A
FAMILY TAPESTRY
Jose
Here
is a man who has traveled and lived on three continents, only to die alone in a
desolate North American hotel room. Not that he didn’t have family; families he
had two of his own, one in Hong Kong and one in Peru. But his spouses only gave
him illegitimate children.
My uncle Jose always leaves a trail of
water and bits of vegetables when he worked in the restaurant kitchen.
Similarly, he left unfinished business and traces of himself where he had
traveled and lived. He walked unevenly because one of his legs was shorter than
the other. Born in China, immigrated to Peru at an early age, and came to
Washington State when sponsored by his sister at the age of fifty, he died
alone in a hotel room meant for an overnight guest in Seattle’s Chinatown. Is
there something that attracted people to come to Seattle’s Chinatown, a most
comatose place in the entire cosmos, or is it simply bad feng shui?
When Jose first arrived, he and I shared
the old house on Bay Avenue, across the dirt field beyond which lies the rail
tracks. Freights with cargo came from Georgia on the Georgia Pacific line to
the Port of Grays Harbor in Aberdeen, where in the past, lumber was shipped to
Japan. In exchange of lumber to build houses in earthquake-ridden Japan, we
purchased the latest in consumer electronic gadgets from there.
My mother is Jose’s younger sister. When
our small family-owned café in the small town of Aberdeen expanded when tourism
was still good, my father needed an extra hand in the kitchen. So we sponsored
Jose over from Peru. Jose claimed to have worked in big chifas in Peru that served over a thousand people. After some
familiarity with her oldest brother, whom she has not seen since she was six in
China, my mother, between dinner and bar rush, would say, “Take back your wife,
Poi’s mother, so that you will have someone to take care of you in old age and
burn incense for you in the after.”
“But I didn’t adopt Poi,” Jose
would protest, “That woman did herself,” referring to his legal wife in China.
“It is too late to argue such matters,” my
mother would speak a bit louder over the cracking of the hot oil in the frying
wok, “Your foreign Peru woman is a foreign devil. At least your wife in China
is Chinese.” To this Jose had no reply. He was over fifty with a limp and
dependent on his sister’s family for work and company. None of them were
sympathetic to his life’s choices. And Jose couldn’t speak English, although
fluent in Chinese and Spanish.
The night that Jose died in his room at
the Republic Hotel in Chinatown, Doctor Hong signed Jose’s death certificate.
His Peruvian wife Carmen said that she and my uncle Jose went shopping the
previous day and Jose had fallen on the escalator. That’s why his body was all
bruised up. My mother didn’t pay for the funeral and burial and so Jose got a
pauper’s grave. I didn’t even know which cemetery. My mother had not talked to
me for some time and I found out about Jose’s death from my brother Lange. Lange
is the bearer of bad news, as well as good news, I suppose, because he is the
bearer of all news. That was his function in the family. He had the gift of
gab. The rest of us did whatever work was in front of us – chopping onion,
de-veining prawns, whipping gravy, or
ladling soup. Lange had polio in one arm and so he waited on the customers.
Since none of us got paid when we worked for our family in our teen years,
Lange worked for tips. So, Lange became a “smooth talker,” as our family friend
Marvin the Sears and Roebuck auto mechanic would say.
Lange spins it just right is the way I saw
how he operated. My sister Linda said that Lange was just “happy-go-lucky.” My
siblings all seem to speak a different language than I did, because I was born
in China, the same as my parents. My parents referred to my siblings as “jook
sing” or bamboo-natured, because they were like bamboo, hard and sturdy
outside, but wildly hollow inside. So, I got the burden of being the
Number-One-Son. It is just some unfair game my parents played on guys like Jose
and me, China-born and so supposed to play by Chinese rules.
“I don’t know how much professor make, I
make thirty thou,” is what my father says to me. I had wanted to be a
mathematician ever since I saw an inspirational film about a mathematician and
how goes about doing his work. The film showed a mathematician; just a man
dressed casually bending over a creek and looking intently at the flow of the
water. He then draws arrows on his clipboard and scribbled some letters and
numbers. He is representing the water flow by a vector field. These are a bunch
of short arrows that depict the direction and force of the water flow. This way
he could calculate the erosion on the creek bank over time. He makes a
representation of the real world with a set of diagrams and formulas. He just
needed a clipboard and a pen. I thought to myself, “Wow, that’s a job I like –
work alone, anywhere, see things out there and inside your head. And you don’t
have to be in a shop or an office. That would be the ideal job for me!” And I
did well in high school. But my father had other plans for me and was out to
sabotage me. At least, that’s what my paranoia ideation tells me now. Today I
am 72 years old and my father has been dead for 35 years, over third of a
century. And my wife tells me that I am still talking about my father as though
he was in the bedroom with us. But what my parents did tell me though, one
night after the closing hour of the restaurant, they took out a jade and gold
set. It was an investment. They are from the old country and never trust the
value of currency and so they invested in jewelry. And the Chinese value jade
the most.
My mother holds up a jade bracelet. Even I
was surprised at the color composition of the jade. It appeared to be translucent
with different hues of different colors diffusing in the stone, as if an orange
or blue cloud would disperse and spread in the sky. “You hold up a piece of
jade to the sky,” my mother said, “it is looks like clouds running in the jade,
then it is good jade,” she said.
“Someday
when we can’t see you anymore, you will have some jade too,” said my dad. He
was wearing a soft green sweater, as if that softened him as well. That was a
benign time when I was 21 years old, back from the University of Oregon,
visiting for the Christmas holiday. Later on times did not prove to be so
bucolic.
“He
Good Boy.”
It embarrasses me when my mother tell
people that I am a “good boy,” because then I can’t do anything wrong. Of
course I wanted to goof off as much as the next guy, and I wasn’t that young
anymore, at the age to sow wild oats. Tacitly I could not date a white girl,
and I imagine for most of the white people in town, they don’t want their
daughters to get familiar with me. Sometimes living strictly inside the margins
of safety is missed opportunities. I mean, some of the white people in town
would not have actually mind it if I dated their daughters. After all, my dad
was a “businessman.” That is, our restaurant was a steady source of income, and
later when I worked for the post office, I was earning enough money to support
a small family. But the unspoken injunction was not to date at all. My parents
didn’t know what was out there and I didn’t know that much either.
