1968- Eye Hotel
Page 6
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)
8.1In 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.
8.2Edmund also wrote the obituary for Sai Gin Lew, PFC, born September 20, 1949, died in Vietnam December 5, 1970.
8.3Edmund 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.
8.4March 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
9.1Someone 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.
9.2Down the street and across from Portsmouth Square, in the heart of Chinatown, the Holiday Inn was inaugurated with twenty-seven floors and 565 rooms, but there were no Chinese working there. Edmund went as the director of the CYSC, but who was he, a young skinny student with horn-rimmed glasses and some federal funding? “We are sorry,” they said, “no qualified Chinese have applied.” A hotel with a name like Holiday can only be a business, not a charity.
X
Virtue is not solitary; it always has neighbors.
—Confucius (4.25)
10.1Edmund 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.
10.2First 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)
11.1Being 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.
11.2The 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?
11.3Are 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
12.1Paul Lin wrote this poem:
I have been left to wander this
three-tiered palace
among your memories
your priceless antiquities
paintings and poetry
your hair oil scented in the cushions
and bedsheets
your spiced preferences
old canisters of herbal remedies
and aged teas and cognac.
In your absence
I practice the art
of the gentle scholar,
while across the bay
the red arches of revolution
beckon home my
Chinaman self.
On which side of the bay
does the father live?
On which side of the bay
the worthy son?
On which side of the bay
the beloved?
The yin and yang
of self
split in multiple and
prismed refractions
against the sun
that inevitably sets
in the West.
XIII
No one knows less about servants than their master.
—Charlie Chan
13.1The 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.
13.2Paul 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
14.1Chen 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?
14.2Baldwin 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.
14.3The 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?
14.4But 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.
14.5The 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.
14.6The young reporter would finally leave and malign the memory of the writer, declaring Baldwin’s show of magnanimity the pathetic response of the has-been writer, out of touch with his subject. Distant from hospitality, one’s gratitude may disappear.
XV
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
—Paul Valéry
15.1Edmund 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.
15.2The Poetry Boys Club called themselves CARP, like the fish.
XVI
Best place for skeleton is in family closet.
—Charlie Chan
16.1In 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.
16.2Do 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)
17.1Jack 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.
17.2Later 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
18.1Who are the true heroes? The poets or the revolutionaries?
18.2Who are the true men? The poets or the revolutionaries?
18.3The answers to these questions are on page ___.
XIX
A journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet.
—Lao Tzu
19.1Chen 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.
19.2Meanwhile, 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 . . .
19.3Chen 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
20.1When 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.
20.2He said, “Listen to the soft purr of that engine. Can you hear it? That’s the Fiat 2-liter v8. Crafted in Geneva in 1952. Nica took the prize with this at the Targa Florio in 1957.” Paul and Edmund looked skeptical. When had their teacher become a mechanic? “Now listen to this.” He revved it up. What else does one do with a race car? One races it.
4: My Special Island
Okinawa is vital for the security of the U.S.
Korea is vital for the security of the U.S.
Indochina is vital for the security of the U.S.
The Philippines are vital for the security of the U.S.
Taiwan is vital for the security of the U.S.
The Tiao Yu Tai islands are vital for the security of the U.S.
Tiao Yu Tai?
Two Days after the Lunar New Year of the Pig (Boar) . . .
Now don’t get Maoist with me. You know I’m not a proselytizing kind of girl. Look who you’re fooling with. Do I look like I’ll do time with a naked face and/or nails? Not that I couldn’t, but girls like me don’t get starring roles in The Good Earth. There might be days I could do pigtails, and if you put beads and brocade on that Mao jacket, it might go over something more evocative. A red silk cheongsam slit to the hip, for goodness sake. I could substitute my bangles for some red star earrings. I’ll tell you one thing: I could go for the beret à la Che look. I would wear that man stretched over my bosom any day. Now, honey, would that arouse you?
Now, you know where you should be. You should be out there with your friend in Saint Mary’s Square next to Sun Yat-sen,
protesting with five hundred others over the Tiao Yu Tai. It’s quite a crowd. All riled up good and Chinese-like. And there’s Father Sun presiding, looking all sun-reflective, proof that the Chinese padred California too. But no, instead here you are, humping with me in a pathetic little room in the I-Hotel. Oh no you don’t. Don’t come yet. I’m not finished with you.
Did you read their manifesto? What manifesto? The Tiao Yu Tai manifesto, of course. But who nowadays doesn’t have a manifesto? Even I have a manifesto. But as a good Oriental citizen, I’m all for their manifesto. Think about those beautiful little islands out there in the middle of nowhere, just waiting to be grabbed up like Hawaii. Wild flowers. Flying fish. Green and verdant. Just thinking about them makes me go paradisiac. But I hyperventilate. The Japanese and the American military need to keep their pesky hands off those islands. If anyone knows what to do with an island, it’s the Chinese. What? Oh well, overpopulate it, I suppose. Fill it up with all those number-one sons, sail them out on picturesque junks, come home to honey with a big catch, and make a lot of babies. Turn it into one big happy i-land commune.
AN INTERNATIONAL CONSPIRACY!
U.S. government succumbs to Japanese secret demands and agrees to deliver the oil-rich Tiao Yu Tai islands to Japan. The Tiao Yu Tai islands, 20 miles north of Taiwan and 240 miles south of Ryukyu, are rightfully Chinese. Chinese fishermen have used these territorial waters for centuries. The recent discovery of rich oil deposits around the islands—almost twice the deposits of California—is too attractive to the Japanese militarists. The Sato regime has secretly demanded that the islands be included in the Ryukyu group and be returned to Japan in 1972. The U.S. had yielded to Japanese demands and had agreed to return the islands to Japan without the consent of the Chinese people. Our Chinese people strongly protest this Tokyo-Washington plot and tell the world you may forget Pearl Harbor, but we will never give away Tiao Yu Tai.
Chinese Six Companies
San Francisco, California
I’m here today representing the Japanese Community Youth Council, and we Japanese in America condemn the government of Japan for this act of international robbery against other Asian people. Just as we condemn the American government for its criminal acts in Southeast Asia, we condemn the Japanese militarist government of blatant pig acts against the Tiao Yu Tai islands. This pig activity, whether in the oil fields of these islands or the rice fields of Vietnam, this pig activity is called imperialism. Down with Japanese imperialism! Down with KMT traitors! Down with U.S. imperialism! All power to the people!