Container | Yordan Radichkov | Bulgaria

BULGARIA, LONG WAY HOME | ASIA-EUROPE SHORT STORY CONTEST

Contributed by: ASEF culture360
Date Posted: Monday, 19th August 2013

Yordan Radichkov’s short story received 2,860 votes. This image was captured 1 September 2013 at 11:59 pm (Singapore SGT).

Container
A short story by Yordan Radichkov, Bulgaria

We were unaware of when the iron shutters had closed except that now we were immersed in darkness together with a few hundred poor souls, shivering in the chillness of winter. We could hear the dull pounding of the waves against the sides of the ship which to our ears sounded even duller and made us drowsy.

The walls of the container were pressing down on us and the air was stale and fetid. It was difficult to breathe and we gasped in fitful draughts. Many of us were ill and the coughing, spilling out in surges, rebounded against the walls and gushed back in our faces.

“I haven’t been home for twenty years,” he said. “I don’t know whether I’d be able to find my family.”

I felt for him. He was a native of one of the small and distant Asian islands from where years ago he had fled, leaving his whole life behind. The place he called home was so obscure to me I thought that even if we survived the journey and made it there alive I would never be able to fully understand it.

It was our second day of the voyage but we were not allowed out of the container. Not for anything in the world. It was all so illicit. No one was to know that on this ship hundreds of people of different backgrounds and origin were to be smuggled illegally into the country.

I had only heard of the containers packed with refugees. I had seen pictures, but never had I imagined that a day would come when I would be in one of those containers. That I would be amongst those people of no belonging and no background and together with them I would be heading for a country which I knew nothing about.

And then he began to speak of his family as of something sacred. At first I could not understand him, because it was all so unfamiliar to one like me who had never known a mother’s gentle touch.

The family to him was his whole life. As he spoke the words illuminated every corner of the container and darkness gave way to light. Everyone listened without a sound so as not to interrupt his tale.

Our thoughts were carried away with his tales of the native country and we forgot about the cold and the hunger. For a brief moment the journey seemed almost bearable. His burning words of love for his family gave us warmth and his tenacity and determination gave us strength. With every second we were drawing closer to our final destination.

We thought that all would be fine. We felt the ship had come to a halt. The time spent in the container had made us grow so used to the place that now it seemed as though we no longer wanted to leave it.

When they opened the iron shutters we saw that many of us had died. The face of death breathed into mine with the repulsive staleness of aging. The expressions of the dead were like Chinese masks.

He was triumphant and cried with the ebullient joy of a free man. As soon as he set foot on dry land he fell to his knees and kissed the ground beneath him. I stood there in disbelief of how he could rejoice in so much death, in his own doom and in his lack of freedom.

He turned to me and said: “We never got to understand each other truly. I know that the language is difficult, and you morn for all those dead souls. But you should know that each one’s death is a moveable feast for the soul. The soul has been liberated. It has paid its dues along its earthly journey and now it has headed for the place where the eternal energies merge into the miracle of being.”

His words reached me in a chain of broken sounds which lost their meaning within the walls of the container, within the darkness and the new found land and within death, which was all around us. I shall remain in my existence unenlightened, drawn neither close to nor away from a force supreme.

The future was ahead, shining bright and blinding us, but we nevertheless walked on, unseeingly towards it. Years after that journey his words still resounded in my mind that the deaths of those who had not made it home would be rejoiced. But it was only with the twilight that it dawned on me that amongst us all the dead alone had made it home.

The Evidence of Us | Leroy Luar | Malaysia

MALAYSIA, LONG WAY HOME | ASIA-EUROPE SHORT STORY CONTEST

Contributed by: ASEF culture360
Date Posted: Monday, 19th August 2013

Leroy Luar’s short story received 12,800 votes. This image was captured 1 September 2013 at 11:59 pm (Singapore SGT).

The Evidence of Us

A short story by Leroy Luar

I had already given the door a few tentative knocks, but then I knocked again just to be sure. I had looked for a button to press or a bell to pull, but there was no such thing. There is a little window – a panel of pebbled glass – and through it I see him moving about inside the apartment. It’s just like him to putter about; he’s probably fussing about some detail or other – I’ll have to fix the hinges on that door soon, maybe I should turn the TV off, where on earth is it? I just had it a moment ago.

We were introduced ten, fifteen years ago by mutual friends. They had told me that I would be meeting a man some years older but the perfect gentleman; very intelligent, a celebrated professor who lectured in well-respected universities all around the world. I liked the sound of that. I didn’t know what exactly they had told him about me.

