-
On Muses
Be patient with your muse, I was recently told. Maybe my mentor sensed my feeling of being time crunched and frustrated. Since working on my second creative portfolio I have bumped into too many false starts. And since I am the author of two forthcoming novels, Year of the Wood Horse and The Chimerican, due out 2016 and 2017 respectively, she may have detected my sense of urgency. While I do know patience is a virtue, I feel that I am running out of patience as I have been patient all my life it seems. So I work hard, studying the body of Alice Munro, hoping the nuts and bolts…
-
How to Act Now Before Your Total Abnilisation (All major credit cards accepted!)
A Note to the Reader: “How to Act Now Before Your Total Abnilisation†is a work of cosmic pseudepigraphy by American fabulist Matt Muller, significant for its experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works of metafictional advertisement in the American language. Its first draft written in Chengdu, China over a period of 3 hours, and first published online minutes later, just 24 hours before it would be made to disappear from Chinese cyberspace. The entire work is written in a falsely eloquent language, consisting of a mélange of standard American and neologistic jargon, which many critics believe attempts to recreate a simulacrum of expertise and…
-
Where I Come From
A Chinese student, a talented English major from a university in Hunan, China, asked me to describe my hometown. This is what I wrote: Smethport is very different from Chenzhou. It is like a dream that I’m afraid will seem unreal or too abstract for you to realize. Words alone are not enough to describe the beauty, wonder, and charm of my home town. But I will try. Right now it is a very special time of the year in which we celebrate the birth of our country, the Declaration of Independence and like your country, a revolution against Imperial tyranny. Now the weather is much like Kunming in the…
-
Going Back to China
I rolled through an intersection without stopping. I pounded, tapped, blasted, and played the car horn like a motherfucking riot. And wherever I went pedestrians and motorists alike trembled in fear. America is a diverse country. That was something I had missed while teaching in Hunan last year. I had missed the Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, hipsters, Goths, jocks, blacks, whites, yellows, reds, gays, conservatives, liberals, independents, blondes, brunettes, etc., etc. Everybody was fiercely self-expressive. But when I drove in the traditional Hunanese Driving Style, I got to see the one thing they all had in common: In a flash their facial muscles flexed, pupils dilated, white teeth showed, and…
-
Indochina Expedition 2010: Eve of Departure
My first semester in China as an English teacher was over. I would leave at dawn for Vietnam on Monday, January 25, 2010. Now it was time to go and see if I had what it takes to travel for real. This would be the first time traveling alone in the developing world without a gun or a posse. I not only didn’t speak the languages, but lacked any mathematical ability whatsoever. I knew that I was poor by American standards, but in Laos, I was a millionaire. Trouble lurked ahead when I would try to calculate the cost of a soda or a room.  If I was a…
-
Happiness is a Vampire
Every day I discover other worlds so unlike the one I once called home. The possibilities seem boundless. I even fantasize about coming to America to become a Wal Mart door greeter or an assistant manager at McDonald’s. If I work hard for a couple years and save money, then I could return to paradise and buy a home and still have enough left over to start a business. Sometimes when I hang out with other expats we cannot stop saying, “I can’t believe this,” and we pinch ourselves to see if we are in a dream. It is as if we all had met Morpheus in our pre-expat lives…