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Water Cure

Water Cure

Jane drives to Umm Suqeim beach. Umm Suqeim: the mother of the sick. She has done the night shift all week at the American Hospital, willingly. And on Friday, the holy day in Dubai, she goes to the beach. She goes to Umm Suqeim beach because she thinks it’s funny being a nurse and taking the water cure at the mother-of-the-sick beach. It’s a quirky thing to do. Not that she is sick, not sick herself. As she steps from her dark-windowed car onto the bright street, she sheds the dim gentility of the working week and squints across the water at the pink, fairy-castle water park across the bay. Atlantis is its name.

Little Bottle

Little Bottle

Just before the Avenue of Eternal Peace, before the main drag, where Wangfujing whirls off to the right, where the rich can eat McDonalds and stroll amidst the new abundance, stand the snow white headquarters of the China Women’s Organization. The building is nestled between Changan Dasha, where the state theater diligently stages Peking Opera, where on occasion men still play the female roles, and the International Hotel, whose biggest customers are the Americans who come to adopt China’s daughters, whisking them off by the thousand to the land of beauty in exchange for a few pieces of silver that amount to less than they pay for their week-long sojourns in a hotel that has a real fountain in the atrium and a babysitter service.

The Short Guy

The Short Guy

The short guy has no borders.  He is as round as he is tall. He rolls like a ball along the smooth corridors of international business, slipping easily into myriad cultures between day and night, taking the red-eye east, cutting deals in silver and chairing blusterous conferences in five star hotels with his eager, sweaty-handed Latin American sidekick who is shorter and poorer than him and whom he calls his friend.  He is affable with the menial, and flirtatious with the dull, and secretly vicious with anyone who threatens, with intelligence or high-mindedness, to disturb the easy flow of personal success that sticks to him like static as he jets around the corporate universe.

Stone Woman

Stone Woman

I live in Guangxi where the mountains look like giants’ fingertips sticking up out of their graves, where there is always a fine watery mist feeding our crops and rotting the walls of our houses, where I am lucky not to be working the fields. I am a modern girl and have learnt to type and use the internet which I use to chat to people who will never see the material me. It’s quite a comfort at times. I work in one of the Western bars in the town and cycle seven kilometres to work in the morning and back again in the blanket of the night. My parents think I am being corrupted by mixing with the tourists and they have started to worry about my future. I tell the foreign men I am a Catholic. They understand my message and they always back off.

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