FRANK CHIN BLOG

TAKEYUKI'S BOOTS - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 07:54:00 +0000

[To mark the union Kimi Omi and Carroll Braxton in Oakland,California]

by Frank Chin

To Quan and Omi

COMPANY SCAR

A brick building used to stand three
stories tall and two blocks long
where groves of colored bamboo now
grow thick enough to hide the ruins
of the rubber plant where the Old
Man used to work.

The Old Man and the Old Woman
managed the Company-owned Eclipse
Hotel next-door, and watched the
empty lot of bamboo stand up like
scared hair. Then they bought the
hotel and the empty lot of bamboo.

The Old Woman looked off of her
pedestal five brick stories high. Her
feet were a long way down to the
flat roof of the only five story tall
brick left standing, for blocks and
blocks all around.

All brick and five stories up. She
kept her feet and set the sights of
her eyes down five stories to the
ground and off into the distance of
city block, after city block of broken
sidewalks.

Every block was a broken cement
flower pot. Every pot spilled over
leaves of grass, flowers and weeds.
An occasional seedling sprouted from
a discarded pit. A date palm. An
avocado. A peach. She knew them all.

The Old Man built her waist high
tables around the glass skylight, to
plant her garden. She fingered and
handled every seed, every root, of
every herb, every tomato, every
eggplant, and, her pride and joy,
every tree in her grove of living
bonsai. Miniature trees, fingered,
and groomed into the memorable
characters of history.

Her hands had coaxed a cutting
taken from an oak on Steuben
Street into a mass of knots that
bulged like the muscles of the
Muscleman for Good. A furry
cypress Bonsai grown from a cutting
taken from one the trees that used
to line Washington Street, she hand
twisted and tied to lean as if bent by
a wind that tore with the whiz of
arrows over the head of the
Drummer Girl. Her eyes look from
the high ground on the enemy down
below. What she sees she beats to
her lover, on a drum. She bends but
never cracks.

THE BIG WINTERMELON

A pear, an apricot, a peach, a couple
of different apples from seedlings
found growing in empty lots, and
seeds, pits and cores thrown from
stray cars. She knew them all.

Now and then she went out to search
from block to block for the long dark
green leaves of mustard greens, the
rippled yellow green leaves of
dandelion greens. She found a
growing Wintermelon.

It grew large over the summer.

She cut it loose in the fall. The
Wintermelon was too large to get
her arms around. She put the melon
under her loose gown and tied the
apron to hold the melon against her
belly. She was built to carry babies.
But the Old Woman and the Old Man
grew old without having a baby. Not
one. She carried the melon home
singing like a mother.

The Wintermelon was larger than
her largest pot. She wanted a pot
large enough to put the melon into,
to soup for an hour, and large enough
to remove her Wintermelon as whole
as it went in.

She and Old Man ordered a pot from
the blacksmith a mile’s walk past the
blocks of sidewalks become
flowerpots sprouting tall weeds and
berries.

The blacksmith delivered the pot, on
his pride and joy, a wheelbarrow,
with an inflatable tire, and a brake
on its one wheel.

“A brake!” the Old Man says. “Wow!”

“It’s handy for going downhill.”

“You’re a clever man,” the Old Man
says.

“How do I get the melon in and out
of the pot?” the Old Woman asks.

“I’ve provided a sack to hold the
melon when the two of you put it into
the pot. Add water. Boil. Grasp the
edges of the sack, to pull the melon
out of the pot whole.”

“Ah!” the Old Couple says.

“All the people of the Scar heard I
was making a large pot for a large
Wintermelon.”

“Where did they hear this?”

“From the blacksmith himself, of
course,” the Old Man says. “People go
to the blacksmith for ironwork, tools
and fittings.”

“Like us,” the Old Woman says.

“And people like us see he’s at work
on this big iron pot.”

“Oh.”

“And we ask the Blacksmith,
‘What’reya workin’ on? ’”

“They are all coming with food,” the
Blacksmith says.

“What kind of food?” the Old
Woman asks.

“Pigsfeet in black vinegar. Whiskey
chicken. Partially boiled eggs. Thick
rice soup in chicken broth. Shell the
eggs put them in the soup . . .”

“Good,” the Old Man says. “How
about chicken and pork broth with a
few peanuts . . .”

“Oh, yum. To put inside the
Wintermelon to steam?” the Old
Woman says.

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

The Wintermelon Festival left happy
memories and became a holiday in
the Scar to celebrate the memory of
the first Wintermelon Festival.

TEA CITY

Over time she took the seeds of the
leafy plants she and the old man
liked to eat, and planted them in two
blocks, and palm trees to block the
wind from the sea, across the
street.

In another block, a walk away, on the
rise to the old concrete road into
Tea City she tended pines, cypress,
evergreens grown from cuttings.

They looked like Christmas trees as
tall as a very tall man. They didn’t
really impress with their might, vigor
and height when she took the look
from her roof five stories up.

The life she tended in the blocks all
around the Eclipse Hotel would be
gone, with the Eclipse Hotel sold and
built as something else before the
trees grew to a size that they could
take care of themselves.

The Company was taken to court by
Tea City and forbidden to sell the
waterfront industrial fill, the
Company had filled, compacted, and
built on. Tea City claims dominion
over the land. The Company claims
the right to sell to anyone they want.
They won’t sell to Tea City at Tea
City’s fixed price.

The Old Couple are former
employees of the Company, like the
few people that chose to stay when
the Company left. Then Tea City
wanted the land at its the toes.

The Country, going through an
identity crisis, Tea City and the
Company agreed the employees had
no rights. The Company and Tea City
were on their way to the Country
Supreme Court.

The Old Couple and the people living
on the Company Scar lived spread
out over blocks and blocks and saw
each other only on market days.

They saw the Old Woman they called
the Tree Lady out picking plants and
taking cuttings. They waited like
bugs for the winner’s oblivious foot
to come stepping down on them a
crunch underfoot on their walk to
money, big money, pretty money.

“But today everything is ok,” she said
as she went out every day but rainy
days, out to her blocks for new trees
to take cuttings from and grow into a
tree, or a bonsai. Other days she
went out to tend the trees, in one lot
or the other. Or tend her garden of
green favorites.

On rainy days she did what she did in
the evenings. She made umbrellas,
children’s furniture, toys, and
trinkets, and kitchen tools, garden
tools, objects and machines that
stretch the imagination of the
bamboo the old man cuts and brings
home from the forest next door.

THE OLD MAN AND BAMBOO

Every day the Old Man went to the
empty lot next door, and cut bamboo
all day, every day, rain or shine till
the last light of sunshine slipped
through a crack in the sky, bounced
down through the fingering of small
leaves at top of the bamboo, down
off the polished shine of swaying
stalks of bamboo to where sunlight
started to rust and darken.

He had just sat down for lunch and
already it was getting dark. He
wanted to be out of the creak and
breaking bones of bamboo before
the darkness began to clot and
cottage cheese.

He was lost! How could he be lost in
the bamboo forest one block wide
and two blocks long?

A SNOW IN SUMMER

Snow on the ground kept the light
late in the forest of bamboos. Snow
quieted everything down. Where did
the snow come from? He followed
the patches of snow to a light, a glow
promising warmth in the bamboo. The
glow soothed him as he approached.
The air turned cold. His breath
became white puffs that faded as if
imagined. He wasn’t at all terrified.
He was cheerful stepping through
clots of darkness onto the crunch of
odd snow underfoot that caught his
eye with an icy sparkle every step he
crunched.

He was drawn closer and deeper
among a growth of magnificent blood
red bamboos. He knew he had never
seen these bamboos before. Blood
red stalks as big around as small
boats would have stuck in his
memory. He had a memory for odd
bamboos . Blood red bamboos were
very odd.

These were the fattest bamboo
stalks he had ever seen. Up they
went, shimmering red and turning
black all the way up the long, very
tall stalks that swayed, and cracked
like masts in changes of the high
air’s weight and movement. He heard
the rubbing of high air as the hum of
happy women above him.

[CONT'D]

TAKEYUKI’S BOOTS - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:13:00 +0000

[PREVIOUS]

He followed the light to a brightness
that came from low to the ground.
He eyes through the shadows and
stalks to a single stalk, and a pair of
red rubber boots on the ground near
the freshly thickened base of a
thick bloody stalk that still dripped
wet earth and oozed.

The glow came from inside the third
node from the ground. A cool
cantaloupe melon light blurred the
shape inside the bamboo.

“Forgive me, Old Bamboo,” the Old
Man said.

He unpacked his fine-toothed
crosscut pullsaw. He cut a window
into the third node. He looked
inside.

He saw a doll that was as shapeless
as a flame. He reached for the
flame, it was cool. He was surprised
the grip of his fingers came
together empty.

The glow was alive and ran to the
window and jumped off the back of
his hand into one of the red rubber
boots.

He repaired the bamboo with the
section he cut out and a paste his
wife made for him, out of rice,
bamboo sawdust and water.

He emerged from the cold of the
forest of red bamboos into the
sweatiness and knocktalk of the
bamboo forest in summer. Then out
of the of long stalks and into the
dark of night, the heat of the season
and the cold of an empty
neighborhood of blocks and blocks
shaved bald of buildings. The
bulldozers and dumptrucks were
gone and haven’t been back.

The stars and the dark of night was
uninterrupted by buildings, telephone
poles, yardarms, wires and cables
strung between the yards. He
remembers them on this street when
he was a kid and misses them like
the uncle home from a war he misses
from when he was a kid.

Over here about five blocks, there
was a light from a house, and in the
five blocks along First Avenue, a
duplex lights the dark, and way over
there another house, then a triplex
on Chemical Avenue, all bought from
the Company in happier days. They
can only hope when the Company sells
the industrial waterfront Scar, Tea
City doesn’t claim domain and they
will get more than they paid the
Company for the only building left
standing for blocks around.

Lights from the neighboring houses
are so distant they’re as dim as the
glint in the Old Woman’s eye.

The only real lights around are on at
the Eclipse Hotel, the building the
old couple managed then bought in
better days.

APT. NO. 9

In their fifth floor apartment
Number 9 the old man puts the living
doll that glows in the red rubber
boot, on the chair the Old Woman
had just put together.

“She’s beautiful,” the Old Woman
said.

“I can see,” the Old Man said. The
outpouring of her glow seemed to
have been absorbed and he could see
the living doll indeed, was a beautiful
girl.

“This must be the child we have
always wanted,” the Old Woman said.

The Old Man found a note in the
other red boot. “I don’t want her.
You can have her. She’s too bad for
me.” The note was signed “Moon.”

“What does the note say?”

“It’s just rubber company
advertising for boots.”

What did the note mean? The Old
Man wonders. Who was Moon?

THE NEXT DAY

The next day, he goes into the lot
next door to cut bamboo. Just as
every day, rain or shine, he goes into
the crazy hair forest to cut bamboo.

One day in the following month he
found himself lost among bamboo he
had never seen before. He found a
pair of gold rubber boots with a
layer of California eight sided gold
pieces he deposited in a savings
account in the bank.

He dreaded getting lost in the
bamboo forest. Not that he
suffered a terror when he was lost.
But dread is dread.

Still, every day, rain or shine, dread
or no dread, he goes into the bamboo
forest to cut bamboo. Every time he
gets lost inside, he finds a pair of
colored rubber boots with a layer of
jewels or gold or silver on the soles.

Once he found a pair of boots with
the soles filled two pearls grown to
fit the soles. He deposited the
treasure in the bank. The Old Couple
took out the amounts needed to care
for and provide their girl, a care and
a provision at a time, ever since.

She has grown from a doll sized
miniature girl to full sized six year
old brat, in two years.

The old couple hire the hotel’s
tenants to help care for their visitor
and keep her strange existence
secret.

The gardens and groves grow in pots
on tables around a thick chickenglass
skylight, on the semi-flat roof.
Dusty light sinks down the five-story
well of the carpeted staircase.

The door to the indoor corridor,
around the stairwell, between
apartments is closed and locked
against strangers who land on the
roof.

A blackhaired moonfaced girl with
full moon lips and moons over her
dark eyes, stands under the skylight.
A shadow of smoke passes in the sky
overhead.

The old man inserts the key to the
door, but suddenly looks over her
head, and sees nothing. He looks
down and sees the girl. She holds a
pair of yellow boots to her chest like
a teddy bear.

“You sure you live with us?”

“Don’t fool!” she throws a little fist
at his leg.

Her eyes are bright and round and
dark as two eclipses. Her lids rest
half way down her bright pupils. She
looks calm, relaxed, sleepy.

“We live on the highest floor in the
building. The air should be moving up
here,” the old man says.

She breathes. “I breathed this air
yesterday. And the day before that.

And last week. I’m tired of
breathing this tired air over and
over.”

“You sure you don’t live with the
twins Koko and Pele downstairs?”
“Come on, open the door.”
“Don’t be so bossy,” the old man says.
“What are you going to name me?”
“We’ll see what the Namer says.”
“How about ‘Flower?’”
“We’ll see what Namer says.”
“How about ‘Pretty?’”
“How about ‘Beautiful?’”

“Beautiful? I like Beautiful.”
“ ‘I like beautiful!’” he imitates her.
“Admit it, you’re vain.” He looks at
her and his mood changes.

“Are you feeling all right?” He puts
the palm of a hand on her forehead,
to feel for fever. “I can’t get over
how your face brightens from the
inside, like a Jack-o’lantern,” he says.

“What?”

“A Halloween pumpkin with a candle
inside.”

“My face is not Halloween.”

“But I feel a candle inside your
head.” He takes his hand off her
forehead.

“You do not!”

“See your face glows with light from
the inside.” He puts his hand
between her face and the wall. He
wriggles his fingers. “See the
shadow?”

“Is that good?”

“You cast faint shadows, like the
moon.”

“The moon?”

•

APT NO. 9

She goes straight through the
apartment to the short hall at the
back door and her collection of
rubber boots.

“I want to wear my boots out in the
rain.”

“Good idea. That’s what rubber
boots are for.”

“But nobody can see me.”

“People will see you, but I’ll take you
out in disguise. No one will really see
you. But the day will come when you
meet the Namer, barefaced.”

Her face dimmed before the Old
Man’s eyes.

“Shh! Shh! That’s all right. A Namer
keeps all the names living on the old
company land we call the Scar.”

“That’s not what I mean!”

He is shocked by his urge to bow his
head to the little girl and apologize.

“Then the Namer introduces us, and
we introduce you, What’syourname
as our daughter to society. It’ll be
fun,” the Old Woman says stepping
aside the open door and sweeping
them in.

“Society?”

“People from the Scar have to see
you, to say you’re real. You are real.
Very real,” the Old Woman says.

“But not everyone has to see you,”
the Old Man says. Just the Namer
and the neighbors on the day you’re
named. Then you’re gone. A fading
memory. Never to be seen again.”

“I want to go out in the rain first.
You said you’d disguise me. And no
one would know it’s me.”

“Yes. That’s what I said,” the Old
Man said. “The next rainy day.”

[CONT'D]

TAKEYUKI’S BOOTS - Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:16:00 +0000

[PREVIOUS]

SUNSHINE DAYS

Heat out of the darkness all night
long. The light of morning strikes
like a match. Buildings all over the
city open their mouths to breathe.

Windows with and without fire
escapes gape open.

The light struck the Old Man’s eye in
the kitchen. He wears an undershirt
that shows his armpits.

“Red boots, and yellow boots,”
What’shername said.

The old man shook the newspaper in
his hands. He glanced at the girl in
the blink of a turning page.

“Uh huh,” he said. He turned his
chair out of the sun.

The girl said, “and boots of dark
blue rubber. And rubbers of light
sky blue.”

“When it rains. When it rains, slip on
your boots and I’ll take you out.”

“What color will I wear?” the
nameless girl asks”

“It doesn’t matter. They’re all
yours.”

ANOTHER AIRLESS MORNING

Another hot airless morning.

Nameless opened the back door to
her apartment. She let the light
outside come in. It sizzles away the
shadows of the back hallway and
heats the rubber boots of different
colors lined up on the floor.

The old man put his paper together
and threw a look. “Are you doing
something on purpose?”

“Boots of all different colors from
white to black.”

He opened his newspaper and said,
“And they’re all yours.”

“They are?”

“It’s important to keep a little girls
feet dry.”

“Rubber boots really look cool.”

•

The next morning the backdoor is
open.

The light through the open door
sparkles on her rubber boots.

“They shine!” she says.

He flaps the newspaper like
butterfly wings, and turns a page.

“The colored rubber they’re made of
shines like wetness,” he says.

They did? She looks into the dog
nose of the black boot she has put
on. She drools a gob of spit splat
onto its toe. She sees a hazy mirror
image of herself in the toe she’s
wearing on one foot.

“And when they get wet, the rubber
is slippery,” nameless says. He
crumples the paper in his lap and
looks towards her.

“And the shine is bright,” she says.

“Did you use water from the toilet to
shine those boots?” the Old Woman
asks from the back stairs.

“No. Papa said rats swim in the
toilet.”

“Right. And so they do!” the Old
Woman says.

The Old Man asked, “What’re ya
doing with your boots on?”

“You said you’d take me out with my
boots on.”

“When it rains! When it rains! It’s
not raining now. Not a shadow on the
ground. Not a cloud in the sky. Not
chance of rain today. ”

“Why?”

“Why? Boots without rain aren’t
boots.”

“Why?”

“ ‘Why?’ ” the Old Man asks amazed.

“Yeah. Why?” the Old Woman asks.

“Because rubber is waterproof.
Rubber boots don’t make sense on
feet unless they’re keeping water
off the feet.”

“That’s stupid!” the girl says.
“My sentiments exactly.”

“Hey! Who’s older here? I’ve been in
many rains. Many many rains.”

“I have too,” the girl said.

“But not all over the world. I
remember the rains I’ve been in. I
was caught by a rain in Spain without
my boots on. I was caught barefoot
in Malaysia by a heavy rain with
drops as large as ping pong balls
popping all around my feet. Rain got
in my shoes in Milwaukee. It wet my
fuzzy socks. And my wet socks
squished when I moved my feet. I
felt like I was walking barefoot in
the spit of thousands between my
toes! Ugh!” He shudders. “It was
awful. But spit-shining your boots is
the way I used to shine mine. Just
don’t get any juice on the floor.”

“You’re being disgusting on purpose.”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Ooh!
Disgusting. You’ve been talking to the
Old Woman. Just wait. The next
time it rains, when it’s boot-time, I’ll
show you the rain.”

“How will I know it’s a rain?”
“And not a drizzle?” the Old Man
asks.

“Or just a shower,” the Old Woman
adds.
“Yeah,” What’shername says.
“You won’t go out in a drizzle?”

“No.”
“How will you know you’re not out in a
drizzle?”

“You will not take me out in a

drizzle!”
“A drizzle sounds like pop bottle
bubbles popping on the windows all
over the house.”

“No!”

“You won’t go out to see what’s
making the sound of fuzzy bubbles
on the windows?”

“No fuzzy bubbles.” She shakes her
head. “No! No! No! No!”
“How bout a shower?”
“No! No shower! No! No!”
“A shower sounds like baby flies
flying into the windows.”
“Baby flies?”
“Little rain drops…”

“No little rain drops.”
“…that now and then raise a ding
that sings in the glass.”

“No! No! Not little rain. You said rain.
So, rain.”
“Oooh! You really want rain?”
“What’s rain like?”

“Oh rain! Rain drops of a rain are big
and fat and sound like they hit the
glass hard enough to break.”

“What about me?”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“Will the rain break me?”

“Stop your cute kid act! The rain
isn’t acid. The rain is drops of water
flicked from the fingers of a giant.”

He puts his finger to his thumb, nail
to nail. “They fall on you and feel
like a stranger doing this…” His
forefinger springs off his thumb and
smacks Nameless’s cheek.

“Ow!” Nameless says.

“Don’t cry. That didn’t hurt.
Remember when a moth crashed into
your cheek?”

“Maybe a little sting.”

“When it rains it will hit a lot of
little stings. They will be cold. Most
rains come with a cold touch on a
cold day.”

“The rain will touch me?”

“Rain begins with drops as big as
moths, millions of them. They fall out
the sky and tap on the windows like
the fingertips all over the house. You
hear the rain tapping the glass and
see rain clinging to all the windows.
That’s how you’ll know it’s raining.”

“When it rains, I will wear one red
boot and one black boot,” the
nameless girl says.

•

The next day is sunny and bright.
Not a cloud in the sky cast a shadow
on the street.

The Old Woman sweats in her
chemise. She smokes a cigarette in
the shadows of the kitchen, with all
the windows and back door open. She
put the cigarette between her lips
and took the newspaper in both
hands just like the Old Man.

“Have you seen a lot of rain?”
nameless says.

“A lot of rain?” the Old Woman
snubs out her hand rolled cigarette.
The Old Woman blushes Nameless
feels in her face. From where the
Old Woman sits she can see the
smoke slowly eddying toward the
backdoor. She touches the ash end
with a fingertip, over a brass hat
ashtray. She puts the butt behind
her ear. “Yes. A lot of rain. The
next rainy morning daylight, we’ll get
in our boots and raingear and go
walking in the rain. I want you to see
raindrops clinging like clear beetles
hanging upside down to the joints of
a spiderweb. Look up close and you’ll
see the spots on their bug backs are
reflections of the world upside down
in a raindrop.”

[CONT'D]

TAKEYUKI’S BOOTS - Part 4

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:01:00 +0000

[PREVIOUS]

RAIN

Early one morning What’shername
hears a clatter out of the sky like
lumber tumbling off a tall truck. It
crackles out of the rolling darkness
of daylight. The air sounds heavy.
The crashing lumber becomes booms.
She feels each boom squeeze her
from the head down to the bed-legs
to the ground. Taps and ping pong
balls on the windowglass. She opens
her eyes.

Rain!

•

WALK IN THE RAIN
The Old Man locks the back door.
With What’shername between them,
the Old Man and the Old Woman
rubber boot through the apartment
and out the front hallway door.
Along the carpeted corridor to the
stairwell. Down the carpeted stairs.
Light through the skylight and
windows is as dark as early night.

•

Rain squirms worms down the hallway
windows were transparent shadows
on the walls.

There they are again, on the next
turn, down, and again, on the same
place, five stories down.

•
The water sounds like a choking
throat inside a three-inch pipe. The
pipe coughs a splash out, makes more
choking sounds before throwing
another gush.

•
Gray and silver water flows a slither
of large snakes in every gutter at
the edge of every block in the Scar.

The Old Man points at the fat
snakes twisting in the gutter.

“Don’t step into water that looks like
that. And if you have to step into
water like that, do it only if you have
your boots on.”

“Why?”

“You never want to step in water
where you see rainbows floating
darkly on top without having your
boots on.”

“Floating rainbows?”

“Look into the pool of water on the
blacktop of the streets the gutter
water that sometimes collects at the
stopped up corner sewer. The
rainbows are pretty. They are dark
as poison and may be made of stuff
that eats rubber and then your
socks, and then the flesh of your
feet!”

She reaches for the sound the dark
side of the darkness.

“Don’t touch,” the Old Man says and
too late holds his finger up to stop
her.

She steps in the pool of slick water
with crumbs swirling on top. She
bends to look inside the sewer. The
Old Man sweeps his hands under her

arms. Suddenly she’s out of the
water. Her boots and feet down on
the sidewalk. “That water is full of
dark rainbows!”

“Oh, no!” Nameless says. “I forgot!”

“The sounds of the sewer. They
invite. They deceive,” the Old
Woman says.

“That means they’ll fool you! The way
they fooled you into forgetting what
the Old Man said.”

“What did he say?”

“Don’t chase your hands into the
dark of a sewer after the sounds.
And don’t step into water that leaves
crap and shit on your boots.”

“Oooh! Bad word! Bad word!”
nameless says.

“That’s how much I hate the crap
and shit in the sewer water.”

“Oooh!”

Nameless bends to brush off the
stuff and ick stuck on her boots.
“No!” the Old Woman says. “Don’t
touch. The Old Man will wash your
boots off.”

•
The rain drops crash and burst on
the concrete. A slick of raindrops
slops across the sidewalk and
trickles off the edge of the curb as
clear water into the water full of
thick stuff that bubbles up and
poofs a smelly belch that leaves a
fizz in the water.

•
Water rattles off the roof into the
chuckle of a roof-gutter, into a
three inch drainpipe for a five story
fall down. Somewhere down inside
the pipe, the pipe gulps.

•
They walk into the shadow of five
story red brick buildings standing
shoulder to shoulder. Red brick and
concrete closes in and shuts out the
light on either side of the brick
alley.

Words they uttered awhile ago
bounce back to them. Colors change
moods before their eyes. The reds,
and yellows. The green and purple of
their boots and rain gear has
definitely changed color.

The Old Woman stands behind
Nameless, as the Old Man lifts one
of the girl’s legs and holds the leg
and boot under the mouth of the
drainpipe.

A flower of water bursts white vomit
out of the pipe. Then a long rush of
water that ends in a wheezing sound.
The air in the alley is darker than
the streets at the ends of the brick.
The air seems filled with a purple
spray that gives the air a creepy
glow.

And then the other boot. The yellow
rubber glows a sick green Nameless
hasn’t seen before. The leaves
lapped and shining as threatening as
fisheyes leap forward around the
mouth of the pipe and the water

flowers white petals out of the

mouth like a charge of vomit.
“I don’t like what’s growing on the
pipe,” Nameless says.

He lets go of the yellow boot.
“I don’t like it,” Nameless says again.
“And you?”
“I don’t like it,” the Old Woman said.
“Nobody likes the green of the

leaves growing round the pipe?”

“No!” the Old Woman and
What’shername say together.
“That’s the Pukinji Phenomeon,” the

Old Man says.
“What’s that?”
“Look! The light at the end of the

alley!” He said hard and high and
pointed. They looked.

“The Pukinji phenomon is happening
in your eyes are blasted with
brilliance! Everything goes black. Not
quite black. You now see through the
eyes of the rods turned on to seeing
in purple. But the cones are still on
to color that’s not there. The greens
seem to be aware of you.”

“You mean they’re not?” the Old
Woman says.

“I know they are,” Nameless says.

“How old are you?’” the Old Man
asks.

•

Mr. Prince
The nation wants to be everything
the country is, and on top of that, it
wants dominion over the highest
mountain within its borders but it’s
owned by ancient land grant.

The owner of the largest mountain in
the nation trades the ancient title to
the mountain for the same ancient

title to the hundred eleven square
miles of shoreline known as the Scar
at Tea City’s toes. The nation gets
its highest mountain and he gets a
hundred and eleven square miles of
fill-land and beach.

He’s the perfect owner. His trade
with the nation gives him the power
to rule his 111 square miles of
industrial fill like a prince for as long
as he stays on his land. He honors
the contract the Company made with
the former employees. He provides
water, power, sewage. He pays the
Company what they want. He rules
his property the way he wants and
that’s all right with Tea City as long
as he pays his City taxes.

NAMELESS GETS HER NAME

Today the nameless girl gets her
name. This morning the old man
wears a shirt over his undershirt.
The Old Woman is dressed for the
occasion of their girl receiving her
name, in front of society. “That’s all,
just the loners on the old Company

Scar,” the Old Woman assured
nameless. “Only the neighbors.”

The Old Woman walks into the
kitchen with the neighborhood
keeper of names. Everybody’s
Namer is a lady.

“Pretty Beautiful Flower’s gone I
don’t know where she is,” the Old
Man says.

“I’m right here.” Nameless sits on
the floor with her boots, in the back
hall.

“In the kitchen,” the Old Man calls.
“Time to and get your oil and battery
checked.”

“She’s beautiful!” the Name Lady
says.

“Is that her name?” the Old Man
asks.

“Her skin glows.”

“I was born out of Bamboo, in the
snow.”

“Bamboo ‘Take’ Snow ‘Yuki.’ Name:
Takeyuki,” the Namer says.

“Takeyuki,” the Old Couple says,
hears her name in their voices, and
“Oooh!” they like it. “Tah-kay-yukiiii.”

As the sun goes down and the air
turns blue as a bruise and closes
around the neighborhood, Takeyuki
emerges to be introduced to the
neighborhood. Her face glows.

RICH PLAYBOYS CALL

One day a filthy rich spoiled young
man knocks on the Eclipse Hotel door
waves money and asks to see the
beautiful Takeyuki.

Word has gotten out to Tea City of
Takeyuki’s other worldly beauty, and
been exaggerated and embellished.
He dabbles in a bit of poetry
himself. He has the money to make

her happy. It’s her’s if she is seen
and photographed with him.

“No.”

More rich playboys and sleazy
playboys, playboys of the tabloids
hissing and snapping papzis and the
merely curious appear. The tenants
set up coffeehouses and noodle
shops in the empty lots next door.
The playboys send expensive gifts.
They send themselves disguised as
gifts. No one gets a sight of her. No
one hears her voice.

They write poetry, to the unseen
mystery, they write prose with a
subtle lot of alliteration on her
beauty or her neighborhood, they
write letters from the hasty beat of
their hasty hearts to the love of
their lives Takeyuki, a voice they’ve
never heard, a sight not one of them
has ever seen. They write short
gushes of words chucked from all
kinds of male hormones to Takeyuki
who they all love fiercely, and
competitively but not genuinely.

A year later the Old Couple have a
carp pond and a seafood stand for
the people walking in the park. There
are five rich playboys left. They are
famous for their devotion to a cause,
and identified by the
idiosyncratically colored and pungent
liquids they’ve become Takeyukifamous
for gulping in one swallow.

Five liquid colors in little hard
glasses: Gold, Amber, a Red that
flashes flame, on the gulp, a Blue of
beautiful eyes, and a thick liquid as
Green as dirt.

The five go to the Old Man in the
Eclipse Hotel and make him an offer
he can’t refuse.

“You’re old, Old Man. You’re going to
die soon. Who will take care of your
daughter then? Talk to her. Have
her meet us. Our year’s devotion is
worth something, isn’t it?”

“The playboys make a kind of sense,”
the Old Man says to Takeyuki.

The Old Man returns to the five
waiting playboys and says, “There are
five of you, and five tasks. Each of
you gets one task.

“Gold is to go to India and the Bodhi
tree the Buddha sat under, and bring
Takeyuki the bowl Buddha drank
from. She wants to see if it really
glows in the dark.

