I must like blogging away the Mondays.

Because I always seem to blog on a Monday morning. Maybe that is because I am procrastinating the beginning of yet another week. Which I’m usually afraid is going to suck.

But not for much longer!

The perk of being in academia is definitely the summer break. This summer, I have every intention of finishing my second novel, about a group of western or ‘westernized’ Chinese women in Hong Kong. The plot is loosely based on Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, for anyone who cares. It’s more of a literary novel, but I don’t think that people who like a good ‘beach read’ would turn away from it either. It’s all about relationships and what it’s like to be a white women in a post-colonial setting. From, clearly, my own personal experience with such a thing. It should be fun, and serious, and just a good read. Hopefully, it will also be provocative of discussion about what it means to be a woman, and Chinese or American in today’s world (respectively, I only barely dabble in Chinese-American status, which I know about only from my friends in China classes).

I can’t wait to just sit down and crash it out.

That and a couple of academic articles.

I guess I plan on being productive.

But you know how that works. Doesn’t the weekend always look better on the Friday side of it? By Sunday, I think most people have disappointed themselves. They didn’t do everything on their ‘list’. That’s something that should be on “Stuff White People Like”. Lists.

Well, I say frak the lists. To-do lists outside of work only depress people. Don’t even have a MENTAL to-do list.

Instead, why don’t you try keeping a record of what you’ve accomplished during the day. Shake it up. Yesterday, for instance, I wrote an introduction to a theory paper about the so-called ‘problem’ of China, specifically focusing on the issue of science & technology. I also wrote about the ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s for my field statement on the anthropology of science. In addition, I read an article in Chinese about China’s economy for today’s Chinese class. I took an hour walk with my lovely boyfriend. I grilled hot dogs and hamburgers. OK, I just ate them and he grilled them, but still.  I also managed to call my close friend Mark and gab.

Looking at that list makes me feel pretty good about my Monday. Let’s see if it lasts. . . .

Fiction Friday – on Saturday, my bird flu novel serialized. . .

“That is Banteay Srei, ma’am. The Citadel of Women.” Soun was still staring at her. Where the whites of his eyes should have been was a brownish color instead, as if he had been steeped in strong tea as a baby and never lost the effect of it over the visible parts of his body. Myriam felt the urge to reach out and touch the drops of sweat on the skin just above his cheekbones, which were reflecting the scant rays of sunlight able to penetrate the deep jungle canopy.

Instead she said, “That’s fitting,” and shrugged her muscular shoulders.

Soun looked perplexed for a moment and then did a little half-jog to catch up to Harry. As she watched them, quickly lost again into conversation, Myriam was suddenly and overwhelmingly happy to be alone. The fear that she had gulped down earlier in the day – when she heard, rather than saw or felt, all the insects buzzing around her, when the thickness of the air had begun to force its way into her lung cavity making it an effort to inhale and a whisper to exhale, when she saw that the trail was barely a footpath with no markers and no wooden signs with white-painted lettering and no caretakers to cut back the insanely-green vegetation that seemed to encroach upon her ankles and calves as though trying to trip her up as she trudged forward through the reddish-brown mud underneath her boots – had all faded into a minor irritation, not even a prick on her skin’s surface. She was in the Cambodian jungle seeing things, great things, unbelievable things, things she might never have had the opportunity to see if it weren’t for Harry’s stubbornness and stark inability to compromise. He had brought them here to this jungle, not her. But she was the one really in it, wasn’t she? She was the one smelling the dirt caked in her nostrils and wondering what kind of an animal could possibly move so quickly hidden in the underbrush, crackling dead branches and swooshing palm leaves out of its path as it traveled to some unseen destination for some unknown purpose. Harry was the one doing all of the talking; she was the one doing all of the listening.

Myriam curled up her pink-glossed lips into a smile, took another swig of her water, and began following Harry and Soun, careful to keep the distance between them. Though she might be in a mood to listen, she didn’t want to hear Harry’s incessant questions or Soun’s faltering answers. The murmur of their talk was enough to keep her company as she made her way toward the clearing ahead of them, where they would see their umpteenth temple and they would all – even Soun – be breathless and awed by the sight. As though none of them had ever seen anything like it before. That was the way the experience made Myriam feel, as though each structure was unique and the same all at once. But it didn’t matter because they were all spectacular, rising up out of the jungle like they were part of it themselves and had never been touched by a man’s hands. It was as though, covered in rich, green moss with massive trees sprouting right out of the center of them, nature had crafted those temples all by herself.

“Screw Harry,” Myriam said.

