Like the lady at the front of the Cathay mortuary who is burning paper—joss paper, otherworld paper money, paper clothing, paper replicas of cars, televisions, houses, servants, everything going up in symbolic smoke to send along with Dad in the next world.

“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.”

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.”

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.

Next day in Chen’s class, it’s Mao Tse-Tung’s poetry. At least that’s the syllabus. But Mao’s practice comes to class instead. BSU and TWLF students walk in with their leather jackets, Afros, dark glasses, berets, what have you, but mostly attitude, and announce: This class is over. We are on strike until the pig administration meets our non-negotiable demands. Someone lights a match in the trash can, and everyone files out. War of the flea.

Down in the field, publisher and physician Dr. Carlton Goodlett’s being carried on the shoulders of his cohort. Looks like two hundred colored people with Goodlett riding on top in a sea of white students, some say six thousand. He’s got his own bullhorn system, and he’s yelling, “We’re not subscribing to violence at this time! If the police feel that their duty is to provoke violence, all hell is going to break loose.” Who’s he talking to? S. I. in the bathroom? Six thousand white students? Tactical squad lined up on the green? They aren’t listening. Police got their orders. They arrest the good doctor and club the non-innocent bystanders. Throw everyone into paddy wagons. Situation explodes. Garbage cans get firebombed. Blow the motherfucker up! Folks go on a rampage, smash the windows of all the parked cars along Nineteenth. Someone climbs up to the wires of the MUNI car and yanks them off. M looks like a giant metal insect with a wagging antenna stalled in traffic. Another group pushes a UPI station wagon into the intersection, releases the brakes, and lets it roll. Folks hysterical and running in every direction.

Although no one took his dismissal of Chen seriously, it was cited as a further example of our acting president’s autocratic highhandedness. During the strike Chen used a café in North Beach as his classroom. The Brighton Express on Pacific Avenue was a popular café and hangout for the bohemian crowd. A nisei woman named Joanna ran the café. In the past, when the president enjoyed the local jazz scene, on occasion he too frequented the café. Joanna, always good-humored and friendly, called him “Professor.” One supposes she called Chen “Professor” too. During the strike, they were all teaching their classes off campus somewhere, in their homes or in churches. This business with the strike was nonsense. No student wanted to lose a year of coursework. No teacher wanted to waste his time on a picket line.

Students gathered around a couple of tables, and Chen began his lecture, “Mao Tse-Tung on Literature and Art.” “Comrades!” he both addressed the students and quoted from Mao. “You have been invited to this forum today to exchange ideas and examine the relationship between work in the literary and artistic fields and revolutionary work in general . . . This,” he said, “is how Mao addressed the Yenan forum twenty-six years ago on May 2, 1942.”

Chen continued, “Taken in this context of war, Mao continues . . . ‘In our struggle for the liberation of the Chinese people, there are various fronts, among which are the fronts of the pen and of the gun, the cultural and the military fronts. To defeat the enemy we must rely primarily on the army with guns. But this army alone is not enough; we must also have a cultural army, which is absolutely indispensable for uniting our own ranks and defeating the enemy.’” Indeed. But to be fair, Chen never had the teeth for violence. He would never have jumped on a truck and yanked out power cords and destroyed equipment. He was much too refined. He really believed in the cultural army, in liberation by means of the pen. So he continued.

“I realize, considering the violence we have sustained in recent days under the severe measures of the current administration—”such an oblique reference to our acting president—“it would seem to some that the gun might be the more appropriate tool. I want to make it clear that I am not advocating the gun. We are here to discuss contemporary Chinese literature, but we cannot examine that literature without also examining the political and social context that drives its formation during this time period.”

The students loved Chen. Suddenly his knowledge of the Chinese revolution and his Marxist point of view were in vogue. They sat around him mesmerized, as if he were Confucius himself, Chinese wisdom coupled with his contemporary knowledge of revolution. They all wanted revolution, but they didn’t know what revolution was. Paul, for example, wanted revolution, and he wanted this revolution packaged in the poet intellectual. But was he listening when Chen again quoted Mao? “Many writers and artists stand aloof from the masses and lead empty lives; naturally they are unfamiliar with the language of the people.” The language of the people was exactly the language our acting president had spent his life studying. Unlike Chen, he knew this language and how the common understanding of this language controlled society.

