United States of Japan by Peter Tieryas (2016)

 Bald New World and United States of Japan both strongly have the potential to be the basis for great movies.

My Post on Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas - A collection of Short Stories

  

My Post on Bald New World by Peter Tieryas - an amazing debut novel

My Wide Ranging Q and A with Peter Tieryas

One of the great rewards of book blogging for seven years is that it has afforded me the opportunity to follow the careers of writers.  Three years ago I had the pleasure of reading a great collection of short stories, Watering Heaven, the first book by Peter Tieryas.  Here were my closing words in my post on Watering Heaven:

I really liked the stories in Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas. They contain strong elements of surrealism, I think Alfred Jarry would like them, and magic realism.  The stories are very mega-city urban and area very tuned into how social media and its permeation of the world connects us no less or more  than it isolates us.  There is a preoccupation with death and suicide in these stories. .  There are a lot of hookers and no happy old fashioned relationships or marriages accept maybe of a character's grandparents and even that may have been a sham.  The use of language is marvelous, the details are perfect.  I know of no other writer as attuned to how social media is taking over the world as Tieryas.

Tieryas's  novel Bald New World gets my award for most intriguing title for a 21th century debut novel.  The story begins on the day everyone in the world goes bald.  I read this book twice before I felt prepared to talk about it.  I will share my thoughts a bit as I think United States of Japan appears to be greatly expanding interest in the work of Tieryas and because there are thematic and rhetorical overlaps between his three works that will, I think, help to deepen our understanding of his new book, United States of Japan.

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There is just so much in Bald New World to like it is hard for me to feel I can adequately react to the book.  The narrative covers some twenty years and is kind of centered on two experimental film makers trying to produce movies about this new world.  The richest people are now the wig manufacturers.  Much time is spent in this world trying to understand why everyone lost their hair, the blame is placed on everything from the extreme environmental pollution of the world to seeing it as some kind of divine punishment. There is a plot about hair restoration.  Poverty is extreme, corruption is rampant and life is very cheap. 

The novel also deals with how social media and gadgets are totally changing how we live, in all ways.  A leading sport is cricket fighting where people somehow lock up mentally with crickets.  One of the lead characters was once a famous cricket fighter (think Avatar) and when he gets in trouble he agrees to fight again.  The scenes where he enters into the consciousness of a cricket are really brilliant.  The scenes of the fights and the mating with crickets were enough to make one feel the revulsion of this brave new world.

The hysteria now being created by The Fox Network about Ebola some how reminds me of the parts of Bald New World in which we learn of the many overt and covert ways the very rich and their minions try to control the masses by distracting them from their real problems.   The role of the army in wars against African "enemies" as a last chance employer and feeder of vendor wealth for sure is see-able as a commentary on the foreign and domestic priorities of the United States.

Blad New World would make a great movie.  It is very visually oriented, fast moving, has some nasty sex scenes (not just the ones where you feel you are having sex with crickets!) with beautiful women, lots of diverse locations, interesting villains, strong women and I would love to see scenes of all the ways people cope with being bald. A brilliant filming of the first day of baldness could be an immortal classic segment in the right hands. There are prison escapes and plot twists abound.  This is a very dark, brilliant and at times very funny book.  I can almost guarantee you will never be bored reading Bald New World.

My expectations and hope for United States of Japan were very high.  The work exceeded my expectations.   The book begins in California, in 1948, now part of The United States of Japan.  In this alternate history plot, the United States does not enter the war in 1941 but waits several years.  In this time Germany and Japan become more and more powerful. The Japanese have the time to attack the west coast of the United States with nuclear weapons.  After the United States surrenders tne Eastern part is ruled by the Germans and everything west of the Rocky Mountains is part of The United States of Japan. 

The novel covers about forty years, from 1948 to 1988.  In California we see the extreme cruelty of the Japanese rulers of California and the brutality of their soldiers.  History is rewritten to suggest the Japanese were completely blameless in their actions during the war and American school children are taught to revere the Emperor. Any expression of doubt about the divinity of the actions of Japan, seen as directed by their divine emperor, by a Japanese is seen as treason.  The culture among Japanese in California is one full of informants dominated by fear of secret police units.

