Yamashita Karen Tei

I Hotel

I Hotel: A Novel Karen Tei Yamashita

For Asako and her grandchildren

Contents

1:Year of the Monkey

2:Language in Reaction

3:Analects

4:My Special Island

5:We

6:Tofu Tigers

7:Chinatown Verité

8:This Moment

9:Authentic Chinese Food

10:All the Things You Are

Afterword

Author’s Acknowledgments

The Illustrators

Permissions Acknowledgments

Funder Acknowledgments

Coffee House Press

1: Year of the Monkey

So I’m Walter Cronkite, dig? And it’s February 27, 1968, and I’m saying, the U.S. is mired in a stalemate in Vietnam, and you are there.

But whoa, let’s back up twenty-nine days to the Lunar New Year. Now we know the Vietnamese call it Tet, but the Chinese own it: New Year, they call it. This year it’s significant for Paul because on this night his dad grabs his heart like it’s been antipersonnel-mined with a BLU-43, what you call dragontooth, like it was waiting there in one of those jungle paths, waiting for someone to put his toe on the de-toe-nator, and boom! There’s firecrackers busting all up and down Grant Avenue, so Paul can’t hear his dad cry out, but he’s walking behind through a narrow in the crowded festivities and the spitting lights glittering overhead only to stumble across his dad, crumpling into a laundry heap on the sidewalk.

“Ba! What is it?”

Ba has a vision as he passes: his big mistake and no atonement. “When your mother died,” he’s gasping, “for your sake, I should have married again.”

“What are you talking about? Help! We need help. An ambulance!”

“Just the two of us from that time on”—gasp—“Good son. Only child.”

“Move away! Give him air!”

“Now, my son . . . I’m sorry . . . in the world all alone . . .”

Maybe he says this, maybe not. Paul can’t hear him with all the explosions and the drumming. This Lunar New Year of the Monkey. There’s a float with everyone dressed like monkeys. They’re scurrying around with their wire tails bouncing. Every day for a hundred days, Paul tries to hear his father’s last words. Maybe he said “. . . in the world be strong . . .” Every Chinese New Year for the rest of his life, he tries to hear his father’s last words. And every year, he will hear something different.

Who’s Paul? Just one of those sensitive Chinatown kids in high school, senior at Lowell, now orphaned. Isn’t his story the story of every kid in the Year of the Monkey, 1968? Every one of us orphaned this year; just that Paul knows it first, a midnight orphan on the gung hay fat choy. Who are we to know that our black daddy Martin with a dream and our little white father Bobby will take bullets to their brains? By the end of the year, we are monkey orphans let loose, raising havoc; no daddies to pull the stops, temper the member; got those wired tails swinging from every rafter, we are free at last, brother, free at last.

On the Tet, boys back in Vietnam about to be orphaned too. Got their helmets fitting snug at the chin, faces smudged like football defenders, hugging those rifles for a sneak attack, all in camouflage like the VC can’t see them. Must be why more Vietnamese get killed than American boys: 58,000 to 3,895. Numbers for Vietnam are rounded off to the nearest thousand. Numbers for The Boys are exact. You do the math—it’s fifteen to one. We must have won. Saigon, Khe Sanh, and Hue—we get them all back. We get back the little places too, like Ben Tre and My Lai. At Ben Tre, an officer without a name says, “It became necessary to destroy it, in order to save it.” At My Lai, Charlie Company gets its orders: This is what you’ve been waiting for—search and destroy—and you’ve got it. LBJ, the CIA, Westmoreland, McNamara, the Wise Men, they all say, let us wash our hands, go quietly into that good night. Bye-bye. See you on the judgment day.

Judgment day is here already for Paul’s daddy. Wait a week to let the festivities die down, keep daddy on ice at the Cathay Wah Sang on Powell Street, over there near Jackson where the cable car makes its turn. How many ghosts hop the cable car to make the U-turn out of Chinatown? Paul makes two calls, one to Auntie and one to the Benevolent Association, and suddenly everyone goes into action like a finely tuned machine that cranks out tradition.

“My brother, what was he thinking?” Auntie wails. “He never went to the doctor. Me, I take my pills every day. Our father died the same way.”

Paul don’t know what to say. Maybe it’s his fault. Wasn’t paying attention to the old man. But how old was he? Turning sixty-five. He was supposed to live to ninety, see Paul graduate college, get married, see his grandchildren. He was betting big-time on his only son.

Auntie’s on the kitchen phone with the Cathay morticians. “My brother only has one son, and he doesn’t know anything about funerals. But why should he? He’s only sixteen.”

“I’m eighteen, Auntie.”

“Ay, how time flies. But what does it matter? He still doesn’t know anything. We’re going to have to take care of all the details.”

“Auntie, what details?”

She waves her hand at him and continues on the phone. “You know my family, well, everyone knew our father. A modest funeral, you understand? My brother was, well, why not say it, eccentric, but we are a traditional family. Yes, Ning Yung, that’s right. Someone from the Association will be in touch. I’ll be there tomorrow in the morning. Yes, my nephew will come. After all, the son should be the one to choose.”

“Auntie, choose what? And what about Ning Yung?”

“Chinese cemetery in Colma. Don’t worry. They’ll take care of everything. They’re professionals. Tomorrow there’ll be an obituary in the Chinese Times. Be sure you go and get a copy. Now, come here.”

Auntie jumps up, and Paul follows her down the corridor to the study. They walk through and over the books piled with scattered newspapers on the floor. From the desk, she picks up Dad’s reading glasses. She pulls one of his calligraphy brushes from a bamboo holder. “Here,” she says, handing the glasses and the brush to Paul. She scans the tall shelves of books that line every wall of the study. There are books in Chinese, English, and French. There’s classical Chinese literature, painting, ancient and contemporary Chinese, Western and American history, philosophy, politics, and religion. The man could read! Books are open to selected pages, annotated in the margins, wedged in every cranny of available space in the room. And behind everything else, stacked in the corners are painted canvasses. Auntie throws her hands up—“Hasn’t been dusted in years. Scandalous!”—and marches out in disgust. Paul follows obediently like a dumb puppy dog. Everything is the same as it’s always been. He can’t remember his mother’s feminine touch, her tidy ways. It’s all forgotten. He looks back at the torn leather on his dad’s old reading chair, and the way the wood floor is worn from the chair to the desk. He sees his dad pacing back and forth from the chair to the desk. No dust there. Not one speck.

But keep following Auntie. She’s on a mission down the corridor to his dad’s bedroom. She freezes at the door. Their house is a bachelor pad, so it’s a shock. Clothes everywhere. More books. More canvasses. Bed unmade. You can see the shape of his body in the wrinkled sheets. That’s where Auntie finally loses it. “My brother, you are gone,” she weeps, grabbing the dark wood of the doorframe and slipping down into abundant sorrow. Paul bows his head, stares down at his tears spattering his dad’s reading glasses and calligraphy brush. Old ink gets bloody in his young hands.

Later, Auntie sits down in the kitchen. Writes a list:

one full set of clothing including best suit

don’t forget socks and shoes

reading glasses

brush

newspapers

mah-jongg set

bottle of French cognac

What else?

his favorite things

like favorite pen or favorite book

Pentax box camera

“O.K.,” says Auntie. “You have to find these things. If the clothes are dirty, you bring them to me tomorrow morning and I’ll wash them. Remember. His best suit. The one he wears to,” she pauses foolishly, “funerals. Bring everything tomorrow. Maybe we need to get it dry cleaned, too.”

“Why the favorite things?”

“We put these things with him in his coffin, to make his journey.”

“Auntie, maybe he wouldn’t want us to do this.” Paul can’t help it, but he yawns. He’s been up all night in the study trying to read his dad’s old letters. “Maybe he didn’t believe in the journey.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Camus?” he suggests. “Existentialism.”

Auntie huffs, “What did he pump into your young mind? All that’s irrelevant when you die in Chinatown.”

Yes, ma’am, all that’s irrelevant when you die in Viet’nam. To celebrate the Tet, nineteen VC commandos charge through the walls of the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon with antitank rockets. Marines hold them off until they get a helicopter of the Airborne in to finish up this mess. When it’s over, you got nineteen dead VC, two dead Vietnamese civilians, and five dead American boys. And we’re watching the action all on TV, dig? But that’s just the embassy. The North Vietnamese have infiltrated the entire city, coming in on holiday with their ammo hid under flowers, rice, and vegetables. It’s a peasant surprise. Presidential Palace, South Vietnamese Army headquarters, Westmoreland’s headquarters, radio station, and the air bases all attacked. Aircraft crippled, neighborhoods reduced to rubble, two million new refugees. Ol’Walter pulls you back to the map, and you see the DMZ, line that marks North from South, and you say hey, that’s a long ways away from Saigon. What’s the war doing down there in the deep South? Hey, Westmoreland, are we winning this war or not? And if we are, why are twenty-six hearts and minds bleeding there on the floor of our U.S. courtyard, what you call U.S. soil?

By the time Paul’s father’s wake comes along, Saigon the city is under control. The war’s pushed to the outside villages, which is easy because all they got to do now is destroy them. Like the lady at the front of the Cathay mortuary who is burning paper—joss paper, otherworld paper money, paper clothing, paper replicas of cars, televisions, houses, servants, everything going up in symbolic smoke to send along with Dad in the next world. Paul can see the flames go up and smolder, reflecting off the shiny brass along the casket. The pungent smell of incense and burning paper swirls through the room. Paul’s dad is dressed in his best suit, sleeping on a satin bed in a beautiful box with all his favorite things.

Auntie and her husband and their five children and their children are all there. There are other cousins too, but Auntie says they are paper cousins, so do they count? If they’re not careful, lady in the front might grab them, send them up in symbolic smoke.

The Association president is there. So are Paul’s dad’s office manager, the typesetter, and Mr. Fung, who practically does all the writing and photos for the newspaper. It’s just a small operation. His dad’s been publishing this local paper since his mother died maybe twelve years ago. Auntie says her brother went to hide inside that paper, use it to publish what was in his mind. She doesn’t say that no one reads it; at least she never did. She reads Mr. Fung’s articles about events in Chinatown, but she never understood her brother’s writing—all those complicated philosophical ideas of his. Well, his friends always said he was brilliant, and they got their brilliant writing in print too. Paper comes out once a week on Friday, so today’s paper’s a big photo with a full-page obituary. Readers maybe don’t know the whole paper is Paul’s dad, and maybe this is the last issue. Auntie folds a fresh copy and tucks it in with her brother. She inspects everything: can of tea, passport, reading glasses, calligraphy brush, bottle of French cognac.

“Oh,” she notices and says to Paul, “you found his old Pentax box camera.” She approves. “He loved that camera and took so many pictures with it.” Then she notices a book resting in the satin. “What’s this?” she asks.

“Favorite book, you said,” Paul mutters quietly.

“Capital?” she whispers. Even Auntie knows Karl Marx.

“Ah yeah, it was the book he was reading these days.”

“Favorite?”

“He always said the book he was reading was his favorite.”

Auntie’s exasperated, but she smiles and looks around. She slips the book out and hugs the cover to her bosom. “Do you want to get us in trouble?” she squeaks, bowing three times.

“But—”

“Bow three times,” she interjects. “Customary to do so,” she instructs, and moves away with Marx under cover. Outside, she shoves the un-American book at Paul and hisses, “Get rid of this.”

Meanwhile, under cover of air and artillery blasting away at the fat walls of the Citadel, Marines in assault craft ply the Perfume River to its banks to take back the sacred city of Hue. Who will bow three times to bless the blood lapping at the shore?

Next day at the funeral, Paul wears a black suit, a black waistband, and a black band on his left arm. The waistband means he’s the oldest son. He knows people see it and think that that’s not all it means. He’s too young to be wearing this waistband, too young to take his father’s place. Now the Chinatown community files in, solemnly bowing three times, one by one, and filling the pews at the Cathay. They’ve sent wreaths of flowers with ribbons naming the family, institution, or shop Paul’s father did business with.

And now Paul’s got to be the oldest only son, approach the casket to perform the blanket ceremony. If only there were other sons: a third son to place the white blanket of heaven, a second son to place the red blanket of life, a first son to place the gold blanket of spirituality splashed with red characters. If only there were ten sons to place ten blankets, to send his father warmly into his spirit life. But Paul’s the only son, so he surreptitiously hides Karl Marx under the folded blankets, shrouds his father’s traveling body with each eternal blanket, tucking the pei in to hide Dad’s unfinished reading. Paul thinks, even if it’s not his daddy’s journey, it’s their journey: Auntie’s journey, Mr. Fung’s, the Benevolent Association, his father’s writing buddies. It’s their journey, dig? It might be Karl’s too. Back of the hall, paper-burning lady’s going at it with the matches. Could have given her his dad’s entire library plus his paintings, burn it all up to heaven.

Endless eulogies, three bows per person, and condolences take forever, but finally the pallbearers get the casket out into the long hearse. They make Paul sit in the Cadillac convertible with a giant wreathed photo of his dad. The Cathay brass band of twelve old white guys in maroon outfits starts in with their signature tune, “Nearer My God to Thee,” and marches in front of the convertible Cad. Paul looks back at the hearse following. All the other cars follow the hearse. He’s on parade through Chinatown. Everyone on the street is staring at him and the giant photo. Does he look like a younger version of his dad? Chinese look to see if they recognize the guy in the photo. Kids run alongside the band and then the Cad, like it’s a continuation of New Year’s, and tourists snap their Brownies. He can hear the tourists saying, “The band is playing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ Can you beat that in Chinatown? These folks are Christian too. Honey, is that yellow confetti they’re throwing out of the cars? How festive!” Paul grips his dad’s photo and hides behind it, every nerve in his body electrocuted by an overloaded circuitry of grief and humiliation.

Suddenly, he senses a presence at his side. Someone has jumped into the Cad. “They are going to stop at the Benevolent Association first, next the newspaper office, then at your apartment.”

Paul looks at the man whose agile body leaped into the moving car.

“I know this is highly irregular, but I thought you could use some company.”

Paul nods behind the photo, sucks in his breath. Got to get his composure back.

“I’m Chen Wen-guang,” says the agile man. “Friend of your father.” He nods at the photo. “He would hate all this”—he looks around at the spectacle, “but—”

Paul finishes the thought: “It’s irrelevant when you die in Chinatown.” He notices Chen’s white gloves. So he’s one of the pallbearers.

Chen smiles. “He always said you were a smart kid.”

The procession comes to a halt. Rest stop: Benevolent Association. His dad’s ghost is halfway to heaven. Time to pay his last respects, eat some boiled chicken, a bit of steamed bun, maybe take a banana for the trip.

“We’ll talk again later, I promise.” Chen jumps out into the street, again like an acrobat. “What did you put in that casket with your dad? It’s really heavy.”

Two more stops: the newspaper office on Clay Street and their apartment around the corner on Commercial. Auntie’s planted someone there to open the doors, make sure Paul’s dad gets a good last visit, then shoo his ghost out. The doors on the back of the hearse get flung open. The mortuary director pulls out a wreath of flowers and stands at attention. The brass band plays another Salvation Army tune.

Finally they get to the edge of Chinatown. They might be a band of old white guys, but the edge of Chinatown is their limit. It’s also the limit for the Cad. Paul gets out and sits shotgun in the hearse with a burning cigar of incense. A motorcycle escort takes over. It’s not that Paul has never left Chinatown, but it’s always foreign out there. Chinatown’s his citadel. But when you die, your bones got to travel thirteen miles south outside the city to the Chinese Cemetery in Colma.

As Paul speeds away from Chinatown with his dad’s spirit and favorite things, the boys in Vietnam are battling each other through the streets of Hue, house by house, block by block, hand to hand. Boys got to charge into buildings tossing grenades and wipe out the enemy room by room, meter by meter. Citadel’s a concrete stonewall maze, sort of Old World castle city that American boys never seen back home. Center is the Imperial Palace of Peace, surrounded by a city maze of side-by-side stone houses of the clergy, commoners, and bureaucrats. Boys got to put up the flag at the Palace to show they won the battle, but first they got to get the tanks in there with special concrete-piercing shells to blow out the thick walls, got to destroy ten thousand houses and forty percent of the city. Vietnam boys got their own map of trenches and tunnels and sniper positions; time being, it’s their citadel.

Paul stares into the pit at the coffin, throws in his black armband and his black waistband. It peels away from his waist like a thick skin, exposing his guts for one horrific moment; then suddenly, the tension in his abdomen recedes. No one notices, it seems. Bow ties and white gloves flutter down to the casket. Once again, almost mysteriously, the agile friend of his father, Chen, is at his side; he, like the other pallbearers, tosses his bow tie and gloves, and now his ungloved hand rises to Paul’s shoulder. Paul wants to cry out, but he cannot. Everything gets pushed down deep. He’s still trying to hear, through the fireworks, his dad’s last words. There’s nothing but the soft din of juniper and flowers pelting dark wood.

Far as any outsider can tell, on the one side it’s American boys and Vietnam boys dying. On the other side, it’s just Vietnam boys dying. ARVN/U.S. versus NVA/VC. Fighting’s fierce, but the ARVN/U.S. have the advantage of their technology, the superiority of aircraft and artillery. To save lives and win the city, we shell and bomb the sacred history of Hue back to the Stone Age. Six thousand residents die in the rubble and one hundred and twenty thousand wander homeless. In retaliation, sacred history is replaced by sacrilegious history: they massacre the enemies of the state, the government officials, the sympathizers, and the Catholics; pop them off in mass graves, three thousand human lives, Vietnamese rounded off to the thousand. Meanwhile, inside the city Citadel, maggots ooze through the strewn corpses, anonymous piles of sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, spouses and lovers, rats and rabid dogs feasting on their bloated corpses, a fog of stench escaping the crumbling maze, groveling in pity at the perfumed moat.

A week later, Auntie calls and says, “We go to Colma for Ching Ming. This year it’s April fifth. It’s a Friday, so you come to my house after school. Don’t worry. I’ll get everything ready, but you pay attention. One of these days it’s going to be your responsibility. You got to do this for your mother and father. For your grandfather. I say to my kids, don’t let us down, especially when we’re dead.”

Night before Ching Ming, MLK Jr. is standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, gets shot through the neck. Next day, the flags are all at half mast. School’s abuzz. They’re rioting in DC, in Chicago. What’s gonna happen here in SF? The Panthers over in Oakland calling for keeping the peace. It’s not the time to go to the streets. What you want? A bloodbath? They’re pretending they’ve got everything under control. Don’t know that Eldridge Cleaver’s yet to see his soul on ice and Bobby Hutton’s young years got to be cut short.

Once again Paul’s in a car driving to the Chinese cemetery, squeezed between Auntie and her kids and grandkids. Car smells like roast pig and jai choy. Cousin playing Sly and the Family Stone on the local channel. No assassination’s going to interfere with Chinese tradition. “Better to go to Ching Ming, get outside the city,” Auntie justifies. “Ancestors know better. Get outside the city.”

“But what about on the way back?”

“We take safe streets. Inside Chinatown, no trouble. Here,” she says, passing a box of pork bao. “I got extra for you. You must be hungry from school. Are you eating? You didn’t come last week for dinner. What happened?” She nudges him. “Got a girlfriend?”

Paul’s mouth is filled with bread. “Huh?”

“It’s O.K. Forty-nine days are past. You can go back to your party life.”

“Thanks, Auntie.”

At the cemetery, other Chinese already there for the Clear Brightness Festival. Auntie becomes central command, moves her troops into action. Every kid’s got a job. Sweep, rake, pick out the dead leaves, dump the old flowers, make a nice arrangement of new flowers. Stick the red candles in the soft dirt, get them lighted. Make a spread and it’s a feast. Center attraction is the suckling pig’s head looking all tanned and glazed. Contrasting is a whole white boiled chicken. Then the sautéed jai choy and dim sum. Auntie throws in a boiled egg, an orange, a banana, and an apple. Ancestors get three bowls of rice, three cups of wine, three cups of tea, and three pairs of chopsticks.

Paul has to light the incense bundle. “Don’t blow on the fire,” Auntie warns. “Bad luck.” She fans the fire with a newspaper.

One of the kids is holding on to a bag of kitty litter. Auntie rips open the bag. “This is my invention,” she says proudly. “Works good, you know.” She pours the kitty litter into a can and demonstrates how the litter is going to hold up the incense sticks. What’s tradition if you don’t improve on it? It’s also a good bed for burning the joss papers and the otherworld money. Next time the house’s on fire, run to the kitty litter.

Now it’s the ceremony: three incense sticks per person, three bows per person.

Paul does his thing obediently, but turning from the altar, he sees Chen coming forward with three sticks of incense.

Chen greets Auntie and smiles at Paul. She says, “Maybe you are interested in my brother’s books. Talk to my nephew and make a visit to the house.”

Chen rakes his fingers through his hair and says to Paul, “Have you walked to the other side of the cemetery?” He motions to Auntie. “Don’t worry. I’ll drive Paul home.”

Auntie’s wraps up the food offerings. “Look, you take this home for your dinner.” She hands Paul a hefty shopping bag.

Paul follows Chen, crisscrossing the tombstones carved with Chinese characters. He points at the names and notes the oldest families, the earliest dates. “No paper names used here. When you die, you use your real name. Too late for immigration to deport you.”

Paul nods, but he knows his name’s not paper. It’s the real thing. His father’s story is different.

“I introduced your mother to your father,” Chen says casually. “She was very beautiful, much younger, my age. Twenty years difference, but it didn’t matter. At first they met with their brains. She fell in love with his mind. Well, there was more of course, since you didn’t pop out of their brains. You were born right away.”

“How did you know my father?”

“He was a friend of my family in Paris, but I wasn’t even born. He came to Paris to paint around 1920. He hung around Chou En-lai and the others at the Pascal Restaurant, on the Rue de l’Ecole de Medicine.” Chen speaks the last words in French. “He helped Chou stage a protest of the Chinese Legation, traveled around Europe with Chou to get recruits for the Chinese Communist Youth Corps.”

Paul is hearing this for the first time. “Chou?” he asks.

“Yes, China’s premier. The same.”

“He never said.”

“They parted ways. Chou returned to China to fight with Sun Yat Sen. Your father came home. What he really wanted was to return to his painting, and his family was here. His father died suddenly. Your auntie was a young girl, and he was the only son. He was a Marxist, but also filial.”

Paul is quiet. He isn’t a Marxist, but he already knows it’s going to be impossible to be filial.

“I looked him up when I came to study. He remembered my family from those days in Paris. When I met him, he was living and painting in the Monkey Block.”

“Monkey Block?”

“That’s what they called the block on Montgomery at Washington. The street was a hangout for artists and writers. The building was full of artist studios. Used to be the Black Cat Café in the basement.”

Paul follows Chen. Chen’s a stroller, reading the stones and throwing out anecdotes. Paul’s trying to grab his past as Chen tosses it over his shoulders. “Let’s take that pig’s head and head on home,” Chen says. “I’m famished.”

Paul thinks famished is an interesting word.

Back at the house, Chen clears off the kitchen table, washes the dishes, rummages around the drawers and finds a tablecloth that hasn’t been used since Paul’s mother was alive. He spreads that out, boils water for tea, sets the table. Paul’s not famished, he’s starving, but Chen’s got to have a pot of rice too. Far as Paul knows, it’s high dining. Chen fills glasses with foaming beer and toasts. “Now,” he says, settling in with the food and steaming rice, “eat slowly. Think about your father. And Martin Luther King.” He shakes his head. “I teach at San Francisco State. I cancelled my classes today. A great loss.”

Paul sips at the foam across his glass of beer. Acid bubbles singe his senses. Suddenly it occurs to him. He could get stupidly wasted, like every other high school kid with that opportunity. Chen seems oblivious, cutting into the pig’s head, relishing every bite. It’s an empty freedom.

Next day, he doesn’t know why, but he starts to clean his dad’s house like he’s looking for something. Those paintings in the corners. Dust, sweep, polish, wipe, classify. It’s like he’s one of Auntie’s kids, commandeered to tidy up the gravesite. All summer he’s into it. Auntie comes round to see what he’s up to. She’s pleased, but he doesn’t stop. The dark grain of the wood floors and paneling is shining back at her. Smells like Pledge. “Is this healthy?” she asks timidly. She’s looking at her brother’s old paintings. Kid’s got them hanging on the walls. “Are you having a psychological crisis? You should enjoy the summer with your friends. It’s not normal to be alone inside this old house.”

“I’m fine, Auntie.” He’s distracted. On the television, Walter’s talking about Chicago. Police clubbing and gassing protestors at the Democratic Convention.

End of summer he knows the house, every shelf, every drawer, every corner, everything. House is immaculate. Day after Labor Day he steps out, locks the door. Heads off to SFSC. Got to see Chen to find the real keys to get back in.