“Amber is to bring Takeyuki the
Chinese Fire Rat that stories say
cannot be burned.

“Johnny Red is to present Takeyuki
with a branch from the storied tree
with roots and trunk of gold,
branches of gold and silver, twigs of
silver, leaves of jade and fruit of
precious jewels.

“Blue is to sail to the mythical
southernmost island and snatch the
jewel of myth from between the
eyes of a dragon that is rumored to
live there. Present that jewel to
Takeyuki.

“Green dirt is to find the island of an
ancient myth a where a bird is said
to be born and flies away never to
touch land again except to lay one
blue egg, fly off for the last time
and disappear. All you have to do is,
bring Takeyuki a piece of that bird’s
blue egg shell that disappears if
touched by human sight.”

Years go by. Plants grow. The
neighborhood changes.

The Buddha’s bowl doesn’t glow in
the dark.

The Chinese fire rat burns up in a
fire.

The branch of the storied tree with
gold roots and trunk and branches
and twigs of silver, leaves of jade,
and fruit of precious jewels arrives
with six shouting unpaid jewelers
waving their itemized bills.

Four and Five are never heard from
again.

[CONT'D]

TAKEYUKI’S BOOTS - Part 5

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 07:03:00 +0000

[PREVIOUS]

Mr. PRINCE COMMANDS

The owner has transformed blocks
and blocks of empty lots into
parklands, a ritzy casino, a strip of
hotels and fancy restaurants from
around the world. Like a prince of old
Mr. Prince never leaves his land.
He’s taken the name Prince, for his
Principality. He spends as much time
hunting or fishing among the streams
and forests in the park as he does in
the glitter and pampered eyebrows
of the pretty. The Old Man is the
keeper of the bamboo and the Old
Woman is the keeper of the other
woods and plants.

Mr. Prince sends the Old Man a
message telling him that he will be
out hunting next Saturday. At 5
that evening he will stop by the
Eclipse Hotel. All the doors will be
unlocked and open all the way to
Takeyuki’s apartment and room. He
deserves to see every citizen of his
principality before he counts them
citizens.

The Old Man apologizes to Takeyuki
but this time what he asks is real.
Mr. Prince is coming. The Old Man
and Old Woman owe the paradise
they brought the girl from the red
bamboo into, to Mr. Prince. They own
the Eclipse Hotel but he owns the
city-state it sits on.

Takeyuki knew her parents would
betray her.

“No. No! Yes. We apologize,” they
protest.

At precisely 5 o’clock that Saturday
Mr. Prince, the Prince of the
Principality dismounted his horse and
walked into the Eclipse Hotel, walked
up the five stories of open doors to
Takeyuki’s apartment Number 9. The
sight of her was a sudden punch in
the stomach. He didn’t see she was
with the twins from downstairs, Koko
and Pele.

“Marry me!” blurted out of his
mouth.

“Because you own the ground I was
found on, I will marry you. Then I will
fade.”

“Don’t fade!” he says. “Please, don’t
fade. I won’t marry you. Forget I
mentioned such a thing. Everyone,
forget! Forrrrrget! Everyone!”

“Believe me,” Koko says, and Pele
joins her, “it’s forgotten!”

“You are a funny man,” Takeyuki says
to Mr. Prince.

“I think…” Koko or Pele begins.

“They want to be alone?” the other
finishes.

“Girls!” Takeyuki says.

“We have to make a fresh pot of
tea.”

“Actually I’d prefer a cappuccino,”
Mr. Prince says.

“Two cappuccinos please,” Takeyuki
adds.

•

Mr. PRINCE & TAKEYUKI

Mr. Prince became a regular visitor.
He and Takeyuki spent time on the
roof admiring and painting the view
of the mountain he used to own.
They looked from the roof down to
the tops of fir, cypress, spruce and
pine trees planted by the old woman
and wrote poems.

“Cypress bark makes good rope. It
doesn’t lose strength or rot no
matter how many times it gets wet,”
Mr. Prince says.

“If pine lasted forever like Cypress.”

“If cypress had the heart of pine.”

“I think it tries!” Mr. Prince
protests.

Laughter blurts out of her mouth
before she can cap it with her hand.

They watch the darkening of the sky
over the trees. The mountain
changes as it’s lit by the rise of the
Moon.

“Your people have a story about the
Moon tying the wrists of lovers
together with a blood red cord,” Mr.
Prince said.

“The blood of the moon is moonlight,”
Takeyuki said.

She embroiders a Hokusai memory
of a yellow full moon shining on a
snow streaked top of the perfectly
shaped mountain Fujiyama rising out
of the mists of Japan on a starry
night. He sees it is the view of his
mountain from the rooftop of the
Eclipse Hotel. She gives the
embroidery to Mr. Prince, and tells
him the smoke between the top of
his mountain and the moon is yet to
be embroidered.

“It’s not important. I can’t wait to be
alone with this little bit of you.”

“You may take it only if you promise
to bring it back when I have the
proper thread.”

“Only if you promise to sew it in my

presence.”
“Of course, I promise,” Takeyuki
says.

“I promise,” Mr. Prince says.

SUMMER INTO FALL
The Old Man found Takeyuki crying.
“What is this? Mr. Prince and you

have both blossomed since you met.”
She told him her real father was

coming to take her home on the 15th
of August.
“Home?” the Old Man asked.
The Old Man wrote Mr. Prince.

Mr. Prince flexed his political muscle.
Tea City patrols the roads that
border Mr. Prince’s Principality. Mr.
Prince sends masons to build a wall
around the Eclipse Hotel grounds and
the expanded bamboo forest. The
national navy patrols the waters that
exit the streams and river into the
sea.

Not a fish, not a shrimp, not a clam
passes unnoticed.

Come the 15th of August.

The muscle power of Mr. Prince over
his principality are on the wall
around the Eclipse Hotel. A man of
his personal bodyguard is at every
window, on every floor, and eight
bodyguards on the roof garden of
the Eclipse Hotel.

During the day, the hot blue skies
are patrolled by predator hawks with
big eyes and speedy peregrine
falcons and owls with silent wings
and especially large eyes in the dark
of night. Nothing. Not a bird, not a

bat, not a mouse can slip into or drop
on the Eclipse Hotel by surprise.

Nothing does.

When the full moon rises, for the
night, there's no stopping the beam
off the Moon’s face that shines
down to the Eclipse Hotel.

Every window and all doors of the
Eclipse Hotel leading to Takeyuki’s
room flew open at the first touch of
moonlight.

Down the moonlight comes the
floating tread of ladies to their
Princess’s door. Takeyuki is
compelled to float out glowing into
the arms of the ladies come to
“bathe her, powder her, dress her
for her homecoming.”

“Her homecoming?” the Old Woman
protests.

“To the moon,” the ladies of the
Moon say.

“To the Moon!” the Old Woman
glowers at the Old Man.

“Come on! Look me in the eye and
tell me you didn’t know.”

“Oh, I knew.”

“Shut up!” the Moon gentles them
with coolth.

The Old Man and Old Woman can do
nothing but lower their heads and
bawl.

The Moon tells the old man, “The
Princess was sent to earth as
punishment for some offense that’s
nobody’s business.”

“You made it our business,” the
weeping Old Man says. “You gave
your problem child to us. We loved
her.”

"But I provided for you all by
planting gold and jewels in the
bamboo for the Old Man to find.”

“Did you leave a toy, for her? A
note? ‘I love you, Dad?’”

“I gave her rubber boots.”

“Yes. You gave her rubber boots,”
the Old Man says.

“Prisoner’s boots,” the Old Woman
adds.

“You have no reason to complain," the
Moon says.

“We’re not complaining,” the Old Man
says. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t
have complaints, with and without
reasons.”

The moon ladies give their princess a
vial of the elixir of life. She takes
half and moves to give the rest to
the Old Man.

The Moon sees all and says, “No!”

“Might I give the Old Couple my
homecoming kimono as a keepsake?”

“Yes.”

"Might I write to my friend Mr.
Prince?" she asks.

“Yes,” the Moon says.

What she wrote, no one knows. She
touched her lips to the letter and
slipped the vial of the elixir of life
into the letter.

“Might I ask you to deliver this to
Mr. Prince?” the Shining Princess of
the Moon asks.

The Old Man and the Old Woman
lower their eyes, and accept the
letter into their hands.

The Princess of the Moon says,
“Think of Takeyuki whenever you
look at the Moon.” She faces the old
couple and drifts up to the face of
the moon backwards.

LOVE IS STRANGE

Mr. Prince reads the letter and looks
at the vial of liquid.

If he drinks the elixir of life he can
have immortality. He can go to the
moon and live with the Princess
forever. But Mr. Prince is the soul
of his principality. If he leaves his
principality, before he fathers a son
to an age where his succession is
assured, the principality loses its
soul. Ceases to be. Yes, love is
strange.

He gives his bodyguard a secret
errand. “Old friend, a personal
errand. Take this letter and the
elixir of life to the very top of the
highest mountain in the land and
burn them.”

“The highest mountain in the land?”

“We used to live there. Remember?”

Mr. Prince’s bodyguard tells no one
who he is, what he has, where he's
going, or what he's going to do. He
talks to no one.

He walks three days to leave no
memories behind, to the highest
mountain in the country and climbs it
to the top for old times sake. He
sets a fire with the letter and twigs
from the trail.

Mr. Prince happens to set his eyes on
the embroidered silk made by
Takeyuki of the very top of Mt. Fuji
and the full moon, at the moment the
bodyguard empties the vial of the
elixir of life into the flames.

“Look, Baby Moon,” Mr. Prince says
to the shine who glows cool in a
rubber boot. “It is as Takeyuki says,
‘If one looks to the perfectly shaped
mountain, and the light is just right,
you can see a stitch of smoke write a
line from the top of the mountain, to
the moon.”

Racist Love

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:39:00 +0000

In: Seeing Through Shuck
New York: Ballantine Books, 1972

White racism enforces white supremacy. White supremacy is a system of order and a way of perceiving reality. Its purpose is to keep whites on top and set them free. Colored minorities in white reality are stereotypes. Each racial stereotype comes in two models, the acceptable and the unacceptable. The hostile black stud has his acceptable counterpart in the form of Stepin Fetchit. For the savage, kill-crazy Geronimo, there is Tonto and the Hollywood version of Cochise. For the mad dog General Santa Ana there's the Cisco Kid and Pancho. For Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril, there is Charlie Chan and his Number One Son. The unacceptable model is unacceptable because he cannot be controlled by whites. The acceptable model is acceptable because he is tractable. There is racist hate and racist love.

If the system works, the stereotypes assigned to the various races are accepted by the races themselves as reality, as fact, and racist love reigns. The minority's reaction to racist policy is acceptance and apparent satisfaction. Order is kept, the world turns without a peep from any nonwhite. One measure of the success of white racism is the silence of that race and the amount of white energy necessary to maintain or increase that silence. Likewise, the failure of white racism can be measured by the amount and kind of noise of resistance generated by the race. The truth is that all of the country's attention has been drawn to white racism's failures. Everything that has been done by whites in politics, government, and education in response to the failure of white racism, while supposedly anti-racist, can be seen as efforts to correct the flaws, redesign the instruments, and make racism work. The object is to shut up the noise. Do it fast. Do it cheap. White racism has failed with the blacks, the chicanos, the American Indians. Night riders, soldier boys on horseback, fat sheriffs, and all them goons and clowns of racism did destroy a lot of bodies, mess up some minds, and leave among these minorities a legacy of suffering that continues to this day. But they did not stamp out the consciousness of a people, destroy their cultural integrity and literacy sensibility, and produce races of people that would work to enforce white supremacy without having to be supervised or watchdogged by whites.

In terms of the utter lack of cultural distinction in America, the destruction of an organic sense of identity, the complete psychological and cultural subjugation of a race of people, the people of Chinese and Japanese ancestry stand out as white racism's only success. This is not to say that Asian-Americans are worse off than the other colored minorities. American policy has failed in Vietnam, yet no one would say that the Vietnamese are better off than the people of Puerto Rico, where American policy has succeeded. The secret of that success lies in the construction of the modern stereotype and the development of new policies of white racism.

The general function of any racial stereotype is to establish and preserve order between different elements of society, maintain the continuity and growth of Western civilization, and enforce white supremacy with a minimum of effort, attention, and expense. The ideal racial stereotype is a low maintenance engine of white supremacy whose efficiency increases with age, as it became "authenticated" and "historically verified."

The stereotype operates as a model of behavior. It conditions the mass society's perceptions and expectations. Society is conditioned to accept the given minority only within the bounds of the stereotype. The subject minority is conditioned to reciprocate by becoming the stereotype, live it, talk it, embrace it, measure group and individual worth in its terms, and believe it.

The stereotype operates most efficiently and economically when the vehicle of the stereotype, the medium of its perpetuation, and the subject race to be controlled are all one. When the operation of the stereotype has reached this point, where the subject race itself embodies and perpetuates the white supremacist vision of reality, indifference to the subject race sets in among mass society. The successful operation of the stereotype results in the neutralization of the subject race as a social, creative, and cultural force. The race poses no threat to white supremacy. It is now a guardian of white supremacy, dependent on it and grateful to it.

For the subject to operate efficiently as an instrument of white supremacy, he is conditioned to accept and live in a state of euphemized self-contempt. This self-contempt itself is nothing more than the subject's acceptance of white standards of objectivity, beauty, behavior, and achievement as being morally absolute, and his acknowledgment of the fact that, because he is not white, he can never fully measure up to white standards.

The stereotype, within the minority group itself, then, is enforced by individual and collective self-contempt. Given: that the acceptable stereotype is the minority version of whiteness and being acceptable to whites creates no friction between the races, and given: fear of white hostility and the white threat to the survival of the subject minority, it follows that embracing the acceptable stereotype is an expedient tactic of survival, as selling out and accepting humiliation almost always are. The humiliation, this gesture of self-contempt and self-destruction, in terms of the stereotype is euphemized as being successful assimilation, adaption, and acculturation.

If the source of this self-contempt is obviously generated from outside the minority, interracial hostility will inevitably result, as history has shown us in the cases of the blacks, Indians, and chicanos. The best self-contempt to condition into the minority has its sources seemingly within the minority group itself. The vehicles of this illusion are education and the publishing establishment. Only five American-born Chinese have published what can be called serious attempts at literature: Pardee Lowe has a one-book career with Father and Glorious Descendants (1943), an autobiography; Jade Snow Wong, another one- book career with the most famous Chinese-American work, Fifth Chinese Daughter(1950), an autobiography; Diana Chang, the only serious Chinese-America writer to publish more than one book-length creative work to date, has written and published four novels and is a well-known poet; Virginia Lee has one novel, The House Tai Ming Built in 1963; and Betty Lee Sung, author of the semiautobiographical Mountain of Gold (1967). Of these five, four--Pardee Lowe, Jade Snow Wong, Virginia Lee, and Betty Lee Sung -- confirm the popular stereotypes of Chinese-Americans, find Chinese-America repulsive, and don't identify with it.

The construction of the stereotype began long before Jade Snow Wong, Pardee Lowe, Virginia Lee, and Betty Lee Sung were born within it and educated to fulfill it. It began with a basic difference between it and the stereotypes of the other races. The white stereotype of the Asian is unique in that it is the only racial stereotype completely devoid of manhood. Our nobility is that of an efficient housewife. At our worst we are contemptible because we are womanly, effeminate, devoid of all the traditionally masculine qualities of originality, daring, physical courage, creativity. We're neither straight talkin' or straight shootin'. The mere fact that four of the five American-born Chinese-American writers are women reinforces this aspect of the stereotype.

The sources of Chinese-American self-contempt are white Christianity, the sojourner's state of humiliation, overt white racism, and legislative racism. Each served to exclude the Chinese-American from the realm of manliness and American culture. The Chinese were the target of the largest missionary campaign ever mounted in the history of mankind. It's now in its fifth century. The American missionary movement is now in its second century. In 1871, the Reverend John L. Nevius wrote:

The Chinese as a race are, as compared with the European nations, of a phlegmatic and impassive temperament, and physically less active and energetic. Children are not fond of athletic and vigorous sports, but prefer marbles, kite-flying, and some quiet games of gall, spinning tops, etc. Men take an easy stroll for recreation, but never a rapid walk for exercise, and are seldom in a hurry or excited. They are characteristically timid and docile... While the Chinese are deficient in active courage and daring, they are not passive in resistance. They are comparatively apathetic as regards to pain and death, and have great powers of physical endurance as well as great persistency and obstinacy. On an average a Chinese tailor will work on his bench or a literary man over books with his pen, more hours a day than our race can.

The Chinese in the parlance of the Bible, were raw material for the "flock," pathological sheep for the shepherd. The adjectives applied to the Chinese ring with scriptural imagery. We are meek, timid, passive, docile, industrious. We have the patience of Job. We are humble. A race without sinful manhood, born to mortify our flesh. Religion has been used to subjugate the blacks, chicanos, and Indians along with guns and whips. The difference between these groups and the Chinese was that the Christians, taking Chinese hospitality for timidity and docility, weren't afraid of us as they were of other races. They loved us, protected us. Love conquered.

It's well-known that the cloying overwhelming love of a protective, coddling mother produces an emotionally stunted, dependant child. This is the Christian love, the bigoted love that has imprisoned the Chinese-American sensibility; whereas overt and prolonged expressions of hatred had the effect of liberating black, red, chicano, and to some degree, Japanese-American sensibilities.

The hatred of whites freed them to return hate with hate and develop their own brigand languages, cultures, and sensibilities, all of which have at their roots an assumed arrogance in the face of white standards, and defiant mockery of the white institutions, including white religion. One of the products of these cultures born of overt racist hatred was a word in the language for white man, a name loaded with hate. A white man knows where he stands when a chicano called him "gringo," or a black man called him "honky," "Mr. Charlie," "ofay," "whitey," or an Indian calls him "paleface." Whites aren't aware of the names Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans have for them. And it's not a little embarrassing for an Asian-American to be asked by a curious white what we might call him behind his back.

The first Chinese were sojourners to America. They arrived in a state of humiliation as indentured servants, coolie laborers to California to perform the labor of slaves, which were outlawed in this free state. They never intended to settle here. The whites encouraged them with overt white racism and legislative racism to leave as soon as they could. The first Chinese so loathed this country that they regularly burned all their letters and records of their stay, journals and diaries, and tossed the ashes into the sea in the hope that at least much of themselves would make it back to China. As a consequence of their total self-contempt, Chinese- America has no literary legacy. Of the Chinese who stayed not one complete account of one Chinese man's life in California, in diary, in journal, or in the form of correspondence, survives. Nor is there any oral history. All that survives from those old men is the humiliation of being foreign.

If life here was something to be erased from memory, death here was the ultimate humiliation. They were contemptible in life on American soil. Life they could endure. But death, no. So the practice of returning the bones to China for burial in hospitable ground, an eloquent and final expression of their loathing of America released after death, which the whites regarded as quaint and heathenish.

Legislative racism, the only form that openly survives, was invented to cope with the Chinese specifically and the first applied against them with success. Legislative racism culminated in the passage of The Chinese Exclusion Act by the U.S. Congress, giving the Chinese the distinction of being the only race to be legislated against by name.

The racist policy applied against the blacks defined them as nonhumans, as property without legal status. This resulted in political schisms among the white majority and contributed to a costly war, thus failing as an instrument of white supremacy. It also failed to control the blacks and condition them into white supremacist self-control. The policy of extermination and incarceration applied against the American Indian was another costly failure.

For the Chinese, they invented an instrument of racist policy that was a work of pure genius, in that it was not an overtly hostile expression of anti-Chinese sentiment, yet still reinforced the stereotype and generated self-contempt and humiliation among generations of Chinese and Chinese-Americans, who, after having been conditioned into internalizing the white supremacist Gospel of Christian missionaries, looked on themselves as failures, instead of victims of racism. This wondrous instrument was the law. They gave the Chinese legal status, access to the protection under the law as "aliens ineligible for citizenship." We were separate but equal under the supposedly blind impartiality of the law. Legally we were masters of our own destiny, limited only by our intelligence and talent.

The game was rigged. The Chinese were forced into Chinatown and out of American culture and society by laws supposedly designed to protect fish, secure safety against fire, and protect public health. One law stated that only "aliens ineligible for citizenship" of the laboring class would be admitted into the country. A fancy way of saying only men, no women. this law was designed to control the Chinese population. It discouraged Chinese from staying by denying them access to their women, underscored the state of their (supposedly voluntary) humiliation in America, and guaranteed that even should all the Chinese stay they would not reproduce. And eventually they would die out.

This law worked. At the turn of the century the ratio of men to women was 27 to 1. Then a little after the turn of the century the Chinese population took a sudden decline. White historians like to say that suddenly a lot of us went home to China. We didn't, but our bones did, six months after we died here. This law was doubly successful in that it contributed to the myth of Chinese-American juvenile decency and thus added to the effeminization of the racial stereotype. According to this myth, the reason juvenile delinquency stayed so low in Chinatown until the last twenty years was that maintenance of the strong Chinese family. Nothing less than Confucianist Chinese culture was making law-abiding citizens of us. The reason there was no juvenile delinquency in Chinatown has less to do with Confucian mumbo jumbo than with the law against the birth of Chinese kids. There were no juveniles to be delinquent.

What holds all this self-contempt together and makes it work is "The Concept of the Dual Personality." The so-called "blending of East and West" divides the Chinese-American into two incompatible segments: (1) the foreigner whose status is dependent on his ability to be accepted by the white natives; and (2) the handicapped native who is taught that identification with his foreignness is the only way to "justify" his difference in skin color. The argument goes, "If you ain't got Chinese culture, baby, all you got's the color of your skin," as if to say skin color were not a culture force in this country.

The privileged foreigner is the assimilable alien. The assimilable alien is posed as an exemplary minority against the bad example of the blacks. Thus the privileged foreigner is trained to respond to the black not the white majority as the single most potent threat to his status. The handicapped native is neither black nor white in a black and white world. In his native American culture he has no recognized style of manhood, in a society where a manly style is prerequisite to respectability and notice. His pride is derived from the degree of his acceptance by the race of his choice at being consciously one thing and not the other. Black, white, chicano, or a museum of Chinese culture. In his use of language, voice inflection, accent, walk, manner of dress, and combing his hair, the handicapped native steeps himself in self- contempt for being "quick to learn... and imitative." At worst, he's a counterfeit begging currency. At best he's an "Americanized Chinese," someone who's been given a treatment to make him less foreign.

MOSES MIKE MASAOKA, part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:37:00 +0000

Frank Abe of KIRO NewsRadio Seattle asked Cynthia Kadohata a question about her debut novel THE FLOATING WORLD. How did a Japanese family of migrant farm laborers find themselves in a car in 1950’s Arkansas? Instead of answering, “Camp,” she snapped her answer, “There’s activism. And there’s art. My work is art.”

The United States of America is the only country founded in “The Great American Experiment - Democracy.” If the American experiment absorbed the cultures of JACK AND JILL, RUMPELSTITLSKIN, THE UGLY DUCKLING, the hungry experiment would chew on the stories POON GOO, the giant, and NUR WAW, the Mother of Humanity welcome a new culture and grow, the yellows who came for gold, thought. Democracy would welcome THE WATER MARGIN, the story a China formed by alliances between regional families, races, and gangs bound by oaths that joined disparate philosophies in a fight for the land. In THE WATER MARGIN, in all of the heroic tradition, the government was just another gang. The American experimental democracy promised cultural integrity and political freedom.

Yellows know JACK AND THE BEANSTALK, CINDERELLA, RUMPELSTILTSKIN from their childhood as American stories. President Clinton has declared Kingston’s lies about Chinese history and Far Mulan the official United States version of Chinese culture .

For the ChineseAmericans the message is simple: serve the white man. You don’t believe me? Whites expect you to know the white THE PRINCESS AND THE PEA. You have the right to expect the whites to know Nah Jah the three headed boy. You didn’’t know you had that right did you? Thanks Socioology and Asian American studies for your ignorance about Asain America.

The Japanese have been in America, on the mainland for over a century. They have the right to expect their fellow Americans to know KAGUYA HIME, the girl who glowed like the moon. Japanese America had a Japanese Kabuki style stage and a production of a folk play, about the rise of a family of samurai against the government to avenge their judgment that their master’s death was unjust. This suggestion that every Nisei child of 1930’s Seattle knew CHUSHINGURA comes from a review of an all-girls production being staged at Seattle’s Nippon Kan, by James Omura, in a part Issei part Nisei paper.

MOMOTARO, the story of a boy found inside a large peach, is the Japanese match for JACK AND THE BEANSTALK. CHUSHINGURA is the plot to the opera of Japan, the grand Kabuki. References to both occur in John Okada’s NO-NO BOY, a JapaneseAmerican novel, published in Japan and a flop in America where it was written. Was it rejected by JapaneseAmericans as the lack of sales indicated?

The America that accepts MOTHER GOOSE, from England and The Bros. Grimm from Germany pointedly rejects Yellow children’s stories from Yellow cultures.

No art is lower than opera. No art coalesces the high and the low into singing the same song like an opera. An art –like an opera -- that is not activist, is an art without content. An art without content is entertainment. Verdi’s revolutionary operas rouses voices to sing like heroes, Wagner’s heroic Viking women singing on the mountaintops in winged helmets and armor. The heroic Peking and Cantonese operas. The Japanese Kabuki.

The JACL contends that Japanese Americans aren’t activist. That’s why the JACL exists as the entry into an America free of Japanese influence.

The Nisei might not be activist, but their parents the Issei had to be activists, or they wouldn’t have come. Issei Sessue Hayakawa had his own Hollywood studio. He owned Haworth Studios and starred in Haworth’s movies. He played an American Indian, a suave Mexican gigolo, Chinese, and Japanese and imaginary Pacific islanders. Rudolph Valentino came to him looking for work. Hayakawa turned him down. Hayakawa was the top of the Holllywood heap.

He quit Hollywood after he discovered the white partners in his Haworth studios conspired to split the insurance money following his death in an earthquake scene. Luckily technician told him not to stand where he was supposed to stand. He went to New York and wrote a novel, developed the novel into a night club act, took the nightclub act to France, the French made a movie of his novel and he became a French movie star and nightclub raconteur. When Germany and Japan signed an alliance and walked into Paris, he left the stage. That was another form of art as activism. When the Americans liberated Paris, he went out in the streets and met a group of American troops and invited them to dinner.

Hayakawa was born into a Samurai family in Japan. He was as an Issei. Kadohata’s vision of art being separate from activism was born in America.

•

TARO YASHIMA to MAKO to MOMO

Taro and Mitsu Iwamatsu were painters more known for their Fauvist action approach to drawing and painting till the militarists took over the state. They fled Japan after artist friends had been taken Gestapo style in the middle of the night. The Iwamatsu’s landed in New York, where Taro took the name “Yashima” and went to work drawing and writing for the U.S. Office of War Information. He was the author illustrator of the messages John Okada chucked, out of B-24 runs over occupied islands in the Pacific. He is known to American children for his children’s books. MOMO’S UMBRELLA has been in print since 1977. He published two “picture books” in America. HORIZON IS CALLING, the story of Japanese militarists driving him out of the country, and THE NEW SUN the story of his return and recovering his son, Mako. These were normal size books of full page illustrations and a caption of two lines in English and two lines in Japanese. If there is a Japanese American reading of Yashima’s combined graphic art and captions that justifies taking the works seriously as JA literature, I wish a JapaneseAmerican critic would argue that case. None did when the picture books came out. Too activist. But JapaneseAmerica has another chance to embrace or ignore Taro Yashima.

Momo, of MOMO’S UMBRELLA , is shepherding a university press though a reprinting THE NEW SUN according to her father’s design. The new, NEW SUN is due out next year.

Sessue Hayakawa and Taro Yashima and Mitsu Iwamatsu prove that the separation of art and activism was not invented by the Issei.

Mako, the son left behind as a baby by Taro and Mitsu was too sickly to travel. He was 16 when sailed alone to America. He’s an Oscar nominated actor, starred On-Broadway with PACIFIC OVERTURES and was the founding director of the Los Angeles EAST WEST PLAYERS. He wanted to be known as a great Yellow director of the great Japanese American play about camp. He slipped me $200 to write him that play. A play for him to direct, not act. He was an activist. He slipped writers a little encouragement, a little courage, with his money. His private gift bound us like brothers. I would send him sample pages of ideas that came to me. There was a play based on Hiroo Shinoda, the Japanese soldier that fought WWII in a Phillippine island until the 1970’s when Japan sent his former commanding officer and relatives to command him to leave. Mako as Shinoda and Pat Morita as a fictional draftee from America drew an enthusiastic phone call, but fizzled.

He let the world know that by a great JA play he meant a camp play, when he announced a whole season of four to be written plays dedicated to camp.

It’s not his fault the writers let him down, and the actors are busy kissing themselves all over.

A critic in the tradition of lone Jimmie Omura might see a parable of JA history in the story of art and activism from Japan come to America to have “art” separated from dangerous “activism” by the JACL.

Isn’t it curious that Omura considered the editor of the JACL newspaper the PACIFIC CITIZEN Larry Tajiri, a good friend? Memories of the San Francisco 30 club for Nisei journalists, and walks around the city where they talked of the Great JapaneseAmerican Novel they expected the other to race them to write.

Omura the lone champion of a free press in JapaneseAmerica and Tajiri the lover of books movies and writing, who turns against his love of art and leads JapaneseAmericans to write as a service to white supremacy as Sociologists. Sociology is white religion disguised as science. That explains why JA has had no newspapers, no magazines since CURRENT LIFE and the Rocky Shimpo.

Larry Tajiri was the spokesman for Mike Masaoka’s JACL policies, and confidential informant to the FBI code named “T-1”( Masaoka himself was code named Confidential Informant T-11) Why did Tajiri give George FurIya a moment of JACL fame in the pages of the PACIFIC CITIZEN?
Furiya was unpublished, unknown. Why praise for an unpublished writer who cusses the JACL out? Furiya wrote to Tajiri:

I notice those bastards in the JACL turned quisling when the invasion ran over 'em. What the hell's the matter with you guys out there on coast. The fact that had to evacuate you can't deny, of course: and it would have been sheer folly not to cooperate with the fascist military boys to make the evacuation as nice as possible. But the JACL boys didn't just cooperate; they actually went and kissed the army's ass.