The opening segments, set in San Jose, California are just brilliantly chilling and ring completely true to me. It was so much easy to visualize troops of young Japanese soldiers striking terror in Americans. I was brought to reflect on how the Americans saved millions of Japanese from starvation after they surrendered in World War Two and how they help  restore the Japanexe economy and in fact brought a level of freedom to Japan never known or even conceived of under Japanese military rule.  One of the deepest cultural questions brought to mind by United States of Japan is how a country where beauty has been cultivated for many centuries could at the same time produce leaders and followers of incredible brutality.   Of course this is not unique to Japan.

As time goes by in California and elsewhere, American culture and history begin to be forgotten, replaced with ideas created to control the Americans.  Few Americans born since 1948 have any true memory of American history.  However are underground groups of Americans who wage guerrilla warfare against the Japanse.  Much of the recreational time of people is taken up by video games and someone has created a subversive video game that is very popular that depicts what things would be like had the Americans won the war.   The lead chzracter and tne driver of the plot is Captain Ishimaru who is in charge of finding out who is distributing these service video games.  An alternative smart phone device plays a big part in the life of the Japanese in California.  

I don't want to give away the intriguing plots, surprising twists of events, interesting characters and abounding social satire found in United States of Japan.  I found the ending deeply moving.  I did not see it coming but it was a wonderful close. 

Besides being a lot of fun to read, there are some good sex scenes, characters to hate and some to feel sympathy with, I think we can read this novel as a commentary about how the surface culture and seductive power of social  media can play into the hands of forces seeking to control societies to put in place malignant private agendas.  

I totally enjoyed United States of Japan, it is exciting with lots of interesting developments, well done characters and presents a very credible alternative historical narrative. I won't tell you what has happened to Catalina Island but you will be shocked.  

Official Author Bio

Peter Tieryas Liu is the author of United States of Japan (Angry Robot Books, 2016), Bald New World (Perfect Edge Books, June 2014),  Watering Heaven (Signal 8 Press, 2012), and Dr. 2. His debut novel, Bald New World, was nominated for the prestigious Folio Prize, listed as one of Buzzfeed’s 15 Highly Anticipated Books of 2014, and named one of the Best Books of Summer 2014 from Publisher Weekly in a star review. Watering Heaven was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor Int’l Short Story Award. He has a variety of work published in places like Electric Literature, Evergreen Review, Gargoyle, Hobart, Indiana Review, Kotaku, Kyoto Journal, New Letters, New Orleans Review, Toad Suck Review, Tor.com, and ZYZZYVA. He is also a VFX artist who has worked on films like Men in Black 3, Guardians of the Galaxy, Alice in Wonderland, and Hotel Transylvania and he has worked as a technical writer for LucasArts, the gaming division of LucasFilm.

OK, that was my third person bio. =)

As for information about this blog, The Whimsy of Creation gets its name from one of my favorite stories that I published at the Evergreen Review. I’ve worked in films, games, and writing, so this blog will focus on all three areas. That means you’ll see book reviews, movie reviews, musings on games, quotes from books I’m reading, links to stories, and photographs Angela (my wife) and I take as we travel to various places in the world. I try to post at least once or twice a day and look forward to interacting with everyone out there. If you need to reach out to me about any business related issues, just ping me somewhere =)

And if you want to connect via social media, you can either follow this wordpress, follow on @TieryasXu Twitter:, or Goodreads me.

https://tieryas.wordpress.com/

I have great faith in the future of Peter Tieryas.  I am sure one day I will be standing in line to go see a movie made from one of his works.  

Mel u

Bald New World by Peter Tieryas Liu - 2014- An Amazing Debut Novel by the Award Winning Author of Watering Heaven

"I was eleven when everyone in the world lost their hair."

