Chin to China, part 3

[cont'd from part 2]

This very strange Chinese woman didn’t know the heroic tradition as a series of works that build on each other. She didn’t know the stories or their forms well enough to tell a real story from a fake. She didn’t know the stories of children come to teach the adults not to sell their children for the good life was a uniquely Asian form. Only the Asians featured heroes who came to the earth in boats, in the form of an egg, (Poon Goo) a lotus bud ( Nah Jah), a node of bamboo (Kaguya Hime), a giant peach (Momotaro) aburst with a hero to instruct the earthlings, the adults of the world not to sell their children for the good life. A Japanese American woman says we don’t know what Kaguya Hime said in her letter to the Emperor, but we know they don’t live happily ever after.

“When we’re young we accept being told we don’t know what she writes her lover. And we don’t ask. But we’re older now. We might have even done ‘it.’ She secrets half the elixir of life in the letter to the emperor. We know she is a princess of the Moon sent here as punishment for an unknown crime on the Moon. The Elixir will give the Emperor immortality and the power to fly to the moon and be with the woman he loves. But the emperor of Japan and the princess of the Moon are special. They are the soul of their land. He can never leave Japan and she has to be home for the passing of her immortal father. They are the contrasting dots in the dark and light bladders of the yin yang symbol.”

The similarity of the stories to each other define them as a form. The form is unique to Asia.

MONKEY IS A KILLER

NOT AN INDIAN TRICKSTER

She didn’t hear herself as stupid when she desperately changed the subject by charmingly comparing Monkey, the character from JOURNEY TO THE WEST to the American Indian character “Coyote” saying “Monkey was a trickster too.” She wasn’t a racist, she was just stupid. She was simply stupid. Every word out of her mouth was —STUPID!!—It was the English dept combined with AAStudies that was racist, in dignifying her stupidity with tenure. Ah, sweet tenure. I love it. Tenure means anything she says is smart, intelligent, brilliant. Arrgh! I said, “Monkey was not trickster. He was a killer.”

Ladylike and patronizing and straining her patience, she says, “That is not Monkey! Everyone agrees that Monkey is a Buddhist novel. Monkey would never disrespect Buddha.”

“Everyone is stupid! Monkey sees through the pretensions and fancy rhetoric of everyone, including the pompous self-important Buddha!”

“What!” She hadn’t heard this before.

“The Tang Priest says, THOU SHALT NOT KILL! The evil spirits say, THOU SHALT NOT KILL! Before Monkey kills them. Monkey’s girlfriend Kwan Yin says THOU SHALT NOT KILL, Buddha says THOU SHALT NOT KILL. And Monkey defies Buddha by killing the fake Monkey right under Buddha’s nose!”

“He does not!”

“Right between Buddha’s crossed eyes, Monkey kills! And it’s significant that no one, including Buddha can tell the difference between the real and fake Monkey, except the real Monkey. He’s the proof that he knows more than the Buddha. You must remember the chapter, it’s a favorite of opera and comic books unambiguously titled THE REAL AND FAKE MONKEY,” I say.

“My mother had this Monkey book published by New Directions…” a visiting poet with a Chinese mother and a Dutch father says.

“Yes, the Arthur Waley’s racist bowdlerization of MONKEY.”

“How bowdlerized?”

“Go on, you were going to deny Monkey kills in front of Buddha.”

“No, I was recalling the chapter where Monkey tries to fly away from Buddha and flies to a mountain with five peaks, and he urinates at the base of one, and it turns out to he pissed on Buddha’s finger.”

“So?”

“That shows that Monkey could not get away from Buddha. Buddha is universal. ”

“No, all the Buddha’s trick does is make Monkey mad. That happens early in the book. THE REAL AND THE FAKE MONKEY is Monkey’s revenge against Buddha. He kills in front of Buddha. Proves Buddha powerless! Why? Because he’s learned more than Buddha knows. He brings back the Buddhist texts, from India with the Tang priest, Sandy and Pigsy, safe and sound, and his mission complete, he turns his back on Buddha, like India itself, where Buddha was born, he dumps Buddha in his piddling little Nirvanah. He leaves the book. He’s long gone from the book when Buddha gets around to honoring him with the title of a sub-Buddha. And Monkey’s no where around to receive it.”

“Ah! Ah! Ah! Hold on there!” the prize Chinese expert on Chinese from China says.

“If a monkey born dumb as a rock can learn to be more than gods, more than the Jade Emperor, more than Buddha himself, so can men. That’s the lesson of Monkey.”

“That’s not right,” she snoots and turns away. “That’s not Monkey,” she says with disdain.

“Oooh, is baby upset?” I say with undisguised contempt. “Everything I said is a fact from the book. Monkey is missing from the last chapters. That’s the fact, not interpretation. Learn the difference. The class is assigned to read the book. It’s all there. It will go fast when you reach the last three chapters. Just read for Monkey’s name. All stuff in reference to the past. He’s just not there. That’s the fact. Give me facts from the book arranged into an acceptable paraphrase of Monkey that proves me wrong, or shuddup and stop making a fool of yourself. It does you no good to waste your time saying ‘No.’”