A
drive to Nowhere
Like
I would just jump into the car; it was variously a ’55 Plymouth, a ’61 Comet,
or a ’68 Plymouth again. Where would I go? There was no one I know on a
Saturday. The weekends, the dreaded weekends. My search for psychic sustenance
begins with those fifty mile drives to nowhere.
The
family restaurant would be busy on the weekends. I would need to work until
three in the morning on both Friday and Saturday nights, amid the grease vapors
and the clanging of the wok, steam from the noodle vat and the steam table. I
was eighteen and still a senior in high school in the coastal town of Aberdeen,
Washington. These are the towns that the freeway missed in Richard Hugo’s
poetry. The rain was melancholic and it drip and slanted all day, and I was
trapped being “Number-One-Son” of a Chinese immigrant family, born to Kim and
Bill who operated the Hong Kong Café on Simpson Avenue which was on the Highway
101 as it slices through the logging town of Aberdeen, where logging trucks
carried the long logs with dancing red flags on them to warn the drives behind
them. This road goes up to Forks, Washington and eventually to Port Angeles as
it looped around the Olympia Peninsula. And going south, the same two –lane
road would lead to Pacifica, California.
I
worked variously as waiter, cook, and occasionally manager. Except for work and
study, I was lonely and alone. I was so lonely that I enjoyed reading Silas
Marner in my room during the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, the
only two days that we closed the café. My parents had undergone the world-wide
Depression in their youth in China and then the Sino-Japanese War. I was so
lonely that the book on the back seat of my car, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
was actually a good dialogue with an imaginary companion. I knew the writer in
the sense that he knew me, he knew my loneliness. It was a small town, and
there were few minorities in it. There was a black janitor at the Smoke Shop
Café, owned by the mayor. I suspect that he was there for a reason, just like
the only black student at the local Grays Harbor College was a football player.
The black janitor seemed to recede into the wood panels of the café dining room
as he mopped it during idle hours.
I
remember I keep on filling the coffee cup of the girl with the dark Spanish
eyes that came alone or with her sister, mostly alone. She drank her coffee
black and I was the awkward waiter in the slow hours of the afternoon. She and
I never chit chat and I never learned her name, but somehow once I summoned the
nerve to asked her whether she lived at home. She said she lived away from home
alone and as long as she doesn’t get into trouble, it was OK with her mom. She
was a year older and had dropped out of high school. I was also a part-time
worker at the Aberdeen post office and I drove the truck two hours in the
morning and two hours in the afternoon picking up mail from street boxes. And
on Saturday, I had the downtown walking route. I had a regulation uniform on,
and I felt like a worker, a government worker.
The
way out of town was a windy road, evergreens on both sides, a monotonous green
with firs shouting up 30 to 40 feet. These were new growth and I was a fourth
generation immigrant to these parts of lands. I was wondering how far I could
go and how high I could rise. But all I could envision was driving a modest car
to work at Boeing and perhaps have a son and a daughter and live again in a
modest house, befitting of an electrical engineer. Everybody in high school
said I could have become whatever I wanted to.
I
didn’t go that far; I drove to Ocean Shores and back then in 1968 it was only
one street along the beach front with the burr of the crabgrass waving in the
wind. There were summer homes that people did not live in during the winter. It
was fog and winter mists as described in Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great
Notion. He was talking about the roads in Oregon. Here the crabgrass rose
from the sand, an occasional gull, and the steady sloshing waves greeted my
loneliness, and I encounter no other cars.
Chrysanthemum
Showing posts
sorted by relevance for query Journal creation myth. Sort
by date Show all posts
Friday,
February 19, 2010
Journal
Here’s my own “Creation Myth”
Creation Myth In the beginning out of the Void and Chaos there was only one
Being, who called himself God. He was a lonely guy because although he had the
means to slow, stop, or to speed up time, to travel from one dimension to
another, to create galaxies and parallel universes as easily as you and I could
say “Pie” he had no one to appreciate his powers and his ken. He hadn’t even
contemplated the idea of a Dog yet, which was merely the spelling of his name
backwards. But one day, as he was traveling through deep space, through a “worm
hole” created by a massive dying star, which was creating a black hole, he
noticed that he was getting warmer and warmer as his infinite being was being
sucked into the black hole. An incredible insight came to him from this
darkness. He contemplated a department store called Sears, Roebuck, and
Company; he further contemplated all the things that he could create for this
variety store. He thought of washers and dryers, television sets, computers,
shoes, hats, winter mittens, and even chain saws. He thought even of home
improvement k here was no complex organism such as Himself that could
appreciate what he was capable of. His loneliness only deepened until he
thought of an entity called “Man.” [The reader is advised to read the word
“man” as a generic term for man, woman, boy, or girl] So, he invented dough,
the kind that you make cake and donuts out of and not the slang for money. He
fashioned the dough into little figures of men, women, and children. He put
them into the oven which he had previously invented. But since he hadn’t
invented a timer and a thermometer yet, he had to estimate how much time to
cook each batch of tiny dough figurines of the people he had fashioned. So, he
put the first batch into the oven, but he took them out too soon. They came out
as the “white” people. So, he told himself that the second batch has to stay a
little longer in the oven. But he waited a little too long, and so the second
batch came out too well done and so they were the “black” people. And so to
remedy the situation, He put in the third batch and took it out timing it
carefully. And so they came out just right. He called these the Asian people [a
bit of reverse racism here]. And so He created people. Even though the people
became highly knowledgeable and civilized after a few million years or so, they
kind of forgotten about Him, and so He invented immaculate conception and
created a Son of his own. He called it Godson. Some people wanted him to call
his Son by the names of Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, or whatever, but since God is
God and there is no way of telling him what to do, Godson became part of the
vocabulary and reality. So, this was the Original Story. Then the people
created Hollywood. After that, nobody knows the truth anymore. people created
Hollywood. After that, nobody knows the truth anymore.
