5 posts tagged with "Social Critique"

I developed a cough, a sticky, persistent kind of cough that just wouldn't let go. It wasn't anything serious, just the kind where you're about to make a witty remark, and it jumps in with a "cough, cough," making the atmosphere feel like the minute before a memorial service; or in the dead of night, just as a spark of insight about the origin of the universe flashes in your mind, it lets out a couple of "hacks," shattering that spark like a clumsy waiter dropping a platter of fine food. In short, it wasn't fatal, but it thoroughly spoiled the fun of life.

I went to see a doctor, a middle-aged man wearing thick glasses, his expression as solemn as if he had just presided over a failed philosophical debate. He listened to my lungs, looked at my throat, then said in a tone that permitted no doubt: "You need to smoke."

Old Dubois felt his rib was broken. Not a dull ache, but as if a red-hot iron poker was being brutally stirred inside his left chest with every breath, every slight movement. The pain was so real, so tyrannical, much like life itself often imposed upon him. He had slipped on those damned steps, coated with a thin layer of ice, still clutching a small bag of wrinkled potatoes, his sustenance for the next three days.

I heard this story in a jazz bar.

That night, Tokyo was experiencing a dense rain, like some invisible, viscous substance threatening to devour the entire city. I sat alone in a corner of the bar, nursing an excessively expensive whiskey. The ice cubes swirled slowly in the amber liquid, like time itself, melting away silently.

Lao Li, fifty years old and supposedly at the age of knowing his destiny, had been feeling a strange swelling in his chest lately. At first, he didn't think much of it, assuming it was just his blood pressure rising from arguing with Widow Wang next door. But the swelling in his chest grew increasingly strange, from a slight distension to a dull ache, and then, eventually... eventually, damn it, he grew boobs!

This terrified Lao Li. He was a real man, burly and rough, with a bristly beard. Anyone who saw him on the street would call him "Brother Li." How could he have grown these things? He secretly went to the hospital, registered, got checked, and the doctor pushed up his glasses, looking at him like he was an alien: "You have... breast hyperplasia."

On the altar table where Old Wang's family enshrined the Kitchen God image, the dish of maltose candy, carefully made, was gone.

It was the fourth day of the Lunar New Year, the day to welcome the Kitchen God, and this candy was the key to persuading him to "speak good words in Heaven and bring back blessings." Old Wang was in a panic, pacing back and forth in the room like an ant on a hot pan.