Chin to China, part 2

[cont'd from part 1]

CHINAMAN LIT

We were wrong not to distinguish between Christian CHINESE-AMERICAN lit invented in 1910, and the older, non-Christian “CHINAMAN” literature invented by the CHINESE ENGLISH PHRASE BOOK, of 1882, by Wong Sam & Associates. Chinaman literature. My apologies to my co-editors of AIIIEEEEE! And THE BIG AIIIEEEEE! history.

I was too hasty. I had never thought of “Chinaman” as a sensibility of the definition of a form of it’s own. And what of the WWII vets working as copy editors, reporters, and writers on the real metro daily dominants of their market, everyone knew were busy at their typewriter every night writing his or her guts into a novel based on their WWII experience.

Ken Wong of the San Francisco Examiner. Not a page, not a word of his novel will ever be read. His name will not exist. He’ll only be a memory, of a rainy day in San Francisco we were caught on each other’s eyes. I was looking for stuff to read for an AIIIEEEEE! I crossed Broadway to Grant, where Chinatown chugs cars into the street in the days Broadway was a long Bay Bridge on ramp. I talked to him in the rain about Chinese-American literature and made him dance like he was working hard not to burst his urge to piss.

Chinaman lit isn’t Christian, isn’t autobiographical. And it doesn’t lie. The Chinaman writers are Wong Sam & Associates (1882) and Chiang Yee of thirties, stranded in Britain by WWII. He told stories in two cultures and painted in the manners of two cultures with humor and charm, in his own signature style. I didn’t know what it was when I saw his work in a used bookstore, then at a friend’s house. The memory of the book in my hands and the comfortable uniqueness of printed form of the book, the shape of indented poetry in a different font, from the deceptively plain style of the prose. If there had been a Chinese American public that read about him in a Chinese American critic’s criticism in a CA magazine he wouldn’t be unknown and untaught in AALit as he is today. The magazine would try to both shape public knowledge and opinion, influence the writers and arts they criticize.

I say for the twelve smiling graduate stupids in class, “The Chinaman writer has no interest in being accepted by whites, as Monkey had no interest in being accepted by men.”

“I disagree,” the Chinese educated UCLA professor of AALit says, in her deep voice that reminds me of Hildagard Neff, “Monkey wants to be accepted by men, that’s why learns the ways of men.”

“There’s more to learning than learning the ways of men, Monkey learns from men who try to master him. He learns that the men that teach him try to master him, so he seeks the beings that men regard as masters, and learns that they are corrupt, as he beats what he wants to learn out of them.”

“I used to be Chinese, but I have learned to be Chinese-American, ” she says.

“Asian-Americans want to be mastered. Chinamen master but are not mastered,” I say. “Monkey tries to teach the Monkeys and Apes he settles in the Land of Fruit and Flowers behind the waterfall. But he learns beyond their ability to absorb his lessons. They are stuck in a tic tac toe championship.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the UCLA princess snoots.

“Exactly,” I say.

FAIRY TALES

Ladies and gentlemen of China, AALit is your American offspring. Your very own American child. We were born whole in America, like Nah Jah come to China out of his mother’s womb in a lotus. The lotus was a boat, from some place. As Poon Goo’s egg was a boat, from some place. We were too young to ask where Nah Jah, or Poon Goo had come from. They landed in boats from mystery into Chinese consciousness. We landed in America in boats from Kwangtung, China.

It was no mystery where we had come from. The Qing were Manchu horsemen as the Chinese learned when Qian Cai published a novel GENERAL YUE FEI, about a Chinese hero from history, who beats Wushu, a prince of the horsemen, in the mountains, on the water, on the plains. The book was published after Qian Cao’s death ( he died sometime before 1735) after being banned from publication by Emperor Qianlong (1736-1795) And published or not the novel was being read so the ban was lifted or drifted away by 1862. The plot of the novel reflected Chinese hatred of the Manchu and hatred of the Christians driving Chinese to service and consume opium. Good reading during the Opium War initiated in the southern port of Canton, by the British.

We came from the British Opium War in Kwangdung Province, China. The war waged against the Chinese for the Holy Christians profiteers of the Church of England, who, along with the Crown became the owners and operators of the British East India Co. because of Opium War I. GENERAL YUE FEI grew in popularity as the 19^th Century progressed and Christian opium madness defined Qing China as the white man’s playground.

THE FIRST BRITISH OPIUM WAR-1840-1842

Ah the opium war started by an honest law abiding Cantonese port Commissioner who confiscated three million tons of opium, smuggled into China by the British. Lin the Commissioner had the British sign a bond promising not to deal opium in China or get out. Dealers in goods and not opium signed. The Church traders lied, bit their lips and prayed.

Lin the Commissioner humiliated the Brits with invitations to watch him dissolve the opium in water, add more than a dash of salt, and a large sprinkling of white lime that caused the solution to boil up thick bubbles that swelled and popped a noxious smell.