Chen’s got a class in contemporary Chinese literature. He lectures without notes. It’s all in his head. This cat’s amazing. Quotes passages. Talks dates, anecdotes. Like he knows the authors. Maybe he does. Paul goes home and finds the books. It’s all there in his library, in Chinese and in translation. His dad’s scribbling’s in the margins, but it’s mostly in Chinese. Paul’s got to use a dictionary to decipher it, or ask Chen. Chen says, “You know Yat Min Lee? Calls himself Edmund. He sits in the back. I’ll introduce you. He can read it all for you. And in return, you can lend him the books. He doesn’t have the money to buy them.”

Turns out Edmund is the smartest kid in class. Reads everything in the original Chinese, criticizes the translations. Paul tries to be friendly, but Edmund’s too busy. He comes around when he can, hangs out in Paul’s library, but he’s got a job busing tables at Fisherman’s Wharf. That’s his routine. Got to make money to keep from taking it from his family’s table. Family’s loud and noisy, crowded into two rooms above a laundry. His business is everybody’s. As for Paul, his dad always had rent money coming in from his properties. Now Paul’s got to do the accounting every month. Two boys wishing they had the other’s problems.

Today Chen’s on to Lu Hsun. “Mao Tse-Tung has said that Lu Hsun is his favorite writer.” Everyone perks up at this. Mao, he’s the man. Lu Hsun’s got to be our favorite too. Chen goes on to give the details. Lu Hsun was studying medicine in Japan when he saw these imperialist war slides of Japanese soldiers chopping off the head of a Chinese spy. What disgusted him were the bored Chinese in the pictures who were forced to see the spectacle. That’s it. Lu Hsun gives up medicine. What’s the point? He could study all he wanted to make his people healthy in body, but they were sick in their minds, dig. Now this might seem like a jump, but Lu Hsun thinks the answer is literature. So he starts a new life writing.

Chen pulls it out of his head: Lu Hsun’s preface to his collection of short stories. He’s got a photographic memory, but if you want to check, you can follow along in the book: “When I was young, I, too, had many dreams. Most of them came to be forgotten, but I see nothing in this to regret. For although recalling the past may make you happy, it may sometimes also make you lonely, and there is no point in clinging in spirit to lonely bygone days. However, my trouble is that I cannot forget completely, and these stories have resulted from what I have been unable to erase from my memory.” Chen’s voice trails off like he’s forgotten what he’s on to, but Paul knows he’s talking to him. Why is the call to write so strong? Only a writer knows. You can give any excuse you want.

Paul says to Edmund, “Chinese students meeting today. You going?”

“I have to work,” Edmund says. “Let me know what happens.”

Later, Paul reports. It’s one of the ICSA Chinese who speaks. That’s Intercollegiate Chinese Students Association. Fills in for a Chinese BSU. Chinese cat wears these shades that he never takes off. Works on being intimidating. He says, “What we are trying to do is to expose the contradictions of this society to our communities, separate fact from fiction. Fiction is that the Chinese have never suffered as much as the black or brown communities. Fact is the Chinese community has the same basic problems. Difference is that we got the neon lights and tourist restaurants. Fact is the restaurants are staffed by illiterate Chinese who work fourteen hours a day, six days a week. Fiction is Chinese businessman is doing good business. Fact is this is exploitation of Chinese immigrants who can only find work in sweatshops, laundries, and restaurants in Chinatown.”

Edmund says, “I’m not illiterate. What’s he talking about?”

Paul says, “It’s not about you. It’s about the others.”

Edmund says, “I am the others.”

Paul says, “There’s another meeting. This one is Third World. You get in if you’re Chinese.”

“I have to go home and work,” Edmund says. He always has to go home and work. Paul doesn’t have to go anywhere. And no one’s waiting at home for him.

Stokely Carmichael’s the main attraction. You get in to hear him if you got some color in your skin. BSU stands at the door and checks you out. Right on, brother. Paul likes this feeling of attitude rippling under his skin. Some white brother who’s sympathetic wants to get in. Says he knows Stokely personally. BSU takes him aside. “Nothing personal, brother, but this is about self-determination, you dig?” Paul files the information: self-determination.

Stokely tells it like it is. In a nutshell: you got to get control over the power structure. It’s not about you getting some Swahili classes. It’s about getting the methodology and the ideology. We got to heighten the contradictions to politically awaken our people. Easy to die for your people, but more difficult to live to work and kill for your people.

Then some other BSU cats get up and talk about the War of the Flea. Get down to the strategy, dig? How we are going to wear down the man. Paul nods; this is a Chinese thing. Guerilla practice of Uncles Ho and Mao. Lao Tzu. Art of War. Asians the brains behind the operation.

Next day in Chen’s class, it’s Mao Tse-Tung’s poetry. At least that’s the syllabus. But Mao’s practice comes to class instead. BSU and TWLF students walk in with their leather jackets, Afros, dark glasses, berets, what have you, but mostly attitude, and announce: This class is over. We are on strike until the pig administration meets our non-negotiable demands. Someone lights a match in the trash can, and everyone files out. War of the flea.

Month later, it’s more than fleas out there warring. Buses lining up at Holloway and Nineteenth, black folks stepping out like it’s a church function. All the big honchos of the community arrive: Reverends Cecil Williams and Lloyd Wake of Glide Memorial, California Assembly Rep. Willie Brown, Economic Opportunity Director and Delegate to the Democratic Convention Ron Dellums, and physician-publisher of the Sun-Reporter Dr. Carlton Goodlett. Besides which, some of these men are alumni of SF State. It’s a we-shall-overcome protest gathering. Even so, the students are in charge: On strike! Shut it down! We want the puppet! They pelt the windows of the administration building with rocks. Throw garbage cans at the doors. Turn over the cafeteria tables. Throw typewriters out the windows. Run into the library and push the books off the shelves. Stuff them down the toilets. War of the flea.

Inside, the bureaucrats hide the new and acting president, S. I. Hayakawa, in the bathroom. He must be the puppet! Outside the police line up with their riot gear, batons in their fists. You can hear S. I. speaking from his post over the Big Brother speaker system. This is your acting president. I order you to leave the campus at once. There are no innocent bystanders. I thought if we allowed you to talk you would calm down, but now this problem is escalating. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. His voice gets shrill.

Down in the field, publisher and physician Dr. Carlton Goodlett’s being carried on the shoulders of his cohort. Looks like two hundred colored people with Goodlett riding on top in a sea of white students, some say six thousand. He’s got his own bullhorn system, and he’s yelling, “We’re not subscribing to violence at this time! If the police feel that their duty is to provoke violence, all hell is going to break loose.” Who’s he talking to? S. I. in the bathroom? Six thousand white students? Tactical squad lined up on the green? They aren’t listening. Police got their orders. They arrest the good doctor and club the non-innocent bystanders. Throw everyone into paddy wagons. Situation explodes. Garbage cans get firebombed. Blow the motherfucker up! Folks go on a rampage, smash the windows of all the parked cars along Nineteenth. Someone climbs up to the wires of the MUNI car and yanks them off. M looks like a giant metal insect with a wagging antenna stalled in traffic. Another group pushes a UPI station wagon into the intersection, releases the brakes, and lets it roll. Folks hysterical and running in every direction.

Paul’s got his pockets filled with rocks, just in case. He’s in a stand-off with others, between defending himself from and sticking with the crowd. He sees a girl being dragged by her jacket collar into a paddy wagon, and he fingers a jagged stone in the deep of his pocket. He thinks he’s going to save her, but strong arms surround him from behind. He tenses, ready for his own struggle, then he recognizes the voice. “No! Don’t do it!” Chen has got him in one of those kung fu grips. “Run this way,” he commands. They slip away through Quonset huts faking as offices and classrooms. Paul looks back in shock at a charging cavalry of mounted police. Suddenly he sees himself multiplied, monkey orphans let loose, raising havoc. One by one, an invisible daddy cracks his multiplying monkey skulls. Who is free to be free at last?

2: Language in Reaction

There exists an unscientific attitude toward language that results in doctrinal disagreements. We must understand that problems are formulated in words, and that a change in the attitude toward language can help us become understanding listeners. Alfred Korzybski said, “A person tends to see the world as conforming to the words he has been taught to use about it.” There is a system of semantic principles to guide us in the everyday thinking, talking, listening, reading, and writing that leads us to our actions. Let’s examine the following story:

Once upon a time, there were two public institutions of higher learning, separated by a great bay but connected by a great bridge. The differences and the commonalities between the two sites of education were also greatly exaggerated.

Institution A considered itself a center of research and a factory for knowledge. Its president had said as much, that what the automobile had done for the first half of the twentieth century, the university could do for the latter half. The factory model of the university didn’t go over too well with the students, who protested that they were free individuals who would not be cranked out like cloned widgets on a production line. One of the institution’s most famous students had spoken passionately about how it was time to put one’s body on the gears and wheels to stop the machine. Students didn’t want to be the end product machined from a blueprint they did not believe. The factory model was probably the wrong model to choose, especially since most of the students were the children of middle-class professionals or had those sorts of hopes for their educations.

While Institution A was located in a nice white neighborhood, the surrounding neighborhoods were communities of colored people, mostly black and yellow. Families from these neighborhoods sent a few students to the university, but other colored students came from across the state. Colored students didn’t want to be factory products either, but they didn’t mince words about the blueprint or being free individuals; they simply wanted to control the production itself. They wanted their own classes, their own professors, their own rules, and more of themselves at the university. They argued that their history of slavery, genocide, and racial prejudice gave moral imperative to their demands, and that a public institution of learning should provide an equal opportunity for education for all citizens, regardless of race, class, or creed. And they were going to get it by any means necessary.

One day, a famous black author and leader of a black organization came to teach at the university. He aroused a crowd of students into shouting Fuck the Governor! Fuck the Governor! To anyone who wanted to throw bricks into the gears, this was a splendid brick. Institution A decided that this man would not continue to teach at the university. His rally was not the entire reason for his dismissal, but it was a convenient rallying point. The colored students organized a protest against Institution A to push for control of their education. They organized a strike to stop the work of the university since, after all, it was a factory, and they were the worker-products. The colored students were a very small minority on campus, but the white students, the faculty, and even the staff also joined the strike. After fifty-three days of striking and four hundred arrests, including violent encounters with local police, sheriffs, and the National Guard, involving rocks, fruits, mace, tear gas, and billy clubs, Institution A agreed to establish a department of ethnic studies.

Establishment of the department came with some fanfare and a budget just substantial enough to create a sensation of power and competition, creating political fissures between black, brown, yellow, and red students and faculty, throwing into contest what had once been idealized as a rainbow of colored solidarity. The radical white students who had wanted to throw their bodies against the gears and the black leader who could rally thousands of students to yell Fuck the Governor! had fallen away, leaving the work of education to the bureaucrats and the folks who needed the jobs. Despite these difficulties, Institution A survived this period of turmoil.

On the other side of the bay, Institution B considered itself a teaching college, a middling institution in a tiered system that kept the research factory on top and the two-year technical college on the bottom. Institution B was the meat in the sandwich positioned to provide the middle management, midlevel professionals, the credentialed workers of the great society. This was part of the Master Plan. The idea that there was a master plan planned by masters outside the college didn’t go over too well with the students, who protested that the plan was really much broader and began in grammar school when children were placed on tracks that headed to one of the three tiered educational institutions, to a possible fourth (prison) or fifth institution (military), or to none at all. If Institution A invoked the automobile, Institution B invoked the train. The Master Plan was a great train system chugging students along predetermined tracks. The train model was probably the wrong model to choose, especially since many of the students were the children of laborers who laid tracks, built cars, loaded cargo, harvested or cooked food, cleaned compartments, and mined the fuel.

While Institution B was located in a nice white neighborhood, the surrounding neighborhoods were communities of working-class white and colored people—black, yellow, and brown. Working young adults from these neighborhoods attended the college, and more came from across the state. Colored students didn’t want to be part of any master plan either, especially if being colored might put you on a particular train from the very beginning. And they weren’t interested in sharing; sharing had only gotten them nine hundred black students in eighteen thousand. They wanted to make their own plans. They wanted their own rules, their own classes, their own professors, and more of themselves at the college. They argued that their history of slavery, genocide, and racial prejudice gave moral imperative to their demands, and that a public institution of learning should provide an equal opportunity for education for all citizens, regardless of race, class, or creed. And they were going to get it by any means necessary.

One day, a black instructor at Institution B, who was also a leader of a black organization, gave a speech. He said that Institution B was a nigger-producing factory and called upon students to Pick up the Gun! to defend themselves against a cracker administration. While this may have been a passionate cry to revolution, Institution B decided that he should be fired from teaching at the college. His speech was not the entire reason for his dismissal, but it was a rallying point, and eventually the colored students organized a protest against Institution B to push for control of their education. They organized a strike to stop the work of the college since, after all, it was a train station, and they were the worker-passengers. The colored students were a very small minority on campus, but the white students and the faculty also joined the strike. After 137 days on strike and nine hundred arrests, including violent encounters with local and mounted police and tactical squads involving rocks, bombs, arson, and billy clubs, Institution B agreed to establish a department of ethnic studies.

Establishment of the department came with some fanfare and a budget just substantial enough to create a sensation of power and competition, creating political fissures between black, brown, and yellow, throwing into contest what had once been idealized as a rainbow of colored solidarity. The radical white students who had opposed the Master Plan and the black teacher who rallied students to Pick up the Gun! had fallen away, leaving the work of education to the bureaucrats and the folks who needed the jobs. Despite these difficulties, Institution B survived this period of turmoil.

These are textbook cases with semantic morals. In both cases, students got what they wanted: a department of ethnic studies. But it wasn’t about what they wanted—it was about how they went about getting it. In this sense, it was all about words.

Reread the stories about Institutions A and B. Instead of worrying about whether colored students had equal access to higher education, ask yourself the following questions:

1.What is the significance of comparing Institution A to a factory or Institution B to a train station, and how do these comparisons influence the actions of the students?

2.What do you think about the provocative comments made by the black leaders to students at both institutions?

3.Is it possible or reasonable for students to go on strike?

4.Why does the narrator use the word black instead of Negro?

5.Considering the disagreements between the students and the institutions, was the violence incurred necessary?

6.Was the conflict between the students and institutions a war of words?

Jazz was our acting president’s great passion. In his twenty-part jazz seminar, he spoke about the sources and characteristics of jazz, from the blues, through bebop, boogie-woogie, and gospel, to the California-New Orleans revival. Everyone had forgotten that he played the harmonica.

They only remember that he hoisted himself onto the back of a truck parked at the gateway of our once peaceful college and tore out the wires to a sound system. The truck was being used as a stage for ranting and epithets. Free speech, his tam-o’-shanter! He surprised them by climbing onto that truck, yelling, “Don’t touch me! I’m the president of the college!” He jumped up and down and mimicked their ridiculous chants: On strike! Shut it down! On strike! Shut it down! He had a plan to beautify the campus, plant flowerbeds and pipe in swinging music on the intercom. He might have piped in his entire twenty-part jazz seminar, complete with musical examples. Instead we got this mindless ranting.

One of his colleagues yelled out his name, attaching it to General Tojo. He peered through those thick black horn-rims into the crowd. A sansei student had a sign with his caricature that said, “Tojo is alive and well and living under Mt. Tam O’Shanter.” He had spent his life’s work in general semantics, articulating a theory of language to fight precisely this sort of fascism. He fired that colleague Chen on the spot. Later he had to capitulate. He told Chen he had meant to say “Shame on you!” but after all, didn’t he understand his fury?

Someone had ripped his tam-o’-shanter from his head. He saw it spinning in the air, tossed from hand to hand. This was typical of the disrespect he had to contend with. As he said, the leadership of the SDS and the BSU had shown themselves to be a gang of goons, gangsters, conmen, neo-Nazis, and common thieves. And he was Tojo?

This was precisely the sort of semantic error he tried to point out in his comments to the faculty senate when he said, “I wish to comment on the intellectually slovenly habit, now popular among whites as well as blacks, of denouncing as racist those who oppose or are critical of any Negro tactic or demand. If we are to call our college racist, then what term do we have left for the government of Rhodesia?” He must have heard someone yell out, “Racist! Racist!” He continued, “Black students are again disrupting the campus. A significant number of whites, including faculty members, condone and even defend this maneuver. In other words, there are many whites who do not apply to blacks the same standards of morality and behavior as they apply to whites. This is an attitude of moral condescension that every self-respecting Negro has a right to resent, and does resent.”

As a self-respecting minority himself, he felt he could speak for the Negro. And this was not the first time. In one of his many books, he devoted an entire chapter to the subject: “The Self-Image and Intercultural Understanding, or How to be Sane though Negro.” The tenants of this chapter were simple. If the Negro has a self-concept of I am a Negro accompanied by a sense of inferiority, he will act obsequiously, and the white person he encounters may act with superiority. If the Negro has a self-concept of I am a Negro accompanied by a sense of defensiveness, he will act counter-defensively, and the white person may act offensively. If the Negro has a self-concept of I am a Negro as a simple statement of fact, then he will act naturally, and the white person may act naturally too. Therefore, the power to determine the outcome of a meeting lies with the Negro. Now the Negro might say that he is acting naturally, but how do you know you are acting naturally? The secret to acting naturally is exemplified in the famous person, a movie star or prime minister, who forgets he is famous and acts naturally. To act naturally, you have to forget that you are Negro. Why shouldn’t this be possible—our acting president himself was able to forget he was Japanese. White people are ignorant and require psychotherapy to get over their obsession with skin color; so, the Negro must act as the white person’s psychotherapist. Granted, this will be accepted in small steps, but the basis for happiness is minimum expectations. In the long struggle for equal rights and opportunities, because of the strong moral sense of the nation as well as economic and practical necessity, segregation must eventually end. This is the self-fulfilling prophecy of political democracy, and communication is the first step.

However, psychotherapy at the impasse of the current breakdown in communications was no longer possible. Didn’t the faculty realize, as our acting president did, that the SDS had assumed tactics similar to those of the Nazis of the thirties, intending to disrupt democratic institutions and bring down the political structure? He characterized the BSU leadership as actuated by self-hatred, strutting about self-consciously behind dark glasses, playing Black Panther, stalking in gangs, scaring little girls. This behavior, he said, would have been simply pathetic if knuckleheaded whites didn’t take them seriously. He never took them seriously. He recognized the primitive and animistic notions embedded in their language that prevented them from comprehending civilized paths to a democratic society. This was what he had characterized as the “Jim Crowing of the mind.” Segregation was not a physical condition but a mental condition. He knew they were all flying high as kites on dope.

He only took this job on the condition he be allowed to call in the police. He testified to Congress that to restore proper order during campus unrest, troops should be sent in early, and lots of them. He personally addressed the police himself as they entered the campus, advising them to ignore the students’ bad words and to smile. Bad words, he said to them, can’t harm you, and shouting them allows the students to blow off steam. Cursing has a therapeutic effect. However, if arrests were necessary, they would not be made in vain, for he would offer no amnesty to students. He further offered his knowledge of general semantics, saying some people, as the result of a childhood experience, cannot help being frightened by the mere sight of a policeman. Similarly, some people automatically become hostile at the words un-American, Nazi, or Communist. This is the unfortunate business of being blinded by prejudice and living in the delusional world of abstractions.

Ten thousand letters came to his desk supporting his decisive actions. The governor himself saw him on television and announced to his cohort, “I think we’ve found our man.” Our acting president was not only exhilarated by this response, but also by the confrontation itself. It was a rollercoaster he rode with the excitement of a child born again.

Although no one took his dismissal of Chen seriously, it was cited as a further example of our acting president’s autocratic highhandedness. During the strike Chen used a café in North Beach as his classroom. The Brighton Express on Pacific Avenue was a popular café and hangout for the bohemian crowd. A nisei woman named Joanna ran the café. In the past, when the president enjoyed the local jazz scene, on occasion he too frequented the café. Joanna, always good-humored and friendly, called him “Professor.” One supposes she called Chen “Professor” too. During the strike, they were all teaching their classes off campus somewhere, in their homes or in churches. This business with the strike was nonsense. No student wanted to lose a year of coursework. No teacher wanted to waste his time on a picket line.

Students gathered around a couple of tables, and Chen began his lecture, “Mao Tse-Tung on Literature and Art.” “Comrades!” he both addressed the students and quoted from Mao. “You have been invited to this forum today to exchange ideas and examine the relationship between work in the literary and artistic fields and revolutionary work in general . . . This,” he said, “is how Mao addressed the Yenan forum twenty-six years ago on May 2, 1942.”

One of Chen’s young protégés, Paul Wallace Lin, sat among the students with a notebook and fingered the pages of Mao’s talk.

Chen moved around the tables confidently. Two or three patrons were huddled in the corners with coffee, reading their newspapers but still listening to Chen. Even Joanna was seated among the students. “It’s important to consider the date of this talk. May second, two days before the May Fourth movement anniversary. As we have previously discussed, on May 4, 1919, a student uprising in Peking and Shanghai protested the Versailles Treaty. The Versailles Treaty marked the end of World War I but also relinquished previously held Chinese territory to the Japanese. This was the beginning of a Chinese nationalist movement driven by Marxist antifeudal, anti-imperialist political forces.”

Paul nodded and underlined student uprising. His father had been a student then too.

“And 1942. The United States had just entered the war against Japan, a war the Chinese had been fighting already for five years. Mao identified the principal enemy of this period: Japanese imperialists.”

Paul scribbled the dates into his notebook. Imagine Professor Chen pontificating on Mao, adding fuel to the fire already destroying our campus.

Chen continued, “Taken in this context of war, Mao continues . . . ‘In our struggle for the liberation of the Chinese people, there are various fronts, among which are the fronts of the pen and of the gun, the cultural and the military fronts. To defeat the enemy we must rely primarily on the army with guns. But this army alone is not enough; we must also have a cultural army, which is absolutely indispensable for uniting our own ranks and defeating the enemy.’” Indeed. But to be fair, Chen never had the teeth for violence. He would never have jumped on a truck and yanked out power cords and destroyed equipment. He was much too refined. He really believed in the cultural army, in liberation by means of the pen. So he continued.

“I realize, considering the violence we have sustained in recent days under the severe measures of the current administration—”such an oblique reference to our acting president—“it would seem to some that the gun might be the more appropriate tool. I want to make it clear that I am not advocating the gun. We are here to discuss contemporary Chinese literature, but we cannot examine that literature without also examining the political and social context that drives its formation during this time period.”

The students loved Chen. Suddenly his knowledge of the Chinese revolution and his Marxist point of view were in vogue. They sat around him mesmerized, as if he were Confucius himself, Chinese wisdom coupled with his contemporary knowledge of revolution. They all wanted revolution, but they didn’t know what revolution was. Paul, for example, wanted revolution, and he wanted this revolution packaged in the poet intellectual. But was he listening when Chen again quoted Mao? “Many writers and artists stand aloof from the masses and lead empty lives; naturally they are unfamiliar with the language of the people.” The language of the people was exactly the language our acting president had spent his life studying. Unlike Chen, he knew this language and how the common understanding of this language controlled society.

Accordingly, what Chen was not telling his students is that any war of words will ultimately be resolved in society’s decision to define those words. Art and literature. Mao Tse-Tung and the Cultural Revolution defined those words in the service of a political agenda. Poetry for the Marxist-Leninist must be written for the proletariat. Everything that Chen loved about art and literature had to be destroyed or changed. He knew this, but he didn’t tell the students.

Chen’s class was over. Students paid for their coffees and mud pies and wandered out, back to the picket line or to the next noon rally. Paul remained behind.

“Where’s Yat Min today?” Chen queried, using Edmund’s Chinese name.

“Working. Always working. He sent his apologies, and here’s his paper.”

Chen nodded. It was a thick treatise written entirely in Chinese. “Since he’s mastered two languages, maybe he should study a third.” Chen said this as if thinking to himself.

“Right. I’ll let him know.”

“It’s not necessary. He’ll figure it out for himself.” He packed his papers away in his briefcase and announced, “Do you have some time for a short walk? It’s just down Montgomery.” As they passed out of the café, he asked, “Did you know the Brighton?”

“No.”

“Maybe not. Your father used to hang out here, but then after your mother died, I guess he never came around again. Do you know Janis Joplin?”

“Not personally.”

“She was here the other day. Everyone’s been here. Now you too.”

They walked down Montgomery to Washington and stared at a parking lot. “Remember what I said about the Monkey Block? It used to be right here. There was a huge building, four stories, occupied most of the block. Your father lived here. It’s where he painted his best work. Where he met his friends. He knew everyone. William Saroyan, Diego Rivera, Kenneth Rexroth. Well, Rexroth is still around anyway. When Rivera came to paint his murals with his wife, Frida Kahlo, your father got the Chinese Revolutionary Artist Club together to host them. He was going to name you Diego, but your mother favored Paul. It was Paul for Paul Cézanne and Paul Valéry. Painter-poet. They had romantic hopes for you. You know, he knew Valéry in Paris.”

“What about Wallace?”

“Wallace? Middle name? Must have been Wallace Stevens. Your mother studied him at Stanford. It was her thesis.”

