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I wanted to lead my students to another world, one where people value writing and art more than war, and yet I knew then and I know now that the only thing that matters is to make that world here. There is no other world. This is the only world we are in. This revisable country, so difficult to change, so easily changed.
He must have twenty years on me, I decided, coasting on his calm and fine lines both.
A trauma surgeon. What does it take to push someone that way? You don’t avoid the most unexpected tragedies; you invite them. What is there to fear. You know you will see the worst. You have control. Resurrecting lives. Setting up stories. Dealing with pain.
I thought about how my father once told me that he found coolness as an old man. The story I’d always heard was that he’d lost it. No, he said, cool came to him when he decided to no longer go after things. He set it up so that everyone would have to find him. And they did. He went full detachment. I think my mother caused this desire of his to withhold. He gave her more effort than he’d ever given anything, but that didn’t make her stay.
He changed himself when it was already too late to become what he thought the person who abandoned him wanted. So much character development happens this way. Self-cancellation. Don’t love me. You’ll get no results.
Graves told me there is a thing, like the cinéma du corps, called the cinema of attractions. A term coined by a guy named Tom Gunning. Something like you present a series of images to tell a story, without worrying too much about the words. “Exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption.” He brought up a short movie on YouTube with his phone: “How It Feels to Be Run Over,” shot in 1900 by the Hepworth Manufacturing Company. A motorcar crawling towards imminent collision with the screen.
Graves’s ad hoc curriculum worked with what was at hand. We had 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman, Anna Karenina, Bandits in Milan, Charlie Bubbles, The Red and the White. They were all dated 1968. There was a graphic printed on the faded pieces of paper that lined the bottom of the box. It had the digits “2” and “1” in red and orange arranged like a sun, 21212121212121212121. Below, “21e Festival International du Film: Le Rendez-vous Mondial du Cinéma. Cannes 1968. Du 10 au 24 Mai.” And then, taped below that: “Interrompu par solidarité avec les étudiants et les travailleurs, le Festival de Cannes est annulé.”
honestly jealous
“Oh,” she notices and says to Paul, “you found his old Pentax box camera.” She approves. “He loved that camera and took so many pictures with it.” Then she notices a book resting in the satin. “What’s this?” she asks.
“Favorite book, you said,” Paul mutters quietly.
“Capital?” she whispers. Even Auntie knows Karl Marx.
“Ah yeah, it was the book he was reading these days.”
“Favorite?”
“He always said the book he was reading was his favorite.”
Auntie’s exasperated, but she smiles and looks around. She slips the book out and hugs the cover to her bosom. “Do you want to get us in trouble?” she squeaks, bowing three times.
“But—”
“Bow three times,” she interjects. “Customary to do so,” she instructs, and moves away with Marx under cover. Outside, she shoves the un-American book at Paul and hisses, “Get rid of this.”
;lol
Night before Ching Ming, MLK Jr. is standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, gets shot through the neck. Next day, the flags are all at half mast. School’s abuzz. They’re rioting in DC, in Chicago. What’s gonna happen here in SF? The Panthers over in Oakland calling for keeping the peace. It’s not the time to go to the streets. What you want? A bloodbath? They’re pretending they’ve got everything under control. Don’t know that Eldridge Cleaver’s yet to see his soul on ice and Bobby Hutton’s young years got to be cut short.
“He was a friend of my family in Paris, but I wasn’t even born. He came to Paris to paint around 1920. He hung around Chou En-lai and the others at the Pascal Restaurant, on the Rue de l’Ecole de Medicine.” Chen speaks the last words in French. “He helped Chou stage a protest of the Chinese Legation, traveled around Europe with Chou to get recruits for the Chinese Communist Youth Corps.”
Paul is hearing this for the first time. “Chou?” he asks.
“Yes, China’s premier. The same.”
“He never said.”
“They parted ways. Chou returned to China to fight with Sun Yat Sen. Your father came home. What he really wanted was to return to his painting, and his family was here. His father died suddenly. Your auntie was a young girl, and he was the only son. He was a Marxist, but also filial.”
Paul is quiet. He isn’t a Marxist, but he already knows it’s going to be impossible to be filial.
“I looked him up when I came to study. He remembered my family from those days in Paris. When I met him, he was living and painting in the Monkey Block.”
“Monkey Block?”
“That’s what they called the block on Montgomery at Washington. The street was a hangout for artists and writers. The building was full of artist studios. Used to be the Black Cat Café in the basement.”
aaahh
Chen’s got a class in contemporary Chinese literature. He lectures without notes. It’s all in his head. This cat’s amazing. Quotes passages. Talks dates, anecdotes. Like he knows the authors. Maybe he does. Paul goes home and finds the books. It’s all there in his library, in Chinese and in translation. His dad’s scribbling’s in the margins, but it’s mostly in Chinese. Paul’s got to use a dictionary to decipher it, or ask Chen. Chen says, “You know Yat Min Lee? Calls himself Edmund. He sits in the back. I’ll introduce you. He can read it all for you. And in return, you can lend him the books. He doesn’t have the money to buy them.”
Turns out Edmund is the smartest kid in class. Reads everything in the original Chinese, criticizes the translations. Paul tries to be friendly, but Edmund’s too busy. He comes around when he can, hangs out in Paul’s library, but he’s got a job busing tables at Fisherman’s Wharf. That’s his routine. Got to make money to keep from taking it from his family’s table. Family’s loud and noisy, crowded into two rooms above a laundry. His business is everybody’s. As for Paul, his dad always had rent money coming in from his properties. Now Paul’s got to do the accounting every month. Two boys wishing they had the other’s problems.
Later, Paul reports. It’s one of the ICSA Chinese who speaks. That’s Intercollegiate Chinese Students Association. Fills in for a Chinese BSU. Chinese cat wears these shades that he never takes off. Works on being intimidating. He says, “What we are trying to do is to expose the contradictions of this society to our communities, separate fact from fiction. Fiction is that the Chinese have never suffered as much as the black or brown communities. Fact is the Chinese community has the same basic problems. Difference is that we got the neon lights and tourist restaurants. Fact is the restaurants are staffed by illiterate Chinese who work fourteen hours a day, six days a week. Fiction is Chinese businessman is doing good business. Fact is this is exploitation of Chinese immigrants who can only find work in sweatshops, laundries, and restaurants in Chinatown.”
Edmund says, “I’m not illiterate. What’s he talking about?”
Paul says, “It’s not about you. It’s about the others.”
Edmund says, “I am the others.”
Paul says, “There’s another meeting. This one is Third World. You get in if you’re Chinese.”
“I have to go home and work,” Edmund says. He always has to go home and work. Paul doesn’t have to go anywhere. And no one’s waiting at home for him.
lol