China Cowboy

by Kim Gek Lin Short

“Moving between the explicit descriptions of the Marquis de Sade and the implicit ironies of Nabokov, these pieces are excruciatingly compelling, so infernal as they are related in languages variously pornographic and desperately, radically tender. Short’s brilliant tragicomedy can be read as a metaphor for China’s dynamic with American culture or the story of any determined enterprising youth whose eager “bloody head” under a bumbling tyrant’s “boot is bent.” A bold, imaginative, timely work from a courageous and complex thinker. —Heidi Lynn Staples

“China Cowboy is more hydra than hybrid, a slim monster sprouting new directions for form, narrative, culture, and identity. Meanwhile, everything it bites comes to vicious, gorgeous life.” —Christian TeBordo

Heated & heartbreaking, China Cowboy charms like wedding cans, flesh-filled, on tarmac. This car (perhaps an old, long Cadillac with longhorns glaring & charred) contains a man, Ren: a “family man” or “something commensurate.” La-La: our heroine. & the driver, guiding us expertly over the bluegrass, bodies & Time Warps of Hell, child abuse, power & Country Music is Kim Gek Lin Short. —Rauan Klassnik

La La is a myth-making myth. What we learn from her is that we all are. Born in Hong Kong to a family of thieves, she survives by giving herself fully to her religion—Americana. Her saints: Loretta Lynn and Clint Eastwood. Even after being kidnapped and brutally tortured by one of her family’s victims—ironically a farmer from Missouri named Ren—she asks herself, “what would Patsy Cline do?” The answer: “she’d belt every song in that / scratchy face.” Composed primarily of prose blocks that miraculously retain the surprise of linebreaks, this fragmented narrative chronicles their dreams, delusions, and horrific physical lives. La La and Ren are as searing as any characters I’ve encountered—Henry and Mr. Bones, Lolita and Humbert Humbert, Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill, etc.—and we share with them the reality that something must be imagined in order to keep going. Mired in what he is doing to La La, even Ren can comfort himself: “I grasp myself with my arms and say it is / almost too much to contain, this happiness.” La La can only respond by yelling “into her microphone: ‘Shut up, Lao Ren! I caint hear / myself sing!’” —Chris Tonelli

Genres: Fiction, Poetry

132 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2012

About the author

Kim Gek Lin Short is the author of the lyric novels The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits and China Cowboy, both published by Tarpaulin Sky Press. She is also the author of the cross-genre chapbooks Run (Rope-a-Dope) and The Residents (dancing girl press).

Reviews

[Paula Koneazny · Rating 4 out of 5]

China Cowboy is an indeterminate prose work that veers toward story telling. Non-linear in that it ricochets back & forth between 1989 (when the heroine/victim La La is 12), 1997 (when La La is either 20 or dead) & 2001 (when La La's story has become myth, at an exhibition at Soyabean Gallery, when La La herself is dead or alive). One could say that La La is both dead & alive throughout. The setting is America set in Hong Kong, that pulp town par excellence. That La La's parents support themselves through a combination of prostitution & picking up tourists stranded during hurricane weather, then murdering them & stealing their luggage is apropos, since Ren is one of these typhoon-tourists. He survives to return as the American cowboy cum soybean farmer cum artist cum rapist cum pedophile. From the top, the story of La La & her abductor Ren (aka Run aka William O'Rennessey) recalls Lolita & Humboldt Humboldt, as it must. It's not just La La's name or age. The violation that is violence, or vice versa, is more overt in China Cowboy & the prose is not the perfect English sentence of Nabokov (which I find suspicious), but rather its antithesis. China Cowboy trumps Lolita in that La La gets out more alive than dead, even if she is really dead. Lolita survives but as the living dead. La La is the more compelling presence, perhaps because the story is told from both her & Ren's perspectives, so that the tables are at least turned 90 degrees (La La is still, it's important to note, a victim, no matter whether or not she "wins" in the end). I imagine La La giving Nabokov the finger, perhaps both in homage & in defiance. I may be creating my own text in thinking of La La this way. For all I know, Gek Lin Short adores Nabokov. But La La has agency in a way that Lolita does not. La La can get up on the table & sing. Her imitation (Clone) becomes something new. Her victim identity is not all she is. Nevertheless, she is dead & gone, or she splits into three: dead, alive, gone. Ren, differently, splits into two: Ren & Bill. But Ren & Bill are one & the same in a way that Pet, La La & Patsy Clone are not. China Cowboy also brings to mind Alice Notley's feminine epics, Descent of Alette & Disobedience. Both author's reference Dante in creating their heroine's journeys. And Gek Lin Short's Ren /Run, Clint Eastwood, Patsy Cline/ Patsy Clone reminded me of Notley's Hardwood/Hardware/Hardwill; Mitch / Robert Mitch-ham / Dante Hardone, etc. China Cowboy is in keeping with other books on the Tarpaulin Sky list in that it has a transgressive nature. Trangress away!