My Post on Watering Heaven


My Q and A with Peter Tieryas  Liu

In January of last year I read Peter Tieryas Liu's debut collection of short stories, Watering Heaven. I was actually shocked by how good it was, by how much I liked it.  Here is a part of my concluding remarks on the collection:

"I really liked the stories in Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu.  They contain strong elements of surrealism, I think Alfred Jarry would like them, and magic realism.  The stories are very mega-city urban and very tuned in to how social media and its permeation of the world connects us no more than it isolates us.  There is a preoccupation with death and suicide.  Someone kills themselves in a number of the stories.  There are a lot of hookers and no happy old fashioned relationships or marriages accept maybe of a character's grandparents and even that may have been a sham.  The use of language is marvelous, the details are perfect.   At the start of the e-book there is a quote about the book that says "his surreal brilliance and vulnerability reminds one of the best of Borges, Calvino and Pynchon".   When I first read this I thought "oh, sure" but I now fully agree with this."

I knew I wanted to read much more of Peter's work and hopefully watch his talent develop.  Long before his first novel, Bald New World came into print I thought what a brilliant title.  I have now read Bald New World twice, once three months ago and just last week.  I waited three months to read a second time as I wanted to let the work sink into my consciousness for a while and I knew right away that the book would get a lot of attention so I waited.  I was right as it has received glowing reviews all over the internet and beyond.

When I read the opening section describing world wide reaction to the day everyone in the world went bald overnight I thought I sure would not want to be in Manila when that happened. Just about every other TV commercial here is for hair products.  

There is just so much in Bald New World to like it is hard for me to feel I can adequately react to the book.  The narrative covers some twenty years and is kind of centered on two experimental film makers trying to produce movies about this new world.  The richest people are now the wig manufacturers.  Much time is spent in this world trying to understand why everyone lost their hair, the blame is placed on everything from the extreme environmental pollution of the world to seeing it as some kind of divine punishment. There is a plot about hair restoration.  Poverty is extreme, corruption is rampant and life is very cheap.  Showing my age and echoing the remarks of numerous others, this novel will make you think of the great movie, Blade Runner.  

The novel also deals with how social media and gadgets are totally changing how we live, in all ways.  A leading sport is cricket fighting where people somehow lock up mentally with crickets.  One of the lead characters was once a famous cricket fighter (think Avatar) and when he gets in trouble he agrees to fight again.  The scenes where he enters into the consciousness of a cricket are really brilliant.  The scenes of the fights and the mating with crickets were enough to make one feel the revulsion of this brave new world.

The hysteria now being created by The Fox Network about Ebola some how reminds me of the parts of Bald New World in which we learn of the many overt and covert ways the very rich and their minions try to control the masses by distracting them from their real problems.   The role of the army in wars against African "enemies" as a last chance employer and feeder of vendor wealth for sure is see-able as a commentary on the foreign and domestic priorities of the United States.

Blad New World would make a great movie.  It is very visually oriented, fast moving, has some nasty sex scenes (not just the ones where you feel you are having sex with crickets!) with beautiful women, lots of diverse locations, interesting villains, strong women and I would love to see scenes of all the ways people cope with being bald. A brilliant filming of the first day of baldness could be an immortal classic scene in the right hands. There are prison escapes and plot twists abound.  This is a very dark, brilliant and at times very funny book.  I can almost guarantee you will never be bored reading Bald New World.

Liu has created a very real feeling virtual world.  Aldous is smiling while he awaits to see Liu's next trip through the doors of perception.  

Official Author Bio from his webpage

Peter Tieryas Liu is the author of Watering Heaven (Signal 8 Press, 2012), Bald New World (Perfect Edge Books, June 2014), and Dr. 2. Bald New World was listed as one of Buzzfeed’s 15 Highly Anticipated Books of 2014, one of the Best Books of Summer 2014 from Publisher Weekly in a star review, and Watering Heaven was an Amazon best-seller and long-listed for the Frank O’Connor Int’l Short Story Award. He has a variety of work published in places like the Adirondack Review, Camera Obscura Journal, Electric Literature, Evergreen Review, Gargoyle, Hobart, HTMLGiant, Indiana Review, Kotaku, New Letters, New Orleans Review,  Rain Taxi, Toad Suck Review, and ZYZZYVA to name a few. He is also a VFX artist who has worked on films like Men in Black 3, Guardians of the Galaxy, Alice in Wonderland, and Hotel Transylvania and he has worked as a technical writer for LucasArts, the gaming division of LucasFilm.