Tajiri wrote in the Jan. 17, 1948 issue of the PACIFIC CITIZEN:

An Unpublished Novelist

"There are uncomplete novels in his trunk and one of these days George will be back to finish them. Maybe one of them will be published and he will be famous. You might remember the name. George Furiya."

Old fashioned literary research turned up a letter to the Tajiri’s from George Furiya. The letter is refreshingly written in the rhythms of spontaneous spoken language. This is a taste of the prose of George Furiya, Larry “T-1” Tajiri believed deserved a read.

Dearest Larry and Guyo,

Anyway, how are you? And you, Guyo. The bugs are well under control, so don't worry. The old saying about children would describe my bugs well if it had been written by Milton: The bugs are not seen, neither are they heard. Or something. Anyway, I'm fine. I notice those bastards in the JACL turned quisling when the invasion ran over 'em. What the hell's the matter with you guys out there on coast. The fact that had to evacuate you can't deny, of course: and it would have been sheer folly not to cooperate with the fascist military boys to make the evacuation as nice as possible. But the JACL boys didn't just cooperate; they actually went and kissed the army's ass. Not even a single protest, be it to the nisei's everlasting shame. By the fact of not protesting (not that it would have done ay go, of course) you actually gave recognition to necessity for evacuation when you knew damn well that no such necessity existed. What the JACL should have done was this: We recognize no necessity for evacuation, and we say to plainly †hat we are all following your orders under duress (whatever duress means). Then the JACL should have gotten busy to try to get that phony military order revoked. Because as long as that military order hangs over the heads of the dumb nisei, it's going to mean that the nisei have been guilty of what the military boys said they were guilty of. Worse the order is going to hang like sword Damocles over the heads of the nisei, poised to come down this time like a ghetto-system, this time like the hostages for the white-American prisoners o the Japs, ad infinitum. I know that safety from West Coast mob-rule was one of the arguments used in favor of evacuation by the JACL quislings-in-effect, but moving inland from the West Coast hasn't safety; they've just hung that sword of Damocles over their heads. Anything can happen as long as sword hangs there. Hell, the JACL didn't cooperate with the army. In France, they call that kind of thing collaboration. The invasion has come and gone, but what the hell is everybody doing? I think what the Pacific Citizen should start campaigning to get that military order revoked.---And for Christ's sake, tell the boys to cut out some of that flag-waving, will? It's really disgusting. Carl Craw came back and told Shiro: "That Mike Masaoka is sure some flag-waver, isn't he?"

South America? Wonderful, from this distance. The most charming people in Argentina were French. (God, how I love the French! One thing this war proved: I'm a damn good Frenchman and damn good Russian.) Padilla's Free Man of America really exists in Latin America--at least, so far as I'm concerned. I had only to mention that was North American. From then on, I was never a Japanese to these refugee Europeans and the Latin Americans. I was a North American. Not even an eyebrow raised. For the first time in my life, I was an American--with nobody to question or doubt that fact. I tell it was terrific. Can you wonder that I consider North Americans the worst kind dopes? These refugee Europeans and Latin Americans never spoke to me as Japanese. They always spoke to me as an American. They never doubted my loyalty to the United States. (Dangerous word, that loyalty. But not now. I mean I won't go into why that word's a dangerous one. What I mean is all this hullabaloo about loyalty this-and-that, disloyalty this-and-that in the evacuation business, no one from DeWitt and Roosevelt down to the least of the JACL quisling's (sic) quislings exactly described what they meant by loyalty disloyalty. What I mean is I am definitely against turning the Japanese people over to Wall Street and the No-dogs-And-Chinese-Allowed boys? Is that disloyalty I traveled eight thousand miles submarine infested waters to come back to the United States from a more or less good life-time job in B.A. with the Asahi. Does that constitute loyalty?- --Anyway, to Latin Americans, Padilla, and the whole French people, my love. Sao Paulo is still a wonderful city to me. Did tell you about my Turkish girl, 22-years, educated in France, widow of a French infantry lieutenant, with whom I was on tu -terms, Spanish and halting French? Lovely. I should have fallen in love with her. And so forth. Sighted two submarines, dodged two torpedoes the night, didn't even so much as get excited, and the navy gunnery crew was given orders by the ensign in command to shoot me on sight if they caught me signaling to any ship, the damn fool (the kind of thing that me despair for America.)

A long letter, but a well-meant one. I love you both, and thanks for letter. It was most touching. Now guess what I'm doing now. I'm on Long Island, stuffing dirt into pots at the Japan Nurseries, Inc., $50 a month with room and fish-diet, 11 hours a day. You should see me. Positively boorish. A muzhik, a muzhak--the Russian for peasant. Am getting my unemployment insurance soon, however. Then to work.

Love,

George Furiya

Japanese Americans will have to find George Furiya’s novel, and confirm or prove Omura’s memory of a firm friendship or wishful thinking.

Tajiri went from editing the PACIFIC CITIZEN to culture editor at the DENVER POST with the Czar of JA publishing, Bill Hosokawa. He wrote knowledgeably and appreciatively about operas, plays, movies like a white critic of white art in a white newspaper. Everything…every thing that JapaneseAmericans didn’t have.

These actors in the story of JapaneseAmerica were found in the course of separating fact from fiction to define and appreciate the art of John Okada’s NO-NO BOY.

Were we suckered by a good title NO-NO BOY that fizzed with personality and “style?” The subject was the American definition of the author’s Japanese blood. The flesh and blood existed in reality. Did the ideas, the city, the people exist? Were they still alive? A journalist’s questions preparatory to sniffing out an interview.

A visit to Seattle showed the Boys that Okada’s Seattle was still Seattle. The Aiiieeeee! Boys liked John Okada’s NO-NO BOY for its honest portrayal of tensions against No-No Boys tearing apart the Japanese Americans of Seattle.

John Okada volunteered for the army from camp Minidoka, and served in intelligence in the Pacific, he was a living example of the perfect JACL internee, volunteer, hero, but he didn’t write about himself. We liked that he wasn’t writing about himself. This was a true novel.

I do not remember one reference to the JACL in Okada’s novel other than his choice of th derogatory term invented by the JACL, “No-No Boy” to designate the internees that foiled the WRA questionnaire the JACL was so sure had been soo cunningly designed it trap thousands of internees into volunteering for the army from a prison camp that the JACL’s Mike Masaoka became volunteer no. 1 in August. In the 1957 that the book was published the “No-No Boys” was a JACL synonym for “traitors,” a term known only to Japanese Americans in the hush of conversation when John Okada wrote. NO-NO BOY was an operatically activist novel before Japanese America had an opera.

The Aiiieeeee! Boys liked NO-NO BOY so much, we re-released it in 1974 under our secret identity, CARP Press with cover and book design by Robert Onodera, and an afterword that willingly exposed Hajime “Jim” Akutsu as Okada’s model for his protagonist “Ichiro.”

We didn’t know it at the time, but by combining our names and races in AIIIEEEEE! we were re-enacting the meeting of three men of three different faces, three races, three walks of life becoming blood brothers, in the Oath in the Peach Garden to save China and die on the same day. A knowledgeable Yellow critic would have pointed out the similarities between the alliance of four Aiiieeeee! Boys and the 3 brothers of the Oath in the Peach Garden and racist significanse of THE FIVE CHINESE BROTHERS.

But we have no critics. We—Asian America haven’t had critics since Seattle’s Broadway High School graduate James Matsumoto Baking Powder Omura edited San Francisco’s CURRENT LIFE until Dec. 7th 1941, and Tetsuko Toda hired Omura to car to Denver to edit the ROCKY SHIMPO. In the ten camps Toda unleashed Omura in the ROCKY telling the news to that was shortly told and useful to the internees, and editorials that criticized the government and “the Constitution” was the code, to the JACL and the words he recommended in his editorials, be used. Omura was the only critic the people had to nag everybody as an objective Nisei outside observor of the ten camps. Each a city of ten thousand souls. The Issei subscribed and the Nisei gathered round to hear news from the ROCKY. Think of a movie peek at this news from the ROCKY scene at Minidoka, Idaho, the ROCKY at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, the ROCKY at Amache, Colorado.

If we had a critic, or at least a gossip we would know what Pat Morita the comic, remembers hearing a voice between the barracks at Tule Lake calling “Errr-Rocky here! Errr-Rocky Shimpo!” A magazine should have pulled that out of Pat in public, and not passed in private like a secret.

Take any avenue to check for the facts of NO-NO BOY. It will eventually lead to the conclusion that Seattle had an unusually large number of contenders for leadership of the American born Nisei and the JACL. James Sakamoto, the blind boxer turned publisher of the first all-English JapaneseAmerican newspaper, and a founder of the JACL, Bill Hosokawa, an editor on Sakamoto’s JAPANESE AMERICAN COURIER before the war, and the post war JACL Czar of JA publishing, James Omura, a cantankerous opponent of the JACL. Gordon Hirabayashi, the first to resist by violating tie Army curfew order. All come from Seattle.

Min Yasui of Portland was the second Nisei to violate the curfew. Though a lawyer and he should have known better, he agreed to attach his case Ex Parte to Hirabayashi’s.

I’ve heard that members of sainted Min Yasui’s Portland JACL say their venerable Japanese American Citizen’s League has differences with me. They don’t like me and yet they’re sponsoring my flight to Portland to talk to you.

The difference Portland JACL has with me, might be the Day of Remembrance they didn’t support as the JACL but as individual Issei, and Nisei everyone wanted to happen. No one wanted to organize, to lead but were willing to be one of a group of sponsors, they were willing, even anxious to be organized.

The first and only JapaneseAmerican use of the paid political ad in history, began at the 1979 Portland Day of Remembrance. The text to the OPEN LETTER TO SENATOR HAYAKAWA in favor of redress was on a table with a lined sheet for signing and a can for contributions to buy ad space in the Washington Post. Min Yasui read the letter, clapped his hand on the table, took out his wallet, and signed then and there. Later he asked that his name be removed from the letter but keep the five bucks for the cause.

George Takei, Mr. Sulu of STAR TREK signed. The Mayors of Seattle, Puyallup, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and more mayors signed. Jane Fonda signed. And signatures from five dollar Japanese Americans that filled a third of a page in the Washington Post and caught Sen Hayakawa off guard.

Getting to the bottom why a vet John Okada wrote NO-NO BOY about a pariah and not himself, led to AIIIEEEEE’s! research into the book that led to Seattle and that led to the JACL betrayal of Japanese America into the camps and the JACL creation of the 442nd as the cowards of camp and their private JACL police at home. The JACL controlled JapaneseAmerican history, and suppressed knowledge of the resisters winning a Presidential Pardon that gave JapaneseAmericans their civil rights back into the time of camp. It was the resisters from Hirabayashi to the draft resisters of 1944, and Endo’s Habeas Corpus suit that demanded the governent tell her why she was interned, that opened the wire gates of camp. If it were up to the JACL JapaneseAmerica would have gone extinct in camp.

Aiiieeeee’s! conclusion about JapaneseAmerican history is the opinion of four rogue writers. JapaneseAmerica hasn’t been heard from. If JapaneseAmerica wants to celebrate it’s traitors and forget it’s heroes, so be it. That’s news.

Why don’t Yellow activist artists in Oregon know about artist activists California? Why are Oregon civil rights activists not linking the WWII Resisters refusal to be illegally drafted from camp, with Lt Ehren Watada’s refusal to obey the illegal deployment to Iraq? Watada’s right close. We don’t know Yellows a mile down the road because we have no newspapers, we have no magazines. Because we have no magazines. Activists in Portland don’t know that actress Momo Yashima has put together a presentation of resistance leader Frank Emi, and WWII draft resister from Heart Mountain Wyoming, Yosh Kuromiya, and Ht Mt internee drafted into the Army, with service in Military Intelligence, Paul Tusneishi, who resigned his membership in the JACL and has been a one man campaign for Japanese America’s recognition of the heroes of JA civil rights.

Ehren Watada called the resisters in Los Angeles from Seattle. It was put on You tube and licked a column in the San Jose Mercury-News. The resisters reached from the camps of WWII to today, men in their 80’s and 90’s to link up with Lt. Watada.

The activists in Portland might bring Momo’s show to town, and arrange a meet up the road at Ft. Lewis, between Lt. Ehren Watada and the resisters. Just a thought.

The Aiiieeeee! Boys all publish in white magazines. Some big. Some small. White anthologies, in white company, From Ishmael Reed adventures into book publishing and magazine publishing all kinds of publishing we learned the joy of publishing among a truly multi-racial American magazine. Made us conscious of Yellows having no publishers. The publishers faking it for us are like Lee & Lowe. Michi Weglyn approached them with the idea of doing a version of KAGUYA HIME. Lee & Lowe said all their Asian stories were sociologically accurate and they did not publish traditional Asian stories.

If we publish at all, we have no choice but to step into the white man’s pocket.

[CONT'D]

MOSES MIKE MASAOKA, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:34:00 +0000

[CONT'D FROM PART 1]

At least the Aiiieeeee! Boys have published books with their names on them. There’s no mistaking your reading a book by Chin, Chan, Inada or Wong. Stepping into a book by one of us is like stepping into my private Men’s room. You don’t have that book by Chin expecting to read about Britney, or Madonna, or Lisa Liu bragging about knowing nothing of Chinese children’s stories. True! The men’s room with my name on it, is in a White house. True the books come from White pockets. I’m grateful to be published. My ego bows to White generosity. But I’m bothered by the fact I’ve chosen to be a writer, of a people that have no publishers, no theaters...

A people has theater, and critics. Sessue Hayakawa took a job at “Toda” a Japanese theater company in Los Angeles, Little Tokyo run by a man named Toda. A people has magazines, movie stars, heroes, and Zippo lighters for making fire. No record of Toda. No reviews of Toda’s shows. THE LAST OF THE LINE, a William Ince film about Indians becoming drunks in the cities starring Sessue Hayakawa as a son of a chief that goes to the city and the worst happens. Hayakawa writes of being discovered by Ince at a performance of the HURRICANE at the Toda theater.

The Yellow magazine has yellow critics. Critics that know as much us, as we know about ourselves. We read each other and knew enough to detect a fake Chan, a fake Wong, a fake Inada a fake me. We were all you needed to know as long as we were the only AA writers.

Then Kingston said she learned THE BALLLAD OF MULAN as a child listening to her mother. Neither Chan, Inada, or Wong had said anything about Chinese or Japanese stories of our childhoods. Did we have childhoods?

If we call ourselves Chinese, or Japanese, as we do, and call ourselves American as we do, we should know the literary world of our people, we should know Chinese children’s stories and the national myth, in China’s case, the heroic tradition, the first novel of the Ming dynasty, ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS, the expansion of THE BALLAD OF MULAN into a rather bloodthirsty five hour play ending with taking off her armor and emerging a luminous woman), the novels THE WATER MARGIN, MONKEY, and GENERAL YUE FEI, to match our knowledge of white culture and children’s literature.

These are the heroes of yesterday’s history and today’s comic books that define China, as King Arthur defines England, Washington defines The United States of America, Fidel defines the Cuban Revolution.

At least have enough of the stories to not be faked by Kingston’s keeping secret from her readers that Mulan was not really tattooed. The Chinese mothers fuming over Maxine writing that Mulan was tattooed by her parents used to be normal in Chinatowns. Parents give birth to perfect children. Unmarked skin. Uncut hair. Tattoos are the mark of a criminal. Why would parents want to mark their child a criminal?

You saw Shawn Wong in WHAT’S WRONG WITH FRANK CHIN? say that Kingston had gotten me, meaning my writing, perfectly. That she had rewritten the “Chinatown Dreamgirl” scene from CHICKENCOOP into her WOMAN WARRIOR and had me “down to a tee,” meaning my “style” not my misogynist “content.”

She characterizes her mother dancing through her childhood chanting the rhymes of THE BALLAD OF MULAN . By characterizing her childhood, she had made every Chinese-American …at least every Chinese –American writer responsible for the literature of the Chinese childhood. Specifically, to answer the question: Is Kingston’s Far Mulan real? Thirty five years ago nobody yellow could answer. In 2008, you can read the reviews of WWWFC? and see that nobody Yellow can answer that question today. A Kingston-like voice reads that she took the tattoos off of Yue Fei’s back, went back in time to 550 AD and put them Far Mulan, because it was the feminist thing to do, and no one Yellow notices. Kingston gave the interview in 1986 to Kay Bonnetti. Pres Bill Clinton gives her his Humanities Medal in 1997, making her mutilated Far Mulan the official US telling of the Chinese children’s story and history. The first intrusion of a head of state into the folklore, history, and literature of another culture. As much as the US hated Nazi Germany, the government never endorsed a rewrite of RUMPELSTILSKIN.

Usually the imitator is forgotten or at best becomes Rich Little in Vegas and the original given a lifetime of steak dinners and free booze. But ChineseAmericans and AAmericans are different.

That’s why the AIIIEEEEE! boys need Yellow critics. It’s not up to Chin, Chan, Inada and Wong to speak in defense of their own work. It’s up to the people. It’s up to the people to claim their heroes. When they claim their heroes they make their writers reputation. The people sing the song we wrote about the heroes. The people cheer the operas we wrote about their heroes. The people commissioned an artist to sculpt a bust, a statue, paint a portrait, perform an inspired work and donate the statue, the portrait, the work inspired by the hero, to the people’s park, or people’s museum, or shopping center.

Until then we are hitching a ride in the white man’s pocket.

There is no great writer without a great people. Art elevates the people. And the people elevate their art. If AAwriters are that great AA’s should have heroes with names that cross every yellow’s lips every day.

The heroes and the writers are in the market for a people we call ours. A people with publishers. A people with critics. A people with readers. If we have all that, I’m proud to say that the single most mentioned name in 20th century AsianAmerica was Mike Masaru Masaoka. And I’d like see JapaneseAmerica prove itself a people by mounting an opera telling his place in JA history. And in writing, music, and JapaneseAmerican voice the opera taking charge of JapaneseAmerican history.

I can imagine MOSES MASAOKA with Randy Kim with his trademark acting rubber likeness of Masaoka’s large lips and cheeks and a wig of Masaoka’s wavy hair as Mike Masaoka. Glasses. His Masaoka looks like Charlton Heston wearing glasses. And his Shakespearean voice. A little W.C. Field’s twang and he’s Masaoka at his most Moses.

Randy Kim as he was called before the N.Y. Shakespeare in the Park production of Pericles and his name bulked up to Randall Duk Kim, was the increasingly celebrated Yellow actor in New York from around 1970 on till the end of the century. He had done a couple of Steve Tesich’s plays, and couple of mine at the American Place Theater and Shakespeare’s PERICLES at Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the park.

Famous for his voice, his Shaksepeare in Missouri, Randy shook his head at ever doing a movie or tv because “they’re a director’s media. The live theatre is the actor’s medium.” And he was an actor. He knows theatre history. The history of Shaespeare. The history of Shakespearean actors. He believes he is the reincarnation of Edwin Booth, the actor brother of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

Imagine him as Masaoka, in MOSES MASAOKA. Kim’s Masaoka and Clyde Kusatsu as Bill Hosokawa. What did the JapaneseAmerica make of the apparent split between Sakamoto and Hosokawa? And what did they make of Hosokawa becoming Boswell to Moses Mike’s Dr. Johnson, from Heart Mounntain on to his death. It has to come from a JapaneseAmerican mind, a JapaneseAmerican writer. Perhaps a diabolical JapaneseAmerican writer could write the opera where Masaoka says, to Bill Hodsokawa, “Himmler sent pictures reports of Treblinka to American Intelligence and my friend and mentor senator Elbert Thomas, of Utah to my sight.”

“You’re not saying….”

“These are things I can’t talk about.”

A diabolical part JapaneseAmerican writer?

, Sen Elbert Thomas (played by George Washington), for advice.

“Because of December 7th, your future in politics is over. Read these.” The Senator might be written by the diabolical JapaneseAmerican as handing Masaoka State Dept files on what happened in Treblinka and Sobibor in 1939. “Taking over the JACL might be your only chance at eventually earning enough American trust to run for office.”

“I hoped to run for President of the United States in my lifetime.”

“Don’t worry White Americans are not the Nazis.”

“No, that’s not why…”

“If you were to lead the JACL with an official secret understanding with the government, like Jacob Gens, you realize that you would be as hated as he was by his own people.”

“A secret understanding?”

“Jacob Gens was the President of the Judenradt of Vilna Ghetto Lithuania. An organization similar to the JACL. ”

“The Field Executive of the JACL would secretly be, in reality, American?”

“The Judenradt posed as activists for Jewish civil rights in a Nazi ghetto.”

“A secret American, a secret agent, a secret G-Man,” Masaoka says.

“A secret American!” Bill Hosokawa says.

The Senator says, “ He gathered the names of those wanting to fight for their rights against the Nazis, and,” he snaps his fingers, “He turned them in. Unlike Gens, your Nazis are going to win this war.”

Masaoka laughs.

Bill Hosokawa points in the air, but says nothing.

The Senator continues, “Your organization will continue to exist under the wartime mandate: to drive the race to extinction.”

“The sociologists call it ‘assimilation,’” Masaoka says.

Bill says “assimilation” simultaneous with Mike’s story.

The good Senator says, “You would be leading your people to a better world.”

“I would lead my people to a better world, a better America!”

“Yes! You would be the Prophet that saved your people the wrath of the white race by voluntarily going extinct.”

“I would, wouldn’t I? I’d be Moses!”

“Mike, listen to me, Mike. I agree with you 100%,” Bill Hosokawa says. “But you can’t talk this way today.”

“But Greenwood, Oklahoma. I didn’t want the JACL mistaken for the NAACP,” Masaoka says.

“America’s changed what it says,” Hosokawa says.

“They burned Greenwood to the ground!”

“No one’s said they’ve changed what they believe.”

See Masaoka through Hosokawa’s admiring eyes to convince Randall Duk Kim that Masaoka is a role worthy of being explored by great actor’s great acting. The trick is to convince him he was chosen for his acting, and he was, and no one thinks for minute, not for a second that Randy’s anything like the thoroughly traitorous Masaoka.

Give a taste of Masaoksa:

Some of my friends and some who are not my friends, also call me Moses. Moses Masaoka. They say that like the Biblical prophet, I have led my people on a long journey through the wilderness of discrimination and travail. They say that I have led them within sight of the promised land justice for all and social and economic equality in our native America, but that we will not reach it within my lifetime.

Masaoka is larger than the life of the obvious craven self-interested slob Masaoka is, but Masaoka character of Shakespearean dimensions, because of the 110,000 Nisei that followed and trusted him. He led them to the promised camps. Can you blame him for not going in?

The US Gov’t gives Masaoka a people to lead, and right away, he betrays them. For their own good, Hosokawa says. The Japanese characteristic timidity, he explains. Once Masaoka has JA into camp, he betrays his people again by aksing they be drafted from camp. For his third betrayal he refuses JACL support to court cases to test the constitutionality of the Army’s orders, and turns against Yasui and Hirabayashi’s challenges. Next he joins the WRA in a questionnaire designed to trick the men into volunteering for the Army from camp. It fails. While he’s in the Headquarters of the 442nd in Europe, the JACL supports the gov reinstate the draft in all of its papers around the ten camps, and the gov reinstates the draft in 1944.

The JACL’s being FBI finks was the worst kept secret in in camp. After camp the fink rap kept the whiff of gov’t control swirling about everything the JACL did. As if to emphasize the point, Masaoka became successful as the JACL’s first Washington lobbyist. For years "The Japanese American Story," a Japanese American history by Bud Fukei, Minneapolis: Dillon Press. 1976 pp iv-xvii.
With Mike Masaoka guest writing the chapter titled "Why the Japanese Americans Cooperated," and Bill Hosokawa’s NISEI : THE QUIET AMERICANS , Boswell adoring Dr. Johnson were the first and for a long time the only Japanese American in the trade books. Being editors of respected papers. Fukei of the Seattle Times, Hosokawa of the Denver Post made them anonymous readers publishers use. But being Nisei readers of Nisei books compromised their anonymity.

He shepherded his people into extinction without a whimper without a sigh. He died a fat and happy quisling.

The Portland JACL brought me to town in 1979 to fulfill a promise I’d made to Dr. Jim Tsujimura, ophthomologist and Nat’l Pres (they love that title) of the JACL, in the plush soft leather of his new black Continental Mark V.

He wanted a Day of Remembrance to pair up with the Day he’d seen celebrated in Seattle over the last Thanksgiving Day weekend. Seattle had never done anything like it before and neither had Portland.

Both Portland and Seattle were the main feeders of the concentration camp at Minidoka, Idaho and Tule Lake. Califorinia. The fits of activism that took over a day in Seattle and Portland occurred because a number of Japanese Americans had read NO-NO BOY by John Okada. The combining of groups and individuals for the cause of redress, smacked of the combining of outlawed talented men and women to fight for their China against the Imperial gov on the inside, and the horsemen invaders from the outside.

In doing literary research into what makes John Okada’s NO-NO BOY great we had stumbled on the real history of Japanese from the newspapers of Okada’s hometown of Seattle into the camps. I handled the paper, the tools of the libraries to research to verify the facts, to separate fiction from fact. For a limited time we had access to the people, to everybody he knew, everybody real in his book, combined and created by John Okada. The greatness of NO-NO BOY does not rest on how well he imitates the favorite writer of the moment, or triple tongues the tropes pleasingly, alone, but on how well he manipulates the facts to his purposes. Whatever those purposes are. I don’t know what those purposes are, but I know they weren’t the same very plain purposes as the JACL. To aggrandize their wartime leader Mike Masaru Masaoka as the savior of the race! All the JACL publicity piped to bigshots was designed to make Masaoka famous.

Famous for leading the JA to volunteer for camp in 42, famous for being Volunteer No. 1 in 1943, famous for lying about themselves, their leader Mike Masaoka and the 442nd freeing the JAs’ from camp in 45.

Okada leads the reader to Akutsu to the editorials of James Omura, that encouraged the JA’s resisting the draft in the ten camps to stand on the Constitution. The vigilant Yasui who understood “Stand on the Constitution” as code for the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee stand on resisting the draft from camp and blew the whistle on Omura.

It was Omura’s journalism, his dissemination of the news from Heart Mountain in the Denver ROCKY SHIMPO to reach Noboru Taguma at Amache. Min Yasui interviewed Taguma for the FBI as he awaited trial for resisting the draft. Noboru’s son Kenji learns his laugh-all-the-time father was one of a group of Amache resisters who referred to themselves as Amache Indians and he turns his life in a new direction toward journalism. He is the editor of the San Francisco Nichi Bei. News of Amache reached Heart Mountain through the pages of the ROCKY. I learned of the existence of the organized resistance at Heart Mt from the front page of the ROCKY.

The discovery of the Heart Mountain Resistance, is the inevitable effect of reading John Okada’s NO-NO BOY, a novel, a fiction set in a real Minidoka and a real Seattle that reaches a climax at a real “Club Oriental” known in the world as the Wah Mee Club in Maynard Alley. And ends thirty pages later with Ichiro all smiles warmth and sunshine into the dark of night zooming into California.

We know more about Jim Akutsu, Okada’s model for the protagonist “Ichiro” than we know about Okada. We know that Okada went to Minidoka and volunteered out in 1943, he served in Military Intelligence, with frontline units in the island hopping campaign. He was always accompanied by a guard. He was to be shot dead rather than risk capture by the Japanese enemy. The only glimpse we have of his service in the elite of Nisei, M-ID the first to get shot no matter what. Good going Nisei! The preface on board a B-24 four engined bomber with a “blond giant.” An unidentified Nisei explains why he volunteered. “If they put me in camp, they could kiss my ass,” the white giant says. “I have my reasons.” The Nisei answers. We don’t know the missions he was on, his decorations, has arms qualifications, his rank because his family has never seen a photo of him in uniform.

Might the blond giant been Okada’s guard sanitized of his mission? Might the dialog be the key to the book? Questions better asked and answered by Sansei, or Yonsei, or Gosei. Better hurry. You’re below 100,000. Below 98,000. You’re down to 92,000 including Hawaii. You were 123,313, all mainlanders when the camps let you out 60 years ago. If you were chipmunks and had gone from 123, 313 to 92,000 you’d be declared a protected species.

But you’re not chipmunks.

I wonder if Akutsu told his story to John Okada exactly the same as I’ve heard him recite to people several times in several places.

I mentioned all the names that I’ve associated with Akutsu, first. Like Min Yasui the Portland curfew violator. I mentioned Min fikrst, then Akutsu told me he went to Min Yasui, after he was released to Minidoka for advice on his stupid idea of writing to the Japanese gov through the Spanish consul, to come and get him.

Frank Emi has a letter from Akutsu trying to sell his repatriation to Japan as strategy to resist the draft. The carbon copy of his answer says the FPC stands on the Constitution and get yourself a lawyer.

If Akutsu had told Okada about his trudge through the snow to Yasui’s barrack and his letter to the leader of the organized resistance at Heart Mountain, I have no doubt that Okada would included them in NO-NO BOY. Why did Akutsu leave out of his memory that Jimmie Omura at the ROCKY SHIMPO refused to forward Akutsu’s letter to Ht. Mt. Fearing a trap set by the FBI with the JACL help of Min Yasui of the Denver office of the JACL was about to snap. Min Yasui, a curfew resister in 1942 was a JACL shill and FBI fink in 1944. Omura came out with his LET US NOT BE RASH to distinguish between crazy tricky thinking draft resisters saying “repatriate me” and those whose resistance to being drafted from camp rests on constitutional grounds.

Had John Okada known about the ROCKY, and Omura’s Lone Ranger news and “Hi yo, Silver,” editorials coming through the mail every week, with news releases from Ht. Mt by the Emi bros. Had Okada known about the handsome, self-effacing, third degree black belt in Judo then, he’s sixth degree now, leader of the FPC in Heart Mountain. Okamamoto the leader of title, was being held at Tule Lake from 1944 on. The leader from the super hero cartoons of men. Superman. Batman. Nisei Man. Emi the man vs Project Director Robertson “May I have a transcript of the proceedings?” Emi vs the JACL’s Nobu Kawai in six weeks of dedbate in the Heart Mountain Sentinel.

