C. Gordon

Part I Continue reading…

5 Quick Questions for H.A.L. Author Susie C. Gordon

S. C. Gordon was born in the north of England in 1981. Her poetry collection ‘Peckham Blue’ was published in London in 2006, and she writes short stories, plays, and novels between freelancing as a journalist in Shanghai.

1. What are you working on right now?
I am in the final planning stages of a novel provisionally entitled “Hengshan Road” which tells the story of two sisters who live with their father, an exiled British author, in his near-derelict villa on Hengshan Lu. One sister was adopted as a baby, and the narrative focuses on the search for her birth mother. What they find is far from the expected. Continue reading…

A Tail of the Unexpected

by Susie Gordon

What I absolutely did not expect to find that night reclining beside a pile of slub and unwanted plastic down by Suzhou Creek was a mermaid. I hadn’t expected to find anything at all, except for the sort of solitude that would have been welcome after the despicable night I’d had thus far. I’d been down at Shelter, for yet another tiresome evening of overrated dubstep (whatever that is) and being asked what I “do” by legions of sweep-haired, sweaty entrepreneurs bent on upping their cool-cred by frequenting Shanghai’s dirtiest club.

On arriving at the creek somewhere near those warehouses on Guangfu Lu which are now “studios” taken over by yet more legions of sweep-haired entrepreneurs, I had skeeted down a set of slimy steps and alighted near a long-abandoned barge. Beside the barge, wrapped in an old orange jacket discarded by a migrant worker, sat what appeared to be a female torso atop a giant, dirty salmon’s tail. A length of mucky blue rope bound it the rusted pole against which it was leaning. A mermaid. A mermaid? Part fish, part girl – the result of some toxic leak on the Yangtze? A failed experiment in a lab somewhere?

I stared until it noticed. When it saw me, it – she? – gave a double take and a little shoulder shake.

“Lee?” she said in an odd accent that could have been American.

I held my hands up to show I meant no harm.

“Where’s Lee? Who are you?” she asked warily.

“Lee?” Amazed that the creature could speak English, I barely knew what to say. Her long brown hair was falling from a shell-comb, the effect of which – coupled with the blue-black sweep of her tail – gave her a charming Andersen look.

“Are you part of the team?” she asked. My mouth fell agape as I marvelled at her perspicacity.

“You noticed straight away!” I whispered.

“Are you a friend of Lee?”

I figured Lee must be some sort of guru or deity.

“Yes. Yes, I’m with Lee,”

“Did he tell you when it’s all going to end?” The mermaid shifted against her rope bonds, a flash of discomfort crossing her face. The apocalypse? The end of days?

“No…” I breathed. “He didn’t tell me,”

“He promised it would be soon,”

I was starting to feel the early fronds of a hangover spreading over my head, so I decided to sit down.

The mermaid sighed.

“Lee said everything was ready – all he needed to do was push the button,”

“The… button?”

She fixed me with a look.

“Do you even know anything about this?”

“Um, not really,”

“So what are you doing here?” she had that blunt way of school bullies.

I shrugged artlessly.

“Just out for a stroll,”

“Do you even know Lee?”

“Not exactly. But I could convert.”

“Convert? What the hell are you talking about?” she was aghast. “Don’t you even recognize me?”

“No. It’s not every day I see a mermaid,”

“For fuck’s sake – I’m not a mermaid. Are you stupid? This is fake,” she jabbed the tail. “I’ve been sitting here in the cold and damp for the past two hours while Lee and his stupid friends set up their camera equipment on the other side of the river,”

“What? You’re not real?”

She cocked her head and poured pity from her eyes all over me.

“Are mermaids real?” she purred. “We’re part of an art collective at the Art for Art’s Sake Gallery on Moganshan Lu. This is our first project. It’s called ‘A Tail of the Unexpected’.”