Paul shook his head because he didn’t know any of this. Chen could have been making it all up. The building was a parking lot, gone, Chen said, for about ten years now. All Paul ever knew during his years growing up was this parking lot. And there was more history before that, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain. The names read like his American literature textbook. A history of artists and writers had been swept away, and now Chen was saying his father had been the rare Chinese American artist to add his name to the Monkey Block.

“Chinatown is just over there.” Chen pointed. “One day, your father went inside and closed the door.”

“Why? I don’t understand. I didn’t even know.”

Chen was silent for a moment. “I didn’t consider that. Of course, nothing was ever different for you. You never saw the change.”

“I feel I knew someone different. I know the paintings. Found all of them. I put them up, but I don’t know the person who painted them. I found his old easel and a box of dried-up tubes, but I never saw him paint.”

“You know, Valéry was a poet, then one day he quit, just like that, and never wrote a thing for the next twenty years. I think your father admired that sort of resolve to find another path. Does that make sense?”

“Maybe.”

“Some of those men at the funeral know your father’s past. They were in the artists’ club, but they might not admit it today. People like Rexroth and the North Beach crowd didn’t even know he died. For them, he disappeared.”

Chen crossed the street and Paul followed. They walked in silence over to Kearny, weaving around the old Chinese and Filipino bachelors emerging from the pool halls, barber, and cigar shops. “Like this building, this International Hotel.” He pointed to the sign on the central door and gestured up. “Occupied the entire block. The Monkey was taller, another story higher, and a more beautiful, stately granite structure, but like this, with businesses below, offices, restaurants, and when your father was there, the general motley crowd of bohemian types.” They turned the corner at Jackson to get a sense of the size of the building.

Some Chinese kids were hanging outside a storefront, smoking in a group. “Hey, Paul,” they nodded in recognition. He knew them from the Y. Now they were hanging out at Leway’s, playing pool after school every day.

“Hey,” he answered coolly.

“You at State now?”

“Right.”

“Cool, man. Heard it’s tripping there.”

“Yeah.”

“I could do that. Cherry bombs. Shit.”

The group all simultaneously puffed into the air and laughed.

Paul shrugged and walked on. “Back to my history lesson,” he prodded Chen, who had conveniently become momentarily invisible.

“I lost touch with your father for a while after your mother died. But he promised to raise you. And I suppose the Monkey Block didn’t seem like a place to raise a child. Not that you were living there. He had already given up his studio. He was probably under investigation by the FBI. You were born right in the middle of those years when Joseph McCarthy was active. Remember, your father had a history in Paris with Chou En-lai, and he was friendly with all the wrong people: Rivera, the revolutionary artists’ club. They had us all running scared.”

So this was the avuncular role Chen took on with his friend’s son, now his student, as if he could retreat into a romantic past, escape the revolution that threatened his bourgeois intellectual role. In any case, Paul was about to live his own youth.

Paul met his friend Edmund. “Are you thinking about learning a third language now that you’ve mastered English and Chinese?”

“I’m working on Mandarin. Does that count?” Edmund spoke with a Shanghai dialect.

“I guess so.”

“Our acting president is going to be honored by the Japanese American Citizens’ League at a banquet on the wharf. We’re going out there to protest. Coming?”

“I’ve got to work that night.”

“Right.”

“I’ve started writing articles for the newspaper East West. If you take notes about the protest, I’ll write the article. We can share the byline.”

“Good idea.”

As it turned out, Paul’s notes were interesting but useless. Edmund Lee discovered that the banquet he was waiting tables at that evening was the very JACL banquet in question. Paul covered the one hundred protestors on the cold, wet wharf outside the restaurant that evening, and Edmund listened to the president’s speech and briefly interviewed him in the kitchen as he snuck out the back and up to a waiting helicopter on the roof to avoid the angry hubbub. Only Japanese Americans would go to so much trouble to avoid conflict. Edmund thought if it were the Chinese, the Six Companies would have just hired their goons to take care of business.

Edmund listened to the president’s speech with interest, scribbling notes at intervals and stuffing them into his white coat pocket. It all made beautiful sense. For example: What kind of language we speak largely determines the kinds of thoughts we have. He went on to explain that the informal and formal structures of our language determine the way we interpret our experiences and therefore the way we act in any given circumstance. Edmund thought about himself, his accented English and the Shanghai Chinese that ran under and around his speech and writing. How was this speech controlling his thinking and actions?

The president looked out on his Japanese American audience and gave the example of his Meiji Japanese immigrant mother. “Shikataganai,” he intoned, for example. All the nisei nodded and thought about mama. “‘It can’t be helped.’ Or, ‘don’t cry over spilled milk.’ The sanseis who are out there rabble-rousing against me hate this idea of shikataganai. They have their points to make, but they don’t understand the source of strength that this idea comes from, the ability to endure suffering and sacrifice. Our parents, the issei, interpreted it to mean endurance, but we nisei probably interpret it to mean don’t cry over spilled milk, so let’s get on with it and move to the next thing.”

The audience murmured approval. They fancied themselves a bunch of positive pragmatists. How else could they have come so far?

“But the sanseis,” he continued, “interpret shikataganai to be a show of weakness. You hear it from the students all the time. They say, We don’t believe in shikataganai; that’s why you all got sent to camp, because you gave in.’ But you all know it’s not so simple. Well, what is shikataganai anyway? It’s just a word, or series of words, and we’ve got to communicate better with each other about what we mean when we say or think it. And until we have this honest exchange with our children, when we really listen to each other, we won’t bridge the gap that is growing between us.”

Edmund bused some abandoned dessert plates and hurried back to fill the glasses with ice water. He could sense the approval of the nisei as they stirred the cream into their coffees. They were willing to take a little browbeating from the president. After all, here was a very reasonable man who wanted communication and exchange, and they should follow his example. Obviously those sansei on bullhorns out there were incapable of listening.

Edmund did everything slowly and carefully and obsequiously, nodding graciously to every guest like an invisible immigrant. No one suspected he was a brilliant student in Chinese studies at the president’s college. He was going to make himself necessary as long as possible. Meanwhile, Paul was outside chanting to keep warm, leafleting the tourists and standing next to the signs that said, “We Orientals may look alike, but we don’t all think alike.” Someone had created a life-sized puppet complete with tiny mustache, tam-o’-shanter, glasses, suit, and tie. The puppet was held aloft in the air with poles and entertained the crowd with foolish antics while someone screeched into a bullhorn: “Don’t touch me! I’m the president!” And the crowd answered in unison: “No! You’re a puppet! You’re a puppet!”

Inside, the president was explaining something he called time-binding. “Time-binding is what distinguishes human beings from other living things. Plants,” he said, “survive by their ability to energy-bind, that is, a system for taking energy from the environment to feed their organisms. Animals survive by the hunt, or their ability to move around to get their food; this is what we call space-binding. But humans are unique in that we survive by our ability to time-bind, that is, by using and controlling time.”

About this time, Edmund slipped around the tables and poured coffee, as if coincidentally to nudge a few from nodding off to sleep. They gratefully brought the cups to their lips and regained their alert and interested composures. Edmund rushed back to fill his carafe with hot coffee and jotted time-binding into his notes.

“What are you doing?” another waiter queried.

“Getting more coffee,” Edmund parried.

“We get paid by the hour for this. No tips.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a goddamned banquet. Relax.”

“Right.” Edmund rushed back to hear more about time-binding.

“Humans,” the president continued, “have created language to communicate, to pass on vital information to each other and to the next generation. That’s how we survive over time. This time-binding capacity is another name for our ability to create society and civilization.”

One JACLer waved Edmund over and asked for an ashtray. Edmund returned with the ashtray, popped a lighter from his pocket, and lit the man’s cigarette.

“For example, the JACL is a society of citizens that depends on communicating your purpose and your history. This, I agree, is the difficult task ahead.” Outside, the president’s puppet was going through the motions of ritual disembowelment while the crowd chanted, “Haya-kiri, haya-kiri, haya-kiri . . .”

The JACLer puffed in the air away from the half-eaten slices of apple pie and nodded appreciatively to Edmund.

The president adjusted his bifocaled vision, scrutinizing his crowd in various dispositions of alertness. “You of the Japanese American Citizens League have an important history and mission to communicate. If the youngsters outside could hear your brave history and mission, they would join your ranks and extend your proud history.” This comment brought about some grunting and scattered clapping. The youngsters outside had gotten their puppet into a kneeling position with a knife stuck in his belly.

Inside, the president continued. “If you fail to communicate or become stagnant in your thinking, if you lose your ability to think toward the future, this league is doomed to pass away without change.” He paused to let the doom of it all sink it.

Edmund jotted down with some glee: Nisei dinosaurs. Extinction.

“But”—the president wagged a telling finger—“I know that the JACL is an association that knows great change, and you have not and cannot be afraid of change. After all, you survived World War II.” More grunting and clapping. “But think about one of the reasons you survived the war—”

Edmund panned the room, wondering what these second-generation Japanese Americans could be thinking.

“English,” the professor announced. “As nisei you were able to speak English and communicate your concerns to the American government. The English language: a small thing we take for granted, but a key to our survival. Your ability to communicate effectively in English binds you to your American citizenship.”

Outside, the poor puppet protested, “Ouch ouch!” while the crowd cried out the Japanese translation, “Itai itai! Aiyaiyaiyai, itai yoooo!”

Someone tilted his head toward Edmund, to which Edmund responded while trying to keep an ear on the president’s speech. “Do you speak English?” the nisei asked Edmund.

“Pardon me, sir?” Edmund tried a British accent on the man. It was a reflexive response, a haughty survival tactic learned on the job. Edmund caught himself; maybe this guy had taken the president’s words to heart and wanted to bind his English to their shared American citizenship.

But the nisei replied with controlled agitation, “Ah, the toilet, the men’s room?”

“Yes sir. Right this way, sir.”

Edmund ushered the man out. Beyond the doors of the banquet hall, the ruckus was a low roar. Police were stationed at the entrance, and clients slipped in and out with amused babble or testy exchanges, the din rising and falling into the foyer. Edmund thought he saw Paul with his picket sign but ran back to hear the president’s closing remarks.

“Now I’m not talking about change for the sake of change, but about progress, progress that is a forward-thinking process of time-binding in which we pool all of our technical and intellectual resources and support the freest cultural exchange between all races and creeds and classes for the purpose of solving the world’s problems.”

At this moment, the puppet sewn from rags was splitting its guts. Long red ribbons sailed into the foggy night, flung across the wharf with spraying clouds of sparkling crimson confetti. The poor puppet heaved his entrails over the dancing protestors in a bizarre display, an Oriental Mardi Gras.

As the JACLers rose to applaud their speaker, Edmund ran into the kitchen, positioning himself at the salad bar to accost the acting president as he moved quickly along with his entourage.

“Sir, Mr. President.” Edmund stood in the narrow aisle and called out like a reporter.

The voice, coming from the bins of lettuce and tomatoes, caught the president’s attention. Who was this young waiter?

“I listened to your speech with great interest.” He fumbled quickly with a pertinent question. “I was thinking, won’t it be necessary to promote a civilization of people who speak multiple languages in order to translate and exchange ideas and technology?”

“An excellent question. Who are you?”

“Edmund Lee. I’m a student at your college.”

The president nodded to his nisei bodyguards. “This is what I’m talking about. Intelligent and hardworking students like this young man. Studying by day, working by night. That’s what we’re about, not that minority of rabble-rousers.” He patted Edmund on his padded white jacket shoulder. “Ed, come to my office and we’ll talk about your question. But tell me just one thing: what did you learn tonight?” He began to walk on, pushed along by his bodyguards.

Edmund, following, ventured awkwardly, “Well, I think you said that the winning civilization will be the one that keeps its history going.”

They climbed the stairs to the roof, and Edmund could hear the deafening roar of propellers. The president placed his hand over his tam-o’-shanter and looked back at Edmund, yelling something incomprehensible, his mouth a grin and a grimace at the same time, then ducking away into a whirring fog, tiny bits of crimson confetti glinting here and there.

“Fuck,” Paul exclaimed. “I can’t share that byline with you.”

“Why not?”

“I was outside. You were inside.”

“So? That’s the beauty of it.”

“My participation is about ten percent. The whole article is yours. And besides, who reads his work? Now you’re inside his goddamned head.”

“Pretty weird, huh?”

Paul read from Edmund’s draft. “‘To paraphrase the president, he states that conflict is essential to growth, but unresolved conflict over time results in emotional disturbance (i.e., you become crazy) as one’s self-concept departs from the reality of the self. Your territory separates from your map.’” Paul looked up from his reading. “What’s this map/territory thing?”

Edmund’s face scrunched up. “It isn’t very clear yet, is it? O.K., it’s like the territory is the real land and the map is just a representation. So you got a map in your head about yourself, but there is the real you or self that is the territory. So this conflict he’s talking about is when the territory is changing but the map stays the same. It’s this disconnect between the two, between the abstraction and the reality, that causes one to be insane.”

“That makes sense,” Paul nodded. He was thinking about how he himself could be defined as insane, but he read on: “‘The man’s entire body of scholarship—ideas that can be said to be largely utopian—has been demolished by his actions. His map is that he’s an effective communicator, a great scholar applying his theories to active duty. His territory is that of a convenient minority banana used by the white power structure. Even if that’s an exaggeration, his recent displays of buffoonery and arrogant affectations take on that role. He’s abandoned his principles of human dignity and self-concept to play the fool. So even by his own terms, he’s insane.’”

Edmund started to pull his jacket on. “I’ve got to revise this for the paper. What do you want to do?”

“It’s not my article, Edmund.”

“Yeah, I better take full responsibility. Probably nobody will read it anyway.”

“It’s brilliant, really. Only you would do that sort of homework.”

“I’ve got these photos that Professor Chen took that I’m going to use. He’s got the students being handcuffed, lines of police with batons, injured students, blood on the concrete, teachers marching with armbands, paddy wagons.”

“Talk about the territory,” Paul scoffed.

“Exactly.” Edmund stood in Paul’s living room, staring for a long moment at an oil portrait of a mustachioed man in a suit and tie, his tilted head and ochre colorings against the brushstrokes of an olive green background.

“Paul Valéry, a French poet,” Paul commented, mystified as Edmund that this canvas left by his father should be his personal window.

Edmund adjusted his jacket and stuffed the article into its deep pockets. He muttered a partial thought, “The winning civilization—” opened the door, and left.

3: Analects

Authors sometimes take strange liberties.

—Charlie Chan

I

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

—Karl Marx

1.1 She said: Who am I if not the dowager empress, called upon in modern times to weave a brocaded wisdom? Admit it: you step lightly, fearing to see my visage in the carpeted tapestry; you suspect me to be hiding in the wings of every drama; you want to believe my tiny stinking feet and painted peony lips have long decayed, chopped up with my decadent remains, but language recuperates me again and again. I am hidden in a library left behind over time, incrementally established with great care and then abandoned as if its librarian had suddenly escaped. Indeed he fled, left his great collection in this great sitting room overlooking a craggy scene of California cypress framing the stately Golden Gate, a play of red arches in the blue Pacific. Two young men—let’s say his scribes—were left to tend these archives, and in offering his home for their services, they had already begun to assume the robes of their hopeful futures: poet and scholar. Truly a library is a room of dreams.

1.2 Poet: Paul Wallace Lin stretched himself out in the cushioned embrace against one end of the expansive bay window, puzzling over the mind of Monsieur Teste and his creator Paul Valéry. He wondered if his father, who had painted the French poet’s portrait, had ever read Monsieur Teste, and if reading it himself would illuminate his father’s expectations for his son. Even the man who is free of his father’s will desires some direction.

1.3 Scholar: Lee Yat Min, similarly stretched at the other end of the window, did not speculate on his father’s ambitions for his son. After establishing a laundry business, his father sent for the family in China, and when Yat Min arrived in California at age twelve, his father sat him down between the damp steam rising off pressing irons and the reeking shirts stained in sweat and growled very plainly that if Yat Min ever worked in a laundry like this, he’d break his son’s legs. Yat Min learned that the mind can run faster than the legs. He turned the pages of Lu Hsun, running a finger down the printed characters of a story entitled “Diary of a Madman.”

1.4 In such a fashion, two young men framed the sunlit entrance to the library, one seeking to decipher a Western mind and the other an Eastern, only to discover that neither was more inscrutable than the other.

1.5 Now, let us pull away from this great window as if riding the soft fog that creeps into the bay beneath the Golden Gate, and observe the stunning house against the cliffs. Professor Chen Wen-guang designed this custom-built palace for his second wife, a wealthy Austrian baroness. It’s engineered in three split-levels on a hillside beneath Mount Tamalpais, great windows on every level overlooking the San Francisco Bay. On the first level, a dining and living room; on the second level, the library and bedrooms; on the third level, an artist’s studio and gallery. The Baroness lived only briefly in the finished house, Europe and China meeting in cordial feng shui, before she died, leaving a comfortable stipend to her learned and beloved Chinaman.

1.6 Chen Wen-guang modestly insisted that he was but a historian, a witness to events, a chronologer, if such a title exists. In that role, predictably, he created a chronology of those days in turmoil at San Francisco State College as if such a record would create an enlightened path by which to walk through and finally leave behind disturbing events. By such chronology the puzzle of history was stretched out, one factual account stepping after another factual account, moment by moment, day by day, month by month. But upon scrutinizing his own work, he discovered but a single and continuous silken thread pulled away, unraveling at every tug the very fabric of a robe once splashed in calligraphic dreams.

II

When dealing with a man who is capable of understanding your teaching, if you do not teach him, you waste the man. When dealing with a man who is incapable of understanding your teaching, if you do teach him, you waste your teaching. A wise teacher wastes no man and wastes no teaching.

—Confucius (15.8)

2.1 The wise Professor Chen read with great interest a position paper on the establishment of Chinese Ethnic Studies, presented to him by the Intercollegiate Chinese Students Association. He approved of their proposed curriculum in sociology, social psychology, community counseling, and Cantonese language. He supported their argument that eighty-three percent of Chinese in America speak the Cantonese of the streets. But he could not help but notice the absence of the study of mainland China, Taiwan, and Chinese living in Southeast Asia. Even if the students had not forgotten that he was a scholar of contemporary Chinese literature and political thought, they could not see how this learning was connected to their desire to serve the people. There are situations for which a Mandarin’s knowledge is not required.

2.2 Professor Chen resigned his high post as chair. It is the Confucian belief that enlightened intellectuals should naturally conduct the political life of a just government. However, the American egghead is perhaps not such an intellectual.

2.3 Professor Chen applied for his long-delayed sabbatical and accepted a scholar’s invitation to the Sorbonne. In making arrangements for his house, he entrusted its financial upkeep to his student Paul Lin, who had inherited the business of overseeing his father’s properties, and he hired Edmund (Yat Min) Lee as a caretaker in exchange for free rent. The teacher with trusted students is surely fortunate.

III

See Paris, die happy.

—Charlie Chan

3.1 Chen Wen-guang strolled the old Parisian streets where he was born and raised within the formalities and rituals of the Chinese legation in the 1920s. He was a boy of fourteen when he left; the next year, the Germans crossed the Meuse River and bombed and occupied Paris. The boy who returns as a man sees with a boy’s eyes.

3.2 To Paul, he wrote: I heard Charles Mingus at the Palais de Chaillot the other night. Marguerite Duras, whom I happened to meet there, sends her regards. “Paradoxically,” she says, “the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.” And yet, I am lost in this familiarity.

3.3 Contrary to his questionable recognition and usefulness at his own institution in the United States, Professor Chen was everywhere in Paris, and as they say, the talk of the town. Thus it was proven that a man’s wisdom is rarely appreciated in his own household. His French colleagues wanted to compare student movements. They gave him an office at the Sorbonne, although the school was closed intermittently by student protests. But was this not the case the world over? This was the rise of a new Communist movement inspired by Mao and the Chinese Revolution. And what of China that had so inspired Western Marxists? What did he believe to be Chou En-lai’s possibilities to succeed Mao Tse-tung? What was his analysis of the Cultural Revolution? Of the Russia/China split? How should one predict a revolutionary future? Three steps forward and two steps backwards.

IV

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

—Paul Valéry

4.1 It was not Monsieur Teste but a poem by Valéry that aroused an awakening in the spirit heart of the young poet. Paul Lin wrote enthusiastically to his mentor Chen Wen-guang at his address in Paris. He did not think it was a mere coincidence, that is, the poem’s title, “Le Cimetière Marin.” He knew himself to be in the same hills of California’s Marin County, in a beautiful cemetery of books overlooking the salt-breathing potency, that fresh exhalation of the sea.

4.2 The poet commanded: The wind is rising . . . We must try to live! / The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave / Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking / Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages! Where, Paul asked, in France was le Cimetière Marin? Would Chen be visiting?

4.3 In Paris Chen felt a strange foreboding, as if Monsieur Valéry’s ghost lurked at his sleeve, even as the memory of Paul’s soft features floated over the flickering sunlight tracing the scaled surface of the Seine. The teacher embraced the exuberance of his young and awakening apprentice. “Yes, perhaps,” he replied. Valéry was born in the port of Sète on the Mediterranean. He had planned anyway a trip to Provence to visit James Baldwin in the coastal village of Saint-Paul de Vence.

4.4 Edmund rolled his eyes but smiled. He asked: “How is it that our teacher knows everyone?” Scanning the shelves for Chen’s American collection, they found a copy of Giovanni’s Room signed by Baldwin: To my dear friend Wen-guang. James. Those who walk in the same spheres enjoy the coincidence of friendship.

V

Mind, like parachute, only function when open.

—Charlie Chan

5.1 Chen collected postcards of predictable sites (the Eiffel Tower) and obscure significance (a bald woman), stood in what he thought to be significant locations, and penned cryptic aphorisms to the boys at home. On the Rue de Fleurus, outside of Gertrude Stein’s flat, he wrote to Yat Min in scripted Chinese characters: “It is wonderful how a handwriting which is illegible can be read, oh yes it can.” So said Gertrude Stein.

5.2 To Paul he wrote in blocky English: “There ain’t any answer, there ain’t going to be an answer, there never has been an answer, that’s the answer.” Gertrude Stein

5.3 The young poet wrote to his long-distance mentor: I am collecting your postcards (please send more) along with my own reflections and jottings, nonsense, and whatnot too, in a journal I have named Analecta. I am adding analecta to it every day. For example, Valéry writes in his analecta: “Reality can only express itself with absurdity.”

5.4 P.S. I met Jack Sung, as you suggested. He hangs out at Il Piccolo with some others. Edmund hangs out at Il Piccolo too, but for other reasons. Edmund calls Sung and his bunch “the Poetry Boys Club.” We meet, then head out like a bunch of gangsters, rummaging around used book stores, looking for any discarded book by an Oriental. So far: Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna. Youth has its purposes.

VI

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them.

—Paul Valéry

6.1 Edmund Lee played tricks with the weekly Chinatown newspaper, published bilingually—English running left to right on one side, Chinese running right to left on the other. On the Chinese side, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, aka Six Companies, promoted the Miss Chinatown USA Pageant with a large spread and photograph of the charming Carole Yung, Miss Year of the Rooster Chinatown, crowned and smiling nervously with a live rooster in her arms, more than ready to turn over her crown, sash, and animal on February 8 at the Masonic Temple at 1111 California Street at eight p.m. to the new Miss Year of the Dog Chinatown. Above the Chinese article about someone voted the most beautiful Chinese girl in the USA, Edmund set the large headline in bold type: GALILEO STUDENTS WALK OUT!

6.2 Two hundred impetuous Galileo High School students walked out on February 5 in a demonstration to make Chinese New Year an official U.S. holiday. As they say, fat chance. Could it be that the lovely Carole Yung, like an impertinent homecoming queen with her crowned princesses in tow, also walked out? Beauty may sometimes be used for political gain.

VII

At times I think, and at times I am.

—Paul Valéry

7.1 Paul Lin signed up for Jack Sung’s creative writing workshop at SF State. The other students in the workshop were confused by Paul’s work. They said: We want to know what it is. What’s this cryptic shit about? Sung said: Leave him alone. He’s working it out. That was how Paul knew he had arrived in the Poetry Boys Club. The reasons for membership were not always explained.

VIII

As for the good man: what he wishes to achieve for himself, he helps others to achieve; what he wishes to obtain for himself, he enables others to obtain—the ability to simply take one’s own aspirations as a guide is the recipe for goodness.

—Confucius (6.30)

8.1 In the same year, Edmund Lee investigated and wrote articles about the infamous Wah Ching Chinatown gang and their exploding violence. His first article was about Glen Fong, who ended his short nineteen years of life shot and killed by a rival tong on Jackson Street at one in the morning. In another few months Teddy Ta, twenty-one, was stabbed, and by the end of the year Larry Miyata, sixteen, and Raymond Leong, eighteen, were also shot and killed. Their blood smeared the sidewalks of the street the Chinese affectionately call Dupont Guy.