*****

As they sat across from each other in the nearly empty restaurant having a late lunch, Myriam scanned back through the pictures she had taken throughout the morning and early afternoon. There was one of Harry as a self-styled ancient king, one of his arms folded across his chest and the other raised with his hand in a fist, legs spread atop the Elephant Terrace. Soun, who at the moment sat having his lunch with their driver on the hot, sun-drenched terrace, was in the background of the photo, squinting into the sun and smiling broadly. From the angle of the photo it appeared as though Soun, who was indeed a foot shorter than Harry, was no more than a dwarf. Harry towered over him more like a beast than a king.

When she glanced up from the camera, Myriam saw that Harry had slurped down his second coke and was eyeing her own. Instinctively, she reached out for the moist, cool glass and took a sip. She sat the glass down six inches closer to her, so that Harry might have to half-stand and lean across the table in order to grasp it. She doubted that he would go to the trouble; with Harry it was always more the ease of taking than the effort of desire.

“Does this chicken look good to you?” Harry said.

Myriam looked at the already half eaten dish of chicken curry on his plate and nodded. For emphasis, she took her own fork and grabbed a morsel of meat from his plate, cut it open and gave it a cursory inspection. It didn’t look pink. But then it was hard to tell with all of the reddish sauce covering it. Myriam had never eaten such horrible meat, the quality of it was awful – gristly, oily, stringy, tough – as though they had mistakenly ordered beef jerky or dried meat. Myriam had been a temporary vegetarian since Bangkok three weeks ago.

“It looks fine. As far as I can tell, anyway.”

“That’s a fat load of help.”

“Don’t start,” Myriam said and forced herself to concentrate again on the photos. Almost the moment they had stepped off the plane in Hong Kong to catch their connecting flight to Ho Chi Minh City, they had started to bicker. By Bangkok, the bickering had escalated into frequent arguing. By Hanoi, they had established open hostility. Myriam was tired, not of traveling, but of the constant fighting. Today, as they trekked from one scenic spot to the next, she had begun to think that perhaps she was beginning to be tired of Harry himself.

“Any good photos?” Harry said.

“Some. I wish we had brought the manual, most of them are fuzzy.”

“I told you we should have brought the old digital camera. At least we knew how to work the damn thing.”

The fan overhead kept blowing Myriam’s white paper napkin off of her lap and scurrying across the floor. Although the staff had turned on the air conditioners when Harry and Myriam had arrived, it was still hot and sticky in the open room. Myriam noticed that they had left some of the windows open despite the air-conditioning. She could feel her skin peel back from the plastic chair as she stood up to retrieve the napkin. As she sat heavily back down in her chair, she inhaled the aroma of the curry and felt intensely hungry for the first time that day. Something about the heat had made it continuously impossible to eat. All she wanted to do was drink liquids, preferably straight out of the refrigerator, so cold that when she took a sip her teeth would seize up and cause her a sharp pain. And the quality of the food wasn’t helping. She could see that people in Cambodia were mostly poor and she couldn’t exactly expect them to import meat and cook it differently just because the Blakes had come to town. So she tried her best not to complain, not to grimace or cringe or otherwise show her displeasure if she put something into her mouth that was disagreeable to her western palate. She simply swallowed it quickly and asked for another beer or coke to wash it all down.

Roughing it, was what Harry had said.

*****

Fiction Friday – the next excerpt from my novel, serialized. . . .

PART ONE – TRANSMISSION

 

Chapter One

 

Siem Reap, Cambodia – early April, 2010

 

The taste of it was in Myriam’s mouth – gritty like a mouthful of wet dirt, sharp like the crackle of dead leaves on the jungle floor, wet like the moisture from a steam-bath with its droplets of water dripping from the ceiling. Absurdly large, jagged-edged palm leaves grazed her uncovered, pale white shoulders as she used her freshly manicured hands to push back the foliage that everywhere surrounded her, engulfed her husband and the tour guide up ahead on the path, twenty, maybe thirty paces away. The mud beneath her heavy hiking boots slid out from underneath her every step, making any forward progress feel as though she were walking through a vat of honey or molasses. Yes, that was it, molasses. Even the air felt dark and thick and slightly unctuous.

Thin rivulets of sweat had gathered at the small of her back, tickling the tiny hairs along her skin as it skidded off of her, forming a wet patch along the waist of her khakis. She had followed the precautions recommended in the guidebook to the brand of insect repellent: long, light-colored pants tucked into her thick cotton hiking socks; light-weight, breathable fabric for an outer shirt that would cover her arms after dusk; wide-brimmed straw hat that made her head and neck look like a thin stick holding up a plate; sunglasses that wrapped around her face like the safety glasses she used to wear in science lab; ankle-high, waterproofed boots that would slowly give her a blister on the side of each little toe. In her red day-pack, she had chosen to carry not only water, high-SPF sun block, and extra bug spray, but also some snacks taken from the miniscule excuse for a mini-bar tucked away in a corner of their bungalow.