“No!” she snoots.

“All right, waste your time. But don’t waste mine. I will teach the second half of each class and you will keep your mouth shut or be gone, I don’t care. But I don’t want to hear your voice during my time, when I’m teaching.”

The Chinese woman with Russell’s eyes but thicker lashes said nothing.

“Chinaman lit knows history from Poon Goo making the earth Sun and moon, out the egg that carried him and his two eyes, and Nur Waw, who the Chinese have been trained not to notice that she was Poon Goo’s sister, that’s her in the connecting story of her coming to the earth.”

“No! No! No! I must interrupt!” Now, the Chinese trained professor teaching the Heroic Tradition with me wants to argue. “Nur Waw is not anyone’s sister, certainly not Poon Goo’s. They don’t so much as meet.”

“They don’t meet? Nur Waw comes to earth from the same outer space Poon Goo comes from.

“The earth is Poon Goo’s body. His eye is the sun. His other eye is the moon. His dandruff is the stars. The earth and everything found in the solar system, is all him. They have more than met. Maybe when you get a little older and learn about sex, you will realize that Nur Waw handling Poon Goo’s parts to make the six animals that serve man in six days, is six days of mutual manipulation and sexual foreplay. And on the seventh day she makes the human couple with her hands out of mud. That took too long. She cuts a phallic bamboo switch dips the tip in mud and flicks the mud off the stick. Where the flick splats …on the grass or a leaf, or twig, of a tree---becomes the Grass, Leaf, Twig, family. Nur Waw and Poon Goo fuck and fuck and fuck! That’s why Nur Waw is known as the Mother of Humanity. Who is the father? The deeper meaning is revealed without exposing the kids to tumescent and oozing organs in literary devices as numerous as the writers who know what they’re writing.” I said, “Now give me twenty dollars. I’m fining you a dollar for every word you say in my half of the class time.”

She laughs.

“Thirty dollars. And shut up, right now! Or thirty dollars and get out.” I licked my hand and put it out flat to receive my money. She placed thirty dollars in my hand, but did not leave. I put the three ten dollar bills in my wallet, and said, “MONKEY was written in the Ming.

THE CHINESE MING INVENTS LIT OF THE LOW

The Ming, restored China to Chinese rule, in 1368 and a hundred years of bad jade and Mongol rule was nothing but a bad memory. (What no protest over “bad jade”?) The Ming Dynasty freed Chinese writing from the guises and disguises used to hide the Chinese content of their writing from the Mongols.

The Chinese writers of the Ming invented a new simpler, more direct Chinese form designed to make money. Popular operas for the semi-literate became in print the first novels. Operas from the low, became novels from the low, about the low. Nothing was lower than a monkey.

The low always have contempt for the emperor who fights his own rather than the nomadic horsemen of the north who covet China’s lush edible greenery.

THE HEROIC TRADITION

THE BEGINNING OF THE CHINESE NOVEL

In form, fictionalized history, and content, the vernacular novel was a new form, in a new aggressively Chinese language, and an aggressively new vision of Chinese as a nation bound by “blood brotherhood.” The 3 Brothers of the peach garden, the 108 outlaws of the Marsh combined don’t resemble any last emperor. The movement started in THREE KINGDOMS is capped by the story of Yue Fei being marked as a criminal by his mother, taunting the emperor by tattooing “Loyalty to the country” rather than “Loyalty to the emperor,” and the gathering of descendants of 3 KINGDOMS and THE 108 OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH paying their respects to the treasonous mother, and defying the emperor by burning incense at Yue Fei’s tomb.

The simplification of court language to an understandable mock court literary language, with a lot of rhyming and common characters using the common language, talking 0f common activities from bathroom functions to the issue of the day were operas had evolved to for at least five hundred years. So if the novels were quickly considered “insurrectionist” the operas they were based on must have been insurrectionist wanted posters on the move.

No wonder the opera people’s tong, the Bot Waw Wooey Goon was a prominent supporter of the Shaolin insurrection against the Imperial government, a euphemism for the fool at the top, the emperor of one of the Three Kingdoms, the coward of the Song (Sung), or the later Sung. Check the popular period personal combat movies from Hong Kong, that end up three or more good guys against one supremely bad guy. The TRIO OF DRAGON’S INN was a crunch of plots and conclusions that lent itself to being a moving paraphrase of the heroic tradition.

From the Ming on, to the present, the Chinese people have been known by their common knowledge of the Heroic Tradition of THREE KINGDOMS, THE BALLAD OF MULAN, MONKEY’S JOURNEY TO THE WEST, THE WATER MARGIN, and becomes obviously insurrectionist, with the fictionalized history GENERAL YUE FEI published the Manchu Qing. The Manchu were descended for the Jurchins, the bad guys to Yue Fei’s good. Other, lesser read works of heroic tradition are CREATION OF THE GODS, THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL. THE YANG FAMILY GENERALS and MUK GWAHYING.