February 13, 2010
I have not been posting the responses to the weekly discussions in this journal
and I have to do so now. I haven’t been writing in response to the View Points
and I have to do so now. From this point on, I have to follow instructions more
carefully.
This is the beginning of the 5th week for me, and I have to write about the
Master’s program and what it is to me. It means developing a certain kind of
confidence through expertise in what I study and do. It also means catapulting
me to a position where I can be an independent scholar for the rest of my life.
For someone who is 61 already, I realize that I must consolidate what I have
learned in life so far and put all the experiences to good use. I need to
integrate them so that there is a certain identity or “brand” to it.
My Master’s degree will be on psychoanalytic literature. I want to study not
only what writers write, but also why they write what they do. This means then
that I must study a whole spectrum of social, political, and philosophical
issues of the epochs that the writers write. Some write for pure personal
pleasures and not meant to share with others. I wonder about the poems of Emily
Dickinson and wonder if she expected them to be published.
Others write to change the world. Some are very controversial: such a writer is
Solomon Rushdie.
Now let me think about my background for such an undertaking.
I am already a published, award-winning poet. And so what is there to do, after
we have climbed the mountain, asks Donald Justice? We can look down at the
valley and regret that we are here with the snow and miss the warmth of the
valley?
Climbing literary mountains isn’t exactly what I am out to do. I have always
written for therapy.
Viewpoints from Your Mythic Journey
P 10. Make a list of 10 words or phrases that describe you best. I am
_____________.
They might be functions, feelings, activities, affiliations (ticket taker,
frightened, Rotary Club president, student, competent, clown).
I am a writer who is also a philosophy student. I am anxious to become a better
scholar and to exercise more care in my thinking and writing. I am hard working.
But I suffer also a serious mental illness. I sometimes deny my mental illness.
I am a businessman who has a lot of good ideas but not enough capital. I cannot
do many things such as driving a car because I am on medication. I am a good
friends.
In what ways are you unique?
I am unique in the sense that I have survived a 3 decade mental illness and
still retain enough wits about me to work for the good and to challenge myself
into doing more and more. I don’t rest on my laurels either. What I have done
is phenomenal all things considered. But I am not going to capitalize on it. I
want to keep going and be of help to others.
Chrysanthemum
Showing posts with label identity. Show all posts
Monday, February 22, 2010
Issue
of identity for Chinese-American writers
If I carried an ID which says that I am Chinese-American, would
you still ask me if I would go back to China? The China I left is a half a
century ago. What landmark still exists in Canton, the mouth of the Pearl
River, and the sampans that sold fish congee?
My svelt auntie ruffled my hair here in the Canton evenings when the breeze
from the ocean was still warm. Lovers and children lie on the grass. Some
truant boys are still up in the massive yung trees.
Here the British gun boats that once fired into this oldest of all Chinese sea
going city in the attempt to sell opium.
Here they were defeated and they went north to Nanking. The Empress Dowager
sold China because it wasn't hers. She was a Manchu.
The China I can go back to is only in the heart, in memory, and in spirit.
Capitalism has stinky up China and so it is becoming like the West. When you
begin to have young people grow up on rock'n roll instead of your ancient
poets, only one thing can happen, the Merchant sails down the river and is gone
forever, along with the ancient wares of China, the treasures that will never
come back, nor the emigres to other lands.
I have come to know and like (sometimes) pizza, hamburger, fish fries, and
apple pie -- they are good and convenient and the electrical wiring of the coke
dispensing machine is more intricate than my logic, I bow to the neon gods,
I supplicate to credit cards, and I love formal poetry, and did I leave out
anything? We will take our sales team there.
Is there some things that are invariant when translated into a new domain? Why
do there exist Chinatowns? The invisible walls that keep the Chinese
"in" or the others "out"?
Even Hu Jintao wears a suit, a business suit.
I wear Lands End clothing in this freezing land. They are a good company. And
they did not do like Marco Polo, who stole silkworms from China in a bamboo
stick. Gone are the scholars and concubines. Gone is Li Po who crazily embraced
the moon. Gone are the water-buffaloes grazing on the perimeter of the village
pond. Gone are the bull frogs that croak as the evening descends. It is night
over there now if the day begins here.
And here I sit at the Computer, an infinite better refinement of the abacus.
But the abacus was all China needed. Then someone said, you got to make things
that don't last. That way, you have repeat customers and so you will have a
steady source of profits. I think China has learned that lesson from Japan. And
so who am I who is here bemoaning Progress?
You can go back to the land, but not to the people. Here you are suspended,
uncomfortably straddling two or more cultures. Define yourself through praxis.
Define yourself by nothing but love.
Chrysanthemum
Sunday, August 31, 2025
Uncle Sum
Uncle Sum Within and without his unreal estate of mind, Uncle
Sum was once beaten to silliness, his face deeply cut in the shape of a sickle,
with which I harvested rice as a truant little boy in Nan On Village outskirts
in the autumn rice paddies. Locusts will not wait. In the Canton flat, Uncle
would sit in deep silence before walking and kicking his leg into the thin air.
It was summer and the sunshine was honey on the black tar of the streets. Here
he is pushed into the bamboo armchair because of a bad leg. Later we knew it
was diabetes. He told me never to play shallow, yet deep waters contain fish
they cannot leave. Such is the oppression of the natural world. Kafka’s father,
another Kafka, had sentenced his son to death by drowning. Uncle Sum later lived
on Chek Kai Island off the coast of Guangdong Province, which was abstemious
enough not on any map. He stared half a day into the ocean. This considerably
enlarged his mind – the unreal estate of poetry.