I endorse this book without reservations of any kind other than to say it will offend members of The Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Crickets.

I hope to read lots more by Peter Tieryas Liu.

Peter Tieryas Liu A Fascinating Interview with the author of Watering Heaven

I recently read a new collection of short stories Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu that simply amazed
me.  Peter has also authorized me to let my readers know of a special price of  $1.99 on Amazon.

There are in all 20 stories in Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu, each one stranger than the one before it.  They are sort of interrelated in that several of them deal with an IT worker and his life.  Most of the main characters are Chinese- Americans, mostly with American roots but still with ties to a very different world.   Some of the characters speak Mandrian and three, though we think they are not related, have the same last name, "Chao". 

I really liked the stories in Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu.  They contain strong elements of surrealism, I think Alfred Jarry would like them, and magic realism.  The stories are very mega-city urban and very tuned in to how social media and its permeation of the world connects us no more than it isolates us.  There is a preoccupation with death and suicide.  Someone kills themselves in a number of the stories.  There are a lot of hookers and no happy old fashioned relationships or marriages except maybe of a character's grandparents and even that may have been a sham.  The use of language is marvelous, the details are perfect.   At the start of the e-book there is a quote about the book that says "his surreal brilliance and vulnerability reminds one of the best of Borges, Calvino and Pynchon".   When I first read this I thought "oh, sure" but I now fully agree with this (with the clarification I have not read much Calvino, not enough Borges but I have read all of Pynchon's work more than once). 

I am very honored that Peter has agreed to do an interview for The Reading Life.

Hi Mel! Thank for having me on The Reading Life

1.    Who are some short story writers you admire?    

I loved your earlier article about Hemingway’s short stories and I loved his stories when I was growing up. There’s a punchy terseness in his writing that is very powerful and deceptively simple though it is very difficult to recreate. While we’re on classics, I enjoyed Fitzgerald, Kafka, and a lot of the older Greek/Roman/Chinese myths. Current authors I enjoy include Tim Horvath, whose imagination has no bounds; Kristine Ong Muslim, whose stories are disturbingly beautiful and is from the Philippines; Berit Ellingsen, a Norwegian writer who writes words as though she were writing music;  and Leza Lowitz who is a writer I greatly admire; there’s an intangible lyricality to her writing that draws me into her world. She actually was the one who suggested I make a collection of all my published stories, for which I’m very grateful. There’s so many others, I could go on and on.

2.   Many of your stories have suicides and are preoccupied with death-what is the genesis of this preoccupation?   

Writers like Camus and Maugham would say suicide and death are the only relevant questions in story-telling. Why do we live?  I think that’s at the core of all the questions of identity and part of what I love so much about the American dream. Anyone can live for whatever reason they want. I also think the power and shock of suicide is it seems to go against everything in nature. So when a suicide rocks the character, say as in the “Political Misconception” or “The Wolf’s Choice,” the memories of those who’ve passed on haunt the character and unconsciously shape the paths they choose. In context of their pain, their reaction, often bizarre and extreme, reveal layers of their humanity as they rethink what is really important in their lives. 

3.  You have worked in the video game industry.   Recently after the wave of school shootings in the USA, some commentators said violent video games are very much a part of the cause of this.   Do you agree at all and why or why not?  

This is a really difficult question and I want to tread carefully, especially in light of the tragic circumstances in the recent months. I’d say the question is extremely complex and I don’t have enough research and data to feel like I can make a fair conclusion without generalizing. I will say this; earlier last year, I played a game called Journey that was quite possibly the most beautiful game I’ve ever played. There are no weapons, no deaths, just a journey one wanderer makes to reach a mountain. It nearly brought both my wife and myself to tears. After we turned the game off, we did not go and try to climb a mountain.

4.  The future world-more like Mad Max or Blade Runner?

I loved both movies but I’ll have to go with Blade Runner. I loved the Noir feel, the people speaking languages that are a hybrid of multiple nations. My personal hope for future worlds though? Star Trek with its Federation and its exploratory ideals. Having said that, according to Star Trek history, some pretty terrible things happened before humanity achieved that peace. I’m hoping we can skip that part.