I heard about, Qian Cao’s GENERAL YUE FEI in Chinatown, and even saw it when I was 11. A loner who did his kung fu in secret, showed it to me, to keep his secret. It was in Chinese. I couldn’t read Chinese. All the other works of the heroic tradition were accessible in several English translations. I read all the translations I could find in Chinatown bookstores (there used to be several), used bookstores like Holmes Books in Oakland that specialized in California and had extensive sections of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and the Oakland library.

All but Yue Fei was translated. Why? There were pocket sized comic book children’s versions of Yue Fei in Chinese, in Chinatown. The pictures didn’t tell me much about why he was second only to the redfaced Kwan Kung among the Chinese my age from China. I collected apocryphal stories trying to put him and the novel together. From everyone I learned that he was the famous tattooed warrior. That much was universally known. But why was he famous for tattoos? He wasn’t the first tattooed warrior. There were several tattooed warriors among the 108 outlaws in THE WATER MARGIN, whose descendents joined Yue Fei as their grandparents had joined Song Jiang (Soong Gong) the outlaw leader of the Water Margin nicknamed “the Timely Rain.” All the kids I talked to knew that the corrupt government had him imprisoned and poisoned, and that his tomb on Westlake of Zhejiang, the Province directly south of Shanghai, was a popular shrine. How did that connect with his tattoos being so significant he, and not another, is the tattooed warrior?

While I was in New York, researching Chinatown gangs for TV, in the sixties, I went to the room of a kid born in America who pointed to a picture of a beardless warrior in a white costume. “Who’s that?” he asked. I didn’t know.

“Ngawk Fei,” he said, using the Cantonese pronunciation Yue Fei’s, “The tattooed warrior!” Who was Ngawk Fei, and other than being a criminal what was special about being tattooed?

Reading the three volume bi-lingual comic book YUE FEI published by Singapore’s T.C. Yang’s Canfonian PTE, suggested the answer. The tattoo was the mark of a criminal, at least since the time of the Water Margin, fifty years before the time of Yue Fei. I suspected that being tattooed with “Loyalty to the country” was not the same as being tattooed with “Loyalty to the Emperor.”

But Pretty Lips stupid by force of will, from Hong Kong kept shaking her head, “No. No. No.” My evidence was circumstantial from comic books and not from the novel itself.

YUE FEI IS TRANSLATED AT LAST

The Tattooing of Yue Fei, became available to readers of English, in 1988, thanks to T.L. Yang’s translation of the Qing Dynasty’s Qian Cao’s popular novel GENERAL YUE FEI. T.L. Yang is the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Hong Kong.

Qin Kuai (Chun Wooey) the traitorous Prime Minister of China set the emperor against China’s hero Yue Fei at everyturn of his life— from his youth to his death in a dungeon.

Qin Kuai has arranged for the emperor’s son to beat all comers in a martial arts contest. When Yue Fei kills the emperor’s son in a fight weighted in the prince’s favor, the Prime minister puts Yue Fei on a reward poster: Wanted for Murder. Only the intervention of the judge of the contest saves Yue Fei’s life, but dooms his own.

Years later the Northern Jurchens horse into China, Yue Fei is approached by patriotic pirates from the Water Margin to lead them against the invaders. Yue Fei becomes blood brothers with the pirates, but refuses to become a criminal. Yue Fei’s mother overhears her son and the pirates.

The Prime Minister causes the emperor to temporarily forgive Yue Fei’s past crimes and order him to save China. Yue Fei’s mother tattoos her son with a declaration of loyalty to “the country” the “gawk” not the “kwun” or “Commander” or “the emperor” which is a capital crime.

“My son, you go out and set up incense sticks and candles and put them on the incense table in the middle of the hall. I have a personal reason for doing this.”

“Yes,” said Yue Fei, and he went out, obtained the incense and candles, went to the central hall, placed the table in the middle, and placed a pair of candle sticks and an incense burner on it. Having arranged everything in its proper place, he entered to inform his mother that the incense table was ready and he invited his mother to go out.

Lady Yue came out with his (sic? I think “her” is meant) daughter-in-law. There they burned incense and lighted the candles in front of the scared family shrine. They paid obeisance to Heaven and Earth and to the ancestors, and the Lady commanded her son to kneel whilst the daughter-in-law was told to prepare the ink.

Kneeling down Yue Fei asked, “What command does Mother have for me?”

The Lady said, “I, your mother, saw that you did not accept the recruitment of the rebellious thief, and that you willingly endure poverty and are not tempted by wealth and status, this is of course extremely good. But I fear that after my death, there may be some unworthy creature who will come to entice you. And if you should momentarily lose your principles and do something disloyal, will you not have destroyed in one day your fragrant reputation gained in half a lifetime?

