Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Publishing Co.?

Email exchange dated December 5th, 2017:

From Ishmael Reed to Frank Chin:

Frank, They're tired of [David Henry] Hwang. He got a bad review in the Times. Send yr play the way you wanted it printed. We have a new design and web master.

Best,

Ishmael

From Frank Chin to Ishmael Reed:

Thanks. I've shouted to the Yellows that I've published out of White tolerance of Yellows. For some reason the Whites refuse to publish a Yellow American telling of Yellow stories from the old country. The Yellows will prove the people know who and what they are, where and what they come from, and what combined to make them identifiable as Yellow folk, by 'telling their child's garden of stories dear to identifiable children.. Sorry to say, the Yellow children's stories I know, are trash to Yellows out for White fame, power, and money.

Let's wait a little longer. One of the new Yellows in politics or the news will spill the truth and start Yellows thinking.....That's my hope. But I know, it's nope. Yellows are me me me and live well and die. Their kids hate themselves and dream the dreams of Ornaments.

The baker that refuses to bake a cake for a gay couple says baking such a cake is against his art. In THE WATER MARGIN- the stars of Heavenly Spiritls are the Professions. And the star of Earthly Fiends is the TRADES. Tradesmen make goods for trade. He's in the business of trade. Artists produce works that serve no use or purpose till the artists identifies or doesn't identify it, or sell it. The artist is taken by the people, and that's what makes an artist an artist. A cake by an professional artist is not food.

A solid gold working replica of the Buntline Special made for Wyatt Earp, custom built in the Colt shop, confiscated from a corrupt and greedy Commie Provincial boss,, and stolen, turns up to having been sold for a ridiculous pile green showoff money money money. Money makes a gun I wouldn't touch and feel icky for having looked at in conspiracy with art and experienced AWE! Wow! Art. There are people who collect photos of corrupt Chinese collection of gold guns on the phone. Art and people's art is squirrel.

The 36 stars of Heavenly Spirits includes a thief - thievery is a profession- all 105 are murderers or accused of murder - but they have standards of moral behavior - The towns around their hideout depend on the 108 for protection from the predatory corrupt Imperial court, and nomadic tribes of the north -

The baker is in business or he isn't. He bakes a cake. Customers buy a cake. A cake is a cake. Made for trade without ego.

FCC

From Ishmael Reed to Frank Chin:

Frank,

The publishers want assimilation from all ethnic writers. Black writers especially the males who've been scapegoated by academic feminism or daughters of patriarchy posing as feminists, have been declared rowdy and so they've imported African writers to scold us and Britishfy our vernacular. Most of them write like Jane Austen because colonial schools in Africa teach 19th century English. Yellow, Brown, Black and Red academics have enough resources to start a Yellow publishing co. Make you the head. Ishmael ps I saw one of their tokens, a Native American at the Library of Congress. She got up and praised the disgusting Saul Bellow, a bigot and an idiot. I wanted to vomit.

Ishmael-

From Frank Chin to Ishmael Reed:

On a ride to panel of Yellows at the U of Chicago, Hutchin’s U of Chicago- I am picked up by a Sri Lanka writer – who’s story about a Sri Lankan girl who has eyes for Blonde Bigpecs and Blue eyes – and wins a prize – I ask her to tell a Sri Lankan children’s story she’s against learning Sri Lanken culture and complains she’s not responsible for a culture that causes her complaints – I want out of the car – Yellows on the make as writers of the now! And future tell me to acknowledge that cultural symbols change over time- like Kingston’s Mulan from an unmarked baby to tattooed at birth by her savage parents – Don’t the Asians of Chicago hear themselves? The head of what amounts to the Yellow playwriting dept turns out to be taught by a Rose Hum Lee, Betty Lee Sung 60’s sociologist. The U of Chicago is a White Racist Indoctrination Center- A handsome Korean short story writer shows his handsome face and gently brags about being the first to write about his affairs with White women. WHAT? IT’S THE 1990’S AND JUST NOW HE LUCKS OUT WITH A WHITE WOMAN? He’s never glimpsed Vegas comic entertainer Johnny Yune? “How do I like White men? I like Whitey women better.” Pat Morita did a Johny Yune impression. Cruel! Mean! And Funny funny.

The most influential Japanese American sociologists believed in White superiority over the Yellows from Shotaro Frank Miyamoto, SOCIAL SOLIDARITY AMONG THE JAPANESE OF SEATTLE (1939) to Harry Kitano , to the White newspapers to 1939 model Mike Masaoka , and the Japanese American Citizen League. ASSIMILATION was an Issei duty, but they keep the contents of their culture. As he wrote his praise of Assimilation, the sounds of the all girls production of CHUSHINGURA rehearsed a block up Sixth Avenue. Miyamoto hates CHUSHININGURA. Hates all Jap stories. Hates with his toes. Hates with his ears. Hates with his words. SOCIOLOGY RULES THE WORLD! Sadly the Japanese America built by the self-hating Yellows loosed by the U of Chicago – prove you’re not a Jap – volunteer for camp - reduced to todays smelly JACL, the Japanese American National Museum going intellectually and monetarily bust and sold to Japan and the White racist Smithsonian Institution. The proof is really strange. George Takei pleads the Jap case as a gay activist, whose husband is snubbed by Capt of Star Trek, on stage at the JAMN.
George Takei is only Jap voice to call Trump out for saying the Muslims should be treated like the Japs in 1941. The only Yellow voice of correction and protest. If my children;s garden of stories reaches book stage, it should take the stage at the beginning of Yellow hope, not the end.

Anyone hear a wolf? WOLF? THE NEWSDOG IS COMING. The Newsdog? THE YEAR OF THE ROOSTER IS ENDING. LOOK AT THE SKY. IT'S DARK AS PITCH AND ONLY 5 O'CLOCK. LET'S HOPE THE YEAR OF THE NEWSDOG TELLS MORE THAT'S TRUE.

FCC

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Election Day

Ishmael Reed,

I’ve been learning about Blacks, yes, Whites have Lorded in over the Blacks, and the Mexicans that lived within sight of Chinatown, accused of passing –what? – the border –and Indians here, and Indians there, different Indians (damn stubborn) some like Chinamen. Some have stories-

Can’t we read each other – work our common history & knowledge of the Trumpian White Race of America and civilize the slobbering White’s who dominate and call it Democracy?

ELECTION DAY IN ALABAMA- MOBILE LIL, THE BEAUTIFUL TWA STEWARDESS FROM ALABAMA & L.A. PHIL , THE HANDSOME PHOTOGRAPHER (CLASS COMPETITION FOR CORKY LEE OF NEW YORK.) BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE –“ I AM A LOVER” A PHOTO BOOK by Jerry Stolll jr and Evan S. Connell OF NORTH BEACH OF THE 50-60’S WHEN THE BEACH WAS BASQUE, ITALIAN, (FROM GENOA, WHERE THEY MAKE PESTO, NOT NAPOLI WHO DON’T AKE PESTO) SPANISH FROM SPAIN, CHINESE. THE PICS SPEAK-FLAMENCO IS IN TOWN IN A BIG WAY- FREDDIE MEJIA AS A BOY PLAYS THE GUITAR IN A CROWDED COFFEE HOUSE AND DRAWS EVERY EAR TO HIM. ONE CAN SEE IT IN THE PIC. THE CAMERA IS ACROSS COLUMBUS STREET STANDING ON THE CHINATOWN SIDE OF THE STREET, A FREEZE LOOK AT STREAKS OF TRAFFIC RIPPING GHOSTLY OVER THE FOGGY BIG WINDOW OF THE HOT COFFEEHOUSE. GUITAR NECKS STICK UP LIKE RIFLE BARRALS.

Jerry Stoll taught himself photography shooting this book. Evan S. Connell is a stoic writer from the Midwest ( MR. BRIDGE ) who edits fiction at CONTACT magazine out of Sausalito, and buys and publishes my first short-story FOOD FOR ALL HIS DEAD. I am 19 years old.

NORTH BEACH IN PICS LOOKS LIKE THE GATHERING OF OUTCASTS AND GANGS AT THE WATER MARGIN.

BUT THE WATER MARGIN IS A CHINESE PEOPLES REFUGE FROM THE MONSTROUS PRESS OF THE FOREIGN EMPIRE. EVERYTHING CHINATOWN ISN’T.

THE NOISE OF CULTURES CLASHING AND FORMING IS AT THE ITALIAN END OF THE ADLER ALLEY, IN LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI’S (AND SHIG MUROW’S) CITY LIGHTS BOOKSTORE AND NORTH BEACH AT THE END GRANT STREET. AT THE OTHER END OF VERY SHORT AND NARROW AND DAMP ADLER ALLLEY IS THE CHINATOWN END GRANT STREET AND ACROSS BROADWAY AND COLUMBUS GRANT STREET DISAPPEARS INTO NORTH BEACH. NORTH BEACH IS NOT CHINATOWN.

NOT- CHINATOWN GLITTERS AND SHINES AND SMILES FUMES OF OLD BLACK BEANS AND SMELLS OF ITSELF ALL IN SILENCE.

1975- PREVIEW COPIES OF THE WOMAN WARRIOR, BY MAXINE HONG KINGSTON FOR REVIEW FLY OUT OF NEW YORK.

MS. MAGAZINE LOVES MAD MAX’S MADNESS. Ms. Magazine founder Gloria Steinem flies to the West to embrace Mad Maxine Hong Kingston, who fakes Chinese history, culture and customs to bug her father who claims to be a Literatus – a Scholar-official –who passed the Imperial Exams last given 1905-

Where is Gloria Steinem’s support of the Maxine Hong Kingston’s White racist lies convincing Pres Clinton and Obama’s awarding Kingston Humanities and Arts Medals?

Read Kingston for the TRUTH . IGNORE CHINESE CHILDREN’S LIT AND THE HEROIC TRADITION WHERE LIANG HONGYU, THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL (SHE WASN’T LITTLE, BUT SHE WAS A SIGNAL DRUMMER AND STRATEGIST WHO DIRECTED HER HUSBANDS MANUVERS FROM THE HIGH GROUND- also she is wrestler and an archer, and leads a horseback unit ) AND MU GUIYING, THE BANDIT QUEEN, WHO BEATS A YANG FAMILY GENERAL IN SINGLE COMBAT, MARRIES HIM, IS APPOINTED SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE SEVEN YANG ARMIES BY THE YANG MATRIARCH, RETIRES AFTER BECOMING A GRANNY THEN, AT 47 IS ASKED TO LEAD THE IMPERIAL ARMY AGAIN. PLEASE! THEY REFUSE TO FIGHT FOR ANYBODY BUT MU GUIYING. WHAT KIND OF FEMINIST IS GLORIA STEINEM?

WILL SOMEONE ASK HER? SOMEONE SCHOLARLY ON UNIVERSITY LETTERHEAD – SOMEONE FRIENDLY – SOME CHINESE OR KOREAN OR JAPANESE AMERICAN OR NOT – WOMAN WRITER? MMMMM?

OR, HOW BOUT YOU, GEORGE? Mr, Sulu Invites Gloria Steinem and Maxine Hong Kingston to join him on C_SPAN-AT THE JAMN in conversation on “feminism “ the word of the year an English language Dictionary society says. Fuck, go for broke! Invite Jeanne Wakatsuki and James D. Houston, Karen Tei Yamashita, ( “ ‘i’ Hotel” is about the hotel built from bricks from the 1906 Earthquake and Fire on the corner of Jackson and Kearney, and housed the jazz and comedy club The Hungry “i” in the basement, Filipino business on the shop level, and Filipino Scouts waiting for the US Citizenship and back pay from the US Gov ) and Amy Tan, who just adores her imagination.

SAY! HOW BOUT A RADIO PLAY OF A MEETING OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL ASIAN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHSICAL LITERARY , THEATRICAL , MUSICAL, ARTISTIC THINKERS OF THE AGE? YELLOWS DOING YELLOW VOICES ON THE AIR. DOESN’T YOUR VOICE WATER, YELLOW ? OR DRY UP, AS THE VOICES OF ORNAMENT PASS A FEAR OF WHITES DISCARDING YELLOW ORNAMENTS, FOR ANOTHER COLOR, AMONG FELLOW YELLOWS LIKE A VIRUS, AND LIKE A VIRUS IT PASSES AND STAYS.

AMERICA MAYBE HOME – BUT EVERYWHERE I GO, I’M TOLD TO KEEP MOVIN BY MY OWN. I’M THE SHOWOFF OF YELLOW THEATER REDUCED TO A THEATER OF ONE STORYTELLER AND ONE STOOL, FOR HEIGHT - JUST A LOOKIN FOR A HOME – I HAVE STORIES OF THREE MEN OF THE OATH IN THE PEACH GARDEN , ONE MAN WAS HEAVENLY SANDAL MAKER WHO WANTED AN EMPIRE/ONE MAN WAS AN EIGHT FOOT TALL MAN EVERYONE WANTED – ONE WAS A RICH MAN WITH EVERYTHING – EVERYTHING FORGED FORMED TOOLED, WOVEN –DREAMED IN CONCERT WITH THE EARTH-

THE SANDAL MAKER AND THE RICH FARMER ARE DRINKING AT A CROSSROADS TAVERN WHEN KWAN KUNG STEPS INTO THE DOORWAY CHEERILY BELLOWS, GREAT DAY! TODAY I VOLUNTEER TO FIGHT THE YELLOW TURBANS , DIRTY NORTHERNERS! BRING ME WINE! SOMETHING ABOUT THE BIG MAN MAKES EVERYBODY CHEER AND WAVE HIM TO THEIR TABLE.

THE FARMER IS ON HIS FEET AND INVITES KWAN TO SIT AT HIS TABLE WITH THE SANDAL MAKER. THEY LEARN THAT KWAN KUNG WAS LOCKED UP BY HIS PARENTS BROKE THE HOUSE DOWN AND BURNED IT, RUNAWAY INTO A GIRL BEING FORCED TO MARRY BY HER GREEDY FATHER, HE KILLED THE GROOM AND GREEDY FATHER, AND REFUSED THE GIRL’S OFFER OF HERSELF, RAN OVER THE MOUNTAINNS WHERE HIS FACE DARKENED AND EYEBROWS TAKE OFF LIKE BLACK MOTHWINGS- THE THINGS I LEARN FROM THEN TO HERE MAKE ME MAD.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE FARMER AND MY RAGGEDY SELF?” Liu Pei asks. He listens for an answer milking the question for martial content.

Kwan Kung says, “I’M A MAN WHO DRINKS BUT NEVER GETS DRUNK . YOU’RE THE FIRST MEN I’D BE HAPPY TO GET DRUNK WITH.”

