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She’s working the telephones at the office, waking up early to cook for the breakfast program, distributing the paper, running day care during the morning and a free school in the afternoons, lifting shit and raising money for the programs, doing political study in the evenings and basic training on the weekends. In between, she’s got to be giving you honey, even though you might be getting several honeys. Even though from time to time you lose your mind and put your revolutionary fist in her face. She accepts your weeping apologies because what lumpen can be perfect? Takes time to get your freedom. She’s gonna bear it for you. Gonna prove her mama’s wrong about you. After all, she’s got your babies and another one coming. Producing those power children for the next generation. For the protracted struggle.
But how long’s this gonna last? Dope offers up the future: funk wears off. What else you got to offer? By the time it takes you by surprise, you know she’s found it all out yesterday. Oh, yes.
How many nights she’s got to sit home with the baby waiting for the field marshal to return with his ratty briefcase? One night he comes home, finds the door ajar. First time he has to really draw his weapon, kick the door aside, and jump around with his heart in his throat, thinking, what’s the door open for? She’d never leave it open in this neighborhood, not at this time of night, not with what’s been going down. He searches the house, kicking in the doors, checking every room like he’s in enemy territory, snuffing out a sniper. But it’s empty, and she’s gone.
O.K., so much for the future you could predict. What happens next, and over time? Hasn’t happened yet, but you gonna find Akagi renting a room in the I-Hotel with the old Filipino and Chinese bachelors. Nothing strange about that. He’s a bachelor too. He’s like all the other activists down home with the tenants, working for their rights. Even though he’s been purged from the Party, he’s not like others to go wash his hands of everything, reject his beliefs. Where’s he gonna go anyway? Gonna keep working for the people.
What's Il Piccolo? Is it a coffee house? A doughnut shop? A Chinese cake and tea shop that plays Italian opera? Honey it's a stage, a dais for the imagination. It's reproduced in every city on every continent. Gather the intellectuals, the politicos, and the surrounding lowlifes to exchange the necessary drugs that fuel the imagination: caffeine, nicotine, absinthe, opium. So on the one hand, you have the revolutionaries staging their purposeful antics, and on the other hand, you've got the outlaw literati. [...]
3.1 If war brought Olivia and Ben together, would peace then pull them apart? For the young, seven years might seem an eternity, but for those who live seven years, it is finally only a beginning, and the promises of seven years stretch out into multiples of seven until youth crumbles into age, grasping for a reevaluation that desires once again a blank slate, the sloughing of cares piled one upon the other, the emptiness of freedom.
2.1 Ben sat in the audience and marveled at the confidence of the young woman who marched to the microphone and spoke without notes, in complete sentences, with casual but forceful articulateness. She recounted her journey, her work, and the significance of her meetings and discussions with those personages of high repute: H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. She could not have been more than twenty. He noted the sheen of her hair curled behind her ear, the elegant gestures of her hands and long fingers, the sense of her stature despite her height.
2.2 At another event, Olivia heard the intensity in the voice of the young man who introduced the labor organizer from the farmworkers' movement, Philip Vera Cruz. She heard his voice, but she watched his eyes, which seemed to her almost stunning in their bright beauty, the way his look across the crowd sparkled with both kindness and fury.
2.3 First impressions may both deceive and perceive.
1.4 They met in Kang's apartment on Dwight, blocks from the university, arriving with their copies of Capital, The State and Revolution, WHat Is to be Done?
1.5 Kang opened the discussion. We're going to take this slowly and build our knowledge. What I realize is that this is a body of knowledge that has been censored out of your education, whereas to think in Marxist terms outside of America is common practice. Marxism is a way of thinking.
1.6 Ben spoke enthusiastically: For the first time I feel as if I am reading about my own condition, about the condition of my parents as workers, and I finally understand my father's alienation. Although he did not admit it here, it was the case that as Ben read, he came to passages in Marx where he could not help but to kiss the pages and to whoop and dance about his room.
1.7 Olivia rolled her eyes at what she interpreted to be an excessive emotional display and asked for clarification about the differences and similarities between the peasant and the industrial worker.
cute
7.3 Ben asked, When did we become Asian American?
7.4 Olivia answered, What sort of question is that?
7.5 Karl interrupted. Wait, it's not a stupid question. Nineteen sixty-six. There's a magazine article about the Japanese American model minority, a kind of American. Before that, Japanese are racially identified as Japanese -- otherwise how could they all be interned during the war? After sixty-six, we all get racially identified as hyphenated Americans.
7.6 Olivia posed, But Asian American is a political designation.
7.7 Karl answered, It's political, racial, and national. Look, you are organizing around this designation, and that's useful, but you are going to have to scrutinize it through a Marxist analysis that includes class. Hey, trust me. This is going to make or break you.
7.8 Ben asked, You mean we have to move away from race and organize based on class?
7.9 Karl shook his head. Don't think it's that easy.
9.10 Karl said, _Marx said that men make their own history but not necessarily as they please. He predicted the inevitability of the failure of the capitalist mode of production, and you yourselves can see the contradictions that make continuous acquisition of the earth's resources and the exploitation of everyone to do so a finite proposition, but when it will fail and how, that's --
9.11 Olivia inserted, Up to us.
looove
1.1 Ben San Pablo was named after this father, Bienvenido San Pablo, Sr., a strong muscular man of broad shoulders and deep voice, a tough, bold exterior fortified nightly by the golden flame lit within an amber bottle of whiskey. There was no earthly weight that Bienvenido Senior could not lift, no woman he could not charm, no comrade from whom he did not receive respect. And yet a great weight surrounded his heart like a lead suitcase, an unattainable woman sneered blue cat eyes in his dreams, a great white father reminded him constantly of his place. Thus a great man was a cripple in his own mind, uncontrollably jealous of the woman with whom he became attached such that his paranoia and self-doubt eventually drove each of them away, and though a respected foreman at his job, he spent all his additional pay buying drinks and loaning money to his working crew to assure himself of their friendship and continued loyalty.
1.2 A man's self-worth can only be measured by himself.
7.1 When the epiphany came as it tends to near the end of one's life, Bienvenido Senior saw his dead mother in a wreath of light at the foot of his bed and, fearing for his life, followed her out of his house in Daly City, along the silent avenues, and into a grocery market, losing her somewhere among the fruits and vegetables. Standing there barefoot and stupidly in his pajamas at three in the morning, he wept into the broccoli and the cantaloupe, the memory of her toil spreading like those fields in a tarmac of blinding light.
7.2 Ben had begun bringing his mother's meals to his father, trying to arrive before his father could hit the evening bottle, and holding forth with a planned question. But the next night, his father said: I saw your grandmother last night. You don't have to worry about me. I know what I have to do now.
7.3 Bienvenido Senior went to church, made his confession, tossed his whiskey habit, and organized a plan to build a new church in his old village.
7.4 Years later, Ben Junior would travel to the Philippines to visit his father, buried next to the church he had struggled to build with his bare hands during those years of martial law. Ben lit a candle in the church and sat to contemplate the rebellious zeal of their separate passions.