8.2 Edmund also wrote the obituary for Sai Gin Lew, PFC, born September 20, 1949, died in Vietnam December 5, 1970.

8.3 Edmund hung around the Il Piccolo coffee house, where he met the lost Chinatown kids he recognized to be like himself: fresh off the boat but with nothing to show for it, and no pop to bless their arrival in America with a break-your-legs warning. To see oneself in another is to learn both fate and possibility.

8.4 March Eu Fong, our crowned assemblywoman, and her political entourage visited our forbidden city—labyrinth of tourism, flaming woks, gambling dens, herb and curio shops. Something had to be done. High commissioner Fong asked who among her constituents had the talent to write. It was thus that Edmund volunteered to write the proposal to the federal department of Heath, Education, and Welfare. By the end of the Year of the Dog, to Edmund’s great astonishment, the government granted one hundred thousand dollars in funding to open a Chinatown Youth Service Center. Writing can be lucrative.

IX

Ancient ancestor once say, “Words cannot cook rice.”

—Charlie Chan

9.1 Someone said, “Edmund Lee, you wrote the proposal, now you better make it work for us. You are now the director of the Chinatown Youth Service Center, with offices in the old Hungry i in the I-Hotel.” What was the responsibility of the director of the Chinatown Youth Service Center? As Edmund Lee himself had proposed, he should get jobs for the Chinatown youths. Otherwise they were going to spend their time on the streets making trouble and killing each other.

9.2 Down the street and across from Portsmouth Square, in the heart of Chinatown, the Holiday Inn was inaugurated with twenty-seven floors and 565 rooms, but there were no Chinese working there. Edmund went as the director of the CYSC, but who was he, a young skinny student with horn-rimmed glasses and some federal funding? “We are sorry,” they said, “no qualified Chinese have applied.” A hotel with a name like Holiday can only be a business, not a charity.

X

Virtue is not solitary; it always has neighbors.

—Confucius (4.25)

10.1 Edmund angrily paced Professor Chen’s library in Marin overlooking the Golden Gate, reading the cruel history of celestials in America. He wrote his manifesto in the newspaper and called for a new organization: Chinese for Affirmative Action. Paul Lin said, “Remember when you were always working as a waiter and had no time to protest?” Every man must take his turn to stand out in the cold and face the riot squad.

10.2 First he and Paul Lin and about a dozen others, then fifty, then two hundred, then more and more Chinatown Chinese who now called themselves Chinese for Affirmative Action protested in front of the Holiday Inn, blocking the doors and marching around the tourists with picket signs and bullhorns. They were joined by the International Hotel Tenants Association, the Save the Kong ChowTemple Committee, and the Chinatown Cooperative Garment Factory Workers. Gung Hay Fat Choy! Whose holiday, Holiday Inn? Holiday Out! Holiday Out!

XI

When nature prevails over culture, you get a savage; when culture prevails over nature, you get a pedant. When nature and culture are in balance, you get a gentleman.

—Confucius (6.18)

11.1 Being the director was not easy, especially when the youths he was supposed to be helping walked in the next day as Red Guards, talking militant revolution, waving Mao’s Little Red Book in his face, accusing him of reformist measures, and wanting to set up a breakfast program like the Black Panthers’, for Chinatown kids. One man’s program is another man’s complaint.

11.2 The Six Companies yelled about how the Red Guard marched around throwing cherry bombs at tourists and yelling, “Off the Honkies!” What kind of business plan was that? And Chinatown kids don’t need a breakfast program; their mothers feed them every morning. I might be a dead dowager, but I know a thing or two. This is Chinatown; did your mother ever send you to school hungry? It’s an insult! What sort of son are you anyway?

11.3 Are we Yellow Panthers to mimic the blacks? We are one billion Chinese in the world, a powerful majority with a decisive role in history and the destiny of humanity. Insult your mother, and one billion Chinese will destroy you. And if it is not already clear, the Chinese are the wisest people on earth.

XII

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

—Lao Tzu

12.1 Paul Lin wrote this poem:

I have been left to wander this

three-tiered palace

among your memories

your priceless antiquities

paintings and poetry

your hair oil scented in the cushions

and bedsheets

your spiced preferences

old canisters of herbal remedies

and aged teas and cognac.

In your absence

I practice the art

of the gentle scholar,

while across the bay

the red arches of revolution

beckon home my

Chinaman self.

On which side of the bay

does the father live?

On which side of the bay

the worthy son?

On which side of the bay

the beloved?

The yin and yang

of self

split in multiple and

prismed refractions

against the sun

that inevitably sets

in the West.

XIII

No one knows less about servants than their master.

—Charlie Chan

13.1 The masculinity of the man of color in America is constantly called into question. What should be done about those colored homosexuals and raging feminists whose presence undermines the full and masculine citizenship of every man of color? I ask, if your masculinity is not your own, to whom does it belong? But in the Year of the Dog, who is listening to the dowager who lived among eunuchs? Only the tough and vitriolic can survive.

13.2 Paul Lin read Chen’s signed copy of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, and for the first time read a literary critique that spoke plainly of it. But he also read the Panther’s Minister of Information, Eldridge Cleaver, who spat his hatred of the homosexual traitor Baldwin, who displayed, he said, the most agonizing self-hatred and “the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of whites.” Then one of the black writers in the Poetry Boys Club came around and laughed about Baldwin, calling him that “hustler who comes on like Job.” Paul remained silent. Club membership depends on keeping its pretenses.

XIV

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets . . .

—James Baldwin

14.1 Chen joined others at James Baldwin’s eighteenth-century house nestled among arbors of hanging grapes, peach and almond orchards, and fields of strawberry and asparagus in the acreage just outside of Saint-Paul de Vence, an ancient walled village overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. He sat nursing a glass of local wine, scribbling postcards, and overheard the questions posed by a bright young black reporter to Baldwin sitting in the dappled sunlight. What did Mr. Baldwin feel about Cleaver’s accusations?

14.2 Baldwin played magnanimous. He wouldn’t be intimidated by this young, impressionable reporter who no doubt sided with the radicalized machismo of the current black movement. Baldwin said he was very impressed with Cleaver’s writing, that he couldn’t be insulted since what did Cleaver know except from his assumptions of the debased faggots he met in prisons? They’d never met. Cleaver’s thinking was understandable from his life experience and also his perverse encounters with his angry sexuality. (Baldwin never mentioned the word rape.) No, he didn’t mean to patronize Cleaver.

14.3 The reporter looked off with some distraction into the olive and pine trees, sniffed the wild rosemary and thyme perfuming the air. What is the use of a garden if not to rest the mind and to soften the heart?

14.4 But how, insisted Baldwin, were he and Cleaver so different, created out of their different but equally oppressive encounters with white society? Baldwin himself was an “odd and disreputable artist,” and Cleaver an “odd and disreputable revolutionary.” A pity there should be no time for them to meet. All men are brothers.

14.5 The reporter smiled. Did Mr. Baldwin know the news that Cleaver was even now just across the Mediterranean, escaped to Algiers? Baldwin said nothing but smiled over at Chen, who must have quietly made the delicate connections to allow Cleaver to travel at all and, eventually, to China. A true benefactor is surely invisible, if not coy.

14.6 The young reporter would finally leave and malign the memory of the writer, declaring Baldwin’s show of magnanimity the pathetic response of the has-been writer, out of touch with his subject. Distant from hospitality, one’s gratitude may disappear.

XV

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

—Paul Valéry

15.1 Edmund said to Paul, “If you want to be a poet, you have to present your poetry to the public. You have to rise to the occasion and read, like Allen Ginsburg, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder. What are you waiting for? Why should those guys be writing Asian American poetry anyway? I propose a real Asian American read-in. You can read here at the Chinese Youth Services, on the old stage of the Hungry i. You, like Barbra Streisand and Lenny Bruce, can make your start at the Hungry i. I’ll give you top billing, and you can bring your Poetry Boys Club along as well.” Oftentimes the declaration itself is one’s independence.

15.2 The Poetry Boys Club called themselves CARP, like the fish.

XVI

Best place for skeleton is in family closet.

—Charlie Chan

16.1 In the Year of the Dog, in the month of the ninth moon, the Gay Liberation Front recognized the Black Panthers as the vanguard of the revolution. Some gifts arrive like undersized lingerie for a heavyset woman.

16.2 Do you not know the stories told in our classical literature of the half-eaten peach or the cut sleeve? A beautiful lover offers the sweetest side of his half-eaten peach to his beloved lord. A Han emperor cuts away his silken sleeve, caught beneath his sleeping lover, rather than awaken such quiet beauty. The inscrutability of any story is to be deciphered by those intended to know the answers.

XVII

Those who have innate knowledge are the highest. Next come those who acquire knowledge through learning. Next again come those who learn through the trials of life.

—Confucius (16.9)

17.1 Jack Sung, the leader of the Poetry Boys Club, mischievously called the Chinatown Red Guard a Chinese minstrel show that mimicked the Black Panthers. He also presented a few choice episodes from his newest play, Dear lo fan, fan gwai, whitey, honey babe, with provocative lyrics like “Ching-chong Chinaman” and a monologue satirizing the proud leader of the Red Guard. After the real Asian American read-in on the old stage of the Hungry i, Paul rushed to see the leader of the Red Guard call out the leader of the Poetry Boys Club and punch him unceremoniously to the ground. Irony is lost on he who is satirized.

17.2 Later Jack Sung said philosophically, “I think I was beaten up kind of Western style. Maybe I was lucky in that I didn’t have one of these legendary forms of Oriental self-defense used on me.” In the full production of Sung’s play, G.I.Joe tossed a bloody cow liver into the audience. A woman felt the slop plop into her lap. Irony is lost on she who is splattered with blood.

XVIII

Door of opportunity swing both ways.

—Charlie Chan

18.1 Who are the true heroes? The poets or the revolutionaries?

18.2 Who are the true men? The poets or the revolutionaries?

18.3 The answers to these questions are on page ___.

XIX

A journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet.

—Lao Tzu

19.1 Chen bid farewell to his French Maoist colleagues, who dreamed of an intellectual Maoism championing Third World revolutions. They tested their endless theories on Chen, who tired of the pretense that he might be Chou En-lai, their very own French interpreter. One man’s history is another man’s imagination.

19.2 Meanwhile, Chen received news from his colleagues in San Francisco. Student and union agreements to end the strike at the college in 1969 were in fact never signed by the president, nor the board of trustees; demands were never met, agreements were never enacted. Students were punished. Professors denied tenure. The trustees failed to protect academic freedom, and the California Senate drafted over one hundred bills to suppress campus dissent. But, they wrote, flowers are blooming on campus—daisies and petunias and marigolds . . .

19.3 Chen returned to San Francisco, but not before standing on the hill of le Cimetière de Marin and penning a final postcard to Paul: “Some have the merit of seeing clearly what all others see confusedly. Some have the merit of glimpsing confusedly what no one sees as yet. A combination of these gifts is exceptional.” Paul Valéry. But who among us is exceptional?

XX

Old man, how is it that you hear these things? Young man, how is it that you do not?

—Kwai Chang Caine and Master Po

20.1 When Chen returned, he opened his long-closed and dusty garage, took the Siata 208s Spider coupe off its blocks, and bought new wheels for it. He made Paul, who had nothing better to do, drive it back and forth to the mechanic, replacing, testing, and cleaning parts, and polish its red body to a high luster. He had met his second wife at the Grand Prix in Monte Carlo; she was a race car enthusiast, and this was her car.

20.2 He said, “Listen to the soft purr of that engine. Can you hear it? That’s the Fiat 2-liter v8. Crafted in Geneva in 1952. Nica took the prize with this at the Targa Florio in 1957.” Paul and Edmund looked skeptical. When had their teacher become a mechanic? “Now listen to this.” He revved it up. What else does one do with a race car? One races it.

4: My Special Island

Okinawa is vital for the security of the U.S.

Korea is vital for the security of the U.S.

Indochina is vital for the security of the U.S.

The Philippines are vital for the security of the U.S.

Taiwan is vital for the security of the U.S.

The Tiao Yu Tai islands are vital for the security of the U.S.

Tiao Yu Tai?

Two Days after the Lunar New Year of the Pig (Boar) . . .

Now don’t get Maoist with me. You know I’m not a proselytizing kind of girl. Look who you’re fooling with. Do I look like I’ll do time with a naked face and/or nails? Not that I couldn’t, but girls like me don’t get starring roles in The Good Earth. There might be days I could do pigtails, and if you put beads and brocade on that Mao jacket, it might go over something more evocative. A red silk cheongsam slit to the hip, for goodness sake. I could substitute my bangles for some red star earrings. I’ll tell you one thing: I could go for the beret à la Che look. I would wear that man stretched over my bosom any day. Now, honey, would that arouse you?

Now, you know where you should be. You should be out there with your friend in Saint Mary’s Square next to Sun Yat-sen, protesting with five hundred others over the Tiao Yu Tai. It’s quite a crowd. All riled up good and Chinese-like. And there’s Father Sun presiding, looking all sun-reflective, proof that the Chinese padred California too. But no, instead here you are, humping with me in a pathetic little room in the I-Hotel. Oh no you don’t. Don’t come yet. I’m not finished with you.

Did you read their manifesto? What manifesto? The Tiao Yu Tai manifesto, of course. But who nowadays doesn’t have a manifesto? Even I have a manifesto. But as a good Oriental citizen, I’m all for their manifesto. Think about those beautiful little islands out there in the middle of nowhere, just waiting to be grabbed up like Hawaii. Wild flowers. Flying fish. Green and verdant. Just thinking about them makes me go paradisiac. But I hyperventilate. The Japanese and the American military need to keep their pesky hands off those islands. If anyone knows what to do with an island, it’s the Chinese. What? Oh well, overpopulate it, I suppose. Fill it up with all those number-one sons, sail them out on picturesque junks, come home to honey with a big catch, and make a lot of babies. Turn it into one big happy i-land commune.

AN INTERNATIONAL CONSPIRACY!

U.S. government succumbs to Japanese secret demands and agrees to deliver the oil-rich Tiao Yu Tai islands to Japan. The Tiao Yu Tai islands, 20 miles north of Taiwan and 240 miles south of Ryukyu, are rightfully Chinese. Chinese fishermen have used these territorial waters for centuries. The recent discovery of rich oil deposits around the islands—almost twice the deposits of California—is too attractive to the Japanese militarists. The Sato regime has secretly demanded that the islands be included in the Ryukyu group and be returned to Japan in 1972. The U.S. had yielded to Japanese demands and had agreed to return the islands to Japan without the consent of the Chinese people. Our Chinese people strongly protest this Tokyo-Washington plot and tell the world you may forget Pearl Harbor, but we will never give away Tiao Yu Tai.

Chinese Six Companies

San Francisco, California

I’m here today representing the Japanese Community Youth Council, and we Japanese in America condemn the government of Japan for this act of international robbery against other Asian people. Just as we condemn the American government for its criminal acts in Southeast Asia, we condemn the Japanese militarist government of blatant pig acts against the Tiao Yu Tai islands. This pig activity, whether in the oil fields of these islands or the rice fields of Vietnam, this pig activity is called imperialism. Down with Japanese imperialism! Down with KMT traitors! Down with U.S. imperialism! All power to the people!

A revolutionary

Federal Building

January 29, 1971

Around noontime on April 9 . . .

I saw Ike and Tina Turner the other night at the Fillmore. Tina worked the mike, you know what I mean? She worked it, like it was her object. She tongued the machine. I was there, right there in the front watching her try to wrap her body around and get into that thing. Right, disgusting. By now you’d think it would be a cliché, the mike thing, but it’s the music that gets into your system. So we’re gonna pump those speakers into the floor. Take your shoes off. Now feel that. Oye Como Va. The floorboards are vibrating like they got a pulse.

Old Chinese guy below is probably deaf, don’t you know. But he’s not there anyway. He got his old Chinese brothers together to march around Portsmouth Square with Edmund and the others. Want to imagine it on KPFA? Come on. Stretch yourself out, and feel it happening like we’re there. Let’s do some island lovin’. Oh, we’re in luck. It’s Arthur Ma reporting. Listen. They’re singing the Tiao Yu Tai song in Portsmouth Square.

Arthur Ma: About fifty demonstrators, mostly students from China going to school here, are gathered today in Portsmouth Square in Chinatown to protest the U.S. and Japanese takeover of the Tiao Yu Tai islands. They have been making their speeches in Cantonese, and the student organizers of the rally urge their supporters to keep up the pressure against the oil grab of these islands. The students are showing their support by putting up their fists in power signs.

Down with Japanese militarism!

Down with U.S. imperialism!

Down with the KMT sellouts!

Ma continues: Now you notice in the park, there are the usual Chinese elderly folk sitting around playing checkers, reading the paper, and sunning themselves, but with these excellent speeches, some of them have begun to perk up and take notice. You can see their shy smiles and quiet claps of appreciation and approval. The speaker is saying: “Chinese must have pride and not allow foreign governments to step all over us and then allow the Chiang Kai-shek government to do nothing! It’s because of this that our Chinese people have had to leave China.” Now they are standing up and clapping. What the—? Who are these guys?

Who are these guys? The Wah Ching of course, hired by the KMT sellouts come to beat up the Communists. What did that ruffian yell? Death to the Communist traitors! Oh, it’s kung fu time. Oh baby, come get me like a Water Margin outlaw. Just rough me up a bit. Oh yes.

Ma: Eight guys dressed up in black have just rushed onto the stage! They’re attacking the speakers and throwing around the sound equipment!

Oh, the commotion! But check this out honey, the Chinese elders from the park are rushing to the stage! Oh, that’s gotta be my old man downstairs. Spinning around with kung fu kicks and punches! Truth is, only real men with experience can fight like this. It’s like a kung fu motion picture! Baby KMT gangsters are just no match. They’re scattering like black mice. There now. There’s our interlude. The rally can go on. Oh, but can you hear it now? Oh baby, it’s the Tiao Yu Tai song! Nothing moves me like island patriotism.

Student speaker: We will march as planned! We will not be intimidated! Follow the monitors in black armbands. First we will march to the KMT Chinese Consulate. Then to the Japanese Consulate. And then we will march to the Federal Building! Follow us!

Hey hey hey!

U.S.A.!

Stay away!

From Tiao Yu Tai!

Ma: This is Arthur Ma for KPFA signing off at one thirty p. m. from Portsmouth Square in Chinatown on April 9, 1971.

The Ping Heard Round the World

On April 10, nine ping-pong players, four officials, and two spouses stepped across a bridge from Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland, ushering in an era of “Ping-Pong diplomacy.” They were the first group of Americans allowed into China since the Communist takeover in 1949.

On the Anniversary of the May 4 Chinese Student Movement . . .

I’m just like that little Mowgli feral child in the Jungle Book. Can you believe I cried when I saw that cartoon? That was me: a little Asian girl raised among drag queens. Now, they’ve dropped me off in the forbidden city to hide my sorry ass. But who in Chinatown isn’t facing the same circumstances? Look at you. We were all left here in the tribal village to fend for ourselves. Honey, pass me that pipe. I’ve got some forgetting to do.

Edmund’s going to have to make some choices. Five hundred academic sinologists can sign off on a letter, tell Taiwan what for and so on about how to run its business, but in the end, what does it mean? You can’t stir up a pot with five hundred sinologists. Honey, you need five million sinologists.

My old man downstairs explained it all to me. He was right there on the very day at the birth of the revolution. He told me that he arose a new man on that day. But I’m confused. May 4 is the birth of the revolution, but which revolution? The one for Sun Yat-sen, for Chiang Kai-shek, or for Mao Tse-tung?

The land of China can be conquered but not ceded; the people of China can be slaughtered but not bent. The nation is falling! Fellow men, rise!

Luo Jialun

Tiananmen Square, May 4, 1919

Overseas Chinese will never forget the motherland!

Well, you should know more than I. Your dear professor friend is always advising Edmund, isn’t he? He’s the one who suggested tying the island protest to the May 4 Chinese student movement. I’m with RG, Mr. Red Guard himself, who said who gives a shit what happened in China over fifty years ago, but obviously Professor Chen knows how history works on people’s psyches. If people see history repeating itself, they get all nostalgic and riled up. I know. I was there, sitting next to Edmund in that same movie.

You know those movies. They’re showing them every weekend downstairs at the Asian Community Center, like entertainment for the old folks, to give them a peek of the homeland. You see maybe millions of Chinese in black-and-white, standing room only, in that square in Peking that looks likes it’s a mile wide, red flags flapping around everywhere. They’re going crazy. Now that’s a rally! What’s a mere one-fifty at Portsmouth Square, or even five hundred at Saint Mary’s? All right, I agree. Each of those five hundred represents five hundred more. At least Chinese know how to count.

Edmund’s over at Portsmouth Square again, rallying the folks. They’re all making speeches in Chinese about the anniversary of the May 4 student movement. But notice that the Red Guard is doing security backstage with their Mao caps and shades, packing loaded revolvers behind their flack jackets. No one’s taking any chances this time. No eight KMT gangsters dressed in black are going to disrupt this session. They’ve got Red Guards posted on the roofs above the square with loaded rifles. Wah Ching could only arrive to a bloody surprise. The Tiao Yu Tai college types are making their speeches in Cantonese, with translations in English for the ABC. Please be patient, darling.

ABC: American-Born Chinese

MIT: Made in Taiwan

HIP: Hong Kong Instant Product

FOB: Fresh Off the Boat

KMT: Kuomingtang

ROC: Republic of China (Taiwan)

PRC: People’s Republic of China (mainland China)

MTTT: Mao Tse-tung Thought

O.K., now they’re finished with their history lesson.

Here comes the ABC Red Guard with their flamboyant red flags, blasting “East is Red.” RG struts his thing to the podium and makes his speech: We of the Red Guard salute you in the Year of the People Off the Pig!

(chanting) People Off the Pig! People Off the Pig!

Let it be known today, May 4 in the Year of the People Off the Pig, that we, the Red Guard, claim the territory of Portsmouth Square in the name of The People and henceforth rename it Tiao Yu Tai Park!

China in the News in 1971

July 15

After Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s secret mission to Peking, President Nixon announces he will visit China.

September

Lin Piao, understood to have been Mao Tse-tung’s successor, is killed in an airplane crash in Mongolia. The official explanation is that he had been involved in a failed plot to kill Mao and was killed fleeing to the Soviet Union.

October 25

Resolution 2758 is passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations, withdrawing recognition of the ROC as the legitimate government of China, and recognizing the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China.

But, darling, as I was saying about the movies: I’m sitting next to Edmund in the dark with those millions of black-and-white Chinese flickering off our faces, and they say: THE CHINESE PEOPLE HAVE STOOD UP! And Edmund, he’s wiping his tears away. O.K., I admit it: I cried too. I cried, and I’m not really Chinese. When it comes to solidarity, I’m solidarity all the way.

So right now, Edmund and his comrades are marching over to the Taiwan—or was it the Formosa?—Consulate to deliver their manifesto. Oh excuse me. The Republic of China Consulate. Listen, if you ask Edmund, he’ll tell you that this is not an issue of supporting one government or another. It’s not about long live Chiang or Mao. This is about the sovereignty of the Chinese people, period. You and I could be there now with the masses, yelling. The Chinese people have stood up! The Chinese people have stood up! Oh, rub me there, baby. Right there. It’s time now, baby. Oh yes. The Chinese people have stood up! The Chinese people have stood up! THE CHINESE PEOPLE HAVE STOOD UP!

5: We

When we arrived, there was no Golden Gate, no Statue of Liberty. Even so, some shouted: America! America! And we floated into the bay like the fog at twilight. If we got here earlier than the great earthquake and fire, our first impressions of our golden city were on the Barbary Coast—loose men and women of the vintage Gay Nineties carousing in dance halls and bars, around and about in horse-drawn buggies, speculating on a future and fortunes made from California gold. If we arrived after the fires, some of us might have noticed the island of Alcatraz but were forced to dock at another prison island, the one called Angel.

In those early years, the bay’s geography was traversed by ferries, fanning out from the city’s great transportation hub: the Ferry Building. We ourselves fanned out across the peninsulas, congregating in cities segregated by covenants, in farmlands confined by land laws and leasing contracts, on coastal waters in small fishing boats. We worked as houseboys, cooks, pickers and stoop labor, gardeners, fishermen, and canners. We opened shops: groceries, dry goods, tailoring, restaurants, flower shops, drug stores with soda fountains. We ran boarding houses and hotels, churches, temples, newspapers, health clinics, language schools, YMCAs and YWCAs, and kenjinkais. We gave our adopted towns names like Li’l Yokohama and Nihonmachi.

By the third decade of the century, our children witnessed the great engineering feats and the openings of the stately Golden Gate and Bay bridges. Cable cars and automobiles replaced horses and ferryboats. We sent our children to school and college, only to see them return home jobless. Those were the days when you’d meet a fella with an engineering degree selling fruit on the corner. Everything changed with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We were forced to leave our li’l towns and farming and fishing communities and were herded en mass to desert camps surrounded by barbed wire and gun towers. We looked like the enemy, but that’s not the same as being the enemy.

