Two weeks ago, I went to Talk Story, the first conference of Asian American and Hawai‘i writers. Never before had I listened to writers read and talk for a week straight, taking time out for eating and sleeping, but usually talking about writing while eating, too. It takes me about twenty years to see meaning in events, but here are some first impressions:
The opening party was at Washington Place, the Governor’s mansion, where Queen Lili‘uokalani stayed under house arrest in 1895. We ladies trailed our long skirts over the lawns and through the rooms of Victorian furniture to the lanai, where the band and the food and wine were. People blessed one another with leis and kisses, and the smell and the music of Hawai‘i filled the air. The moon, full that very night, rolled out of the rushing clouds. I didn’t get to the food because I was dazzled by meeting the people whom I had only imagined from their writings.
The writers from the mainland, not used to Hawai‘i, must have felt strange, having just come out of their solitary writing rooms.
Listening to the keynote speakers the next morning, I was humbled when Ozzie Bushnell, author of Ka‘a‘awa, said that if “us local kids” don’t write the Hawai‘i novel, then “the outsider” will come in and do it. I guiltily identified with this “outsider.” Ozzie is such a strong speaker, talking both standard English and pidgin, that I felt scolded, a Captain Cook of literature, plundering the islands for metaphors, looting images, distorting the landscape with a mainland—a mainstream—viewpoint. I temporarily forgot my trusty superstition: the capable seer needs only a glimpse of the room or the forest or the city to describe it and its inhabitants more truly than one who has lived there always. A place gives no special writing powers to those born and raised in it.
On the second day, during the panel, “The Plantations and the World War II Camp Experience,” Noriko Bridges read the one poem she has taken a lifetime to write. She wept in the middle of it, where the brothers are killed fighting in Europe, their families still imprisoned; many listeners cried too, some women holding hands. Writers who had not seen one another since camp days were having a reunion. They had first published in the camp newsletters.
There was a lovely moment when Milton Murayama, author of All I Asking for Is My Body, talked about how pidgin vocabulary is changing. For example, nowadays, Hawai‘i people say, “good,” “mo’ bettah,” and “da best.” But in the old days, they said, “good,” “go-o-od,” and “go-o-o-o-od!” He said the “goods” louder and louder and louder.
On the third day, we Chinese Americans had a fight. Two of the panelists were Jeff Paul Chan and Shawn Wong, editors of the anthology, Aiiieeeee!, who said that publishers maintain a ghetto of female ethnic autobiographers and reject the work of male ethnic novelists. They said that the known bulk of Chinese American literature consists of nine autobiographies, seven by women. We are to draw the conclusion that the dominant society uses minority women to castrate the men. The audience was very upset. Some felt insulted at the speakers’ proud use of the word “Chinaman.” Lilah Kan from New York came bursting forth with her beautiful gray hair flying, to accuse the panelists of being part of a “Chinese American literary mafia.”
Afterward, my feminist friends said we should have cheered for those seven women. The newspapers said the “brawl” was between the mainland Chinese Americans and the island Chinese Americans. But I think it was the men against the women—the men erecting Louis Chu, male novelist, as the father figure by knocking down the Jade Snow Wong mother figure. It was embarrassing that we were the only ethnic group that did not show a harmonious face; on the other hand, I felt good about our liveliness.
On the fourth afternoon, I moderated the panel, “Themes and Concerns of Writers in Hawai‘i.” Probably because of the events of the previous day, people kept interpreting this title politically, but none of the panelists wanted to or could talk that way. Phyllis Hoge Thompson, speaking from the audience, said she had set out to write a poem about Tom Gill losing the election for Governor. “But the poem turned out to be about a tree in the snow,” she said. “Holding” is about the Scandinavian Yggdrasil tree, though even the name of the tree doesn’t appear. She was mapping the strange, secret way of poetry, and I wished she were on the panel instead of me, an “outsider.”
The most wondrous presentations were two evenings given by the Hawaiians, who each gave his or her genealogy of teachers. They chanted and danced variations of the same mele, sometimes accompanied by gourd and sometimes by knee drums, for example. They told how a new mele is written today, often first in English, then translated into Hawaiian by a teacher, who tells the poet what kind of a mele it is (an Entrance poem, a Call, etc.), and where it belongs in tradition.
The panelists’ families and students sat in the back of the auditorium, and after the program, the children walked up to the stage and sang for their teacher, John Kaha‘i Topolinski. Some participants who had attended the two previous Asian American Writers’ Conferences (Oakland ’75 and Seattle ’76) said that the Hawaiians were contributing the only new theory and scholarship. The Hawaiians also gave a vision of the artist, not as anchorite but as builder of community.
Voice after voice telling all manner of things, by Saturday, I found myself saying my own work inside my head to counteract certain poets. My ears and head and body rejected their beats, which I also tried to cancel by tapping out my own rhythms with a finger. I felt like Johnny-Got-His-Gun, paralyzed except for that one finger. Earll, my husband, was reciting Yeats’s poetry to himself, as antidote.
A rhythm that is wrong for you might stop your heart, or, anyway, scramble your brain. I learned that it is not story or idea that counts. What really matters is the music. A famous writer walked out as I read my suspenseful new chapter. (“‘Nothing but disdain,’ Mimi thought, ‘could make some Chinese passionate.’”—Diana Chang in The Frontiers of Love.) I watched her high-heeled silhouette dart out of the lighted doorway. She probably prevented my rhythms from breaking up hers. Or maybe she needed sleep; it was almost midnight.
At the last set of readings Saturday night, Ninotchka Rosca was nowhere to be found. The rumor spread among the writers that she was at work on her novel; the writing was coming to her that night, and she would not interrupt it. We enviously told one another this story of discipline, dedication, and nerve. We could have been making the story up in a fit of withdrawal symptoms, having abandoned our writing for a week.
Hundreds of us went to the lū‘au at the Sumida Watercress Farm Sunday evening. I felt a shock to see Stephen Sumida exhume the pig—pink and long like a human being—the dirt and burlap falling away. Will there now be a cycle of pig imagery in our work? How do reality and writing connect anyway?
I know at least six people who fell in love at first sight during the conference—all requited—levels and levels of conferring.