She intends to tattoo Yue Fei to prevent his changing his loyalty from “Gawk or Kuo” “the country,” in a moment of weakness, to “the Kwun,” “the emperor.”

For this reason, I have prayed to Heaven and Earth and to our ancestors, because I want to tattoo on your back the four characters ‘Utmost’, ‘Loyalty’, ‘Serve’ and ‘Nation’. I only hope you will be a loyal official, so that after your mother’s death, people going to and fro will say, ‘What a good lady, she has trained her son to achieve fame by serving his nation with the utmost loyalty, and so his reputation will continue its fragrance for a hundred generations’. I shall then smile even in my grave under the nine springs.”

Yue Fei however suggested, “The sage said, ‘One does not harm his body, hair and skin because all these he has received from his parents’. I shall of course accept and obey your solemn instruction. Please refrain from tattooing me!”

Because Yue knows that tattooing is to mark him as a criminal.

“Balderdash!” said the Lady.

A few words from Confucius are usually enough to stop an argument, Confucius is the Great Sage of China, after all, but rather then tempering her urge to tattoo, she ridicules the words of Confucius:

“If you should do something unworthy and are brought before the court under arrest, and if you should be beaten and knocked about, are you still to say to the official, ‘Having received the body, hair and skin from my parents I do not dare cause them any injury?’”

(pages 247-248)

Caught between a choice of the words of Confucius and his mother, Yue Fei goes with his mother.

Does she speak as the head of the Yue family clan? Is she declaring a shadow government of the fighting men the Yue family has attracted? Are the Yue’s a family clan that competes for an individual’s loyalty of arms with the ruler of the kingdom?

Yue Fei accepted the leadership of the army from Qin Kuai, the traitor that made Yue Fei a criminal at the beginning of the book. Lady Yue expected the crooked Prime Minister would be the one to tear off her son’s shirt. In the operas about this moment he is. The Prime Minister tears off Yue Fei’s shirt, reads the tattoo. He raises his hands bugs his eyes his mouth opens, he steps back in shock. Just as Lady Yue had envisioned. Her son was torn by a loyalty split between his resourceful family, and the Weak Cowardly Emperor.

Yue Fei beats prince Wushu’s Jurchen horsemen in the mountains, on the plains, on the waters in the valleys and is about to destroy Wushu’s invading army when the treacherous Prime Minister orders Yue Fei imprisoned and ignominiously killed... Thus the tattoos being the mark of a criminal is a unifying symbol of Yue Fei’s torn loyalty.

Qin Quai the traitorous Prime Minister is the model for the Chinese American Christian aspiring to miraculous whiteness through white fame, like Peter Kwong the author of CHINESE-AMERICANS: the immigrant experience, who falsifies two heroes of Chinese culture by attacking me.

Themes from the heroic tradition that speak to Chinamen are (1) the supremacy of family over the emperor (2) love is two warriors back to back fighting off the universe, (3) you don’t need parents to be a hero, (4) You don’t need China to be Chinese. (5) The hero dies without ever knowing why (6) if Monkey can learn the secret of learning itself, man can too.

[cont'd]

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.

≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈

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!

≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈

[cont'd]

Chin to China, part 1

EXPLAINING GUTLESS AALIT TO CHINA

“Know your enemy as well as yourself,” SunTzu the strategist says. Chinese thought begins with strategy.

The humble Asian-American Writers Workshop says, “Follow the lead of Chinese-American Maxine Hong Kingston. Her re-vision of Far Mulan caused a revolution and a re-thinking of and in AAwriting.” There is however a caveat: If her Far Mulan is real she has launched a revolution in the literary world.

If she has faked Mulan, Kingston and all the writers of the AAWriter’s Workshop are on record as being committed white racists.

“I doubt that!” the woman who seems to be a feminized Russell Leong with the same jaw, and dimples the same lips but darker more swollen, not that Russell’s aren’t full, but hers are more full. She’s the AAlit expert from Hong Kong UCLA waves like a trophy over the Asian American Studies Dept. She’s become a white racist for Kingston in the name of white feminism, to prove she’s become an American.

She defends THE WOMAN WARRIOR as a “very original autobiography” When she was new in America, and didn’t know the autobiographical form, she was offended by Kingston’s putting Yue Fei’s tattoos of Mulan. Over time she realized that Kingston was using the mistaken understanding of Mulan to dramatize her search for the meaning of being a Chinese-American. And when does the wrongly unnamed tattooed warrior Yue Fei make his case?

“What kind of case can he make?” Hong Kong big dog lushes out like oil “He was not in the book. Not one mention,” from her mouth.

“There goes your ‘original autobiography’ argument. If she didn’t come to realize she got the tattoos from Yue Fei, she believes her victimized tattooed Mulan is real. Does Kingston ever confront her mistake?”

How did Kingston come by her seeing the tattooed general Yue Fei as the virgin warrior Mulan, in the first place? Five hundred years separate the Mulan the girl warrior who was famous and the birth of Yue Fei. Nowhere in the book does Kingston discover the tattoos she gave Mulan really belonged to Yue Fei. Where in WOMAN WARRIOR does she restore Mulan to the first expression male-female equality in the poetry of the world, and not a tattooed victim of her parents’ cruelty?