Emi was tried as one of Okamoto, the six leaders of FPC and the accused a co-conspirator journalist James Omura of Denver versus the USA. He’s accused of talking people into resisting the draft. His strategy is to admit to the charge. No one asks the identity of the leader who forced the line “We won’t go” in their public bulletins. They knew Frank would admit it was him. In the course of the trial he only takes issue with Jack Nishimoto falsely testifying to having witnessed Frank Emi promising a young man, in the men’s room that the FPC would take care of the young man’s mother, if he’s sent to jail, for not appearing for his pre-induction physical.

Frank Emi and Okamoto’s FPC were convicted and Omura acquitted but socially and financially ruined. Then a fairy tale ending. The leaders of the FPC win an appeal. The draft resisters are pardoned by Pres Truman on Xmas Eve 1947.

THE GREAT JAPANESE AMERICAN NOVEL might be a version of NO-NO BOY written with the camp story JapaneseAmerica that completes what John Okada began.

But the author of the JA history now being taught “throughout the land” to use Masaoka’s prophetic words, is the JACL. No mention of Omura, the Rocky, Okamato, Emi, the FPC or the draft resistance.

James Omura saw his nemesis as JACL leader and Volunteer No. 1 and secret agent Jr. G-Man Mike Masaoka. On the field of publicity, in the world of white newspapers, and Japanese vernaculars, in wartime, Omura was the lone defender of freedom of the press - Omura was so obviously right in everything he published. The authoritative white histories of Japanese America admit what Masaoka did was probably illegal and his claims to freeing the Japanese from camp are wrong, but he was right to volunteer for camp because Americans are bigger and stronger than any little Jap. But Americans aren’t Nazis. You the JACL are the Nazis. You’ve done the white racist work to become more “American,” that’s why you keep your wartime name. The Nazi’s have changed their name. Is it arrogance, loyalty or stupidity that explains JACL’s refusal to repudiate their corrupt WWII leader Mike Masaoka. They admit, they boast that he led JapaneseAmerica into camp for good reasons. They admit that the JACL betrayed JA into camp.

Why hasn’t JapaneseAmerica taken charge of their own history and seen that James Omura’s best writing was bronzed by, dare I say it, a “grateful”people?

No wonder JapaneseAmerica’s going extinct. Before you go, I want you to know you had artists, strange sorts of person to be sure, who are so few, especially when

of person to be sure, who thought that what Okada led to, should be celebrated as the fruit of knowing how to read

compare to the number of books fiction and non fiction by Jews about their European camps that existed about the same time as the WRA camps in America, and ended at about the same time at the end of WWII.

In the 60 years since the close of camp there have been three JA works. Okada’s NO-NO BOY, A novel, Michi Weglyn’s book of bitchy gotchya fact and history YEARS OF INFAMY, Lawson Inada’s DRAWING THE LINE, a book of poetry, with title poem DRAWING THE LINE about a young architecture student, sketching Heart Mountain the volcano shaped like a heart from an angle not available to him in camp and the poem contemplates the young artist’s resistance to the draft.

The continued existence of the JACL might appear intimidating to some former internees, or the JACL might really intimidate JapaneseAmericans and control JapaneseAmerican publishing and that explains why JapaneseAmericans so few have written about or talked about camp.

There are two documentary films by JA’s on the JACL, the camps, James Omura and FPC. Emiko Omori’s RABBIT IN THE MOON and Frank Abe’s CONSCIENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION. Both aired on PBS. Both have close-ups of Frank Emi answering an interviewers questions. Both agree on basic facts. Both back way off from making a JA judgment about whose the good guy and whose the bad guy.

The JACL aren’t shy about whose good and whose the bad.
From Bill Hosokawa’s "JACL: In Quest of Justice" New York: William Morrow & Co., 1982.

JACL had in fact made considerable efforts to help some of the draft resisters. Joe Grant Masaoka and Min Yasui first met with Nisei from the Amache camp at Granada being held at the Federal Correctional Institution outside Denver. Yasui, who had gone to jail to challenge the curfew order as discriminatory, endorsed restoration of Selective Service because it ended discrimination. Next they visited Amache to talk with confused young men being pressured by activists to resist military service. Then they traveled to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to talk with some fifty imprisoned draft violators from the Heart Mountain camp. (To put the number of resisters in perspective, it is necessary to note that more than seven hundred men from Heart Mountain signed up for the draft and took their physical examinations. (p.273)

Hosokawa writes pure fiction here. No threatening activists at Amache. But Yasui talked to Noboro Taguma. Masaoka and Yasui spoke to six out of sixty three Heart Mountain draft resisters in Cheyenne, Ike Matsumoto and Yosh Kuromiya were interviewed by Min Yasui. Accounts of Taguma, Matsumoto verify each other form different camps. "Visit to Cheyenne County Jail with Japanese American Draft Delinquints. JACL Report to the FBI" April 28, 1944 authored by Yasui differs greatly.

The three non-JACL works proclaimed the existence of an honorable resistence in camp. Moses Mike responded in his last book, THEY CALL ME MOSES MASAOKA:

"Some historians, writing from the isolation of their ivory towers, have contended the draft resisters were the real heroes of the Japanese-American story because they had the courage to stand up for a principle. These historians are wrong! The significanse is in the relatively small number of dissidents in the face of gross injustice. The heroes are the men and their families who demonstrated their faith in America."

A 4th JapaneseAmerican work fights its way to currency from a fabled outskirt of Chicago. David Mura’s FAMOUS SUICIDES OF THE JAPANESE EMPIRE is about to be released. At least a part of the novel is set in Heart Mountain. It may have a set of facts that differ from everything known in the facts of Heart Mountain, and all the JapaneseAmerican fictions about Heart Mountain.

What survives of JapaneseAmerica has time to read and view dvd’s on tv and decide how much the facts Heart Mountain really mean to the reputation of a people that landed here five generations ago.

What if Mura’s book says, as fact An alien called FPC burst into the barrack and turned all internees into horny toads?

It will be JapaneseAmerican response that will make everyone’s reputation as spokesmen.

Frank Chin

UNTIL A REAL AA MAGAZINE APPPEARS

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:27:00 +0000

If Amerasia Journal was a real magazine, it would have published my response to Frank Abe’s review of my book BORN IN THE USA: A Story of Japanese America: 1889-1947. The book came out in 2002. It was reviewed in 2004. My response was never published. Since this is my blog, I’ll publish it myself.

BENDETSEN SPEECH MISREAD
BY FRANK ABE TO PROTECT THE JACL’S MIKE MASAOKA

Frank Abe claims to have found confirmation Masaoka’s “contingency plan” in Bendetsen’s speech, cited by Mike Masaoka.

In his review of BORN IN THE USA in Amerasia Journal, Volume 30:2, 2004, he writes:

The author (Frank Chin) wants to catch Masaoka in a lie about an Army “contingency plan” to round up all Nikkei at gunpoint within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, which Masaoka knowingly used to scare Nisei audiences into submission with exclusion. Masaoka overreacted and embroidered the threat with images of “guns, bayonets, and tanks,” and James Omura and Joe Kurihara call him on that. But you can read in Major Karl Bendetsen’s own words confirmation of just such “a plan for immediate evacuation if developments required a complete evacuation, practically overnight, in the event of an emergency” (221), a plan entirely consistent with a military force instructed not to distinguish citizen from alien.

“a plan for immediate evacuation if developments required a complete evacuation,” is not a “contingency plan.” Bendetsen’s “practically overnight,” is not Masaoka’s “Within 24 or 48 hours.” Bendeten’s “in the event of an emergency” doesn’t say whether the “emergency” he envisions comes in the form an invasion or “raid” by the Japanese, or from an American uprising in reaction to the military orders. Nowhere does Bendetsen suggest, much less confirm is his speech one word of what Masaoka said to the JACL convention, on August 10, 1982:

"Col. Bendetsen pointed out, and it was told to us much more in cruel detail, that the Army had two programs for removal of the Japanese. One, if you will cooperate then the Army and the United States will do its best to make that movement as humane as possible. Two, if you don't--and this is the thing to remember--the Army has a contingency plan to move you out within 12 or 24 hours.

"What are you going to say in a situation like that?
"You want people murdered on the streets? You want tanks to come in and destroy the little ghettoes we have enjoyed? I think we had no alternative."

In his "Final Report" to the JACL National Board of 1944, the JACL's Mike Masaoka cited this speech by Colonel Karl R. Bendetsen, G.S.C., United States Army, Assistant Chief of Staff, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, as his "proof" that the WDC had a "contingency plan" to round up all the Nikkei on the West Coast within “forty eight or twenty four hours” using "guns, bayonets, and tanks..."

James Omura seems to be the only Japanese American writer to have actually read the speech and found Masaoka to have put ideas and words into Bendetsen's mouth. To check Omura’s reading and Masaoka’s “proof” I sought out Bendetsen’s speech.

After reading Bendetsen’s speech, and checking the number of troops under arms, and the state of arms available, I determined that Masaoka lied. I found no indication in Bendetsen’s speech that the Army had a “contingency plan” to round up the all Japanese Americans in Washington, Oregon and California “within 24 or 48 hours.” Bendetsen’s speech does not have the words that threaten Japanese Americans that Masaoka says are contained in the speech. No “guns.” No “Tanks.” No “bayonets.”

I asked the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians if they had any information of Bendetsen’s “contingency plan.” On April 28, 1981 Bendetsen wrote the Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians:

Your question relates to an allegation that the Western Defense Command issued a preemptory order that Japanese and Japanese Americans must cooperate and that if they did not, the Army would come without notice, "with bayonets drawn, backed by tanks and artillery to force them out of their homes or hiding places one by one."

The allegation that such order was ever issued by WDC is totally false. The truth is that to their eternal credit all such persons cooperated from the beginning.

I cannot bring myself to believe that Mike Masaoka would himself fabricate such a falsehood; most certainly not one as base and demeaning as this. If it is true that he has made such an allegation, I would be compelled to conclude that someone has deceived and misled him for mischievous purposes.

Falsehoods about this regrettable episode abound in the books of self-appointed historians, of which there are several.

Bendetsen was courteous even generous to Masaoka, without revealing that he had appointed Masaoka an intelligence agent of Army G-2 on December 17, 1942, in a three page PLAN FOR IMMEDIATE SEGREGATION OF JAPANESE EVACUEES because, thanks to Masaoka “all such persons cooperated from the beginning.”

The three page long PLAN FOR IMMEDIATE SEGREGATION OF JAPANESE EVACUEES was signed Gen. DeWitt the Commanding General of the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, and initialed by Major Karl Bendetsen, Chief of Aliens Division; to the Chief of Staff, on December 17, 1942. This is the plan that Mike Masaoka inflates into a “contingency plan,” to take all the Japanese Americans out of their homes with “tanks, guns, and bayonets,” within 24 or 48 hours.

Actually the plan consisted of DeWitt’s cover letter (page 1) a page of the Wartime Civilian Control Agency (WCCA) designating individuals “R” for repatriation, “P” for parolee, “G-2” for Army Intelligence, “S” for WCCA Subversive; and “Gr” for WCCA Police” (page 2); and “LIST OF DETAINEES” by number of projected prisoners in each camp(page 3).

No “guns” no “tanks” no “bayonets” to drive the prisoners running for the protection of camp. All the Army had to scare the Japanese Americans into obeying Army orders, was agent Mike Masaoka’s mouth that said anything he wanted public, because he was (shhhhh!) Army G-2. Besides being two “Confidential Informants” to the FBI. T-11, to spy on the Japanese Americans, and SLC-167 to spy of on his own JACL.

Below is the whole of Bendetsen’s speech that Masaoka and Frank Abe claim contains the “contingency plan” as published by the Commonwealth Club.

"The Story of PACIFIC COAST JAPANESE EVACUATION: An Address Delivered Before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, on May 20, 1942, by COLONEL KARL R. BENDETSEN, G.S.C. United States Army, Assistant Chief of Staff, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army."

From: "Proclamations, Exclusions, Restrictive Orders and Collateral Documents." Western Defense Command and Fourth Army. Office of Assistant Chief of Staff, Civil Affairs Division, Wartime Civil Control Administration. San Francisco, California. 1942

The problem of evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific coastal frontier is one that interests the people of the United States. Especially is it one that interests members of the Commonwealth Club, as well as all persons resident in this coastal area.

First, I should like to tell you something of the reasoning behind the evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry from this coastal frontier.

There are three principal dangers--hence, the three principal problems bearing upon internal security in time of war. These problems, and the methods used to combat them are described, ordinarily, in these terms: Anti-sabotage, counter-espionage and counter-fifth column. By the latter is meant action in concert by well-organized groups under raid or invasion conditions.

The relationship of the Japanese population to these dangers, following the outbreak of the war, became a problem peculiar to the West Coast. The Japanese community presented a group with a high potential for action against the national interest—

By design, or by accident, substantial numbers of the Japanese coast frontier communities were deployed through very sensitive but very vital areas.

Now, if you and I had settled in Japan, raised our families there and if our children and grandchildren were raised there, it is most improbable that during a period of war between Japan and the United States, if we were not interned, that we would commit any overt acts of sabotage acting individually. Doubtless, in the main and irrespective of our inner emotions, you and I would be law abiding.

But when the final test of loyalty came, if United States forces were engaged in launching an attack on Japan, I believe it is extremely doubtful whether we could withstand the ties of race and the affinity for the land of our forebears, and stand with the Japanese against United States forces.

To withstand such pressure seems too much to expect of any national group, almost wholly unassimilated and which has preserved in large measure to itself, its customs and traditions--group characterized by strong filial piety.

It is doubtless true that many persons of Japanese ancestry are loyal to the United States. It is also true that many are not loyal. We know this. Contrary to other national or racial groups, the behavior of Japanese has been such that in not one single instance has any Japanese reported disloyalty on the part of another specific individual of the same race.

There has been no substantial evidence of manifestation of nationalistic fervor exhibited by any Japanese group in the United States since the outbreak of the war. Even on the Emperor's birthday there was no visible evidence that the day was remembered in evacuee centers.

This attitude--well illustrated, I think, by the fact that there has not been a single instance when any Japanese has reported disloyalty on the part of another of the same race--may be, and can be a most ominous thing. Chasing specters of fear is merely exhausting. It accomplishes nothing. The Army least of all will expend its energies in that direction. But it must be realistic--the nation must be realistic. The real contingencies must be taken into account. The contingency that under raid for invasion conditions there might be widespread action in concert--well-regulated, well-disciplined and controlled--a fifth column, is a real one. As such, it presented a threat to the national security and therefore a problem which required solution.

Here, in brief, is a timetable of how that problem was met.

On February 19th the President of the United States delegated to the Secretary of War the power to exclude any person, alien or citizen, from any area which might be required on the grounds of military necessity. This delegation of power included the authority to carry out an evacuation program.

The following day these powers were delegated by the Secretary of War to Lieutenant General J.L. DeWitt, Commanding the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army. Responsibility for a solution of the problem relation to Japanese along the frontier became his.

The development of a program depended in part on enactment by Congress of the necessary sanctions, upon which enforcement could be predicated. This was done on March 21st with the approval of Public Law 503, 77th Congress, making it a misdemeanor to violate any published regulations made applicable by Commanding General under the Executive Order to the right to enter, remain in, or leave the military areas.

On March 2nd, General DeWitt by Public Proclamation Number One designated the West half (roughly) of Washington, Oregon, California and the South half of Arizona as Military Area No. 1. There were created certain prohibited and restricted zones. In establishing these military areas, General DeWitt announced that Japanese aliens and American born persons of Japanese lineage would be the first required to evacuate certain critical points to be designated. At this time it was also indicated that following the evacuation of critical areas there would be a gradual clearance of all the coastal area and all prohibited zones.

By order of the Commanding General on March `10, the Civil Affairs Division of the General Staff of Western Command and Fourth Army was created. It was charged, under the Assistant Chief of Staff for Civil Affairs, with the responsibility for formulation of plans and directives for "control and exclusion of civilians, including the designation of military areas." On March 11, 1942, the Wartime Civil Control Administration was created by order of General DeWitt. It is the operating agency of Civil Affairs Division under command of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Civil Affairs to carry out such plans and directives.

On March 18, a Presidential Order established the War Relocation Authority. It is charged with responsibility of selecting, preparing and operating permanent centers where evacuees may live and work for the duration of the war, and to supervise all work and employment of evacuees both in and out of such centers.

On March 29th an order was issued by General DeWitt prohibiting voluntary migration by the Japanese. This date marked the beginning of planned, supervised evacuation.

On May 31st the interim evacuation of the Japanese population to temporary Assembly Centers will have been completed, except for 2000 who will be evacuated by June 6th.

This timetable represents the highlights of the undertaking.

The evacuation program itself consisted of three interim steps and a final solution.

The first step was designation of military areas from which the Japanese were to be excluded and the voluntary migration which followed....

The second interim step was a plan for immediate evacuation if developments required. The Army needed time to prepare a permanent program and the situation called for an emergency plan. It was impossible, of course, at this time for the Army to reveal the fact that it was prepared to affect a complete evacuation, practically overnight, in the event of an emergency. Plans were made to move the 113,000 Japanese into already established Army cantonments in a Mass Movement which could have been undertaken immediately. Prepared in this way against the possibility of fifth column activity, or for any outbreaks of anti-Japanese feeling, the Army continued with its plans for a permanent program.

The third interim step was the selection and preparation of eighteen temporary Assembly Centers to which the Japanese could be quickly removed for later transfer to permanent locations. The decision to remove the Japanese to temporary assembly Centers was based upon several important considerations. In the first place, the use of fairgrounds, race tracks and other public properties which provided installations of utilities as well as convenient locations, contributed to greater speed in the evacuation program. The use of these properties also made it easier to protect the evacuees' welfare and property. Moreover, evacuation through these centers could be accomplished with the use of a minimum number of soldiers.

The final step in the program is the settlement of evacuees in the permanent centers operated by the War Relocation Authority. This is the phase of the program that has taken more time than was available considering the necessity for early evacuation. It was primarily to prepare for this concluding phase of the evacuation program that the methods described were employed in the preliminary or interim steps.

The actual operation of the program is under the Civil Affairs Division of the General Staff of the Fourth Army and Western Defense Command. In direct charge of the evacuations operation is the Assistant Chief of Staff who serves as head of the Civil Affairs Division of the Fourth Army Staff and of the Wartime Civil Control Administration.

This brings me to the actual details of how the evacuation is carried on.
There are 64 W.C.C.A. stations on the coast through which the Japanese are given necessary assistance. In each station there are representatives of each Federal agency directly involved. For example, the Federal Security Administration provides a receptionist; a social worker who is prepared to assist in family problems and in preliminary plans for housing. The Federal Reserve Bank provides consultants to advise on property protection, auto and truck transportation, household goods, storage, etc. Representatives of Farm Security Administration advise on crop loans, handling of farm equipment and matters relating to the purchase or management of farm lands.

The exclusion order is the first step in actual evacuation procedure. It has required careful advance planning down to the smallest detail by the Army staff comprising the Wartime Civil Control Administration. The task of each agency, whether civil or military is carefully prescribed to fit the evacuation project involved. Careful synchronizing must be assured by this advance planning. Following this, the order for the evacuation of a given, desirable area is given and the team starts functioning.

Notices are posted advising the Japanese population of the limits of the area to be evacuated and advising them to report to a Civil Control Station and to be prepared to moved by a given date.

Each Civil control station functions about five days in a particular evacuation area. The team which makes up a given "station" then moves on to its next assignment--it spends about 4 days in advance reconnaissance. Such a team comprises civilian agency representatives including a medical examiner from the U.S. Public Health Service and a team captain from the U.S. Employment Service. They have been trained in advance for the job by the Wartime Civil Control Administration.

The next major phase of the evacuation procedure is the transportation of evacuees to the Assembly Centers.

On the date of moving the Army takes full charge of the movement and determines whether the evacuation is accomplished by train, bus or automobile caravan. Evacuees may sell their automobiles to the Government or have them stored temporarily.

Upon arrival at the center the evacuees are registered and assigned living quarters by the civilian personnel. Much of the detail work connected with resettlement in the Assembly Centers is carried on with the assistance of the Japanese themselves. A small army contingent guards the camp but the Army has no other personnel involved in the operation of the Assembly Centers after the evacuees have been brought into the grounds.

The accommodations at each of the Assembly Centers include living quarters for family units, group dining halls, milk stations, show baths, toilets and laundries. A post exchange in operation at each center and a modest program of recreational activities to supplement work projects is being provided. Each center has its own hospital and staff.

The evacuees are supplied with food, housing, hospitalization, medical and dental care and necessary clothing. During their temporary residence in the Assembly Centers, Japanese are given nominal allowances for incidentals. Upon application the evacuees may secure coupon books which may be used for the purchase of merchandize at the center exchanges or stores. These books entitle a single adult to $2.50 merchandise per month, a couple to $4.00, an individual under 16 years $1.00. The maximum allowances for any family is $7.50.

Compensation is given to those evacuees who work in the Assembly Centers upon this basis: unskilled workers $8.00 a month; skilled workers $12.00; professional and technical workers $16.00 a month. No wage schedule for evacuees who are assigned to administrative and maintenance work has been determined. The wage schedules in Assembly Centers are based on a 44-hour week. The compensation to which I refer is provided only for work done in connection with the operation of the Assembly Centers.

The eighteen temporary Assembly Centers were selected for the accommodation of all Japanese in the Western States. These centers are located in four states as follows:

Arizona: Mayer,

California: Fresno, Marysville, Merced, Pinedale, Pomona, Sacramento, Salinas, Aracadia, Stockton, Tanforan, Tulare, Turlock, Tule Lake, Manzanar.

Oregon: Portland

Washington: Puyallup.
The largest is at the Santa Anita race track in Aracadia, with a capacity of 17,000. Next come Manzanar and Tule Lake with a capacity of 10,000 each and Puyallup and Tanforan with 8,000.

Fresno, Merced Pinedale, Pomona, Sacramento, Stockton and Tulare have capacities of 6,000 each, Salinas and Turlock 4,000 each, Marysville and Portland 3,000 each, and the more less isolated Mayer center, 250.

The complete job of preparing the Assembly Centers and actual removal of the Japanese to these centers will have been accomplished during a period of about two months. During this time housing for 112, 000 people has been erected, supplied and equipped. The construction, equipping and supplying of the eighteen Assembly Centers and the whole evacuation procedure have been accomplished under the direction of only 35 Army officers.

LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN:

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:53:00 +0000

Ruby Chow- Chow Mah Serng Gum died of congestive heart failure the morning of June 4th surrounded by her husband, five children, two brothers, one sister, six grandsons, three granddaughters and three great grandsons.

At her last public appearance last September, at a fund raiser for the new Wing Luke Asian Museum building, her "favorite (and only daughter) daughter" Cheryl read the following for her:

Thank you. Special thanks to my friend Faith Ireland for reasons that take too long to tell, like all long time friendships. But I want say I’m happy be your friend, in public, on the street, anyplace, any time.

Standing up here, among the most prominent citizens of Seattle in the city where the Asians have shone the brightest stars in American politics, entertainment, industry and... restaurants... I only wish my mother were here to see the company I’m in.

Chinese restaurants were --- to be honest --- considered dumps when my mother raised ten children all by herself, in the back room of a Chinatown store.

And sliding down the banister of our building, head first, I realized I wasn’t the brightest of mother’s ten children. But I was the fastest. I crashed into the marble floor with my eyes open, and I saw stars.

I saw Seattle’s Keye Luke become a Hollywood pioneer. Wing Luke become the first Chinese to be elected to office, in America, in 1957. I saw Warren Chan fight newspaper prejudice with dignity and become a distinguished judge of the King County Superior Court. I saw Chinese restaurants rise from slophouses to places of Seattle’s haute cuisine.

I saw Asians rise from copy boys to reporters and anchors on Seattle and the nation’s media. I saw the creation of the Chinese Girl’s drill team, with their own 125 foot long dragon appear in celebrations and parades around the world bearing Seattle’s name. I saw the town erect the beautiful Wing Luke Asian Museum to tell our history. (Your name won’t be forgotten, Mom.) And I saw Seattle’s political stars rise to the highest office in Washington State, with the election of Gary Locke, to Governor. And the end isn’t in sight.

My mother revived me, and I told I had seen stars. Real stars.

And she said something very wise. “You would have seen as many stars if you had come down the banister the other end first.”

I have been up and down many banisters, both ends first, and, you were right Mom. I wish you could see me, now, married to Ping who gave up opera stardom to raise your five grandchildren and cook in my restaurant. The least I could do was take his name…Chow…and take it to the highest banister. We’ll take this one together, Ping.

Thank you, for this evening.

Thank you all for 80 years of Chinatown. Thank you

OUR FATHER WHO ART IN HOLLYWOOD

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Mon, 26 May 2008 07:13:00 +0000

OUR FATHER WHO ART IN HOLLYWOOD DECREES: As God the Father gave up a son in the image of the perfect white man, to lead whites to walk the path of righteousness toward salvation, and praise God, so the White Man gave up a son in the image of the perfect Chinese American to lead the yellows to build the road to acceptance toward assimilation. Ah, sweet assimilation. Charlie Chan was his name.

NEW LINE OF ORNAMENTAL ORIENTALS ON TCM: HOW TO CRITICIZE WHITES WITHOUT OFFENDING THE STEREOTYPES AND GETTING YOUR SAG CARD PULLED.

Wayne Wang, director, and Amy Tan, the writer, and famous actors George Takei, Rosalind Chao, James Shigeta, Miko Taka gush on the joys of accepting the stereotypes, writing the stereotypes, being the stereotypes, acting the stereotypes on-screen and living white off-screen, over TCM previews their upcoming movies . John Wayne, as Genghis Khan, Katherine Hepburn with slanty eyes and choppy English in a Pearl Buck story of Christians saving Chinese orphans, after the Christians have killed their parents.

Separate your false on-screen persona from your off-screen true self as Mike Masaoka distinguished between his public identity as the leader of the JACL, and champion of Japanese American history and culture against white racism of WWII, from his secret, his real identity his Superman identity as an official Intelligence Agent of Army G-2, an official Confidential Informant of the FBI code named T-11 to spy on the JA’s, and SLC-147 to spy on the JACL.

Being a Hollywood insider is like a white secret agent wearing his yellow skin as a disguise. You’re not completely white, but whites recognize you as knowing more than the yellows know about themselves.

But the actors and agents of white supremacy and the trappings of their white success are only half the story of white racist love and hate so visible in the movies. It’s not how the agents and actors behave that counts. It’s what the white characters say that really counts.

From GUNGA DIN HIGHWAY

"GEE, POP!"

Longman Kwan

It's a long long flight from Hollywood to China on Pan American Airways' China Clipper. I never made it, never went back to China to fight the Japanese before they bombed Pearl Harbor. My publicist's Hollywood myth about me says I was about to catch the Clipper back to China and make my way to the Chinese air force to fight for China against the invading Japanese. No such thing. But people enjoy thinking of me as a hero of my people. Everyone agrees, my people need a hero.

The flight from Hollywood to Honolulu via United Air Lines is long enough for me, though I have another flight to another island to make yet to make exteriors for HAWAII FIVE-O. There's word of a new Charlie Chan movie in the air. NBC Vice President David Tebet is on a much publicized round the world search for a Chinese actor who speaks English well enough to be understood by American audiences to become the first Chinese to play Charlie Chan the Chinese detective. The sons of Charlie Chan, Keye Luke, Benson Fong, Victor Sen Yung and me all feel the magic of the movies we made, setting us aglow. We strike casual poses by the phone, waiting for the thing to ring, just in case God happens to walk from one room to another with a camera.

I've come to meet my movie father, Anlauf Lorane the Charlie Chan to my Number Four Son. We are old men when we are the money stars in the B's of twenty years ago, though I always look, and photograph younger, much younger than my actual age. And we are older old men now. He's too old to play the new Charlie Chan, and probably looks it, and doesn't want to. I don't understand.

I don't look too old, of all the sons of Chan I look the youngest still, and want to be the first Chinese to play Charlie Chan on the screen. Keye looks and acts too old, and the older he gets, the more foreign he seems. Not Chinese foreign. Some kind of European foreign with a pseudo-British accent. Benson is just too rickety. And Victor looks awful and has lost it. Of the four sons who've lived to take over the part of Pop in a Hollywood movie, I'm the only one. My time is near. Big screen or little screen: I want to be the first.

I land in Honolulu in one of those island rains with drops of falling water as big as eggs breaking on everything. The air is so thick with water it seems United Air Lines has landed me under the sea and I'm breathing watery goo, and can't tell if the mud is falling on me or it's splashing up at me. All I hear is water and squawking muck. Through the water washing sweat and hair in my eyes all I see are blobs of grays and blues and vague greens and bluish reds. What is airplane and what is airport, what is slipping rainwater and what is glass and steel, I can't see. Five blobs distinguish themselves from the mass by calling my name and vague aloha shirts come into view.
A very wet toasty brown skinned hula girl in a plastic hula skirt and toothpaste smile drops a wet orchid lei around my neck that immediately makes my nose run, and presses her wet gooey lips against my wet gooey cheek. The hula girl disappears and the five vague aloha shirts pat me on the back and laugh.

There is no difference between air and water, land and sea until I am in the dry quiet insides of the limousine the brothers from the tong hired to meet me. Old time Honolulu brothers of the good time Boom Boom tong are more good time Charlie American than my Boom Boom brothers on the mainland. Not that they don't own and run honkey tonks, bottle clubs, and see girls run through their business and take their share during the war, but there was law in Seattle, and San Francisco and Los Angeles. In Hawaii the war is the law and boys of the Boom Boom tong are happy soldiers, judges, juries and executioners of the law.