Jiang Fei says, “LET’S GO TO MY PLACE. IT’S QUIET THERE. THE PEACHES ARE RIPE. LET’S GO THERE AND DRINK IN THE BREEZE OF SWEETENING PEACHES AND SONG OF MATING BIRDS.”

FCC

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN: WOOD MOY

(photo by Nancy Wong, 1981)

by Frank Chin

Wood has me to dinner and asks me if I have read The Water Margin, when I have not. Like everyone else, I have heard and can’t figure out what The Water Margin is. He’s the only yellow actor to ask about where the Yellow River slows to maze of slow moving smelly marsh of rot and fat and the hideout of the 108 outlaws who displaced the cowardly emperor in the people protected by the outlaws, in Shantung Province.

I read the cartoons of Chinese comic books POW! And ARRRRRGGH! Water Margin and three translations and from the Shapiro trans of Outlaws of the Marsh published by the Chinese Foreign Languages Press- verified by children’s stories. [CONT'D]

Tuesday, December 05, 2017

LA Times Articles by Frank Chin

The following articles (and links) by Frank Chin come from the LA Times. Enjoy:

November 06, 1988

David Henry Hwang is the writerly equivalent of Charlie Chan's Number One Son and Gunga Din ("Hwang's Metamorphosis," by Sylvie Drake, Oct. 30).

The China and Chinese America he writes of in "F.O.B.," "Dance and the Railroad" and "M. Butterfly" are the products of a white racist imagination, not any encounter with the facts or the reality of the warriors whose names and lives he forces into the white racist stereotype of a Chinese culture.

He should not be surprised at the popularity of "M. Butterfly." It's Charlie Chan as the whites originally conceived him. The good Chinese man, the best Chinese man, the manliest Chinese man is an effeminate homosexual.

Hwang always wrote like a white about the Chinese, freely faking it to create racist effects. I, for one, am overjoyed that he at last is giving up playing Joe Papp's Number One Son and writing about "just anybody."

Please, David, now that you have declared yourself white, stay white, write white about whites and get out of town.

FRANK CHIN
Los Angeles


Charlie Chan's Number None Son
January 22, 1989

You had to go out and find Charlie Chan's Number None Son to review my Chinaman work (Douglas Sun reviewing "The Chinaman Pacific & Fresco R.R. Co.") (Book Review, Jan. 1). You'd probably get Gunga Din to review "Gandhi."

Your grad student, George (sic) Sun, writes as if he's grading my paper for Northrup (sic) Frye's junior high English class.

Supposedly Sun is a Chinese-American. Supposedly he is knowledgeable in the literary universe of the Chinese-American literary sensibility, but lo! all his literary touchstones are white! He doesn't know Chinese when he reads it.

In my work, the universals of the civilization founded on religion--Christendom--work with and against the universals of the civilization founded on history--Confuciandom. In Confuciandom, neither tragedy nor autobiography are literary forms. Tragedy and autobiography can only exist in a religious civilization, because they are religious forms. I play with them, but I don't write them. Against the mannerism of autobiography and tragedy and all that Western mysticism that has faked Asia and my history, I play with the universals of the Confucian ethic of private revenge and the ethic of collective revenge on which kingdoms rise and fall and nations come and go, known as the Confucian mandate of heaven.

The Chinese-American fiction Sun prefers seeks only white approval and acceptance; mine is more Chinese and literary in its intent. Like Kwan, the god of fighters and writers, and Monkey, I try to make the difference between the real and the fake.

FRANK CHIN
LOS ANGELES


The Big Mix
February 19, 1989

I was saddened and not surprised to learn Mako has resigned as artistic director of the theater he founded and ran while my kids were born, marriages came and went, the kids graduated high school, college and grad school, went into careers, fell in love and face marriages of their own (Victor Valle's stage article).

Mako stayed with East-West Players and turned down more work than he accepted to pursue content and art in Asian-American theater. There isn't an Asian-American actor or writer of the last 25 years who hasn't grabbed Mako's goodies and run, some to better things, some to nothing. Now seems a good time to thank the man for what he's done and the help he's been.

FRANK CHIN
Los Angeles


'Ornamental Orientals'
December 15, 1991

Carolyn See's investment in the Christian stereotype of the Chinese as misogynist and morally despicable is personal and pathological (Nov. 3 interview with David Wong Louie, whose "Pangs of Love" won the Art Seidenbaum Award for best first fiction).

What she hears from her ornamental Orientals is not any silence being broken, not any Chinese stories being told, but the noise of the same old Pearl Buck, Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan.

She can hear the stories, or read them, or play with them, simply by walking into a Chinatown bookstore--as can any Chinaman who wonders if white people really teach their children sexual roles with "Cinderella," which in some early German versions is the story of a bisexual who does things with three bears, by checking the book out of the library.

Louie deserves whatever awards he gets on his own merits, not because of the company or the enemies See chooses for him. Louie has not fabricated texts of despicable Chinese morality like Maxine Kingston, Amy Tan and Gus Lee; he has not appropriated the names of the heroes or heroines of Chinese fairy tales and children's stories and stuck them onto the white stereotype of Chinese. Nor has he used Chinese fairy tales and stories to inform the intelligence driving his stories.

He neither rides in my gang, nor invites me to choose him out. It's Carolyn See, the demagogue-messiah maker, who saddles him with the Christian stereotypists.

FRANK CHIN
LOS ANGELES

Thursday, November 30, 2017

Remember 1978- the Sunday after Thanksgiving?

Remember when most of Asian-America is proud of Chinese and Japanese mingling in their souls?
Thru Movies & History

The "artists" from another side of Yellow - the Religious Masaoka-Minetta White side of Yellow seem to have the run of the remnants of "the community" There are a few ghosts who communicate with yours truly -I wish they’d speak for themselves - but Yellows have been bred scared for too long. The receptivity to art has gone dud in the American Yellow. What's a Yellow full of his people to do? Sing another man's song loudly? Yell? I'd like to see Yellow art, like a play, be played by different casts across the land at the same time-each perf valid, exciting, controversial in relation to the times should be questioned for shady reasoninng called storytelling.

Yellows of the old country told stories, and had stories told about them, and knew how to tell the diff twixt folk and the official national taught-
'Note that the Masaoka-Minetta -NCRR camp never, never, never tell a children's story from the old country. Never have. Never will. They just don't know themselves. Michi Weglyn come back! Walter, talk to her.

THE JACL STRATEGY Masaoka – via Hosokawa logic seems to be – Japs because of the Yellow race splashed all over them IN SPITE OF being born in the USA – before citizenship, must earn it. (In the Womb?) Only Whites are born or endowed with citizenship. Citizenship is a state approved by Whites. The JACL rejects the Issei and their civ and culture, and declare their clean slate preference for White gods, in an act of surrender of Jap ways and submission to White concentration camps for tests of White racist loyalty. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? WHADDAYA TALK?

How many Yellow films in all the years of Yellow films at the Yellow festivals tell a story of a Yellow male in love with a Yellow female who is in love with the Yellow male? How many of yesterdays Yellows of today show Yellow looks at Chinatowns and J-Towns of Yesterday. How many films like Hayakawa owned Hayworth studio' s THE TONGMAN with Sessue Hayakwa looking like a Tongman of the 20’s. White women in the Midwest swooned in the silent moviehouses. Sighed and swooned. Then Valentino arrived. Then Somerset Maugham hit it lit! Singapore and the Colonizing east Asia makes the movies. THE LETTER, of 1929 with Jeanne Eagels and THE LETTER with. Bette Davis and an ending written to satisfy The Hays Code morals certification of the producers association. MGM- THE GOOD EARTH (1937) opens with a card signed by Irving Thalberg saying this is the first movie approved by the Code- The White racist morals Code. Where does Koreatown come from? The eyes of Code of Hollywood looks down on all Yellows, Down down down ever since.

Now the neglected actors act like the JACL – Moral Instuctors in the, White approved, proper portrayal Yellows before Whites. Yellows are wrong to criticize chickenshit Yellow actors. WHAT DO THE PEOPLE THINK OF ACTORS AND THEATERS THAT SCOLD THE PEOPLE TO BEHAVE MORE LIKABLE TO THE WHITES THAT RESCUE US PEOPLE THINK? “HUH?” A theater that tells the people it speaks to , and for, not to criticize it for fear the Whites might read. So don’t criticize. Don’t publish. AATheater of Tisa Chang and Ken Narasaki and the East West Players are bouquets of prayers to the White Man to Please Shit on Me. Shit on us please! Like St Thaomas Acquinas, Yellows have sinned heavily, naughtily, drunkenly while young and like Acquinas Yellows jumped from Sin into old age and redemption. Yellows that convert to White belief are SAVED! Hallelujah! And the Filps and Tisa Chang, Ken Narasaki, East West Players, and STAR TREK character George Takei demand Yellows confess their sins and the real resisters and journalsts and No-No Boys have no reason to like or obey or attend official AATheater.

A journalist would check the names of people I say are prominent in their community circles, in the Internet. Check my facts about Far Mulan and the Heart Mt Fair Play Committee.
You call yourself Asian or Chinese, at least, or finally. Whose Poon Goo? (Pangu) Mmmmmm?

Ah! You find your way to the children’s stories on your own. The playwright driven to writing fiction meant to be read aloud - by his casts and newspeople, and spokesmen for the Yellow peoples – AAStudies boasts that Frank Chin Is NOT A Part of This Class - Yellow Journalists climb into your brains and deal in hard facts of the real and the emptiness of the fake.

Meantime Minetta has a monument waving the flag of Mike Masaoka as a Civil Right Advocate on US ground reserved for gov approved monuments over the objections of Japanese American scholars. The Sec of Interior, said his friend Menetta assured him the scholars were too young to know what they were talking about, and scolded the scholars and approved the monument sneakily honoring Minetta bro in law, the JACL ‘s Mike Masaoka. The JACL and Mike Masaoka are officially accepted as American heroes because they stand on ground designated as sacred to the nation: hallowed ground. What about monuments on private ground like headstones? Exactly. Who owns the land. Who erects a monument on their own land like a Bob’s Big Boy statue in front of Bob’s Big Boy, And verily! Verily! Maxine Hong Kingston’s THE WOMAN WARRIOR is taught across the grade school of America as the truth.

Why are JACL - George Takei’s trust the intent of the USA and Mad Max’s Woman Warrior truth the same? BY ORDER OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

Verily! Verily! Pres candidate Trump compares Muslims in America and Japanese and say treat the Muslims the same Roosevelt Executive Orders the Japs into a program of ten concentration camps in states with swamps and deserts, from California to Arkansas. Arkansas has two camps of ten thousand souls each. Blaine and Rohwer. George Takei was five years old in Rohwer, Arkansas. The Japanese family traveling from farm to farm in Arkansas in Cynthia Kadohata’s THE FLOATING WORLD, is in a world with no memory of Blaine or Rohwer or where the Nisei mother preferred the company of a White man. White critics oooooh! And Ahhhh! Over the selective vision of Yellow self.

Alan Lomax traces the folksong, THE STATE OF ARKANSAS- to a wave of “Irish migratory workers who come to Arkansas in the early days of statehood, looking for a job. Having endured ‘swamp angels, canebrakes, chills and corn-dodgers as hard as any rock’ for a month, he escaped back into America and went on his way spreading his ‘ant-Arkansas’ propaganda.”

The song opens:

My name is Stamford Barnes, I come from Nobleville town./
I’ve travelled this wide world over, I’ve travelled this wild world round;/
I’ve met with ups and downs in life, and better days I’ve saw/
But I never knew what mis’ry were; till I came to Arkansas.

The last three verses:

I worked six weeks for this son-of-a-gun, Jesse Herring was his name,/
He was six foot seven in his stocking feet and taller than any crane,/
His hair hung down like rat tails on hos long lantern jaw,/
He was the photograph of all the gents who lived in Arkansas.
He fed me on corn dodgers, as hard as any rock,/
Till my teeth began to loosen and my knees began to knock,/
I got so thin on sassafras tea, I could hide behind the straw/
And indeed I was a different man, when I left old Arkansas.
Farewell to swamp-angels, canebrakes and chills/
Farewell to sage and sassafas and corn dodger pills,/
If I ever see this land again, I’ll give to you my paw,/
It will be through a telescope – FROM HERE TO/
ARKANSAS. Owooo!/
Hear that wolf?

FCC

Monday, October 30, 2017

Frank Chin Legacy Event This Thursay -- Here's More Info!

Dear Readers,

I (Eddie) was sent more detailed information for this Thursday's event.  You're all invited to come and it's free!  Don't miss it:


TCG and UCSB to Host Screening Event to Honor

Frank Chin, Founder of the Asian American Theater Company

New York, NY - Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), are proud to announce a screening event to honor Frank Chin, founder of the Asian American Theater Company, as part of the Legacy Leaders of Color Video Project (LLCVP).  The free event will be held at 2pm on Thursday, November 2nd, at the Multicultural Center at UCSB, 494 UCEN Rd, Isla Vista, and include a screening of Chin’s LLCVP video, and readings from his plays.

“Frank Chin’s unflinching voice and fearless championing of authentic Asian/Pacific Islander (API) images deserves celebration,” said Emilya Cachapero, director of artistic and international programs, TCG. “Along with his fellow visionaries Mako, founder of East West Players in Los Angeles, and Tisa Chang, founder and artistic director of Pan Asian Repertory Theatre in New York City, Chin is a cornerstone of today’s robust API theatre community. Although Frank founded AATC primarily as a writer’s theatre, there are scores of producers, actors, directors and designers who developed their artistic voice there and benefitted from the sense of community. All of our paths were positively altered by his work and we are forever indebted to him.”

“UC Santa Barbara is pleased to host the Frank Chin Legacy Event,” said Professor Carlos Morton of the Theater and Dance Department. “Chin is not only a graduate of UCSB, but the Davidson Library holds his papers in its Special Collections.”  The campus sponsors include: The Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative; Division of Humanities and Fine Arts; Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor; Office of the Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Academic Policy; Asian American Studies, Davidson Library, and the Department of Theater and Dance.

TCG created the LLCVP over a two-year period. With support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation to work with video production company MOPED, TCG filmed a series of interviews chronicling the stories of founding leaders of theatre of color, including Douglas Turner Ward. Screening events will be held in the leaders’ communities to further celebrate their legacies and galvanize support for their enduring impact.