At war’s end, those of us who survived came back to our golden city and our little towns, took up our old jobs or started new ones. We rebuilt our old communities and started new families. Our youngsters turned into the third generation, what we call the sansei, and that’s about the time when this story begins.

Who’s to say what love is or how it starts inside each person? Who’s to say what triggers the feeling, the knowing that passes from one to the other? We saw the young man walk through the tattered remains of the old ferry building. Maybe it was the old building with its ghost lovers, we can’t say. We could see his footfalls avoid the scraps of trash ground into grimy crevices. Maybe it was the decay of an old place. He was wearing gold alligator cowboy boots. We could see them shuffling out from his ragged bells, scuffed and shredding at the toe. We could tell that those boots were his favorite, snug in the right places, his walk confident.

He walked out into the warm-swept sunlight, the sort of day we rarely know in our foggy city. When such a day arrives, it’s like a sweet summer gift, and we know that we truly live in the most beautiful city in the world. From the hills we can see the glorious expanse of the azure bay and its bridges reaching into the picturesque vistas. All the pastel Victorians winding up and down over the hills in rows, like glittering ladies with gloved hands pressed one to the other.

We saw him remove his jeans jacket and toss it jauntily over his shoulder. Beneath the jacket he was wearing a thin shirt, so thin it was threadbare. It was sepia in tone, and perhaps it was silk or some sort of nylon imitation. We could see it flutter at the sleeves but press with the wind about his body, exposing the curve along his spine and the rise in his chest above his ribcage. The sepia of the shirt reflected off his felt fedora of the same faded sepia, which he adjusted to account for the sun.

He presented his ticket and walked the gangway into the ferry. He chose a place along the starboard railing, looking out across the bay in search of his destination. His soft features shimmered off the glinting ocean.

We weren’t tourists. We lived here, but taking the ferry in those days had become unusual, like the weather on this particular day. A few of us worked on the other side, and the ferry was still the most direct way to some points. But that day, we wanted to revisit old haunts that held our memories. We’d step onto Angel Island and remember our lives as we began our American journey with detention and interrogation.

Chen was already on the ferry, seated on the top deck in his usual spot, reading a book. We knew him to be a regular on this ferry when the weather was good. Maybe our commotion bothered his reading, but when he looked up he watched the young man in his gold boots saunter across the ferry. We smiled at the man’s show of casual independence, and so did Chen. The felt fedora shaded his face with a slight attitude of mystery. In that moment we sensed a longing pass from the young man, flittering like the gulls along the ferry’s wake. We knew that the young man knew he was being watched by the older man. He felt that watching. Craved it. Please see me, his longing seemed to speak.

Chen stood and walked to the railing. He held his book before him. The young man saw the book in his hands before he saw Chen, but he knew it was he. Their shoulders touched. The threadbare shirt grazed the short-sleeved cotton bound to Chen’s muscular biceps. “For your birthday,” Chen said, proffering the book to the sea. “It’s today, isn’t it?”

“How did you remember? I’m twenty-one.”

“We’ll celebrate.”

Every culture has its day of passage. We’d adopted this one because we believed in the law. We of all people knew the promise of law could be broken, but we doggedly struggled behind that faith.

The young man took the book from Chen and turned from the sea. He leaned his back into the railing with the open book. The pages flapped up in a salty gust as the ferry left the dock. We looked up into the sky with Chen as the ferry’s horn announced its departure. But the young man was troubled with the wild pages of his new book.

“You’ve written another book.”

“I translated the calligraphy and wrote the historic text. It’s the work of an artist I’ve long admired. He died a few years ago in his nineties.”

“When did you do this?”

“This year.”

“You’ve been busy.”

“So have you.”

“I moved into the I-Hotel.”

“Edmund told me.”

“It’s over. She left for Cuba.”

Chen nodded. “Venceremos?”

“She was stripping to save the money.”

“Viva Che.”

The young man smiled. “The things we do for the revolution.”

“And you? Why didn’t you go too?”

“I guess I couldn’t strip for the revolution.”

“Ah, no?”

“I have bourgeois tendencies.”

“Stripping is not?”

“The experiment failed.”

We understood Chen’s quizzical look, but he remained silent.

“I was the experiment, I think. She gave up. No, she got tired. I got tired.”

Chen said nothing.

“It was all about pretending. I couldn’t pretend all the time.”

“Drugs help.”

The young man turned to Chen with some astonishment, then embarrassment. He turned to the sea and felt his tears well uncontrollably.

Neither spoke for a long time. We felt the ferry press across the bay, chased by gulls.

Chen spoke first. He changed the direction of the conversation. “The work of the revolution is a life devoted to the people, that is to say, the public. It’s a public life. A man’s private life, one’s deep interior, must at times be forgotten or sacrificed.”

The young man shifted. We shifted too, wanting to avoid the weight of these words.

“Here.” Chen retrieved the book offered as a gift, searched the pages. “This is one of my favorite paintings. Twin peaches in a small basket. Peaches represent long life, but as you know they are delicate, bruise easily. If the tree lives long, the fruit is ephemeral. Picked ripe from a tree, there is nothing sweeter or more succulent. Here twin peaches sit together, sweetly and exaggeratedly red in color for a lifetime.” Chen reached up to touch the soft fuzz of the young man’s felt fedora and tugged it down in jest.

If we felt confused, it was also the young man’s turn to look with questioning, as well as sheepish, eyes.

Chen sighed. “Revolution is old, but older yet is the sentiment of this painting, of love and of poetry.”

We studied the painting. We admired the swift brushstrokes, rapidly accomplished in a single sitting. How could such a thing seem so simple? It was a demonstration of a life of training revealed in a moment. It was unlike the Western oil painter’s painstaking labor of color and light and perspective revealed over many years.

Chen continued, “I don’t have an answer except for the experiment, as you say, of my own life. If it’s your own experiment, how can it fail?”

The young man looked up.

“A long life might be many lives, many ephemeral lives within one life.”

The ferry chugged into its slip, and we ambled onto Angel Island. Angel Island felt like it might be our island; so much of our history was here. But it was now a state park, and the authorities in control were friendly park rangers who directed hikers and picnickers. They had mostly forgotten the old history of the island.

The young man followed Chen, who walked quickly toward an old two-story building. A park ranger came forward to greet them. “Professor Chen? I’m Alexander Weiss.”

We followed Ranger Weiss to the dilapidated building. “You’ll excuse the mess. This building was a barrack. It’s been used as storage. As you know, it’s slated for demolition. I thought we should see what was in it before we tore it down. You never know. I didn’t expect to find any treasure.” He turned the key on the lock and shoved the door open. The light through it illuminated a cloud of dust, and we stepped inside.

“Watch your step. Upstairs. Over here.” Weiss held a flashlight to a section of the wall.

Chen scrutinized the wall. Looking closely we saw the wood was carved away, inscribed in Chinese characters. We saw Chen’s fingers delicately touch the wall. We thought he closed his eyes as if a blind man reading vivid Braille. He translated slowly:

Leaving behind my writing brush and removing my sword, I came to America.

Who was to know two streams of tears would flow upon arriving here?

If there comes a day when I will have attained my ambition and become successful,

I will certainly behead the barbarians and spare not a single blade of grass.

“A poem,” said the young man.

“It’s haunting,” said Ranger Weiss. “I’ve searched the other walls. There are many others. Like cave paintings, I think. A record of each man’s time here.”

“Plans for demolition will stop?” Chen asked.

“Yes, hopefully we can stop it. I’ll have this building cleared out so you can see safely.”

“When?”

“In a week or two? Can you return?”

“Yes, yes!” Chen said excitedly. He stepped back to the carved wall and read the bitter, defiant poem again, this time in Chinese.

We heard the long quiet in those barracks as his recitation came to a close, standing with three men in a jubilant circle in a dusty path of light.

We left Angel Island with Chen and his young companion. They took the ferry on to the far side of the bay, to Tiburon, their conversation filled with plans and possibility.

“We’ll get Edmund involved. He can help with the translations.”

“But a poet’s sensibility about language is necessary, to transmit the feeling of the poem into English. You should help with this.”

We saw Chen’s racy white Shelby Mustang GTO was parked conveniently at the ferry port.

“How about the Siata? How’s it running?” the young man asked.

“I raced the Monterey Historic last week,” said Chen, gunning the engine to emphasize his boast.

“Are you angry with me for disappearing?”

We tooled with the racecar up the hills to the familiar layered pavilion that was Chen’s house overlooking the bay. “I’ve been too busy missing you to be angry.”

Chen set a table on the terrace. He placed stemmed glasses, silverware, and candles in a precise pattern on the cloth. We followed him back and forth from the kitchen. “One of my specialties,” he said, fussing over a complicated sauce. “I learned it from a French chef.”

“Julia Child?”

“How did you know?”

We didn’t argue, since Chen was the sort of person who might really know Julia.

“Julia’s instructions are to grill duck breast rare.”

We stared at a photograph of a woman decked out in racing gear—gloves, goggles, and helmet—and standing next to a car. “Porsche 356 Monza. I’ll never forgive Nica. She gave it to a girlfriend who one day just drove it away.”

We continued to stare at the photo, trying to see the woman behind the goggles while pretending to scrutinize the car. What does a baroness look like?

“Nica was a bit older than me.” Chen thought for a moment. “Our marriage was happily arranged. She and I were excellent company. I cared for her when she became ill.”

He popped a bottle of champagne and nudged a glass at the young man. We looked out at the island where we had passed the day, and at the city’s hills. They toasted the sunset over the bay, slipping behind the Golden Gate.

The young man knew as he had craved his knowing in sepia tones on the ferry that morning. And Chen had also known the ephemeral moment that would constitute another life in a long wish for a long life. Once again they leaned out over a railing, their shoulders touching, the soft youth of a man newly twenty-one and the toned muscularity of a scholar of many lives.

Many years later we would sing the poem penned in the morning after:

Speaking of love and the revolution across the bay.

Speaking of ferrying south, that endless intent.

The ocean is wider than the sky, your grace taller than Tamalpais.

How could spring rain turn rocky cliff into soft soil?

How could sprouts grow taller than this outlook?

Wind chimes have replaced the sound of water on the roof.

I’ve been too busy missing you to be angry.

I’ve been too busy missing you to be angry.

6: Tofu Tigers

For those born after the liberation, it is necessary to attend speak-bitterness sessions and to listen to the old folks talk about the old days, what they suffered and how they were abused by the old system. The new generation does not know this past; they only know about the days after liberation. Chairman Mao says that the world and China’s future belong to the youth, but because of their inexperience they cannot comprehend the hardships of the past and the struggle required to establish a happy socialist society. This must also be true of overseas Chinese people. Although they may confront hardships, their struggles have not yet led to socialism. Lately, many overseas Chinese citizens return to visit the motherland. They come in the spirit of pride and learning and are welcomed as compatriots and comrades. They are quickly infected with the energy and spirit of the people, and they acknowledge their industry and progress.

This return coincides with the visit last year of the American President Nixon to the People’s Republic of China. This is a momentous event that signals a new era of exchange and equal standing between great nations. The People’s Republic of China in a short time accomplishes the unification of the country. This is a long and arduous road for which millions of Chinese sacrifice their lives. Since May 4, 1919 the Chinese people fight bravely for three decades to expel the Japanese imperialists and defeat reactionary nationalists. This struggle is won through the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the revolutionary army it commands. Thirty years later on October 1, 1949, Chairman Mao stands on the rostrum of Tiananmen Square and announces a new era for the Chinese people. This is a great victory for the worker and peasant masses, who together bring about this great proletarian socialist revolution. Now in fewer than twenty-five years since the liberation, the Chinese people demonstrate their ability to change the social, political, and physical landscape of China by removing, one by one, the three big mountains of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-capitalism.

Chen Wen-guang and Lee Yat Min are such overseas Chinese returnees; they are traveling in China to experience for themselves the great changes that have occurred in their absence. Chen is invited to continue his study of Chinese literature since the liberation. For six months, he is actively collecting newly published books and interviewing writers. Lee, who is Chen’s student, has come for a shorter period of one month with a group of Chinese American journalists. Since Lee is fluent in several dialects of the Chinese language, he is the interpreter for his group. Not all returning overseas Chinese are so fluent in the language or so knowledgeable about China. Understandably their memories of the China they left behind mix with new realities. Such a leap in time may be a shock. For Chen it is more than twenty years. For Lee it is only a decade, but for the young man as for the older, this leap in time represents almost half of their lifetimes. To accompany their new understanding and many sensations is to learn about the past and to participate in their rebirth.

Lee and his group of Chinese American journalists arrive from Hong Kong, stepping into the People’s Republic at Shum Chun. The transition—crossing from a decadent colonial to a prosperous socialist society—cannot be more apparent. On the one side, a city of grimy poverty, crime, and prostitution, rich tourists ignoring children begging under the signs of Coca-Cola and Lucky Strikes. On the other, verdant hills laced with communal rice paddies, happy children playing under newly planted trees, red flags, and posters with encouraging slogans to the people.

Members of the Chinese Communist Party, specially trained as guides for foreign guests, meet Lee’s group as they board the train. Everything is carefully planned; journalists like Lee will report back to their people to tell the truth about China’s revolution. The guides welcome the overseas Chinese back to China, although most of them were born abroad and have never been to China. This is the feeling of brotherhood and solidarity extended to Chinese people all over the world. The excitement and pleasure of the group is evident as they choose seats near the windows to view the landscape. Lee interprets: “This train was built entirely in China by the Chinese people.”

His is a group of ten, almost all of them young. They represent student newspapers and underground papers for mass organizations. One older comrade writes for a Chinese-language newspaper considered to be left-leaning. He and Lee interpret for the group, although only Lee can also speak Mandarin and, as it turns out, the dialect of Shanghai. One sister-comrade gets to work quickly and initiates a conversation with one of the train workers. Lee is called to sit between them.

The train worker says, “I graduated high school four years ago and have been working on this train since that time.”

She asks, “Did you wish to go to college?”

“I applied, but it’s my country’s wish that I work here.”

“Would you rather go to college?”

“If my work benefits the country, then I do it wholeheartedly.”

“Did you study America in school?”

“Yes, we studied the history and politics of the United States. I learned that there is a wide gap between the rich and the working people that is not right.”

“If you were an American citizen living in those conditions, what would you do?”

“Start a revolution.”

“That is not so easy.”

“I know, but we did it here. So it is possible to move such mountains.”

Lee himself asks no questions. He is trying to listen to more than the answers. He is grateful for the direct questions that he himself feels uncomfortable asking, but he tries to put himself in the train worker’s place.

The sister speaks to Lee excitedly as she copies everything down into her notebook. “Well, we’re not in Chinatown anymore,” she muses. “I know this sounds obvious, but you know when they talk about the Chinese being one-fourth of the world’s population? Well, I never really thought about it until now. That’s what we are a part of. I never really felt that way until now.”

The train is on its way to Canton, and from there, in the next few weeks, the group travels on to Peking, Nanking, and Shanghai. Before reaching Peking, walking through Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City and the requisite trip to the Great Wall, they make an important stop at the Tachai Commune in Shansi Province.

A three-hour documentary about Tachai describes the struggles of the Tachai Production Brigade to resolutely implement Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line. Tachai is a poverty-stricken village built against a steep mountain where the people live in caves. The soil is eroded and washed out from gullies on Tiger Head Mountain, but with their bare hands, the peasants of Tachai move the soil and rock from the ridges and fill the gullies to create terraced fields. They build twenty reservoirs and dams, fertilize the soil, dig wells, and build new houses. The peasants literally move mountains to create a productive agricultural community that boasts of contributing seventy percent of their crops to the country while keeping thirty percent for their own needs. Now corn and millet grow in the terraced fields. There are hundreds of acres of conifers, nut and fruit orchards, and they have electricity and machinery as well. They raise pigs and start a noodle factory. They also build a school and a health clinic. Chairman Mao says, “In agriculture, learn from Tachai.” Thousands of people visit Tachai every day from far places in the country to learn from their heroic example.

The sister-comrades in the Chinese American group ask to meet the sister-comrades of Tachai. Lee goes along as the interpreter.

This is a warm and excited meeting, the conversation going back and forth in a lively exchange.

“What is it like to be women in America?”

“We Chinese American women have to fight the oppression of both American society and the old Chinese patriarchal society.” A discussion continues for a bit about the patriarchy. Chairman Mao says that men are oppressed by three systems of authority: political, clan, and religious. Women, however, are further dominated by a fourth authority: their husbands.

A Tachai sister says, “Chinese women fought in the war for liberation. Some fought with guns and others with their labor. The war may be over, but the revolution continues. So we continue to prove our strength here in the fields.”

Then a Chinese American sister asks, “What do you think about your relationships with men? We struggle with the attitudes of men who we feel must share the work of the household.”

The Tachai sister answers, “It is the same here, but women must be strong enough to do both—to work and fight like men and to take care of the household and the children.”

The Chinese American sister replies, “If we are to change our position in society, men as well as women must change. Men must also care for children and cook. It is reactionary to think that women must be superwomen and do everything.”

When Lee translates the sister’s response, there is a confused murmur among the Tachai sisters. One sister rises in some distress; then all of the Tachai sisters follow her out of the room.

“What happened?” The Chinese American sisters look at Lee for an answer. “Where did they go?”

Lee shrinks down in his chair and shakes his head.

After a while, one woman returns with a tray of tea and nervously passes the cups around.

The sisters say to Lee, “Ask her where they went. Why don’t they join us for tea?”

Lee translates, but the woman only smiles.

“That’s so weird.”

“Is it something I said?”

Lee nods. “I think so.”

One of the guides assigned to the group walks in quickly and speaks with Lee. Lee nods and turns to the sisters. “He says that they said you called their thinking reactionary.”

“Right.”

“You can’t say that!” Lee jumps up, tipping over his tea.

“Oops.”

“He’s right. Haven’t you figured it out? Being reactionary is like being an imperialist capitalist pig.”

“What did Mao say? All reactionaries are paper tigers.”

“What does that have to do with anything? You insulted her.”

“Oh, shit.”

After about an hour, the Chinese American sisters find a way to apologize and to get the Tachai sisters back into the room.

Lee translates, choosing his words carefully. “There has been a misinterpretation. What we meant to say was that in a historical context, women in China have advanced to a stage in which they are still proving their strength, and this is also the case for us in America, but in comparison we have also reached another stage, in which our men must share the burden of the household. This we see as a progression similar to the stages that lead from capitalism to socialism to communism.”

The Chinese American sisters look anxiously at the Tachai sisters, who break into smiles of relief.

“Yes, now it’s clear. An unfortunate misinterpretation.”

“Good job, Edmund.”

While Lee is busy interpreting, his teacher Chen is in Peking, housed at the Overseas Chinese Hotel and waiting anxiously to see, after an absence of twenty-five years, his old teacher and mentor.

As soon as Chen hears the hesitant knock at his door, he springs forward excitedly. The elderly man standing in the doorway of his hotel room chuckles to see his student, now a middle-aged man. Even after so many years, the gracious formalities of greeting each other seem improbable, and Chen finds himself speechless. As if to save Chen from any unseemly emotional outburst, the old teacher smiles and simply nods, “So it is you,” and walks into the room.

“I’ve been here for many weeks, but the process to see you has been complicated and very slow. You are the first person I asked to see,” Chen complains.

“I have been in the countryside,” says the old teacher. In fact, Chen’s persistence must have called the old man back from the country. But it is just as well. Even though the old teacher volunteers to go, he is much too old to be useful, and the mud and damp in the winters are hard on his old bones and bad for his rheumatism. He volunteers to go in order to be closer to his wife, who is sent there to teach. Fortunately she finds a small compound for the two of them, and his duties are light.

“Where in the countryside? I should have come to visit you.”

“Not too far from my own village in Hunan.”

“Then you had an opportunity to write again?” Chen remembers that his teacher was known for his stories about village life in Hunan.

“I have not written in many years.”

The old teacher is a well-known and celebrated writer during the days before the liberation. Chen studies his work along with other writers of this generation. They are men and women who are infused with the spirit of the May 4 movement, and urged to write a new Chinese literature that reflects the reality and future aspirations for a new China. Inspired to do their part for the revolution, they congregate with artists and other writers in Yenan, the intellectual center of the Communist revolution. They come inspired by their fellow writer Lu Hsun’s Call to Arms. Chairman Mao calls Lu Hsun a great man of letters, a great thinker, and a great revolutionary. The work of revolutionary writers is a heady time in Yenan in those days.

Chen knows that his teacher no longer writes, but he still hopes. He goes out daily to the bazaars in Peking, standing in line at the China Books counter where books are sold cheaply and by the thousands. He buys books of every sort, but can never find any of his old teacher’s, nor of any of his colleagues’ of those early days.

The old teacher looks around the room and notices the piles of the small five-by-seven-inch books stacked everywhere.

“Why have you have stopped writing?” Chen questions his old mentor. Again, Chen asks an empty question for which he already knows the answer, but he wants to hear his teacher’s words.

“My writing is out of touch with the people.” He picks up a copy of Hao Ran’s Broad Road in Golden Light from one of Chen’s stacks and peruses the cover.

Hao Ran himself sits in the same room only a week earlier. Chen interviews the popular writer who, if it really mattered, could claim that several million copies of his new novel were sold in a matter of weeks. People are hungry to read, and these days anyone can afford the thirty-two cents it costs to buy a book. Royalties are irrelevant; Hao Ran tells Chen he is a “worker in the field of literature.” He is of the generation of writers after the old teacher.

The old teacher sits on the edge of Chen’s bed and removes his cap. “My writing is not what is required these days.” He replaces Hao Ran’s book on another tall stack. It is Hao Ran, a peasant cadre who learns to read during the war of liberation, who now represents the spirit and the realization of the Yenan Forum in 1942, where Chairman Mao declares that there is no such thing as art for art’s sake—that all literature and art are for the masses of the people, for the workers, peasants, and soldiers.

Chen leans forward from his chair. “I’m reminded of the last time I saw you. I was seated on the edge of your bed in that small room you occupied near the university. In fact, the bed was covered with books. I think you slept on top of them.”

The old teacher smiles. “Nothing has changed. I still sleep on a bed of books.”

“I remember you joking. You said: ‘The able join the revolution, the wise become government officials, but only fools want to become writers.’”

“Did I say that?” He scratches his head.

“Do you still collect antiques?” Chen recalls his teacher’s extraordinary collection of jade and porcelain, but especially his collection of handmade paper dating back to the tenth-century Sung Dynasty.

“I don’t have to. I work for the museum.”

“And your collection?”

“I gave it to the museum. It was best to share this treasure with the people.”

“Tell me about your work.”

“We are the receiving center for archeological finds sent in from all over the country. As buildings and industries go up, more and more excavations are taking place. We collect and classify this material and prepare it for storage.”

“Storage?”

“Yes, it’s a shame we don’t have more skilled students in museum work. We can hardly manage the task. Curating the material for display is next to impossible. So much is hidden away.”

“Your collection included.”

The old teacher nods. It is only a few years ago that the students band together as Red Guards. The People’s Army protects the museum to prevent the students from looting it. Chairman Mao speaks to the students in Tiananmen Square, ordering them to smash the four olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. The old teacher is dragged from his work classifying old objects taken from an old tomb. The objects are saved, but the old teacher takes his lessons from the Red Guards. When he cannot recite passages from Chairman Mao’s writing, he is sent to stand facing the wall. He can remember the titles of hundreds of books and the dates and origins of every piece in a collection of silk, but he cannot remember what Chairman Mao says about the unity of art and politics.

“While classifying these artifacts, I have been contributing to a meticulous history, for example of Chinese silk. Do you know that we can identify the origin of the silk, the date, the dye, the weaver, and the wearer from a single strand of thread?” The old teacher’s eyes light with excitement. What he describes is the collective work of research based in history, art, and science. Twelve other professors like the old teacher leave the university at the same time to devote their lives to this work.

Chen still pursues his concern about his teacher’s writing. “You are now writing about silk?”

“Yes, we published a history and compilation of forty thousand illustrations.” What is important is to create a record of the craft of silk, the skilled craftspeople and artisans who developed their art and techniques to the highest levels. This record also parallels the movement of people and historic change.

Chen hears the insistent tone in his teacher’s voice, and remembers the same timbre in Hao Ran’s words when describing how a factory worker he didn’t know bicycled a hundred li to tell him what needed to be changed in his novel. “The people have a stake in our literature, and we must learn from them.”

Although Hao Ran is himself a peasant farmer, he lives and works on communes to draw the most accurate portraits of the life and people. And he does not embark upon his first novel until he undergoes a thorough study of the Marxist theory of literature. “I thought finally I was ready to write, but I was told to study the communiqué issued by the 10th Plenary Central Committee of the Communist Party at the end of the 8th Session. Also the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Chairman’s writing on the struggle in 1957. Then there was the material on the Second General Assembly of the Soviet Russian Communist Party on Greater Democracy, championed by Krushchev.” In this study, he grasps the significance of true class struggle and its worldwide implications. Finally Hao Ran is ready to write his novel.