The brothers from the good time Boom Boom tong tell me sometimes late at night when they get home from their business and turn on the TV and flip the channels through the old movies, looking for one to watch awhile, not often, but sometimes, around four or five times a year, a movie I die in is broadcast from every station in Hawaii. The brothers think of me as a bigshot star of opera and movies still. Though I am here as a Guest Star on a two part episode of HAWAII FIVE-O and expected McGarrett would send a limo for me, the brothers were only too pleased to meet me at the airport and escort me to my Waikiki hotel, and too happy to let HAWAII FIVE-O publicists take pictures, and write stories about the old tongs of Honolulu looking on Chang Apana, the detective sergeant in the Honolulu police and the fat Charlie Chan the detective as the creators of the happiest memories of childhood and wartime businesses in their Honolulu Hotel Street Chinatown, on the piece of island real estate that suddenly is the bleeding end all be all of American honor. And in the movies of the time, I was, I am Charlie Chan's Number Four and most American born and Americanized son. In real life, whatever that is, I am born in China. The South. Tang People. Cantonese. It all blends into a nice story about me the newspapers and publicists blurbing me want to believe. I love it.

"The part I've come to Honolulu to play is nothing special," I tell the brothers. "But it is paying my way to party with my brothers in Hawaii, and visit the last white man to play Charlie Chan still alive."

"You mean he's on the islands?" the brothers ask. "We had no idea!"

"I seem to be the only one he trusts with his address. He craves anonymity," I say. "He wants his privacy. I have several offers from advertising companies for him to put on the white duck and Panama straw hat of Charlie Chan again and sell a few products for them. I'm going to try to talk him into coming out of hiding and make a little money."

They're impressed at my humility and loyalty and still want to know about my part in HAWAII FIVE-O. Do I live? Do I die? Am I Chinese? Am I Japanese? Am I southern artist? Am I northern bureaucrat? Does it make any difference? Am I squinty? Am I swishy? Am I bald? Do I have big eyebrows? We laugh a lot, stirring up old laughs, old short sleeved Hawaiian shirts, old memories of old movies and happy days in the war. This ceremony over, the brothers grin at me, open mouthed as catfish, their old bottomfeeder's eyes shine as if they'd swallowed strong drink, in the eye of their swirling wait, they're ready to know about my part on HAWAII FIVE-O.

I tell them, "I'm another cultured slimey warlord smuggling drugs into the United States through Hawaii who runs afoul of McGarrett, Chin-ho, Danno, Zulu and the whole Five-O show, and, of course, I die in the shadow of Diamond Head."

They love it. HAWAII FIVE-O has really perfected the Charlie Chan formula, they say. They love the villains from WWII movies finding new life on the show. It's a breath of the old days.

"And it gives me work," I say and we all laugh.

On the way to the hotel I see that Tora! Tora! Tora! is still playing in a big first run Honolulu movie palace. "Ah, yes," I say, "A peace movie."

"A peace movie?" a brother asks.

"A war movie made in peacetime. I remember playing in war movies made during the war, with John Wayne, Van Johnson, Cary Grant."

Yes, the Hawaiian brothers remember the names and the stars who partied here after Pearl Harbor. The brothers ran restaurants or bars, or honky tonks during the war and remember me flying over from Frisco or L.A. to play an ugly Japanese spy or sadistic Japanese officer who screams "Aiiieeeee!" when I die then head down to Chinatown for dinner and rice before painting Honolulu red, with the other sons of Chan and Willy, and Kam chasing the tails of our fame and all the Chinese and Japanese women we can find from club to club from Chinatown to Waikiki. And the soldiers and sailors on the town and off-limits recognized us, grinned and laughed, put their arms around us, and we put our arms around them, they patted us on the head and we patted them on the head and watched them totter away to the whores or back to their bases.

Aiiieeeee! Aloha! Gung ho! Goong hay fot choy! The movies and Chinatown were exciting then. It had a future waiting for it after we won the war. There was an electric light night life. There was a Chinatown class and style. Padded shoulders. Wide lapels. Double breasted suits. Straw hats. They were happy days for me too.

"There are people in Hawaii who object to the Charlie Chan movies and John Wayne war movies, and WWII movies on the late night TV," the brothers tell me. "No sense of history."

"The younger generations don't remember when Americans thought all Chinese were sex perverts, opium smugglers and torturers of women," I say.

"That's right, you and Keye, and Benson, and Victor were a more positive and real life like image of the Chinese," a brother says.

"As was our father, Charlie Chan," I say.

Yes, turn on your TV late at night to any old Charlie Chan the Detective or WWII in China movie and you are reading my life story. Every night from some tower over Honolulu or New York, or Chicago one bit of my life or another unspools like smoke. I still like turning on the TV to get away from it all, in another town and being pleasantly surprised with the best days of my life.

For nearly fifty years, half a century, I am the most famous Chinese in America: an actor. I am Charlie Chan's Number Four Son; the Chinese nicknamed Die Say or Say Die. Yes, I am the rhythmic Christian of Charlie Chan's movie sons; the martyr, the one famous for saying nothing but "Gee,Pop!" and "Gosh, Pop!" I am The Chinaman Who Dies.

Fifty years of acting movies and TV has washed out a better me, a bigger name, a set of brighter memories from the mundane, ordinary facts of my life. I am no longer born in a village in south China and apprenticed to a floating opera company on the Pearl River, I am born and last seen being carried off by Hollywood alleycats into a dark soundstage. I cry bald and naked in a bombed out railroad station in a Shanghai air raid scene. William Bendix stumbles in the rubble of a Chinese village during another Japanese air raid in my next movie, and hears me wail. The baby is a doll. The closeup is me with my cheeks stuffed with cotton and my eyebrows shaved off. Movie magic! I'm at my dead momma's withered tit. I wail high long long wails that end in sputtering lungs. The movie is China. The baby in the wideshots is a doll. The closeup of the wailing baby is me.

I am the symbol of helpless, struggling China in the arms of William Bendix. He says I'm a "cute little fella." He names me "Donald Duck."

Alan Ladd and William Bendix leave me in the arms of a Chinese convert to Christianity played by a white woman who looks me in the face and coos, "Who but monsters would want to kill one such as this?" and from this shot on, I am known forever to people who go to the movies, as the Chinaman Who Dies.

I take a breath. Then another wail from my endless lungs goes from movie to movie, Jap air raid somewhere in China scene to singing America the Beautiful with Kate smith on the radio into the homes of Americans who cherish the memory of me dying when they buy one more War Bond.

Kate Smith smelled as sugary as she looked, and a little spicy, like a hot pan of huge friendly cinnamon rolls fresh from the oven.

I sing "My Old Kentucky Home," in Cantonese and am adopted by Gary Cooper and his girlfriend, the Red Cross nurse, in a missionary movie, a Japanese officer with slime on his teeth, slicks the long straight blade of his samurai sword into me, jolting me to scream, "Maaaaaaamaaaaaaaaa!" and slick on through my body into my mother's body heaving screech and out of her back, as the camera turns to see my face just behind the blinding gleam of the pulling of the long sword slurping out of us. It sucks against lips of our long wound. I scream the one word the poet from the Office of War Information says crosses all languages, all ages, all time, "Maaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" until the sword is all the way out of my little body, and unpinned from my mother China, I thump to the ground at the officer's feet like a large broach. And there we are, the triplet, the poetic form of the war movie as emotional weapon: A bloody dead Chinese mother. A bloody dead Chinese son. A leering Jap wiping his blade clean of blood.

The Japs torture me into giving up John Wayne's secret position, throw me into a truck and bounce the little life of me left in my little battered body over bumpy roads. Out to get the jump on John Wayne, leading my missionary teacher from Indiana and all of my Filipino guerrilla friends through the jungle. I grab the wheel of the truck. The Jap soldiers scream. I wail in the key of tears and pull the truck off the edge of the world and down we go into the darkness.

My body rolls out of the burning truck to the feet of John Wayne and all my surprised friends working their stealthy way through the jungle with Anthony Quinn. America sees my face by the flamelight of the burning truck full of burning Japs. They see me trying hard not to cry out in pain. Tears stream down my cheeks.

"Don't try to talk," John Wayne says softly. Anthony Quinn turns away, sniffles, and loads his Tommy gun. And John Wayne and the missionary teacher who failed to teach me how to properly spell "America" A-M-E-R-I-C-A instead of A-M-E-L-L-I-C-A exchange looks and shake their heads. All the soldiers and all my friends are getting down on their knees around me. The music also rises.

"I failed," I gasp. "I guess I'll never be promoted to sergeant now," and my eyes roll back into my skull and my breath, shrieks like tearing sheets in a windstorm. My lungs sound like a man filing a steel girder on a steel bridge with a long file. I cough. A half pint of blood rosebuds out of my mouth. By the light of burning Jap bodies sizzling, sputtering and bursting like sausages in the background, women in the shoppers matinees with their papersacks and red meat tokens, see tears in John Wayne's eyes. He removes the bird colonel bird insignia off his collar and pins it on me.

"You didn't fail," John Wayne says, and has to lower his eyes and gulps down a sob before he can say, " He-yeck! You get that promotion!" He adjusts the little bird on my bloody shirt and says, very low, very soft, "I got orders from the President himself to promote you all the way to colonel!"

My eyes open. I struggle for breath. The music rises just so.

"Teacher?" a tiny voice climbs up out of me. "I can't see!" And I can't see.

And the missionary teacher from Indiana has to put her ear to my mouth to hear me agonize my last words out.

"Ayee!" I say, "Emmm!" My eyes come open and shine gleaming silver like something crazy. The missionary teacher wipes blood from my lips, from my eyes and arranges my hair, a bit at a time, avoiding the patches of matted blood and open wounds, as I continue. "Eee!"

"Easy, champ," John Wayne soothes. He shrugs violently and looks back into the flames of the burning trucks.

"Ell! Ell!" I scream from out of my croak. My chest heaves like the back of a mating dog. "Eye! See! Ayyyy!" I cry triumphantly and struggle up to my elbows. "AMELLICA!"
The missionary teacher screams.

John Wayne says, "At ease, colonel," and I fall back into a shot of John Wayne sighing and furrowing his brow and am dead dead dead in his arms.

John Wayne turns to the missionary teacher from Iowa and says, "I oughta shootya for not teaching him how to spell America with an 'R'."

"Cut!" the director shouts and directs me to spell "America" properly with an "R" and no "L" I think of wishing him a joyeux Noel too, but contain myself.

The brothers of the Hawaiian branch of the tong like my stories of making the movies they see me in.

They want to know if I ever played the part of a pilot. Did I ever fly in the movies.

I tell the brothers I always played children much younger than my real age, in the movies. I had to fight to play young men, except when they think it will be funny to play me against my type, and I am a fanatic treacherous babyfaced Jap pilot.

The old men want to hear about that. Stories of Chinese who fly in Hollywood movies are rare.

One day flying my Zero low across the water in a fog, I see Cary Grant's American submarine the USS Copperfin sailing toward Destination Tokyo. I drop a bomb on the sub but it doesn't go off. I turn around and rake the sub with my machine guns, sew a line of bullets across the conning tower and knock down Alan Hale, Jr.

John Garfield shoots me down with the deck gun. I trail smoke and sing a nasal swan song into an out of sight crash, only the yanks in closeup see as something wonderful. They blink in the light of an explosion that washes me over to the side of Cary Grant's submarine. A sailor jumps off the deck into the water to pull me in. I flash my eyes, show my teeth and knife the American sailor in the back.

The skinny full lipped pharmacist's mate who will disarm the bomb I dropped then perform an appendectomy on a very nervous Elisha Cook, Jr. on a mess table with a boning knife and a potato peeler during a depth charge attack, is fresh from the bacon and eggs, sunrise to sunset three squares a day Iowa where he has obviously never come across anything so rude, impolite and ungrateful as someone like me stabbing my rescuer in the back. "Welcome to World War Two, kid," I say at the kid's stupid look, and scream "Aiiieeeee!" as the kid's first bullets crash into my body. The same William Bendix who found me as a baby in the rubble of my village watches the skinny kid machine gun me into goo floating on the sea. My ad lib becomes gutteral nasal gibberish in the release print, and the kid's good Christian Thou shalt not kill upbringing is sick with Freudian shadows from having tasted real hate and enjoyed killing a man.

Captain Cary Grant pats the kid on the back, lights his pipe, and says "You killed a Jap, not a man."

The kid's too young to shave, never been kissed, never been laid. He doesn't quite know the difference between boys and girls. He has Lana Turner's voluptuous lower lip. He doesn't understand. The machinery hums inside the tight little submarine. The steel walls sweat. Cary Grant gleams and shines, but does not sweat.

Cary Grant puffs his pipe and thinks, then takes his pipe from his mouth and says, "This is not just a war of one nation against another nation. We are in a war that will decide whether or not decency will survive in the world. This is a war of good against evil." The captain muses and puffs his pipe.

The kid's Adam's apple bobs as he swallows hard, and blinks. Alan Hale leans in to listen, wiping his hands on his apron.

"I identify with that kid," Benson says in the office of one of his Polynesian fantasy restaurants around L.A, watching Destination Tokyo, a black and white on TV "I wish I were that kid when I was a kid," he says hesitantly but without his usual stutter that slows his emotion and makes him seem less than spontaneous.. "I could have joined a fraternity. Gone to frat parties, danced with sorority girls."

An officer puts his hands on the table and bends closer to Cary Grant. It looks a little like Da Vinci's The Last Supper humming underwater toward Tokyo. Cary Grant lets out a deep breath, and says, "It makes one wonder about these Japanese who sell their daughters off at thirteen to be married -- or worse." He shakes his head and hardens his voice, "The Japs know nothing of the love we hold for our women."

The smart pert bright eyed Hyacinth teaches me that even before there is Pearl Harbor to make the difference between Japs and Chinks there is Pearl Buck sorting out the good Christian "Chinese-Americans" from the evil Chinese "Chinamen."

I was young. I converted, and the other opera men stranded here by the tide of war did not. I was too young, a mere apprentice. I shouldn't have come over. I wasn't a real star of the Cantonese opera. My sister born of a mother in America is an American citizen and helps me. The real opera stars Wong the Handsome, the Great Kwan, Lee, the voice, wait out the war going from Chinatown to Chinatown performing Cantonese opera, getting cheated and robbed, and shooting Chinese movies in the Sacramento Delta. Now, it's as if no one had ever heard of them and I was the greatest and the only star of Cantonese opera star to land in America before the war.

Unlike the other sons of Chan I have lived the part of Charlie Chan. I have crossed from Cantonese opera and Chinese movies to Hollywood. I have converted to Christianity. I have become Americanized. I have used the ear and voice trained by Cantonese opera to sound looser and more at home with jivetalk than stiff stuffy old Keye Luke trying to make his voice sound deep. I could play anything, any age, from a one year old baby in diapers to a hundred year old leper, unlike the pouting, stuttering, choking Benson Fong. For that shot of me wailing in the bombed out rubble of a Shanghai railway station they padded me in a flesh colored suit and built an oversize set, so I would look like a barebellied baby. I am more American than the very American-born Victor Sen Yung. Keye, Benson, and Victor.

Being married to the Chinaman Who Dies is not good enough for my wife, Hyacinth. She's an American born girl, fourth generation American born, and more old country Cantonese and serious about opera than I ever was. Her American born mother speaks nothing but Chinese all her life. A Kwangtung dialect so old I've never before heard it spoken. The old woman agrees with Hyacinth. She is not happy with the idea of her grandsons growing up watching me die in the movies. "What kind of example is that to set for your sons?" she asks.

"That's just what I ask him, ma," Hyacinth says.

"For our sons," I tell her, "I promise to be the first Chinese to play Charlie Chan in the movies."
"Charlie Chan?" Hyacinth and her mother ask.

"You are not Christian, but as you see, I do love you anyway. As Charlie Chan I shall lead you to your great salvation. For, it is written: As God the Father gave up a son in the image of the perfect white man, to lead whites to walk the path of righteousness toward salvation, and praise God, so the White Man gave up a son in the image of the perfect Chinese American to lead the yellows to build the road to acceptance toward assimilation. Ah, sweet assimilation. Charlie Chan was his name. "

"Of course Charlie Chan. Where would any of us be without Charlie Chan?" the brothers say and we laugh like the dreams and hallucinations of a star alone in his limousine. The privacy, the intimacy me and the five brothers feel inside the unreal quiet and cushiness of the limo turns us into laughing fools. And it's nice to feel like a movie star again.

Hello, Portland (part 1 of 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:18:00 +0000

Thymos of Portland, Oregon
and the Fighting 44’s:

"Hello, Portland" is being posted on my blog to give you people grist for your mill. Curtis and me fly in on the Friday11th of July. That night he shows his movie WHAT'S WRONG WITH FRANK CHIN? The next morning I tell stories to the kids who bring their parents, and talk yellow to yellow on Saturday, the 12th. My friend Jeff should tell his guest from China to read "Hello Portland" She should have said all of this, as a Chinese by birth, by upbringing, by choice long ago. In fact, thirty-five years ago. She wasn’t born yet? You mean she was born and lived in China all her life and she doesn’t know Chinese childhood lit? Oh she grew up the Cultural Revolution of the comical Gang of Four that came on in 1976; replaced Chinese culture with their paperdoll revolutionary operatic silliness till 1976, when Kingston’s WOMAN WARRIOR fortuitously appears with hateful lies about China and continues to erase Chinese culture, lit, and pride. And recording her every word, with adoration in his eyes is Bill Moyers, the owlish former Presidential Press Secretary.

I will say it plainly: Bill Moyers is a white racist. He Popes his own TV church preaching Kingston’s lies about Mulan being a victim of sadistic parents, about Chinese opera people mutilating the mouths of newborn, about the written character for "woman" being the same character for "slave" as the revealed truth. To give Yellow voice to these Christian lies about Yellows he appoints Yellow turncoats Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, David Mura, to his college of archbishops and invests them on TV. Their posture as artists of Asian-American history and culture is based on their American dreams, following Kingston’s intellectual method and not one fact of Mulan, the Chinese children’s story, or Chinese culture, just their singular dreams.

•

I stopped by a Chinese woman friend's place unannounced and was greeted with her and a white woman friend making happy over Maxine Hong Kingston's WOMAN WARRIOR which was being celebrated in the white Harper’s Newsletter, The New Yorker, "Ms", the white magazines. The N.Y.Times, L.A. Times, the San Francisco Chronicle were ecstatic over Kingston's uncovering the truth of Chinese culture through the intellectual method of writing her dreams. My friend was Kingston's friend and rather than turn on my heels, I said “If you like Kingston’s writing, you are a white racist.”

“You can’t say that!” the white girlfriend said.

“Sure I can! I just did.”

“Maxine does write beautifully.” My Chinese friend said, “She likes the writing.”

“George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were faggots who used to give each other blowjobs before meetings of the Constitutional Convention.”

The two women’s faces reddened , the darks of their eyes tightened like assholes, and their mouths set.

“You don’t like what I said?” I said, “I said it beautifully didn’t I? I just changed the names of Kerouac and Ginsberg. As Kingston says, ‘Myths have to change or they die.’”

Later my friend scolded me for insulting her white friend.. “You should not have called her a racist,” my friend insists.

“What else should I call her? A liar? All right, I don’t mind. Your friend is a white racist liar.”

“You have to be careful what you say. People don’t know THE BALLAD OF MULAN like we do. It isn’t known by everybody, you know.”

“Then where did she get the name? And you don’t care enough about Chinese kids to tell your friend the truth?”

“It’s just conversation.”

“And you oppress your own cultural integrity for the sake of a white friendship? You think you’re protecting your friend by attacking me for telling the children’s truth?”

“I consider Maxine a friend too.”

“Fine. I don’t. Don’t count me a friend any longer.”

White lies anointed by Moyers and blessed by President Clinton have rewritten Chinese culture and history to Kingston’s racist specifications, and their church of Asian American Studies has grown on the adoring repetition of white lies that guide their dreaming, and the dreams guide their poetry that enable the lies about the Chinese past to grow some more lies.

The truth of Chinese history and culture is told in its literature. THE BALLAD OF MULAN is as definitive a work of Chinese lit as the “myth” of Joan of Arc defines the “French” of every Frenchman. Everything known to any of us comes through books, printed on paper till 1041-1048. Paper was easy to make and meant more copies for the Chinese at a time the west was still scrawling on prepared and treated animal skins. The books of skins prepared by hand were for the rulers and the Church only. Paper was made by and written and drawn on and bought by the people.

THE QINGLI reign of the Song Dynasty, [1041-1048] Bi Sheng invents movable type. He made a small rectangular blocks of clay, and carved inverted characters in relief on them. He fired them hard, forming pieces of movable clay type for mass use in printing on paper. Chinese culture was booked 400 years before Gutenberg printed his first Bible in 1435.

The Chinese kept records from the First Empire on. In the age of mass printing, and Chinese rule of China in the Ming, centuries of official facts of history became Chinese children’s stories, and fictions of the Heroic Tradition. 3 KINGDOMS, WATER MARGIN, MONKEY and Yue Fei "the tattooed general", Liang Hongyu "the Little Drummer Girl", Mu Guiying "The Supreme Commander of the Yang Family Armies", Soong Ching Ling "The Soong who loved China", and Mei Lanfang, the man who introduced Peking Opera to the west. Sometime between 1932-38 Mei Lanfang wrote version of the 5th century poem MULAN JOINS THE ARMY. Sir T.L. Yang's 1995 translation of the Qing Dynasty novel GENERAL YUE FEI, by Qian Cao completes the Ming cycle of the heroic tradition.

The heroic tradition has everything to do with THE BALLAD OF MULAN. The Christian autobiographers have never heard of the heroic tradition or even read THE BALLAD OF MULAN. Their colleges don’t believe the Chinese about the Chinese. They believe Maxine and the white Christians who praise her.

President Clinton officially blessed white racism against China and Chinese culture as official US policy when he gave Kingston his Humanities medal in 1997.

If you can choose to be (1) a Chinese who reads, or (2) a Whiteman’s Ornamental Oriental, why not choose (3) to be something, anything other than Yellow? Why insist on being a Yellow know-nothing who makes your Yellow name as a writer hating Yellows? Why make the search for false knowledge to hate yourself, the heart and soul of your poetry, or prose or artistic expression?

In the interest of an interesting give and take when I speak on July 12th at 10 in the morning, here is more than I can say, when I’m there. (Bibliography at the end)

FCC

HELLO, PORTLAND

When Maxine Hong Kingston published THE WOMAN WARRIOR, every Chinese-American writer was put on the spot. Luckily there weren’t many at the time. She seemed haunted by a woman hero and the trotting rhythm and rhyme of a Chinese childhood chant. Jick jick fook jick jick/ Muklan dong woo jick/ But mun gay chur jing./ Woay mun nur tahn sick. White vigilantes descended on their local Chinatown with their Chinese ornaments and demanded to know the truth from every Chinese man, woman, or child, “Oh, you poor kid.” Chinese children were especially interesting. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll protect you from your cruel parents.” Children could be converted. “Tell me Little Yellah, did the girl warrior really have letters carved into her back in the BALLAD you grew up with?” They called it teaching school in San Francisco. They called San Francisco the most Asian city in the continental U.S.

And the brave Yellow writers answered, “Did’ya hear that? Shhhh! Listen!”

That’s the sound of distraction.

I am a Chinese-American writer. I know the Chinese children’s story. In fact, I used to be a Chinese child. In 1972 THE CHICKENCOOP CHINAMAN took a corner of New York and occupied the theater there. The ungrateful Chinese-American playwright appeared with three Asian-American writers, scholars and poets as co-editors of a collection of short fictions by American-born Asians in AIIIEEEEE! in 1975. The foreign-born AA like Yung Wing, and Lin Yutang were already published. 1972-1975 were good and bad years for the Ornamental Orientals of the Hollywood white stereotype machine.

ABC put KUNG FU on TV with David Carridine playing a “half-breed” named “Caine” passing off slow motion ballet exercises as martial arts, and stupid Charlie Chanisms for Chinese swimming instruction from a blind man. “Listen for the color of the sky. Look for the sound of blue...”

I wrote the N.Y.Times that the days of the machine-made riddle talking Chinesey KUNG FU were over, and waited for the yellows to show themselves.

Howard Friedlander one of KUNFG FU’s racist creators sneered at THE CHICKENCOOP CHINAMAN, in comparison to his KUNG FU, and predicted, rightly that his KUNG FU, was the future of Chinese in America. My ungrateful American written Chinese or Chinese written American plays and the first assertion of an American-born sensibility in AIIIEEEEE! jammed the gears of the Christian stereotype machine. They became unstuck and fluid again with Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1976 release of THE WOMAN WARRIOR.

Fakework breeds fakework. David Henry Hwang and Amy Tan have written fakery about Chinese heroes they name, and fake Chinese children’s stories that conform to the Christian white racist stereotypes of the 19th century. They have made the airwaves safe for David Carridine to revive his mumbo jumbo impersonation of a Chinese Buddhist monk to the delight of whites. “Hey, Caine! Love your Yellow ads, man. But can you tell me how to get the men’s room? I have to go, bad, man!”

“Haste make waste.”

“Can’t you just tell me, man? I gotta go! I mean…”

“Rolling stone gather no moss.”

“MMMan, I have to go!”

“Two in hand worth one in the bush.”

“Huh?”

“Two in the bush worth one in hand?”

“Huh?”

“As mistress Kingston says, ‘Myths have change, or they die.” Of course what she says is nonsense. When did the Greek myth of Ulysses change? What changed? He didn’t own a dog in the original? Did it die? Check the text.

•

CHINESE-AMERICANS

How many of you know the story JACK AND THE BEANSTALK? You all know JACK AND THE BEANSTALK. CINDERELLA? Everybody again. THE UGLY DUCKLING? PETER AND THE WOLF? PINOCHIO? Everybody. RUMPELSTILTSKIN? Yes. Everybody in this house is American. Somehow, in the twenty years of life as a child in America, each of you has learned the children’s stories brought here by immigrants from England, France, Denmark, Italy, Russia, Germany. The PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN? Another Bros Grimm from Germany. Yes again. Who told you these stories?

In your All-American childhood, you’ve picked up, and can tell, if you take a moment, at least a hundred children’s stories, fairy tales, fables, songs, legends and lies from around the world. Yes! Take a moment and think. The Gullah stories of the Georgia Sea Islands come echoing back to some of you privileged to have heard them when you were a kid. Others of you may know “Br’er Rabbit” and “Uncle Remus” as Walt Disney creations, but the stink Walt Disney created with the movie SONG OF THE SOUTH will remain a mystery to those of you fifty years old or younger because Disney won’t distribute the film in America. Disney fears of the controversy that still seethes between Disney and the characterization of African-Americans in the movie. You have to go overseas to Europe to Asia to see the movie that gets the backs of Blacks up at home.

You remember the stories, but you don’t remember the first voice or the face, or the language when the magic of this story started to work. When you were 20-25 years old you lost or gave up the magic of children’s stories for the urgent awareness of your hormones and their awakening new feelgood sensations that made body beautiful to be in.

Then you have kids.

You yellows know that Rumpelstiltskin and the rats the Pied Piper takes out of Hamelin are us. You should tell your kids RUMPELSTILTSKIN before someone else tells them the story.

We’re a people that look different and have funny names like RUMPELSTILTSKIN and of course we know how to spin straw into gold.

Is it fair to take the straw we’ve spun into gold and not pay us the price agreed on eye to eye and a handshake before we set to work? Not only are we stiffed, we are humiliated in public as if this cheating foreigners out of their labor is the custom, and we’re run out of the neighborhood, run out of the town, run out the country, run out of their language.

•

This question is for people who have taken an Asian American Studies course:

How many of you know Poon Goo, the giant in the egg? Nur Waw the Mother of Humanity? Nah Jah (Nezha) the three headed boy?

When your kids ask Mommy or Daddy, “Tell me a Chinese story,” what story do you tell? Or is this when you discover AAS hasn’t taught you the stories to tell your kids?

What good is AAS if they can’t teach what the Asians learn of themselves? The why of their existence. You know the American childhood hit parade. You’ve gone to AAS and thought you were home to the Chinese children’s story, the Korean children’s story, the Japanese children’s story.

If AAS hasn’t taught you the Chinese stories, they haven’t told you of the China under the Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty that drove the Chinese stories to be written, and published, when publishing was new.

The Chinese children’s story taught self-sufficiency, loyalty to the family, in a time of imminent threat from the horseman tribes of the north. Keeping the family together was the prime objective. The Mongol Yuan wiped out six generations of a traitor’s family. Marco Polo’s foreign trader’s account of Chinese trade goods, and customs was accurate. Of course the peasants and middle-class of the Ming didn’t tell their kids they might have to move suddenly, take another name and get out of China. But if the worse came to pass the kids were ready to run from the first story they heard and remembered THE FOX AND THE TIGER.

Is this a story you want to teach your kid?

THE FOX AND THE TIGER

YOU ALL KNOW what a fox is. Looks a little like a large house cat. Looks a little like a medium sized dog. Sharp-nosed. Sharp-eared. Bright-eyed. Bushytailed. It is a nice day. Fresh. The little fox is out for a little walk, through the woods, minding his own business.

Out of the shadows jumps the tiger. "All right, little fox, say Goodbye! to the world, for I'm going to eat ya!"

"Now, hold on there, Tiger!" the little fox says. "You just can't jump out of the shadows with bad manners and threats! You can’t interrupt my pleasant nice little walk around the charms of my woods!"

"Your woods?"

"You don’t know that I am the King of the Woods?

"You! The King of the Woods?" The tiger laughs, "You? You? Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. You can't be King of the Woods! You have a teeny kitty cat body, and I have this beautiful, (Ooh, I love it so much) magnificently sculpted musculature! You have these little itty bitty kitty cat paws. Me, I have these magnificent ripping, terrifying claws. You have little toy teeth that can't get around one of my toes. And I have a mouth full of these pointed big teeth to puncture hide and muscles, break bone, and bite meat. Teeth that break! Teeth that gnash! Teeth….!” Suddenly the cat purrs, “How can you be King of the Woods?"

"Tsk.Tsk. Tsk.," the Fox shakes his head, "Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.. I don't want to hurt you, Tiger."

"Hurt me?"

"I know you are just a big dumb guy. But I am willing to give you a chance to see for yourself."

"Huh?"

"I am going to walk down this road here.”

“You’re going to walk?”

“We are going to walk down this road here. And we’ll see how the first three animals we meet along the way treat me with courtesy and respect.”

“What?”

"If just one of these three animals talks bad manners all over me, or spits on me, or makes threats… I’ll let you eat me."

"Hmmm,” the tiger thought a moment, “You’re going to walk down this road?”

