Funnyvale

Carrie Chang

Description

This subconscious ploy into a humorous city enlivened by the diablo ghosts of another era is a soulful breather of incarnate words and post-modern identity; Emily Yew is a down-and-out Chinese American writer who is battling her Werther-like en situ in Funnyvale, where nothing is ever that funny. Propped up by her 80-year-old mother and her sister Audrey, Emily struggles with being “uncured,” with dark, creative depressions, and revisited by romantic flashbacks from her primal youth. A heart-warming novel about meta-writing, that will make you ooh and ah.

Sujets

• Humor
• Soulful
• Fiction
• Musique soul

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 03 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669866299
• Langue: English

Extrait

Funnyvale










Carrie Chang



Copyright © 2023 by Carrie Chang.
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-6628-2
eBook
978-1-6698-6629-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.





Rev. date: 02/07/2023





Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
851029



Contents
Part I
Pint-Sized Children
The Good Vegetarian Circus
The Dumpling Contest
Lady Wittgenstein, Be Good
No Friends Day
Part II
The Lonely Tomato Garden
Mimiko Cat & the Art of Conversation
Singing Funky Dory
Bird-bath Mis En Scene


















(dedicated to Thomas Merton)












All my friends have become exalted scholars,
And all I can do is count the dollars.”
I, a bumster of chinoise worth,
poetic in demeanor,
And noble of birth,
Get inside your copter bed,
With dreams of dandelions inside your head,
I know that mommy has treated you well,
And put you in a bunting spell,
Changed you diapers till you were 55,
And tolerated your American jive.