The nine leaders featured in the videos are: Lou Bellamy, Penumbra Theatre, St Paul, MN; Tisa Chang, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, New York, NY; Frank Chin, Asian American Theater Company, San Francisco, CA; Miriam Colón, Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, New York, NY; Woodie King, Jr., New Federal Theatre, New York, NY; Muriel Miguel, Spiderwoman Theater, New York, NY; Jackie Taylor, Black Ensemble Theater, Chicago, IL; Luis Valdez, El Teatro Campesino, San Juan Baptista, CA; and Douglas Turner Ward, Negro Ensemble Company, New York, NY. 

“Our theatre field and broader culture owe an enormous debt to the artistry and activism of these extraordinary leaders,” said Teresa Eyring, executive director, TCG. “We hope these videos and screening events not only honor these nine leaders, but raise awareness more broadly of the essential role played by theatres of color in our field. As more and more theatres make equity, diversity, and inclusion central to their work, we must remember the theatres that have been working with artists and communities of color for generations.”

The Legacy Leaders of Color Video Project is one of the key elements of TCG's Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Initiative’s “Establishing a Baseline” programming, which also includes REPRESENT, a demographic survey that thinks outside the checkbox, and The Well, a hub of EDI-related resources.“Establishing a Baseline” programming received Phase I and Phase II support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s (DDCF’s) Fund for National Projects.

Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Program Director for the Arts Maurine Knighton said, “Each of the nine leaders whom TCG has interviewed has made tremendous contributions to the American theatrical canon. We are confident that by capturing their firsthand accounts and addressing the under-documentation of their work, this project can greatly encourage current and future theater-makers creating pioneering work that expands the community of theater.”

The mission of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF) is to improve the quality of people's lives through grants supporting the performing arts, environmental conservation, medical research and child well-being, and through preservation of the cultural and environmental legacy of Doris Duke's properties. The Arts Program of DDCF focuses its support on contemporary dance, jazz and theater artists, and the organizations that nurture, present and produce them. For more information, please visit www.ddcf.org.

MOPED is a full-service digital media and video production company that intersects stories that matter with technology — to catalyze conversation, mobilize audiences and drive impact both on and offline. We help you achieve heightened visibility, audience understanding and greater success, by developing your story as a vehicle, and then leveraging the platforms you’ll use to share it with the world. http://mopedproductions.tv/.

For over 55 years, Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for U.S. theatre, has existed to strengthen, nurture, and promote the professional not-for-profit theatre. TCG’s constituency has grown from a handful of groundbreaking theatres to over 700 member theatres and affiliate organizations and more than 12,000 individuals nationwide. TCG offers its members networking and knowledge-building opportunities through conferences, events, research, and communications; awards grants, approximately $2 million per year, to theatre companies and individual artists; advocates on the federal level; and through the Global Theater Initiative, TCG's partnership with the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, serves as the U.S. Center of the International Theatre Institute. TCG is North America’s largest independent publisher of dramatic literature, with 15 Pulitzer Prizes for Best Play on the TCG booklist. It also publishes the award-winning American Theatre magazine and ARTSEARCH®, the essential source for a career in the arts. In all of its endeavors, TCG seeks to increase the organizational efficiency of its Member Theatres, cultivate and celebrate the artistic talent and achievements of the field, and promote a larger public understanding of, and appreciation for, the theatre. www.tcg.org.

# # #

Monday, October 16, 2017

Frank Chin Legacy Event!

When:

Thursday, November 2nd at 2:00PM-4:00PM

Where:

Multicultural Center, UCSB,
494 UCEN Rd,
Isla Vista, CA 93106

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Calvin McMillin

SCREENING of Frank Chin Legacy Video (trailer here)

SYMPOSIUM - “Relevance of Chin’s Work in American Drama” (Moderator: Carlos Morton) Participants: Professors Diane Fujino, Calvin McMillin, David Hur.

STAGED READING of Chin’s Work - Year of the Dragon / Chickencoop Chinaman

Friday, June 09, 2017

Do Not Sell Your Children to Monsters

(picture by Corky Lee)

Chinese writer does the coast and takes on icons
By Frank Chin, March 23, 1995

My first novel is in the bookstores. My name and, here and there, my picture pop up in newspaper book reviews and Asian-American weeklies. “Are you famous?” Sam asks. What is fame to a five-year-old kid? How am I, the almighty daddyisimo, to explain it to my son? Someday he’s going to leave home—for college, or to go to war, or take a job, or marry a woman out of state or on the moon. If he grows up thinking I'm famous, he might not want to go. (Cont'd)

Monday, April 03, 2017

REAL & FAKE ASIAN AMERICAN ARTISTS & WRITERS ON ART – WHITE RACISM & ASIAN AMERICA - WHO IS T. L. YANG?

[The following was written on April 1st:]

TODAY IS APRIL FOOLʼS DAY

FRISCO AND THE ORNAMENTAL ORIENTAL POP POPULATION OF CHNATOWNS AROUND FRISCO PUSH KINGSTON AND WIN ACCEPTANCE OF THEIR SUPERIOR WHITES- AND PUSH ON - KINGSTON SPEAKS THE WHITE FEMINIST TRUTH – LISTEN UP YOU YELLOWS! – AND YELLOW WOMEN LISTEN AND REPEAT. YES! YELLOW WOMEN ARE ANTI-MALE FEMINISMO!

IN 1988 KINGSTON BOASTS TO KAY BONETTI, OF FAKING MULAN AS “AGGRESSIVE STORYTELLING” against what she never specifies. WINK! WINK! BETWEEN US WOMEN. SHE STOLE THE TATTOOS OFF THE BACK OF YUE FEI, A MAN WHO LIVES 600 YEARS AFTER THE BALLAD OF MULAN IS PUBLISHED.

Frank Chin proposes a storytellers storytelling for children. A flurry of what is he after? Iʼm after the Yellow stories you tell Yellow Storyteller. I tell three stories from the Yellow book of I00 folk (childrenʼs) stories. The 3 stories will make the listener proof against being fooled by a fake Yellow childrenʼs story that emerges in the Heroic Tradition (the promotion of opera to folk literature. Reading leads me to say the Heroic Tradition is the literary equal of the Bible, The Torah, the Koran.

WHAT? NO! No ! resounds from AsianAmericanStudies coast to coast, border to border.

AND SURPRISE - SURPRISE EVERY YELLOW WRITER AND SCHOLAR – PSYCHOANALIZES ME, SOCIOLOGICALLY SCANS ME, AND JUDGES ME A CHINESE MISOGYNIST, THROWS ME OUT OF THE OFFICIAL CURRICULA OF AASTUDIES. AND KINGSTON IS THE CHINATOWN TRUTH. SHE AND THE YELLOW FEMINISMO LIT PERSUADES PRES CLINTON AND PRES OBAMA INTO GIVING KINGSTON THE UNITED ST A TES PRESIDENTS MEDAL OF HUMANITIES AND ART, FOR TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT CHINATOWN, SAN FRANCO, USA. Kay Bonetti and Maxine Hong Kingston, sing it! DING! DING! THE San Francisco treat!

ANTI-YELLOW WHITE RACISM IS OFFICIAL US POLICY – DING! DING! “KINGSTON SAYS” REPLACES WRITTEN CHINESE HISTORY & LANGUAGE IN US LIBRARIES & UNIVERSITIES
CELEBRATE! CELEBRATE ! LET ME TELLYA FACE TO FACE WHAT I THINK!

HOW ʻBOUT IT, OAKLAND?


From: Ishmael Reed
Subject: till painting controversy
Date: March 26, 2017 12:02:13 PM PDT

To: Frank Chin
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/opinion/the-emmett-till-painting.html?_r=0
Emmett Till controversy. Your piece is up at Konch, ishmaelreedpub.com

I hv no control over oakland fair. gentrifiers run it. i don't show up unless i am paid.IR


To the Editor:

Re “Painting of Emmett Till Draws Protests” (Arts pages, March 22):

It is far more important to hang a painting of Emmett Tillʼs body beaten and killed by a mob of white men — even though painted by a white artist — than to show nothing at all of this racial crime, which occurred in Mississippi in 1955. What are the alternative paintings these protesting artists offer?

Better to get busy and paint one themselves than advocate the removal of this one.

Do we want to deepen the divisions among us or face and accept our responsibility for whatever part we have played in our countryʼs history of racial violence?
And destroy this painting, as one of the artists suggests? I never thought that I would see the day when any artist advocated censorship of any kind.

MARY MCLEOD, ST. PAUL



HONG KONG 97 – Remember?

TIA LING YANG is retired from the Chief Justice of the Hong Kong Supreme Court, given up his British citizenship, his British “Sir” at the Queens head of his name, to mountainstop of the University of Hong Kong, In 1995, JOINT PUBLISHING (H.K.) CO. LTD.

He begins his preface with a childhood memory of visiting Yue Feiʼs tomb, stopping outside to piss on the stone statues of the couple in charge of Yue Feiʼs jail and jailhouse murder. He began translating Qian Cai, a writer of the Qing Dynasty, who writes a history-fiction of General Yue Fei of the Southern Song Dynasty. Heʼs lived the life of a Chinese in Hong Kong and lawyered from the long day of British Colony, to 1997, till the big day, glossy heavy paper covers and new printing of Chinese women and girls pulling up their shirts and revealing all. Hong Kong mags toward the 1997 show and flash tit and oooh coochie coo. Chinatown liquor stores fill up with Chinamen at the mag racks. T.L.Yang runs for the Hong Kong Executive, allowed by a vote of Communists on the mainland. He does surprisingly well in the rigged election. The former Chief Justice of the Hong Kong Supreme Court (and the first Chinese on the all WHITE Court. The only English “Sir” to say in a dignified insulting way to the Queenʼs son, “take your Sir and stuff it.” There were Chinese that know their Chinese lit, who liked what they heard. T.L. Yang devoted his life to Hong Kong works within the system in power, pushes it as far as he can, and now eyed by the Mainland Commies, he graciously retires to the woods and mountains. Self-styled Yellow professors of Yellow culture in Australia and New Zealand and Singapore tell me the translator of GENERAL YUE FEI is a former CHIEF JUSTICE and doesn't see just anybody. / Fuck them. The fakes. The Yellow professors donʼt know the Chinese childrenʼs story is always told from the pov of a semi-stupid, who lets a wolf talk him into dumping the books, and filling the bag with the wolf. After getting past the Imperial wolf hunters, the wolf tells the semi-stupid, heʼs going be eaten, because the wolf got hungry in the bag. Thatʼs not fair! Cries semi-stupid. Ask anyone, the wolf protests. The wolf chooses three characters- in this case, an apricot tree, a blown horse, and a drunken monk. Two say itʼs more than fair for the wolf to eat the semi-stupid. The third doesnʼt understand a thing and backtracks, step by step to Stupid meeting the snake, tying the snake in the bag, and leaving. The story is structured to teach strategy. How do you get along, on the road.

Aesop and the Greeks and Romans tell stories in the voice of authority. Do what the Big I says, or die! Thatʼs THE BOY WHO CRIED WOLF.

The Chinese wolf story teaches self-reliance. Aesop teaches obedience.

The Japanese KAGUYA HIME (Princess of the Moon) Kaguya Hime, learns to tell the difference between, playboys who have never laid eyes on the Kaguya Hime, but plead undying love for her beauty. The playboys threated Kaguya Himeʼs “parents.” They find her , abandon by her Father, the Moon, inside a node of bamboo. The father asks Kaguya Hime to at least meet the playboys. She will meet the playboy who goes to a land of story and return with an item myth that has been seen by humans. Five fantastic, wonderful tales. The Buddhas bowl does not glow in the dark. The unburnable Chinese Fire Rat burns up. The gold branch with twigs of silver and fruit of precious stones turns out not to be natural but manufactured by unpaid jewelers.

The King of Japan hears of Kaguya Hime. He must meet every citizen of his kingdom. He commands she be available to him on such and such a date and time. She obeys because he is the King. He commands she marry him. Sheʼll obey because he is the King, but once married, she will begin to fade. He takes his command back. He begs her not to tade.

A period of normal get acquainted though and exchange of letters poems, jokes, visits, till August 15th and the Harvest Moon. Moon comes to take his daughter back to the moon-

The old man writes the King. The King sends his Samurai, his owls to fly the night, but nothing stops the Moon.

The Moon rises. Kaguya Hime is drawn out of her room and walks on moonbeams. She asks permission to say goodbye.

The old folks that raised Kaguya Hime, protest. The Moon tells them to shut up, the Moon made them rich with silver and gold and jewels for loyal servants.

The childless couple raised Kaguya Him with love – the Moonʼs love was gold and silver for the old folks to hire servants.

Kaguya Hime drinks one half of the elixer of life that restores her immortality. She asks to give half the elixir to her parents. They can live forever on the moon with her. The Moon says no. She gives her parents a kimono from the moon.

She secrets the remaining half in a letter to the King and leaves the earth.

If the King takes the elixir of life he can go to the moon and be with his love forever. But he canʼt leave Japan. The King is the soul of Japan. Kaguya Hime is a princess of the moon. She is the soul of the Moon.

The King orders the letter and elixir be taken to the top of Mt. Fujii and burned.

The story ends with direct talk to the reader: When viewing Fujii – squint a little – if the light is right you will see a thin wisp white smoke rising from the top of Mt. Fujii to the Moon.

Every people has a story a phrase a way of saying that assures the sense of the people stays the same.

HONG KONG elects a woman – she emphasizes sheʼs for the One China two systems – Young Hong Kong voted electors who the Mainland Commies rejected- so Mainland rigged elections – Is there in Chinese history a band of patriots who raise a mass revolt against foreign oppression?

I hope the Kingston Frisco-Oakland slander of Mulan and the trashing of all the Chinese women generals is worth it to San Francisco-Oakland, the Chronicle and KRON Kingston and Amy Tan and David Henry Hwang and all the Ornamental Orientals hating themselves ornamentally on the Whitemans walls. You can come down off the 19th century now, you're dry.

As you watch Hong Kong, Singapore, S Korea, Japan , N Korea swing and sway to Asian music, does your attention stray to the sweet White men out Whiting each other?

TRUMP GLEEFULLY BRAGS HEʼS WHITE AND HEʼS RIGHT! WHITE MEN OF THE WORLD UNITE! WHITES RULE THE WORLD! Coloreds of the world, US Citizenship for sale! You get the Citizenship you pay Trump for. All Trump Whites brag about how they're going to screw the coloreds and the poor white rejects, by making them pay rent for citizenship. Trump does not have my American born consent to rule me. Where I come from, a fact is a fact; a spade is a spade. A Trump is a trump.

The remaining decent whites who care must do something to define their Whiteness as moreknowledgeable of the American people than the White racists. They have to demonstrate they know as much about colored core culture, as the coloreds know about the White man.

The Last Days oof the Republic, by P.W. Dooner ends in 1976, with the horror White women fucking Yellow scum like crazy!

