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by R. Jean Mathieu

"Ying Wen would not have gone into the store had it not been a few days before Christmas. He had forgotten to buy his mother a gift, and, knowing her predilection for antique Russian dolls, he hoped that one of the high street shops in East Gate Shopping District would have something like that.


“No have.” The old woman at shop said. “We have other, you want, you want?”


She cluttered worthless baubles on the table, old coins, costume jewelry, and little ceramic trinkets, marking each one with “You want? You want?” Ying Wen had no time for some senile old crone from the inner provinces who was too backward to speak proper English. He was about to say so when she pulled out the book."


A Christmastime satire of holiday tradition and a chillingly possible future, R. Jean Mathieu's "Simplified" is not your usual Christmas story. In 2100 China, business is good. The world has adapted Chinese business practices like the English language and the Gregorian calendar. And yet, in searching for a Christmas present for his mother, Ying Wen stumbles across an older China, a different China...one disturbing in its implications that, once upon a time, China did not speak English.

9 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 18, 2014

About the author

R. Jean Mathieu is the fiction writer of all trades. From award-winning stories of the Peace Corps and meditators on Mars (“Gods of War”) to time-traveling mysteries of a Mexican detective solving his own murder (No Time: The First Hour), Mathieu revels in different genres, different voices, and cultural chop suey. Under other noms de plume, he writes romances, thrillers, pulp adventures, Westerns, and mysteries.
Mathieu grew up in Morro Bay, California. He enrolled in college at fifteen, where he would spend the next ten years. With an Associate’s degree in International Studies and $100 in his pocket, Mathieu traveled to China, alternately working as a teahouse server, organic farmhand, Hong Kong movie extra, and English teacher. Despite being deported thrice, he won his degree in Sociology (minoring in Business) over his five years in China, refining his craft along the way. From the streets of Shenzhen to the Thousand-Handed Bodhisattva to the color of industrial sunlight in a mountain town, he continues to draw on the experiences and life lessons he learned there.
He lives in Morro Bay with his wife Melissa, where they keep a good table when not writing side-by-side or chasing trains to the next adventure. A convinced Quaker, he attends Central Coast Friends Meeting in between writing and publishing his fiction, learning new languages, and practicing Uechi-ryu karate. Besides anthologies and magazines, you can find all his stories at Amazon.com and his commentary at RJeanMathieu.com.