Chen reminisces about his days as a student under his teacher’s tutelage. “I remember when your book of short stories was published. There was so much excitement. I had to fight to get a copy. Your style and approach were entirely new.”

“I remember you had a wall newspaper.”

“That’s right. I posted it weekly on the college wall. There were a number of students who posted. I was mostly interested in poetry in those days.”

“And do you still write?”

“These days my writing is mostly historical and critical, translating Chinese to English, sometimes French.”

“And your poetry?”

“What there is of my poetry is in Chinese, and there is not such a market for it in America.”

They are both quiet for a long moment, each thinking perhaps about their separate destinies. Chen leaves China as an interpreter for the American Army during the war. He marries and divorces his first wife and then a second wife, and eventually he cannot return.

Chen asks about the old teacher’s colleagues. What happened to this or that writer?

“Oh I hear from them from time to time. They are somewhere in Manchuria. They are doing well. You need not worry about them.” Some of these writers are accused of being poisonous weeds, capitalist rightists in support of individualism and leading literature backwards. He changes the subject. “What will you do with all these books?”

“I will take them with me.”

“What will you say about them?”

“That is difficult to say. I hoped to learn from you.”

“Every generation hopes by its literature to leave its mark. My generation is over, and we played our part. The use of literature to rebel is one thing. We thought there was the gun and the pen and that we would be the pen. Yes, the pen can be a revolutionary force and a weapon, but we did not entirely understand what that means. The pen is also used to ensure conformity and political order, and that is as old as Confucius.”

“There are many ways to read.”

“There are many ways to teach one to read. Remember when you lived here, most people in China could not read.”

“And writing? You taught me to write.”

“I taught you nothing. You made your own choices. You came to me educated already in three languages. I was myself not so educated. I am almost entirely self-taught. Do you remember this? You were an extraordinary student.”

“You invited me to spend the summer writing. You admonished me to never lose the desire to write. That desire, you said, is life itself.”

The old teacher withdraws his glasses and polishes the separate lenses with a fold in his shirt. He tries to kill himself in 1949. There are details about their individual lives that cannot be reconciled in a few hours of a scheduled appointment after twenty-five years.

Chen walks his old teacher to the bus stop. “I should make a visit to your home. It’s only proper as your student.” He does not want to end their meeting so abruptly. He wants to know what expectations his teacher has for him, the pupil; what future does he anticipate? What potential does his teacher see in him that he could not in those days see? He does not expect to return to admonish his teacher about the very things he has not accomplished. He feels ashamed.

On the other hand, his teacher has to make a reckoning of his life, to write a full accounting of himself as self-criticism. During this period of self-reflection, perhaps a year, he takes the job of cleaning the museum latrines. He laughs at Chen and even seems to hop on to the bus. “This relationship of the teacher-student is no longer relevant. Don’t worry yourself about such things.”

“How is it that you are so healthy?” Chen calls to him through the open window of the bus.

“Silkworms,” he yells out. “Forty pupas a day. Keeps the blood pressure down.” And the bus pulls away.

It is not until Lee arrives in Shanghai that he really feels he has returned to China. He can hear the sounds of his parents’ voices in the people on the streets. They speak the language that is always encapsulated inside of his house. Even when he lives in Hong Kong, he lives among people who speak Cantonese, and it is the same inside of San Francisco Chinatown. At the same time, nothing in Shanghai is familiar to him. His family leaves in 1960 when he is a small boy; all he can honestly remember is being hungry. Those are the years of the great famine and the failure of the policies of the Great Leap Forward.

Lee walks around the city with one of his sister-comrades. She is the one who is always taking notes and asking forward questions. She asks Lee, “What does your father do?”

“He has a laundry business.”

“Oh really?”

“You sound surprised.”

“I didn’t think you were working class.”

“Why?”

“You’re so educated. And so polite.”

“Good grief.”

“We all assumed you were upper class.”

“We?”

“The sisters, you know. Stupid gossip.”

“And you?”

“Me too. My dad’s a janitor. My mother a garment worker.”

“The others in our group are probably all middle class, don’t you think?”

“Funny. That’s probably true.”

“They have a stereotype about the working class, that we’re all gross and unmannered.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Actually, it’s a romantic idea about the proletariat. They want to be proletariat. That’s why they pretend to act gross and unmannered.”

“Sounds like you’re tired and need to go home.”

“I thought I was home.”

“Look, one of those middle-class pretenders lent me her camera. I’m going to take pictures.” She looks around for something scenic. A man is stooped on the sidewalk cranking a metal contraption over a small stove. “Look, that man’s cooking something.”

“Looks like a small bomb.”

“Can you hear that? Firecrackers inside.”

The man pries open the lid of the metal contraption and positions the opening into a small sack. There’s a sudden BANG.

They jump back, and the aroma fills the air. “Oh shit. It’s puffed rice!”

“Go get us some. I’ve got to get a picture of this thing.”

Lee digs into his pockets for some change and approaches the puffed-rice vendor. The sister readies her camera to snap, then puts in down. “What’s the matter?”

Lee points to the other puffed-rice clients gathering, all holding metal tins and small baskets. “We didn’t bring a container.”

“Doesn’t he have any bags?” The sister snaps her photo.

Lee shrugs and turns around to hear a woman yelling: “Why are you taking a picture? Did you ask for permission? Do you think we are monkeys, so you can steal our pictures?”

The puffed-rice vendor looks up in confusion. Another citizen comes to join in. “Did you see her take your picture?”

Others on the street stop to hear about the incident.

“She’s not from here. Maybe she’s never seen a puffed-rice vendor.”

“What nonsense.”

“How did she get that camera? Is she a rich capitalist?”

“Ask her what her work is.”

Lee waves his hands. “Please. Please.” He tries to defend the bewildered sister. “She meant no harm. She’s just a foolish overseas countrywoman. How could she know the correct way?”

The sister backs up into Lee. “You said I was a foolish overseas something. I understand at least that much. What’s going on here?”

“That’s no excuse! She needs to learn some manners!” The original accuser is now very irate and red in the face. Her yelling attracts more and more bystanders until there is a large crowd of some fifty people surrounding Lee and the sister and the puffed-rice vendor. The people in the center continue to argue, and their arguments are passed on to people at the back of the crowd.

Lee looks at the sister, usually a woman of great self-confidence. Her eyes are wild with fear. “I could give up the camera, but it’s not mine,” she whimpers, clutching the straps around her neck.

Suddenly the crowd seems to part for a small man in a tattered uniform. Lee realizes that he is a police officer. He says, “Follow me.”

Lee and the sister follow him, but so does everyone else—the citizen accusers; the puffed-rice vendor–now with his small stove, bellows, and puffed-rice machine attached to either end of a bamboo pole; and everyone on the street. They follow the officer in a growing parade for two blocks to a traffic kiosk in the middle of the street. “Wait here,” he says. “I will check with my superior.”

By now there are certainly more than one hundred people surrounding them, and at every moment the crowd seems to grow. Lee notices that they are very comported, arranging themselves by height so that the shorter people are at the front of the crowd to see properly. This means that the children are in front. Even so, they are pressed up closely to the kiosk and seem to move in closer as the crowd from behind presses upon them. There will be no escape. Everyone stands there sullenly with stern faces, waiting for the police officer.

Lee can hear his own breathing and thinks he can hear the sister’s heart beating furiously. He feels his sweat dripping from his chin. He doesn’t dare move his arms. It is as if they are all standing together in a gigantic elevator. He looks down at a little boy who looks back up at him. The boy’s eyes follow his sweat and seem to be intent on watching each drop fall. Lee smiles at the boy. He is wearing a red and blue striped T-shirt that he has already outgrown because his belly is exposed. Lee speaks to the boy in a soft Shanghaiese. The boy’s belly is maybe two inches from Lee’s hand; he tickles the boy.

“Do you know how to sing?” Lee asks.

The boy giggles and says, “Yes, uncle. I can sing.”

“Show me what you can sing. Can you sing the ‘Internationale’?”

“That’s easy.” And he begins to sing. His voice is squeaky and sweet. It seems to rise up like a little bell at the center of a storm. Lee sings too, and very soon hundreds of people are also singing, like the great chorus in a revolutionary opera. They sing triumphant verse after verse that Lee does not know. The sound of their voices fills the city. Lee looks up into the Shanghai sky that seems at that hour to glow pink and hears one-fourth of the world’s humanity singing:

Arise, you prisoners of starvation.

Arise, you wretched of the earth.

For justice thunders condemnation,

for a better world’s in birth.

No more tradition’s chains shall bind us.

Arise you slaves, no more in thrall.

The earth shall rise on new foundation.

We have been naught, we shall be all.

’Tis the final conflict.

Let each stand in his place.

The Internationale unites the human race.

7: Chinatown Verité

1 CHINATOWN—NIGHT

(overheard) Forget it, Jake—it’s Chinatown.

Chinese extras crowd around the cream-colored convertible Packard in the final scene. Chinese men in caps or fedoras; Chinese women with hats and purses; a white soldier and his date. More Chinese appear on the street to rubberneck the final scene, bewildered and amused. SOUND of jazz horn.

Credits roll down over the night neon and paper-littered street. Cars and an occasional bicycle pass. Chinese continue to loiter. Butler: James Hong. Maid: Beulah Quo.

2 SAN FRANCISCO CHINATOWN—NIGHT

The Hollywood set fades into real takes of Chinatown nightlife. Camera view alternates between drive-by views and a walking jaunt down Grant Street in the dark. Pans the neon, pagoda facades, catches tourist couples, groups of families emerging from restaurants, shops closing, and workers walking briskly home. SOUND of radio music: Mighty Mighty (Earth, Wind & Fire).

OPENING CREDITS

Credits superimposed on the continuing Chinatown street walk. Camera view seems to be wandering, but it’s the yearly parade route. SOUND of the parade as a kind of residue only.

As the walk continues the night deepens, and the morning lights up through the fog. The streets are the same, but the traffic and passersby change from drunken tourists and bums to early-morning produce trucks, newspaper stand deliveries, shopkeepers opening up. SOUND of pedestrians, cars, restaurant noises, deliveries, music from bars and radios.

By the end of the credits it’s early morning, and the camera view heads into Portsmouth Square, still in fog.

3 PORTSMOUTH SQUARE

Stills of the plaza from four angles: Grant, Kearny, Clay, and Washington streets.

4 CLOSE-CHECKER TABLES

Pool of blood drying on stool next to one of the checker tables, with a trail dripped over the cement walkway. Water from a bucket is being splashed onto the stool, and a scrub brush is scrubbing away. As the blood is washed out, the black stenciled image of Mao Tse-tung emerges on the orange stool. As the camera pulls away from the one stool, it can be seen that all the stools around the table have been stenciled with Mao’s face. SOUND of scrubbing and background radio news about Watergate scandal, calls for impeachment.

5 GARDENER

Middle-aged Chinese man in his forties, in cap and uniform. He’s the caretaker of the square who does gardening and janitorial work. Good-natured and earnest. He’s got a portable transistor radio in his shirt pocket that he turns down before continuing his cleaning.

GARDENER

Drug addicts probably. Pool of blood downstairs too. No. No body. Maybe he got picked up. You don’t know what happens at night. Knifing each other for a fix. I leave at four p.m. That’s when my day’s over. I’m hired to garden, but daytime, this is like a living room, see what I mean? Old guys come out of their hotel rooms and spend the entire day here, playing checkers and mah-jongg. They gonna be here soon. Got to get this shit cleaned up.

6 TRASH CANS

Cans are painted with graffiti: Off the Pigs! Gardener continues to work, sweeping and throwing trash into the cans. Throws more water on the tables and Mao-faced stools.

GARDENER

Radicals did this. I could order some paint, but first it’s the city bureaucracy and second, the old guys say leave it alone. Old Fong said, “It could be my imagination, but my ass’s warmer these days. Why bother? More work for you.” Secretly, they don’t say. They’re, you know, red. Commies. You work all your life and end up with no family, alone in the park with just your best suit and hat and a social security check for $125, you gonna be a Commie too.

7 FOG LIFTS

As the fog lifts, a few men can be seen gathering in the square, their figures floating in like ghosts. SOUNDS of greetings, formalities. Some sit on benches and stare. Others settle down to read newspapers. A game of Chinese chess begins at the table where the gardener had been scrubbing.

The square fills up with business people passing, kids on their way to school, eventually employees crossing the square to lunch in Chinatown. Someone passes out leaflets. The gardener works in the background, trimming hedges, mowing. SOUND of traffic, bustle.

8 CHINESE CRAZY MAN

A Chinese man is walking around the plaza talking to himself. The camera follows him. He talks into the camera gesticulating and lecturing in Chinese. He walks over to a bench and stands on it. He continues to make his speech.

CRAZY MAN

(speaks in Cantonese with subtitles in English as follows) Chinamen are made, not born . . . out of junk-imports, lies, railroad scrap iron, dirty jokes, broken bottles, cigar smoke, Cosquilla Indian blood, wino spit, and lots of milk of amnesia.

. . . in the beginning there was the Word! . . . And the Word was CHINAMAN.[1]

The men playing chess and reading their papers look up and look away. They ignore him, or they seem to gesture and say something to their companions and continue to play or read.

CRAZY MAN

(continuing English subtitles)

I am the natural born ragmouth speaking the motherless bloody tongue. No real language of my own to make sense with, so out comes everybody else’s trash that don’t conceive. But the sound truth is that I AM THE NOTORIOUS ONE AND ONLY CHICKENCOOP CHINAMAN HIMSELF that talks in the dark heavy Midnight, the secret Chinatown Buck Buck Bagaw.[2]

SOUND of voice of Crazy Man continues in the background.

GARDENER

That one there. He’ll talk himself out next few days. He can do some sweeping around here. I’ll give him a couple of beers. Then they’ll pick him up, and he’ll be gone again to the mental can in San Bruno. Another thirty days, and he’s back again.

CRAZY MAN

(continuing English subtitles)

. . . I am a Chinaman! A miracle synthetic! Drip dry and machine washable.[3]

9 CHECKER TABLES

Men gather around the checker tables, look at camera and answer questions between turns.

OLD CHINAMEN

That one there, he’s crazy, but you listen. He say something smart. Most of the crazies, they got nothing to say.

This place here like a stage.

Ha ha. What they say? All world’s a stage.

I tell you something. We Chinese all actors. Pretending. (smiles into camera)

There you go again. Don’t listen. Go take your camera someplace else.

No really. Chinese are greatest actors. We play double roles. We got our real names and then we got our paper names. Name in lights, name in stone.

What you want to go tell them that on TV? You stupid or something?

What’s it to you? I’m old. I die tomorrow, they send my check to my paper name, but they bury me with my real name. Great Chinatown secret is we all got two names.

Both names real. Paper more real—that’s the one America wants. Give them what they want!

(Men argue in Chinese with the following subtitles)

Why don’t you tell TV what they want to hear? Like we got an underground tunnel system. Connects gambling joints to opium dens to prostitution houses. All run by the Hock Sair Woey!

Tell them you’re a fucking spy for Doctor No!

Draw them a map of the tunnels! Secret door right here underneath us. Push a button. Bingo! They can send their luk yi down there to die!

SOUNDS of laughter and continuing monologue of Crazy Man.

10 CLOSE—RICE PAPER

A hand with a flat piece of charcoal is rapidly working over the surface of rice paper tacked up on a wall. Very slowly the charcoal reveals carved Chinese characters beneath the paper. SOUND of charcoal against paper.

VOICES

(reading in Chinese overlaid by English translation)

Instead of remaining a citizen of China, I willingly became an ox.

I intended to come to America to earn a living.

The Western-styled buildings are lofty, but I have not the luck to live in them.

How was anyone to know that my dwelling place would be a prison?

11 EDMUND LEE

A young expert and translator of Chinese literature, Edmund Lee, is interviewed.

EDMUND LEE

This poem is one of more than one hundred poems inscribed by Chinese immigrants on the walls of the Angel Island barracks over a period of thirty years, from 1910 to 1940.

12 CUT TO—ANGEL ISLAND HISTORY

Photo stills of Angel Island history and Chinese detention.

EDMUND LEE

(voice-over) One hundred and seventy-five thousand Chinese immigrants passed through Angel Island, also known as the Ellis Island of the Pacific.

Immigrants were detained for medical examination, interrogation of documents, and deportation. They lived imprisoned in these barracks for months and years. Some made the long journey across the ocean never to touch the mainland.

Chinese laborers were excluded from immigration by a long history of U.S. laws beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Chinese could, however, enter as merchants or as the descendants of American citizens.

13 PAUL LIN—POET IMMIGRANT

A young Chinese American poet, Paul Wallace Lin, muses about the poets and their poems.

PAUL LIN

(points to the charcoal impression of the poem he’s removed from the wall)

I imagine this poet was a “paper son,” bought his immigration papers from a Chinese “paper father” he never knew.

14 PHOTO STILLS—SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE

PAUL LIN

His paper father was in San Francisco at the time of the Great Earthquake in 1906. When the city records were destroyed by fire, he got himself an American birth certificate, sailed home to China, and recorded the birth of ten sons—ten paper sons who could be citizens too.

15 PHOTO STILLS—COACHING BOOK

Photo stills of coaching books used by immigrants to memorize details about their paper villages and paper homes.

PAUL LIN

So this poet had to memorize the paper details of his paper family and paper village.

16 PHOTO STILLS—VILLAGE LIFE IN CHINA

PAUL LIN

How many houses in your village?

How many rows of houses?

On which side of the village is the altar of worship, east or west?

Where is your house located? Is it near the market?

How many rooms in your house?

In which room did you sleep?

Is the floor brick or dirt?

Where is the rice bin kept?

How many steps to the well?

Did you have a dog?

17 CLOSE—PAUL LIN

Return to close head shot of Paul Lin.

PAUL LIN

Sometimes a real son is deported, but a paper son is admitted. Sometimes the paper father was himself an adopted son. Maybe this poet arrived never to see his village again.

18 PORTSMOUTH SQUARE

Return to Portsmouth Square scenes where Crazy Man in the background is still pontificating.

PAUL LIN

Paper memories replace real memories. Memories merge and fade.

19 CHINESE PLAYGROUND

Groups of young people hanging around a playground. Some have permed hair and Mao-type silk jackets. Others wear polyester shirts, bells, and platforms. One group is in T-shirts, playing basketball. One of the players bounces the ball over to the camera. The others hang back, looking wary.

TEENAGE YOUTH

Hey cuz, it’s Edmund, from the Center. Yeah, I live on the Dhon side. My mom’s not there now. You still better not tell her I let you in. It’s not cleaned up or nothing.

Camera follows youth through Chinatown alleys and streets to Ping Yuen Housing Project. SOUND of kids playing in streets. Shots into shops: fruits and vegetables, hanging roast duck, pig snouts, fortune cookie machine, whole fish on ice, smoke shop, barbershop.

20 PING YUEN HOUSING PROJECT—PACIFIC AVENUE

Camera pans Ping Yuen apartments, picks up Chinafied details in the stylized roof and window treatments, and peeling green and red paint; follows children playing, residents laden with bags walking along the outside corridors.

TEENAGE YOUTH

My family moved here maybe five years ago. Compared to where we lived, this is the fuckin’ Gum Shan! This is the projects, Chinatown style. Man, where you gonna find projects matches the tourist town?

21 PHOTO STILLS—YOUTH’S FAMILY

Stills of tenement on Stockton and Washington, plus photos of the family, portraits of mom and dad.

TEENAGE YOUTH

Before Ping Yuen, we lived on Stockton in a one-room, maybe eight by ten. It could just fit one double bed, but we had a sofa stuffed in there too. I slept with my little brother on the sofa, his head that side, my head this side, and my sisters slept with my parents on the bed. We had a card table to eat and study. We cooked everything on a hot plate, but mostly my dad brought home leftovers from the restaurant. Shit, we left, family of ten moved in.

22 INTERIOR—PING YUEN APARTMENT

Camera follows youth around the two-bedroom apartment.

An old man is slumped over asleep in a chair before the television. He awakens disoriented, and the TV’s showing a news broadcast of the SLA and Patty Hearst kidnapping. SOUND and television visuals of burning house and gunfire.

Old man shuffles off and locks himself in the bathroom. SOUNDS of old man coughing, then hacking; a flush.

Bottles and boxes are stacked everywhere. Clothes are scattered. There’s a sewing machine in the living room with pieces of material stacked on the floor in one corner; a table stacked with books and cluttered with papers; and food, bowls, and plates spread on newspaper.

TEENAGE YOUTH

(points to sewing machine)

My mom had her sewing machine stuffed in the old place too. She does piecework at night. Sews all day in the shop, then comes home and sews some more. It’s whir whir all night. (He hits the peddle.)

SOUND of sewing machine.

TEENAGE YOUTH

(holds up a little girl’s dress)

Hey, she does a dozen of these, she gets five dollars.

23 GARMENT FACTORY—JUNG SAI

Exterior shot of Jung Sai Garment Factory. About one hundred women march with picket signs: Jung Sai Unfair! ILGWU Demands Just Wages! Support Childcare for Working Mothers! Boycott Plain Jane! Boycott Esprit! We Will Not be Exploited! Close the Sweatshops! SOUND of chanting.

STRIKERS

Minimum wage is $1.65, but we are not paid even that. Jung Sai says it complies with the minimum wage law, but in fact, our time cards are falsified to meet the minimum requirement.

For years we afraid to speak up, but now all of us united to protest!

We demand back wages and fair negotiation for better working conditions!

24 CHINESE RESTAURANT—LATE EVENING

Exterior shot of Sai Yon’s on Jackson Street. Teenage youth is hanging outside with a group of young men. Camera saunters in with him and others.

Interior of restaurant. It’s the late-night crowd, hanging out with bowls of noodles. About twenty young men commandeer two round tables, ordering platter after platter and beers. One waiter is feverishly rushing around trying to keep up with the orders.

YOUNG MEN

Yeah, you got your Wah Ching, your Joe Boys, your Suey Sing Boys, Hop Sing Boys, John Louie’s, Cookie Boys. Then there’s always the babies: Baby Wah Ching, Baby Joes. Like that.

Us? No we ain’t any of them. Do we look like those fei jies?

Me, I work in the area of holiday festivities. My work is seasonal, picks up around New Year’s and the Fourth of July. That guy there? He’s nothing but a pool shark. (laughter)

Yeah, Chinatown can be a dangerous place. It’s all over the newspapers. Guys shot in the head. That baby gangster Lincoln killed. Something’s got to give.

Hey, waiter. (motions to the waiter)

Let me tell you something. Tourists come to Chinatown anyway. They read the news, but they come anyway. You know why? Because the food is cheap. Tourists will risk their lives for cheap food.

(to waiter who’s come over to the table) Tell him how much you make. Yeah, throw in the tips and everything. How much?

(waiter throws up his hands in disgust and leaves, cursing)

I’ll tell you what he makes: what my old man makes—three fifty a month. O.K., max five hundred. He works six days a week and ten hours a day.

You wanna put down a tip, O.K. Bill’s taken care of, cuz. Services rendered. (saunters out)

(no one pays, waiter yells after them)

25 EXTERIOR—JACKSON STREET

Across the street a white ’66 Chevy Impala is ablaze. SOUNDS of explosion, commotion, and frantic running.

VOICES

What the fuck! Joey’s car!

SOUND of gunfire. Camera swings around wildly.

VOICES

Oh my god!

Edmund! Edmund!

Edmund is staggering. Blood is splattering across the sidewalk. The camera reels around, following scattering footsteps. Swirling visuals capture parts of faces, guns, flash of neon and scuffle of dark bodies. SOUND of motors gunning away and incoherent yelling in English and Chinese.

26 UNFOCUSED—JACKSON STREET

Camera continues to run, a long-view shot parallel to the ground, stretching down the concrete along Jackson Street. Edmund’s broken glasses can be seen through the viewer, and the image of a man running is framed in the glass of the unbroken lens. SOUND of gasping and labored breathing.

THE END

8: This Moment

So maybe there’s this moment. It’s different for everyone, but it’s pivotal. It’s the moment your head gets screwed off and screwed on again, and everything is changed forever. You can never see life the same way again. You can never go back. Well, you can go back, but you go back with new eyes, maybe a new brain, new ears, new mouth. It could be there’s a propensity for the moment, like DNA that’s planted inside you ready to catch the moment. Some folks might say it’s family history. Or maybe you can trace a series of events, plot them out like a map. You remember this time in your childhood: your mother or father said this; you saw that; you got caught up in this; you read that. Then it all comes together and wham! The lights turn on. O.K., it might be more subtle, more gradual, but there’s always something really significant that captures the heart and mind. And it’s not to say that it might not be painful or personally devastating as well. At that moment you shed an old life to become a whole person because, you believe, your body in its actions and your mind in its spirit are wholly in sync. Your talents and possibilities exist for a purpose that is beyond yourself.