Letʼs say Trump is as crazy White racist as New Yorker writer Jane Mayer says on Rachel Maddow tonight, and he believes there is no White racism, there is only Black racism against Whites, he knows, because the Bible tells him so.

White women have married the whole rainbow of colored men, resulting in half- coloreds.

Hagfish McCorrmec- Goggleyed suckermouth scavengerfish suckind old death out of the dead on every suck of every suckered word of old Kentucky water. His Ornamental Oriental wife is a Han Chinese who believes the wife assumes the race of her hagfish husband, Women of North China, the Mongol tribes following the moods of seasonal desert plains, and mix of tribe and Chinese of the Korean peninsula, where women were the equal of men, in managing wealth&family –
Look at the Korean story:

NUR WAW: WHERE OF WHERE HAVE ALL ME CHILDREN GONE? WHERE OF WHERE CAN THEY BE? . Their mommies and daddies teach then Yellow from the White Manʼs Holy of Hollies, and so the children are. And so they are.

CLICK! CLICK! CLICK! Kim jong un says in his N Korean dialect-TRUMP TO CHINA – NIXON TO CHINA AGAIN? - CHINA SAYS HANDS OFF S. CHINA SEAS - KINGSTON AND FRISCO AND ANT-YELLOW “CHINATTOWN AND CHINAMEN – Golly gee the Yellows under the blankets say! What's next? IN THE YEARS SINCE 1975 DID A YELLOW FAN TURN ON THEIR TAPE RECORDER AND DIAL OCA THE ORG OF CHNESE AMERICANS IN WASHINGTON DC, GET THE TONE OF THE VOICE ANSWERING, ANNOUNCE YOURSELF AS A STUDENT OR JOURNALIST - DO YOU MIND IF I RECORD THIS CALL? – IF YES OR NO IS THE ANSWER – THE ANSWER IS GOOD- Why?

Ah so! Yankee Trump! You are sooprise I know your daring Clinton-Obama sneak attack on Chinese FarMulan! I was add-jucat-ed at You See Yell Aay.

Whatʼcha gonna say White Man Trump? Whatʼcha you gonna deal, thatʼs real? Hmmmmm?

NINA FILIPINA OF THE COOP- IʼM colorful, collectable, Iʼm DELECTABLE,

The proof Whites canʼt stand the Yellows – as stealing the misery of the Jews, who were suffering the death camps in Europe at the same time the Japs and Yellows of the White America. Yellows donʼt count because theyʼre not White. The symbol of Yellow dignity acceptable to Hollywood is Charlie Chan. White scholars whoʼve spent all their lives living with Yellows whoʼve spent all their lives living with Whites and Yellows, have never become aware of the contents of the Yellows culture.

Hollywood and White newspapers over San Francisco-Oakland pushed Yellow contempt and neglect, and sobbed over the more numerous and continuous psychological damage of the Nazi campaign of Jewish eradication.

There was an official library in San Francisco. It had two librarians. One White. One Yellow. The Yellow had been in a camp. He read. He wrote. The White Librarian, read the Yellow work and advised. The White also wrote for specialty mags for connoisseurs of detective fiction. He is proud of San Francisco and his close eye on passages from HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY and a Chan novel where Chan admits he has become a Christian and thrown off Chinese ways, but so and so is unredeemed, he has remained (ugh) Chinese!

He corrected my GUNGA DIN HIGHWAY and doesnʼt realize my Charlie Chan quotes the White manʼs stupidity. The Yellow librarianʼs work is published but largely unread by Yellows.

The Yellows have no art! Yellow art is newly invented. No past, beyond Hollywood, and the JACL myth that Masoaka wisely lied to his people to save them from mobs of angry Whites, and wisely lied about the Nisei in camp that knew Masaoka and his JACL betrayed the Nisei into camp against their will.

The study of Sociology is different for the Jews of Germany and the Japs and Yellows of America . For the Yellows Sociology, Antrhropology,Psychiatry is White indoctrination. For the Jews of Germany Sociology is observation, discussion, cumulative facts understanding

Jewish studies of the psycho state of the Jews- notice the children of Jews suffer from the effects of 1932 - 1944- They turn their eye on Bettina Goering, great grand neice of Herman Goering, Hitlerʼs no two, in the Jewish Holocaust. She has her uterus removed to prevent the birth of another Goering with her face. There are others, Hoess who goes to the camp run by his grandfather and faces the grandchildren of Jews his gramps murdered.

Auschwitz is a camp whose ground is hallowed by the lives of Jews. Heart Mountwain Wyoing is run by the same Dept of Interior that ran the WRA during the WWII, with the same racist rules and affection for Masaoka-Minettaʼs JACL versions of history. Not at all interested in the people that occupied Heart Mountain. All gov words played to ears of White racists and Ornamental Orientals.

Just a coincidence that 1957 the same year Bettina Goering is born, the JapAmericans, stumble on John Okadaʼs NO-NO BOY that leads to the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee. The Yellow psychiatrists say the new found is a pack of lies. Forget the names , dignify the JACL lies of Masaoka, Hosokawa, and Masaokaʼs bro in law, Norman Minettaʼs generation of Yellow chickens in city and state and national office. Appointed, of course.

WAYNE WANG, from Hong Kong, insists his stupid CHAN IS MISSING is just the beginners film likely to satisfy the White racists of San Franciscoʼs Cameron House. He buys the Hollywood myth, to “work for change from the inside.” The JACL and Cameron House are accused of fabricating lies about the Yellows designed to accomplish their self-eradication from the White manʼs earth. Yellows of my generation say with a voice of nobility, “Iʼm working for change from the inside.” Spoken like a disciple of Reinhardt Heydrich. Why does the Nisei vet convinced he was wrong to condemn the resisters, when he was young, say one of the reasons he volunteered was “civil rights” werenʼt invented yet. Hirabayashi- Yasui, and the Fair Play Committee, and the 264 resisters of 1944 were all civil rights cases. Why the hangdog, I didnʼt know any better self-flagellation, and insistence on taking over the interview with leading questions? He turns every interview with a resister or No-No boy, into their scolding him.

Cameron House dominates what has become the Hollywood stereotype of the Yellow as a defective White sycophant. He tries so hard, but tsk tsk just canʼt climb out of the gooey Yellow his (ick) lack of a so.

All this Me not them. Me new. ME. ME! ME! Leads to the generation of Yellow fame junkies. Yellow fame among Whites that is.

Yellows donʼt read nothing! Yellows compete for White eyes. There are no Yellow causes left alive for Yellow artists to emerge from. So some Yellows assert their Yellowness by identifying with a local , but otherwise unexplained, colored cause. Real Yellows join the Black Panthers. Or the escape of Latin America across the border with Mexico. Other peoples causes say Yellows are nothing and never were.

George Takei as the embodiment of the Fame Junkie- rises from a tv character , SULU, OF STAR TREK through every form of attention-getting FAME –to the state of being the only famous Yellow in the White press and media. See him August 30, 2017 - he appears at the Smithsonian associate the Los Angeles JapaneseAmericanNationalMuseum, now run by te Japanese gov, pushing George Takeiʼs personal fake history ALLEGIANCE written and acted by know- nothing Filipinos, suckered by George Takeiʼs machine voice.


VINCENT VAN GOGH & ROGER SHIMOMURA




In 1888 Van Gogh shaves his head to emulate THE APPEARANCE OF A BUDDHIST MONK- or Bonza. He writes his sister Will that represented himself as Japanese. He has never been to Japan. Trade with Christian nations was forbidden in Japan. The Tokugawa Shogunate brings 200 years without war. The same 200 years sees Europe riven by an average of 150 years of solid war. Keeping the White Christians out is the smart thing to do. Trade with the all business no religion Dutch from whom not a Christian word is heard, makes good sense to Japan. The west taking from the primitive East with eyes and no brain is as offensive and Roger Shimomura using all the colors and techniques of Western takeover of Japanese Ukiyo-E to paint the world as a boy imagines his grandmother sees it.

He clings to the Masaoka myth of JACL by Bill Hosokawa of the JACL in face of the facts of the JACL betrayal. He creates and recreates images inspired by and forced by his belief in his childhood. Today Whites and Ornamental Orientals embrace him, and the people of Seattle are trembling in White racist fear. How else does one explain the defense of Yellow manhood by repeating the lies of the White Bone Demon?

He occupies an insistence on his childhood as seen by his grandmother- in 1942- 44- a combo of the expereincial real and wishful thinking in art. Heʼs stayed constant to changes in the White world . Heʼs a comment on White ego over colored peoples art, as primitive and backward, and is unaware of the behaviour modification programs hidden as Yellow Social Sciences. Or is he? He forces the Yellows who know the JapCamps to argue their beliefs. No other Japanese American painter keeps the Camp Years live into now.

The Japanese American artist of today accepts White racism and seeks White publication.

White acceptance as a mature JapAmerican writer is achieved in 1980 by Cynthia Kadohata, author of THE FLOATING WORLD, a JapAmerican author who says,”There is art. And there is activism. I write art.” Her vision of “art” is JapaneseAmerican history, without anything, or anyone Japanese. Her translation of Ukiyo-E is sheʼs paid by White publishers for “illusory Japanese”

The yielding of Japanese-America to the Gov of Japan is wrong. Japan still does not have a free press. Art is controlled, parceled out and fake, compared to the freedom artists have in America. Thanks to the Bill of Rights, artists and say and publish any crackpot idea they can say outloud or print. Shakespeare and the American and French Revolutions, and the writing of Thomas Paine (The Rights of Man) and Mary Wolstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792 ) A thousand years after The Ballad of Mulan starts girls thinking for themselves, reading strategy, choosing their men, and raising families that fight imposed national authority over their land . Liang Hongyu, and Mu Guying in the Song Dynasty before the takeover of China by Kublai Khan in 1271 and the amazingly short hundred year Mongol Yuan Dynasty, and Chin Liangyuk escape to Schezwan before the fall of the Ming to the “foreign” Manchu in 1566. The historical and poetic reality of the Four Beauties of China, against the historical and poetic stereotypes.

Mary Wolstonecraftʼs daughter is Mary Shelly the poetʼs wife, who authors FRANKENSTEIN.

There is no Kwan Kung inside the Wing Luke Museum, inspired by Ruby Chowʼs vision of Chinatown political participation in the White manʼs system. A vision violated by Ron Chew, a believer his fake degree in Journalism from UW, makes his every utterance in his fake newspaper the International Examiner, the printed truth, backed by Ruby Chowʼs Filipino enemy Bob Santos founder of Inter*Im, who wants to turn Chinatown-NihonMachi into the town dump for social rejects, and backs Ron Chew as the most knowledgable about Chinatown history perfect for the founder director of the Wing Luke Museum.

Interim housing agency becomes the permanent not “interim” source of Bob Santo’s power in Chinatown-NihonMachi. Ron Chew’d lies hokum self-pity and plain anf simple shit that make the “International District – Chinatown” what it is today.

If youʼve read me at all, you know the absence of Kwan Kung, is the withholding of the Chow familyʼs protection of this building and itʼs contents.

Theyʼve voted in the two system one Hong Kong and the Mainland humiliated the disallowed Hong Kong interpretation of the Mainland one interpretation of the two systems.

Your interpretation of Whatʼs what, in Japanese America and Chinese-America and mine. Letʼs see what happens to San Francisco-Oakland and the JACL and Clinton and Obamaʼs rep for being fooled by Maxine Hong Kingstonʼs contempt for Far Mulan? And I canʼt wait for AAStudies Depts around the Great American Uʼs folding and leaving campus in shame.

Why did the Chinese scholars leave the discovery of Mei Lanfangʼs 1930ʼs world tour of his Peking Opera , being a front for purchasing modern warplanes for China where ever he hobnobbed with celebs and stars? Why am I the only Chinaman to see the obvious? It takes an artist to recognize an artist. I write Tia Ling Yang at the U of Hong Kong, requesting an interview and send him a copy of DONALD DUK. He writes back, by hand, saying heʼs retired to the mountain. He thanks me for my book.

FCC

Wednesday, March 01, 2017

SEATTLE IS MY PARIS

by Frank Chin

PARIS 1905-1930- ARTISTS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD (EVEN CHINA & JAPAN- ) FLOCK TO PARIS TO GET OVER THE WARS-GET ACQUAINTED WITH SOMETHING NEW TO REFRESH THE SENSES-

ARTISTS OF DIFFERENT BELIEFS MINGLED AND CAST KNOWING GLARES AND PASSED CIVILLY WITH ART FROM CAFÉ TO CAFÉ TO THE MONTMARTRE WHERE THEY LIVED AND WORKED. THE ARTISTS FOUND GERTRUDE STEIN, AND WRITERS FOUND SHAKESPEARE & COMPANY and SYLVIA BEACH – who risked her bookshop to publish James Joyce’s ULYESSES.

Berkeley in 1958 was the Paris I’d read about since I was 14 years old. Wardess Taylor was in Berkeley. Writers. Artists. UC Bookstore displayed castings of The Little Dancer by Degas in their big window on Telegraph. Down Telegraph, walking away from Sather Gate, the entrance and exit from the UC campus, cross Bancroft Way to Als Smoleshop on the Bayside corner and I forget on the other hillside corner. A block of class pricey restrataunts , clothing stores, designer mass produced art and and artifacts, and further down Telegraph toward Oakland, coffeehouses, Mexican restaurants, and the Cinema-Guild dual theater- owned by Pauline Kael and showing the Janus series of movies from Europe, Mexico, Japan. The Lundberg’s for music and musicians. San Francisco North Beach-Chinatown for flamenco guitar spreading from Spaniards to the street kids. Jackson Burgess admitted me, a freshman into his grad fiction writing class of 12 that included Henry Park missionary’s son raised in Ethiopia, Fred Haines, a Navy vet, who published his fiction in tit mags, avaiable at Al’s Smokeshop , xxx another vet and an actor in the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop, who was a hit in his pretty boy role in Edward Albee’s THE SANDBOX. What was the actor’s name? He and Fred were the real working writer and actor in the first showing of a play by Edward Albee. He wrote me after I published my collection of short stories. He had a bookstore around Palo Alto, Stanford University way. Maybe it’s better I forget his name. If he committed suicide, I don’t want to touch him. If what I last hear is false, I’m sorry. The loss of any talent hurts all art. Fred Haines, won an Oscar Nomination, for writing James Joyce’s ULYSSES for the movies. And directed his script for the movie of Herman Hesse’s STEPPENWOLF that starred Max Von Sydow, the mythic knight who plays chess with Death in Igmar Bergman’s THE SEVENTH SEAL. Seventh Seal: a reference to Revelations in the Bible. Another book I had to read or be stupid in an unknown world. But Berkeley was where old books old art come to be revered in safety.

