Once upon a time there were two young lovers. He was a skillful guitarist, she was a skillful listener. He, an aspiring musician, practiced day and night. She didn’t mind sitting across from him, cross-legged for hours. So in love was she that it didn’t matter that he was in the midst of creating an original composition, or just practicing chords or deep into his own thoughts. She was utterly happy to abandon herself to him and subjugate herself to be his perfect listener.
The guitarist said, “Listen, Mei Ling, a trickling spring…” He would move the plectrum across the strings lightly, and Mei Ling would reply, “Yes, I can hear it, yes, trickling, trickling every drop of quiet water. The beautiful stream soothes me.” “This one is called ‘Pearls on a Jade Plate,’” he continued. “Yes, I can imagine, pearls rolling gentling on blue celadon. I can see the décor of the Forbidden Palace, and a fresh, pink-cheeked concubine walking toward us gingerly, on lotus feet,” she said, mocking him gently.
“This one is called ‘Panning for Gold,’” he said. To this she replied, “Yes, I can see my ancestors swishing, swishing the nuggets in their pans. They are squatting at the riverbank, scorching under the blaring sun, their long queues sticking to their sweaty backs.”
He said, “Listen, from the west, thunderclap and lightning.” His fingers sliding up and down the shiny muscular neck of the guitar, his plectrum fast and furious. “Yes, I can hear it,” she said, muffling her ears. “I am frightened. It makes me want to crawl into bed and hide under the covers.”
He continued, “Can you hear the railroad, the train coming from the distance?” She said, “Yes, yes, I can see and hear it, the approaching train. It comes all the way from Plymouth Rock to settle in the wild west. I can see my ancestors toiling, laying the tracks. They’re shouldering pickaxes, giant mallets and shovels.”
“This one is called, ‘The Five Horses of the Apocalypse.’”
“Yes, yes, but only five? Shouldn’t there be ten? I suppose a half-baked apocalypse is better than none.”
They would go on this way for hours. He would strum for her; she would respond with playful, cheeky remarks. It was a healthy bantering between two young lovers. He was proud of his political awareness and his new male, feminized sensitivity. She was deeply in love with his hard body and his youthful intensity. She believed in his talent and had faith in their future together. She would postpone her own aspirations to write the great American novel. (In fact, she stopped short on Chapter 28, the immigrant chapter, right when the protagonist was about to pour tea.) Instead, Mei Ling went back to school to get her second PhD and ended up teaching at the local college; meanwhile, she also joined a cadre of lawyers who represented migrant workers at the Calexico border. She didn’t mind working hard; she was intent on supporting her man through both his PhD dissertation and his dreams of becoming a consummate guitar master.
Their love affair went on for years in front of the hearth. Sometimes she would oil the guitar for him or buy him extra strings. And on his fortieth birthday, she bought him a fancy rhinestone-studded case from a celebrity auction. Supposedly, it was once owned by Elvis Costello. It cost her $5,000, but she felt that it was worth every cent. From then on, he and the rhinestone-studded case would be inseparable. He would carry it everywhere he went. It was the emblem of his art and a precious gift from the woman who cherished him.
“Does this sound like Hendrix at Monterey Park?” he pondered aloud. She answered, “Yes, yes, I can see you there, on stage, setting the guitar on fire. You, in an Afro, purple velvet bandana. The crowd is wild, half naked, writhing, stoned out of their minds. Oh burning, burning genitals! Oh burning Hendrix genitals!” Her mockery embarrassed him. Sometimes, he didn’t know whether she was merely being silly or was being aggressively ironic.
“And this, does this sound just like Clapton’s ‘Layla’ in his Derek and the Dominos years?” he inquired. “Yes, it was a song inspired by his passion for George Harrison’s wife, wasn’t it?” Though Mei Ling was more a Hendrix fan and found “Layla” a little redundant, she enjoyed his long repertoire and followed his daydream. There is nothing sexier than an electric guitar, long riffs and a wintry night near the hearth with the man you love.