Chrysanthemum
Showing posts with label dawn from ravine. Show all posts
Friday, February 19, 2010
Journal
How Days Are Past
It is the wait. We have a lot of time to wait. We live in the South Side. You
cross the bridge just as you come into town, instead of going into town. We are
the neighborhood on the road to Westport, just below the hill where the local
college sits. We are not students. We sometimes work in the shake mill or
longshore. Some of us finished high school but some didn’t and mostly we are in
our twenties now. We are too old to hang around the pool hall now or the
bowling alley and so sometimes we get a six pack and play cards and wait at the
union hall. And on days we don’t get called, we just hang out.
Hank there has a job delivering mail at the P.O. It turns out that Hank buys
most of the groceries. There are four of us guys renting this house. The most
ambitious one of us here is John; he free lances for the Aberdeen Daily World.
John used to write for the O.B. in Aberdeen High School. He mainly writes about
his trips to Seattle and sometimes he covers court cases, but his mainstay is
obituaries. Then Sam here spends most of his time with Sally and baby sits her
four-year-old boy when she waits on tables at Duffy’s. Sam is the poet among
the four of us. At night he subs at the Morck Hotel, again part-time. That
leaves me unaccounted for. I do occasional gardening and yard work for senior
citizens in the neighborhood. The rest of the time I just read.
We are four guys that didn’t have much help from our families, because they
didn’t either. We are struggling to keep the rent paid and figuring a way to
get out of this depressed area. I guess it started first in 1972 with the oil
spill at Ocean Shores. Many birds died from petroleum covered bodies and so did
literally hundreds of thousands of clams. Then they planted millions of baby
clams but they got washed ashore by the waves. Only a few took hold of the
sand. It will be another 10 or 20 years before the beach can recover. Then the
environmentalists in Olympia managed to pass the spotted owl bill, which to
save the endangered species they outlawed logging. And so that practically shut
down our town. No more lumber and pulp mills. No more jobs and alcoholism and
teen age pregnancies went up and so did welfare. And petty crime.
Sometimes all the housemates are out except me and I lay around and read. John
kids me that he would come up with some money and set up a little used
bookstore for me and I could read every book in the damn store before we sell
it. I said to John that he should write a few books to put in the store. We had
a few laughs over that and we split a bottle of wine. He went to sleep because
he was driving up to Seattle to cover a case in the Federal Court for the Daily
World. The case had to do with some tribal gambling case. Increasingly there
has been more violence at Ocean Shores. The Native Americans opened up casinos
and so drugs and prostitutions are moving in. Some rumors these people come up
from California or even as far as New Jersey. It is up to people like John to
tell us ignorant people in the Harbor what really is going on. I like to read
the articles John writes for the Daily World. I hope he will be another
Hemmingway some day. Or another John Dos Pasos. And I could be another John
Ciardi. The other guys Hank and John are pretty much Aberdeen people, you know
what I mean. Hank goes fishing when he isn’t carrying the mail. And Sam likes
to hang around Sally and her kid and screws her except the nights he clerks at
the Morck. We are just waiting for something to happen and the days to pass.
Koon Woon
February 4, 2010
I realize that I am falling behind in class, and why is that so? I
Today I had slept until 4AM from 9pm last night. I was out like a light. I had
a moral crisis because I found out I am no longer smart compared to my
classmates in the Philosophy of Mind class. My logic is clumsy and my arguments
don’t cut to the quick.
My mind is fuzzy in other words.
But I am going to try still. I haven’t done anything rigorous because I done
poetry for a long time and not formal poetry either. My mind is kind of loosely
connected --- those neurons that randomly fire control my thoughts.
Today I have a way to get started on my learning autobiography and I will
follow the guideline in our handbook closely. I must start learning and
following rules. They are not always despotic and arbitrary like my late father
was. It is an insight. The world is not according to GARP. Know that, and come
up with your own existential reasons for living, Koon Woon.
February 4, 2010
I realize that suddenly I am falling behind in class. I have not read much of
the assigned reading. So, given what little I know of Rogers at this point, I
want to follow his example and be a little more empirical in my
self-evaluation. I must be less subjective. Just starting with that, what
should I write and how should I write it?
For one thing, I can list down some things that I have done, wanted to do, and
like to see how others do it and what they have accomplished. One such topic is
learning how to play the guitar.
When I was 16, and that was in 1965, the Beatles and the English invasion of
rock ‘n roll swept America. Elvis Presley was on his way out or maybe had
already died. It seemed to me that if you played the guitar well, you would
have at least one girl thinking highly of you! I bought a guitar.
I took lessons from the teacher at the music store. She taught me how to strum
the Beach Boys’ “My Little Deuce Coup.” Apparently I did well enough that she
wanted me to play rhythm guitar for a teenage band. I didn’t think I was good
enough. Eventually I couldn’t afford to pay for my lessons and I hang up my
guitar.
There was a couple that came to our café quite regularly to drink coffee. They
came in the middle of the afternoon when usually at those slow hours they were
the only customers. I fill their coffee as much as they wanted to drink. Then
one day, as the man reached into his pocket for coins to pay for the coffee, I
saw that he had a guitar pick in his hand. I was happily surprised and I asked
him if he played the guitar and was willing to give lessons. He said yes and
said that he had been doing that for some time. He said he called himself, “El
Guitaro.” Since he was only charging half as much as the lady at the music
store, I gladly took up the chance to learn more on the guitar.
I drove to the address they gave me and found that it was at a poor
neighborhood in the adjacent town of Hoquiam. As soon as I went in, I was
assailed by this odor. Later on, when I started smoking in college, I knew it
was cigarette tar and nicotine smell. Apparently El Guitaro was living with a
woman on welfare and she had 3 small children. And so from then on, each time I
showed up for lessons I would bring a large bag of fruit – apples, oranges, and
bananas, the usual kinds found in the fruit section of a supermarket.
First thing that El Guitaro showed me was the flamenco tremolo and he said his
right little finger didn’t work right because he had been in the army and was
mowing the lawn and the mower blew up on him. He taught me for the first song,
“My little brown jug.”
He had a Xeroxed and stapled book that he showed me, and he also showed me a
letter that some guy had sent him threatened to get him for mail fraud.