5.  I noticed a lot of hookers in your stories.  Is that in part a commentary on people like game programmers selling their talents to any one who will pay?  

I think one of the things that’s important for me as a writer is to explore the outcasts and rejects in society. While I wasn't per se commenting on programmers, or for that matter, anyone selling their talents for pay, I felt there was more I could explore using characters out of the norm as in the stories, “Rodenticide” and “Resistance.” I find it interesting that prostitutes play such a big role in many of the Biblical stories and force readers to shift their assumptions about right and wrong. While I was traveling through Asia, through friends, I actually met a handful of ‘paid escorts’ who had amazing (and tragic) stories to tell. That in part shows itself in the stories contained in the collection.

6.   Are your stories in part a reflection of the issues of  being a "hyphenated American?"

I grew up in a very diverse set of communities where race rarely came up as an issue. So I never really thought of myself as a hyphenated American, more an American who loves Asia. I thought it was fascinating while I was in China, most people didn’t view me as Asian, but as American. My outer appearance didn’t matter to them. And culturally, we were so different, it made sense. Having said that, I love it when people refer to me as Asian-American as I love both cultures. I don’t see any conflict between them as part of America’s greatness is it absorbs all. Though I am of course grateful to all those who came before me and fought so hard to achieve that equality through blood, sweat, and tears. In regards to my stories, you’ll find that racial issues rarely pop up and I think that’s a reflection of the way I was raised where race was less important than what you believed and what you fought for.  

7.   When did you first begin to write stories?   Are you interested in other literary forms?

When I was a kid. I wrote about everything. I’ve tried my hand at all sorts of other literary forms including non-fiction essays, game articles, book reviews, reporting of events, and experimental fiction that didn’t make much sense. Some of it has been disastrously embarrassing, others somehow got published. All of them were valuable to me growing as a writer. 

8.  Why do you think most of the classic literature of the world was written in the Temperate Zone?

That’s a good question. Could it have more to do with actual exposure? I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have equally amazing literature? I’m not sure though, but in relation to writing under different weather conditions, I will say my own best writing came in the summer months while I was traveling in China and Thailand. My weakest came while I was in China during winter when I was nearly freezing. It was so cold, I had a hard time writing. I was mainly focused on keeping warm and staying alive. 

9.  E-Readers?   The end of a great era  or the harbingers of a great new era in literature?  

Both. Publishing is changing. I love print books. But I also have to admit that lugging around forty heavy books while I’m traveling halfway across the world is hard, whereas a download to a portable device is much easier to carry. I also love how the digital format is opening up the world to voices that otherwise would never have been heard, including Watering Heaven, which entered the top 100 among short story collections in the digital format. It’s fantastic.

10.   Are gadgets enslaving us with a need to make more money to have better gadgets?  
I really laughed hard after I read this question. Now please excuse me while I go download a music track to my Ipod and make a call on my Galaxy phone and play some games on my Xbox and watch a movie on my Blu-Ray player.

End of Interview

There is an interesting book trailer here

Author Data

Peter Tieryas Liu has almost 200 publications in magazines and journals including Adirondack Review, anderbo, Bitter Oleander, Bookslut, Camera Obscura Journal, decomP, Evergreen Review, Gargoyle, Indiana Review, Kartika Review, Prism Review, Toad Suck Review, Word Riot, and ZYZZYVA, and was the recipient of the 2012 Fiction Award from Mojo, the magazine run by Wichita State University. He has also worked as a technical writer for LucasArts, the gaming division of LucasFilm. 

You can read some of his work online

Word Riot published the Death Artist:
http://www.wordriot.org/archives/2544

decomP published Colony
http://www.decompmagazine.com/colony.htm

Johnny America published Cold Fusion:

http://johnnyamerica.com/archives/2010/12/03/07.00.00/

Kartika Review published Searching for Normalcy:

http://kartikareview.com/?portfolio=issue-07-spring-2010

You can learn more about his work on his webpage

The publisher, based in Hong Kong, Signal 8 Press has a very interesting webpage.

