Now it’s not as if this moment lasts forever, or that things don’t get sticky and go back on themselves. But it’s the moment you return to because it sustains meaning and empowers the lonely individual. Of course most folks never get this moment, and you who do get it are still imperfect human beings.
Witnessing Edmund’s death was that sort of moment. Paul, employed to capture sound, dropped the boom and ran down the street to find a pay phone. But it was Judy Eng who found herself watching everything through the narrow hole of the camera lens. She felt her face hopelessly glued to the machine as if thus empowered to find the source of the bullet and to stop it. The camera swung about searching and recording. It was a mechanical thing, a pompous truth machine. In the aftermath, these last minutes would be replayed relentlessly, scrutinized frame by frame, used by the police and the prosecutor to identity the killer, if not his accessories. Similarly, Judy sat in a dark editing room and obsessively studied the tape over and over again.
“Stop it!” Paul yelled. “How can you keep watching that?”
Judy faced him stalwartly. Her eyes were bloodshot. “Leave me alone.”
“Why are you doing this? Let the police figure this out.”
“Who gives a fuck about the police!”
“You need help.”
“I don’t need help. I need Edmund.”
“Edmund’s gone,” Paul said softly.
“He’s there,” she wept. “Look, there.” She pointed at Edmund’s figure collapsing on the monitor.
“No, that’s not him. That’s not him.”
“It’s my fault.”
“No.”
“It’s true. Look. I timed the minutes from when he falls to when I stop taping. One minute and twelve seconds. Do you know how long that is? I saw him fall in my finder, and I kept on filming, like it wasn’t real or like it was real, like fascination.”
“It’s just confusion.”
“It’s not.”
“You’ve watched it too many times.”
“I was watching him die. Like a fucking spectator!”
Running back down Jackson Street from his frantic call for help, Paul found Judy cradling Edmund’s head in her lap and wailing. She was wailing again now.
One minute and twelve seconds. The time it takes to make a choice, and Judy kept watching her choice over and over again. I think it’s possible at this juncture that Judy might have gone over the deep end. Paul certainly thought that might happen as he tried to drag her away from the equipment.
Chen stood in the doorway, the dark empty corridor behind him. He walked over to a table, pushed away the piles of papers, newspaper articles written by Edmund, and scattered photos, and put down the large paper sack he was carrying. “Paul,” he said matter-of-factly, “I forgot to buy a newspaper, and we could use some drinks. A beer for me.” He drew some bills from his pocket.
Paul loosened his grip on Judy, glanced gratefully at Chen, and walked away.
When Paul returned, Chen and Judy were hunched over Chinese takeout boxes picking out the contents with chopsticks.
“Sorry,” Chen looked up. “We couldn’t wait. Judy hasn’t eaten in three days.”
Judy had grabbed the box of rice, hoisted mein on top, and was wolfing down the contents.
Chen pulled out his pocketknife. Paul popped open a beer for himself and nursed it slowly, observing the empty boxes. He munched on an almond cookie.
“We saved some tofu for you. Your favorite.” Chen pushed a box over and tossed him the chopsticks.
Paul picked out the tofu pieces and stared at a series of photographs of Edmund speaking in front of a mic at some rally. Chen puttered around him, gathered the empty cartons and rearranged the table, and finally hustled the film crew of two out of the studio.
At Judy’s house, Chen said to Paul, “You stay here with Judy. Tomorrow you edit the tape with her.”
“What?”
“For Edmund’s memorial in two days.”
“Edit? I don’t know how to do that.”
“She knows how. For you, it’s easy. Tell a story.” He spoke quietly but firmly. “Don’t leave her side until it’s finished. I’ll see you at the memorial.”
Paul fell asleep on the sofa. When he awoke he looked around and recognized all of Edmund’s things, but in a domesticated setting. This had been Edmund’s life since China, where he met Judy. She had arranged his practical life, become devoted to his work, learned to run a camera because he encouraged the idea. Paul thought she was stuck to him like a puppy dog. He groaned.
Two days later, Chen took his seat next to Paul at the memorial. “Nicely done,” he commented.
“She did all the work.”
“Where is she?”
“Behind the projector.”
“Good.”
“I haven’t eaten for three days.”
“Good.”
The chief editor from the East West newspaper got up and spoke about Edmund. Then someone from the Chinatown Youth Services. Then from the Chinese for Affirmative Action. Guys from the Tiao Yu Tai struggle were there. A woman from the Chinese Progressive Association, aka I Wor Kuen, and a guy who ran Everybody’s Bookstore for the Asian Community Center, aka Wei Min She, were also in line to speak. Old Red Guards were there too. A woman from the Health Services and even the old guys from the Laundrymen Association and the Six Companies chimed in. Wah Ching and the Joe Boys came in an uneasy truce and all the poets from CARP and Kearny. They all told the Lee family that Edmund Yat Min was a good son and exalted member of the community. It was maybe the first and last time that all these entities with competing political agendas and visions came together. In an amazing display of largess, they refrained on one side from denouncing Edmund as a reformist or on the other as a communist. Still, they all claimed some piece of Edmund to demonstrate the worthiness of their associations, shamelessly putting in a plug for Edmund’s support of garment workers or bilingual education or his fight against police brutality.