To defend Kingston she has to falsify all of Chinese history and literature. She asserts that the autobiography is a Chinese form, that the tattoo was not the mark of a criminal, that feminism was flourishing outside of misogynist China in 550 ad when THE BALLAD OF MULAN was published, that Kingston is right when she says “myths change,” that Americans have the right to change the facts of another country’s heroes, and “artistic license” frees artists of being charged with bias or the more severe “white racism,” that artistic “style” has the power to transform objective fact. Peter Kwong, of Hunter College, New York, another Chinese seems to have transformed himself into a Chinese-American through the same falsification of Chinese lit and history. In his CHINESE-AMERICANS: the immigrant experience, written with Dusanka Miscevic, he accepts Kingston’s fake Mulan as real, and characterizes my attack on Kingston as a phony and my attack on Kingston is an act of pure misogyny. Helen Zia, a Chinese-American born in Newark, NJ, in her ASIAN-AMERICAN-DREAMS: The Emergence of an American, sees my defense of the Chinese children’s chant against Kingston’s revision, as “unfortunate.” Amy Tan accuses the nameless critics of her work of jealousy and refuses to talk about criticism of her and Kingston.

In the Summer of 1999 I presented the Arthur Waley translation of real BALLAD OF MULAN, as reprinted in the bi-lingual Singapore comic book MULAN JOINED THE ARMY published by C.C. Low’s Canfonian PTE LTD, and my own translation to demonstrate that the translation process doesn’t create new facts, at the NAROPA INSTITUTE’S Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. I was greeted with nonplussed silence. One student asked a question that he confessed was asked because he was embarrassed for me not getting any questions. That Kingston’s Mulan might be phony had never occurred to them. I was the manly proof of Kingston’s lone heroic feminism against woman-hating Chinese culture, and the girl-hating Chinese children’s story.

Later I was approached by a yin yang team of white faculty who glowered at me and said, I should be ashamed to be a man instructing whites on Chinese culture.

“Huh?”

“You had no right to say those terrible things about Maxine Hong Kingston’s heroic book.” At the University of Oklahoma, an expert of folk tales challenged me on Kingston with, “Then why has President Clinton awarded her a Humanities Medal?”

“Only racists like Kingston’s Mulan.”

“Are you accusing the President of racism?”

“You’re the one who said he gave a medal.”

A Kingston fan and teacher from China challenged my assertion that only Chinese Christians wrote autobiographies. “What about Lum Yutong?” she asked with triumph in her voice. Lum Yutong? Who was Lum Yutong? The high mountain air had affected my head.

“Did he write an autobiography?” I asked stalling for time. Then Lin Yutang, the Mandarin pronunciation of Lum Yutong, the author of MY COUNTRY MY PEOPLE hit me. “He was a Christian, wasn’t he?” My shouting shocked her. “Wasn’t he?!” I wasn’t asking. I was telling the facts. Her face turned red. “WASN’T HE?!” She shriveled up into the fetal position. “He was a Christian! WASN’T HE?!”

She began to cry.

“Don’t cry! This is college! Answer me!”

Her answer was to run from the room.

I presented the real Mulan at The Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio. They refused to print what I had said, but paid me, and invited me to spend the night in the Thurber bed.

Kingston had slept in the James Thurber bed of the Thurber House. I chose not sleep in the Thurber bed that had held Kingston’s body overnight. POETS & WRITERS Magazine cut my remarks about Kingston and Tan, from an interview about Kingston and Tan and asked me for subscription to their white racist magazine. The Oakland Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle, good old hometown papers have treated me likewise. Only the L.A. Times, thanks to Carolyn See, mention that I call Kingston a fake, but she was careful not say why. Her daughter Lisa See peddling her racist lies in ON GOLD MOUNTAIN repeats word or word her mother’s suggestion that my dislike of Kingston and Tan is misogynist.

Am I a misogynist for defending THE BALLAD OF MULAN as the first bald-faced expression a male-female equality in all the world’s poetry? From 550 AD:

The he rabbit tucks in his feet to sit.

The she rabbit dims her shiny eye.

Two rabbits hopping for the tall grass.

Who can tell which is the he, and which the she?

If Chinese-Americans and the Chinese from China can no longer tell the difference between the real and the fake, Maxine Hong Kingston can, and does, with relish but not in the WOMAN WARRIOR.