Roughing it, is what Harry had said.

And now Harry plowed through the Cambodian jungle as though he were a native. With the guide at his side, it looked to Myriam as if he actually spoke the language – all guttural stops and throaty cadences like some sort of rueful, jazzed up music. If you couldn’t practically hear the groans of the Khmer Rouge years in the words, then you could definitely see it in the black holes of their eyes. All darkness, without a speck of light, like tiny wells cut into black earth. Wells that you couldn’t see the end of, they just kept going and going and going, down, down, down into the misery of living so close to the earth, damn near plunk in the middle of it. Myriam couldn’t bring herself to look directly into those eyes, as though she might be sucked in and never find her way out of the jungle.

She halted, brought the day-pack off her shoulders and swung it out in front of her in one flash movement, like a weapon. The buzzing of insects filled her ears to the rim; it sounded as though each and every insect she had ever seen back in Southampton had flown all the way to Cambodia to surprise her. She had never heard anything so alive before. Closing her eyes, she listened hard, straining her eardrums and leaning into the sounds that encased her. Some sort of bird screamed – or was that a monkey? Or one of the monstrous frogs their guide had pointed out earlier? With eyes still pressed shut, she let her hand search for the coolness of her water bottle. Just for a moment, she imagined what it might be like to be among these sky-scraping trees, strangling vines, crayola-colored flowers, and operatic insects in the dead of night. Would Harry even notice the empty twin bed beside his, the half-unpacked suitcase with her unneeded bikini bottoms hanging out, the flip-flops stacked neatly next to the bathtub or her small bottles of creams, astringents, coloring, left scattered around the sink?

“Myriam! What in blazes?”

“Ma’am, are you okay? Do you need to stop now?”

Myriam pried open her eyes and struggled to close her ears. Their guide, Soun, was striding back down the path toward her. She raised her hand in a stop signal like a crossing guard and said, “No, no, I’m fine. I’m coming.” Then, seeing Harry’s hands on his stocky hips and his mouth opening into a O-shape, she added, “I just needed a drink, that’s all. This bloody heat makes me thirsty.”

“Yes, you do not want to dehydrate,” Soun said, close-by her now, his dark eyes narrowing as Myriam watched him searching her for signs of fatigue, or heat stroke, or maybe just craziness.

“You go ahead with Harry, Soun, I can manage. Look,” she said and pointed ahead of where they stood with two dark-pink polished fingertips, “I think I can already see the top of one of the pyramids from here, through that break in the trees.”

Harry must have heard her because a wry smile stretched itself over his slightly-bucked front teeth and he shook his head. After he turned back to face the clearing Myriam’s hand was still limply gesturing at, Harry began lumbering again down the mud path. He shifted the blue knapsack from his left shoulder to his right and Myriam could see the weight of it pressing down into the flesh under the red, sweat-soaked cotton T-shirt. A week ago when they were in Hanoi, Harry had purchased the shirt as a souvenir. It had a large, bright-yellow star silk-screened on the front center, to imitate the Vietnamese flag. A week later and he had already worn it three times. Even from fifty paces away, Myriam could make out the slight rip on the right, back side near the hem, where Harry had torn it in a too-hasty attempt to alight from a pedi-cab in front of the Hanoi Hilton.

His voice muffled by the humid jungle air, Harry said, “We aren’t in Egypt, for Christ’s sake.”

Prologue – “The Eye of the Virus”

PROLOGUE – GENESIS

Tay Ninh, Vietnam – February, 2010

I like the southern delta of Vietnam. It is sweltering, with air so humid that if I were a snake, I might stick out my tongue just to taste the musty, earthy water it contains. The vegetation is dense and rich and everywhere that the humans have not cleared it away. Humans, I have found, can be surprisingly innovative. In the center of the village, they built a grand and beautiful structure and named it Cao Dai Temple. Inside sits a large orb the same green of the shrubs with an eye in its center the color of freshly spilled blood – the all-seeing eye of god. I am like the eye; I am everywhere and nowhere all at once.

The humans in this place worship a strange fusion of religions: Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. In many ways, I am similar to their concept of god: ever-changing, ever-present, between the worlds of the living and the non-living, capable of bending the world to my will. I have been here since the beginning of all things. I am primordial.

I exist for a single reason – to propagate myself. In that way, I am beyond the human notions of good or evil, beyond motive or reasoning, beyond thought or purpose. I simply am.

So when I saw my opportunity, I took it without hesitation, without guilt. Born from the body of a wild bird, I had traveled for many, long years down different channels before a single chance arose. When our paths finally intertwined, I slipped into the young Phuong Trang and began my work anew. We all have our roles to play, and mine was within her lithe, energetic form.

