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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!
lmao
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.
cute
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.”
But back up, brother. There’s more. So Akagi gets out of the army and takes his G.I. points to college. It’s 1964. Free Speech at Berkeley. Starts reading. Everybody’s reading Marx. What’s this communism he’s been fighting to protect the homeland? Meets up with another old buddy from the days who’s back from the same stint in the military. He’s making use of the G.I. bill too. It’s Bobby Seale. Then there’s David Hilliard. Lived two blocks down. Huey was around Thirty-fourth.
“No shit.” Puffs a donut into the air.
One day, they all check into the Muslim Temple around Third Street and get ready to join up with Elijah Muhammad. But wait, you got to give up smoking, drinking, and women. Can you live on sweet potato pies? Someone says: I could give up women, but not smoking! Brothers reconnoiter. News is, Malcolm’s moving out anyway. Do the Muslim thing minus the religion plus the politics.
Akagi’s at UC Berkeley, so he’s the minister of education. Builds a curriculum. They all got to study up. It’s Marx, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Robert F. Williams. But what’s this Cultural Revolution People of China thing? If there’s a black thing, what about a yellow thing? That’s a lotta colored people marching to the revolution. Akagi checks out China Books in San Francisco for some research.
cute