I’m tuning my computer to docs of Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s Paris and see I don’t know WWI, 1914-1918, as well as I should.

I’m too old to not know the immediate past I face. There are no fellow Yellows on the tube, I turn away from Johm Wyane in THE SEARCHERS and more and more to the soothing believable acting of Alec Guiness as Smiley in a script by John LeCarre.

BOB FERGUSON Attoney General OF WASHINGTON –CHALLENGES TRUMP’S EXECUTIVE ORDER AGAINST IMMIGRATION from 7 MUSLIM COUNTRIES- EO 9066 is mentioned a lot.

No one notices the Japs are the only oft mentioned minority, not to show. Bu† we know different, don’t we, dear Reader? Don’t we?

What’s the difference between NiseiJaps and Whites? The Nisei serve the White man. The Chinese-Americans checked their identity at the door of the White world. They were no longer Chinese, but looked Chinese. They are Ornamental Orientals. As loyal as homedogs. All they know of Chinese comes from White Hollywood storytellers and Hollywood Ornamental Orientals in the movies and tv and teachers in the news of now.

My body’s shutting down, fuses blown, feelings fuzzing out. I’m not going to see my plays done right. I’m looking for the Yellows as smart as Paris before the Depression hit in 1929. We never had Paris. My Paris was Berkeley where Yellows disliked fellow Yellows and hissed at Yellows. The streets of Berkeley were walked by writers that win Oscar Nominations, for adapting James Joyce’s ULYSSES for the movies. The English Dept is run by Mark Schorer, glittering biographer of Sinclair Lewis, who writes novels celebrating a stiffening conformity that drives Hemingway and Dos Passos and Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein to Paris. Schorer’s book is interesting. He says he is writing about a writer he doesn’t like, but he admires Sinclair Lewis, writing

In 1930, Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer from the United States to receive the award, after he had been nominated by Henrik Schück, member of the Swedish Academy. In the Academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In his Nobel Lecture, Lewis praised Theordore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and other contemporaries, but also lamented that "in America most of us— not readers alone, but even writers—are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues," and that America is "the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today." He also offered a profound criticism of the American literary establishment: "Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Certainly, Henry Miller would approve of writerly activism for truth. In Paris, Henry Miller writes about American bread and bread products lacking of taste, flavor or texture . All the identifying characteristics of bread’s identity as bread, and what violence has to be done, to give it taste, campared to real bread baked in Paris. Smartmouth Kate Coleman, used to come smash down at the Med for an expresso. She gets a reporters job at NEWSWEEK and calls Hubert Humnphry a war monger, she writes it, reports it to NEWSWEEK they print it and she’s fired. I’m in the Med when I read NEWSWEEK. It’s warm in the high ceilinged coffee house. Fog has turned to floating rain. The insides of the large windows are fogged. The Med is a clean well lighted place.

The disappearence of Brueners Xmas Window with the electric trains running around a tiny town, of toy houses, and three story hotels, and lights in every tiny window around a giant Xmas tree, and shiney presents. The disappearence of movies at the Paramount Theater. The disappearence of one block long and one block wide Houswives Market. The Whites of Oakland boarded up their relics of the past and left town. The walk from Bruener’s down Telegraph to Broadway DeLaurer’s Books and Magazines, the crosstreet street of used books and documents, like letters with a President’s signature, and photos signed by Gen Douglas MacArthur, through the soldiers and sailors in civvies crowding the two blocks of Entertainment Centers with open storefronts showing movie machines. Oakland –Alameda was famous for glimpses of Roberta Pedron, star of the movie machines walking with her beautiful tits. Enough to make a boy faint. Every walk to Chinatown used to be a walk with the clowns freaks and fleas of the whole Oakland circus, from Bruener’s Furniture to Chinatown to Jack London Square and the mixed waters of the Alameda estuary. Chinatown says it’s dying. The grocery stores in the new Chinatown after the Vietnam War by Clinton Park have already moved to greener pastures, with larger parking lots.

Those are the happy memories I rmmember now and then to keep fresh but the wounds I’ve taken like a man, and the wrongs I have buried are the only fresh memories unremembered, I’m into an age beyond Chinese lifetime. Nothing to do but remember and wish I were dead.

FEB 14, 2017- VALENTINE’S DAY –

Seattle is Paris to me. The people from the journalists Jim Halpin, the police reporter, Jim Compton, starts in Seattle, then goes to the near east, learns Arabic and reports for NBC, and finds his way back to Seattle and KING TV, lives in Seattle as Paris. Lots of bright lights go from the Seattle locals to NBC and PBS , the movies, to Hollywood, like Keye Luke, and James Wong Howe and Yellows with ambitions James Omura, Bill Hosokawa, James Sakamoto, writers John Okada Monica Sone, artist Fay Chong and George Tsutakawa, Paul Horiuchi. Ruby Chow and hubby Ping Chow the cook hidden in the kitchen revived Cantonese opera and made Seattle a food stop with restuarants run by opera stars. Seattle asserts the city as where Asia shows its identities out loud and in color. I’ve tried to revive the Yellow joy of boys and girls hopping for the tall grass, like rabbits, and proud of our artists, for our reasons. Reasons that were alive in the Seattle Chinatown- NionMachi.

No longer. Ruby Chow’s designated heir to her, kindly in your face activism, gets spoken Cantonese into the Seattle Schools, but hesitates at the literay reason for teaching Cantonese. Mandarin is also in the schools. She complains about the Prof’s C-Span speeches about China-American policies but hesitates to write him about his defense of Chinese manhood.

A prominent Seattle lawyer-Emeritus Prof-with a way to ears in high places, declines to defend Chinese manhood by telling Pres Clinton and Pres Obama they gave their Medals of Humanities and Arts to Maxine Hong Kingston, as White racist fraud. Maxine brags about her literary fraud in CONVERSATIONS WITH MAXINE HONG KINGSTON, by Maxine Hong Kingston. Kingston’s THE WOMAN WARRIOR leads to the rise of Yellow Feminismo. Chinese men are bad. We Yellow women want real men. Whoopee! And the Yellow men know nothing and gratefully take the feminist contempt of Yellow women.

The story of Yellow sex and love has been dickless, witless misogynist men and beautiful and talented Yellow women yearning to be free since San Francisco Cameron House Charles Shepherd’s racist screed THE WAYS OF AH SIN hit the Social Darwinists morning papers.

In Hollywood the Woman Warrior’s contempt for Yellow manhood leads to Creative writing exalting White racist ignorance of the Chinese children’s story. The Yellows write to White tastes.

The children’s stories start with the telling of a parent. The American-born Yellows haven’t known the Chinese children’s stories since the hundred years of the 19th Century. I don’t have the time or energy to restore the Chinese stories to the people , but I can telll a few stories and eat around the restaurants I remember. Ho Ho’s down 6th Ave from the Panama. J’s Sushi. Mikes Noodles. Taylor’s Oysters, Il Terrazo Carmine. Yum. Yum. As David Ishii, the bookseller says when addressing food he’s going to eat.

People who want me to speak will get me to speak if they put together enough money to cab me to Bob Hope (Glendale-Burbank) Airport and fly me to Seattle-Tacoma then, cab me to the Panama Hotel, corner of 6th Avee & Main Street, where they pay for my seven day stay, and arrange with Seattle Schools and the Panama Hotel for an audience of 20 children and a parent or parents for an hour of my children’s storytelling. The storytelling shot with 3 cameras- (1) A static cam over my shoulder and behind me for views of the kids faces facing me. (2) Ext Panama lower level view interior through window- (3) Hand held - They have the rest of the week. To talk to me. I want a $100 a day food money, and the return fare home. And $10,000 honariam.

Friday, February 24, 2017

They're closing in...

Dear Readers,

Frank Chin gave me the following message:

EDDIE- PUT PRINCETON ON MY BLOG- DO YOU SEE HOW HOW THE STEREOTYPE REPLICATES ITSELF GENERATION TO GENERATION? SOLICIT COMMENTS- COMMENT YOU CHICKEN YELLOWS - Whaddaya know?

[Link to the Daily Princetonian article: Do You See Me Now? : A Review of Charles Francis Chan Jr.'s Oriental Murder Mystery]

Sunday, February 19, 2017

75th Anniversary of Executive Order 9066

Dear Readers,

Eddie here. February 19, 2016, marks the 75th anniversary of President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt signing Executive Order 9066 into law, which forced Japanese Americans (nearly 120,000 of them) into concentration camps.  Frank Chin's book Born in the USA: A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947 is simply a must-read book for any person interested in this tragic event in American history.  Dr. Lane Hirabayashi says, "On May 11, 2002, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) apologized to the 'resisters of conscience' who had refused induction while they and their families were confined in American-style concentration camps during World War II.  Why? Bursting with passion, Born in the USA uses insiders' accounts of the resisters' lives to explain their cause and their persecution.  This is an indispensable contribution to the literature on Asian America."


Back Cover Book Description:

Newly arrived Japanese and newly minted Japanese Americans remember their history from 1889 through World War II and the concentration camps, to Christmas Eve 1947. American novels, songs, newspapers, movies, and cartoons also paint a picture of Japanese America. Same country, different story.

Frank Chin extensively interviewed Japanese, Japanese Americans, and white Americans in an effort to understand the times surrounding World War II. He masterfully interweaves their recollections with the popular culture of the time to present a history of America at war with itself that reads like an intricate spy novel. Yet every word, every document, every name is real.

Chin tells the story of a Japanese America wrestling with coming of age in the United States just as the Imperial Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor, dashing their dreams and fragmenting their community. Confused citizens are forced from their homes into the darkness of the interment camps. The conflict overseas overshadowed the secret war seething behind the barbed wire among groups of Japanese Americans and their differing views of Americanism. On the one hand, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) had government support and publicity for its policy of surrendering civil rights until its fellow Japanese Americans "re-earned" them. On the other, the resisters had no official support and almost no publicity. Yet they had one honest journalist, James Omura. They had a lawyer and they had leaders, in particular one man, Frank Emi.

Born in the USA tells the story of the JACL collaboration with the government in arresting James Omura, shutting down his newspaper, and silencing the resistance. yet the JACL survives as the only group organized to defend Japanese American civil rights. Until the publication of this book, the story of the fight against JACL policies was one of the best-kept secrets of the internment camps.

Buy the book at Amazon.com here.
Preview parts of the book here.

Tuesday, February 07, 2017

A BUDDHIST IDEAL

A BUDDHIST IDEAL
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY WITHOUT EGO

by Frank Chin

Albert Saijo is known for Trip Trap (1972) a collection of haiku by Saijo, Jack Kerouac and Lew Welch. The poems describe a road trip from California to New York the three men take in 1959.

Saijo and Kerouac become friends, bound by a shared appreciation of Zen Buddhism and Gary Snyder. Snyder’s wanderings in Japan, guide them to timely connections to cool jazz and alcohol across the United States of America. In 1962 Kerouac fictionalizes Saijo as a minor character “George Baso" "the little Japanese Zen master hepcat sitting crosslegged in the back of Dave's jeepster" in his novel BIG SUR.

Beat Zen of Kerouac is White. The Zen school run by his girlfriend as refuge for old worn out Beats. Two of the school’s teachers Zenned to the highest degree of poetry and fiction, tell me to my face I have no right to call Maxine Hong Kingston a liar and no right to read the real BALLAD OF MULAN in Chinese and English, and no right to read a Singapore comic book translation of the short poem and my 1952 translation from the 6th grade of Chinese school.

Saijo rejects the world and retreats to Volcanoes, Hawaii pads off into nature and is gone until Bamboo Ridge of Hawaii publishes Saijo's only solo collection of poetry, Outspeaks: A Rhapsody in 1997. He is 71 years old. Unwittingly, Marie Hara of the Hawaii Herald is the first Japanese American writer to write a letter of inquiry to a Nisei Beatnik poet. The year is 1998. He writes Marie Hara back. It’s a letter of his war years, Heart Mountain, and the 442nd.

In 1949 young Albert Saijo writes a piece critical of the Zen sensibilities of Toshio Mori’s YOKOHAMA, CALIFORNIA, as “childish”. Saijo admits own , post Korean War writing with Kerouca ad Welch has been called “childish” and worse. Lafcadio Hearn is a White man last from America, who comes to Japan, and his translated Japanese stories are accepted as Japanese by the Japanese Academy. One of the Japanese stories he retells,THE OLD WOMAN AND HER DUMPLING. An old woman sells rice balls or buns, at a busy crossroads. One bun rolls away. She chases the bun that disappears down a hole in the earth, leading to an underworld. She goes down the hole. Oni, demons, sense her presence. She hides behind a Jizo, the protector of stillborn and aborted children. The Jizo capture and force her to cook for them using a paddle that stirs endless rice. Oooh! Endless rice! The old woman thinks. She gets the Oni drunk on rice wine. Grabs the spatula and crosses the river. The Oni wake up . She taunts them. They drink up the river, a little water is no barrier. She makes faces, tells jokes, gets the Oni to laughing and laughing and they laugh up the river they drank and get washed away.

She returns to her bun stand by the busy crossroads with the ladle of endless rice.

Did Lafcadio Hearn translate or raise the story from nuisance mice to savage Oni? Is there a children’s story with a Jizo protector of stillborn and aborted children being told at the same time as Hokusai did his spit print in two-pages, of KAKURE-SATO, ‘The mythical hideout of mice. James Michener, another White man accepted as an expert on Japanese art, writes for the multi-colored panel of experts on Japanese , Japanese art and Katsushika Hokusai. In 1958, Michener includes in the opinions he summarizes , accompanying the prints, are his own opinions.

"...Here the boss sits atop rice bales and works his abacus. Others haul in a sackload of gold coins. Three keep books on the riches, and others weigh baskets of coins."


"The well-known tale of 'The Rolling Rice Cakes' tells of a man who was lucky enough to penetrate in the Kakure-sato. He had gone to his fields to gather firewood and while eating lunch allowed one of his rice cakes to roll into a hole in the ground. When he kneeled down to retrieve the cake, he heard tiny singing voices. Overcome by curiosity, he dropped all his rice cakes int the hole, and ended up by tumbling down himself. He was bedazzled by the rich kingdom he had uncovered, but the mice, although grateful for the rice cakes, insisted that he return home. As a present they gave him a very small bale of rice and dismissed him. But when he reached home he discovered that the tiny bale was a wonderful and magic gift. It always remained full to the top, no matter how much rice was taken from it."

