Today I am pleased to welcome Marshall Moore, author of Bitter Orange, to the blog. Marshall has stopped by to tell us a little more about himself and where he got his inspiration for his new novel.
Welcome, Marshall!
Crime
and Invisibility
Let
me start out by saying that I’m not going to encourage you to slip a bottle of
Merlot into your backpack after you finish reading this. That being said, if
you’re unable to control your illicit impulses, I take no responsibility. My
new novel Bitter
Orange is
about a guy stealing things, spying on people, and committing various acts of
mayhem while invisible. There’s a twist: the cause-and-effect sequence is
reversed. Seth, our anti-hero, isn’t doing these things because he’s invisible,
exactly; he’s doing them in order to become
invisible,
because that’s the only time his ability works. You can see how this would make
things a bit complicated.
I
used to live in Korea, a country without a large expat population. I’m white.
And I never got used to being stared at. Little kids would gawk, grab their
parents, and point, slack-jawed. When a school bus would pass by as I walked
down the street, the kids would hang out the windows and shriek at the top of
their lungs,
Hello? What is your name? Where are you from? And
perhaps the ne
plus ultra
of my expat experience in the Land of the Morning Calm was the unabashed way in
which guys would crane their necks to stare at me in the men’s room. They
wouldn’t even pretend they weren’t looking. While there’s also much that I
liked about living in Korea (and I love going back for visits now that I live in
Hong Kong), being treated like an interesting zoo animal did uncomfortable
things to my head.
At
some point, the light bulb went on: curiosity is human nature, but these
fascinated Koreans weren’t seeing me
at all and perhaps weren’t even trying to. They were seeing a privileged skin
color, a set of assumptions, a mythology. Putting these thoughts in my home
context, I went through the obvious revelations first (so this is what it’s like
to be a person of color in America) to the insidious (what happens if someone
who looks kind of like me gets in trouble with the law?). Even when no harm may
be intended, the net effect of so many minor abrasions is a
scar.
And
that’s when I heard the cannabis rumor. Apparently the Korean drug enforcement
authorities take a zero-tolerance stance on recreational drugs. Whenever a
foreigner was arrested for possession of marijuana, the cops would confiscate
his mobile phone, check all the contacts, round up all the other foreigners
whose names and numbers were in there, and subject them to drug tests... or
deport them if they would not comply. To frame this properly, I should point
out that there are a lot of lonely Western kidults in Korea teaching English in
rural towns, drinking too much, quarreling online, and passing on tall tales
from the local expat watering holes. Stories like this one circulate like
dollar bills. But was this the truth or completely apocryphal? No one I knew
had been personally affected, but everyone I knew seemed to have heard some
version of the story. Even though I never so much as smelled the smoke from a
burning blunt during my time in Korea, I always wondered whether someone I knew
would be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Would I get a phone call telling
me to report to the local cop shop for a urine test, the logic being
Well,
you’re white, so you must be guilty till proven innocent?
Like
the best lies, fiction is at its most effective when it tastes like the truth.
Even though my work isn’t autobiographical, I can always tell when I reread it
what was on my mind at the time. No, I’ve never had the power to turn
quasi-invisible, but when I wrote Bitter
Orange,
I had spent several years standing out like a big white sore thumb. Being
exactly the opposite of invisible made me think about what people were seeing
(or not) when they looked at me, and these musings found their way into my
work.
Let
me wrap this up by saying I’m not encouraging you to steal license plates off
cars, steal the cars themselves, or drive to Vegas in the aforementioned stolen
cars to rob casinos in broad daylight (and no, I’m not saying these things
happen in Bitter
Orange...
but they might). In the book, we have a person whose life has been turned
inside out. Then it gets turned upside down and taken for a spin in the tumble
dryer. Then he finds out he can do unusual things. What choices will he make
when his moral center is no longer even on the page? I promise, it’s not
autobiographical. Honest.
About Bitter Orange:
Seth Harrington can be invisible or undetectable, but he is not a superhero. The ability only works in morally grey situations; the rest of the time, he can't turn it on and off at will. He can use a movie ticket stub to buy a coffee or a one-dollar bill to pay for a cell phone. He can stop muggings in plain sight, unseen, but only with worse violence. But this only adds to his confusion about his place in the world. Still reeling from the horrors of the September 11 terrorist attacks and ambivalent about his future, Seth is at a crossroads: Can he be one of the good guys by doing bad things, or are his newfound powers part of someone else's malevolent agenda? There are no easy answers or expected outcomes in Marshall Moore's exploration of urban life and the ways that people can disappear.
About Marshall Moore:
Marshall Moore is an American writer and publisher living in Hong Kong. In
addition to being the publisher at Typhoon Media Ltd, he is the author of three
novels (Bitter Orange, The Concrete Sky, and An Ideal for
Living) and has just finished the first draft of a fourth (Murder in the
Cabaret Sauvignon) and two collections of short fiction (The Infernal
Republic and Black Shapes in a Darkened Room). He is also the
co-editor (with Xu Xi) of an anthology of Hong Kong fiction with a World
Englishes focus; the working title is The Queen of Statue Square and other
stories from Hong Kong. And as if all this weren't enough, he is about to
start on a PhD in Creative Writing from Aberystwyth University in Wales. His
website: www.marshallmoore.com.
Author Links:
Purchase Bitter Orange:
Thank you again, Marshall, for visiting the blog!
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