She admits she pulled a fast one on her publishers, the public, four universities and the ultimate --President Clinton in an interview with Kay Bonetti, found on page 40 of the feminist-to-feminist CONVERSATIONS WITH MAXINE HONG KINGSTON, edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin, U. Press of Mississippi: Jackson

KINGSTON: "Oh, yes, the myths I change. I change them a lot, and I've been criticized for that by the traditionalists because they don't understand that I have no intention of just recording myths. I mean, I'm not an archivist. I want to give you an example of myths that I've changed. When the woman warrior has the words carved on her back, that's actually a man's story. It's about a man named Yüch Fei [Yue Fei, Ngawk Fei] who had a vow carved on his back by his mother. Now, I took that and gave that to a woman. I gave a man's myth to a woman because it's part of the feminist war that's going on in THE WOMAN WARRIOR, to take the men's stories away from them and give the strength of that story to a woman. I see this as an aggressive storytelling act, and its part of my own freedom to play with myth, and I do feel that the myths have to be changed and played with all the time, or they die. The problem with doing all that is that these myths are not known to most of my readers. So I had to figure out a way to inform people at the same time play around with them. I think at that point I just decided not to tell anybody the original stories, and then tell the story, and I just figured, well, let the scholars figure it out later, but they've actually attacked me for not sticking with the story."

The woman who looks like the editor of UCLA’S AMERASIA JOURNAL, defends Kingston by dissing her, “I doubt she knew Yue Fei when she wrote WOMAN WARRIOR,” she sniffs. Only Asian-American’s use Ignorance as an excuse? But then where did Yue Fei’s tattoos come from? And what of Stupid’s finding Kingston’s autobiography “original?” Where in THE WOMAN WARRIOR does Kingston admit her mistake?

The baring of CA ignorance of the still published, still translated, still recited, still gamed in Chinatown sixth century children’s chant, THE BALLAD OF MULAN as a badge of Americanism has struck fear of all Chinese children’s stories in all the Chinese-American writers writing today. “Don’t get on me for Maxine Hong Kingston,” a writer I used to be close to shouted, “I have a kid to support.” He supports that kid by his writing and teaching AALit. So he’s afraid of the Chinese children’s story for the sake of his kid. He admits the program he started, is racist. He blames his being a coward on his kid. Wow! What about the kids the BALLLAD was written for?

I’m in the Chinatown apartment of Japanese married to a Chinese, playing with their very active boy and talking about Kingston. “Aren’t we so far removed from China that we don’t know the stories anymore?”

“Are you so far removed that you can’t go downstairs to the bookstore and buy, or read the real stories? If you don’t like that store you can find another bookstore on Broadway. Where do these excuses that blind us to what’s around us, come from?”

Haven’t you, a Chinese in China who’s had a Chinese childhood noticed that Fear has made all Chinese writing in America and Chinese-American writers afraid of all the stories of their childhood? You, the litterateurs of China have yet to be heard from, on the question of Kingston’s Mulan being real or fake. Has she buffaloed you too?

The students from China who write me from surprising parts of the world seem bewildered by the question of Kingston’s Far Mulan being real or fake. The Americans have their own version of Mulan, they say. If they do, it is a racist version because Americans are not Chinese, and Far Mulan was Chinese or created by a Chinese.

“I disagree,” the Stupid from Hong Kong said in a familiar voice from the movies. “It is the right of Americans (or Westerners) to create their own versions of foreign cultures.” The voice of Hildegard Neff!

“That means that the Chinese have their version of Queen Elizabeth II doing the naughty with Cromwell and for that matter a version of the dance of Elizabeth I over Shakespeare’s poetic codes and hidden meanings? Writers don’t mess with names and don’t change the facts of history.”

What would the Kingston fans make of Thomas Paine, the Anglo-American Frenchman who coined the ideas and the name “the United States of America” before there was a United States of America, had ideas that contributed to the French Revolution, and won a death sentence in England? Three nations in turmoil because of one man’s writing COMMON SENSE and THE RIGHTS OF MAN. Nations come and go, but history is history. He was the first to write that there was no divine right of monarchs, and it wasn’t natural for a man to be owned by a monarch, and invented 18^th century republican democracy. If a monarch had no rights over a man, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in her 1789, answer to RIGHTS OF MAN, THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN he also had no rights over a woman, and feminism was invented.

Kingston has a right to be a racist, if she wants to be a racist. I have a Chinese obligation to call a white racist a white racist. And you, China you need to take charge of your culture.

There is no “American version of Far Mulan,” as there is no Chinese version of George Washington. All American versions of Ebenezer Scrooge give credit to the original and the author.

It’s like jazz. You might have given “Goodnight, Irene” a sound that is yours, like Lead belly, but he acknowledges he was not the first to sing the song, he didn’t write it. He learned it from Anonymous, the Weavers made their “arrangement,” based on hearing Lead belly sing. Lead belly and the Weavers acknowledge they didn’t create the words or music we hear on record. That’s a nod to “Anonymous” the unknown author of the words and music.

“I’m a Christian and believe in the prince of peace, Jesus Christ. I’m only taking this course because it’s required,” a student pipes up.

“No, you’re not,” I say, “This is my class, my subject, my classroom.” And it was my class. Russell Leong, the editor of UCLA’s AMERASIA JOURNAL had gotten me Regent’s Professorship, teaching the children’s story and the Heroic Tradition. Unfortunately I had asked to teach with the woman with Russell’s feminine twin. I had intended to infect her with my knowledge, not the students’ plea for grades. “Get out, now!”