Now it’s not as if this moment lasts forever, or that things don’t get sticky and go back on themselves. But it’s the moment you return to because it sustains meaning and empowers the lonely individual. Of course most folks never get this moment, and you who do get it are still imperfect human beings.

Witnessing Edmund’s death was that sort of moment. Paul, employed to capture sound, dropped the boom and ran down the street to find a pay phone. But it was Judy Eng who found herself watching everything through the narrow hole of the camera lens. She felt her face hopelessly glued to the machine as if thus empowered to find the source of the bullet and to stop it. The camera swung about searching and recording. It was a mechanical thing, a pompous truth machine. In the aftermath, these last minutes would be replayed relentlessly, scrutinized frame by frame, used by the police and the prosecutor to identity the killer, if not his accessories. Similarly, Judy sat in a dark editing room and obsessively studied the tape over and over again.

“Stop it!” Paul yelled. “How can you keep watching that?”

Judy faced him stalwartly. Her eyes were bloodshot. “Leave me alone.”

“Why are you doing this? Let the police figure this out.”

“Who gives a fuck about the police!”

“You need help.”

“I don’t need help. I need Edmund.”

“Edmund’s gone,” Paul said softly.

“He’s there,” she wept. “Look, there.” She pointed at Edmund’s figure collapsing on the monitor.

“No, that’s not him. That’s not him.”

“It’s my fault.”

“No.”

“It’s true. Look. I timed the minutes from when he falls to when I stop taping. One minute and twelve seconds. Do you know how long that is? I saw him fall in my finder, and I kept on filming, like it wasn’t real or like it was real, like fascination.”

“It’s just confusion.”

“It’s not.”

“You’ve watched it too many times.”

“I was watching him die. Like a fucking spectator!”

Running back down Jackson Street from his frantic call for help, Paul found Judy cradling Edmund’s head in her lap and wailing. She was wailing again now.

One minute and twelve seconds. The time it takes to make a choice, and Judy kept watching her choice over and over again. I think it’s possible at this juncture that Judy might have gone over the deep end. Paul certainly thought that might happen as he tried to drag her away from the equipment.

Chen stood in the doorway, the dark empty corridor behind him. He walked over to a table, pushed away the piles of papers, newspaper articles written by Edmund, and scattered photos, and put down the large paper sack he was carrying. “Paul,” he said matter-of-factly, “I forgot to buy a newspaper, and we could use some drinks. A beer for me.” He drew some bills from his pocket.

Paul loosened his grip on Judy, glanced gratefully at Chen, and walked away.

When Paul returned, Chen and Judy were hunched over Chinese takeout boxes picking out the contents with chopsticks.

“Sorry,” Chen looked up. “We couldn’t wait. Judy hasn’t eaten in three days.”

Judy had grabbed the box of rice, hoisted mein on top, and was wolfing down the contents.

Chen pulled out his pocketknife. Paul popped open a beer for himself and nursed it slowly, observing the empty boxes. He munched on an almond cookie.

“We saved some tofu for you. Your favorite.” Chen pushed a box over and tossed him the chopsticks.

Paul picked out the tofu pieces and stared at a series of photographs of Edmund speaking in front of a mic at some rally. Chen puttered around him, gathered the empty cartons and rearranged the table, and finally hustled the film crew of two out of the studio.

At Judy’s house, Chen said to Paul, “You stay here with Judy. Tomorrow you edit the tape with her.”

“What?”

“For Edmund’s memorial in two days.”

“Edit? I don’t know how to do that.”

“She knows how. For you, it’s easy. Tell a story.” He spoke quietly but firmly. “Don’t leave her side until it’s finished. I’ll see you at the memorial.”

Paul fell asleep on the sofa. When he awoke he looked around and recognized all of Edmund’s things, but in a domesticated setting. This had been Edmund’s life since China, where he met Judy. She had arranged his practical life, become devoted to his work, learned to run a camera because he encouraged the idea. Paul thought she was stuck to him like a puppy dog. He groaned.

Two days later, Chen took his seat next to Paul at the memorial. “Nicely done,” he commented.

“She did all the work.”

“Where is she?”

“Behind the projector.”

“Good.”

“I haven’t eaten for three days.”

“Good.”

The chief editor from the East West newspaper got up and spoke about Edmund. Then someone from the Chinatown Youth Services. Then from the Chinese for Affirmative Action. Guys from the Tiao Yu Tai struggle were there. A woman from the Chinese Progressive Association, aka I Wor Kuen, and a guy who ran Everybody’s Bookstore for the Asian Community Center, aka Wei Min She, were also in line to speak. Old Red Guards were there too. A woman from the Health Services and even the old guys from the Laundrymen Association and the Six Companies chimed in. Wah Ching and the Joe Boys came in an uneasy truce and all the poets from CARP and Kearny. They all told the Lee family that Edmund Yat Min was a good son and exalted member of the community. It was maybe the first and last time that all these entities with competing political agendas and visions came together. In an amazing display of largess, they refrained on one side from denouncing Edmund as a reformist or on the other as a communist. Still, they all claimed some piece of Edmund to demonstrate the worthiness of their associations, shamelessly putting in a plug for Edmund’s support of garment workers or bilingual education or his fight against police brutality.

I guess you could say that Edmund was our slain Chinatown Romeo, sweet prince fallen between many houses. But maybe you could also say that this event was a testimony to the kind of person Edmund had become in a few short years. He was probably not, as they exaggerated, a man of great passion and unwavering commitment to the rights of oppressed people, but he was a young man of uncommon intelligence who used his talents to work daily on behalf of people in need. Why did he choose to do this? There had been endless meetings, strategy sessions, leafleting, articles to write, politicians to approach, folks to interview, statistical research, funding and legal matters, speeches and debates. And Edmund did all this while nominally working on his graduate studies in Chinese political philosophy and history. Chen knew Edmund’s genius and that Edmund, who alone among all his students could leave Chinatown, had chosen to stay. I am not sure if Edmund, had he lived, would not have eventually moved on, but these few years of which we speak were formative in the lives of many. A seed was planted. A moment of awakening.

Judy came over to hug Chen. “Thank you,” she said.

When she walked away, Paul complained, “Hey, how come . . . ? Oh, never mind.”

“Jealous?”

“Oh fuck you. That was my work too.”

“I could tell.”

“That wasn’t easy. He was my best friend.”

“I know.”

Paul looked angrily at Chen, whose eyes were quietly sad. “Take me home,” Paul said, shamefully. He tugged Chen’s sleeve. “Please,” he begged. “I’m famished.”

Although the pivotal moment theory might work for some, it might be overblown. As time drags on, other events step up to the plate, and one begins to wonder why any fork in the road presented the less traveled option. Chen knew his own confused path that, upon review, could not have been changed then and certainly not now. Chen was a man who lived in several exiles. As for Paul, he was still too young to know. Thinking about Paul and Chen, maybe you couldn’t exactly compare pivotal moments, but rather a single desire that united the two men: the desire to write.

The desire to write is linked to the desire to think and the desire to record. You could say it’s all the same thing, but you probably favor something or another. You who think you’re thinking are recording your thinking, but you who think you’re writing are recording your writing. You who think you’re recording are writing your record. It’s all stupidly obvious except for the desire. You could say it’s an obsessive trait, and once it kicks in, you’re stuck with it. The desire is selfish and personal. It has nothing to do with talent or giftedness. That becomes apparent or unapparent in the act, but the desire is an enigma. You say, I want to be famous; I want to be remembered; I want to speak; I want to communicate; I want to imagine; I want to remember. But writing itself is a strange way to accomplish any of that stuff, sitting alone for hours with a pen and paper or typewriter. It’s a complicated desire that becomes mixed up with the self, and Chen and Paul, if forced, would admit that it was a desire stronger than any human relationship, including the one between them.

Writing itself might be a laudable occupation, but the desire could be sinful—a lot of pretending and fakery. Mao was probably right to try to socialize writing, make it work for the people. Of course once they try to make rules about writing, you’ll go off and hide somewhere and write heresy. Still, having the desire is not the same thing as having something to write. The desire has to coincide with belief and necessity at a time and place in history. So the Poetry Boys Club hung around coffee houses, mostly with their desire, and defined a belief and necessity in a time and place.

“I think we need to present ourselves professionally,” Paul said. He could hear grumbling on the phone. “She doesn’t know us from Adam. Truth is, we’ve never actually done this, never published anything.”

“There’s the anthology in progress, and we’re going to publish her husband.”

“Besides which, we’re Chinese.”

“What difference does that make?” Jack’s voice rose.

“Did your folks wear I’m Chinese buttons?”

“Yeah, well—”

“We’ll pick up Kamiyama in Fresno.”

“Good idea.”

“Listen. You agree this is important.”

“John Okada publishes the first real serious novel in Asian America in 1957! It goes out of print with a couple lousy reviews. Nobody recognizes it’s a classic. And we discovered it!”

“Practically in a trash bin at McDonald’s.” Paul patiently recounted finding the discarded hardcover at the used bookstore on Turk and Market. Heroics were all part of it.

“It means we got a history! We’re yellow writers who come from a tradition of yellow writing!” Jack bellowed, then his voice got intense. “So this just in: Tuttle sent me a copy of a letter from Okada dated 1956. Okada says in the letter that he’s writing another novel.”

“So what happened to it?”

“It’s gotta be in his papers. Maybe an unfinished manuscript. Who knows! Can you believe this? We gotta get that manuscript!”

“So we’re not just asking her permission to reprint No-No Boy?”

“Right! We gotta get permission to ransack her house!”

Jack threw a duffel and his guitar case into the trunk of Paul’s car. Then he hooked some hangers under plastic on the windows behind the driver’s seat.

“What’s that?” Paul turned around.

“High-school graduation suit.”

“Does it still fit?”

“You want professional, this is the best I can do.”

“Vintage.”

“Speaking of, where’d you get this car?”

“I bought it off Chen.”

“It wasn’t this color.”

“Right. I painted it.”

“Fucking Steve McQueen. Why do I need a suit? Leather will do.”

Paul laughed. “You watch too many movies.” Paul twirled the ’66 now-green Mustang GT out of the driveway, shot down 101 to pick up Kamiyama in Fresno, and they were on to L.A.

What happens next in L.A. at Dorothy Okada’s house is history. Her husband, the writer John Okada, had died only months before, and she had burned all his papers before moving. It wasn’t entirely her fault. No one seemed interested in his work or writing. Not UCLA. Not the Japanese American community. There was no affirmation of his work, and she had lived her own reality. Now these young men had driven four hundred miles of pure anticipation to her doorstep, and she could not fathom their disappointment. She did not know this desire to write and the cost of defining a belief and necessity in a time and place.

Paul looked at Jack in his high-school graduation suit. He looked like he was going to rip it off his body. Paul’s look said, Be professional or I’ll kill you. Jack was fuming, thinking that young chump Paul wasn’t even born when Okada’s book was published. But Kamiyama looked at Jack with a sansei look that said, Don’t make her feel bad. So Jack said, “Well, O.K., tell us about John. Ah, what sort of guy was he? I mean, what sort of sex life did you have together?”

Paul got right to work on the book projects. Maybe he did it because he was the youngest and didn’t know it was a shot in the dark. That’s another thing to take into consideration, the way things happen because you are young and don’t know any better. You might say it’s youthful idealism, but youth doesn’t really know what’s ideal. It just feels right sometimes.

Paul knew how to collect rent, write up contracts, keep accounting books, carry out a will. Maybe Jack or some other poet made the contacts, but Paul followed through, got the contracts signed, deposited and signed checks, printed letterhead, licked the stamps on the envelopes. He had learned from Edmund about press releases and advertising. It was business, on the one hand. On the other, he had learned something from editing Edmund’s memorial tape. It was like Chen had suggested. You tell a story. Pieces for the anthology arrived, along with interviews of the authors. A new introduction and afterword for the Okada reprint had to be written and proofed. Paul poured over the material and meticulously edited everything. He got the confidence to get Kamiyama to pull back on the nostalgia and to make Jack accept cutting out whole paragraphs of run-on blather. The whole operation looked professional, but it was just Paul, schlepping books to the post office in the back of the green Mustang.

You’ve got to wonder, too, about the role of teachers. The problem for Paul was that Chen had become more than a teacher. Sometimes you think the student wants to surpass or show up the teacher, but that wasn’t the case for Paul. He wanted to make Chen proud. He wanted to give back something significant in return. He was busy being a member of the poetry club, of course, but he thought this was part of delivering the goods, as it were. The edited book, some of it his own writing—he wanted to give that to Chen. Of course, he didn’t think about it in exactly this way until months later, so while he was busy being a singular worker in a staff of one, he failed to notice Chen’s malaise.

Chen went back and forth methodically to his teaching appointment. And for days he might disappear with a car to the races.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Racing.”

“I thought you said you were going to write this weekend.”

“I couldn’t.”

“You say that every weekend. What are you reading?” Paul picked up the scattered papers Chen had discarded on the carpet next to the sofa. He thought they might be student papers, but he recognized the typewriter and the style. “This is Edmund’s stuff.”

“There’s a box of it. Judy gave it all to me. For a long time I couldn’t look at it.” Chen rubbed his eyes. “This is the dissertation he started.”

Paul slumped into the sofa.

“It’s brilliant.”

“Can you publish some of it?”

“Maybe.” Chen shook his head sadly.

Paul tried to change the subject. “I found this artist in J-Town who does prints and silkscreens. He’s perfect to do the cover for No-No.”

“Such a loss.” Chen hadn’t heard Paul. He got up and walked to the large window of his study, the library where Paul and Edmund had spent so many hours reading together. Chen stared out, watching the fog slip into the bay. He didn’t hear Paul leave the room.

The next weekend, Paul ran into the emergency room of the Valley Memorial Hospital in Livermore. He found Chen with a bandaged head and broken arm, rushed there from the Altamont Raceway. “You wanna kill yourself?” he barked at Chen.

“This driver cut in front. We were lucky, you know. That’s skill.” Chen proudly hid his embarrassment.

Confined to the house, Chen sat next to Edmund’s box of writing and read and reread everything. He pulled out Edmund’s translations, made corrections, and had Paul type up new drafts.

“When are you going to get that cast off?” Paul asked.

“Maybe next week. If you don’t want to type for me, it can wait another week.” Chen looked frustrated, shuffling through papers with his left hand.

“I can do it.” Paul tapped a ream of papers on their bottom edge and said, “But I’ve got these transcripts to complete, then turn into bios. They want it all in a few weeks.”

Chen spoke to himself. “There are another fifteen poems in this series to translate. I’ll have to do that myself. But Edmund’s history seems complete.”

“Hey, want to hear this? This is Jack’s interview of Keye Luke.”

Chen looked up, but he hadn’t heard Paul. He muttered, “Then there are the footnotes.”

Paul got up to peruse a spread of photographs on the coffee table. He stared at a black-and-white photo of a Chinese man holding a pole balanced with two baskets filled with chickens. The man in the photo and those around him were wearing traditional jackets, slippers, and Western hats.

Chen glanced over and said, “Arnold Genthe. Took those in Chinatown before the earthquake. Tangrenbu: what they called Chinatown in those days. I’ve been collecting them. Thought there might be something we could use.”

Paul nodded and stared a long time at a second photo, of a little girl standing in front of similar baskets. Her Chinese jacket looked soiled, torn and shredded at the sleeves; her pajama pants were wide. Perhaps she had to carry those baskets on her back.

“In that drawer over there.” Chen pointed. “There may be another box of photos.”

Paul pulled out a large tin box and pried open the cover. It was filled with envelopes filled with photographs. He rummaged through and pulled out a large portrait of a young Chinese man and woman. The woman was wearing a simple gown and holding a small bouquet of flowers. The man was dressed in a tux. In the can there were other photos of the same woman, standing on the Golden Gate, sitting under a tree at a picnic, standing on what seemed to be the Stanford campus. She wore a short-sleeved sweater and pleated skirt. Her hair was bobbed, her bangs cut straight against her forehead. Paul had very little memory of his mother, but the small pounding in his chest told him that these images matched the ones he knew. He looked up at Chen, who was buried in Edmund’s text.

Those days Chen only thought of Edmund’s work—Edmund’s brilliant scholarship, Edmund’s genius, the tragic loss of Edmund. Chen had realized that there would be no outlet for his own poetry, and that like his own teacher before him, his writing was out of touch with the people. Who were “the people”? They were young people like Paul and Jack, who had a vision for a new literature. It was now their turn. Of this new generation, only Edmund had read Chen’s poetry and knew its flavor and value, but Edmund was no longer. Paul’s father’s newspaper was no longer. It was a limited readership in a foreign land. He could write equally well in French or English, but he did not find his creative voice there. He was not a Nabokov or a Conrad, in that sense. Out of necessity, he had become a scholar and a translator.

He hid his slight intellectual disdain of Paul’s project, which seemed to him dislocated from literary history whether Western or Asian, but especially Asian. He knew that it was a breaking away and a breaking out, that someone had to stand up to American racism and to claim American English. He knew the political meaning of literary acts. He knew that if Paul and his generation of writers wanted a history, they would have to dig it up and invent it for themselves. He believed in this and accepted his small part: consulting, translating, offering historic accuracy and money. But Paul sensed what Chen would not admit: how much Chen missed Edmund and how he had thought that Edmund would eventually play out his political calling for more literary pursuits. So it’s not only a question of the role of your teacher, a role that might arise from happenstance, but also your role as a student, finally chosen to succeed. Paul knew that Chen had chosen Edmund.

It shouldn’t have mattered. Paul loved Chen, and Chen loved Paul. But the elegant portrait of the Chinese man and woman with the flower bouquet told Paul more than he wanted to know. Paul saw the soft features of his mother that matched his own, his own questioning eyes. And the beautiful Chinese groom was Wen-guang Chen. Paul slipped the photos back into the tin can, walked away from the house in Marin, following the winding streets down from its overhanging cliff.

After some time Chen checked his watch and turned on the evening news. Walter Cronkite presided from his desk as a frantic crowd of people scaled the walls of the American Embassy in Saigon; others fought to jam themselves against and even hang off waiting helicopters.

“Paul!” Chen ran from the room, but Paul had boarded the ferry and was crossing the bay back to Chinatown.

9: Authentic Chinese Food

How many places you gotta go before you find a decent bowl of noodles? Two? Three? Ten? Decent in this town—O.K., two, three, why not? We got standards and competition, so for decent, it’s not a problem. But if you’re serious, if you take your noodles seriously, you got to do your homework. Now I tell you what: true noodle connoisseur, he takes his noodles late at night. Gotta be after nine, earliest. Later the better. Midnight. You know why? It’s the soup; all day long the bones and leftovers getting thrown in that pot, simmering down easy, see. Already your choices narrowed, right? Gotta be those joints open to the wee hours.

Chen, see, he’s got what I call the palate. So he does the noodles tour. Not like a tourist thing, more like a quest. Not that he couldn’t make quality noodles himself. It’s the gritty kind he’s after, the kind you can only get in a busy kitchen at the end of the day. It’s a return to his bohemian days, but now he’s got money. Could be it’s an opera or a concert, classy event like that, or the last showing of a movie. Could be it’s a smoky house of jazz and blues. That’s just the set-up. Then he peels away for the noodles showdown.

So that’s how I meet Chen Wen-guang. I call him Wen for short. It’s one a.m., and we’re at the counter side by side at the Cathay. We got the same bowl of noodles, ’cept he’s dressed nice. Madison Avenue’s finest. ’Course by this time of night, he’s got his silk tie stretched out and thrown over his shoulder. Jacket is hanging off the stool behind him. Time was I could afford suits like that, make a killing back of Lucky M and go out and buy me the best. Pinstriped, double-breasted, silk hanky. But that was before my union days.

Wen’s got his eyes closed, concentrating. Then he takes up a slurp of the noodles and gets the texture between his teeth. I look at him, and I say, “Pork neck. Could use a few more.”

He says, “Snout. That would do it, too.”

And I know he knows. It’s the sticky cartilage that gives a soup grip. I’m impressed.

Then he says, “And some more white pepper.”

He nabbed it.

And that’s how it started. I say, “Have you tried Chop Suey House over on Post?” And we meet there the next week, and every week practically we’re on the quest.

So one night I tell him this story:

Long long time ago in a faraway place, two lovers meet every solstice, summer and winter. That’s the only time. Twice a year. You know, the gods. They control everything in those times. So those lovers they make the most of it. You bet. Having sex this way and that, like in those Indian instruction books, Kama Sutra. Hey, I know my stuff. Pathetic old codger like me. That’s me in book six. But I been to every other book. Yeah, I been there. O.K., nowadays Joy of Sex, right? Like that. You use your imagination. Wet. Sticky. Hot. Rolling around. Running around. You got a chance only twice a year, you better be good. You remember your best times and then you double that. No, you triple that. Imagine that. That’s probably why the gods prohibited it. They were jealous.

Then, you know, after you spend that kind of energy, you gotta eat. Now, this is the important part. This is when the lovers appease the gods, or who knows, maybe they won’t let them come together next solstice. Hey, it can’t be just any food, rush out and get a burger. Young people these days think porno and burgers. No, these lovers have the palate. Palate of the gods. Gotta be maybe a ten-course meal. They do the jan ken pon for who dishes up the first course, and then it’s back and forth, each one trying to outdo the other, appetizer to dessert. Now this is some good cooking. Finest ingredients. Highest quality. And everything perfect like a concert. Pungent dishes followed by subtle and refreshing. Crunchy to smooth and succulent. Chicken to pork to duck to beef to fish.

So I tell Wen this story. I say to him, “You know this story? It’s a classic.”

He looks at me like, if anybody knows a classic, he’s the one. Stuck-up son of a bitch. I can say that, you know. He’s my friend, like a kid brother.

I say, “Every Asian people has a version of this very story. Japanese, Korean, Pilipino, Vietnamese. Some things different. Sometimes the sex before. Sometimes after, but basically the same story.”

“And different menus.”

“Now you’re talking.”

I get serious. “This is the great myth of Asian peoples. How can the West compare? All they got is that poison apple.”

Wen laughs.

“Think about it. Innocence to knowledge. Good and evil. And then they get to have sex. What kind of screwed up thinking is that?”

Wen orders another beer.

“Sex is everything. Beginning of the universe. It’s one big—” My gesture says it all.

Wen and I toast.

I continue, “But it’s more than meets the eye. Complicated. Two cooks can’t live together!”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s true what they say. Too many cooks, you know? Got to be one palate at a time, but like a balancing act. You Chinese say, yin and yang. And each gonna offer the other the most delicious dish possible, but it’s also competition. It gets more intense with each dish. So the gods know what they’re doing. Keep the lovers apart, they get the best possible meal.”

“That’s the moral of the story?”

“I don’t know nothing about morals. What’s the moral about that apple? Don’t go talking to snakes? It’s already too late. It’s like life. You want good sex? You want good food? You gotta go to the trouble.”

“What about companionship?”

By now, I know. Wen’s living in some big house all by himself.

“I’m living how many years by myself in that I-Hotel? I used to have a regular girlfriend, but then she disappeared. I never see her again. So what’s left? I got food. I’m fighting this eviction thing.”

Wen looks sad.

“Listen,” I say, “Wen, my friend. You still young, but I tell you something they never tell you when you’re young. You think you gotta have your woman. That’s what you hungry for all the time. Guys like me don’t have that chance. So we got that knowledge. But I tell you this. Most important thing you gotta learn is to be alone. I think I’m not cut out for this. I go back to the Philippines or something. But this is my home now after fifty years. It’s my freedom. I’m gonna die free. And I’m gonna die alone. Same for everyone.”

I don’t see Wen for a while, then he comes around and we go look for noodles like usual. He says, “I been thinking about your story.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, the part where I’m confused is the menu. You said twice a year on the solstices. That’s summer and winter. How about the equinoxes? Spring and fall?”

“O.K., we can change the story. Why not? Four times a year.”

“You can change the myth like that?”

“Why not? It’s my myth. I change it if I want.”

“Is that so?”

“This is improvement. Definitely. You got to get the variety of food in each season. Of course! Spring duck! Summer could be tropical, refreshing. Fall, big harvest. Winter gotta braise the meats, slow cooking in heavier wines.” So that’s when we start to make menus. I say, “At night, I’m dreaming menus. Like summer. First course: lime ceviche, try albacore.”

He says, “Second course: drunken chicken in Shao-hsing wine.”

I say, “Fried lobster claws.”

He says, “Cold sour soup with cucumber.”

I say, “Peking duck on steamed bread.”

He says, “Zucchini flowers and tofu.”

I say, “Barbecued spareribs.”

He says, “Beef with asparagus.”

I say, “Brandied scallops.”

He says, “Lychee sorbet.” Then he says, “The first dish, ceviche. That’s not Chinese.”

“Who said it has to be Chinese? What about lychee sorbet?”