Toshio Mori, a Nisei retells the same story, in his THE OLD WOMAN WHO MAKES SWELL DOUGHNUTS, with a Nisei change of age, and setting. The crossroads is the Southern Pacific mainline a few blocks away. The dumpling or bun stand is Grandmother making doughnuts . The kids are multi-racial. (typical Oakland) The demon Oni are the sounds of trains, Grandmother says that chug hope and travel in the wistful future, without the constant threat of White Racist intimidation.

Toshio Moriʼs retelling of the getaway bun rolling from a crossroads, to the underworld, rolls from Japan to Japanese America, as well as, or better than Lafcadio Hearn bridges the cultures of Europe and Japan.

Japan is grateful for the revival of the Japanese story as a form, a stranger stiimulates. He is accepted by the Japanese populace as a Japanese folk artist- scholar. Japnese artists make book, books, movies of Lafcadio Hearnʼs Japanese stories. Meantime, The Whites of the American Academy are stalwartly White Racist stupid.

These days Albert Saijo matter of factly admits his writing is different from 1949 . Here is where a critic would help. Is the “childish” simple no frills fact after fact writing of Toshio Mori, like Albert Saijo’s writing now? He admits to his mistake in literary judgement.

I believe Albert Saijo’s letter to Marie Hara achieves the impossible. He has written an autobiography that observes the facts without a care for self-interest- that seems an achievement of –dare I say it: Buddhist enlightenment. The Augustinian form of Confession & Redemption is gone, simply does not exist in Saijo’s letter. The letter is released to our reader’s eyes, because Marie Hara published it.

- WE GOT THRU THE DEPRESSION IN FAIR SHAPE – CHICKENS IN THE BACK YARD, TEACHERS AT JAPANESE SCHOOL GOT PLENTY OF VEGGIES FROM PARENTS OF STUDENTS – FATHER WITH CHICKEN & EGG BIZ –MOTHER TEACHING JAPANESE SCHOOL & WRITING A DAILY COLUMN FOR THE KASHU MAINICHI ONE OF THE LARGE VERNACULAR NEWSPAPERS OF LABASIN – HER COLUMN WAS TITLED SEKAI NO UGOKI – WHEN SHE WASN’T WORKING OR DOING CHORES SHE WAS WRITING –SUMMERS WE WOULD BE IN THE FIELD PICKING BERRIES TOMATOES ONIONS ETC. ON A NEIGHBOR’S FARM SHOULDER TO SHOULDER WITH THE MEXICAN FAMILIES- WE GOT BY MOM POP BIG BROTHER ME YOUNGER SISTER – WE DID OK- THEN CAME THE WAR –SUDDENLY JAPANESE PART OF MY LIFE WAS GONE – NO MORE JAPANESE SCHOOL NO MORE KENDO PRACTICE NO MORE J SCHOOL BEACH PARTY NO MORE KENJINKAI PICNICS BON ODORI CHAMBARA MOVIES IN LOCAL HS AUDITORIUM WHEN AT THEN END OF EACH REEL THE PROJECTIONIST WOULD SHOUT INTO THE DARKENED ROOM RIGHTO PREASE – SUDDENLY MY MOTHER AND FATHER ARE WORRIED ABOUT GETTING PICKED UP BY THE FBI – DIG BIG HOLE IN BACKYARD – IN GOES ALL JAPANESE LITERATURE & ANYTHING THAT COULD BE CONSTRUED AS PRO JAPAN – BURN EM BURY EM –ELDERY RETIRED ENGLISH COUPLE NEXT DOOR IN SMALL COTTAGE STOOD IN THEIR YARD & WATCHED SMOKE RISE INTO SKY – ANTI JAP PROPAGANDA FLOODS NEWSPAPERS & RADIO & MOVIES – RACE HATE HYSTERIA – I KNEW IT WAS SERIOUS WHEN OUR CLOSEST JAPANESE NEIGHBOR DID SOMETHING I THOT WAS FAR OUT –A FARMER – 11 KIDS – 80 ACRES UNDER FULL CULTIVATION AT ALL TIMES – MRS TOOK CARE OF FARM – TINY WOMAN ORDERING AROUND BURLY WORKERS – MR WAS A DREAMY GUY – HIS JOB WAS LOAD UP HARVESTED & CRATED PRODUCE ON HIS BIG TRUCK & DRIVE IT INTO LA WHOLESALE PRODUCE MARKET AT THE END OF EACH DAY- ON HIS OFF TIME HE PAINTED PICTURES – HE NEVER WORKED IN THE FIELD – HIS MASTERPIECE WAS A PORTRAIT OF EMPEROR HIROHIT0 – IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ORANGE ORCHARD THERE WAS HIROHITO IN FORMAL REGALIA WITH PLUMED HEADWEAR MOUNTED ON A WHITE HORSE – THE PAINTING WAS HUNG IN THEIR LIVING ROOM – SHORTLY AFTER THE WAR STARTED AS THE HYSTERIA GATHERED HE TOOK HIS PAINTING OFF THE WALL & BURNED IT –I THOT THAT WAS FAR OUT- THEN FDR SIGNED EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066 MAKING LEGAL THE FORCED EVACUATION & INCARCERATION OF ALL JAPANESE CITIZENS & ALIENS ALIKE FROM THE WEST COAST – THERE WERE NO ACTS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST JAPANESE IN THE VALLEY – AT SCHOOLS THINGS WENT ON LIKE NOTHING HAPPENED – NO ONE TALKED ABOUT IT –EVERYONE KNEW WHAT WAS HAPPENING – AT HOME IT WAS BUSY & DESPERATE GETTING READY FOR THE DAY WE WERE TO BE INCARCERATED – SELL WHAT WE COULD SELL OF OUR PERSONAL PROPERTY & WHAT WE COULDN’T JUST LEAVE – DUTIFULLY WE SHOWED UP AT THE TOWN PARK TO BE CARTED OFF IN ARMY BUSES TO POMONA ASSEMBLY CENTER - THE ASSEMBLY CENTER WAS BUILT ON THE DIRT PARKING LOT OF THE LA COUNTY FAIRGROUNDS IN POMONA – ROW AFTER ROW OF JERRY BUILT WOOD BARRACKS – CRACKS BETWEEN THE WOOD PLANKS OF WALLS & FLOOR LET IN DUST OF DUST STORMS THAT SWEPT ACROSS THE CAMP- OUR FAMILY OF 5 HAD A ROOM PERHAPS 12 X 12 – COTS WITH STRAW MATTRESSES – WELCOME TO CAMP USA – BEHIND BARBED WIRE WITH GUARD TOWERS & ARMED GUARDS – BUT IN SPITE OF THE OBVIOUS DOWNER SUFFERING SIDE OF THIS CATASTROPHIC SOCIAL EVENT FOR THE JA COMMUNITY & MY PARENTS & FAMILY I PERSONALLY AS A 15 OR 16 YR OLD KID WITH NEWLY MATURE BODY & BRAIN THOT IT A GRAND ADVENTURE – EVERY HAPPENING WAS FIRST TIME & NEW – RIGHT OFF TO BE RELEASED FROM PECULIAR MORES OF WHITE DOMINANT SOCIETY WITH ITS WEIRD SOCIAL NUANCES WAS ODDLY LIBERATING EVEN IF IT WAS BEHIND BARBED WIRE FENCE – NOW ONLY BASIC HUMAN QUALITIES COUNTED – THERE WAS NO RACIAL CONSIDERATION BECAUSE EVERYONE WAS SLANT EYE – I COULD MOVE IN ANY DIRECTION SOCIALLY – FREEDOM & ADVENTURE EVEN IF IT WAS BEHIND BARBED WIRE – FREEDOM FOR ONE THING FROM FAMILY –THERE WAS NO LONGER A NEED FOR FAMILY – HAD A BED – EAT IN COMMUNAL MESS HALL –COMMUNAL BATH HOUSES - YOU SPENT YOUR DAYS WITH FRIENDS ROAMING IDLY THRU CAMP – GO HOME ONLY TO SLEEP –IT WAS FASCINATING TO SEE ONLY JAPANESE WITHOUT WHITES & MEXICANS – I HAD NEVER SEEN SO MANY JAPANESE TOGETHER IN ONE PLACE AT ONE TIME - BIGGER THAN A KENJINKAI PICNIC BY FAR OR NISEI WEEK IN LIL TOKYO LA – 1000’S –ALL HUMAN TYPES – ONE DAY I WAS ROAMING ALONG THE FENCE WHERE THE BACHELORS WERE HOUSED – GOING BY AN OPEN DOOR I LOOK IN & SEE A MAN PAINTING A PICTURE OF A WOMAN RISING LIKE A MOON ABOVE A LANDSCAPE OF OPEN ROLLING HILLS – HE TURNED & SMILED A GAP TOOOTHED SMILE – HE HAD A MOUSTACHE LIKE THE MEXICAN ACTOR CANTINFLAS & A THIN LINE OF BEARD REACHED FROM HIS LOWER LIP TO HIS CHIN & HE HAD LONG HAIR TO BELOW HIS SHOULDERS – I HAD NEVER SEEN A JAPANESE HUMAN LIKE HIM BEFORE – HE REACHED BEHIND HIS CHAIR & PULLED OUT A PAPER BAG FULL OF FRUIT – HAVE AN APPLE ORANGE BANANA HE SAID –DAYS PASSED SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY – LEARNING EXPERIENCE IF HERE EVER WAS ONE – THAN ONE DAY WE TRUSTINGLY GOT ON TRAINS THAT WERE TO TAKE US TO A MORE PERMANENT CONCENTRATION CAMP FAR INLAND – WE HAD HEARD THEY WERE BUILDING CAMPS IN COLORADO WYOMING ARKANSAS ARIZONA UTAH IDAHO & A COUPLE IN CALIFORNIA – WE WERE TOLD WE WERE GOING TO A CAMP IN WYOMING – HEART MT RELOCATION CENTER IN THE CORNER OF THE STATE –THE TRAIN RIDE FROM POMONA TO WYOMING WAS A SUPER ADVENTURE – I HAD NEVER BEEN OUT OF CALIFORNIA TO THAT POINT IN MY LIFE – THESE RR CARS WERE OLD – PULLLED BY OLD STEAM ENGINE LOCOMOTIVES MADE OF WOOD –YOU COULD OPEN THE WINDOWS & LEAN OUT – WE PASSED THRU TOWNS & DESERTS – THRU FORESTS OVER MTS & ALONG RUSHING RIVERS – THRU TUNNELS – OVER HIGH PLATEAU TILL WE REACHED THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE – HEART MT RELOCATION CENTER WITH ITS OWN RR SIDING – BIG SKY – DISTANT MT RANGES – I MILE SQUARE SURROUNDED BY BARBED WIRE WITH ENUFF BARRACKS TO HOLD 10,000 PEOPLE – SAME GUARD TOWERS & ARMED GUARDS LIKE POMONA – BASIC SET UP SAME AS POMONA – EXCEPT BARRACKS WERE TIGHTER FOR FRIGID WINTER WEATHER WITH HIGH WINDS – THE ROOMS WERE OF VARIOUS SIZES – ONE FAMILY PER ROOM - OUR ROOM WAS ABOUT THE SAME SIZE AS POMONA - EACH ROOM HAD A POTBELLY STOVE THAT BURNED COAL - COMMUNAL MESS HALLS & TOILETS – UNLIKE POMONA HEART MT HAD SCHOOL BUILDINGS – LIFE FELL INTO ROUTINE OF SCHOOL HANG OUT GO HOME SLEEP- FOR ADULTS THE MORE PERMANENT SET UP AT HEART MT WAS RELAXING AFTER THE HARD INITIATION INTO INCARCERATION EXPERIENCE IN ASSEMBLY CENTERS LIKE POMONA – VEGETABLE GARDENS & SMALL JAPANESE STYLE GARDENS IN FRONT OF FAMILY ROOMS APPEARED – A CLUB FOR EVERY IMAGINABLE INTEREST SPRANG UP – HAIKU CLUBS TANKA CLUBS GARDEN CLUBS HUNT FOR POLISHED DINSOSAUR GULLET STONES CLUB SPORT CLUBS THE OLD KENJINKAI CLUBS – THERE WERE BUDDHIST & XTIAN CHURCHES ETC – A WORLD 1 MILE BIG - MY FATHER STARTED A CAMP CHICKEN RANCH THAT EVENTUALLY MET THE NEEDS OF CAMP – MY MOTHER DID A LOT OF WRITING - SHE COULD WRITE WITHOUT INTERRUPTION - BUT LOST THESE WRITINGS IN BIG POST CAMP MOVES CROSS COUNTRY – HEARTBREAKING – I RARELY SAW MY OLDER BROTHER BECUZ HE PRACTICALLY LIVED AT A RECREATION HALL GIVEN OVER TO ART CLASSES & COMMUNAL PAINTERS STUDIO – MY BROTHER STUDIED PAINTING THERE WITH YOU GUESSED IT THE GUY WITH THE FUNNY MOUSTACHE & BEARD I SAW IN POMONA – BENJI OKUBO WAS HIS NAME – IN HIS 30’S HE WAS HEAD OF THE ARTSTUDENTS LEAGUE OF LA – THERE WAS EVEN A ZEN MONK IN HEART MT – NYOGEN SENZAKI – I LATER STUDIED WITH THIS MAN IN LA – HEART MT WASN’T A PLACE WHERE YOU COULD HAVE DIED FOR WANT OF SOMETHING TO DO - IN OTHER WORDS IT WAS A LIVELY PLACE – THE 1ST WINTER WAS A BLAST – TEMPERATURES 20 BELOW & LOWER – THIN ICE PONDS WERE DUG IN ALMOST EVERY BLOCK – AH TO GLIDE OVER FRESH ICE – EVERYONE SENT OFF FOR ICE SKATES THROUGH MONTGOMERY WARD & LL BEAN CATALOGS – NO HT MT WAS NOT ONE OF THEM NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS – I WAS EDITOR SCHOOL NEWSPAPER HT MT ECHO – I GRADUATED IN FIRST GRAD CLASS AT HT MT HS – I STARTED WRITING CALL EM VIGNETTES OF CAMP LIFE NOW FORTUNATELY DISAPPEARED – LOST- AROUND THIS TIME THE GOV’T DECIDED TO ALLOW PEOPLE TO LEAVE THE CAMP & GO TO ANY PLACE IN THE US EXCEPT E & W COASTS – AFTER I GRADUATED HS THRU THE QUAKER FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE I GOT A JOB AS BUS BOY IN THE U OF MICHIGAN FACULTY CAFETERIA - I THOT I’D TRY GETTING INTO U OF M EVENTUALLY BUT SOON AFTER MY 18TH BIRTHDAY IN ANN ARBOR MICH I WAS DRAFTED INTO THE US ARMY – I SPENT OVER 3 YEARS IN THE ARMY AT CAMP SHELBY IN MISSISSIPPI & THEN IN ITALY WITH 442 – MY STORY IS TYPICAL – LOTS OF NISEI MY AGE LEFT CAMP ABOUT THIS TIME WITH ITS ODD SECURITY AND WARMTH - WE LEFT CAMP & THE WORLD CRASHED IN ON US & OUR ADOLESCENCE RAN OUT & WE WERE CARRIED FAR FROM INNOCENCE OF HIGH PLATEAU SURROUNDED BY MTS – FAR FAR FROM PRE WW2 SAN GABRIEL VALLEY -

He is fascinated by being a Japanese among Japanese and nothing but Japanese. Camp is a Japanese Shangri-la for 16 year old Albert Saijo. A new world different from the America of the San Gabriel Valley. He charts his trip from:

“IT WAS FASCINATING TO SEE ONLY JAPANESE WITHOUT WHITES & MEXICANS – I HAD NEVER SEEN SO MANY JAPANESE TOGETHER IN ONE PLACE AT ONE TIME”
to

“LOTS OF NISEI MY AGE LEFT CAMP ABOUT THIS TIME WITH ITS ODD SERCURITY AND WARMTH - WE LEFT CAMP & THE WORLD CRASHED IN ON US & OUR ADOLESCENCE RAN OUT & WE WERE CARRIED FAR FROM INNOCENCE OF HIGH PLATEAU SURROUNDED BY MTS – FAR FAR FROM PRE WW2 SAN GABRIEL VALLEY”

I detect no bitterness, no rage, no vengeance. No personal desire. The amused Buddhist observation of nature (of man) without ego or desire. The wrong of camps, is obvious, from the nature of his universe. White racism obviously exists in the nature of America. He’s not an emotional man. He’s intense. We met in Hawaii. I’d only read his 1949 criticism of Toshio Mori written with upper case and lower case letters and punctuation. He wrote a lot of stupid stuff as a youngster, he said. He was at Heart Mountain. I mention the mountain of mimeographed bulletins from the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee.