“May Christ…”

“Get out of my classroom. No Bible thumping, no saving children’s asses, no religion allowed. The rest of you Christians you either live with my hostility or get out. Now, please!”

Do you have classes like this in China? These are grad students. Top skim of the cream. Twelve of the best and brightest? They all impress me as totally empty, untaught and stupid. What I am anxious to teach … the literature and meaning of Chinese children’s lit and the heroic tradition…they aren’t anxious to learn.

They don’t know what a “myth” is. That’s the stupid prize from Hong Kong’s fault. She argues against the fact that myths don’t change. It has never occurred to her that, that’s why they’re myths, not legends. She cites Kingston, who teaches in the English Dept at Berkeley, who asserts she changed the myth of Mulan to prevent it from dying. To save the myth of George Washington it’s legitimate to change his facts? What nonsense. I challenged her to name a myth that’s changed. My hand was on my copy of Bullfinch’s MYTHOLOGY, ready to flip it open. Of course she couldn’t. She asserted “artistic license.”

Of course every artist has license to be racist if they want. “Artistic license” does not free one to be racist without being called a racist. “Artistic license” is not a God given license to lie; it is not a law but an artist’s conceit. All defenses, and justifications, for Kingston’s lying about Mulan and China are racist in content and style.

Russell Leong had gotten me a Regent’s guest professorship to teach this course with a woman from Hong Kong determined to “become an American.” Her brand of “Americanism” is “Feminism” and “American feminism” is a religious belief. The bottom line of religious belief is faith, not fact.

This true believer in her right of UCLA professorship to pronounce without proof that “texts naturally change” (they do not), that “myths change” (they do not), that the “tattoo was not the mark of a criminal” ( The phrase “the mark of a criminal” is an old Chinese phrase from the First Empire [ 221-207 BC ] )-Her defense of Kingston to prove her Americanism goes so far as to deny Confucius said, “Your unmarked skin and uncut hair are gifts from your parents.” If he said that (and he did) that would mean that Mulan’s parents would not mark the purity of the skin they had given her and protected while she was at home.

She basks in the glamour raining its confetti and light on her as a Chinese with no Chinese text behind her from real Hong Kong. She had the following of a tick tack toe champion who’d just made the record books.

I would hate to have gotten stuck in championship tic tack toe. I was stuck in Aiiieeeee! And the Big Aiiieeeeee! as the last words to be said about Asian American lit till the AA critics of AA lit, I was sure they would be along soon, made the case for the lit as lit in the first place, inevitably they would come upon the chaos of their own time and the emergence of AA lit in 1970 with Kai-yu Hsu and Helen Palubinska’s ASIAN-AMERICAN AUTHORS, and find that Kai-yu was not wholly convinced by my arguments to consider any publication by a CA, including autobiographies as “Chinese-American writing.” It’s not anything I’d want to write, but the fact is most of CA writing is the autobiographical form.

The critics capable of giving a literary definition of Asian-American lit just haven’t appeared. Nor have AAmagazines or newspapers, with critics appeared between the writers and the public. Without critics and magazines AAwriters have no public. Without a relationship of AA writers, AA critics in between, and an AA public, there is no AA lit. The AAWriters are servants of white culture. They serve, they entertain and do what they are told.

We were young and arrogant but still oh so right in the two Aiiieeeee!s but we didn’t make the
difference between the “Chinese-American” and the “Chinaman” real enough.

The difference should be obvious to you the Chinese writers of China. The “Chinese-American cannot or will not tell a Chinese children’s story for every “American” kid story they tell.

On C-Span now! -somebody’s panel of Vietnam war writers. The writer of a famous book that was the basis of one of the definitive and famous films on the Vietnam war wanders into talking about a Viet vet of the war who had learned English as a Viet Cong, read American writers Melville, Walt Whitman, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway when Kennedy was President on into the war. And went from camp to camp lecturing on Melville through Hemingway throughout the war.

“What authors of Viet literature did you teach your soldiers?” the former guerilla asked. The white telling the story didn’t answer question. That was the story I heard him tell.

He says that he was in units where Walt Whitman was never mentioned. The other authors, vets all, on the panel guffaw in recognition.

As Charlie Chan says Contradiction please, the Viet had asked about white knowledge of Viet lit to balance the Viet knowledge of American lit.

Oblivious to what he’d revealed about himself he wonders out loud and on camera about why Jack London was a great American writer to the Viet. Perhaps because of London’s high regard among Communists, he mused.

