Celebrating Lunar New Year and AWP with Great Stories to Read
Bringing you Ted Chiang, Xia Jia, and the Z-Man sandwich
Hello!
Many of you are probably reading this as you travel out of Kansas City, returning to whence you came post-AWP. The many Recovering the Classics postcards you took hold pride of place amongst your AWP spoils (we hope!). As we welcome the Lunar New Year, we’re grateful that you took us along with you in some way, even if it’s just as one of the 85 tabs you have open in Safari.
As a reminder, Writing Atlas is a still-growing online catalog of short stories. Our goal is to build a powerful and vast reference tool along the lines of an IMDb for writers meets a Wikipedia for fiction, centered first around short stories. As of now, we’ve listed over 5,000 short stories in Writing Atlas, curated mostly by college students over the last three years. You can start browsing here to find any of those short stories by title, author, tags, or your most embarrassing guilty pleasure. Over a thousand people now show up each weekday on Writing Atlas, and we hope to grow that community with your help.
Our first curation below is from Hannah Oo, a senior at Stanford University majoring in Biology and minoring in Creative Writing and Spanish, who hails from Michigan. Whether or not you celebrate Lunar New Year, we hope that Hannah’s picks reach you with a sense of festivity, family, and fulfillment. Thank you, AWP attendees, for being here with us to celebrate this time of wondrous growth. To celebrate, we leave you with a photo of the marvelous Z-Man sandwich from Joe's Kansas City Bar-B-Que, which we hope everyone has a chance to try at one point in their lives (They have a portobello version too for vegetarians).
Stories and Other Curations by Hannah Oo
Hello fellow literary lovers, and happy Lunar New Year! On February 10, 2024, we rang in the first lunar month—the first new moon nearest to the spring equinox. The celebration, having its origins from a variety of Asian cultures and countries, including China, South Korea, North Korea, Singapore, and Cambodia, officially ends fifteen days later on a full moon. Regardless, during this period, we celebrate by paying respects to elders, fireworks, and parades with dance and ritual.
Lunar New Year 2024 is the Year of the Dragon, a zodiac that in addition to being the only mythical animal in the calendar, represents luck, strength, charisma, and authority. Thus, to begin our curated collection of short stories, we have “Spring Festival: Happiness, Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy” by Xia Jia (full text here, translated from Mandarin by Ken Liu). Jia is a prominent Chinese storyteller, focusing on science and speculative fiction but never lacking that thread of humanity and nature that makes her work so moving.
In “Spring Festival,” her subject is the Lunar New Year season itself, celebrated in China specifically as the Spring Festival. She chronicles short epistles set in a China of the future, complete with infant rituals of predetermination and holographic images of past and future selves. The message is eternal, though: no matter how far we advance with technology, mankind’s greatest struggles are innate, are matters of peace, companionship, mortality, uncertainty.
Xia Jia may as well be thought of as the Chinese Ted Chiang (or maybe Chiang the American Xia Jia), but regardless of which way you spin it, the fact of the matter is that both are among a large and excellent canon of Chinese and Chinese-American writers. Chiang is most famous for his novella “Story of Your Life,” which became the premise of the award-winning 2016 movie Arrival (full text here).
Far from a one-hit-wonder, Chiang’s body of work is interesting, innovative, and eloquent; his story “Liking What You See: A Documentary” (full text here) holds especially pertinent for this New Year season. This story, told in first-person point of view by various characters in an interconnected network, chronicles a world in which people can choose whether to see beauty or not once they turn eighteen years old. Focusing on one young adult’s experiences with her choice, themes of acceptance, judgment, desire, and satisfaction are explored, themes that hold especially pertinent during the New Year time as we focus on improving ourselves from the mistakes of the past and creating a better future for ourselves and our loved ones.
Finally, it wouldn’t be appropriate to speak on this year’s Lunar New Year without acknowledging the fiery spirit of the Dragon 🐲. If you aren’t a Dragon, you know a Dragon. You probably quarreled with one recently, whether it be about the necessity of a jacket in this February chill or the correct pronunciation of GIF—and yet, you love your Dragons. They get things done, some of their methods more unorthodox than others. Though they can become hot-headed, they have a natural charm and benevolent spirit that makes them the best of leaders and lovers. Therefore, our final short story, “New Poets” by Michael Deagler (full text), is an homage to the Dragons in our lives. First published in Harper’s in 2018, this is a tale of a protagonist reunited with old college friends, one of whom is a Dragon to a T:
“The Dogman presented himself like a Wall Street bond trader from 1987, a figure of surplus and insouciance.”
The crew’s night slowly devolves, and our narrator is left painfully pondering the meaning of life—a new year’s habit as timeless as watching a ball drop or receiving a red envelope of money. Finally, the cherry on top is that Deagler’s story features a lizard. I think it’s fair to say that’s as close to a dragon as we’ll get in this life, and that’s pretty darn cool.
Hannah’s Wikipedia Page to Note: Palola viridis
Our silly little human society loves the solar calendar (Hello? Leap Year!!). But the Paloa viridis begs to differ. Their reproductive cycle follows the lunar calendar, and at the end of the lunar month, all these worms accumulate on the beach of the Banks Islands in the South Pacific War.
Hannah’s Favorite Emoji: 🐲
For obvious reasons, though I have been inspired to begin using this highly specific emoji in the most random of situations. See below:
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve just read through the very first Writing Atlas newsletter!
If you can tolerate a few more lines, here’s a little more about our Writing Atlas and Substack fantasies. Having a Substack newsletter to celebrate short stories has been a goal of ours for a while now, and we’re happy to debut it after having met so many of you at AWP, all who’ve brought so much passion to your work as authors, teachers, librarians, readers, and more. We hope to use our newsletter to publish curations of short stories from those in the Writing Atlas community, and also share quirky yet curious things (so you’ll find interesting emoji thoughts, Wikipedia articles and other fun things on the Internet selected by our writers). Every so often, we might share other news relevant to Writing Atlas: how writers can take advantage of our platform to share their work, any upcoming changes we’re making to our website, and so on.
You can learn more about other parts of Writing Atlas here, especially if you talked to us at AWP. If you would like to use Writing Atlas for teaching, or you want to contribute, please fill out this form.
Thank you for spending time getting to know us, and reading Hannah’s thoughtful piece about the Lunar New Year. Moving forward, we hope to keep reaching you with more fascinating short stories shared by the fascinating people around us, and we hope that you stick around to read them with us. For now, as AWP in Kansas City winds down, we wish you safe travels—and a splendid Year of the Dragon.
Sincerely,
Your Writing Atlas team
P.S. Shout out to our conference neighbors at Principia College and Mistake House for taking the final batch of our Recovering the Classics postcards and posters after the end day of the book fair at AWP.
P.P.S. This post-apocalyptic scene below is from the street celebrations after the Super Bowl as taken from the Marriott Kansas City Downtown.
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