I guess you could say that Edmund was our slain Chinatown Romeo, sweet prince fallen between many houses. But maybe you could also say that this event was a testimony to the kind of person Edmund had become in a few short years. He was probably not, as they exaggerated, a man of great passion and unwavering commitment to the rights of oppressed people, but he was a young man of uncommon intelligence who used his talents to work daily on behalf of people in need. Why did he choose to do this? There had been endless meetings, strategy sessions, leafleting, articles to write, politicians to approach, folks to interview, statistical research, funding and legal matters, speeches and debates. And Edmund did all this while nominally working on his graduate studies in Chinese political philosophy and history. Chen knew Edmund’s genius and that Edmund, who alone among all his students could leave Chinatown, had chosen to stay. I am not sure if Edmund, had he lived, would not have eventually moved on, but these few years of which we speak were formative in the lives of many. A seed was planted. A moment of awakening.
Judy came over to hug Chen. “Thank you,” she said.
When she walked away, Paul complained, “Hey, how come . . . ? Oh, never mind.”
“Jealous?”
“Oh fuck you. That was my work too.”
“I could tell.”
“That wasn’t easy. He was my best friend.”
“I know.”
Paul looked angrily at Chen, whose eyes were quietly sad. “Take me home,” Paul said, shamefully. He tugged Chen’s sleeve. “Please,” he begged. “I’m famished.”
Although the pivotal moment theory might work for some, it might be overblown. As time drags on, other events step up to the plate, and one begins to wonder why any fork in the road presented the less traveled option. Chen knew his own confused path that, upon review, could not have been changed then and certainly not now. Chen was a man who lived in several exiles. As for Paul, he was still too young to know. Thinking about Paul and Chen, maybe you couldn’t exactly compare
pivotal moments, but rather a single desire that united the two men: the desire to write.
The desire to write is linked to the desire to think and the desire to record. You could say it’s all the same thing, but you probably favor something or another. You who think you’re thinking are recording your thinking, but you who think you’re writing are recording your writing. You who think you’re recording are writing your record. It’s all stupidly obvious except for the desire. You could say it’s an obsessive trait, and once it kicks in, you’re stuck with it. The desire is selfish and personal. It has nothing to do with talent or giftedness. That becomes apparent or unapparent in the act, but the desire is an enigma. You say, I want to be famous; I want to be remembered; I want to speak; I want to communicate; I want to imagine; I want to remember. But writing itself is a strange way to accomplish any of that stuff, sitting alone for hours with a pen and paper or typewriter. It’s a complicated desire that becomes mixed up with the self, and Chen and Paul, if forced, would admit that it was a desire stronger than any human relationship, including the one between them.
Writing itself might be a laudable occupation, but the desire could be sinful—a lot of pretending and fakery. Mao was probably right to try to socialize writing, make it work for the people. Of course once they try to make rules about writing, you’ll go off and hide somewhere and write heresy. Still, having the desire is not the same thing as having something to write. The desire has to coincide with belief and necessity at a time and place in history. So the Poetry Boys Club hung around coffee houses, mostly with their desire, and defined a belief and necessity in a time and place.
“I think we need to present ourselves professionally,” Paul said. He could hear grumbling on the phone. “She doesn’t know us from Adam. Truth is, we’ve never actually done this, never published anything.”
“There’s the anthology in progress, and we’re going to publish her husband.”
“Besides which, we’re Chinese.”
“What difference does that make?” Jack’s voice rose.
“Did your folks wear I’m Chinese buttons?”
“Yeah, well—”
“We’ll pick up Kamiyama in Fresno.”
“Good idea.”
“Listen. You agree this is important.”
“John Okada publishes the first real serious novel in Asian America in 1957! It goes out of print with a couple lousy reviews. Nobody recognizes it’s a classic. And we discovered it!”
“Practically in a trash bin at McDonald’s.” Paul patiently recounted finding the discarded hardcover at the used bookstore on Turk and Market. Heroics were all part of it.
“It means we got a history! We’re yellow writers who come from a tradition of yellow writing!” Jack bellowed, then his voice got intense. “So this just in: Tuttle sent me a copy of a letter from Okada dated 1956. Okada says in the letter that he’s writing another novel.”
“So what happened to it?”
“It’s gotta be in his papers. Maybe an unfinished manuscript. Who knows! Can you believe this? We gotta get that manuscript!”
“So we’re not just asking her permission to reprint No-No Boy?”
“Right! We gotta get permission to ransack her house!”
Jack threw a duffel and his guitar case into the trunk of Paul’s car. Then he hooked some hangers under plastic on the windows behind the driver’s seat.
“What’s that?” Paul turned around.
“High-school graduation suit.”