“Closer than ceviche. We do South America later. For authenticity, the menu should match the Chinese version of the myth.”

“O.K. Squab-stuffed mushrooms.”

“Now I’m hungry.”

“O.K. You buy the ingredients, I make everything. Completely authentic. You gonna think you’re Nixon in China. I heard he got himself a Chinese cook, but common knowledge he’s Pilipino.”

“You’re lying.”

“Maybe not. You look around. Take the movies. Pilipinos stand in for everything: Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Egyptian, Hawaiian. That’s what good coloring does for you.”

“What’s the movies got to do with this?”

“Hey, I cook you any kind of cooking. Doesn’t matter. People come peek in the kitchen to see who the chef is. Ask me, when did you come here from Japan? Or, you must be French Vietnamese. Did you get your training in France? I always say, that’s right. How did you know?”

So that’s how every once in a while I go to Wen’s place, put on my chef hat, and cook. Always a crowd there testing the palate. Like I said. At night, I’m dreaming menus. O.K., I’m dreaming beautiful women too, but all I remember in the morning is the menu. Think about it. Beautiful menu like a beautiful woman: refreshing, delicate, sophisticated, succulent, juicy, spicy. Takes your breath away. You die happy. So if I give the menu to Wen, one day we go shopping. Half of my dream comes true. What you think? Fifty percent is pretty good for old guy like me.

People say, you gonna give us cooking lessons. Pass on the traditions. Pass on the secrets. I say sure. I pass on everything. Some say, what is it? The ingredients? You get this stuff imported? I say, I don’t know. Most of it hundred percent American ingredients. Made in America. Where you think we are? Some stuff you improvise. Make your own. Then there’s bird nests and shark fins. Ube and taro. If you get your hands on the exotic stuff, they all go wild. They can’t believe their taste buds. But from my point of view, it’s only fifty percent ingredients. Other fifty percent is technique. Every cuisine got technique. You got to know the way. For Chinese, it’s the way of fire.

So Wen’s got a celebration going, and three of us taking turns with the dishes. Wen, he got a duck smoked in tea, red peppers, cinnamon, and star anise. Then Jack Sung’s making lobster Cantonese with black beans. But I got the piece of resistance.

Jack says, “Hey, manong. You starting to sound like Master Po.”

“That’s me. Kung fu cooking master.”

“What’s that dish you got there?”

“You know this dish? Mrs. Nixon’s favorite.”

“Mrs. Watergate herself?”

“Serious. I made it for her in the Great Hall when she visited China in 1972.”

Wen laughs. “Another true story.”

I take out the Life magazine and show Jack the pictures. “Here it is. You call this dish, ‘lady’s quivering buttocks.’”

“No fucking shit!”

“Dongpo pork,” says Wen. “It’s a Song Dynasty recipe named after the poet Su Dongpo. Dongpo wrote a poem for this dish: ‘In Praise of Pork.’”

“He compares it to a lady’s quivering buttocks?”

“Why not?”

“Oh, mama!”

The pork belly melts between your teeth. Like I said, it’s a piece of resistance.

“What else you cook up for Pat?”

“Oh, jasmine chicken soup, three-colored sharks fins, smoked duck in tea.”

“And they say I’m bourgeois.”

“You convert to Mao, we let you eat like this too. By the way, this was Mao’s favorite too. That’s why I make it. To honor Mao.”

“End of an era.”

We toast to Mao, who just died. We toast to Chou En-lai, died in January. “To the end of the Long March.”

“That’s it,” Jack says. “You should write a cookbook.”

“I been thinking the same thing. I base it on the classic Asian myth of the two separated lovers.”

“What’s that?”

I tell him the tragic story of the lovers that all Asians should know.

“Chen, this guy’s a real bullshitter.”

“You look it up. All Asian people know this myth.”

Wen winks. “Look it up.”

I say, “My idea for the cookbook is simple. We do Asian American cuisine. American because we use ingredients found in America. Imported is O.K. Ajinomoto. Soy sauce. Wonton wrappers. Then we do ten-course menus in Chinese, Japanese, Pilipino, Korean, you name your Asian American. Only problem is I can’t write.”

Jack says, “You leave that to me.”

“You got to tell the classic myth. That’s the key.”

“If you insist.”

Wen knows better. “And we have to test all the recipes.”

“No problem. I volunteer.”

I say, “After Nixon in China, you see all these Chinese cookbooks. Problem I see is no pictures. I gotta have pictures in my cookbook.”

So after this, I’m telling Jack the menus and the recipes, and Wen is painting pictures of the food. He’s also got poems in Chinese next to the pictures. How do I know what they say? I say to him he better have sex in those poems, like “quivering buttocks.”

He says, “Don’t worry.” Up in his studio, he’s painting every day. I find out he quits teaching. Quits writing his books. It’s just painting and cooking and writing poetry.

I say, “Maybe you taking this thing too far. After all, just a cookbook. Me, I still got to go out and protest, argue with the mayor. Stop this eviction. If I don’t do that, I got no place to live. What’s a cookbook?”

“Not just any cookbook,” he says. I can see he’s fighting loneliness. Working out his freedom. He makes arrangements of food and paint. We go to the markets and he sketches everything. When we cook, he’s got his paintbrush right there in the kitchen, and he gets the inspiration. Quick brush work. He’s painting everything. Knives and woks, ducks and bamboo, lobsters and mangos. Step by step and more poems. It’s all there. Pretty soon, you see a whole world.

Meantime, I’m telling my story to Jack, who’s taking it all down on his typewriter. He’s always arguing, “We can’t say you cooked in the Great Hall for Nixon. It never happened.”

“So what? In my mind, it happened.”

“What about this story about you and Ho Chi Minh in Paris?”

“That’s one of the best stories.”

“And this one, cooking for Imelda?”

“She goes wild for my pancit. She goes so wild, she worked it into her love cosmology.”

“When were you in Yokohama?”

“That’s really true. I docked there with the merchant marines. I got a girlfriend there. Wanna see her picture? Yoko like Yoko Ono.”

“Like Yoko-hama.”

“Hey, I forget to tell you all my girlfriends. We got to put them in.”

“You got a girl at every port, right?”

“You know it.”

“I give up.”

“In my long life, there’s no work I don’t do. I do everything. I been everywhere. If I don’t do it with my own two hands and my back, stooping with my legs, walking with these old feet, I do it with my head. I fish up in Alaska. I do canning work. I do stoop labor and cut asparagus, artichokes. Pick tomatoes, strawberries, grapes. I carry a gun for the U.S. military. I build houses. I plant flowers. I build bridges. I sell grocery. I’m a bartender. I work the dock. I organize for the union. I gamble. I bust some butts in my time. Short time I do acting jobs in Hollywood. Dance with Fred Astaire. I play the ukulele in Honolulu with Don Ho. And all the time, I got the women. You write that down.”

“Where’s Paul? Let him do this. Hey, Chen, I got a postcard from Paul. He’s in Taiwan. When’s he coming back?”

Wen shrugs. “Haven’t heard.”

“The Okada book came out and he left. I think we worked him too hard.” He shakes his head, then looks at me. “Is this a cookbook or a fake autobiography?”

“Nothing fake here. I’m for real. I’m your real Makoi.”

“What?”

“Makoi. Makoi. You don’t know?”

“I’m not ghostwriting no imaginary autobiography, McCoy or not.”

“Why not? All the recipes I give you: authentic. This one goes back to Song Dynasty, original recipe with original poem. Taste travels to you from eight centuries.”

Wen says, “He’s right. Anyway, you’ve been doing the research. You should know. A whole history of civilization in a single dish. In time, everything else vanishes, but the dish can be recreated.”

“Food is made in America, but the recipe is guaranteed authentic, put your mark of good housekeeping. O.K., sometimes I change something here and there. Working to perfection, but I’m like the artist. Add my signature. But my life? My life is a dream. It’s what I got. What you want? Take it away?”

Wen’s got his brush out, splashing color. Dark red plump chunks of lady’s buttocks. Almost feel the quiver. Then the poem. Brush goes in quick flashes. Swish. Swish. Poem’s like cuisine. Makes the world sensible. Ingredients in the head, then apply fire. Have you eaten today?

10: All the Things You Are

What thoughts I have for you tonight, for I walked down Kearny under the shadow of an invisible hotel with a piano improvisation: all the things you are. Sweet poet. Sweet lover. Monk of the Tenderloin. Master Konnyaku. Fillmore Pilipino priest of ten thousand pianos. Play a song for former lovers meeting in the howling rain.

A drenched, unshaven man disappears in a steamy cloud behind the glass of a telephone booth.

Paul?

Wen-guang? It’s been a long time.

Yes. I need a favor.

Where are you? Bad connection.

It’s the rain. Did you hear that? Thunder. I’m at the gas station. Bottom of the hill. You know the one?

Car trouble?

No. They’ve condemned my house.

What?

All this rain. The foundation is slipping. They’ve cordoned it off.

Shit.

I’ve removed your things. What you left. And there’s more. Could you come? I borrowed a truck. I’ve been filling it up.

Shit! I heard that one.

That was close.

I’ll be there.

Sitting in your teahouse made from the refuse of the demolished Fillmore, the rain is softer, drenching the hydrangea along the bamboo wall. The spirits of those old Victorians seep through the wood and curl around your tea. Some are raucous spirits, dark panels pulled from dance floors and smoky bars, titillating tunes of blues and bebop. Some are cloistered spirits set in dark hardwood cherry, hoarding precious leathered first editions. What of those books? The music and the words now silent. Konnyaku, the three-legged, one-eyed cat, curled in a disheveled ball next to a warm teapot.

Meanwhile, the rain crashes in great waves across the Golden Gate. Cars slither precariously, headlights groping forward. Up the winding hill, two small rivers of mud and debris rush past on either side of the traffic parade. At the top of the hill, the cypress point to the ocean in the direction of the windswept storm.

A drenched man is running from his house with an armful of books.

Your stuff. It’s all in the Siata. There’s more. I threw in what I could. I filled the trunk, the backseat. Car’s too small. It’s a mess, but they didn’t give me any time.

I don’t need my stuff. I haven’t needed it all year.

I need to tell you something.

It doesn’t matter.

Your mother and I met at Stanford. She was a brilliant student of English literature.

Can’t this wait? You’re soaked!

We were great friends, so we got married, but I could never be faithful. We were married only a year, and she left. But we were always friends. It’s really true I introduced her to your father. They were very happy together.

Why didn’t you tell me before?

When your father died it didn’t seem appropriate, and later, it felt very strange. I thought you would be repulsed, and you were.

I thought you might be my father.

No! That’s not true! That could never be true. Is that why you left? Why didn’t you tell me?

Why didn’t you tell me?”

I’ve missed you.

It hurts, Wen-guang. It hurts badly.

Konnyaku, with a dingy spotted coat the color of konnyaku, a tail hairless in spots, a dark socket for the lost eye. That must have been some fierce fighting, screeching yowling dissonance, claws and teeth ripping and tearing. Two crazy cats in a fight to the finish. How did you come by this ugly old soldier, this war-torn survivor?

The relentless rain washes across their faces, dribbles from nose to chin to chest to stomach to crotch. The clothing has to be peeled off, layer by layer, abandoned with boots in sloppy piles in the dark entry-way. Naked, shivering.

They’ve turned off the gas and electricity.

What did they say? Can they save the house?

Too precarious to know. They told me to leave immediately.

Immediately. Then—

You’re shivering.

Get under. Hurry.

Hurry.

Whip me up some frothy tea from boiled rainwater and tell me about all the women you have ever loved, all the serenading and sweet-talking, all the tender tunes you played. Or better yet, toss a fish head in the boiling rainwater and tend the roiling pot, replay the minor keys along the spine, the major keys across the hips, the soft and frantic melodies that brush the lips. Or better yet, throw in bulbs and tubers, roots and leaves, seeds and bark, algae and fungus, and stir the moaning moaning in the pot.

It was as if the thunder of the ocean’s waves engulfed the house, crested in white sheets against the windows, pounded the roof.

Wait. Listen. Hear that?

Rain. Never stops.

No. Get up.

I can feel it. Do you feel that?

Here. Put this on. Quickly.

Like a small earthquake.

Hurry! Get out!

Take the Siata. I’ll follow in the truck.

Where are you going?

One last thing. I just remembered.

Forget it. We can come back later.

It’s too valuable.

It’s too dangerous.

You’re getting wet again. Get in the car.

Fuck it! Just hurry.

I’ll meet you at the bottom.

The hot pot sits between us, steam and fragrance curling up to the dark underbelly of your Fillmore roof. We fish with long chopsticks for the tender and shared sustenance. You pick out a bulb. I pick out a tuber. You pick out a root. I a leaf. You a seed. I a piece of bark. You algae. Me fungus. The fish head cools in a bowl for Konnyaku.

The Siata pulls away, its wipers flapping, wildly banging at the splatter. Headlights search the road, chasing the water to the bottom. She pulls herself around the hairpin curve, tires slipping, skimming a slick skin of water. She skids to a stop, backing away from a torrent of mud and uprooted trees. Within, she holds a small treasure and the unrequited future: a pink slip; two unfinished manuscripts, one of translated poems, songs of Gold Mountain, and another, an illustrated cookbook; a tin can of old photographs.

Light flashes a sudden blast, illuminating the falling house, but the thunder that follows is the thunder of its crashing: groan and slippage of parting concrete, shattering glass, crossbeams of weighted timber caving in on three tiered floors of gracious elegance, living room falling into library falling into studio, falling.

Afterword

In the 1990s, Amy Ling, then professor of English and Asian American literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sent me a questionnaire she hoped would turn into an essay that would be part of a collection of essays by Asian American writers. The answers I returned disappointed Amy—she sent me a more full-bodied response written by another author. Comparing my work to the other author’s, it seemed to me that we both had answered everything with the same ideas, except my answers were in shorthand. I decided to answer Amy with something she really didn’t want at all, something she could reject outright. So I wrote an article about a book I’d never written. That led to thinking about that unwritten work. It was about the Asian American movement, mostly as I knew it in Los Angeles. But by 1997, I had come to live in Santa Cruz, and I thought I should explore the San Francisco/East Bay area where my parents grew up and where I was born. I shifted to a new center for this now real project: the International Hotel in San Francisco Manilatown/Chinatown, the site of political activism and community service for almost a decade until 1977, when residents of the hotel were forcibly evicted.

The I-Hotel, as it was known to its residents and the greater city, housed mostly elderly Filipino and Chinese immigrant bachelors, men who had come to work and make their fortunes prior to World War II and who, because of antimiscegenation laws, exclusion acts prohibiting Asian immigration, and a life of constantly mobile migrant labor, were unable to find spouses, have children, and to settle in the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s, the I-Hotel was sold to force the eviction of the residents and to redevelop the site as the extension of a West Coast Wall Street. In an effort to save the hotel and the surrounding Chinatown and Filipino communities, Asian American activists staged dramatic protests with thousands of participants and made the hotel a center for political activities and community service. The I-Hotel became a magnet for a multitude of political action groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, a center and symbol for the Asian American movement.

Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the political and social changes of this period, Asian American students and community activists, influenced by the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, and international revolutionary movements, gathered to create what became the Asian American, or Yellow Power movement. From this came Asian American studies, with departments in colleges and universities across the country, communes and cooperatives, drug rehabilitation programs, bookstores, newspapers and journals, theaters, filmmakers, cultural centers, artists, musicians, politicians, law cooperatives, educators, historians, underground Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collectives, and literary and political movements. For the Asian American community, this was a flourishing time of new creative energy and political empowerment.

Since beginning this project, I have spent countless hours in Asian American archives, wandered around the old brick-and-mortar sites, read books, viewed films, listened to music, speeches, and rallies, and had both long and short conversations with over 150 individuals from that time. Researching a period in this way is passionately involving, so much so that you begin to live it and to forget why you began the project in the first place. At some point, I realized that I was supposed to be writing a novel, and the research had to stop.

I began to create a structure for the project. I found my research was scattered, scattered across political affinities, ethnicities, artistic pursuits—difficult to coalesce into any one storyline or historic chronology. The people I spoke with had definitely been in the movement, but often times had no idea what others had been doing. Their ideas and lives often intersected, but their ideologies were cast in diverse directions. Their choices took different trajectories, but everyone was there, really there. Thus the structure I chose for the book is based on such multiple perspectives, divided into ten novellas or ten “hotels.” Multiple novellas allowed me to tell parallel stories, to experiment with various resonant narrative voices, and to honor the complex architecture of a time, a movement, a hotel, and its people. While the book has become inevitably big, it yet seems to me to be a small offering, a rendering to be continued and completed by others.

Author’s Acknowledgments

In the way of institutional support to accomplish research for this project, I would like to acknowledge: faculty research grants awarded by the Committee on Research and the Institute for Humanities Research at UC Santa Cruz; Amerasia Journal at UCLA and Russell Leong and Mary Kao; Asian American Studies Collection at UC Irvine and Dan Tsang; Asian American Studies Collection at UC Santa Barbara and Gary Colmenar; Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University and Malcolm Collier and Marlon Hom; Asian American Studies Library at UCLA and Marjorie Lee; The Car Show, KFPK Pacifica Radio, and John Retsek; Chonk Moonhunter Productions and Curtis Choy; City Lights Books and Paul Yamazaki; Eastwind Bookstore and Harvey Dong; Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley and Wei Chi Poon; Filipino American National Historical Society and Fred and Dorothy Cordova; Fine Arts Gallery at San Francisco State University and Mark Johnson; Freedom Archives and Claude Marks; Hokubai Mainichi Archives and J.K. Yamamoto; Hon-Kun Yuen Archives and Eddie Yuen; Japanese American National Library and Karl Matsushita; Kearny Street Workshop and Nancy Hom; Manilatown Heritage Foundation and Emil de Guzman; McHenry Library at UC Santa Cruz and Frank Gravier, Martha Ramirez, and Beth Remak-Honnef; National Japanese American Historical Society and Francis Wong and Peter Yamamoto; Philip Vera Cruz Audio Archive and Sid Valledor; San Francisco State University Special Collections and Helene Whitson; Steve Louie Archives and Steve Louie; Urban Voice and Boku Kodama; Yuri Kochiyama Archives and Yuri Kochiyama. Also, I’d like to recognize the work of Sudarat Musikawong, who worked for the project as a research assistant through UCSC, creating a database and copying many hours of audiotapes from the H. K. Yuen audio archives. Also, a special nod and thanks to Warren Furutani and Jessica Hagedorn for shared material, to Sina Grace and Leland Wong for their graphic renderings, to Linda Koutsky for art design, to Anitra Budd, Allan Kornblum, and Kristin Thiel for editing, and to Claire Light, Molly Mikolowski, and Patricia Wakida for grant and publicity consulting support. Many thanks to the remarkable staff at Coffee House Press and the staff in Literature and Humanities at UC Santa Cruz for their careful and meticulous work, to Lourdes Echazabel-Martinez and Ronaldo Lopes de Oliveira for translations, to Jane Tomi Boltz and Fred Courtright for their legal expertise, to Craig Gilmore and the Facebook Fan Club for making me feel famous, and to Micah Perks for being my colleague in the crime of fiction. For Richard Sakai, there are no words to express my humble heart. And finally, a wave to Amy Ling, in the heavens, whose prodding gave rise to an article about an unwritten book; now that book is written.

Along the way, generous readers have agreed to read and comment on early drafts of some or all “hotels”: George Abe, Shoshana Arai, Anjali Arondekar, Chris Connery, Eddie Fung, Emil de Guzman, Estella Habal, Alex Hing, Ted Hopes, Makoto Horiuchi, Ruth Hsu, Betty Kano, John and Mary Kao, Allan Kornblum, Lelia Krache, Russell Leong, Jinqi Ling, Zack Linmark, Steve Louie, Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, Stephen Sohn, Andy Chih-ming Wang, Rob Wilson, Paul Yamazaki, Judy Yung. I mention their names to thank them for their critical contributions, care, and time. Many more people have joined this journey, but I have decided not to name names. I have been humbled by so many stories, some revealed with bravura, others insinuated obliquely, but much also silenced from pain, fear, or loss. If this fictional representation seems larger than life, perhaps it is because the work and lives of these activists have been largely invisible. In part, I came to know a kind of collective invisibility of folks in the movement who, in this labor for social-political change and revolution, gave up their youth, personal aspirations, and predictable family and social lives. My thanks and gratitude for the stories recuperated from this great labor cannot be conveyed except through this fiction, but it’s still entirely my fault.

—Karen Tei Yamashita

KAREN TEI YAMASHITA, the author of four previous books and an American Book Award and Janet Heidinger Kafka Award recipient, has been heralded as a “big talent” by the Los Angeles Times, extolled by the New York Times for her “mordant wit,” and praised by Newsday for “wrestl[ing] with profound philosophical and social issues” while delivering an “immensely entertaining story.” A California native who has also lived in Brazil and Japan, she is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California-Santa Cruz, where she received the Chancellor’s Award for Diversity in 2009.

Also available by Karen Tei Yamashita

The Illustrators

LELAND WONG’S prints and photography have been widely published and exhibited both nationally and in the California region. During the 1970s he became involved with the Kearny Street Workshop and remains active in San Francisco’s Asian American community as an artist, screen printer, and photographer.

Illustrations for all chapter frontispieces and karate poses (pages 267, 270, 273, and 276).

SINA GRACE is the author of Cedric Hollows in Dial M for Magic, and the comic book series Books with Pictures. He also provided illustrations for Amber Benson’s Among the Ghosts, a children’s book for Simon and Schuster. He lives in Los Angeles.

Illustrations for “Chiquita Banana” (pages 262-264) and “War & Peace” (pages 244-250).

Permissions Acknowledgments

Anonymous: [#35 “Leaving behind my writing brush and removing my sword, / I came to America”] and [“Ox”] from Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants of Angel Island, 1910-1940, translated by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung. Copyright © 1980 by the History of Chinese Detained on Island Project. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Washington Press.

Frank Chin, excerpts from Act I from “Chickencoop Chinaman” from Chickencoop Chinaman & The Year of the Dragon. Copyright © 1973, 1974 by Frank Chin. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Washington Press.

Kahlil Gibran, “On Friendship” from The Prophet. Copyright 1923 by Kahlil Gibran, renewed 1951 by Administrators C. T. A. of Kahlil Gibran Estate and Mary G. Gibran. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

V.I. Lenin, excerpts from What Is to Be Done? Reprinted with the permission of Foreign Languages Press.

“Si hablo del hambre . . .” (“If I speak of hunger . . .”), translated by Lourdes Echazabel-Martinez. Reprinted by permission of the translator.

Mao Tse-tung, excerpt from “Changsha,” translated by Willis Barnstone, from The Poems of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Harper &Row, 1972). Translation copyright © 1972 by Willis Barnstone. Reprinted with the permission of the translator.

Paul Valéry, excerpt from “The Graveyard by the Seal,” translated by C. Day Lewis, from Selected Writings of Paul Valéry. Copyright 1950 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Funder Acknowledgments

Publication of this book has been made possible in part by a major donation from Richard and Amber Sakai. Support for this title was also received from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Coffee House Press receives major general operating support from the Bush Foundation, from Target, the McKnight Foundation, and from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature and from the National Endowment for the Arts. We have received project support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Coffee House also receives support from: three anonymous donors; Abraham Associates; Around Town Literary Media Guides; Bill Berkson; the James L. and Nancy J. Bildner Foundation; E. Thomas Binger and Rebecca Rand Fund; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; the Buuck Family Foundation; Dorsey & Whitney, LLP; Fredrikson & Byron, P.A.; Jennifer Haugh; Anselm Hollo and Jane Dalrymple-Hollo; Jeffrey Hom; Stephen and Isabel Keating; Robert and Margaret Kinney; the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate; Allan & Cinda Kornblum; the Lenfestey Family Foundation; Ethan J. Litman; Mary McDermid; Sjur Midness and Briar Andresen; Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner, P.A.; John Sjoberg; Mary Strand and Thomas Fraser; Jeffrey Sugerman; Stu Wilson and Mel Barker; the Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation; the Woessner Freeman Family Foundation in memory of David Hilton; and many other generous individual donors.

To you and our many readers across the country, we send our thanks for your continuing support.

Also by Karen Tei Yamashita

Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

Brazil-Maru

Tropic of Orange

Circle K Cycles

Примечания

1

From Chickencoop Chinaman by Frank Chin, from Aiiieeeee!, Howard University Press, 1975

2

See note 1

3

See note 1

Content

Yamashita Karen Tei I Hotel

I Hotel: A Novel Karen Tei Yamashita

1: Year of the Monkey

2: Language in Reaction

3: Analects

4: My Special Island

5: We

6: Tofu Tigers

7: Chinatown Verité

8: This Moment

9: Authentic Chinese Food

10: All the Things You Are

Afterword

Author’s Acknowledgments

Also available by Karen Tei Yamashita

The Illustrators

Permissions Acknowledgments

Funder Acknowledgments

Also by Karen Tei Yamashita

Примечания