Our first meeting was predictably awkward. Mostly silent, we pecked bird-like at the titbits of conversation dropped here and there. We were both probably thinking the same thing: let’s see how this goes. At the end of dinner, he insisted he take the bill. I decided not to make a show of protesting too much; we had been dining at a restaurant I could ill afford. I had had practically nothing to eat, insisting that I was a small eater by nature. Before we parted, he leaned forward and extended his hand. I misjudged his gesture and went in for a hug, surprised that I wasn’t hugged in return.

He called some days later, asking me out again for dinner. Although I had already made plans for that night, I said yes. And when I called my friends to cancel, they assured me that they understood. Even so, they jeered at me – Sam’s gonna get some! – but I didn’t mind. I was excited to see him again; excited even more so that he wanted to see me too.

That night we made love, and after that I asked him how he got my number. And he sheepishly admitted to persuading my friends to share my personal details with him. I made a joke then, somewhere along the line that older people shouldn’t be allowed younger friends, but then I stopped short of the punch line; wary that I might be crossing some boundary I was as yet unable to see.

Before that night, I had only ever fallen asleep in bed by myself. It was terrible; he fell asleep with me wrapped up in his arms, my own pinned underneath my body and my neck crooked at an awkward angle. In the years to come, I learnt the trick of wriggling out of his embrace after he had fallen asleep so that I could lie flat on my back the way I preferred.

Did I ever even for a moment think that our arrangement could become permanent some day? I couldn’t say. We talked about the future sometimes – not often enough in my opinion – always never coming to any satisfactory conclusion. I loved him. With all of what little I have, I loved him. And I knew that in his own intelligent, quiet way, he loved me too.

But then the day came, somewhere around the seventh year of our first meeting. Over dinner, he told me that he would be moving home to London. And it would be best for me if I stayed behind. I told him it wasn’t entirely his decision to make. But we both knew that ours had been a relationship built on borrowed time. Every book he had ever given to me, every note that he had ever written, every mundane shred of the evidence of us, I stoked into a blazing bonfire. The neighbour’s children came out to watch, instinctively drawn to the flames. I wept, long after the ashes had cooled.

Levelled civilisations rise anew. Razed forests regenerate verdant. Humans are all too animal in their ability to move on from loss. I hung out with my friends. I worked at my craft. Eventually, I met someone new. And then my agent called me one day. There’s a gallery in London asking to exhibit your work, she said. We could make a little bit of money there. Sure.

I had kept his address in my pocket, scribbled from a source I found on the Internet. After my exhibition, on the last day of my trip, I hunted it down.

I knock on his door again, a little more impatiently now and at long last he opened the door. “Sam,” he said.

Smile | Pimpan Nuallak | United Kingdom

UNITED KINGDOM, LONG WAY HOME | ASIA-EUROPE SHORT STORY CONTEST

Contributed by: ASEF culture360
Date Posted: Monday, 19th August 2013

Pimpan Nuallak’s short story received 243 votes. This image was captured 1 September 2013 at 11:59 pm (Singapore SGT).

Pimpan Nuallak, United Kingdom

Smile

A short story by Pimpan Nuallak

‘Are you from Pattaya?’ the customer asked me before I even took his drinks order—me, a Londoner born and raised.

He sat with his two companions around the little table, another man and a woman, all of them pink from sun that had not yet come to England.

‘We’ve just come back from Pattaya,’ says the first man. ‘Hot, beautiful place, beautiful, um, girls…’

‘That’s why he wanted to come here,’ said the second man, ‘he just couldn’t get enough!’ The two men laughed; the woman, the pale negative image of a pair of sunglasses banding her eyes, directed a sour look at the first man and then at me.

Despite my efforts at retaining, firstly, a warm smile (the oft-described feature apparently found on every face belonging to a Thai national) and, secondly, a calm demeanour (guide books tell me that all sixty million of usmilitary includedare peaceful), my patience thinned.
‘They’re just like that, the farang,’ Wannapa, another waitress, once said to me on our break, ‘Don’t take it so personally, Usa.’

‘I know it’s not just about me, P’Wannapa.’ The bitten skin around my nails was unsightly.
Wannapa looked away for a moment, then said, ‘If they bother you, I can serve ‘em. It’s no trouble.’

My nod must have seemed dismissive, but I felt it best to keep my gratitude quietalong with the certainty that I would never ask Wannapa. The idea of passing my responsibility onto someone else was disquieting.

So my smile—that famous Thai smile—was nailed onto my face as I stood by the table, head inclined at a gentle angle to show I was listening to their jeering laughter. The woman’s suspicious, pitying gaze added up my breasts and skin.