I can’t explain his not reacting to “Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee.” I can’t explain why the Fair Play Committee Issei man, Guntaro Kubota doesn’t pass by with kids pulling at his shirt tails in the parade from Albert Saijo’s memory of camp. Perhaps he left Ht Mt camp for Ann Arbor in 1943. Perhaps he volunteered in 1943, before 1944 and the reinstitution of the Draft.

“AROUND THIS TIME THE GOV’T DECIDED TO ALLOW PEOPLE TO LEAVE THE CAMP & GO TO ANY PLACE IN THE US EXCEPT E & W COASTS – AFTER I GRADUATED HS THRU THE QUAKER FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE I GOT A JOB AS BUS BOY IN THE U OF MICHIGAN FACULTY CAFETERIA - I THOT I’D TRY GETTING INTO U OF M EVENTUALLY BUT SOON AFTER MY 18TH BIRTHDAY IN ANN ARBOR MICH I WAS DRAFTED INTO THE US ARMY”


Albert Saijo the poet reduces language to combinations of the simplest meanings, stripped of dazzling punctuation and vocabulary, the tools of the poet, tossed out as the sixth patriarch breaking a Buddhist scripture in a flash of enlightenment. Enlightenment is achieved in Indian and Chinese Buddhism through reading Buddhist text. A Buddhist tearing up a text makes as much sense as enlightenment striking a man splitting bamboo, or a man plucking a shrimp out of the water. Albert Saijo looks like Liang Kai’s stomping Buddhist tearing up a sacred book.

A lot of Chan and Zen writing and painting in Japan throws unexpected art at the pretensions of uniform and stable Academy. I would ask the Yellow art critics, if there were any to ask, if Albert Saijo does not blend the line of the hand and the line laid by the brush with the instinct of the pencil or typewriter and writes an act an action of Buddhist selflessness that strikes a flash a wash of enlightenment from nature one step, maybe two, into English?

Art but not the art of one artist, even an artist that engages me, can tell the whole of the people’s story. Albert isn’t in camp in 1944, when the USGOV starts drafting Nisei out of camp.

Chinese-American art is broken. Asian-American art is broken, unformed, declared by pretenders but unproved by Yellow critics, and declared by foreign critics of foreign newspapers for the approval of foreign audiences, for foreign purposes. Chinese , Korean and Japanese histories and cultures are continuous, not foreign or opposed. As Korea and Japan developed written Chinese into written Korean and Japanese languages to reflect their separate and distinct development, they became politically opposed. The Chinese were lines and squares. The Koreans siimplified the squares into circles and changed the shape lines to a different taste. The Japanese write symbols for the sound. Their language might say terrible things but the terribe things will flow on beautiful language.

Chinese were detached from art from their arrival to the California Gold Rush in 1849. The Japanese militarists snobbed away from the Chinese subhumans in the 1920s and acted with arms against the Chinese in the 1930s. The politics and namecalling were opposed. The people of China and Japan weren’t that different. Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the “George Washington of China” married Soong Ching Ling at the home of Japanese supporters in Tokyo. The host was a camera buff and took the happy couple’s picture. Culturally we are, for better or worse, intertwined and continuous. But, politically, China and Japan were opposed.


There’s a certain rightness about the Panama’s being the center - the moral center -of the all-Chinese student protest conference. The Panama Hotel was built by a Japanese from a Japanese American design, and was occupied by White workingmen, and Japanese awaiting clearance from Immigration, Japanese waiting for their bride’s boat to land from Japan.

Artists real and fake, collectors of history, the organizers don’t realize they’ve put together a mix of Yellow artists and Yellow intellectuals and the Yellow curious that seethes and needs just a word to spark into Yellow art historians with history, Yellow art critics who read, and Yellow people proud of Yellow and anxious to know why? I wish I had that word. Cruel Qin Shi Hwang’s unifying the characters of the written language means that Chinese everywhere could read the historian’s history, the critic’s criticism, and the people’s reaction in the writing, when writing was feeling and painting was painting and writing all done with the brush and flicks of the wrist. Louis Chu, John Okada, Lawson Inada, Albert Saijo have taken the line from Asia and made it work on the typewriter and brought the art of the line, their line, to American English and America.

Blatantly activist art works, written by Japanese Americans to rouse Japanese Americans to express what’s still real and unsaid from camp. The artists respond to rousing to the call of the artists, for artists. Aren’t they? Nobody’s saying there’s nothing left to be found in the dim, much less the recent past. Why does Jack Tono refuse to shake Frank Emi’s hand? Did Frank Emi and Jim Akutsu in earnest conversation of his view of affect him? Did a Chinaman presence at a Nisei event at Heart Mountain affect him? Where were the JA critics? Where were the JA readers? Where were the people?

The rain in Seattle stops and, puddles, steams on the sidewalk and the black asphalt shines black and buttery under morning sun. Up the slight incline of Jackson Street, I see a tiny old woman stumble or dance like a new born bird in the morning steam off the sidewalk in front of the old Higo Variety Store. She’s broken an ankle or an elbow? “Look!” she calls to me. A big bare head, all eyes, wobbles on a dangerously thin neck. “Look at this,” she says.

Through the window of the old Higo drygoods that used to be owned by two beautiful Murakami sisters, who never married. I see they kept the name and the look of the first hometown business to open since camp. . Kobo at Higo is a museum of the late 40s and optimistic 50s, a Zen temple of peoples art, a store that shows what it sells. I see a printed sign “The Fox’s Wedding” that describes what’s before my eyes: six white clay foxes 14” to 39” inches tall, dressed for a Japanese wedding in the long front window. The six white foxes are displayed against a roll white paper dropped from the ceiling to the shelf under the fox feet of the six foxes. Left to right: a shabbily dressed fox with a sinister smile on his face, and a sack of baby rabbits over his shoulder is turned away from the wedding party. A vixen bride. A Fox groom. A musician playing what looks like a rattle. A drummer. A Shinto priest. All smiling. Plain white clay fox faces and fox bodies walking like men and splashes of blue signifying various sized rain drops on the skirts of their clothes. Netsue Makino is the artist.

“I am so excited! I just have to tell somebody! I recognized something I have never seen but always looked for when I grew up in Japan.”

“What? What?” I ask looking her over for wounds, blood, limbs bent unnaturally. She was skinny and rickety but whole and unbroken.

She is impressed by the accuracy of the imagery of the farming countryside. What imagery of the countryside? The sign tells me there are six white clay foxes 14” to 39” inches tall in the long front window, and no countryside in the yonder of the store shelves.

“I wonder if artist Makino is local,” she says. “I hope she is. She has captured the feelings of Japanese so accurately”

Feelings in the window?

“In the summer when there is a rain shower and the sun is shining through the falling rain they say the fox is getting married. Bad is supposed to happen to anyone who sees a fox in a sunshower. We hide in behind the trees to watch anyway. Any woman alive, dead, or ugly when occupied by a fox, has the powers to seduce any man silly. We never see a live fox become a beautiful woman. We never see a fox spirit bring a dead woman to life. We never see the fox get married. When the rain stops any wedding there disappears. And now I see it all and can look and look. That is art!”

I look in the window. All I see is a roll of white paper hanging like a sail from the ceiling and threatening the clay figures with tumbling if a freak wind blows through the front door. White staples secure the white paper to the low wall and keep the clay foxes are safe from having the rug pulled out from under their feet.

“Mmmmm,” I make a sound acknowledging the fact I heard her, and leave the bird where I found her and walk on uphill to the corner of Jackson feeling I’m being cruel leaving her where I found her, even though she was happy and chirpy.

The rickety baby bird precisely picks her way up the one step into the airy Panama Hotel Coffeehouse. She brings the bright of the morning sun in with her. Jan Johnson , the tall and sleek owner, comes from around the counter to greet her and introduce me to Kiko Dewa –a fabric artist from Japan who settled in Seattle and worked in the Japanese community in and around Seattle. A fabric artist? Jan directs my attention to the purple thing that looks like a yarn rendering of crumpled showercap on Kiiko Dewa’s head. She makes fabric of things like the sculpture show made of woven tampons, Jan says. Kiko Dewa sinks into the pillowed cushions of a wicker chair and disappears. She talks of her childhood in Japan and foxes in the rain. I tell her of Chinese fox spirits who destroy men by occupying the bodies of beautiful women and seducing them.

*

2005- HAVANA CUBA- THE SOCIOLOGY OF CHEUK KWAN and THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF POK CHI LAU: Same place. Same time. Different Chinese eyes different sights.

CHINESE RESTAURANTS is a 15 1/2 hour tour of Chinese restaurants around the world.

Pok Chi Lau is an Emeritus Prof at the U of Kansas, in Lawrence.

Two Chinamen in the same Havana, Cuba: at virtually the same time. They did not see the same thing on the same streets.

The Chinese that Missionary Donaldina Cameron (July 26, 1869 - January 4, 1968) trained Chinese to go “back to China” to become “our dear subject people” as Will Irwin wrote in his introduction to Arnold Genthe’s PICTURES OF OLD CHINATOWN, (1908) “I hope that some one will arise, before this generation has passed, to record that conquest of affection by which the Californian Chinese transformed themselves from our race adversaries to our dear, subject people.” The “dear subject people” are the people created by generations of Cameronesqe Christian San Francisco education since Pres T.R. Roosevelt’s successful negotiation of the Gentleman’s Agreement between the US and Japan, after the Japanese sinking of the band new Russian iron navy in 1905. Generations of Christianized Chinese believed the stereotype of Chinese civilization was so cruel it didn’t deserve to survive. From Yung Wing’s MY LIFE IN CHINA AND AMERICA, to THE WAYS OF AH SIN, Dedicated to Donaldina Cameron by the author Charles Shepherd. THE WAYS OF AH-SIN defines the stereotype in the words of Cameron House, to Jade Snow Wong’s FIFTH CHINESE DAUGHTER, to Maxine Hong Kingston’s WOMAN WARRIOR from Christian autobiography to Christian autobiography to the autobiographical Christian present and Cheuk Kwan’s tv series CHINESE RESTAURANTS but Sociology ends its influence in Pok Chi Lau’s photographs of the Chinese real.

Cheuk Kwan and his cameraman Kwoi go to fifteen Chinese restaurants in 15 faraway countries. In each they find the owner of a Chinese restaurant and ask for his story. How did they get here? How did this family assemble here? Why here? In Norway, Argentina, Madagascar, Cuba, Canada?

Cheuk Kwan's CHINESE RESTAURANTS is a contribution of new knowledge in the form of 15 stories from the first Chinese travelers to 15 countries, and the travelers’ families that followed. In some countries where the Chinese travelers were plentiful, the restaurant family survives and thrives, in other countries where the Chinese are few the Chinese die out, but the culture in some countries, does not. Kwan Kung lives. He guards the borders of your house and your family and ancestral shrine inside. He guards the borders of your family shrine. He guards the borders of every word you speak write or sign. He admits when he did wrong, but so what? No password, no entry.

The indicator of a Chinese presence in the neighborhood is a lit neon sign that reads "Chinese restaurant." The first family traveler founded the restaurant as the means to bring his family here. Wherever "here" was. Cheuk Kwan's title CHINESE RESTAURANTS is simple, whole unto itself, brilliant.

The travelers all fled countries –China, Vietnam, Burma - that had betrayed them. They walked over the mountains, barefooted over the deserts, were not allowed here and had no time to get there. They overcame border entry, differences in language, and exit from country to country until they found a place for their families to come to and thrive.

In spite of the fact that it is clear that all 15 have never experiencedor seen 19th Century China, because of Cheuk Kwan‘s bias toward holy Sociology, the series insists that all but one are homesick for a China that has never existed except in the fiction of White superiority.

Kwoi’s camerawork is the tipoff of White Sociological bias. The camera is always close to the face of the subject, when Cheuk Kwan asks, “Do you miss home?” The camera zooms closer to the eyes ready to see the target release a tear over the lip of the lid.

The one target s socioliogically.

In Argentina he finds 77-year old Foo-Ching Chiang his first target Chinaman who’s not homesick. Camera closes in on target eyes. Closer. Do you miss China? No tears no matter how hard filmmaker Cheuk Kwan pushes sentimental cliché weepy sounds.


77-year old Foo-Ching Chiang came to Buenos Aires in the 1960’s opened a restaurant , became the “Spring Roll King” of Argentina. opened a restaurant. After bringing his family to Argentina he built a Chinese grocery, with a Kwan Kung watching the door and the cash, and a temple, with a Kwan Kung, a Chinese school for children born here and Kwan Kungs all over the place. He has a tv cooking show, where he showcases Chinese culture, porcelain vases, dow foo, or tofu or beancake. "When blue mold sprouts on it and it looks shriveled up, here's what you do..." He's added the name of a Chinese fried donut that went all over Argentina to the Spanish of Argentina. He has created a self-suficient respected Chinatown in Buenos Aires.