The Christians confessed to being dopeheads and cried they’d been robbed of their “personal property,” to their armed alter ego, and the British Navy arrived in Canton with the British Indian Army in 1840. The Opium War for the Conquest of China was on!

In 1849, whites from the States, on the other side of the elephant, were as much foreigners to the Territory of California, as the Chinese. Whites around the world knew 1849, as the year of the California gold rush. The Chinese came to get rich before the Christians took over California as a State. They envisioned being rich when they’d be made “citizens” of the new state. They were prepared for the state and federal discrimination that fell on them when California became a State in Sept. of 1850. They were the Cantonese losers of the Opium War in 1842 from the battleground of Kwangtung Province, their home, they paid the Chinese Miner’s tax to work tailings. The leftovers abandoned by a miner who’s moved on.

THE SECOND OPIUM WAR 1856-1860

The East India Co sent Christian missionaries to enslave more Chinese to opium, to Christ, and bring home Chinese silver for the church. They sent missionaries on a tour the Christian world raising money for their opium enterprise in China.

In 1856 the British were joined by the French, and then the Russians, then the USA in a grab for all of China, till 1860, when the Qing had no China left to give up. So the Qing gave up the China. Easy for the Qing. They weren’t Chinese. They were Manchu horsemen, the heirs of the Jerchins of the Jin, who kept losing to Yue Fei.

Tribal horsemen have fallen on China seasonally, like crows since the mad Chien Hsi Huang di declared himself the first emperor of the first empire of China, in 221 BC. The great wall he built was to keep the horsemen out. The northern tribal people measured wealth by the number of horses between their legs. To the Chinese of the time, land and green plants was wealth.

The first emperor might have been mad to build the Great Wall, with the waste of men and the grief of women he built it with, but his unification of Chinese writing, and weights and measures made several Chinese peoples one people.

The tribal Nomadic descendants of the horsemen on the wrong side of the wall in the BC took a large bite out of China in the AD around 1115, with a dynasty they called the “Jin” for Gold, and lost it, got it again in the Mongol Yuan, lost it to the Chinese Ming, got it back in the Qing, who farted China away.

The Manchu Qing is falling. We farmers from around the Pearl River Delta come across the ocean from China’s only open port, to San Francisco by boat in 1849. The men that had been told Nah Jah as babies, couldn’t help but have Nah Jah, come, however briefly, to mind, fingering a view through the leaves of the lotus carrying him through and out of his mother where he’ll instruct parents not to sell their kids for the good life.

The Chinese left home to confront the enemy on disputed ground. While the family built walls and towers around themselves their children and farms, and cannons in the towers to protect their integrity.

The Brits made the Qing pay for losing the war, they took Hong Kong, the Portuguese got Macau, and the Manchu Qing made the Chinese pay. From the Chinese people came expressions of anti-Manchu anti-Christian Chinese sentiment. The Taiping Rebellion, led by Jesus Christ’s younger brother, that delayed the start of the second Opium War till 1856 and the Boxer Rebellion of 1899.

The story of China is defined by a long, swing of an erratic but never ending pendulum of war between the Chinese farmers and nomadic horsemen that ended in what the Chinese used to call the Revolution of 1911, but today call “The Bourgeois Revolution of 1911.”

From the rise of the First Empire 221 BC to the fall of Qing in 1911 AD, the life of a hero is based on certain truisms. Life is war. Writing is fighting. Love is two warriors standing back to back fighting off the universe.

WHAT MAKES A CHINESE A CHINESE?

What makes a Chinese a Chinese is the same thing that makes an American an American. Common knowledge of common history.

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AMERICAN TEST

An American test from, ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON, made early in WWII, and released in 1942, from a story by the producer and director Leo McCarey.

Ginger Rogers, an American meets Albert Dekker in France. He claims to be an American agent. He says "My country is your country." Ginger doesn't buy it. And we are the knowing participants in another " American test:

DEKKER

Look let's understand each other. You're an American so am I.

ROGERS

Well, I am.

DEKKER

You mean, you don't believe me?

ROGERS

Uh Uh.

DEKKER

Well, now, I'll have to convince you. Maybe I'd better tell you something about myself.

ROGERS

I'm afraid you'd have to start way back when you were a little boy.

DEKKER

All right, I will. I was born in Germany. When I was a little boy we went to America and became American citizens. There's where I grew up. When I got to be a big boy I was sent to Heidleberg to be educated, and while there the Germans got the idea to making a spy out of me. I communicated with my parents, who by this time had gotten to be very good American citizens. They, in turn communicated with the State Department. State Department said fine…thought I could be useful. So now, I'm a spy for Uncle Sam, passing as a Frenchman, being paid by the Germans. And, the beauty part of it is: No income tax.