‘I’ll have a beer, please,’ she said, speaking at me. The men stopped laughing and followed suit, repeating her request.

With their beers they had the following dishes: satay, curry as smooth and mild as mayonnaise, treacly pad thai, grilled sirloin. They ordered no rice.

As if to brush aside their earlier comments the men asked whether this—they gestured at their half-eaten dishes—was the sort of food I ate at home. My smile showed off the hard-won beauty of my straightened teeth, courtesy of the NHS and a grumpy orthodontist working at my mouth between the ages of eleven and thirteen. It was somehow easy to nod and be complicit in their fiction.

They seemed to particularly relish the food after that, belching and leaving a too-generous tip.

My head felt heavy with the silence I kept about myself, about the women (“girls,” the men called them) of Pattaya, and I felt ashamed.

Work was necessary. Money ensured immediate survival and eventual dignity: every spare penny would be saved for my ticket to Thailand, the research trip that my dissertation required. My parents were gladly coming with me; they still called Thailand “our home” after two decades in Britain.

Once a journalist wrote that the restaurant I worked in, Mae Pim’s Kitchen, was “like visiting the proprietor’s home.” While there was indeed the permanent sweet whiff of cooked rice about the place, and my ponderously British-accented Thai joined the fluent chatter of my colleagues as we gossiped, it was nothing like home. My home eschewed the use of Buddha heads as mere décor.

Speculations on the journalist’s idea of home wandered through my mind as I fumbled for the keys to my own front door at midnight.

Despite their own long days at work, my parents had—as usual—stayed up to welcome me. My mother’s welcome began on a high ‘Ah,’ that sweetly descended, pleased and relieved. She drew her woolly dressing gown around herself as we chatted about our day. Nearby, the microwave sounded with a crisp ding.

‘How are you doing, luk?’ my father said as he emerged from the kitchen, handing me a steaming plate.

I gave my parents the only genuine smile I had given that day. They went to bed, content that their work was done. To my parents it was simply understood that their child would stay home until further notice. The patience of their love was sometimes unbearable.

Keys clattered under my fingers as I worked, motivated by gratitude and guilt and nourished with acacia omelette and white rice, spoonfuls of bitter comfort. It was a curious feeling to study my own culture and attempt to know a Thailand I had never visited, yet I was certain of its importance. I wanted to seek my own truths.

This trip would be my first ever visit; for my parents it would be a return, finally, after twenty-two years. I remembered my parents’ excited voices as they Skyped with friends in Thailand, laying plans, and looked forward to our time together.

Hotel Imperial | William Tham | Malaysia

MALAYSIA, LONG WAY HOME | ASIA-EUROPE SHORT STORY CONTEST

Contributed by: ASEF culture360
Date Posted: Monday, 19th August 2013

William Tham’s short story received 1,120 votes. This image was captured 1 September 2013 at 11:59 pm (Singapore SGT).

William Tham, Malaysia

Hotel Imperial
A short story by William Tham

So I sit here, on the balcony while below me, London unfurls. The traffic lights are barely seen because of the traffic, and I feel snowdrops melting in my hair. Unforgiving grey skies and the cold drive me back into the room, which is mercifully still being heated.

There is only myself left. The others are long gone, leaving me as the only denizen of Room 72, Hotel Imperial. It is Christmas but the overflowing streets are grim. The ground chokes with too-cold air and choking clouds of traffic.

Our travel through the country had been a disaster from the start. We had started out at Edinburgh. But only three of us survivors ended up in the derelict Hotel Imperial with its faded walls, trying to determine the next stage of the trip. After interminable arguments, they left me alone.

Hotel Imperial is old but it tries to look younger than its years. But its free internet is a sham and the walls still smell of bathroom disinfectant. There are some old posters from the Empire Exhibition of 1925 which still adorn the walls. I peer at them sometimes. There’s a picture of an Englishman and his foreign attendants. Where are they from? Colombo, Sudan, and Jamaica. Who is that in the corner? I peer. For all I know he could be my grandfather.

That same grandfather once travelled the world as a student. He told us he was a sailor. He showed us some pictures. There he was on a steamer bound for Hong Kong. There he was with some other compatriots, huddled at Trafalgar Square. A woman in the background squints, repulsed. And then there he is at the Hotel Imperial. “The grandest hotel in London,” he said, misty-eyed. “We won a Christmas raffle and we stayed there for three nights.”

It is now decades later and I sit in the mouldering hotel, watching television with nowhere else to go to. The screen replays television dramas that I have watched countless times up in my dorm, when I once dreamed of travelling the isles. But now, so close to my goal, I don’t feel like going any further. I am exhausted by the travelling and the chaos of my studies.