Apparently El Guitaro sold his books through ads in magazines. Apparently the
buyer in question claimed that he did not receive the book he paid for. And he
suspected fraud because the check was cashed at a tavern. I was alarmed but El
Guitaro said that the FBI wasn’t’ going to get involved for $10. And besides,
he sent the book to the guy. Maybe it got lost in the mail. There was no way to
trace it since neither party paid for certified mail.
As I got to know El Guitaro and his girl friend and her kids from my weekly
lessons, I became more realistic about my potential to make it in the music
world. I can’t read music although I tried with the help of a musical theory
booklet. Soon, I went away to college.
What I did learn was that El Guitaro really enjoyed his guitar playing and was
moderately good, but he had an alcohol problem. Later on I had an alcohol
problem myself when I dropped in and out of college. And that’s the way I
played the guitar --- on and off, off and on. In the end, I bought a Martin a
couple of years ago, and finally I got to perform one song at a local Cabaret.
I realize now that not all childhood dreams are fulfilled. I still think it is
ok to have picked up the guitar because I have learned to appreciate another
dimension of life – music.
While I did not excel in the guitar, I listened to enough music that it seeped
into my poetry. I love poets who have musical ears – Theodore Roethke for
example and also possibly the greatest Spanish poet of all times – Federico
Garcia Lorca. Lorca died during the Spanish Revolution. Possibly he was
murdered by the Spanish Civil Guard. He disappeared when he was 36 and his body
was never found.
While El Guitaro was not a maestro at the Julliard, I enjoyed what little I
learned from him. I realize that we can’t all be Carlos Montoya or Julian
Bream. Having fun is part of life. I still have my guitar and now I can make
CD’s of my playing on my iMACK G 3 computer. Although it is appreciated by only
a few friends, my music pleases me, and sometimes, I figure, perhaps that is
the most important thing.
at February
19, 2010 No comments: 
Labels: dawn from ravine
Chrysanthemum
Showing posts with label essays Misty Poetry. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
The
Misty Poets revisited
With war tensions high between China and the US in the Pacific
Ocean's Yellow and South China Seas, where the US seeks to contain China, I
think it is appropriate to revisit the Misty Poets of the 1980's in China and
exiled beyond for their poetry's relevance. I have two brief reviews (essays)
to post:
The “Misty Poets” from a Historical Perspective
A long time ago in high school mathematics, we learned a technique in “linear
programming” to maximize a variable while minimizing another one. This is the
minimax or the maxmin problem. One of the applications of this technique is
investing in stocks. Let’s say Investor X has an S amount of money she wants to
invest in the stock market. How should she invest the money if she wants to be
safe about it in the sense that regardless of what’s happening in the world,
her investment will be “protected” even though it is possibly not the most
lucrative of investment portfolios.
She would invest equally in Peace and she would invest in War.
For example, she would invest in Dow Chemicals and Boeing or Lockheed in case
that there is war and these companies would then profit from war by making
weapons. On the other hand, if the world was at peace, she would benefit more
from luxury goods such as cosmetics and tourism businesses in companies such as
Proctor and Gamble, Starbucks Coffee, and Northwest Airlines. And so either
way, her investments are “protected.”
This seems to be the approach China is taking with domestic investments and its
foreign polices with the rest of the world. China is investing in peace as well
as in war. By strengthening its defense, it is securing its domestic and
foreign investments. The realistic understanding of the meaning of “property”
is that property isn’t what is in your name, but what you can protect. Witness
the oil in Iraq and the reasons we are in Iraq and I don’t think I need to say
any more on this score nor should I say any more about vast buying of arms by
Saudi Arabia.
It is a long way to get to the Misty Poets from this economic and military
angle but I will get there eventually and explain why the Misty Poets came into
being, and why they were tolerated for a while, flourished, and then squashed,
and exiled, and forced into suicide.
We need to really go back to ancient history in China with the Music Bureau in
the early dynasties, but for our discussion, we will merely go back to the
complacency of China’s imperial past until the Manchu Invasion and the
subsequent occupation by foreign Western Powers which notably was highlighted
by the Opium Wars some 150 years ago.
China had such a difficult time to kick out all the foreign powers, imperialist
Japan, and to engage in a civil war of its own, and then to help fight two
major border wars (Korea and Vietnam) since 1950, because as Jean Follain had
written, Southeast Asia is the “warm belly of Asia.” By this he means the food
production capabilities of Indochina as the French were in Vietnam one time and
learned the lesson that it cannot stop the yearning of a people to be free of
foreign domination. When the US-Vietnam war concluded, this is where our
analysis of the Misty Poets begins.
In 1972, US President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made a
secret trip to China and secretly agreed to end the Vietnam war and to
normalize relations with China.
Deng Hsiao Ping, the Paramount Leader of China, came to Texas and sported a
cowboy hat and the television sequel “Kungfu” became a hit. And an era of
“ping-pong diplomacy” began. China introduced limited capitalism into its
economy and worked “miracles,” so that 30 years later, it becomes the 4th
largest economy of world, and it is predicted by the Economist that it will be
the biggest economy of the world by 2020, just 12 years away.
However, with the introduction of limited capitalism in China, a sort of
freewheeling capitalist entrepreneurial class developed in its cities, so that
within a span of 30 years, it spawned great “wealth” and created a deep
division between “the have it” and “the have not’s.” The Chinese government for
a time experimented with individual freedoms and liberal attitudes for a short
while, and so a group of writers and poets clustered around Bei Dao and his
experimental magazine “Today,” and wrote poetry in what is known as
”Misty Poetry,” in which strange, surreal, and indirect ways were used to
criticize the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in the past and the lack of
complete bourgeois freedom that these writers sought.
Much of the poetry of the “Misty Poets” was a kind of self-indulgence and
complaint about the Chinese censorship. They were tolerated for a while but
once the authorities realized where this kind of writing was going, they
cracked down on it, culminating in the Tien An Men Massacre.