“Um hmm.”

“The first three animals we meet…”

“Un hmmm.”

“And if just one of them treats you with bad manners, spits, or makes threats, you let me eat you?”

“I’ll let you eat me.”

"Hmmm," the tiger thought a moment and said, “How do I know you won't just run away, Little Fox?"

"To make sure I don't run away, Tiger, why don't you just follow me as close as you can?"

"Hmmm," the tiger says, and thinks, "Hmmm.” And thinks some more, and says. “To make sure you don't just run away, I get to follow behind you as close as I want?"

"That's right."

"Sounds good to me, let's go."

The little fox rattles along on his little feet. And the tiger follows close behind with his big shoulders rising and falling and his big pads silently separating the grass and settling into the earth.

"A little fox!" A buffalo comes snorting and charging out of the grass, “Stomp! Stomp! Stompity! Stomp! Gonna stomp on a Little Fox!” The buffalo screeches to a stop. “Oh ho, Little Fox!” he shakes his huge head chews his cud. “How are you today Little Fox?”

“Fine Buffalo. How are you?”

“Fine! Fine! I was stomping along and saw you, and just had to stop and say it’s such a beautiful day, isn’t a beautiful day?”

"Yes, it is Buffalo."

"The birds are singing." The buffalo blinks and shudders a bird off his flanks. “And the bees are buzzing.”

“Yes, they are Buffalo.”

“Well, it’s such a nice day, I’ll just be stomping along. If that’s okay with you.”

"Nice seeing you, Buffalo," the little fox says, and walks on.

The tiger follows, and says to himself, "Hmmmm. Interesting."

They walk on, come to a river and walk by the river awhile.. Suddenly an alligator comes leaping out of the water and snapping its jaws toward the fox. "My, my, my …!" the alligator sees the tiger, "Ooops! …friend! My pal. Ahhh." The alligator smiles, "Beautiful day. My good friend, Little Fox.”

“Hello Alligator.”

“Have you noticed the sun is shining, the grass is so green.”

“Yes, I have noticed that.”

“The water sparkles.”

"Yes, it does."

"Yes, it does. I just had to say it to somebody."

"Why, thank you, Alligator. That’s very kind."

"Yes, it is, isn’t it. Well, see you later."

"See you later, alligator," the little fox says and the alligator slinks back into the water. And the little fox walks on.

The tiger follows, saying to himself, "Hmm. Interesting."

Next a huge python snake comes dangling out of a tree and sticks its thin black forked tongue out and in, fast several times without licking its lips. "Haaaa, Little Fox say..." and the snake sees the tiger, "Hi-i-i-i! Say, Hiiiiiii there!"

"Hello, snake, how are you?"

"Oh? Oh, I'm just fi-i-i-ine, just fine thank you," the snake says. “Well…I mustn’t keep you. I’d hate to do thaaat.”

“Well, I should be going.”

“Yesss. Welll…” and the snake slips around a tree trunk and disappears.

The little fox walks on a few steps, then stops and turns to the tiger. He dusts his fur and asks, "Well, tiger, do you feel like eating me now?"

The tiger shies back and gulps and looks down at the little fox, "Err. Oh, Little Fox. I lost my head. I obviously did not know what I was doing. You are, indeed the King of the Woods. With your permission, I'll withdraw now."

The tiger back steps away, turns and disappears into the shadows, and the little fox walks on.

•

Why didn’t the Tiger eat the Little Fox at the end?

Hands again. Yes, the Little Fox had connived to have the Tiger think he was following the Little Fox to keep him from running, and the animals think the tiger was the Little Fox’s bodyguard. And as lightbulbs blink on above your heads, I’ll reveal the whole title. THE FOX AND THE TIGER STRATEGY.

•

All the stories come to us through the presses of the 100 year Mongol Yuan, and the 250 year Chinese Ming.

Gong!

The Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). Kublai Khan. Marco Polo. Gary Cooper was a joke as the adventurer in THE ADVENTURES OF MARCO POLO. Peasants, the lowest of the low revolted against the Mongols, and brought in the Chinese rule of the Ming Dynasty.

Gong!

The Ming was Chinese, but they were chicken Chinese. The Ming had the peasants build the Great Wall and thought the wall would keep the horsemen out. The wall turned out be not horseman proof. The Mongols and other nomads on horseback, didn’t rule but still they gathered south of the wall every year at harvest time, like crows around China’s farm goods.

The Ming didn’t know the power of mass printing in the hands of the people till unauthorized editions of Luo Kuanzhong’s THE ROMANCE OF THE TRHEE KINGDOMS printed by pirates hit the underground market.

The loud, public mock courtly language of the opera became the private contemplative language of the first operatic or “vernacular” novel, THE ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS. The novel was a new form. A book of history and fact written by an opinionated personality calling for his people to ally up and defend their China. In the Ming he had to write sly, to slip the anti-Ming, pro-family message under the noses of the Ming.

From the first words, the reader was in the words and atmosphere of a rousing opera building enthusiasm for three men over their vision of China, and their fight to achieve it. But the enthusiasm for revenge and war is the reader’s alone in contemplation with the book, in words the peasants read and understood.

Luo Guanzhong the first Chinese author, wants his readers to identify China as home and to prepare to fight for it. A loose translation of the first words:

Kingdoms rise and fall.
Nations come and go.
It’s a good day to die.
Let the goodtimes roll.

•

The first novel saw the invention of Chinese patriotism in the reader. The reader is filled with a personal pride and responsibility for the spot of land where he was born. Home. 3 KINGDOMS is the first novel in China, Korea and Japan and has shaped the way China, Korea and Japan sees their history.

The book tells the history of family dynasties becoming empires giving this book the heft of history. Serious history.

One day: Chien Hsi Huang, a mere king, among kings, gobbled up one his neighboring kingdoms, and was more than a king. He gobbled another neighboring kingdom, and another, making him the first emperor of the first empire, the Qin. Qin (pronounced Chin,) is the word “China” comes from. Chien Hsi Huang unified Chinese writing, standardized money and spent ten years, and hundreds of thousands of men’s lives building the Great Wall to keep the nomadic desert horsemen out of China.

The folk called the wall the long cemetery where the wails thousands of widows and mothers still search for their men. The first empire the Qin lasted from 221-206 BC, just 15 years, and isn’t much loved by the Chinese.

The Han, is the second empire. The Han glitters, twinkles and shines.

The Han is, above all, beloved. The Han is the most legendary, longest lasting of the three Chinese dynasties ruled by Chinese. The other two being the Tang (618-907) and the Ming (1368-1644). Ah, the poor Ming.

•

The book zips through the Han begins to slow down with a revolt that brings three men, with three differently colored faces, from different parts of China, and three different walks of life, a white faced pretender to the throne of the Han; a redfaced murderer; a blotchy faced popeyed rich farmer, meet on their way to save the Han.

The three take to each other and repair to the farmer’s peach garden and swear an oath of blood brotherhood, with the famous line, “Though we were born at different times and places, we hope to die at the same place, at the same time.” They don’t.

Cho Cho, the villain of the piece, who started this mess of revolts that has brought the three Brothers together, with cunning, brilliance and the strategy of Sun Tzu, in an unholy mix with the strategy of Wu Chih. Cho Cho is the pouting misunderstood genius of the piece.

Cho Cho ursurped the throne, and Han China has split into Three Kingdoms.

Cho Cho rules Wei the big chunk to the west, of Wu, where the 3 Brothers of the oath in the Peach Garden end their lives in failure. Shu is the kingdom in the south.

All three brothers die failing to restore the Han. And the novel plods on under the care of the 3 brother’s strategist genius Kungming, aka Geegawk Leong. He dies. It ends with Wu being devoured in, you guessed it, war.

We are born in war. We will die in war. Our right (whoever “we” are) to occupy and farm China as ours is always a matter of contention.

So the book ends. The reader in the Ming was not satisfied. The reader was left with his bloodlust awake and throbbing with Chinese patriotism, in the present day Ming. The peasants that had driven the Mongols out of China. The Ming had let the peasants down by hiding in the silk and porcelain art of their Ming selves, in cities behind walls peasants and common folk were forbidden to cross.

3 KINGDOMS didn’t fire up the people of the Ming. It was the other way around. Luo was born to a people fed up with the cowardice of Chinese Ming. The people of the Ming were publishing schools of kung fu with drawings of their moves. Even the secretive Buddhists of Shaolin temple published their animal strategies. The rich farmers financed private armies to protect them from the government and to fight the tribal horsemen from the north.

Tales of the WATER MARGIN appeared like news broadsides had been distributed piecemeal like meat during the Mongol Yuan. The peasants snarled at the Mongol Yuan and foamed at the mouth and used their teeth, then ran for their lives. Luo Kuanzhong edited and added the long end chapters before Shi Nai’an’s WATER MARGIN was published. Shi Nai’an and Luo Kuanzhong tell a story that reminds readers of the cowardly and ineffective Ming Dynasty that rules them.

Their story is set in the Song Dynasty. The Song has given up bits of China to the nomadic invaders from the north. Worse, the Song confiscates the land and outlaws any Chinese that raises a hand against a nomadic horseman.

Soong Gong (Song Jiang) an average county clerk with an unusual admiration for men and women of the “gallant fraternity” known for their fighting skill is outlawed by the Song he serves. The gallant fraternity nicknames him the “The Rescuing Rain (that breaks the drought)” for his generosity to warriors passing through his county. He is outlawed by the Song he serves and flees to Liangsahn Marsh, or “the Water Margin,” a marshy constantly changing swampland, known as the hideout of criminals, on the Yellow River.

He recognizes talent and isn’t jealous. He leads of the good 36 Stars of Heavenly Spirits, and the bad 72 Stars of Earthly Fiends to combine as Chinese, to save China and the Chinese family from the government and the invading nomads.

They form a community on a mountain hidden deep inside the depths of the Liangsahn Marsh.
The outlaws of the marsh are, the soul of China fighting two enemies. The government out to break up and take the place of an individual’s family and the nomadic invaders out to subjugate China to a crow’s way of life.

The people who live and farm around the outlaws hideout ask the Rescuing Rain to declare himself emperor, but Soong Gong (Song Jiang), refuses. Being a good Confucian, he disdains high office.

He sends a message to the emperor asking for an amnesty for defending China’s borders, an amnesty the outlaws really do not want. Their loyalty is to Soong Gong, not the empire. The emperor agrees, but there are conditions. First Soong Gong must stop the raids by the nomads without involving the emperor.

The outlaws know they are soul of China and will fail to achieve the China they embody because of their leader’s change of heart.

The 5 Ruan brothers ask Soong Gong for permission to withdraw from the 108. Soong Gong gives permission to leave the band, to all that ask.

The Ruan brothers leave the Water Margin with their families and head south and west where they found the kingdom of Siam. The Ruan’s are an indication that Chinese don’t need China to be Chinese.

All you need to be Chinese is to belong to a Chinese family that defines itself with the Chinese story.

Those that stay with Soong Gong are killed in battle, or killed by government agents.

Soong Gong, the leader of the dying band, is sent imperial wine from the emperor himself. He knows it is poisoned, but drinks it to not offend the emperor. Is this criticism of Confucius? Soong Gong, the Rescuing Rain dies. His servant Lee Kuey, the Black Whirlwind, the lowest of the low, and the first of the 36 stars of earthly fiends who used to tear off his clothes to run into one end of battle naked swinging a thirty pound battle-axe in each hand, and out the other end covered in layers of congealing blood buries his master’s body and dies. The China the outlaws loved is in the hands of traitors and a cowardly but artistic emperor.

And another the novel ends with the reader unsatisfied, bristling and gnashing teeth.

The peasants including moneyed farmers who used their money to support vigilantes to protect them, rose against the Ming, and were betrayed. Instead of a new Chinese ruler, the Manchu rode through the wall and established the Qing, in 1644.

Qian Cao of the Manchu Qing, the early Manchu Qing, he died sometime before his emperor died 91 years into the Qing. After he was dead the vengeful Qing pulled his book from publication. That showed him.

His book GENERAL YUE FEI was knowingly insurrectionist. Yue Fei had fought the Jurchen ancestors of the Manchu’s that ruled the Qing, in Qian Cao’s day.

Mother Yue tattoos “Loyal to the country” with the character “Gawk” for “country” formed by the armed farmers surrounded by the borders of a farm, on her son’s back. The character announces the contempt for the “Kwun” or “Lord (over the empire)” or the emperor. The tattoo is the mark of a criminal, and the crime is Yue Fei’s love for the land and the family over the emperor. After beating back the nomads trying to invade China over the mountains, on the plans, over the water, he’s arrested and killed for this crime against the empire.

Yue Fei’s mother leads the descendents of children of the children of the Water Margin and the 3 Kingdoms out of China and into China again. As if to show the Chinese family didn’t need China to be Chinese. The first novels in the language of the people’s opera developed a very assertive belligerent fighting mad individual fed up with bickering chickens in charge of China from 3KINGDOMS to GENERAL YUE FEI.

•

You who grew up without the Chinese children’s story and with the so-called Chinese-American identity problem. You know that if you do as your parents did, your kid will grow up as confused as you did. You also know you can learn the stories and tell them to your kid, while he or she is still a kid.

The Chinese children’s story doesn’t mean your kid is doomed to grow up to be a good or bad person. It means, rich man, poor man, begger man, thief, he’s as Chinese as he is an American.
The secret of the Chinese-American two century long identity problem is the Chinese children’s story.

The war against being Chinese, hidden in plain sight gives urgency to the Chinese children’s story in the Ming. The storytelling in print builds a sense of Chinese familial propriety that is above the government. The sweet THE FOX AND THE TIGER is a way of teaching “Strategy.” All the Chinese children’s stories teach strategy.

THE NORTH COUNTRY WOLF dramatizes a verse of the strategist Sun Tzu: All strategy is based on deception. The story so simple, everything in plain sight, yet it wasn’t plain to me. What strategy did Stupid the Failed Scholar use on the wolf out to eat him? Actually it’s the old teacher of questionable compis menti, who uses a simple deception based on the wolf’s own ego, against him. Parents, hold your kids. Protect them any stray strategy or spit splashing out of my telling of:

STUPID THE SCHOLAR & THE WOLF
(THE WOLF OF SHANDONG)

A SCHOLAR HAS failed the Imperial examinations, "Oh me, I failed the exams. I'm stupid, stupid, stupid!" The failed scholar mopes along on the road of life with his bag of books over his shoulder. "How can I go home? Hi folks, I failed the Imperial exams?" He groans. "I'm just another failed scholar on the road of life to nowhere.” He kicks himself. “Oh, me. Oh, my. I failed.” He slaps himself on the forehead. “I'm stupid. I don't know nothing. Nothing!"

A wolf dashes out of the woods and falls down at the failed scholar's feet, and looks up into his eyes.

"Please! Save my life! Save my life! Save my life!"

"Who? What? I don't know nothing! Nothh…"

"I'll give you silver," the wolf says.

"…thing…Ooh, silver?"

“Silver.”

“Oooh! Silver!”

“I'll give you Gold!"

"Gold!"

"Just hide me, and save my life! And I'll give you silver and gold," the wolf says.

"Err, uhh, how? Where?"

"What do ya have in the bag, man?"

"Books!" the scholar said.

"Books! You don't need books! No one’ll give you silver and gold for carrying books in a bag! Dump the books!"

"Right," the scholar says and dumps the books. The wolf climbs into the bag. His body is tight fit. His neck sticks out. Off in the distance barking dogs are heard. The wolf is frantic. "Come on, man, stuff my head down in this bag. Come on!"

The scholar shoves and pushes, and pushes, "Come on, get me in the bag!" The scholar shoves the wolf's head down into the bag.

"Now tie the bag up! Hurry, man!"

The scholar ties the bag up.

"Now pick the bag up and start walking, come on, hurry!"

The scholar heaves the bag full of wolf onto his back and staggers into a walk.

Hunters on horseback break out of the woods and rein up by the scholar. "You there! Have you seen a wolf come by this way?" the leader of the hunting party asks.

"Wolf? No...."

"You're sure you haven't seen a wolf come by this way or cross this road?" the hunters ask.

"A wolf?"

“The dogs sniff the wolf on your trail, and then nothing, no wolf spoor.”

“Well, I haven’t seen a wolf. If one were around, I certainly would have noticed.”

“Would you?” one hunter asks and laughs.

“You seem a stupid, for a scholar,” the other says. The hunters back their horses and the scholar finally looks up and sees they wear imperial colors. They are the emperor's hunters. They ride off the road where the dogs are sniffing for a trail.

The scholar walks on carrying the wolf in his book bag for one mile, two miles, six miles till the wolf cries out, "Hey, lemme out here! I can't breathe! Put me down. Let me out of here!"

The scholar stops and sets the bag down, unties it and helps the wolf slip out.

"You know, while I was in your bag," the wolf says, "I got awful hungry. I'm so hungry from being in your bag, I am going to eat you up. Don’t look at me like that, it is your fault I'm hungry."

"Now, wait a minute, Wolf. That's not fair. You promised me silver…”

“Yes, I know. And I promised you gold.”

“And you promised me gold if I hid you in my bag and saved your life," the scholar says.

“If you saved my life, yes. That’s what I said.”

"I kept my part of the bargain, and now instead of silver and gold you tell me, I owe you a meal, and I'm it? That is not fair!"

"Sure, that's fair. Anybody will tell you that's fair," the wolf says. "What’s unfair about it?"

"Come on, nobody will say that's fair! I'm not that stupid."

"Ask anybody. Anybody! And they'll tell you, I'm being fair."

"Anybody?"

"Ask anybody. Ask any three living things, and I bet, they'll tell you it’s fair to eat you for saving my life."

"That’s crazy!”

"Yes. Ask three elders, and if one, just one, says it's not fair of me eat to eat you…I won't eat you," the wolf says. He chuckles. "Stupid!"

They walk a bit and come to an old withered apricot tree. "Talk to the tree," the wolf says.

"Talk to the tree?" the failed scholar whines.

"Talk to the tree," the wolf says.

The scholar stops by the old apricot tree, and bows. "Old Apricot Tree," the failed scholar says, "I beg your pardon, I'm nobody, I don't mean anything, but I would like the benefit of your instruction in a personal matter."

The rickety Old Apricot Tree rattles and sighs, "Hummmm."

"Old Apricot Tree, I was minding my own business moping along the road of life after I flunked the big exams and this wolf runs out of the woods begs me to save his life. He makes me dump my books, and promises me silver and gold to hide him in my bag and carry him, and I do, and the Imperial hunters ride up, and ask me if saw a wolf, and I tell them I didn't see any wolf, and then when the wolf gets out of the bag, he tells me he got hungry inside my bag, and it's my fault he's hungry and he's going to eat me," the scholar says on a long breath. "Is that fair, Old Apricot Tree?"

And the Old Apricot Tree sighs and rattles his rickety twigs and says, "I was born and the rain watered me. And the sun shone on me. And you protected me from the birds and made sure I got water and sun, and I grew and grew. And then I sprouted fruit and you humans picked my fruit and ate it and threw away the seeds. And you carved your initials in my bark and you let your kids climb into my branches and break them. Then you cut off my branches and you burned them for firewood. And, yeah, it's fair for the wolf to eat you!"

Oh, oh, the scholar thinks. This isn't good, and thanks the Old Apricot Tree and walks on.

They come to a field and in the field is an old horse. "Talk to the horse," the wolf says. And the scholar approaches the old horse, bows and says, "Old Horse, I'm nobody and don't mean anything but beg the benefit of your instruction in a personal matter."

"Oh, boy, here we go again," the Old Horse says.

"Old Horse, I was minding my own business just walking along the road of life after I flunked the big exams and this wolf runs out of the woods and begs me, to save his life. He falls on his knees at my feet, and begs me to save his life. He promises to give me silver and gold if I'll hide him in my bag and carry him, and I do, and the Imperial hunters ride up and I tell them I didn't see any wolf. And then when the wolf gets out of the bag, he tells me it's my fault he's hungry and he's going to eat me," the scholar says on a long breath. "Is that fair, Horse?"

And the Old Horse says, "I was born. I suckled on my mother's milk and ran and played after her. And you humans gave me good grass and good grain to eat and lots of water to drink and lots of room to run. I was out when the sun shone and sheltered from the rain. Then you made me pull and drag for you round and round or back and forth back and forth. And then you whipped me to make me pull harder when your plow hit hard ground. And the work and the harness left sores on my body. Then you let your kids ride on me, and whip me, and you tie me up to trees and leave me all night. Biting flies buzzed and birds came to eat off my open sores as I got a little older and you stopped feeding me. You no longer let me in out of the rain after all the work I've done for you and, yeah, it's fair for the wolf to eat you."

"Whoops," the scholar says to himself, "I'm in trouble."

Next the wolf and the scholar come across an old teacher asleep on the road.

“Talk to Sleepyhead,” the wolf says.

"Old Teacher. Wake up. You’re sleeping on the road.”

“What?” the Old Teacher says waking up. “What am I doing on the road? I was asleep here? Who are you? Did you rob me?”

“Ask the Old Teacher,” the wolf says so the old teacher will hear.

“What?” the scholar asks.

“Ask him,” the wolf says with threatening show of teeth.

The scholar bursts into tears, falls on his face in front of the old man and whimpers, "Old Teacher, I wasn't hurting anybody I was just walking along the road of life after I flunked the big exams, minding my own business. And this wolf runs out of the woods and begs me to dump my books and promises me silver and gold to hide him in my bag and carry him, and I do, and the Imperial hunters ride up and I tell them I didn't see any wolf. Then when the wolf gets out, he tells me he got hungry inside my bag, and it's my fault he's hungry and he's going to eat me!" the scholar whines. "And he says that's fair! Is that fair, Old Teacher?"

"There are many sides to every question,” the Older Teacher says. “I want to understand this before I decide. Is this what happened, Wolf?"

"Yes, I thought he told it very well," the wolf says.

"Hmmm. There's something I still don't understand," the Old Teacher says. "Where did you say this happened?"

"Oh, back this way along the road about, maybe six miles," the scholar says.

"Can we go back there and let me have a look at where this all happened?"

"Sure, we can. Let's get this over with fast," the wolf says and leads the way.

They reach the spot where the scholar and wolf met and the Old Teacher paces around this way and that with his stick and shakes his head. "No, there's still something I don't quite understand," he says, "You say you dumped your books and this wolf here climbed into that little bag?"

"Oh, I understand your problem," the wolf says, "You don't believe a big magnificent wolf like me can fit into that little bag! Here we'll show you!" The wolf turns to the scholar and snaps, "Come on, Stupid, help me get in the bag!"

The wolf and scholar huff and puff and grunt and groan and stuff the wolf into the bag. And the Old Teacher laughs. "I can still see your head, Wolf. What kind of hiding is that?"

"Well, I had Stupid shove and push on my head till it was stuffed in the bag too."

"Well?" the old Teacher shrugs.

"Come on, man," the wolf says, "Stuff my head down into the bag!"

And the scholar uses all his strength and shoves the wolf's head into the bag, and stops to catch his breath.

"Then what did you do?" the Old Teacher asks.

"I tied up the bag."

"Aha!" the Old Teacher says.

"Tie up the bag!" the wolf says from inside the bag.

The scholar blushes, "Oh, how stupid of me!" and ties up the bag. "Now what?" he asks.

"Walk on," the Old Teacher says.

“Walk on?” the scholar asks.

“Walk on?” the wolf asks inside the bag.

•

How many of you have read THE FIVE CHINESE BROTHERS by Claire Huchet Bishop. Everybody.

Is it real or fake? The book jacket quotes the N.Y.Times “based on a Chinese story.” It is? How many of you asked if it was real or fake? You gave it to your kids anyway, right?

You didn’t you warn your kids THE 5 CHINESE BROTHERS is a story based on the memories of men who enjoyed torturing Chinese during the 100 years of the Opium Wars and their penalty phases?

THE FIVE CHINESE BROTHERS are five Chinese victims of torture for the entertainment of whites. Burn the Chinese. Ha! Ha ! Ha! Drown the Chinese! Ho! Ho! Ho! Hang the Chinese! Ha ha! Ho ho! Chop off the head of the Chinese! Hee hee Hee! Oh, the Chinese are so funny. They’re fireproof, drown-proof, hang-proof, chop-proof…

The First Ornamental Oriental

Maxine Hong Kingston is the first Ornamental Oriental to give her yellow voice, to a fake story and apply it to a real name from Chinese folklore, “Mulan.” Kingston wrote a horrifyingly spare and lovely scene of the girl Mulan at fourteen being surprised awake by her parents sneaking up on her with knives in their hands. White Christian reviewers in the N.Y.Times, The New Yorker, the S.F.Chronicle, The L.A. Times were all fooled into thinking they were suddenly experts on Far Mulan was the tattooed girl.

Fakework breeds fakework. David Henry Hwang repeated Kingston’s slander of Mulan as a tattooed victim like clockwork and faked a tale of another hero by name Kwan Kung, in “F.O.B.” the Obie Winning Off-Broadway play. Then Amy Tan rewrote THE UGLY DUCKLING as a fake Chinese story about a mother who goes to market for a duck that dreams of being a beautiful goose, and put it on page one of THE JOY LUCK CLUB.

“How do you know her duck story’s fake?” an Amy Tan fan might ask.

Ducks and geese bought in the market symbolize one thing in Chinese folk, fiction and lit: food. In China birds bred for market have the intellect and nobility of chicken McNuggets. That’s why they’re called “birdbrains.”

It is the wild birds that embody the 5 noble qualities of you know who. It is the wild birds mate for life.

≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈

WILD BIRDS. NOBLE BIRDS.

A terrible defeat. Soong Gong, the Rescuing Rain leads the Outlaws in panic stricken retreat back to Liangshan Marsh. Dejected, passing thoughts of suicide he comes to Double Woods Crossing and stops to rest. Yan Qing the great archer among the 108 outlaws tries to restore his leaders spirits by shooting down a flock of wild geese.

From Chapter Ninety of OUTLAWS OF THE
MARSH trans Sidney Shapiro.
Page 1423. 5th paragraph:

Song Jiang directed that Yan Qing come to him immediately. The Prodigy wore a broad brimmed white felt hat and a parrot-yellow tunic quilted with a flaxen floss. Astride a roan desert steed and carrying his bow and arrows, he canted up to a halt before Song Jiang, the dead geese hanging over his horse’s rump. He dismounted and stood waiting. “Was that you, shooting geese just now?”

“I needed practice and saw them flying overhead. I didn’t expect every arrow to score a hit. I must’ve brought down more than a dozen.”

“A military man ought to practice his archery, and you’re an expert at it. I was just thinking – these geese leave Tianshan Range in autumn and fly south across the Yangzi with reeds in their beaks to where it’s warm and they can find food, and don’t return till the following spring. They’re the most virtuous of birds. They travel in flocks of up to half a hundred, flying in orderly ranks, with the leader at the dead and the inferiors behind. They never leave the flock, and post sentinels when they rest at night. If a gander loses his goose, are a goose her gander, they never mate again. These fowl possess all five attributes – virtue, righteousness, propriety, knowledge and faith.

“If a goose dies in flight, all utter cries of mourning, and none will ever harass a bereaved bird. This is virtue. When a fowl loses it’s mate, it never pairs again. This is righteousness. They fly in a definite order, each automatically takings its place. This is propriety. They avoid hawks and eagles, silently crossing the passes with reed sticks in their beaks. This is knowledge. They fly south in autumn and north in spring, every year without fail. This is faith.

“How could you have the heart to harm such admirable creatures? Those geese passing in the sky, all helping one another, are very much like our band of brothers. Yet you shoot them down. How would we feel if it were some of our brothers we had lost? You must never hurt these virtuous birds again!”

≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈•≈

Every AAStudies and AALit course teaches Ornamental Orientalia as the only Yellow writing worth talking about. I am banned across the country. I don’t care what the whites say about me. I am not white. Being banned by the yellows for saying “Only white racists can like Kingston’s hatred of the Chinese,” leads me to every yellow written review of WHAT’S WRONG WITH FRANK CHIN? slapping me around for Kingston bashing. Not one Chinese-American reviewer stands for THE BALLAD OF MULAN. They deny the content their youth. Not one stands for Chinese children’s story. They deny they ever had a Chinese childhood. Not one is ashamed of their stupidity showing.

PRINTING IN THE MONGOL YUAN
THE PRESS IN THE CHINESE MING

The storytellers of the Ming printing press appealed to the Chinese sense of being Chinese from the family on up to resist having their crops raided by Mongol and the Manchu horsemen. These weren’t the complaints of poor peasant farmers eking out a living from their pile of rocks. These were the rich peasant farmers growing the wealth of China.

The government built walls and appreciated art. The secretive Buddhists of Shaolin temple Kung emerged one of a flurry of kung fu clubs turned publishers to recruit and train their readers. The well-read, or the literati of the Ming ignored the call to arms being sounded in the play MULAN JOINS THE ARMY, and the vernacular novels ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS, WATER MARGIN, JOURNEY TO THE WEST, THE CANONIZATION OF THE GODS, CHING PING MEI, all written during the Ming. The Ming government judged all but 3 KINGDOMS to be insurrectionist.

The Far Mulan found in the Chinese children’s chant of 550 AD was the world’s first poetic statement of male-female equality, in war and peace. There’s a difference between love homosexual “love” of the Greeks and Romans and the “equality” between the sexes of the Chinese. The chant closes with a quatrain:

The she rabbit dims her shiny eye.
The he rabbit tucks in his feet to sit.
Two rabbits hop side by side.
Who can tell which is the he and which the she?

In the Ming, Xu Wen put these lines onstage. The sight of the Mulan and her ally, as the Yin and Yang circle, as a meaning of the Taoist circle struck what was Chinese in the Chinese. Life on the land versus the life of a nomad.

Xu Wen tucks between the lines of Mulan galloping north to join the army, across the Yellow River to the Black Mountains, a scene of Mulan riding up on a pair of slow moving horsemen going north to defend the wall. She scolds them for thinking women had an easy life at home. Home was the source of wealth. No crops. No money. By the time she reports to the commander she has assembled a number of men insanely loyal to her. That scene is more critical of the Ming present than any dynasty lost in the haze of long ago. Life was war back then, and it was still war in the Ming.