"Do you miss home?" Cheuk asks. Sociology rears it's head. Kwoi’s camera closes in.

"Home?"

"Do you miss China?"

"In traveling all over the world and coming here, I have lost the concept of home."

Cheuk Kwan doesn’t understand, but thankfully he left the moment of his blinking confusion as the answer in the film.

What the restaurateurs did was exactly what our ancestors did in 1849.

The Argentine Chinaman is forever on the run. In what country known to Chinamen in the last two hundred years has a Chinaman felt himself a welcome presence? None. There is no country that welcomes or respects or goes to the trouble to know us to this day. If we keep our soul, we have to keep it, ourselves.

What would be a sign that a country was congenial to the Chinaman? If I saw that Poon Goo, the Giant and Nur Waw the Mother of humanity were as well known and taught in this country as the Biblical ADAM & EVE, and the English JACK AND JILL, and Kwan Kung, the Kitchen God, and the God of Wealth were as frequently accurately described in White America’s writing, as Jesus Christ appears accurately and succinctly in American fiction and non-fiction and poetry and song.

How to explain the White blindness of the thousands of 19th Century white missionaries, the Old China Hands, Pierton W. Dooner, John Steinbeck, Jack London, Earl Derr Biggers, Hollywood and every newspaper in Canada and the United States, especially San Francisco all blind to the Kwan Kung, the Kitchen God and the God of Wealth they’ve seen in Chinese restaurants and shops since 1849?

(Left: Guan Yu as a transformer towers over tiny people in downtown Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning Province, April 20, 2011. Ctr: Kwan Kung-Thailand. Rt: Kwan Kung- an American comic book.)

The answer is simple: White racism. Whites feel their belief in the same religion organized around a mysterious all-powerful supernatural being makes them superior to the facts before their eyes: fact: Kwan Kung, the redfaced and blackbearded. Kwan Kung is a man, a murderer. The defender of the people of the country, represented by earth and 3rd brother Jiang Fei and the chosen by oath as the defender of the Han ruler Heaven the 1st brother Lowe Pei. Fact: the Kitchen god (of society & business) white faced, with a little mustache twirling over his lips, in a red robe of office. Fact: The Kitchen god of the home- is an almanac of the year- The Kitchen god and the Kitchen gods’s wife are pictured as presiding over the kitchen, gathering a daily journal that is burned at year’s end, and replaced with a new almanac. Fact: the God of wealth smiles rolling in gold.

We Yellows are a disease wherever we go. Asia is all over us like fleas. Christianity in the White guise of Sociology is the favored regime of treatment. Instead of acquiring our culture and letting it mix, Sociology gets the Yellows to divest themselves of their foreign culture, and relearn it according to White rules of an acceptable White stereotype.

Cheuk Kwan guided by White fake science, sociology sees no real Chinese in Cuba. He sees the money and brains have left the island. The Red Chinese left behind are abandoned by the PRC, the Chong Wah Wui Goon has no connection to China. The Chinatown is a tourist cartoon construction. The authentic touch is a flighty homosexual who performs Desi Arnez songs.

Cheuk Kwan and Pok Chi both walk among the gleaming stacks of tin cans that hold the bones of first Chinese come to work and go home. Cuba charges a fee to go home. No fee, no home. Now, China is no longer home. Cuba forbids the burial of Chinese in Cuban soil. A number of tins have been broken into and the cleaned bones stomped on.

Still Yellow girls and Yellow boys trained to dislike everything Yellow are attracted to each other. Why are they attracted to each other when all they have in common is Yellow self-contempt? Tell me, Yellow Psychodoc.

An example of a good student of Sociology is Kwangtung born Canadian filmmaker Cheuk Kwan. Whether he knows it or not, his series of 15 half hour episodes CHINESE RESTAURANTS reveals that one thing the Chinese around the world have in common is Kwan Kung the redfaced character from 3 KINGDOMS. His color: green. Right side: armored. Left side: robed like a scholar. He appears as a god in a temple here and in the background there and in every Chinese restaurant in the world keeping his eye on the cash through Cheuk Kwan’s 15 country tour of 15 CHINESE RESTAURANTS.

Strange. In Cuba he doesn’t see Kwan Kung or anything really Chinese in a tourist street of shops the government calls “La Chinesque” or “Chinatown,” in Spanish as spoken in Havana.. Cherk found abandoned Communist ideologues grown old without women and an old homosexual who sings Desi Anez songs in the Chinesque and a Havana gathering of a few old Comunnist Chinamen, abandoned by the PRC.

Pok Chi Lau’s photos are taken in the same streets Cherk Kwan walks. His steps still might be warm. The streets are the same but Pok Chi Lau’s eye is different. Pok Chi sees a Cuba where Kwan Kung lives small, in, not exactly, secrecy. The sight of small family shrines in Cuba guarded by Kwan Kung in spite of a belief or the fact that there are penalties for family shrines in Cuba., moves me. Pok Chi snaps these incriminating images of Chinese culture in Cuba. The Cubans to who allow Pok Chi to snap images of their hidden shrines to Kwan Kung trust him not to snap a shot their faces.

Pok Chi has made photography so much a natural part of his being, people accept his camera as an auxiliary organ, like an oxygen machine. People allow him to take amazing snaps wherever he goes. His sister in the last stages of a cancer, in Canada, allows him to photograph her nude. Before she dies. All of his pictures intrude into the privacy and reveal the embarrassing truth of his subjects. I’ve seen him talk an old tongman in Tijuana into such a state he blurted out, “We were crazy for money. We jump for money money money like toads.” He told me what the old man said later. “Why did he say that?

“It was what you wanted to know.”

“It was?”

“You wanted to know why the 3 legged toad means money’s coming.” “We’re the 3 legged toad? The greed for gold is us?”

Photo. ©2009By Pok Chi Lau

In the United States of America, I was not penalized by the law or terror of the law for daring to say the Chinese heroic tradition and Kwan Kung was real Chinese civilization and Bill Clinton’s pet Maxine Hong Kingston and her Yellow fakettes were White fantasy Charlie Chans as women. The Whites and the Yellows of America clung to each other around Bill Clinton’s official White racist revision of Chinese facts, heroes and history with a Presidential medal of official United States policy for Maxine Hong Kingston and simply ignored me. I was shunned.

I don’t want to brag, so I won’t.

Pok Chi Lau sent me photographs he’d taken in Cuba.. It’s nice to see old men’s shrines around the world have the same je ne sais quoi look. A picture was worth a thousand words. Two thousand words!

Photo. ©2009By Pok Chi Lau

Pok wrote me “Just got back from Panama.”

Frank

I snapped lots of Kwan Kung pics in Panama, mostly in shops and restaurants. Don't be mistaken, Kwan Kung is only used as a way of protection of their property for this new generation of Chinese brought up in Communist China but has not even read or heard anything on the deity.
Photo. ©2009 By Pok Chi Lau

He had pictures of Kwan Kung lording it over Kwan Kungs being blessed for businesses in a Panama temple. Last year he was in Cuba and interviewed and photographed Caridad Amaran, a 77 year old opera singer.

Her son is married to a big Afro Cuban. They didn't come in as I was interviewing Canidad, but the grandson stayed and watch TV. I turned the TV off and made him listen though I don't think he understands Toisahnese.

Pok Chi Lau recognized a Chinese hero in the Cuban woman performer of Cantonese opera. He returns to Havana to see her. He recognizes a woman having not a drop of Chinese blood in her veins, as Chinese. She performs the operas her step-father taught her. She has infected her family and neighbors with a familiarity and affection for Cantonese opera singing.

Though she has no Chinese blood, she has more of the great spirit than the regular majong playing addicts. She spends her lifetime in the 22 blocks of Chinatown, Havana.
Her dad died when she was a year old, and her mother remarried a Toishanese. He only spoke Toishanese with her. He taught her singing and she performed since the age of 9 in operas. There were 4 troupes in Havana.

There were four Cantonese opera companies in Havana in the late 1940’s? I learn more from Pok Chi’s writing than I learn from all of Cherk Kwan’s pictures of the neighborhood Pok Chi writes about. Confucius said nothing about pictures being used to deceive.

There was a tiny Kwan Kung print next to the TV. It was a Yellow from aging. I asked about it and the big print surfaced. She had this Kwan Kung passed on to her by someone and it was below the stairwell to her attic where she and her grandson sleep. Kwan Kung is rare among the Chinese. To some Cubans (especially Afros) Kwan Kung is “San Fancon.”

“San Fancon” might be a peroration of “Sangharama Bodhisattva” one of Kwan Kung’s Buddhist names. Was Caridad Amaran’s step-father a Buddhist?

Photo. ©2009By Pok Chi Lau

The boy is the grandson of Canidad Amaran. He holds a poster of the Trio of the Oath in the Peach Garden.

The Wong-Aleman family. Havana, Cuba Photo. ©2009 By Pok Chi Lau

The Chinese-Canadian Cheuk Kwan, knows he has a legendary name but doesn’t see the heroic tradition when it’s looking him in the face. Sociology seems to have dimmed out his Chinese eye. Pok Chi Lau the Chinese- American photographer knows the heroic tradition and sees it wherever he goes.

THE NAME KWAN: from THREE KINGDOMS
to a pilfered pile of tins on Cuba island.

I have seen people I worked with bringing American writers Toshio Mori, John Okada and Louis Chu back to print, reach the point where they just refuse to read another word. Even a Chinaman writer teacher, a friend who'd been with me at Ping Chow's performance at the Fung Serng at the Pagoda in Frisco in the 80's, refuses to join me at Ping Chow's last recital, after Ruby Chow (born Mar) his wife is dead, and buried in Seattle.

The former students and colleagues raised on favorite white racist children’s stories like Claire Huchet Bishop’s The Five Chinese Brothers just turned off, or shorted out. My colleagues have grown away and grown wise in their direction of the sun. There are Chinese-Americans that cannot see the story of five identical brothers that are have one difference from each other. One cannot be burned. Two cannot be drowned. Three cannot be hung. Four cannot be cut. Five quotes the N. Y. Times claim that Huchet Bishop’s book is based on a real Chinese folk tale. She bases her tale of look-a-like Chinese to racist eyes resisting torture on the stories swapped, over drinks, by the White torturers of the Chinese.

Rather than expose Claire Huchet Bishop as a White racist, generations of Chinese-Americans bought The Five Chinese Brothers and read the story to their Chinese-American kids. They still do. They see no urgency to raise a generation on the real as well as the White racist the fakes exclusively taught in America since 1907 and the Gentlemen’s Agreement of Yellow childhood.

The Yellow PsycDoc tells us the White stereotypes of us are here to stay. What’s new is your knowledge of the real. The real was kept from you, kept off your mind. Kept out of your childhood. The real doesn’t have to be kept from your children, in their childhood.

The fake Yellows for White profit are a part of the White world. The Chinaman’s China is seen through Chinese children’s lit and the heroic tradition. How JACK AND THE BEANSTALK and the stories of White immigrants simultaneously mixed with the Chinese at the beginnings of the expressions of people’s mind, would take a childhood to tell.

Why Whites refuse to read the Chinese real, I don’t care. Why my people the “Chinese-Americans” (that’s a malignant name for Chinamen) They call themselves in the everyday conversational newspaper-ese “Chinese- American” the name explains why they refuse to read anything Chinese especially old Chinese, like their self-contemptuous presence in the city of San Francisco. The city of Ornamental Orientals. Money, comes first. Chinese-Americans race each other with new terrors from their Chinese past for money, they leap after money like toads gone crazy.

That's where I walked out of the bar to forge the uncreated conscience of my chicken race in the smithy of my soul and stopped off at bookstore in Singapore. My plane needed to catch a breath in Taiwan. I went to a bookstore in Taipei’s 101 building that looks like a tall stack of waxed paper cupcake holders. I went on a journey from the Asian unknown and the distasteful west through books. I picked up that Kwan Kung is as popular, morally if not as religiously significant as Jesus Christ, and as lovably crude and sleazy as John Wayne. He’s a man. Likely to smell of recent physical exertion. No taste for the holy and averse to not tipping his hat to a woman. He will never violate a woman. The thought brings a bitter taste to his mouth. He always asks. If he doesn’t get an enthusiastic yes, he doesn’t do it. If everyman lives within Kwan Kung’s limits, he’s ok. You’re a criminal? You’re a murderer? Kwan was a murderer. First brother of the Oath in Peach Garden says Kwan Kung had a reason. Your boss says, so. It’s so. You’re okay. The character of Kwan Kung always a man, always loyal to someone or something sanctified by his loyalty. Those protected by Kwan Kung’s loyalty become great men who all die under mean, pathetic not tragic conditions. Kwan Kung’s loyalty is his trap. Loyalty, once given it can’t be taken back. The heroes from Yue Fei, to Wong Fei Hung, to movie stars Bruce Lee all die until Jackie Chan who’s a movie star, an employee, not a hero of the reality of Kwan Kung in Cuba.

The Ornamental Orientals are visible but don’t dominate the news, talkshows, action shows on American TV. Their ornament gives the look of an ordinary show, that extra ordinary something. Ornamental Orientals are not real. They’re not artists. The Christians fear the real. They fear Chinese art. Though I’ve been woefully inadequate, the Christian Whites fear me. You will note that I am reluctant to talk about me. I talk about the Heroic tradition.

Top: Kwan Kung,L:Chow Chong(Chiang Fei) R: Kwan Ping (Liu Pei) - Mongolia.

I can only hope an artist wiser than me can find a new model hero for the times or the cause that somehow causes a reading the Chinese Heroic tradition that follows the theme of Chinese not needing China to be Chinese further than my humble reading skills. Times of hostility like ours , going on , 150 years in America were made for Chinese and Korean and Japanese artists to make sense of.


Tinned bones of Chinese.in Cuba- Photo by Pok Chi Lau

The uncreated conscience of my soul comes down to Cuba and bones broken out of Cuban cemeteries and piles of tin cans full of the bones of Kwans from a village of Kwans that are not being shipped home away from where they were never welcome.

Kwan Kung and Chinese literature will survive the century long Chinese American descent into Oriental ornaments of White conquest. I wish to live to see an American city on the West Coast blossom from a seeding of stories from the Chinese childhood and heroic tradition into a country full of folk who know the Chinese NORTH COUNTRY WOLF, as well as the Cajun Loup Garou, the English LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD, the Russian PETER AND THE WOLF.