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.
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.
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?
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.
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.