Mulan, the commander of generals, observes in the BALLAD:

Sawk hay churn gum tawk.
The tight northern air drums the watch.

Hawn gong jew tit yee.
Winter dawn glints off the chain mail.

Jerng Gwun bok gin seee.
My generals of a hundred battles are dead.

Jawng see sup nien gwai.
My soldiers’re spent from ten years at war.

•

Maxine Hong Kingston identified the Mulan of the BALLAD as her Mulan. She quoted lines from THE BALLAD OF MULAN before she has her creepy parents creep in and surprise her with tattoos. Her attempt to sell her FIFTH BOOK OF PEACE as having been preceded by four previous Chinese BOOKS OF PEACE, places one of those BOOKS, possibly, the first, with the first Chinese printing press and the freedom of the Chinese Ming.

If her book of peace had existed, at the time, it would have faced one of the most belligerent works of the heroic tradition, China’s first vernacular novel 3 KINGDOMS, in the marketplace. The BOOK OF PEACE would have been compared and criticized and slandered, and scandalized in an intellectual-propogandist journals or the other. Anonymous or pseudonymous critical articles about non-existent chapters of MONKEY seemed to be traded. Was that criticism of MONKEY or the cowardly and oppressive rule of the Ming disguised as MONKEY? Books are asking the Chinese what does it mean to be Chinese, between an oppressive Ming and an oppressive invader? Where is the BOOKS OF PEACE? The Ming would definitely approve it. Peace is what they want. And if it existed, the peasants that rose against the Ming would have ridiculed Kingston’s formula for peace: write a poem instead of fighting the whole world for your land and your way of life.

The Ming falls and the Qing is in, but still Qian Cao, a Chinese writes to rouse the Chinese in the Chinese, to stand and fight against the foreign Qing.

[to be CONT'D]

Hello, Portland (part 2 of 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:11:00 +0000

[PART 1]

WHO IS YUE FEI?

Yue Fei was real man whose story reads like a hero of myth. The Yellow River floods. His mother takes him in her arms and climbs into a large clay jar. His father holds onto the the lips of jar and swims to guide it through the water. He is washed one way and mother and son another way away and away.

They are washed onto land and taken in by one of the disbanded 108 outlaws of the marsh. He teaches the growing Yue Fei that all behavior is tactics strategy and the use of tools and weapons.

Yue Fei enters a martial arts contest and kills the emperor’s son. He is forgiven when one of the judges reveals that the emperor’s son used weapons and poisons banned from the contest. The judge is killed later, in imperial plot.

One emperor has been kidnapped by the nomads and a young addlebrain assumes the throne. A bandit from the old Water Margin offers Yue Fei the leadership of pirates and outlaws to fight the Jurchens. Yue Fei, cannot break the law. At the same time he can’t reject the bandit’s patriotism. He becomes blood brothers with the bandit and as a brother, returns the gifts of gold and silver to the bandit to pay for his return to the marsh. This gesture proves Yue Fei’s use of tactics and strategy as behavior to Yue Fei’s mother.

Yue Fei is approached by a representative of the emperor to take charge of the army and drive the nomads on horseback out of China.

Mother Yue does not like the choice between bandits and the cowardly and traitorous government. She tattoos her son’s loyalty to the family of China, but not the emperor.

Yue Fei leads the army, beats the Jurchens in the mountains, on the plains, and on the water and is jailed by a traitorous Prime Minister for treason and killed.

Why does Qian Cai write the descendants from the 3 Kingdoms and the Water Margin drop by to pay homage to Mother Yue before mounting up and violating the emperor’s order banning the burning of incense at Yue Fei’s tomb?

The answer: Confucius. The germ, the start, the beginning of everything is the family. China is not the government. China is individual loyalty to the family.

Individuals disown the family for one reason or another. Kwan Kung, the 2nd brother from 3 Kingdoms, was beaten and locked up by his parents, and left. He got mad, broke out of his confinement, ran away, saved a girl from a marriage she didn’t want by killing her father and the man she was to marry, and runs some more. His face changes color. His individuality blossoms into a physical being no longer recognizable to his hated parents. Soong Gong, the leader of the outlaws of the Water Margin has his father publicly disown him, to save the lives of his family.

China is the Family Not the Nat’l Gov

China is the family. China is your family as long as you keep the children’s stories and the heroic tradition. It doesn’t matter where you live. Timbuktu, Helsinki, or Athens Greece or Athens, Georgia. You are Chinese if you keep the children’s story and the heroic tradition. If you live in a thriving Chinatown that was organized by a family and family associations that kept the culture, like Oakland, California you might not know the children’s stories and the heroic tradition, but the Chinatown does and protects your Chinese identity.

Chinatowns that don’t respect the family and Chinese culture turn into service centers for tourists, lose the their Chinese identities, wither and die, like Portland’s Chinatown.

You are not Chinese if you’ve lost the children’s story and the heroic tradition.

•

AT A BOOK FESTIVAL in Portland, a long drive up I-5 from L.A. with Sam at five years old, I’m hawking my first book DONALD DUK. A sweating man asks me, "Aren't you ashamed to be a Chinese man telling women about real Chinese culture?" He's the white editor of a California, Bay Area literary review. He has put his favorite Chinese American writer, on the cover. I seem to have been followed by the same question. If not the same man.

"No," I answer.

"Aren't you ashamed of the unspeakable cruelty you Chinese men inflicted on Fa Mulan?"

"What unspeakable cruelty…” I chill and coldly spill, “White Man?" Sam, my little Sam, looks on in horror.

"Carving her back!" White editor says through clenched teeth.

"Aren't you ashamed to be a white man instructing me on Fa Mulan?" [Fa Mulan as opposed to Far Muklan, the Cantonese pronunciation, is respected as the embodiment of the equality of the sexes in war and peace. She was a Northerner. Her birthdate, home and details of her life beyond THE BALLAD OF MULAN are unknown.] Clenched teeth faces clenched teeth. “It's obvious that you've never read the children's poem or the play that tells her story.” My eyes go beady to face his beady eyes. “All you’ve read is racist cant.” I say.

“Then where did Maxine Hong Kingston get the tattooed Mulan of THE WOMAN WARRIOR?” He sweats. I don’t. I’m cool.

“She stripped the tattoos off the back of only warrior famous for being tattooed, Ngawk Fei, a man.” He opens his mouth and I say, “Yue Fei, in Mandarin."

"There are many versions of Fa Mulan!"

“There are as many versions of Fa Mulan as there are of George Washington.” His jaw drops at the mention of the “Father of his country.” I say into his open mouth, “There is only one BALLAD OF MULAN.”

“George Washington was a real man in history.”

“And so was Mulan.” A rustle of clothes, shifting limbs, creaking furniture, clearing throats.

“Ah! The natives are restless!” I said, “You’ve heard the night before George went to fight for British in the French and Indian War, his mother called him into the kitchen, and said, ‘Son, I want to carve your back with a message to prevent Indians from mutilating your body if you’re captured.’ If a little remodeling and repair is in order for Mulan, it can’t hurt George Washington.”

“Maybe…”

“No maybe about it, your favorite author makes clear she’s talking about the same Mulan the Chinese know. She quotes lines from the BALLAD OF MULAN before blaming her parents for stripping the tattoos off Yue Fei, putting them on the girl’s skin.”

“You dare to defend Chinese culture that’s founded on cruelty to women?” He bounces from foot to foot and opens and closes his fists.

“It takes no daring to defend Chinese culture against your racist stupidity. Mulan’s parents knew their Confucius says, and would not mark her skin with a tattoo. For Confucius said, ‘The skin and hair are gifts from the parents.’”

“Confucius,” he says with a sneer.

“The tattoo is the mark of a criminal. And it is because the tattoo is the mark of a criminal, that Yue Fei’s mother tattoos his back with Loyalty to the ‘gawk’ the country. That’s his crime. She didn’t tattoo loyal to the ‘gwun’ the ‘lord’ or emperor. ”

“What?”

“Why haven’t any of you asked if THE BALLAD OF MULAN is not about a girl being cruelly tattooed, what is it about? I’ll tell you, anyway, because I’m Chinese. It’s the first poem in history of the world to state the equality of men and women, in war and peace.”

•

MUKLAN SEE
[MUKLAN SEE Cantonese is matched by a line in English , for scansion. If the translation matches the Chinese, both can be chanted in Chinese rhythm, or lagged into a round of one language up and the other down, and a round in reverse.]
THE BALLAD OF MULAN
Anonymous

Jick jick fook jick jick,
Sniff sniff sigh sniffle sniffle,

Muklan dong woo jick
Muklan sniffles like her loom.

But mun gay chur jing.
Don't ask for the shuttle's shift.

Woay mun nur tahn sick.
Do ask why a girl cries herself sick.

•

Mun nur haw saw geee.
Ask her does she pine.

Mun nur haw saw yick.
Ask her does she yearn.

Nur yick mo saw seee.
No, this girl does not pine.

Nur yick mo saw yick.
No, this girl does not yearn.

•

Jawk yeah gin gwun tit.
Last night I saw the battle rolls .

Hahk hawn die bin bing.
For the Khan's great army.

Gwun shur sup yee gurn,
The Roll Book runs twelve rolls.

Gurn gurn yow yeah ming.
Roll after roll there's my father's name.

•

Ah Yeah mo die yee.
Father has no grown sons.

Muklan mo jerng hing.
Muklan no older brother.

Yurn wooay see ngawn mah.
Leave me buy a saddle and horse,

Choong chee tai yeah jing.
And ride in father's place.

•

Doong see my joon mah,
East Market: buy a good horse.

Sie seee my ngawn jin.
West Market: buy a saddle and blanket.

Nom see my bay taow.
South Market: buy bridle and reins.

Buck see my cherng biin.
North Market buy a long whip.

•

Jew tiern yeah lerng her.
Dawn: away from dad and mom.

Mo sook Wong Haw biiin.
Sunset: camp by the Yellow River.

But mun yeah lerng woon nur sing.
Don't ask her to hear her parents call her name.

Don mun Wong Haw lau sur ming tien tien.
Do ask her to listen to the Yellow River gush and gush.

•

Don chee Wong Haw her.
Dawn: leave the Yellow River.

Mo gee Huk Sahn tau.
Sunset: the peaks of the Black Mountains.

But mun yeah lerng woon nur sing.
Don't ask he to hear her parents calling her name.

Don mun yin sahn
Do ask her to hear the Tarter horses

woo kay sing chow chow.
on Swallow Mountain whinney and blow chuff chuff.

•

Mon lay foo yoong gay.
Thousands of miles of war, battles all the way.

Gwan Sahn doe yerk fay.
Across borders and mountains like birds we fly.

•

Sawk hay churn gum tawk.
The tight northern air drums the watch.

Hawn gong jew tit yee.
Winter dawn glints off the chain mail.

Jerng Gwun bok gin seee.
My generals of a hundred battles are dead.

Jawng see sup nien gwai.
My soldiers’re spent from ten years at war.

•

Gwai loy gin Tien Ji.
On the road home: an audience with the Emperor.

Tien Ji jaw ming tong.
The Son of Heaven sits in the Hall of Light.

Chok fun sup yee juern.
Your army's valor fills twelve books.

•

Serng tee bok tien gerng
Prizes amounting to a hundred thousand cash are awarded.

Hahk hawn mun saw yook.
Now what does the girl want?

Muklan but yoong serng shur long.
Muklan has no use for any position in court.

Yern teee tien lay jook.
"Loan me the famous Thousand Le Camel,

Soong yee won goo herng
To take me home."

•

Yeah lerng mun ner loy.
Father and Mother hear she's coming.

Chut gawk serng foo jerng.
They meet her outside the gates and walk her onto the estate.

Ah Jiey mun mooey loy.
Big Sister hears she's coming.

Dong wee lay hoong jong
By the door, she rouges her face.

Siew Die mun Jieah loy.
Little Brother hears sister's coming.

Maw doh fawk fawk herng jur yerng.
Grind the knife sharp sharp to go for a pig and sheep.

•

Hoy ngaw doong gawk moon.
Open my east chamber door.

Jaw ngaw sai gon chong.
Sit on my west chamber bed.

Churt ngaw gin see ho.
Off with the battledress of recent times.

Jerk ngaw gow see serng.
On with the gowns of old times.

Dong chong lay wun bun.
By the window: do the hair in cloudy tresses.

Dur geng tit fah wong.
By the mirror powder myself flowery yellow.

•

Chut moon hawn faw boon.
Out the door see my ally.

Faw boon chee ging wong.
My ally is agog.

Toong hung sup yee nien.
Back to back in twelve years of war.

But ji Muklan see nur long.
He didn't know Muklan was a girl.

•

Hoong toe gerk hawk sawk.
The he rabbit tucks his in his feet to sits.

Chee toe ngon muhi lay
The she rabbit dims her shiney eyes.

Lerng toe bong day jow.
Two rabbits hopping side by side.

Ngawn lung biin ngaw see hoong chee.
Who can see which is the he and which the she?

•

At every stop, in California, every bookstore, every school, on the road, there were racists waiting for me with accusations of victimizing the “Woman Warrior” and being a Chinese man. Nobody was interested in the author of DONALD DUK. Not one question about the book. Not even, “What’s it about?” No questions about the real Mulan.

They were against Chinese men. It was the feminist thing to do. They knew Kingston’s cruelly tattooed Mulan as the American victim.

The real, the Chinese Mulan espoused, and lived, equality of the sexes, in 550, before the term feminism came into being. The term came into being around 1789 with Mary Wolstonecraft’s [Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)] publication of A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN in answer to Tom Paine’s THE RIGHTS OF MAN. Paine’s writing had influenced the American Revolution, the French Revolution. England declared him a traitor. To enter the discussion of “rights” as an equal smelled of law if not, the law. In the wake of Wolstonecraft’s 1789 publication, women’s writing flourished in England. George Eliot, the author of ADAM BEDE (1859) and SILAS MARNER (1861), Charlotte Brontë, author of JANE EYRE (1847), and Wolstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley, the author of FRANKENSTEIN or THE MODERN PROMETHEUS (1818).

•

Kingston was listed as an expert of Chinese folk culture in one encyclopedia of American Literature, after the other. She fooled at least four American universities into awarding her honorary degrees. In 1986 she finally confessed, that she racistly changed the facts of THE BALLAD OF MULAN for feminist purposes, in an interview with Kay Bonetti:

“Oh, yes, the myths I change. I change them a lot, and I’ve been criticized for that by traditionalists…”

“Traditionalists” her Orwellian Newspeak for “Ugh! Chinese!”

“because they …”

“the Chinese”

“don’t understand that I have no intention of recording myths. I mean, I’m not an archivist”

Her Orwellian Newspeak for “Ugh Chinese!”

“I want to give you an example of the 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 Yüech Fei who had a vow carved 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 that as an aggressive storytelling act, and it’s also part of my own freedom to play with myth. and I do feel that myths have to be changed and played with all the time, or they die.”

She sounds like Ford talking about Mercury the car, not Mercury the myth.

“The problem with doing all that is the way to inform people and at the same time play around with them”

The people or the myths?

“I think at that point I decided not to tell anybody the original stories, and then tell them how I played around with them because I just wanted to get on with the story, and I just figured, well, let the scholars…”

the, ugh! Chinese!

“figure it out later…”

She doesn’t sound like Ford, the John who saw the whole story. We know THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE and agree with the editor who burns his notes and says. “I’ve learned that when the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.” But we’ve seen what Jimmy Stewart saw after shooting his little pistol and we saw what John Wayne saw. John Ford was out RASHOMONing Kurosawa’s great movie RASHOMON. He was giving a tip of his hat to Kurosawa by playing with the form and style based on RASHOMON. Lee Marvin, the Liberty Valance of the piece is Toshiro Mifune, the electrifying bandit throwing sparks and spit from RASHOMON.

“but they’ve actually attacked me for not sticking with the story.”

Strangely Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune cancelled each other out in HELL IN THE PACIFIC the movie with just them on the screen. Alone on an island in WWII they represent their nations, fight, become friends, one side’s men arrive. The rest is irrelevant. They didn’t resemble each other. They didn’t obviously act like each other. The casting marqueed up looked inspired. But in scene after scene they were mirror images of each other. It was like watching a one man show, a long one-man show, rather then the performance of two men.

•

Mulan Leaves her Mark on China

Know nothings disguised as scientists, calling themselves “Sociologists” defend Kingston’s lies by pointing to the “folk process” that magically transforms the original Mulan into the Kingston’s victim. The real folk process of the Chinese heroine can be followed in Chinese children’s books from the publication of THE BALLLAD OF MULAN in 550 AD to Chinese Soong Ching Ling [Soong Ching Ling AKA Mme. Sun Yatsen(1893-1981) WOMAN IN WORLD HISTORY, by Israel Epstein. 1995. New World Press. 24 Baiwanzhuang Road, Beijing, China.], China’s first feminist, and the wife Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China at the beginning of the 20th Century. A flick through the pages of Chinese folklore shows that Mulan did not degenerate, but grew as her reputation for sexual equality lent luster, to the reps of other female champions of China.

Two 10th century women generals with territories of their own, along the same Yellow River that’s in the BALLAD, had grown up with THE BALLAD OF MULAN. Liang Hongyu [Liang Hongyu was the wife of Han Shizong (1087-1151) an admired military man nicknamed “Able to defeat ten thousands.” In history, she was a military prostitute. In fiction she was a drummer girl working in a whorehouse. In battle she occupied the high ground and drummed signals as to the movements of the enemy, to her husband on the ground.], (Leong Hung Yuk, in Cantonese) nicknamed the “Little Drummer Girl,” and Mu Guiying [Mu Guiying- is celebrated in the Peking opera MU GUIYING TAKES COMMAND, performed by Mei Lanfang, famous for performing women’s roles.], (Mook Gwaying) a bandit leader in Shandong become the strategist and commander of the Yang Family armies, were allies of the tattooed warrior, Yue Fei. After Yue Fei’s death, it was Mu Guiying’s strategy that covered the border.

THE BALLAD OF MULAN had inspired, the undoubtedly real Liang Hongyu, and Mu Guiying. Their stories are sketchily told in GENERAL YUE FEI, and detailed in the fictions, operas, comic books and movies based on their lives. For English language readers, Canfonian of Singapore has LIANG HONGYU, and YANG FAMILY GENERALS, with the story of Mu Guiying available in two volume sets of comic book novels.

Soong Ching Ling, took the name of Rosamonde, while attending Weslayan College for Women in Macon, Georgia. Did that name come from a popular lieder or art song(*) of the moment, or did she put together Rosamonde from “Far” the character for “Flower” that can mean “Rose,” [“Rose” in Chinese is “muy far”] as a translation of Far Mulan?

She was attracted to the ideals of Dr. Sun Yatsen, a man 28 years her senior, and married him. In 1923, he photographed her in the cockpit of the first plane designed and built in China. A biplane he had painted with “Rosamonde” on the nose. She wore a pilot’s goggled cap. The illusion that she was a flier, in the picture snapped by Dr. Sun, inspired Chinese women to fly. Their pictures were taken.

Chinese newspapers likened Soong Ching Ling to Mu Guiying and Far Mulan for resisting the Japanese, and fighting for equal rights for women, in China’s first constitution.

Dr. Sun Yatsen is considered the “George Washington of China,” through he preferred the “Abraham Lincoln of China.” (I think Lincoln is on the right, of the blue stamp the US issued in 1961 commemorating 50 years of the Republic of China. Dr. Sun is on the left.) Soong Ching Ling, was his young, brilliant and beautiful wife. She was also one of the famous Soong sisters. The oldest sister, Soong Ai Ling married H.H. Kung, Generalissimo Chiang’s crooked financier, and loved money. Soong Mei Ling [Soong Meiling- (ca 1897–October 23 ,2003 ) Her pro-Chiang version of the facts of the rivalry that existed between the sisters is told in THE SOONG DYNASTY, by Sterling Seagrave. (1985) Harper & Row. New York], the youngest, married power hungry Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and loved power. Soong Ching Ling, Mme. Sun, loved China. Dr. Sun and Soong Ching Ling are revered by both Nationalist and Communist Chinese.

From the Revolution of 1911 till the end of WWII, China was involved in war. A civil war, in China that recalled Far Mulan. A war to kick the Japanese invaders out of China, that recalled Far Mulan. Then World War II. Mulan was alive through all the wars, in children’s books, on matchbox covers, medicine labels, her story was told in paintings on vases, cookie tins, fans and comic books. The pocket sized, comic book, was created to be hidden.

Then came the year, 1932. Japan took over Hong Kong and asked Mei Lanfang [Mei Lanfang (1894-1961) born to an opera family. His father and grandfather performed women’s roles. Lanfang was the third and most famous performer of women’s roles, including Mu Guiying, in MU GUIYING TAKES COMMAND.], the unusually large eyed, Peking opera star, to perform for the Japanese army. In 1930 Mei Lanfang had introduced New York, Hollywood, and western theatre personalities George Bernard Shaw, Paul Robeson, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Sergei Eisenstein to Peking opera. And the westerners went wide-eyed, ooohed and had their pictures [PEKING OPERA and MEI LANFANG. A Guide to China’s Traditional Theatre And the Art of Its Great Master, by Wu Azuguang, Huang Zuolin and Mei Shaowu. (“With Selections from Mei Lanfang’s Own Writings” ) Contains photos of 1930’s tour of the west. (1981) New World Press. Beijing, China.] taken with the man who introduced Peking opera to western senses and sensibilities.

Mei Lanfang, famous for his performances of women’s roles, thanked the Japanese but begged off, because he was growing a mustache. He shut down his company, and took up painting and perfected his calligraphy to support his unemployed musicians and performers. He wrote a script MULAN JOINS THE ARMY [MULAN JOINS THE ARMY, by Mei Lanfang- This opera is one of the works in The Collection of Chinese Plays,compiled by the Committee for Research and Development of the Revitalization of Chinese Plays, under the Political Warfare Division of the Department of Defense (of China).] “An Opera adapted from the Fifth Century poem.” He used the plot and lines from THE BALLAD OF MULAN as his structure and festooned the structure with his words and observations designed redirect the Chinese impulse to war away from your Chinese neighbor, and toward the invading Japanese.

His “synopsis” closes with:

“His daughter Mulan could not bear to see her father go into battle in his condition. She decided to sacrifice herself and go in his stead. Dressed as a male, she resolutely bid her family farewell and reported to the garrison, ready to face the enemy. Mulan, who learned martial tactics and skills from her father, became highly valued by the commanding general. When engaged in battle she would be the one who led the charge towards the enemy. To everyone in the division, from officers to the rank and file, she was known as a hero and a patriot—not a fragile female. After the army’s triumphant return Mulan shed her soldier’s uniform and resumed her identity.”

With apologies to Ming playwright Xu Wen and WWII’s Mei Lanfang.

MUKLAN SEE
THE BALLAD OF MULAN
Anonymous

STORYTELLER
Jick jick fook jick jick,

MULAN
Sniff sniff sigh sniffle sniffle,

STORYTELLER
Muklan dong woo jick

MULAN
Muklan sniffles like her loom.

STORYTELLER
But mun gay chur jing.

MULAN
Don't ask for the shuttle's shift

STORYTELLER.
Woay mun nur tahn sick.

MULAN
Do ask why a girl cries herself sick.

STORYTELLER
Mun nur haw saw geee.

MULAN
Ask her does she pine.

STORYTELLER
Mun nur haw saw yick.

MULAN
Ask her does she yearn.

STORYTELLER
Nur yick mo saw seee.

MULAN
No, this girl does not pine.

STORYTELLER
Nur yick mo saw yick.

MULAN
No, this girl does not yearn.

STORYTELLER
Jawk yeah gin gwun tit.

MULAN
Last night I saw the battle rolls .

STORYTELLER
Hahk hawn die bin bing.

MULAN
For the Khan's great army.

STORYTELLER
Gwun shur sup yee gurn,

MULAN
The Roll Book runs twelve rolls.

STORYTELLER
Gurn gurn yow yeah ming.

MULAN
Roll after roll there's my father's name.

MULAN absent mindedly improvises kung fu

STORYTELLER
Ah Yeah mo die yee.

MULAN
Father has no grown sons.
(She stops. Her eyes pie wide.)
Father has no grown sons!
STORYTELLER
Muklan mo jerng hing.

MULAN
Muklan no older brother.
(With mounting horror and delight)
Mulan has no older brotherrr!

MULAN works out with kung fu

STORYTELLER
THE STORYTELLER as POP, sees MULAN. He watches.

POP
I’ve seen better baton twirling.

STORYTELLER
Yurn wooay see ngawn mah

.

MULAN
Leave me buy a saddle and horse,

STORYTELLER
Choong chee tai yeah jing.

MULAN
And ride in father's place.

POP
If the girl wants to go in my place, she’ll have to beat me!

MULAN and POP approach each other. They fight.
MULAN BEATS POP.

POP
I’m rusty. I was never that good at the staff. The sword is my weapon. If you want a fair fight, you’ll fight me with my weapon. Swords. Wooden swords. Wood hurts less steel.

STAGE MULAN goes to rack and chooses a wooden sword.

MULAN
You used say “Wood kills less that steel”

POP
I don’t wanta think about half-death. ALL OR NOTHING.

MULAN takes her weapon and takes a position

MULAN
All or nothing!

POP & MULAN
It’s a good day to die. Let the good times roll.

They fight again and again Mulan wins.

POP collapses opens his mouth lays out his tongue and pants and wheezes What Mulan saw in the she in the shape and colors of the tubules of the skin of his tongue can’t be told in a children’s poem. What she saw was the tongue of a sick man. He’s on the ground struggling for breath. He coughs to kick start sticky pistons in his lungs to pumping sludge out of the deeps.

MULAN falls on her face and apologizes to POP

MULAN
Forgive me please….

POP
That’s not the way a man bows… Help Help me up and I’ll show how a man bows before his commander.

POP gets to his feet.

MULAN stays flat and facedown

POP
Stand at attention and watch. You ride up to the commander’s tent, identified by a flag with his name on it. You dismount, see to the keeping of your horse in the same place you left it after you come back.

MULAN stays flat on the ground apologizing and weeping.

You enter the commander’s tent confident firm. Get up! You dust yourself off. This is a courtesy, letting everyone in the Commander’s tent know a man has just entered. And giving you a chance to learn exactly where everyone and everything is in the tent and get the cut of the commander. GET UP! Damn you! GET UP! The commander should recognize talent and know what to do with it.

MULAN flattens herself and jams her facedown more

GET UP! You’re a man! You’re not a girl! Get up. Get up, I’m showing you how a soldier answers his orders to appear before his commander report for duty!

STORYTELLER
Mulan thinks

(whispers) Father is going to commit suicide!

MULAN
Ah-Bah, No!

She begins to weep and flattens herself on the floor.

POP
Get up! when I’m teaching you something! You’re the man of this family. Get up!

MULAN gets up.

After dusting yourself off and arranging your clothes after your long ride. You acknowledge no one, with a nod or glance. Your eyes look straight into the commanders, then you drop to one knee, like this.

DAD drops to one knee, lowers his eyes, and offers his covered right hand

Eyes down, you look ahead over your upper eyelid. Your left hand covers your fighting hand and you offer them to the commander, at the level with your eyes and lower your head, like this.

POP covers his fighting hand and offers it to her.

POP
You’re not to plant your eyes into his for a clash. You will glance a look over the back of your left hand covering your fighting hand, like this. You are a man, you want the commander to know. How much of your eye shows over your fighting hand is up to you. You don’t want to show a full half of your eye. You do not show a smile on your face. A good commander will recognize the value of a face that displays no expression and no hostility. You say the words I BOW TO YOU, COMMANDER silently.

POP on one knee bows, slightly. Then lowers himself..

POP
Save our family. Save the country. Come back safely.

MULAN reads her father’s bow as being offered to her. She moves to him but POP prostrates himself

POP
Save our family. Save the country…Come home safely.

MULAN tearfully gets on her horse like a man and goes shopping.

STORYTELLER
Doong see my joon mah,

MULAN
East Market: buy a good horse.

STORYTELLER
Sie seee my ngawn jin

MULAN
West Market: buy a saddle and blanket.

STORYTELLER
Nom see my bay taow.

MULAN
South Market: buy bridle and reins.

STORYTELLER
Buck see my cherng biin

MULAN
North Market buy a long whip.

STORYTELLER
Jew tiern yeah lerng her.

MULAN
Dawn: away from dad and mom.

STORYTELLER
Mo sook Wong Haw biiin.

MULAN
Sunset: camp by the Yellow River.

STORYTELLER
But mun yeah lerng woon nur sing.

MULAN
Don't ask her to hear her parents call her name.

•

Between the first publication of the BALLAD and Mei Lanfang’s MULAN JOINS THE ARMY is 378 years. Mulan hasn’t required a lift or a prosthesis or remade past. The past is the past. She’s Far Mulan, a heroine that defines herself. That’s why she’s a hero. She’s not a product. From the past she has taught and inspired girls that call themselves Chinese.

Sam was five when I came to Portland the first time and the racist teachers sneered at my comic book collection and said, “Doesn’t turn me on.” Suddenly he’s twenty-one, and I’m still getting the same questions, I’m still called the same names by another generation stupid whites, and the children of the children of yellow-hating yellows. They see it as a matter of honor that they refuse to teach their children a Chinese children’s story while they’re young. “Start the car, Sam. I’ll be right behind you!”

•

In 1995 Sir T.L. Yang [Ti Liang Yang ( DOB:June 30, 1929, Shanghai) Chief Justice from 1988- 19996. In 1996 Yang was a candidate for Chief Executive of Hong Kong. Tung Chee Hwa was chosen to rule Hong Kong by a Peking committee of 400. Yang came on second with 42 out of the 400 votes cast. He teaches English at the University of Hong Kong.] the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Hong Kong, completed his 30 year translation of Qian Cao’s GENERAL YUE FEI [GENERAL YUE FEI. A novel by Qian Cai of the Qing Dynasty. Translated by T.L. Yang. Joint Publishing (HK) Co. LTD, 9 Queen Victoria Street, Hong Kong. (1995) (pages 247-248)] into English, and published it. He began the first English translation of the popular Qing dynasty Chinese novel, coincident with the release of Kingston’s WOMAN WARRIOR. Was his translation a reaction to Kingston’s falsification of Mulan with the tattoos of the10th century hero?