[Zack · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.examiner.com/review/book-r...

[Sarah Heady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Check out my review here:

http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/china-co...

[Jai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gross and gorgeous about sums up the Kansas City karaoke nightclub and TECHNICOLOR cinema that is Kim Gek Lin Short’s China Cowboy—all “gorge,” gore and zero pretty. Short’s work is often grossly disturbing and excruciatingly seductive, catching the reader in a tense push and pull with and against the text. Sticky and stuck among the fucking and fucked-up, Short binds us within tales of fierce femme survival as her main character, the feisty and fisty La La, avenges the repeated death of Hollywood’s “dragon lady” with her boots, her mic, and her “country superstar humility.” // READ MORE AT LANTERN REVIEW: http://www.lanternreview.com/blog/201...

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

KGLS is a writer like no other. Definitely one of the best books of 2012! Beautifully designed too. Tarpaulin Sky really raised the bar on this one. Simply a must have, as is, KGLS's The Bugging Watch.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, bloody, sleepy, horrifying. A nightmare I would choose to have again.

[Cayman R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

My third Kim G. L. Short book finished. Despite the psychological discomfort and vulnerability this book demands from it's readers, it was still quite successful in capturing my attention from the very first page. The entire story made me feel like I was Lala/Pet/Clone, Bill/Ren/William O'Rennessey, Lala's mother, etc. and that I was just as manipulative, passive, selfish, aggressive, dangerous, terrified, sneaky, in danger, furious, alive, and dead as the character's themselves. Short's ability to capture her audience and fling them into an entirely foreign experience that is both horrifying and seductive at the most unexpected moments is simply phenomenal. I will be reading this story again.

[Mike Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

from NOÖ [14]:

Read this on buses to and back from New York. It should’ve been raining cowboy spurs. This is the story of a country singer named La La kidnapped from her Hong Kong home by an American soybean artist named Ren. La La eats soapy lumps, her dad stabs typhoon-stranded tourists, her mom’s burnt head shows up in a Froot Loops box—I love them all. There are jam jars with pubic hairs in them, and Ren says we’re all made of slime and beans. Listen: the fried heartache of a country yodel both contains and cooks the gooey yolk of the heart.

[Paige · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book quite literally made my skin crawl. I have NEVER been so uncomfortable doing some require reading for class. Wish we could have gotten some major trigger warnings on this from my professor before reading it. I feel like if I took ten showers, I still wouldn't be cleansed from reading this god awful piece of garbage.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

um, can we have a discussion about this book? as in, what was it that i just read?

[T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wild ride and a visceral one. This book is extremely well wrought.

[Timothy Volpert · Rating 5 out of 5]

yikes. so good. so awful.

[Xixi Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

KGLS is a genius.
China Cowboy's language is different (there isn't another way to describe it), but it still disjointedly runs into the next page, and the page after that. LaLa's perspective and her own language to describe her dreams and experiences reclaims her agency in a situation where she might otherwise have none. The other reviews are more eloquent, but I would recommend for anyone interested in hybrid forms.

[Deborah Poe · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wild ride and a visceral one. This book is extremely well wrought.

[Erica Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found it at Kent States library and couldn't put it down.