Bei Dao himself was out of the country at the time and so he chose exile. Some
of the poets were imprisoned and some where exiled and a couple in exile
committed suicide. Shu Ting, the most distinguished woman poet of this group,
never left China. And I think her reasons are very mature and laudable. I will
just include one poem by her, which in my mind, is the most mature and telling
of why she never left China and is imminently loved outside of China as well as
she is in China:
Perhaps
- reply to the loneliness of a poet
Perhaps our hearts
will have no reader
Perhaps we took the wrong road
and so we end up lost
Perhaps we light one lantern after another
storms blew them out one by one
Perhaps once we’re out of tears
the land will be fertilized
Perhaps while we praise the sun
we are also sung by the sun
Perhaps the heavier the money on our shoulders
the more we believe
Perhaps we can only protest others’ suffering
silent to our own misfortune
Perhaps
Because this call is irresistible
we have no other choice
December, 1979 Tr. Tony Barnstone
Note: Shu Ting was only 27 when she wrote this poem.
Koon Woon, March 15, 2008
_________________________________________________________________________________
Koon Woon (Poetry 2010) on the Misty Poets
Out of the Howling Storm, Ed. Tony Barnstone, Wesleyan University Press 1993
Actually one can draw a parallel between the birth of Beat poetry in the US in
the 1950’s and the rise of the Misty Poets in China in the decade of the 1980’s
culminating in the Tien An Men Massacre. The parallel that can be drawn is of
course the reaction to a faceless, mass, and authoritarian culture. The reason
why the United States was so conformist in the 1950’s is still poorly
understood, at least by me, but I can understand why it was so in China for
many decades since the founding of the PRC.
Mao Tse-Tung had urged writers and artists to serve the cause of the revolution
in his famous “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art” in May, 1942. He
said that along the military front to push out invaders from China and to
liberate the proletariat and the masses from oppression by
counter-revolutionary forces, the writers and artists must help the new Chinese
nation by educating and uniting the masses as a component of the “revolutionary
machine.”
In the ensuing years, Mao kept his power until his death in 1976, but during
the times he faced disloyalty and complaints of his mistakes, he variously
called out the Red Guards and instigated the Cultural Revolution to build a new
base of power founded on the younger people, teenagers.
Bei Dao, the foremost proponent of Misty poetry, which was a term later given
to it by its critics for being obscure had been a red guard and was re-educated
by construction work. He started the influential underground literary magazine,
Today, in Beijing in 1979, which operated for 2 years until it was banned. Here
the poets wrote poems obliquely criticizing the authoritarian mass culture of
China by using fantastic images and obscure language and syntactical
innovations. His most famous poem, “Answer” contains the following lines and
stanzas in part:
The scoundrel carries his baseness around like an ID card
The honest man bears his honor like an epitaph.
Look – the gilded sky is swimming
with undulant reflections of the dead.
…..
Listen. I don’t believe!
OK. You’ve trampled
a thousand enemies underfoot. Call me
a thousand and one.
I don’t believe the sky is blue.
I don’t believe what the thunder says.
I don’t believe dreams aren’t real,
that beyond death there is no reprisal.
….
I think the line “I don’t believe what the thunder says” refers to the
revolutionary doctor turned writer, Lu Hsun, who wrote “In the Stillness of
Mountains/Hear the peal of Thunder.” (Thunder is the English word for Lu Hsun’s
name).Whereas Lu Hsun served the revolution with his writings, Bei Dao is
calling for a literature of the individual.
Even though Bei Dao has been nominated several times for the Nobel, I do not
think that his poetry is of that caliber. It is a fetish of the Western World
to elevate anything that is critical of modern China, witness the uncritical
homage paid to the Dalai Lama, who actually is the head of a theocracy, which
the US Constitution itself advocates the separation of Church and State, and
thus it is a little hypocritical in this stance, although it is not necessarily
true that China treats the Tibetan as well as they treat the Han Chinese, but
that’s no different from how the whites treat the blacks in the US.
Yang Lian is another one of the original Misty Poets who now teaches university
in New Zealand. His poetry is more lyrical and less strident than Bei Dao’s. In
most ways, it is less nihilistic than the whole lot of the Misty Poets. In the
poem “Sowing,” he is more concerned with the future generations and seemed to
have benefited from being sent to the countryside during the Cultural
Revolution. [I have known several people personally who had been sent to the
countryside living now in the United States and I did not detect any real
hatred for this experience from this limited sample]. Yang Lian writes:
I dreamt I was a shuddering field of wheat,
ripe, swaying like a thousand suns,
and even the hot winds were golden,
calmly singing me
a delicate song
soft as an ancient smile,
like a blurred blessing from afar.
Let my desires spill over
and my love be sown. (refrain)
Bury me deep in the warm earth
and let my blood flow into underground rivers
to water shriveled hearts
from the miserable past.
I am a seed where life has hibernated,
a green burning vitally…
There is a feeling of redemption here of the past pains. His lyrics are so
beautiful; I cannot help from quoting another portion of it:
I am proud to be close to the earth;
Even when winter stars are frozen over or under snowdrifts
I think of the coming hope of spring
and the next sure harvest;
after the growing pains
I now know that joy is in faith
And my only duty is to create abundance…
I will end this short commentary with another poet, whom I think is the most
remarkable of this group of Misty Poets, who came to be modern Chinese poets
sort of like water that has flown to sea and comes back during the high tide to
the river. The Chinese literature that was carried out of China like its
pottery and imitated by the Dutch comes back with the European ideals of
individualism, romanticism, and political freedom, but also with a sense of
nihilism and this is acknowledged and echoed by Shu Ting, but her reaction is
mature for she knows the burden of the poet when she wrote in “Perhaps,” at the
remarkable age of 27, and having only a middle-school education, the following
lines which I quote:
Perhaps our hearts
will have no reader
Perhaps we took the wrong road
and so we end up lost
And this was the reply to the loneliness of a poet, which she ends the poem
with:
Perhaps the heavier the monkey on our shoulders
the more we believe
Perhaps we can only protest other’s suffering
silent to our own misfortune
Perhaps
because this call is irresistible
we have no choice
December, 1979
It was not surprising that when she was only in her 30’s, twice she was the top
woman poet in all of China, loved by the world in and out of China. She gives
me hope that the greatest talents are not self-seeking, but cast their lot with
humanity.
at September
01, 2010 3 comments:
Labels: essays Misty Poetry
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Po Chu - I
Koon Woon (Poetry 2010) on Po Chu-I
The Selected Poems of Po Chu-I
Translated by David Hinton, New Directions 1999
Chinese poets, ancient or modern, do not force themselves upon
you, like “Shock and Awe,” but quietly state their case. There is no brilliant
display of virtuosity or great constructions, but only a handful of lines in
each poem that sometimes seem like offhanded remarks, with nothing to prove.