Off camera, in real time (or not recorded earlier) a “Chinaman” muses: Perhaps because of London’s palpable dislike for the yellows of Asia and his rabid hatred of the Japanese in stories found in Jack London’s adventures in the sailor’s Orient MOONFACE and other stories. One of his other stories is THE CHINAGO (a marriage “Chinaman” and “Nigger”)

Little Chinese darlings you and I similarly speak a deceptively common language. For romantic rather than real reasons I want to say Mom! We are one again! But our languages of literature and experience are different one from the other. We Chinamen can tell the stories we brought with us from China. We know enough stories to detect a story being faked as Chinese. Likewise we know enough Chinese stories to enjoy any allusion, reference, parody, or quotation of form you might use in telling another Chinese children’s story. But Chinese lit beyond that is foreign to me as American lit is foreign and bewildering and full of contradictions to you, in China. It was educated into my instinct when I was a kid.

To the China experts who accuse me of being a racist for barring the Chinese from the autobiography I say, “Read!” The first Chinese autobiography published, was by a Christian, written with a white Christian, and was not a form of Chinese writing as proven by it’s publication in Boston, Mass 1910. It was not meant to be a Chinese form, but a Christian form of submission.

From the start the “Chinese-American autobiography” was dedicated to being accepted into whiteness, with white Christian ghostwriters. Read, Leong Gor Yun, CHINATOWN INSIDE OUT (1925), Jade Snow Wong’s FIFTH CHINESE DAUGHTER (1950) two of the better known Christian Chinese autobiographies that fall on their faces thanking their ghostwriters and slobbering gratitude for being accepted by whites.

The autobiography from Chinese state of sin to Christian triumph became a sacrificial form of initiation for Chinese-Americans. “Autobiography” The words are on every book. “Autobiography.” “Autobiographical novel.” “Memoir.” “Otto and Auto.” “Hallucinations” “Me and Me Stoned on Pot.”

The Literature that has come to be called “Asian-American” begins as the Christian ghost-taught Mission school boy in China come to America to become the first Chinese to graduate from Yale, when it was still a religious school. The Christian Chinese autobiography, MY LIFE IN CHINA AND AMERICA, 1910, was the first autobiography of a Chinese to be echoed into a literary form by like Chinese. The likeness was, they were Christian.

I emphasize Christian, because the Chinese are not naturally Christian. Christianity was imposed on the Chinese by force of arms during the 19^th Century. The circumstances of the Christian oppression, opium, and ghostwriters define and enforce the Chinese form as submissive to whites.

The form of the Christian Chinese autobiography is: China and everything Chinese is evil. Christian whites are smarter, prettier, stronger, better, superior in every way of GOOD. The Chinese Christian despise China and the Chinese. The Christian despises it so much he uses their real knowledge of China against itself to sell a big lie, for Christ. That lie is: Chinese hate women more than the Christians. The knowledge of Chinese the Christian can’t give up, no matter how hard they pray, makes them feel guilty. They are attracted to China in Chinatown. They guiltily visit Chinatown. Some live in Chinatown. But feel guilty.

From the Yung Wing autobiography in 1910, to the autobiography of Hu Shih, known for giving up his Chiang Kai shek Generalissimo given post to modernize the teaching of Chinese lit for citizenship in a Christian country, the US, a job at the New York Public Library and tea with Pearl Buck, and Lin Yutang at the Russian Tea Room. Yes, the writer Lin Yutang, another naturalized US citizen and the author of another Christian Chinese autobiography MY COUNTRY, MY PEOPLE.

Yung Wing was echoed again by Leong Gor Yun’s Christian autobiography, CHINATOWN INSIDE OUT, of 1925. It was suspect because of the pronunciation of Leong Gor Yun in American accented English, is a homonym for “Two men” in Cantonese. The book might not be ghosted, but the words were too exactly like “Two Men” a sound effect to be an accident. The clincher is the preface thanking a second hand in writing 2 Men’s book. This Christian book contains the only mention of the Chinatown Hand Laundry Alliance, ever to hit print. This information from a Christian autobiography that suggests it was ghost written by white clergyman is gobbled up as the Gospel in the work H.M. Lai, of the Chinese Historical Society of San Francisco, and Peter Kwong of Hunter College of New York city. The Laundry Alliance existed. Significantly, the Laundry Alliance published a newspaper, the CHINESE VANGUARD. Were the Chinese Vanguard and the Hand Laundry Alliance also Christian?

The line of “CHINESE-AMERICAN (CHRISTIAN)” autobiographical writers continues through Pardee Lowe’s FATHER AND GLORIOUS DESCENDENT, (1943) Jade Snow Wong’s FIFTH CHINESE DAUGHTER (1950), and Maxine Hong Kingston’s THE WOMAN WARRIOR (1975). Kingston’s was the first book to slander a real named hero of a real, recorded, and dated culture and, started a trend of real names and slandered culture among Christian Chinese-American writers that followed her, David Henry Hwang, repeated Kingston’s fake Mulan and faked the red faced hero, Kwan Kung, in his Obie winning play, “F.O.B.” and Amy Tan, faked the Chinese children’s story, in her autobiographical novel THE JOY LUCK CLUB and the Kitchen god and kitchen queen THE KITCHEN GOD’S WIFE.

[Cont'd]