China Cowboy
by Kim Gek Lin Short
Lyric Novel | 6"x8", 132 pp, pbk
ISBN: 9780982541685
Just like the book’s protagonist, La La, who “...wears all
her clothes. Her boots. All three skirts. All the shirts. The panties, many of
them...”
China Cowboy by Kim Gek Lin
Short is an expertly woven story told in tangled layers.
It is the story of an abduction or escape, a brutal love
affair or abusive imprisonment, rise to fame or road to perdition, art
installation or songbook retrospective. It is each of these things in turn or
neither depending on the narrator in charge at any given moment.
Told in turn from the perspectives of each of the book’s
primary characters (La La and Ren), China Cowboy is a successfully executed experiment in prosody that simultaneously
braids and frays narrative timelines and expectations, bringing the reader to
the brink of every sensory extreme and back again. The result is a darkly
surreal adventure in perception that leaves one’s nerves exposed and moral
fortitude shaken to their respective foundations.
As a note in the lower right hand corner of both the back
cover and the title page indicates, “China Cowboy is Told in Technicolor.” In retrospect, this is perhaps a content
warning of sorts for a book publishing industry still as yet (blessedly)
unregulated by any sort of parental advisory ratings agency.
On the other hand, to use the euphemism of a bygone era and
call the language of this book “colorful” would be both a dangerous
understatement and a grave disservice to the unrelentingly aggressive,
continuously shifting, sexually charged and poetically crafted syntaxes that
Kim Gek Lin Short stitches together with apparent ease.
Take the following lines from “American Ball” by way of
example:
“It is not a ball. It is a rubber doll, but only part of
her. The ass and pussy part. I decide I do not want the flashlight anymore I
turn it off. I want my ball back. I lie on the ball but it is not the same. I
want to scream. But I don’t.”
Faced with hundreds of provocatively conflicted passages
such as this, one does not “read” the pages of China Cowboy so much as one is confronted by them and left to
weigh the visceral experiences they both depict/imprint in the mind’s eye and
evoke/carve within the physical body.
Which is to say: When you
pick up this book (and you should) be prepared to
hold both your brightest hopes for humanity and darkest emotional expectations
in a precarious balance. By the time you put it down again, the scales of your
psyche will never be quite the same.
-Travis Macdonald
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