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Subversions into the Green Hills of Songpan
As a young boy, I only had two ambitions. The first was of being a cowboy in the Wild West, riding lonely mountain trails, eating peyote, consulting Navajo shamans, and pilfering forgotten ghost towns. The other was to go to China like Marco Polo exploring its wilds and cities along the Silk Road in search of the real General Tso, the great Qing Dynasty soldier-statesman made famous by Chinese takeout menus the world over. But never in my wildest, childish hallucinations could I have imagined that I would discover an amalgam of these in reality, as if a chapter in the story of my life became a chimerical tale of…
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Interview with Segrob Egroj on the Art of Metafiction
(Excerpted from The Ministry of Foreign Languages Review): Interviewer: When did you begin to write? Did the olfactorory bulbectemy have any impact on the way you write? Segrob Egroj: After the Washington Mall massacre, I decided to stay in the E.A.R. but was befuddled beyond all comprehension as to how to make a living. By that time there were no jobs related to English, but for every one fast food or garbage collector job there where thousands of asylum seekers, most of whom had already undergone the procedures. I had made a journal of the last days before losing my sense of smell and taste. When the Inspector-General declared war…