My job was to transform myself inside one of her billions of cells. I would make my way to the cell nucleus, its control center, and take over cell operations. The rest would be easy. Once inside, I would use her DNA and proteins to manufacture my own genetic information, to make copies of myself. It was sheer luck to find a distant cousin of mine already there behind her cell walls, someone who had long ago become familiar with the human race – how they work, their weaknesses and their strengths. I simply had to borrow and copy some of my cousin’s RNA into my own, the part that told me everything I needed to know, and then I knew myself.

I knew that Phuong’s immune system was still young and inexperienced, weaker than most. That the Trang family kept several chickens and ducks. That her mother, Mai, had caught a seasonal flu and passed it on to her husband and Phuong. That Phuong had two younger brothers, Tu and Phuc, that had not yet gotten sick. That her father, Nguyen, had not culled his chickens, despite the fact that there was an outbreak of the H5N1 virus reported just a few miles away from Tay Ninh.

Instead, he went to the temple at noon to pray with his family. He watched the priest in the colorful robe perform the daily ceremony and bent his head and asked for the virus to pass by the village. In his circumstances, he could not afford to destroy any of his livestock, no matter how dangerous it might become to keep them. If the government could not afford to help him vaccinate his birds against the virus and could not offer him adequate compensation for his loss, then what else could he do? Instead of killing the birds, he would be vigilant and keep the wild waterfowl out of his yard and away from his own chickens and ducks.

Nguyen did not know that I had already arrived and how could he? I had just gotten started, the signs of my presence were not yet visible. But when little Phuc fell ill a few days after his sister, Nguyen began to notice that his chickens and ducks were very sick as well. He became frightened, but still he did nothing. Having no money to pay for a doctor, he decided to wait out the illness and hope for the best. He killed most of his chickens and all of his ducks.

By the time he made up his mind and borrowed money to take Phuong and Phuc to the village clinic, it was already too late to reverse the progress I had made. The next phase of the cycle had begun and instead of one, I was uncountable millions. Instead of being in one body, I had escaped to many. It would be increasingly difficult to prevent my spread, to halt the natural course of my advances.

 

This was only the beginning of my story, a viral evolution.

[This is the first part of my novel about a global bird flu outbreak, that I will serialize here myself. Ever wonder what it would be like to live through an outbreak? Tune in regularly and keep checking back for more.]

New fiction – but beware, it’s a little NSFW

I’m posting a link to a new fiction story by my author-boyfriend. It’s good, but it’s a bit dirty. After all, it is published by Nerve. However, this is a big deal. It’s literary smut, people, and it pays.

So, as I’m putting the finishing touches on my uber-serious article on bird flu, please check out some summer reading at

http://www.nerve.com/fiction/sloan/the-opposite-of-animal/

Keep posted for an upcoming preview of my article, and a future link as to where you can find it. Though, sadly, unless you’re at a university with subscriptions to most academic journals, you’ll probably have to pay to read the entire article. I realize that most non-academics don’t subscribe to Language and Politics. Though maybe they should. . . .

A Shameless Plug for my First Fiction Book – The Eye of the Virus

My novel’s main character is a virus itself – a new strain of avian influenza that makes its debut in a small village in Vietnam. Like the American movie Crash, the story follows the virus as it travels first to Hong Kong and then to the United States. Like a ricocheting bullet, the virus affects the lives of businesspeople, wives, children, doctors, and politicians until it is stopped by a team of Chinese epidemiologists in Beijing and Hong Kong. The story follows six main characters – in addition to the virus itself – in their efforts to cope with the global pandemic and its effects on their individual lives.

Myriam is a British PR executive on holiday with her husband when he becomes the first person infected in Hong Kong. Her life is completely changed by the experience, in ways she never predicted, including an involvement with a Chinese-American doctor who works for the World Health Organization.

Brian is an American scientist who invents a new antiviral medication, but fakes test data so that it can be released early. When the drug begins losing effectiveness, the world discovers that it also has negative psychological side-effects, ultimately causing Brian himself to commit a rash, violent act.

Casey is Brian’s girlfriend, who finds herself stuck on a small island off the East Coast during the pandemic. After losing both her parents to the flu, she loses herself.

Jie is an epidemiologist with ties to Harvard and a director at the Chinese CDC in Beijing. When she gets a call from her old classmate, Will Shen, a WHO worker stationed in Hong Kong, the two work to solve the puzzle of the new virus.

These are just a few examples of the multiple, interweaving storylines followed in my book. As the unknown virus quickly spreads its way across the globe, entire societies are affected and changed by the outbreak, leaving the reader with the ultimate question: What would be important to you, what would you do, if a pandemic actually occurred?