My family, still old-fashioned despite years in business, sent postcards to me all the time although I never once replied. Visit Madame Tussauds. Go to Westminster Abbey. Take a photo with an unsmiling Palace Guard. I have done none of those things. Once in London, I set up camp at the Hotel, unsure of where to go next.

“So you will go travelling, right?” my grandfather told me at the airport, on the eve of my departure. “Enjoy yourself. You young chaps have so much money nowadays that you might as well take an adventure. Go to London and Paris, then to Berlin and Munich and Amsterdam and Istanbul. So many opportunities these days…”

He died a few weeks ago, and I did not hear of it until recently. So, cocooned in the Hotel Imperial, I have time to think about a man who arrived here as a coolie and left speaking perfect English with a London drawl. He was the one who had told me about Limehouse, where he had toiled with desperate men ready to break their backs for bread, and a gleaming country that was for the longest time the capital of the world.

It is still cold. I hear carollers down below, wishing each other while electric lights fight the night. But the hotel is dark. A few lights have blown and the shadows creep in. I turn off the television and raid the bedside table, where a token packet of shortbread forlornly waits. The hotel matches my gloom. Already I feel as if my life has been leading up to this quiet point.

I think of the exams that I have crammed for and the dismal results that I have hidden from my parents. I think of scandals and stories that I have tried to leave behind. But here in this old hotel that ponders the end of empire, I wonder if this country that I have made my home for four years has accepted me. A student from an ex-Colony, pursuing a degree he doesn’t want, still holding on as the snow blankets London, while his wild friends sink inexhaustible sums into nightclubs and train tickets.

I take a postcard that I have been meaning to write for a while. I seat myself by the rusting heater, my hands numb with cold, and begin writing to a family that I have tried to stay away from for so many years. Christmas greetings from the Hotel Imperial. And a story of a boy, not quite a man, eager to run away from fate.

In My Own Country | Rajith Savanadasa | Australia

AUSTRALIA, LONG WAY HOME | ASIA-EUROPE SHORT STORY CONTEST

Contributed by: ASEF culture360
Date Posted: Monday, 19th August 2013

Rajith Savanadasa’s short story received 477 votes. This image was captured 1 September 2013 at 11:59 pm (Singapore SGT).

In My Own Country

A short story by Rajith Savanadasa, Australia

Yes, I know you want to help. You are kind. But what can you do?

What do I want?

Nothing. No. I do not want things. I do not want your big cars, your mobile phones and your thick leather jackets… if thick leather jackets are warmer than this woollen one, then maybe. I do not want the denim pants you wear so tight. I am fine in these cotton trousers. Sometimes, when it is cold I keep my pyjamas on; wear my normal clothes on top.
And yes, these shoes are a little worn but at least I have shoes.

In the village where I come from, people never wore shoes. Not even sandals. We walked on bare feet. On the rockiest roads, the muddiest paths and thorniest hills. I had lots of friends. We travelled in packs like goats, leaping around, playing tricks on each other and picking berries from nettled bushes. There were tourists who came from the city with backpacks and bottles with teats from which you could suck out water. They had shoes like this. One of them told me they were running shoes. Makes you run faster, he said. Since then, I have always wanted a pair. I wanted to beat my best friend in a race. He was always faster. I raced him every day on the way home from school. I always lost. In the end, as fast as he was, running did not save him. It was slower, older me who escaped. It was scared and shameful me that left everyone behind. Now I have these shoes but it’s too late. I have no one to race against.

Eat something, you say?

But I cannot. I cannot eat your pasta. I do not like it. I do not want to go to your big restaurants with their dim lights and finely cut morsels set in the middle of wide plates balanced by smartly dressed waiters. I just want a little rice, some vegetables or fish with gravy. Without gravy rice is too dry, like in the Chinese restaurants where they give you fried squid with rice. Where is the gravy? I ask. Use the sauce, they say. But soy sauce is black seawater. It makes everything salty. I have had enough saltiness for a lifetime. I need gravy. I need spice.

I am sorry but I cannot bring myself to eat your meat pies. Your steaks. Your burgers. It is all meat. I cannot get the smell out of my head – the smell of burning flesh, the smell of something that was once alive being bled. How can I eat it after seeing all the things I have seen?

Do I watch the television?

Sometimes. I try to learn your language by watching, but it is hard work. I do not want to watch your English films with your robots and super strong supermen. I cannot understand what anybody is saying. Things happen so fast. Always starting with a bang and ending with a bigger bang. It is good when heroes always somehow narrowly escape bullets, explosions and ten-foot monsters. But I worry – was there someone left behind? Did the flames burn a child? Did the hundreds of bullets tear a mother’s flesh? Did a brother lose a limb? I cannot stand it – it is too much. Makes me want to run away again.