There is a  very perceptive post on Suko's Notebook on the book.

I am very glad to have read this debut collection and I look forward to following the literary development of the author.   

If you want to see why I am so excited over this collection, please read my post on Watering Heaven.

Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu

Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu  (2012, 210 pages, a collection of short stories)

Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu simply stunned me with its sheer inventiveness and its celebration  of   the darkness that sometimes seem to be spreading over the urban landscapes of the world.  Some times in life you must decide either to cry or laugh.  I think Peter Tieryas Liu  has shown us how we can laugh at some very terrible things without losing our humanity.   My first temptation on this collection is just to blather on a bit then just say read it as soon as you can and you can thank me latter.

I do not especially like posts on anthologies of short stories that just rave on about them in general.  When I visit a forest I do not just like to see the trees, I like to see the moss that grows on them, the vines that climb them and listen to the birds that make them their home.  I like to peel the bark from the trees to see the insects that bore into the trees, I like to study their roots. Sometimes I like to climb to the top of the trees and survey the environment,  once in a rare while I build a tree house and stay a while.  In the case of Watering Heavens, I pulled the rope ladder up after me because some of the denizens of this forest are more than a bit edgy..   Be sure to be on the look out for several million displaced rats!  If your laptop does not work in your tree house, there will be an IT guy along soon.     Get ready to laugh and be amazed by the sheer creativity of this collection.

There are twenty stories in Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu.   As is my normal procedure I will talk individually about enough of the stories to give a potential reader a feel for the collection without spoiling any of the superbly entertaining plots.   Upon completion of this I will then talk a bit about why I love these stories so much.

"Chronology of an Egg"

"I first met Sarah Chao in Beijing over tequila shots after a game conference.  I tell her she is beautiful and she tells me she has a genetic quirk that scares off most men.

'Every time I have sex, I lay an egg'"

The narrator figures this is a joke and gives her his email address when he hears she will be coming to the USA in a few months.  Sure enough in four moths she shows up in Los Angeles and he takes her to "an exhibition about talented circus performers who've died in the act".   The story is told in the first person by Ethan Zhou a game designer who lived in China for three years researching pandas and iguanas.  Sarah Chao is a producer (of video games-not sure) who has spent half of her life in Kentucky and half in China.   She has a fun thing she likes to do.  Whenever she leaves a restaurant she writes on the wall outside it, in Mandarin,  a rating for the place as a warning to others.  She also does this to bars and once even writes something on the dead of a drunk.   She is amazed and a bit revolted of the shallow snobbish culture of Sunset road where breast implants are the norm and everyone is   a celebrity wannabe.  The woman asks him what he wants to be.   He says in the short term he wants some green tea ice cream. I can relate as I love green tea frozen yogurt.   He tells her the story of his ex-hippie uncle who started a green tea ice cream parlor.  He ended up killing himself by putting 1000 Tylenol pills in his own ice cream.    The story is told in the form of journal entries.  In one scene which made me think of the scene in  Pulp Fiction where John Travolta and Uma Thurman dance they visit a dance club.  As the evening passes and the tequila shots flow on they wind up in a Korean Karaoke club.  As the night goes on Sarah and Ethan have some real fascinating conversations.   They wind up at her place.   Now things get unspeakably weird.  I was sitting by myself in our gazebo when I read the ending of the story.   At first something really shocking and immaculately described occurs and just when you think things cannot get any stranger one of the very weirdest shocking and hilarious endings to a story I have ever read caused me to gasp out loud in the darkness of the Manila night.  I guarantee you will not forget this ending and you will have wonder if you could do what Ethan and Sarah do.   I finished this story pretty much flabbergasted and eager to read on.  "Chronology of an Egg" is a great story.

"The Wolf's Choice"

"Was she trying to reproduce that moment when she poured Drano into her coffee?"