ROGERS

But wait a minute. We're getting way off the track. You say when you were a little boy you went to America…And right about there, I get stuck. Where did you uh live---

DEKKER

(Speaks in southern accent)

Honey, I wasn't born in old Kentucky but I was raised in Tennessee. And if you don’t like my peaches, don't you shake my tree.

(Reverts to his normal accent)

And then we moved to Texas,

ROGERS

Oh?

DEKKER

(Speaks in a Mexican accent)

Oh, sí sí. We live just north of the border. By the Río Grande. Down Mexico way. Habla usted Español, señorita?

ROGERS

(Matches his Spanish Mexican)

Seguro, Miguel. And maybe you will hear of my see-ster's neck.

DEKKER.

Oh oh ho he. Sí sí . Your see-sters neck, she fell in the river up to it. But you know about my mother? My mother makes more better tortillas than your mother.

ROGERS

And if I don't think so you show me your mother. ( She Laughs)

DEKKER,

Oh, sí sí.

(He mimes a pregnant woman stroking her belly.)

ROGERS

( Assumes a Scandinavian accent)

Vas you ever in Minnesota? Vere it's be'n so cold…

DEKKER

(Matches her Scandinavian accent)

Oh, ja ja. I take my best girl for a picnic. Every noon I ask he if she wants to take a walk with me in the voods. And do you know why she says, No?

ROGERS

Ja! Because it wasn't her first pic-nic.

(They have a laugh together.)

DEKKER,

Now do you believe I'm on the square.

ROGERS

(Takes on a Harlem accent,)

Yeah, Yeah but, being on the square today, brother, ain't what it used t o be. Your jabber don't jive.

DEKKER

Jive?

ROGERS

Cuz if you're on the square, you're like duh bear. And the bear's nowhere. But won't take long to repeat you with zoot suit. And a stuff cup. And get you back on the beam. Why in no time at all you'll be cooking with helium.

DEKKER,

Huh?

ROGERS,

Well. Don't that make you hep? Ain't you plugged in? Or am I just beatin' my gums?"

DEKKER

I'm afraid the lingo's passed me by. Say where were you born?

ROGERS

Parkside Avenue, Brooklyn.

DEKKER

Near Ebbetts Field?

ROGERS

Foul balls used to light in my backyard.

DEKKER,

What a ball team!

ROGERS

Dem lovely bums. Hmm, it's a great country." She heaves a sigh.

ALBERT DEKKER

And you do love it, don't you.

ROGERS

I can't wait to get back and see that lady. You know that lady that stands out in the harbor?

DEKKER

Hold it! Say this with me, 'I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands….'

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Common knowledge. Baseball is the American game. Young men, the GI’s know baseball. The older men know American movies. All Americans can pass the American tests in the movies, not just the Brooklynites, Minnesotans, Georgians, Mexican-Americans, even Chinese-Americans can pass. So they can justify the “American” part Chinese-American. Can they pass the “Chinese” part?

The CA writer whose claim to being Chinese rests on his being from Chinatown, Oakland is Chinese only in the Chinatown, Oakland he knows, and knows him. One foot beyond Oakland, and he’s a nobody. He’s a writer, yes, but his claim to being a Chinese-American writer depends on his knowledge of books and stories that all Chinese became familiar with in childhood. The children’s stories and the Heroic Tradition. Christians don’t learn Chinese children’s stories or the heroic tradition. They were banned by Christianity and American schools. Christian Chinese-Americans can be identified by testing. A Chinese children’s story for every “American” story.

Check your local school library. You won’t find one genuine Chinese children’s story, not one heroic novel, on the shelves but a lot of fake Chinese works by whites, like the baldly racist THE FIVE CHINESE BROTHERS by Claire Huchet Bishop. Still a best selling, illustrated 32 page children's book teaching that Chinese looks and brains are inferior to whites.

THE HEROIC TRADITION

The heroic tradition are the Chinese stories that inform the Chinese part of “Chinese-American.” Chinamen know the Chinese stories that brought them here. Monkey, one of the heroes of the heroic tradition tells the Chinaman to learn the stories people tell in America or get out with their lives.

Correction: Know your enemies as well as you know yourself means everyone is your enemy. You are alone. Alone! Alone!" the strategist says in mock horror.

“What strategist is existentialist?”

“If Monkey isn’t existentialist in form and content, I’m a monkey’s uncle.”

“You’re wrong! Monkey is not part of the heroic tradition!”

“Spoken like a true idiot! Next you’ll say Monkey isn’t Chinese.” I was wrong to call her an idiot. I was bewildered by her denial Chinese knowledge.

“You don’t have to be crude!” she sniffs.

“I’m trying to be contemptuous. The Greek Oedipus crossed paths with blind Tiresias and Roman heroes had their blind men that aroused a doubt about themselves. Henry II had his Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket. Robin Hood had Friar Tuck. All led to Ishmael meeting Blind Pew the day he sets sail after killing whales and rendering their blubber into oil. The heroic tradition has Monkey.”