Two years after she bought him the expensive rhinestone-studded guitar case, their relationship soured. One day, while she was at the grocery store, she saw him walking with a black woman. He was carrying the expensive guitar case. She was carrying a plain maroon leather case, very beat up, but it suited her. There was nothing false about this woman: she was raggedy, disheveled in appearance, down to her baggy hip-hop jeans, but she seemed utterly confident in her skin. The two were laughing together, chatting in their own musician’s language. There was no evidence that they were lovers and that they were not just friends with music in common. But the fact that he had never mentioned this woman before or that she had never set foot in their house made Mei Ling suspicious. “Knowledge is what corrupts marriages,” her grandmother once said. “If you pretend to be an ignorant donkey, you won’t know that somebody is riding you.” And before she died, she had this to say about Mei Ling’s troubled marriage: “Don’t tread too lightly. You will forget that you’re carrying a burden of cow manure.” Oh hell, something got lost in the translation.
He was supposed to be looking for a job, but instead he was hanging around with this black woman, smoking pot, jamming. Mei Ling was not jealous of a possible affair between them, but oddly, she was jealous that this woman had a proprietary dignity about her. She “owned” her art while Mei Ling had always deferred to others first, and as a result, had postponed her novel indefinitely. And what about the choices she had made? Which should be the obvious choice? The ownership of a husband, or the ownership of one’s art?
Mei Ling drove around for a couple of hours, fuming. When she finally got home, he was already busy practicing a new composition. He said, “This one is called ‘Manifest Destiny.’ Oh, baby, can’t you hear the calvary, can’t you see the bloody prairie? I think that I really have a hit this time, baby, really.”
“No, I can’t hear shit,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like anything. It sounds like bad guitar playing. I have been listening to you banging that crap for years. Postmodern sampling, punk-jazz fusion, bullshit. I’m tired of your appropriating everybody else’s experience while you don’t have a single original idea in that teeny brain of yours. Sorry, baby, I’ve passed the honeymoon stage. You ain’t ever gonna revive that stupid garage band of yours. You don’t have any vision as an artist. Forget about your rock ‘n’ roll pipe dreams. You’re forty-two—it ain’t gonna happen. Jesus was crucified at thirty-three. Buddha obtained enlightenment at thirty-two. You could’ve ‘compromised’ and got a teaching job. But no! You couldn’t lower yourself to be pedestrian. But deep inside, you knew that your PhD was a crock! The only reason why you wrote your dissertation on the problems of male whiteness was because you were trying to be cool and sucked up to your brilliant black professors! You’re not a misunderstood genius waiting to be discovered by Dr. Dre and David Geffen. You’re a fuckin’ middle-aged failure, and I’m tired of paying the bills!”
She couldn’t divorce him soon enough and summoned her lawyer to draw up the settlement within six weeks. She had to give him half of the house, which she purchased with her hardworking teacher’s salary. But what the hell, it was the price of freedom, for which she paid happily. After all, she had fresh immigrant blood coursing in her veins. She could bounce back and start all over. She could go back to start a new chapter of her long-awaited novel, in which she would make a futuristic turn: the protagonists would be the one-millionth wave of immigrants. In this world, the denizens are not white, brown or black, but purple. They are highly efficient creatures, each equipped with both a vagina and a penis for self-procreation. Their world would not be merely international but intergalactical. All the citizens would carry open passports and move freely through a boundless, borderless existence. There would be no Darwinian, capitalist competition, no wars over land or oil. Finally, humankind would discover contentment. Then, after a long night’s rest, she discarded her new ideas completely. “Nah, art is for poseurs and having great ideas is grossly overrated,” she decided.
The next night, her dead grandmother came to her in a dream and said, “Don’t cry, little mooncake. Work hard, save money, open up a small but tasty restaurant in the neighborhood.” And thus, like a good common immigrant girl, she accomplished just what the Great Matriarch apparition predicted. First, she opened Wong’s Double Happiness Café in a battered strip mall in Orange County. Almost overnight, it became the darling of southern California. It would be a favorite hangout joint for all the up-and-coming minor starlets.
In the next few years, Mei Ling would open up ten more cafés on the West Coast, then build up a successful franchise system throughout the continent. Ready or not, Wong’s Double Happiness Cafés would dot the landscape of America with over three thousand franchises, and our once dreamy, idealistic, failed poet/ novelist would become a willy-nilly late capitalist bitch in her middle years and be resigned to living a superficial petty bourgeois life with her adopted spoiled-rotten Russian children, two Cairn Terriers, three Siamese cats…happily ever after. Or, not!