"The Wolf's Choice", also told by a young man, is a fascinating story about a man trying to remake and run from himself.   He spends eight months  adrift, seeking solitude, "wandering through the honeycomb of Asia, shifty Bangkok, grand Beijing, contemporary Shanghai, futuristic Tokyo".    While in Korea he has plastic surgery done to reshape his face.  He returns to his old work place and his colleagues are shocked by the change.  His coworkers do not understand at all what is behind this.  He feels very alienated from office politics and cubicle wars.   He goes to see his family hoping they will make him feel better.  Instead they  feel insulted.  Why did he reject the face he was born with?   He worked, as did the man in "Chronology of an Egg" (maybe it is the same man) as a programmer for online games.   The jobs of the programmers are in the process of being outsourced to India and China.   He gets laid off and he is informed by Nikki from Human Resources.    She is young and cute and she asks him out for a drink after telling him she feels bad over his layoff.    He runs into a panic stricken VP who was just laid off.    We wonder how long until he cracks up his Porsche, assuming he can keep the payments up.   He talks about the differences in attitudes of  people in Los Angeles and the parts of Asia he has been to.   Nikki comes across pretty vacuous.   The ending is just great.   Again I could not help laughing and it was a perfect depiction of some very plausible events.


"Rodenticide"

"The thousand multiplied into millions and the town became a playground for rodents.   Other than curious tourists or travelers who got lost, no one new ever came to town.  Except for the new town hooker, Kathy Chao and a failed film director, Larry Chao."

"Rodenticide" somehow maybe be think of a Simpson's plot written by William Burroughs with the help of Hunter Thompson, after a  very bad, very   long night in Tangiers.

The story opens with Mayor Douglas Kwan in bed in a cheap motel with a hooker.   He is explaining his political plans to her when she tells him "Your time's almost up".   He tells her he has plans to get himself elected to congress.

The setting is the town of Antarsia and it was founded by a whacked out millionaire who created a city out of a H. P. Lovecraft story.   A famous entrepreneur, Wang Toufa (a Pynchonesque name) thought he could cure baldness and erectile dysfunction and was convinced that these were connected.   He brought in 1000s of rats to use in experiments and when the idea failed he let the rats go and now they have turned into millions and they totally dominate the town.     Mayor Kwan figures if he can get rid of the rats popular esteem will take him into Congress.   The story lets is learn more about the hooker Kathy Chao (she and the mayor Douglas Chao are not related)  among them that her best friend killed herself.    The extermination campaign begins.   Rat poison is dropped off all over town.  A small bounty is paid for dead rats.   The town has been doing real bad lately, made worse as no business will open there.   We learn a lot about the rat killing crusade.   "Rodenticide" is, among many other things, a great satire on American politics.   You create a problem and then you solve it  at other people's expense.   There is a shocking protest of the rat campaign.   This was just a flat out really fun to read totally imaginative story.   The ending is incredibly gruesome.  Liu is a very cinematic writer.


"The Political Misconception of Getting Fired"

"When the steak arrived, I ripped it apart with my bare hands, chewing savagely, with my mouth wide open"

Several of the stories are told in the first person by a man, seems like in his mid-twenties or so, who works for a southern California IT company called SolTech.  There is a lot in this story.   I was really moved by the part of it where he recalls his father who failed at every job he ever tried and died working as a clerk surrounded by people a third his age.   The narrator makes very good money and he knows it enslaves him and his coworkers through their obsessions over the latest gadgets.   He has been at SolTech nine years.  He has just gotten a Facebook message from a woman he had a crush on in high school but who would not give him the time  of day.   He was surprised when she suggested they meet up but he agreed to it.    I know enough now to expect some weird dark twists and turns in this story and Liu does not disappoint me.  There are really two plots.  One involves downsizing at SolTech and the other with his old flame who thinks she was kidnapped by aliens.   Like the other stories, death haunts us and the search for love is ongoing, hidden though it may be.  One of  the plot lines comes to what might pass for a happy ending.    I really liked the way the backstabbing and the lying were depicted at SolTech.   It reminded me of a big international corporation I once worked for.