They walked down Montgomery to Washington and stared at a parking lot. “Remember what I said about the Monkey Block? It used to be right here. There was a huge building, four stories, occupied most of the block. Your father lived here. It’s where he painted his best work. Where he met his friends. He knew everyone. William Saroyan, Diego Rivera, Kenneth Rexroth. Well, Rexroth is still around anyway. When Rivera came to paint his murals with his wife, Frida Kahlo, your father got the Chinese Revolutionary Artist Club together to host them. He was going to name you Diego, but your mother favored Paul. It was Paul for Paul Cézanne and Paul Valéry. Painter-poet. They had romantic hopes for you. You know, he knew Valéry in Paris.”

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.

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!

Edmund’s going to have to make some choices. Five hundred academic sinologists can sign off on a letter, tell Taiwan what for and so on about how to run its business, but in the end, what does it mean? You can’t stir up a pot with five hundred sinologists. Honey, you need five million sinologists.

Chen spoke first. He changed the direction of the conversation. “The work of the revolution is a life devoted to the people, that is to say, the public. It’s a public life. A man’s private life, one’s deep interior, must at times be forgotten or sacrificed.”

The young man shifted. We shifted too, wanting to avoid the weight of these words.

“Here.” Chen retrieved the book offered as a gift, searched the pages. “This is one of my favorite paintings. Twin peaches in a small basket. Peaches represent long life, but as you know they are delicate, bruise easily. If the tree lives long, the fruit is ephemeral. Picked ripe from a tree, there is nothing sweeter or more succulent. Here twin peaches sit together, sweetly and exaggeratedly red in color for a lifetime.” Chen reached up to touch the soft fuzz of the young man’s felt fedora and tugged it down in jest.

If we felt confused, it was also the young man’s turn to look with questioning, as well as sheepish, eyes.

Chen sighed. “Revolution is old, but older yet is the sentiment of this painting, of love and of poetry.”

So maybe there’s this moment. It’s different for everyone, but it’s pivotal. It’s the moment your head gets screwed off and screwed on again, and everything is changed forever. You can never see life the same way again. You can never go back. Well, you can go back, but you go back with new eyes, maybe a new brain, new ears, new mouth. It could be there’s a propensity for the moment, like DNA that’s planted inside you ready to catch the moment. Some folks might say it’s family history. Or maybe you can trace a series of events, plot them out like a map. You remember this time in your childhood: your mother or father said this; you saw that; you got caught up in this; you read that. Then it all comes together and wham! The lights turn on. O.K., it might be more subtle, more gradual, but there’s always something really significant that captures the heart and mind. And it’s not to say that it might not be painful or personally devastating as well. At that moment you shed an old life to become a whole person because, you believe, your body in its actions and your mind in its spirit are wholly in sync. Your talents and possibilities exist for a purpose that is beyond yourself.

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.

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.

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.

So that’s how I meet Chen Wen-guang. I call him Wen for short. It’s one a.m., and we’re at the counter side by side at the Cathay. We got the same bowl of noodles, ’cept he’s dressed nice. Madison Avenue’s finest. ’Course by this time of night, he’s got his silk tie stretched out and thrown over his shoulder. Jacket is hanging off the stool behind him. Time was I could afford suits like that, make a killing back of Lucky M and go out and buy me the best. Pinstriped, double-breasted, silk hanky. But that was before my union days.

Wen’s got his eyes closed, concentrating. Then he takes up a slurp of the noodles and gets the texture between his teeth. I look at him, and I say, “Pork neck. Could use a few more.”

He says, “Snout. That would do it, too.”

And I know he knows. It’s the sticky cartilage that gives a soup grip. I’m impressed.

Then he says, “And some more white pepper.”

He nabbed it.

And that’s how it started. I say, “Have you tried Chop Suey House over on Post?” And we meet there the next week, and every week practically we’re on the quest.

I continue, “But it’s more than meets the eye. Complicated. Two cooks can’t live together!”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s true what they say. Too many cooks, you know? Got to be one palate at a time, but like a balancing act. You Chinese say, yin and yang. And each gonna offer the other the most delicious dish possible, but it’s also competition. It gets more intense with each dish. So the gods know what they’re doing. Keep the lovers apart, they get the best possible meal.”

“That’s the moral of the story?”

“I don’t know nothing about morals. What’s the moral about that apple? Don’t go talking to snakes? It’s already too late. It’s like life. You want good sex? You want good food? You gotta go to the trouble.”