Emily Yew pressed the snood of the chou, and prayed to St. Teresa of Avila, the tangled pink hyacinth body of yarn under her freemason foot in the frittered light, dreaming of tattered butterflies in her droopy head, as she always did while she sat there crocheting; she pressed it with a stern vehemence. There was frosty mi chiu in her round face, which she had drunk with some undue eccentricity; when the crocheted “heart” in her left hand resembled an Elizabethan collar for her dirty-eyed pug, she could feel a stifled warmth within her. There were 5 bucks in the glass mason jar on her dressing table, an embarrassing fact which made her eyes cross. She was a female Faustus bent on destroying the world with her pied colors, her hyper-original thoughts of cagey wisdom. Who knew when the sycamore tree outside her window would stop mocking her, swaying left and right in the occasional wind?
She had been, in some such en situ, living with her parents at 50, in Sunnyvale, a depressed writer without a gibbons, who was trying to “make it work.” No longer would the sun shine ridiculously on her as it had in her youth, for she was now a downtown bohemian, with outrageous, cum-cum hair, and pained elocution, swinging her time, and trying to make the night ride on. Little did she know how to put on those youthful airs of spring-time anymore. The code-words of her generation eluded her. The fleurs en fleur of her prose now sagged with all its gentlestock rhymes like cakes in the oven in her clever mind, and she sighed in her tie-dye jeans, tossing away her many strands of yarn. There was only so much liberty to be spoken for, and she vouched her freedoms to be precarious ones, stuttering mid-syllables like blarney in a tryst for a ghost.
No longer would she ride bikes as she had as a child down the court, seeming carefree and blithe. No longer would the tall adults tap her head as a tiny duckling who had only so much essential pluck and verve. She had chosen to hole up in her parents’ house to see the inner-belly-button of the world, and to be that petite gamins. There was an ornery sensation of radical jealousy in her eye as she spoke of this, some speakeasies she’d known of in her youth, for she was the dark mistral of her own dreams, dancing gothic quadrilles with quantum knee-patches bought and sold from Anthropolgie. What were those days but an ante-up of distrust of the time on the calendar, when the molecular gods would parsnip and talk of her lonely fate and leave her somewhat embattled with that destiny that goes for broke? What was the matter with her, strange-faced waif writing abusive pot-boilers in her senile mother’s house while the rest of society trundled away in lolling tongues of well-spent goodness, painting a picture of her as the sacrificial muse.
She was candid to the point of extraordinary verve, depending on each telling moment of the waking day to suit her candidacy for shirking her womanhood. What were the responsibilities of the feminine caste, of the diablo set of privileges which had been given her at birth, as an aging Han sheba, a middle-aged mandy lady who had thrown away all cares to the lovely ocean, and now tossed and turned in her bedroom, thumbing manuscripts which smelled like rotten daffodil and golden ixora. There was an embankment of goody love in her mind, a tryst of forgotten feelings from her past that she was always trying to escape. Like some warding signs that hinted that her sagely predicament was not a tolerable one.
Not for her, the owlish bell-hat and the scholar’s detestable gown, her father had hissed to her years ago, demanding that she paint her toenails bright vegetable green to go with her viridian complex, her frosty soul that needed so much more than that. She was a Sung Dynasty gal that aped the fantasies of all those contemporary soap operas from the cosmos, Hollywood misfit productions in which the lipstick patterns of the lovely actresses resembled little distorted autumn leaves. She would dream her holiday dreams, that someday she would leave this space! Indeed, someday leave this quaint little enclave that was like a tiny formosa sandwiched between two silicon chips. There was albeit a charm about Emily that was guileless and full of sullied weather, some cold irony in her stillborn words, which lit up the room like a new century dragon-fly.
As the clock ticked and flattered in its roundhouse glamour, she stared at the jar on her desk, and sighed, feeling for her strange penury, and dreaming of all things gratis. The centime drapes glittered with its taupe, banana-like creases, and the potions and lotions in the adjoining bathroom oozed quite like little pastel sentinels snarfing at her with their baby Beaujolais scent; there was so little to be grateful for in this racial island of thought, her pensées duly rocked her with no little mirth, and her pug, Squalo leapt from his usual hiding place, birthing consecutive syllables of native woe. There was this day, and the day after to be thought of. Who knew when Red Riding Hood would come? Emily was no standard puppeteer for humanity, and thought the whole thing was a commentary for goodwill living on the beach, a sand-man’s particular, sanguinary expression for comrades hitching a hike through one of the strangest cities in the door-knob. There would be no appeasing Squalo this time, she thought, as she waxed traitor in the tall box mirror, appearing minky and somewhat small for a fifty-year-old woman. There was only so much time to be writing the novel and working the muse, but she preferred to listen for a knock on the door.
* * *
She had, at this time, fantasized that her 80-year-old mother would not bother her at any costs, but in fact stood in the doorway, looking choudy, and supremely southwestern Chinese. There was a jolt in Old Mrs. Yew’s step, some bit of allegiance to the snake country in her roaming eye, and some compassion for her nerdy daughter, who could not make good in a druthers. What were the commonplace tongues of the neighbors wagging about when they saw a real live Chinkesse in a fait a complait mode of high class beggary, swishing her pen and relying on momma’s love for a bit of a sop on a Wednesday morning, when the wren was spare and the cornucopia of newspapers on the front-porch resembled a frangled mess of han alphabetica, the Chesire Cat in the glass cabinet making impudent faces at the crowd of believers on the fence. There were artifacts from Taiwan, little buddhist twinkling twinnings teacups for bum tea. Hers the centurion, brickle-bar breakfasts she had prepared for the last fifty years, steaming mounds of honest shee-fan abandoned at the table by the monstrous children who demanded more savory green-onion, and more helpings with careless abandon.
That was the saga of pure disbelief, seeing her home-grown mama staring you down in your bedroom, thought Emily, who looked cheesed, and semi-obsessed with her work, and accused her of being the qualitative Tiger Mom, someone who put flounces of pressure on her to be The Bit. She didn’t care for it one ounce. She was saw herself as the wary button-hole sage, someone who had inner conversations with herself, spoke for herself and with herself, lived through the whole of life in a lukewarm fashion with outspoken, worldly triceps, listening to Comfortably Numb instead of being the do-gooder atheist in plaid pajamas her betters thought her to be.
Her Buddha-bed had two strikes in it, it was the allegory of Jones, and her room was covered with lovely art posters that had no two ways about it, the rudimentary calculus of sea-grey smudges was albeit the most alarmingly beautiful thing that Mrs. Yew had ever seen, but not quite so sinfully outspoken as the Ivory Coast. What gives, what giv