This novel was first published in the Manchu Qing, when the Manchu were oppressing the Chinese, and the British waged a Christian race war against the Manchu Qing, and brought the opium wars were to life. Both, the Manchu Qing and the Brits made the Chinese pay and pay and pay. From that time comes the novel with whole story of Yue Fei and his tattooing.

•

YUE FEI GETS TATTOOED

“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) 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?

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!”

“Balderdash!” said the Lady.

“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?’”

This scene deserves staging to appreciate the relation of Yue Fei, his wife and his mother. But what of the knives? Did the old woman carve her son’s flesh with knives like Mulan’s parents in Kingston’s WOMAN WARRIOR? The scene becomes greater:

“What Mother says has reason. Please tattoo the characters” – thus speaking, he half-undressed himself. The Lady picked up the brush and wrote out on his spine the four characters for: serving the nation with the utmost loyalty.” The se picked up a sewing needle and gave his back a prick. She saw that the lord Yue’s flesh ‘gave a jump’ and she asked, “My son, does it hurt?”

Yue Fei said, “Mother, you have not even began to tattoo me, so way do you ask me if it hurts or not?”

With tears in her eyes the Lady said, “My son, you fear that my hand will go ‘soft’ so you say it does not hurt.”

Mother Yue pricks his skin with a needle. Carving the flesh with knives is Kingston’s invention.

•

In 1997, on September 29th President Bill Clinton [Bill Clinton, (DOB: Aug. 19, 1946) the forty-second President of The United States, served from 1993 to 2001.], rewrote Chinese history, culture, and the facts of heroes by blessing Kingston with his Humanities Medal. Clinton praised Kingston's talent for revealing "a world we've never seen but instantly recognize as authentic." Through her work, he said, she had "brought the Asian-American experience to life for millions of readers and inspired a new generation of writers to make their own unique voices and experiences heard."

His signature made contempt for Chinese and the Chinese children’s story, an American policy, and Kingston’s creation, the pitiful tattooed Mulan, the official American version of Chinese history

•

Which brings us to this place in this city to talk to the Chinese not controlled by Sociology-Asian American Studies.

THE NEED FOR A REAL AA MAGAZINE

Your interest is AAWriting. The medium of AAwriting should be AAmagazines. But there are no AAMags. Are the AAwriters real or fakes writing to please their white masters?

I ask you consider forming an AAMag on AAlifestyles and what’s on the minds of yellows in yellow news, yellow newsbiz, as a mag you can encourage yellow music, yellow dance, yellow thought, yellow graphic and sculptural art to consider the arts and thought of the people that first settled here and became us.

Your ideas on AAwriting must have produced a critic or critics you respect. They can commission David Hwang and me to meet through your critics and an interview. Not face to face. I don’t tolerate the proximity of Ornamental Orientals. Tolerance and understanding is a critic’s job. My job is writing. Writing is fighting.

Your magazine will need money to run and last three years. That money to include a commission and expenses for as many name writers as there are issues of the mag.

Amy Tan let’s loose on Pool’s Black Widow Jeanette Lee! One way or the other, I’m salacious enough to be interested in what she might say.

A conversation between: GUS LEE, LAWYER AUTHOR OF “CHINA BOY” & LEO YOSHIMURA PRODUCTION DESIGNER “SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE,” “THE CONAN O’BRIEN SHOW,” “THE JAY LENO SHOW” & brother JAMES YOSHIMURA, A PRODUCER/WRITER OF “HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET.”

The name writers and the people they visit are come-on’s to get the mag into yellow reader’s hands. I wouldn’t mind spending a week with Jeanette Lee the Korean Black Widow and champion of the women’s 9 ball pool, if Amy Tan turns you down. She was the lone Yellow ten years ago. Today there are Asian women competing in the American 9Ball from China, Malaysia, Korea, Japan.

Ah-Leon, a sculptor from Taiwan and shows regularly in the US. An AAWriter or artist or I visits him for a week. See how he sets a show or works at a studio. How he makes his fired clay look like other materials. His "Bridge" looks like wood and rusty nails. His short wooden Japanese table, topped with a teacup and a tray of sushi and chopsticks, all made of fired clay, and his teapots with tree branches growing out of its clay show the artist is a thinker. At least he has a sense of humor I’ve never seen expressed before.

Another name writer – say Ben Fong Torres, former editor of ROLLING STONE and an observer of behind the scenes in the media for the S.F. Chronicle. You’ve heard of him, right? The Oakland boy who fancies himself knowledgeable about music goes to Lincoln School in Oakland, Ca and spends a week with the teacher of Chinese opera with a company of CA’s kids performing Peking opera, and a talented black student who’s taken the student company to China.

Send your staff writers to the city the name writer lights in, and measure its temperature for Asians and Asian things. Their articles give your magazine news value. The fictions that you feature. One serialized novel. Two shorts. Started off by the name writer’s look at another yellow artist. Gus Lee looks at fellow San Franciscan Margaret Cho appearing in Denver.

A MAG PUBLISHES DEEP NEWS

A real AAMag would reveal the story of the white racist yellow N.Y. editor soliciting Chinese to write unflattering portrayals of Chinese-American institutions like the tongs, who didn’t care about facts or the real. The editor only cared about “good writing.” This editor’s name is protected by the white publishing fraternity. Yes, the frat is corrupt and protects this white racist. Would they protect an editor at a New York house who let a book through that said George Washington shot Abraham Lincoln at the Booth Theatre?

This Ornamental Oriental’s name has grown as the fake has grown in American publishing. Yes, I was one of the writers the editor approached. I declined the honor of being an Ornamental Oriental.

An AA mag would look at the accepted white racist behavior that characterizes the Ornamental Oriental editor, and note the strange lack of Yellow critics and the rise in the number AAwriters being accepted by whites. What does AALit without AALit critics mean?

A year ago Lt. Ehren Watada’s court martial for disobeying a military order to deploy to Iraq, was declared a mistrial by the Army. The Army hasn’t yet set a trial date. In fact, the Army’s done nothing since. He’s left in limbo, at Ft. Lewis, near Tacoma, a city seen as definitively Japanese American by Japan’s Kafu Nagai, between the Yellows of Portland and Seattle. What have they done, or what are they doing on his behalf? They must be doing something. I would know if AA’s had a real magazine.

Momo Yashima, of L.A. is doing something. She comes from an activist family of artists led by her father Taro and Mitsu Yashima, and has put together the resisters the JACL has devoted thirty years to saying never existed till they appeared, more Japanese and more American than the openly white racist JACL. The resisters are still active and activists for the same civil rights they won after being freed from prison. They were treated better in the Federal pen than at the “Relocation Centers.” That says something. To an AA that says a lot.

She and the resisters give voice to JA works and govt docs of the period, and her brother Mako appears from a computer hard drive singing SONG OF CHEYENNE, a song sung to the melody of a Hawaiian work song, written in jail by 263 resisters awaiting what’s being touted as the largest criminal trial in Wyoming history. All this in a 90 minute presentation: A DIVIDED COMMUNITY. She has taken A DIVIDED COMMUNITY from place to place in the last two years and have you heard about it? The reason you haven’t heard about what’s happening in AA is there is no AAMag.

An AAMag would publish the script to A DIVIDED COMMUNITY and would do a story and interview with Momo Yashima about the show, her family, Mako, art and activism, and the importance of keeping the memory of the resisters alive, as long as there's a JA left.

What else could an AAMag do that a white mag couldn’t?

How about a piece designed to get Yellow artists into activist's gear. An AAMag could run an ad soliciting JA artists to speak for the JA people and create a work of art to the Heart Mt Fair Play Committee. The JA’s enjoy their civil rights thanks to the resisters against the JACL. Yes, Portland’s famous JACL leader, Min Yasui resisted a military order and stood against the JACL. Now he is remembered as the JACL’s resister and a traitor of the resistance by the resisters.
A mag could run a campaign to raise money for the art work, and to find an JA artist to sculpt, paint, make a permanent artwork representing the draft resisters and their dependence on Heart Mountain's organized resistance, for guidance. This artwork to be contributed by a JA individual or group or the newspaper to an art museum, or an individual who will donate it to a museum or school or....

An AA mag would solicit names of JA artists. Any media. Any form. Interview the artists in the mag. And do articles on the artists in contention for the commission. Why they want to do the project or why they don't want to be considered for it. Articles on who's going to judge the choice of artist? A panel of JA's. Stories on the judges. The JA newspapers haven’t done any of this. Does that mean JA has died in the JA artists that remain?

And literary critics of course – Asian-American lit critics or whites who know Asian-lit and Ameri-European lit.

The lit crit should look at vanity publications and self-publication. Dr. Clifford Uyeda, the who lent the JACL the dignity of a JA champion of Tokyo Rose, and convinced new JACL members that the JACL was sincere in their redress campaign, has self-published an autobiography. His writing style is a century of difference from his spoken style, as recorded and transcribed in my BORN IN THE USA. William Hohri, the leader of National Committee for Japanese American Redress who sued the govt for $200,000 plus for twenty causes, that forced congress to pass redress for a mere $20,000 mooting the lawsuit. He has published “The Lim Report” and a book of interviews with Frank Emi, Yosh Kuromiya, Mits Koshiyama of the draft resistance organized by the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee.

I received a copy of Yukio Kawaratani’s, self-published RELUCTANT SAMURAI in the mail. He has not a bad word to say about the JACL, but he sent his book to me, the “Chinaman” as Yuji Ichioka, the late UCLA defender of the JACL called me. He mistakenly thought it was a term of derision. Was Yuji Ichioka consulted before the JACL hired a Chinese scholar of their own to research the camps and the JACL?

A JAcritic should examine why Kawaratani sent his book to me.

Yukio Kawaratani was 13 interned at Tule Lake, and had three brothers serving in the army. His mother, Yukio and the three brothers decided to stay in the US in 1943 when the gov required all internees to answer every question of the Leave Clearance Registration Form, including Questions 27 & 28.

His father had been a prisoner in a Justice Dept camp and released to Tule Lake. “He no longer trusted the United States government and felt that the entire family would be better off living together in Japan. Imagine his anger and disappointment when he learned that Mama, at the urging of Takashi and Hide, decided not to with him! She went against the wishes of her husband for the sake of his children. Now, he, Tadao and Skip would be alone in war torn Japan.”

You might have noticed that there has never been a Japanese-American critic (or a CAcritic) in the sixty years since camp. Why are AA’s scared of criticizing their own? The obvious answer glaring us in face: the managers of camp, Christianity disguised as science, Sociology and the JACL edited and white supervised camp newspapers, that everybody knew were fronts for white supremacy.

The JAs were mad dogs and had to put in the pound. The obedient Chinese wore buttons and voluntarily kept to the kennel. All the Yellows were dogs. The CA’s of San Francisco were the first to turn belly up and offer themselves as Ornaments to white supremacy. The 120,000 mainland JA’s went into camp and 120, 313 came out in 1945. The JACL’s Mike Masaoka made a promise as a Jr. G-Man to the US that the Japs would quickly and cheerfully go extinct. They didn’t go that quickly but with JACL induced ignorance, they went cheerfully. The JA pop went under 100,000 and into the realm of racial extinction a few years ago. Then down to 92,000 five years ago. Today the JA pop is 90,000, even including the padding of Hawaii.

A JA critic would show the world that the JA’s knew who they were and knew the names of their heroes and traitors.

I’d like to see Asian music critics discuss the tilt of AAartists to jazz, and the lack of Cantonese and Peking opera while the clubs singing the arias… But first the AAcritics have to learn the opera the whites taught them to ignore. Most have never heard much less attended an opera, and are too old to learn. The music critics have to be cultivated when they’re young like the company of students learning the opera cold in Oakland. If the current young black star can be convinced to set aside singing long enough to explain his attraction to the opera, he or another member of the company might be the critic the AAMag needs.

Does AsianAmerica know about the Luck Ngai Music Club on Weller St. in Seattle? It has gone from a group of retired opera professionals and amateurs presenting three or four, five hour long, fully costumed productions of opera a year, to zero full productions and a club of homesick individuals singing an aria for nostalgia’s sake.

A magazine piece might attract an Asian musician to the opera. What’s the difference between a tourist piece and an Asian-American piece on the same subject?

An editor. A magazine is not a democracy. Newspapers and magazines are run by “Stylebooks” that dictate that “Chinaman” is a pejorative term not to be used unless it occurs in a quote between quotation marks and that “Chinese-American” is the term acceptable in this magazine, newspaper…. Violation of the Stylebook will result in firing. I would hope the Stylebook of an AAMag would be different, very different absolutely different from the white racist Stylebooks currently in use by the white racist magazines and newspapers.

In the meantime, POET & JAZZ BUFF LAWSON INADA in conversation with JAZZ SINGER PAT SUZUKI STAR OF “FLOWER DRUM SONG” ON BROADWAY

WHITES AS ASIAN CRITICS AND WRITERS?

Realistically, there’s no reason whites can’t be critics in an Asian American mag as long as they know the Asian children’s story to match their American side. It is knowledge after all. The critics job is to make the work of the writer clear to reader.

If knowledge of Chinese children stories is all that anybody need have to pass for Chinese, what’s to stop whites from writing Chinese works? Nothing.

Being yellow didn’t stop us from learning the white children’s stories. There are Yellows that know JACK AND THE BEANSTALK, THE UGLY DUCKLING as sanctifying their childhood as American. There’s nothing stopping whites from learning ours, except white religion, white tradition, the white prejudice of Bill Moyers, and President Bill Clinton’s Humanities medal to Kingston for making our story Ornamental Orientalia.

Timothy Mo had to be born and raised in the streets of Hong Kong to achieve the knowledge to write SOUR SWEET and THE MONKEY KING. Two remarkable books. AAS wrongfully neglects his works because he’s white. He is the reverse of us. Whites reject us as “American” writers because we’re Yellow. And the AA’s ignore him because he’s white. AAcritics are needed to stand between the writers and the readers of every book.

The rules of Christian Sociology and AAS don’t apply to the real world reading a book. Taking the measure of what a book says and it’s style book by book, author by author seems too scarey for any AAEnglish student, so there are no AAcritics. Meantime the whites wind up and loose another Ornamental Oriental every five years.

•

THE SCARY STORY

THE TWIN GIRLS, Leah and Fontaine, about twelve years old, and Brook their younger brother, spread out their sleeping bags in my large front room, climbed in and asked Uncle Frank for a story. A story they couldn't hear, from anyone else but me. One of my stories.

They often spent the night at my place while their mother was out working. In the mornings we would walk downhill to Grant Street and mingle with the crowd of Chinese and Italians and people living in fantasy worlds of their own creation, past Adler Alley Lawrence Ferlinghetti's [Lawremce Ferlinghetti (1919- ) Born in Yonkers, New York. The owner of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. City Lights was the gathering place of the “Beat Generation.” Ferlinghetti is himself a poet, whose most popular work is A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND (ca 1950)], City Lights Bookstore, had the City rename for Jack Kerouac. [Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) Born a French-Canadian, Lowell, Masscuhsetts he made his name with the 1957 publication of his novel ON THE ROAD]

Does Ferlinghetti know what Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg [Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) Born in Paterson, Jew Jersey. Ginsberg with the publication of HOWL! By Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, assumes the poetic top of the Beat Generation with Kerouac “stream of consciousness” prose.] leeringly thought of Chinese boys in Chinatown? Does he know what they said to Chinese boys in Chinatown? I do.

Step into San Francisco, cross the street and you're alive, a thousand miles, a thousand worlds away. Peter Maccharini, a beret and a whitening mustache, and always well dressed in a jacket, was a jewelry maker, with a shop on Grant, a block down from the shop of S. Paul Gee, a more vociferous and outlandish jewelry maker. There was Niño Bernardo, the midwestern American devotee of the flamenco guitar of Sabicas [Sabicas (1912—1990) Born Augustin Castellon) in Pamplona, Spain. Sabicas was a flamenco guitarist who left Spain in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, with dancer Carmen Amaya to South America. Many musicians fled Spain, like classical guitarists, Andres Segovia, and Celedonio Romero, cellist Pablo Casals, refused to perform in Spain under the dictator Francisco Franco. Once Franco died and Spain was semi-democratic again, they returned to their homeland. Sabicas returned to Spain in 1967.]. Always expected to take over New York or make his name in Spain, but always living somewhere in North Beach, and always playing somewhere on Grant or Columbus Avenue. David Jones [David Jones (1941) aka David Serva, now known as David Jenkins because “Jones” in the language of where he had moved was a bad word. He is back in the San Francisco Bay Area and still playing Flamenco.], of Berkeley, seemed the spirit of Flamenco everything- guitar, singing, dancing- in San Francisco, and then he went to Spain and became a Spaniard, and left a hole in San Francisco. Freddie Mejia [Anteola Mejia (1940- ) is married and playing and teaching in Santa Cruz, California.] the Filipino with a Spanish sounding name, was a player, who partnered with David Jones, every now and then. He's an extraordinary guitarist, he can play solo or with anybody, and he's a guitar repairman and maker extraordinaire, but only when he feels like it. There he is, with a new beautiful girlfriend. He gets by on her dreams and her money. Maybe this time…

There were the people who defined the street by their presence that I had no reason to talk to, but I would miss them, if they weren't here every day. And there were the people I talked to and the people that knew me by sight and I knew them to see them. We showed passing recognition in our eyes. We had no need to talk, or jump into each other’s business.

The kids' mother would come by, or most often, she would phone and meet us at Malvina's coffee house, where she sat alert and erect would chatter away about the crowd, and the changes happening to the neighborhood. The twins, and Brook would have a quick chocolate, and zip! they'd be gone. And I'd spend a long time waking up over a cappuccino. Or I'd walk with the kids to Chinatown, through a crowd of whites and into a crowd of yellows and meet their mom for a Chinese lunch. In San Francisco there was always a crowd. What happens tomorrow, happens.
Except for now. There was just us. My apartment was the top apartment, at the top the hill and it was late. Above the crowds. Too late for the crowds. And they asked for a story they hadn't heard before. And they wanted the story to be a scary story.

THE BIG CHICKEN

And nowwwoo…

time forrr…

THE BIG CHICKEN

ONCE UPON A TIME, there were three little children. One was named Leah. And two was named Fontaine. And the third was named Brook.

Late one day, their mother called them into the bedroom, where she was brushing her hair. She said, "Brook, Fontaine, Leah. Your daddy and mommy are going out dancing tonight. But before we go, would like you to go down to the grocery store and buy us some peanuts.

"And make sure you get home before it gets dark outside, because tonight is the night, the Big Chicken comes out!"

"And whatever you do, do not take the shortcut home, through the graveyard, because that is where the Big Chicken lives."

Leah, Fontaine, and Brook went down to the grocery store, found the aisle with the peanuts and got into a big argument. Mommy did not say what kind of peanuts to buy. And there were peanuts in bags, peanuts in sacks cans, peanuts in jars. Salted peanuts. Unsalted peanuts. Peanuts in the shell and peanuts out of the shell. There were roasted peanuts, salt roasted peanuts, honey roasted peanuts, and boiled peanuts. There were even raw peanuts.

There were Texas peanuts, and California peanuts. There were Georgia peanuts and Carolina peanuts and Florida peanuts. Peanuts from Mexico even peanuts from Africa. Fancy peanuts and cocktail peanuts and peanuts mixed with other nuts.

Finally they decided to buy a can of salted cocktail peanuts. And when they got outside the store, it was dark!

"Let's take the shortcut home through the graveyard," said Brook.

"But the big chicken lives there," said Leah.

"Ay yay yay yah," said Fontaine.

"Don't be scared. There's no big chicken," said Brook.

So, Leah, and Fontaine and Brook went walking in the graveyard. The moon was up, and they could see their shadows stretch from their feet and slip over the grass and the headstones and the graves in front of them, as they walked down one hill and up another.

Then they saw this big shadow come up behind them and cover their shadows. And they heard, "Buck-Buck! Buck-Buck!"

"What'd you say, Brook?" Leah asked.

"I didn't say anything. It must have been Fontaine," Brook said.

"I…I…I didn't hear anything," Fontaine said.

And Brook, Fontaine, and Leah looked in front of them and still couldn't see their shadows. And they heard, a little louder, "BUCK-BUCK! BUCK-BUCK!"

"Did you hear that, Fontaine?" Brook said.

"I…I…I" Fontaine said chattering his teeth.

"Turn around and see what it is," Leah said.

"I'm not turning around!" Fontaine said.

"Brook? Would…would you turn around? And see if there's anything behind us?"

And Brook slowly turned around and took a look over his shoulder. And he saw the BIG CHICKEN! It had toes as big as Cadillac's. It's legs were as large as telephone poles! Its body was as big as a McDonald's. It's head was as large as a UPS truck. And it had an EYE as big around as a manhole cover! And Brook said, "Run!"

And they ran. Ran up the hills and down the hills. Ran out of the graveyard and into the street. Ran down the street and into their house. They put the cocktail peanuts in the kitchen and ran up the stairs, into the bedroom. They hid under Leah's bed. And waited. And listened.

They heard the Big Chicken walk into the house. "BUCK-BUCK!"

They heard the Big Chicken walk into the kitchen. "BUCK-BUCK!"

The Big Chicken ate the peanuts. "Buck-buck."

The Big Chicken ate everything in the refrigerator. Then the Big Chicken ate the refrigerator! The Big Chicken ate the cupboards, the stove, the sink. "Buck-Buck!"

The Big Chicken ate up all the furniture in the living room.

They heard the Big Chicken climbing the stairs. "Buck-buck!"

They heard the Big Chicken walk into Mom and Dad’s room. It ate up Dad’s golf clubs. “Buck-Buck.” It ate all Mom’s shoes. “Buck-Buck.” It ate their big bed! “Buck-Buck.”

They heard the Big Chicken walk into the bathroom. "Buck-Buck!"

It ate up the toilet! "Buck-Buck!" It ate up the shower, and the tub, and the sink. "Buck-Buck!" It ate up the medicine chest. "Buck-Buck!"

Then they heard the Big Chicken walk the into Leah's room. "Buck-Buck!" It looked at the Leah's dolls. "Buck-Buck!" And ate them up. It looked at the Leah' chest of drawers. "Buck-Buck!" And ate that. "Buck-Buck!"

The Big Chicken saw Leah’s bed! "Buck-Buck!" It came closer, and looked.

"Uhhhh!" Leah said.

"Shhh!" Brook said.

The Big Chicken ate the bed quilt. "Buck-Buck!"

The Big Chicken ate the blankets. "Buck-Buck!"

The Big Chicken ate the sheets. "Buck-Buck!"

The Big Chicken ate the mattress! "Buck-buck! Buck-Buck!"

The Big Chicken ate the box springs! "Buck-buck." There were the kids under the bed. "Buck-buck!" The Big Chicken looked at Brook! "Buck-Buck!" The Big Chicken looked at Fontaine! "Buck-Buck!" The Big Chicken…Boo!

•••

(*) -Le manoir de Rosamonde
published 1894

by Henri Duparc (1848-1933) ,

De sa dent soudaine et vorace,
Comme un chien l'amour m'a mordu...
En suivant mon sang répandu,
Va, tu pourras suivre ma trace...

Prends un cheval de bonne race,
Pars, et suis mon chemin ardu,
Fondrière ou sentier perdu,
Si la course ne te harasse!

En passant par où j'ai passé,
Tu verras que seul et blessé
J'ai parcouru ce triste monde.

Et qu'ainsi je m'en fus mourir
Bien loin, bien loin, sans découvrir
Le bleu manoir de Rosamonde.

Rosamonde's Manor-House

(translated by Peter Low)

Love, like a dog, has bitten me
with its sudden, voracious teeth...
Come, the trail of spilt blood
will enable you to follow my tracks.

Take a horse of good pedigree
and set off on the arduous route I took,
through swamps and overgrown paths,
if that's not too exhausting a ride for you!

As you pass where I passed,
you will see that I travelled
alone and wounded through this sad world,

and thus went off to my death
far, far away, without ever finding
Rosemonde's blue manor-house.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTERVIEW WITH MAXINE HONG KINGSTON. 1986. By Kay B Bonetti. PP 33-46 in CONVERSATIONS WITH MAXINE HONG KINGSTON. Edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin. University Press of Mississippi. Jackson. (1998)

STORIES FROM CHINESE MYHTHOLOGY Translated and edited from Yuan Ke’s Newly Edited Mythical Stores and Translation of a Hundred Selected Myths by Ke Wen-ii & Hou Mei-xue. Nankai U Press.

CREATION OF THE GODS. Translated by Gu Zhizhong. New World Press. Beijing (1992)

TAI KUNGS SECRET TEACHINGS, in THE SEVEN MILITARY CLASSICS OF ANCIENT CHINA, translation and commentary by Ralph D. Sawyher with Mei-chun Sawyer. Westview Press . Boulder (1993)

THREE KINGDOMS A Historical Novel. Attributed to Luo Guanzhong. Translated from the Chinese with Afterword and Notes by Moss Roberts. Foreign Languages Press/U of California Press. Beijing/Berkeley. (1994)

THREE KINGDOMS China’s Epic Drama by Lo Kuan-chung. Translated and edited by Moss Roberts. Pantheon Books. New York. (1976)

ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS. San Guo Yan Yi. Luo Guan Zhong. Translated by C.H. Brewitt-Taylor. Kelly & Walsh. Shanghai (1925) Graham Brash. Singapore (1985)

OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH by Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong. Translated by Sidney Sahpiro. Foreign Languages Press Beijing. (1980)

WATER MARGIN. Written by Shih Nai-an. Translated by J.H. Jackson. Commercial Press Ltd. Shanghai. (1937)

JOURNEY TO THE WEST, by Wu Cheng’en. Translated by W. J. F. Jenner. Foreign Language Press. Beijing. (1982)

JOURNEY TO THE WEST, translated and edited by Anthony C. Yu. U of Chicago Press. Chicago. 1980

GENERAL YUE FEI. A novel by Qian Cai of the Qing Dynasty. Translated by T. L. Yang. Joint Publishing (H.K.) Co., Ltd. (1995)

Comic book companies that have printings of all titles and more

ASIAPAC BOOKS PTE LTD
629 Aljunied Road
#04-0,6 Cititech Industrial Building
Singapore 1438

CANFONIAN PTE LTD
Thomson P.O. Box 16
Singapore 9157

Film

CHINESE RESTAURANTS, Director-Narrator Chuek Kwan. 15 half hour episodes. TISSA FILMS, Toronto, Canada Tel: +1.416.804.1527 Fax +1.416.231.7532 E-mail: films@tissa.com

Frank Chin , by John Goshert. Boise: Boise State University Western Writers Series, 2002.

"Frank Chin Is Not a Part of This Class! Thinking at the Limits of Asian American Literature." By John Goshert. Jouvert 4.3 (May 2000): unpaginated article (39 paragraphs).

Lt. Ehran Watada and the Resisters

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:56:00 +0000

Lt. Ehren Watada's resistance to the illegal orders to deploy to Iraq connects to the 1944 Japanese American resistance to illegally being drafted from concentration camps. They see it, but does Japanese America? Does JA still exist? Or is stillness and silence their only existence? What about the mad clucking of the Chinese Americans? Are they chickens or Chinese?

Part 1:

Part 2:

Related:

Lt. Ehren Watada - Will JapAmerica Resist this Time?
Please visit Watada's lawyer

BOOK REVIEW: Born in the USA

noreply@blogger.com (Frank Chin) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:47:00 +0000

Anthropology Review Database

Chin, Frank
2002 Born in the USA: A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Notes: xviii, 501 p., [4] p. of plates : ill., map ; 24 cm. ISBN: 0742518523
Reviewed 19 Jan 2005 by: Brad Codr
University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho, USA
Medium: Written Literature
Subject Keywords: Japanese Americans - History - Miscellanea

ABSTRACT: This book follows the lives of Japanese Americans who were directly or indirectly involved in the struggle over citizenship and loyalty during World War II. Although the main subject presented is wartime internment the interviews and documents provide insight into issues confronted by both first (Issei) and second (Nisei) generation Japanese Americans.

Frank Chin utilizes a vast array of primary documents, interviews and archives, to piece together an internal confrontation within the Japanese American community; between the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) and those who resisted the World War II draft. The JACL believed that the Japanese community should comply with the internment process and fight for the United States. Draft resisters believed that they had been stripped of their rights and that their loyalty was unlawfully challenged; thus, the U.S. government had no right to force them into serving their country after treating them as disloyal aliens. The different opinions led to a complex web of interactions and activities, as each group maintained their position.

Section one, The Issei, outlines the struggle for stability in America and the obstacles faced by Japanese immigrants. Through poems and teachings, one can identify the value of traditional Japanese culture in the lives of first generation immigrants (Issei). While these traditions are an intricate part of the Issei experience, the
second generation (Nisei) are navigating through a different social experience. Section one lays a foundation for the reader providing a sense of rapport with the families of the Nisei who are central to the internment struggles.

Section two, The Nisei Dream, follows the careers of the Nisei as they access resources which were unavailable to their parents such as citizenship, full rights and an American education. Leadership roles in the Japanese American community take shape and the JACL becomes the publicly acknowledged voice of Japanese Americans. While the JACL gains national recognition, James Omura, publisher of the Nisei magazine Current Life, which provides a range of viewpoints from Japanese Americans that do not follow the views of the JACL. The Nisei begin careers and increase economic stability only to find them portrayed as disloyal Americans.

Section three, December 7, 1941 û The Closing Papers, and section four, Us and Them, recreate the internment of Japanese Americans on the west coast, while presenting the defining differences between the perspectives of the JACL and draft resisters. The research and time taken by the author for these sections prove valuable as the reader is able to fully understand the argument presented, shedding light on an issue that has received little attention from academia. The impact of the JACL on the decision making process of Japanese American internment is a valuable source of information. More importantly the view and activities of the draft resisters redefine internment and should be taught as an intricate part of the Japanese American experience during WWII.

To cite this review, the American Anthropological Association recommends the following style:

Codr, Brad
2005 Review of Born in the USA: A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947. Anthropology Review Database. January 19. Electronic document, http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD/cgi/showme.cgi?keycode=2270,
accessed April 21, 2008.

© Anthropology Review Database