"Colony"

"The doctors told me that brain imagining had revealed a colony of tapeworms in my brain"

If you ever wondered what it might be like to have tapeworms living in your brain, then read "Colony".  It is one of the shortest stories in the collection, three pages, and one of the strangest, and this is saying something!   I love and am very baffled by this line "relativity is sugar mixed with with a dissolving chocolate souffle, and all the lovers I've disappointed remind me of overcooked salmon simmering in brunt coffee and impossible expectations".   The man feels guilty about medical plans to kill the tapeworms.  It may also be a story of a man completely driven mad by isolation amid too much stimulation trying to find way to explain himself to himself.  

"Resistance"

"I'm inside an abandoned shopping mall and a hooker's chasing me with a kitchen knife"

Like a number of the other stories in the collection, this is a story told by an IT worker.   It is kind of a dystopian work but not quite.   Both of the characters, as are a lot of the people in these stories are Chinese-Americans.  I guess part of the angst in these stories comes from trying to blend two very different cultures.  This story also involves the LA Branch of SolTech. SolTech is an IT company but they are not doing Nobel Prize type stuff.   The narrator and his friend Martin work on computer simulated Vegas dealers in the form of Playmates.  Once they are perfected, casinos will replace dealers with these programs.   The man and Martin talk about guy stuff, girls, cheap pizza the company gives them instead of overtime, and the guilt they feel about created digital replacements for people.  I do not want to tell the plot of this story other than to say it involves and abandoned shopping mall full of the long time out of work, hookers with AIDs, the insane, and now his friend Martin.   This story would make the basis for an exciting video game with the narrator running through the old mall killing hookers and being chased by lunatics.   


There are in all 20 stories in Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu, each one stranger than the one before it.  They are sort of interrelated in that several of them deal with an IT worker and his life.  Most of the main characters are Chinese- Americans, mostly with American roots but still with ties to a very different world.   Some of the characters speak Mandrian and three, though we think they are not related, have the same last name, "Chao". 

I really liked the stories in Watering Heaven by Peter Tieryas Liu.  They contain strong elements of surrealism, I think Alfred Jarry would like them, and magic realism.  The stories are very mega-city urban and very tuned in to how social media and its permeation of the world connects us no more than it isolates us.  There is a preoccupation with death and suicide.  Someone kills themselves in a number of the stories.  There are a lot of hookers and no happy old fashioned relationships or marriages accept maybe of a character's grandparents and even that may have been a sham.  The use of language is marvelous, the details are perfect.   At the start of the e-book there is a quote about the book that says "his surreal brilliance and vulnerability reminds one of the best of Borges, Calvino and Pynchon".   When I first read this I thought "oh, sure" but I now fully agree with this (with the clarification I have not read much Calvino, not enough Borges but I have read all of Pynchon's work more than once).  Of course Pynchon constructs a whole universe but I respect the comparison.    I know of no other writer as attuned to how social media is taking over the world as Liu.  

Above all these stories are great fun to read, really laugh out loud hilarious.  Even  people like me who grew up reading Mad Magazine will love these stories.   

Author Data

Peter Tieryas Liu has almost 200 publications in magazines and journals including Adirondack Review, anderbo, Bitter Oleander, Bookslut, Camera Obscura Journal, decomP, Evergreen Review, Gargoyle, Indiana Review, Kartika Review, Prism Review, Toad Suck Review, Word Riot, and ZYZZYVA, and was the recipient of the 2012 Fiction Award from Mojo, the magazine run by Wichita State University. He has also worked as a technical writer for LucasArts, the gaming division of LucasFilm. 

You can read some of his work online

Word Riot published the Death Artist:
http://www.wordriot.org/archives/2544

decomP published Colony
http://www.decompmagazine.com/colony.htm

Johnny America published Cold Fusion:

http://johnnyamerica.com/archives/2010/12/03/07.00.00/

Kartika Review published Searching for Normalcy:

http://kartikareview.com/?portfolio=issue-07-spring-2010

You can learn more about his work on his webpage

The publisher, based in Hong Kong, Signal 8 Press has a very interesting webpage.

You can buy it in paperback or Kindle from Amazon

 I will soon be doing an interview with the author and I may talk also about one or two more stories then as well as do a word count commentary on his work.

I give this collection my total endorsement with the remark that part of it would be at least r-rated if made into a movie.  

There is a  very perceptive post on Suko's Notebook on the book.