Michael Chenchard’s Reviews > Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan > Status Update

Only when he passed by the tannery and dye fac-
tory was he forced to do as the locals did and stuff his nostrils with
crushed mint leaves to avoid being choked by the indescribable
stench.

And the air was
full of every kind of scent: bread baking in clay ovens, cabinets filled
with spices and herbs whose names he didn’t know, flowers on win-
dowsills, compost in sheepfolds, strong, mint-scented tea, roasting
coffee, steam from the Moorish baths, tobacco in gurgling hookahs,
freshly washed clothes drying in the sun—he couldn’t stop greedily
breathing it all in.

There they enacted the story of the film they knew
so well, speaking the lines faithfully, and like hero and heroine they
experienced the ecstasy of love and the misery of death, the empti-
ness of fleeting life. All this, Seikei thought, would become their own
Marienbad.12

Sometimes he felt
like some ancient fish washed by the waves at last into a sea within a
dormant volcano, his eyes witnessing daybreak over a new world.
His unquiet body, too, welcomed the dawn of a new life.

a game with all the innocence and cruelty of an
unruly child.

When we had finished our simple evening meal, put out our lights, and lain
down in the tent, there was a moment of complete silence, as though to allow the
night to rearrange its stage: the direction of the wind, the arrangement of the
clouds, the height of the tide, the positions of the constellations.

Perhaps the
bubbles tickled—one of them started laughing and the other fol-
lowed, and in the end they both swallowed water and choked half to
death.

Once he
convinced Seikei to try kissing under water. They took a deep breath
and went under together; at the bottom of the pool there was a sud-
den moment of utter silence. Hong took hold of Seikei’s ears and gen-
tly placed his lips on his. When their mouths opened a stream of bub-
bles burst forth like another thousand immeasurably tender lips
kissing the other’s cheeks, nostrils, eyelashes, and hair.

Some people might think this is, think it’s really strange.