“Does it still fit?”
“You want professional, this is the best I can do.”
“Vintage.”
“Speaking of, where’d you get this car?”
“I bought it off Chen.”
“It wasn’t this color.”
“Right. I painted it.”
“Fucking Steve McQueen. Why do I need a suit? Leather will do.”
Paul laughed. “You watch too many movies.” Paul twirled the ’66 now-green Mustang GT out of the driveway, shot down 101 to pick up Kamiyama in Fresno, and they were on to L.A.
What happens next in L.A. at Dorothy Okada’s house is history. Her husband, the writer John Okada, had died only months before, and she had burned all his papers before moving. It wasn’t entirely her fault. No one seemed interested in his work or writing. Not UCLA. Not the Japanese American community. There was no affirmation of his work, and she had lived her own reality. Now these young men had driven four hundred miles of pure anticipation to her doorstep, and she could not fathom their disappointment. She did not know this desire to write and the cost of defining a belief and necessity in a time and place.
Paul looked at Jack in his high-school graduation suit. He looked like he was going to rip it off his body. Paul’s look said, Be professional or I’ll kill you. Jack was fuming, thinking that young chump Paul wasn’t even born when Okada’s book was published. But Kamiyama looked at Jack with a sansei look that said, Don’t make her feel bad. So Jack said, “Well, O.K., tell us about John. Ah, what sort of guy was he? I mean, what sort of sex life did you have together?”
Paul got right to work on the book projects. Maybe he did it because he was the youngest and didn’t know it was a shot in the dark. That’s another thing to take into consideration, the way things happen because you are young and don’t know any better. You might say it’s youthful idealism, but youth doesn’t really know what’s ideal. It just feels right sometimes.
Paul knew how to collect rent, write up contracts, keep accounting books, carry out a will. Maybe Jack or some other poet made the contacts, but Paul followed through, got the contracts signed, deposited and signed checks, printed letterhead, licked the stamps on the envelopes. He had learned from Edmund about press releases and advertising. It was business, on the one hand. On the other, he had learned something from editing Edmund’s memorial tape. It was like Chen had suggested. You tell a story. Pieces for the anthology arrived, along with interviews of the authors. A new introduction and afterword for the Okada reprint had to be written and proofed. Paul poured over the material and meticulously edited everything. He got the confidence to get Kamiyama to pull back on the nostalgia and to make Jack accept cutting out whole paragraphs of run-on blather. The whole operation looked professional, but it was just Paul, schlepping books to the post office in the back of the green Mustang.
You’ve got to wonder, too, about the role of teachers. The problem for Paul was that Chen had become more than a teacher. Sometimes you think the student wants to surpass or show up the teacher, but that wasn’t the case for Paul. He wanted to make Chen proud. He wanted to give back something significant in return. He was busy being a member of the poetry club, of course, but he thought this was part of delivering the goods, as it were. The edited book, some of it his own writing—he wanted to give that to Chen. Of course, he didn’t think about it in exactly this way until months later, so while he was busy being a singular worker in a staff of one, he failed to notice Chen’s malaise.
Chen went back and forth methodically to his teaching appointment. And for days he might disappear with a car to the races.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Racing.”
“I thought you said you were going to write this weekend.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You say that every weekend. What are you reading?” Paul picked up the scattered papers Chen had discarded on the carpet next to the sofa. He thought they might be student papers, but he recognized the typewriter and the style. “This is Edmund’s stuff.”
“There’s a box of it. Judy gave it all to me. For a long time I couldn’t look at it.” Chen rubbed his eyes. “This is the dissertation he started.”
Paul slumped into the sofa.
“It’s brilliant.”
“Can you publish some of it?”
“Maybe.” Chen shook his head sadly.
Paul tried to change the subject. “I found this artist in J-Town who does prints and silkscreens. He’
s perfect to do the cover for No-No.”
“Such a loss.” Chen hadn’t heard Paul. He got up and walked to the large window of his study, the library where Paul and Edmund had spent so many hours reading together. Chen stared out, watching the fog slip into the bay. He didn’t hear Paul leave the room.
The next weekend, Paul ran into the emergency room of the Valley Memorial Hospital in Livermore. He found Chen with a bandaged head and broken arm, rushed there from the Altamont Raceway. “You wanna kill yourself?” he barked at Chen.
“This driver cut in front. We were lucky, you know. That’s skill.” Chen proudly hid his embarrassment.
Confined to the house, Chen sat next to Edmund’s box of writing and read and reread everything. He pulled out Edmund’s translations, made corrections, and had Paul type up new drafts.
“When are you going to get that cast off?” Paul asked.
“Maybe next week. If you don’t want to type for me, it can wait another week.” Chen looked frustrated, shuffling through papers with his left hand.
“I can do it.” Paul tapped a ream of papers on their bottom edge and said, “But I’ve got these transcripts to complete, then turn into bios. They want it all in a few weeks.”
1968- Eye Hotel Page 11