Do I like travel? Not so much. I have travelled enough. Even coming here was hard. I do not want to go to New York, see London or Paris. The pyramids, waterways and palaces are not for me. I cannot leave here. You know that, no?

But maybe one day I will see all of that. You see, in my country, we believe we are three things – water, earth and air. We were made from a mixture of the three. And when we are finished, again, we are liquid, sand and breath. One day I will go to pieces. And when I become sand, I will drift past all your tall buildings where office workers sit in front of computers all night, past the McDonalds full of burnt meat smells, past the pubs and nightclubs where girls dress like there is a cloth shortage and boys drink and vomit in the laneways, past the grounds where giants play your football, the neat rows of houses with lawns watered by your sprinklers. I will become that water. Lie on the grass and run into the drains. Spill into your rivers, through your mountains and out to the sea. Become air and fly, over the oceans and find my country. Look down and there’s my father. Smiling. Mother’s hand on my cheek. Sister and brother singing songs. I am everything. Everywhere.

The Lost Girl | Ethel Kings | Estonia

ESTONIA, LONG WAY HOME | ASIA-EUROPE SHORT STORY CONTEST

Contributed by: ASEF culture360
Date Posted: Monday, 19th August 2013

Ethel Kings’ short story received 363 votes. This image was captured 1 September 2013 at 11:59 pm (Singapore SGT).

Ethel Kings, Estonia

The Lost Girl
A short story by Ethel Kings

They called her The Big Girl, sometimes The Lost Girl, but among themselves The Strange Girl. In her own world she was a little girl. But she stopped being little when she went travelling and decided to stay for a while in another world. It was not the world of Lilliputs and she was no giant, but next to these people she was a big girl. She could never find shoes her size or a shirt with sleeves long enough, also she was expected to know things, because she came from far away and as everybody knows – far away is where all the treasures hide, so everybody secretly believed that she is rich beyond imagination. She didn’t mind to explain there were no other riches than her friends and family waiting for her back home. She explained she knows only what she has seen, which is no more than they know themselves. She didn’t mind the presumptions because she was in love. She fell in love with these people and their world because they smiled a lot and in their world it was always warm and the magic dwelt in the air! Where she was from people didn’t smile, the weather was cold and magic existed only for those who were not smart enough to know how physics work. She was not smart enough. She knew there are the laws of physics but to her it was as good as magic.

Because she was a Big Girl people tried to put on big smiles, it was considered polite. She also learned to smile. Every day she stood for 15 minutes in front of the mirror and smiled. She didn’t care if her smile looked pretty, all she cared about was weather her smile was smily enough to be a proper response to the smiles she was receiving.

They called her names because they could not say her real name. She didn’t mind because for her it was also hard to remember their names. She explained that she is not really lost, she is just wondering around, she wants to see the world. They smiled, but among themselves they wondered why would such a big girl stay in such a small world, they said she is strange. She didn’t know they said that. If she knew she wouldn’t mind, because she did feel a little strange among all the small people. It didn’t bother her – she felt strange among all the big people too. That was why she came travelling, she came looking if there are anywhere such people that she wouldn’t feel strange among.

She thought they will come here where the magic is in the air. It attracted her, it must attract others like her as well. She was excited to meet the travellers, but no other was like her. She felt as strange as ever. Travellers came and left and her heart did not go after them. She started feeling more and more comfortable with the people of this world. After some time she found she wasn’t in love with just the smiling people any more, she was in love with a certain man who was one of these people. Suddenly she was not strange any more and she was not lost. There was a man who wouldn’t let her be lost not for another moment and a cunning feeling that nothing could go wrong was planted in her heart, the magic between them felt as if she could almost touch it until one day it was gone. With no warning, no apology, no explanation.

She didn’t feel like smiling any more, she didn’t feel even like looking at anyone, so they stopped wasting any more smiles on her. The love was gone, the people were gone and one night also her things were gone. She didn’t mind about the things, because the most important thing was already gone and she had no tears left for anything else.

She knew she couldn’t leave now with no love in her heart. She had to make peace before she leaves this world. So she built herself a new life. Further away from the memories. She learned to smile again because that is the way. When she reached the state of surprise over how was it ever possible to fall out of love with this world, she felt ready to leave.

She left. Remembering the good and the bad. She reached her own world where she was expected, greeted and hosted by her family and friends. She was no more The Big Girl neither the Lost Girl nor the Strange Girl. In her own world she was little brave Emili.