She seethes, she leaks steam, from where she should leak steam.

“Monkey is born without parents out of a lifeless, know nothing rock. Totally without a past.” I say, “He learns to identify things like clothes with his body, words, to eat with sticks then he learns to combine the things he knows into tools, then he enters a learning competition with teachers of knowledge. Men, priests, teachers, Taoists, Buddhists, the Jade Emperor, the Buddha. Monkey learns the joy of learning is learning itself. That’s a lesson the Buddha has never learned.”

The Chinese blue ribbon teacher shuts her eyes and shakes her head violently no, no, no.

“Buddha is stuck in piddling little Nirvana. Monkey learns more than the Buddha himself, and is so far beyond Nirvana he isn’t in the last chapters of his book. He is still out there, learning this learning that. If Monkey can bring the gods to shame through learning, so can men.”

“No! No!” blurts out of the UCLA English Department’s Hong Kong trained expert on Asian American literature. I had requested to teach the first Chinese novels with her because I thought she knew something about the foundations of Chinese lit. I found that I was wrong.

“You flunk the Chinese test. You look Chinese and sound Chinese but are not a fit teacher of the heroic tradition. As the American sounding Nazis in American uniforms were not really American.”

“What?”

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AMERICAN TEST

BATTLEGROUND (1949) 1hr 59min- Prod. Dore Schary D.Robert Pirosh. (Story and script)

Starring: Van Johnson, John Hodiak, George Murphy, with Marshall Thompson, Jewrome Courtland, Don Taylor, JAMES WHITMORE, Leon Ames, James Arness RICHARD JAECKEL

The three leafed clover of the Club on the helmet and the screaming eagle of 101^st Airborne on the left shoulder

An American jeep is stopped by an American patrol in the Ardennes Forest.

RICARDO MONTALBAN

What's the password?

MAJOR

"Texas."

(TOUCHES GLASSES AND SPEAKS BEHIND GLOVES)

Keep'em covered they may be German.

VAN JOHNSON

Any line on these woods, Major?

MAJOR

I didn't hear countersign.

JOHNSON

Oh,Leager. Texas leaguer.

MAJOR

Will this road take us back to Third Bat headquarters?

JOHNSON

Straight ahead.

MAJOR

Get going.

JOHNSON

Just a minute.

(RAISES RIFLE ON MAJOR)

What is a Texas Leaguer?

MAJOR

How's that?

JOHNSON

I said, what's a Texas Leaguer?

MAJOR

It's some kind of baseball term.

HODIAK

What kind?

SOLDIER IN BACK OF JEEP

Outside pitch, it's just over the infield.

HODIAK

Nobody asked you!

(TO THE MAJOR)

How'd the Dodgers make out this year?

MAJOR

Hey, who's your commanding officer, soldier?

JOHNSON

Whoever he is he knows how the Dodgers made out.

HODIAK

Let's see your dog tags!

MAJOR

What?

HODIAK

Come on we're not taking any chances.

JOHNSON

Sprechan ze Deutsh!

MAJOR

Hey what is this?

JOHNSON

Wat is die nommon.

MAJOR

Hey what kind of non…

JOHNSON

Schnell! Schnell! Nommen! Nommen! Sprechen zee!

SOLDIER IN BACK OF JEEP-

(STANDS AND pulls M-3 submachine gun on Johnson)

Drop those rifles. Whose Betty Grable going with?

MONTALBAN

Caesar Romero.

DRIVER

(raises rifle )

Shaddup!

(TO VAN JOHNSON)

Whose the Dragon Lady?

JOHNSON

She's in TERRY 'N' THE PIRATES.

SOLDIER IN BACK OF JEEP

What's a hotrod?

JOHNSON

It's a hopped up jalopy.

DRIVER

Hello Joe Whaddaya know?

JOHNSON

Just go back from a vaudeville show...I guess they're okay.

MAJOR

Thank you Sergeant.

JOHNSON

A PFC Major Praying For Civilian. That's why I believe in being careful. And may I suggest sir, that you study up on baseball?

MAJOR

Say, I guess I'd better. And by the way, you might tell your buddy, that Caesar Romero is out. She's married to Harry James.

Jeep goes off-

JOHNSON

Let's go.

Artillery crumps and flashes in background. The three go off into the darkening woods.

JOHNSON

Yeah they really should've sent out a bigger patrol.

MONTALBAN

Well if you want to goof off...

JOHNSON

Who said anything about goofing off?

MONTALBAN

Nobody! Nobody! I'm just saying the best way's to tell'em you uhh you heard voices talking in German.

HODIAK

Let's say you heard voices talking in Japanese and let G-2 figure that out!

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[cont'd]