Yet, these sparse and spare lines, have endured the ages and come to us as the
things we are telling ourselves now in this life. And
of the greatest poetic epoch of China, The Tang Dynasty, the most prolific and
the quintessential poet of this era is Po Chu-I (772 – 846 A.D.). Arthur Waley
has written a 240 page book on Po Chu-I of his life and times, and 2800 poems
of Po survived. And so what I can write here is a very limited account of what
I take away from a very few of his poems that affected me in some useful way.
Let us begin with the poem “Reading Chuang Tzu” written during his years of
exile between 815 and 820 A.D. –
Reading
Chuang Tzu
Leaving
home and homeland, banished to some far-off place,
I
wonder how it is I’m nearly free of grief and pain. Puzzled
and
searching Chuang Tzu for insight on returning to dwell,
I
realize it’s a place beyond questions: that’s our native land.
Po Chu-I was a Taoist poet, like T’ao Ch’ien (365 – 427), who
was a man who preferred idleness and contemplation. Chuang Tzu
was a follower of Lao Tzu, the legendary author of the Tao Te Ching and
Chuang Tzu was famous for the puzzle of whether he was a man who dreamed that
he was a butterfly or whether he was a butterfly which dreamed that it was a
man. In this poem, consisting only of 4 lines, which most likely are 2 couples
of 7-character lines in Chinese, Po Chu-I says that the puzzle is that the
place he is banished to almost feels like home, but it isn’t,
the same way that a man can dream that he is a butterfly but isn’t one, for the
reality lies in not thinking, or idleness in this sense of
Ch’an (the Chinese predecessor of Zen in Japan). In the West we speak of being. To
try to resolve this puzzle, Po reads Chuang Tzu, that is, going
back to authority, but it only leads to more questions about existence. Only in
one’s native land does one take everything for granted and that there is no
harm in doing so. There is, however, a deeper philosophical point here –
whenever we encounter change or the unfamiliar, we are led to seek similarities
with the familiar (“I wonder how it is I’m nearly free of
grief and pain”) but we never can trust our thoughts because as Jacque Lacan
has stated, our thoughts are words that chase other words and that chase never
ends. Buddhism puts it this way: “All thoughts lead to vacuity.” And so in the
end, the only time when we are comfortable with ourselves is being in our
native land, and that’s to say, being in a place where we do not ask any
questions – and that’s precisely what the Ch’an Buddhists call idleness or
its near equivalent in Western thought, being. One does see
the koan-like quality of this poem. And so back to the level of
being, well, then, this poem is about pain, the pain and grief of not being at
home, in one’s familiar territory, and being banished, which at that time in
China, was a very grievous punishment. I might add one other remark before we
move on – the word dwell at the end of the third line is
well-chosen, because of its double-function of dwell, as a place to live, or to
dwell, as to linger on the thoughts of.
Po Chu-I was a very capable scholar as well as social redeemer.
He, by his native gifts, passed the Imperial exams despite his family’s dire
poverty. He never forgot his roots, and so when he was the palace
librarian and had direct access to the emperor, or when he was governor of
various prefectures, he advised or criticized the policies of the ruling
clique. Therefore, he was banished three times and demoted in rank. Each time a
new emperor shows infatuation with Po’s work (and his work was extensive – ranging
from yueh fu, folk songs, to vignettes and poems), Po tries to
affect social change, but each time, the palace intrigues and misfortunes
placed him in jeopardy and so finally, he learns not to partake in politics but
retire to semi-monastic life. But before he did that, he retired from his
sinecures and built himself a comfortable dwelling, and here is one poem of the
Late Period (829-846):
A
SERVANT GIRL IS MISSING
From
the low walls of our small courtyard
to
the notice-board outside our district gate,
I’ve
searched and searched, ashamed our love
proved
meager, wishing I could do it all over.
But
a caged bird can’t bear a master for long,
and
the branch means nothing to the blossom
freed
on the wind. Where can she be tonight?
Only
the moon’s understanding light knows.
This is a beautiful poem that elevates the servant girl above
and beyond the grossness and corruption of the master. Perhaps Po is talking
about himself here. He gave up all his governmental posts to live the life of a
recluse, knowing that in the palace, he is only a tool for the emperor and the
men of low conscience. So, he chose not to serve but to be idle.
There are almost 150 poems in this collection. Each poem reads
like a polished jade piece and I am sure in the original Chinese, the
multiplicities of meaning would be more generous. Truly Po Chu-I was one of the
greatest poets of China. It does make me homesick to read his poetry, written
some 1,200 years ago. In a way China has not changed. But still, I regret I
cannot go back to the China that I knew. I am banished from a place of time and
locality. My dwelling is in the culture that I must win back.
This commentary is really a wake-up call to myself. You can’t go home again but
you can look back, albeit with a sense of regret.
at November
11, 2010 No comments:
Labels: poetry
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April
12, 2018
"Hey Cousin."
“Hey Cousin.”
