Peter Liu - Watering Heaven

What’s the meaning of life? Few writers risk asking such a naïve question anymore, but Peter Tieryas Liu’s debut collection probes the membrane of modern meaninglessness in consistently passionate and original prose. With its robust inquiry into “love’s very anatomy,” Watering Heaven underscores the babble of the global village from inside China’s Forbidden City to inside the bacterium of the hand that holds the ubiquitous videogame joystick. Liu showers us with tales of seemingly lost and strange people who could be a lot more like us than we care to admit- a photographer who collects pieces of humans, a loner who listens to other people’s phone conversations, a politician who tries to stave off a mutant rat rebellion, and a saga of shit-covered shoes. Liu’s brave new world comes at us full-force with a spinning Blade Runner intensity, keeping us guessing as it keeps us on the edge of our postwar, pre-apocalyptic seats. Encore! Encore!

— Leza Lowitz, author of Green Tea to Go: Stories from Tokyo

A surreal menagerie of short stories that sometimes veer into the realm of magic realism, Peter Tieryas Liu’s Watering Heaven explores the lives of those drifting in an existential sea that is our urban post-modern landscape. Whether set in Beijing, L.A., or New York, there is something both slightly haunting yet inviting in these tales of love and loss, connections made and broken, but never forgotten. Mr. Liu displays a deftness in his writing that is both sensitive and intelligent. He’s a writer to look out for.

— Sang Pak, author of Wait until Twilight

Peter Tieryas Liu’s debut short story collection Watering Heaven is edgy, clever, and memorably innovative. He masterfully treats his panoply of characters — an eccentric but lovable production assistant from Shanghai, a photographer of urban legends, a corpulent engineer with the solution to cold fusion, a bacterium spliced into a billion-celled organism called Habit, a failed suicide artist in love with a failed food artist — with a vibrant swirl of wit, compassion, and astonishing respect. Liu’s untainted directness of language, his richness and precision to detail, as well as his surreal brilliance and vulnerability reminds one of the very best of Borges, Calvino, Pynchon. Jolts of spontaneous wisdom, inquiry, as well as ethnic familial tales and euphemisms coming from the mouths of Liu’s heroes and heroines beg the reader to think inward, to test the assumed norms of everyday existence, to aspire to something greater — the unhinged capacity of what is curiously new, prophetically needed. Here is an author who single-handedly breaks the sun in half with sheer novelty and song.

— Leonore Wilson, author of Western Solstice

Peter Tieryas Liu’s ear is expertly attuned to the zeitgeist —the tangle of our social networks, our cubicle culture, the language of science — but the brilliant, haunting stories in Watering Heaven are always leading us somewhere deeper yet: that fathomless reservoir of human need and longing. Like flashing neon signs with some of their letters shorted out, Liu’s characters are sundered, yet continue to function, their messages unmistakable as they urgently attempt to communicate with one another and us, again and again.

— Tim Horvath, Author of Understories and associate Prose Editor for Camera Obscura

Exuberant. Wildly inventive. Grungy, grimy, gritty with global resonance for the 21st century, Watering Heaven boldly treads where devils fear to go. This debut collection of madly manic fiction rides bareback over the rocky metaphysical divide that is Asia (especially China) and the U.S.A. And the journey is bleakly compassionate. These are curious fictions, bordering at times on meditations about the unpredictability and possibility of existence. In particular, the problem of love is always at the forefront, as people meet and part, vanish and return, die and resurrect in a horrific relationship to the blatantly, and even grotesquely, physical. Liu’s protagonists are forever in search of the perfect connection with the partner who will pull them out of their own skins; at times this restlessness is disturbing and weirdly extremist. Yet at the center of each story is a pulsing, beating heart that seems to whisper: try, try, don’t stop trying, heaven is just around the corner. An astonishing energy prevails throughout the collection. This is definitely a writer to watch.

— Xu Xi, Author of Access: Thirteen Tales and Habit of a Foreign Sky

March 6: I first meet Sarah Chao in Beijing over tequila shots after a game conference. I tell her I think she’s beautiful and she tells me she has an unusual genetic quirk that scares off most men.

“Every time I have sex, I lay an egg.”

I assume she’s joking, get her email address. She’ll be coming out to the States in a few months and we agree to hang out then.

July 8, 7:45PM: Four months later, she’s in LA and I take her out to an exhibition about talented circus performers who’ve died in the act. We eat dinner at a ‘fusion’ restaurant on the Sunset strip, a motley of Asian and South American cuisines which end up tasting like neither.

8:04PM: X-ray profiles: me, Ethan Zhou, game designer, grew up in San Francisco, lived in China for three years researching iguanas and pandas. A previously broken ankle, pinky, and nose are the primary radioactive blips on my scan. Sarah Chao spent half her life in Kentucky, the other half in China. She’s a producer, outsourcing work for an online videogame, has a thick scapula, slender ribs, tender forearm, rounded pelvis, almost perfect mandible — and no broken bones.

9:02PM: As we exit the restaurant, she grabs a marker from her bag and tags a Mandarin character on the wall.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“The food sucked and it’s my duty to warn people.”

I’m not going to argue with her, but her vandalism extends to crowded bars, two empty nightclubs that force everyone to stand in line, and even a drunk guy’s forehead. Please love me , she writes in Mandarin.

“You know what you’re doing is illegal,” I say when she tags four badly parked cars.

“So’s drunk driving,” she replies. “Words should have gravity. If you can’t get arrested for a word, it probably isn’t worth using.”

9:18PM: We wander through Sunset, a plastic-boob-infested cornucopia of shallow snobbiness that doubles as a playground for celebrity wannabes. Paparazzi hound some Asians from a Koreatown-based reality show.

“This is what people in LA aspire to?” she asks.

“Not everyone.”

“What’s your aspiration?”

“In the long run, I’m still trying to make up my mind. But in the short term, I’d really love green tea ice cream.”

9:45PM: Green tea ice cream reminds me of my uncle Stan, who used to be a hippie and flew to China for a cultural exchange through his university more than thirty years ago. He arrived with a massive Afro, sparkling silver suit, and sunglasses bigger than his palm. Unsurprisingly, he was an outcast. A small vendor gave him the idea to start an ice cream store back home and he returned as soon as he could, setting up shop in Monterey Park where I always ordered green tea ice cream.

One lunch, he told me an old Chinese folktale about a fox who fell in love with a prince. The fox begged a powerful spirit to turn him into a human and the spirit agreed in exchange for the fox’s soul. But being mischievous, it turned the fox into a man. When the man tried to express his love for the prince, he was locked away and executed.