“Hey Cousin,” Martin snapped, “We each got our own ways. I play
Russian roulette and that’s my own business.” I shut my mouth. The probability
is 1/6 that he blows his brains out each time he spins the gun chamber and
pulls the trigger. He is expected mathematically to do himself in after 6 turns
at this game. He is living in the macho fast lane dealing heavy in drugs, and
he doesn’t listen to me, his cousin from China – from the Old Country. His
mother is my father’s oldest sister and has married out of the Lock clan, and
so I have no say over him, a Lau.
And sure enough after I came back to Seattle, my father called
me from Aberdeen and told me to come home pronto. I dropped
everything and went home on Greyhound.
“Your cousin Martin died in a fight over his girlfriend,” my
father spitted out his words one by one, “Martin came home after corrections
and his girl had shacked up with another guy.” My father told me that Martin
armed himself with a knife and broke into the bedroom of the ex-girlfriend and
her new lover. She screamed and the new lover grabbed his gun under the pillow
and shot Martin four times in the neck, as the stubborn intruder kept advancing
even though he was shot in the neck, not once, but four times. Martin was
finally felled.
“It is self-defense,” My father lamented, “there is nothing we
can do.” He told me that my aunt is lonely as Martin was the youngest and was
still living with her. “Go cheer your aunt up,” he said.
So, I took the Greyhound to San Francisco. Sources later told me
that Martin was executed by the Chinese Mafia because he and his friends robbed
a drug store that was protected.
4/12/2018
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April
20, 2018
Beans or Nothingness
It is not like nature
It is not like nature to be naked, but naked it was… a patch of
blackberry vines in the sun, across the street from me, basking in its
thinghood…
And I was sitting inside the apartment with my door
open. I was at the wooden table writing hesitantly. No matter how
resolved I was in my mind that I knew reality as an a
priori truth, it was no match for the luminescence of the green of the
blackberry existing in its own right. It certainly did not need to apologize to
me.
You can discuss Sartre’s Being and Nothingness all
you want to now, but at that moment in the past with that particular
arrangement of table, pen and notepad,
my vision and heart, yes, heart too for my body tingled. The
blackberry paid no attention to me, how I felt, my doubts about existence, and
so forth. It had achieved naked existence. The most fundamental of being. Yet,
it didn’t alienate me. Though I was not part of that sector of reality because
my mind was outside of its bounds, I did not begrudge to be left out as a
painter who would leave his patron out of the painting because the latter is
too concerned with his toiletry and is too late to show up, and as revenge to
being made to wait, the artist will simply leave the rich patron out of the
portrait altogether.
And this was in the small logging and fishing town of Aberdeen
on the Washington coast. Seekers of enlightenment generally go to
mystics in inaccessible places. I was living quite modestly as a writer, but if
I close my door, hang my hat and coat on the hooks on the wall, I would be in
the Himalayas. No need to go to Tibet. Myths and lies are perpetrated to this
day. What did Buddha say? Straight from the horse’s mouth? He said anyone can
be a Buddha. Seek enlightenment and that will make you a Buddha, and once you
are a Buddha, go forth among the sick and malformed, the prostitutes and the
crooked cops, the unhappy rich man, and anyone else in pain because of earthy
joys. Help them. But don’t pretend you are the only legit one
OK, now, you students of philosophy, do you understand me now?
It is Beans or Nothingness. The wretched of the earth all can
understand me. And you plan to go to graduate school, so first clear yourself
of this muddle.
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April
10, 2018
The slender maple
The slender maple
The slender maple tree reaches my third-floor window of the high
rise in West Seattle. Sunshine. The branches and twigs are budding. This is the
middle of April.
I am drinking tepid Lychee black tea. Its fragrance reminds me
of the fruit of the Lychee trees on the outskirts of Guangzhou, or Canton as it
was formerly called, so-named by foreigners who colonialized China. I led my
school mates out there. They were city boys and I had come from the village.
Although they had been there for nine or ten years as grade school children in
their own birth city, they never ventured out to the city's outskirts, where
the honey buckets were empties after wagons hauled them out to the farmers that
surround this city, where also the Pearl River empties itself into sea. It is
the world's 17th largest river.
During the monsoon in May, the rice and water-chestnut paddies
would be flooded, obfuscating the boundaries by covering the dikes that
separate them. We would steal some of the Lychee fruit. It has a coarse shell
you peel off, then you meet succulent white meat of the fruit covering a large
brown pit. No one was out guarding the fruits of their labor.
I finished one large cup of tea and notice the small green and
orange buds of the maple tree. I decided today not to walk to the library, a
round trip which would be three miles that my heart doctor orders me to do. My
father had died of a heart attack six years younger than my age now at
sixty-nine. I have a pacemaker for complete right bundle block. It is a faulty
electrical system of the heart. I won't bore you with it, except that under the
circumstances, my heart is still good.
I feel rather alone in this high rise for seniors and disabled
people with low income. I should fit right in because I am disabled, senior,
and low income. But I don't because of my intellectual pretensions. I have not
made a living with it. I am like a pertetual student. My father used to yelled
at me, “Jack of all trades and master of none.” He also said that I was always
doing things that don't needed to be done.
(to be continued...)
Koon Woon
April 10, 2018
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March
28, 2018
A Sick Man Ruling a Sick
Land
Ode for a sick man
For a sick man the steak doesn’t tastes red nor the salad tastes
green. His pajama top hangs around his neck like a noose. He wheezes rather
than waltzes his way to the bedroom or to the bathroom. He is trapped in a
defunct body.
This man is the president of the land. He is so addicted to
himself that he must cut himself deeper and deeper in order to verify his
subsistence. He subsists only in the sense that filth is filth that is immune
to itself. He really doesn’t exist in the proper sense of the word. Yet he
commands the largest fleet, a fleet that can rain destruction and he is left to
himself talking to himself like a Faulkner character. A tale told by an idiot.
He manufactures stats that can flummox a mathematician. Because
in this land, truth and fable are inseparable. In this land, the blind is
all-seeing. Things as they are is good enough in this land. Never can a
counterfactual exists except what is dreamt up by the Party.
As language is mangled and guns silence reason, we hope to be
safe. But remember, Hope is the last thing that escaped from Pandora’s Box.
