Memories by Koon Woon

 

There is something insoluble in my tea that you poured

 

I don’t know what it is. Could be a memory of the cold tea in our China village of Nan On, in the bedroom on the teakwood table from the teapot spout I drink in childhood as a schoolboy, when our rooster crowed daylight, when getting up to the winter cold air was the first test of the day…

 

The tea is hot now like the anger I feel in this country when called a racial epithet. This country now has lost all its rights to be a world citizen, and in self-defense, I must be a world citizen and not a denizen of this country, where the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” came from motherland Shakespeare…

 

But more than this, it took me so long to find you, like a rose surrounded by brambles and a yellow chrysanthemum just beyond my height, radiant, that across my childhood years, the pond water was the right tepid temperature to swim in, and the love of ferns I found in these woods nearby as I wandered into it to the hidden waterfall we called the Diamond Falls, near the PUD in Aberdeen, on the foothills of the Olympics, where Darren the Native American fellow would disappear for a month at a time with bow and arrow to test the survival skills of his forebears, like I surreptitiously read the Chinese dictionary to see familiar faces, all 50,000 of them…

 

But long ago I also received my first rejection in a box of a phone booth when she sent icy words up my spine, as the winter booth is fogging up with my breath. Tea is pronounced incorrectly by foreigners as the Cantonese dialect has 9 tones, and each tone has a different meaning and “cha” could mean error…

 

But later I came back to my native culture when my poem, “A Smoke Break at the Nuclear Command,” was published in the Hong Kong online journal “Cha.” So now comparing cultures and phonics I found your love is quenching of thirst as the land of tea…

 

All in all, our love is not a mistake, after a lifetime of them, and now as we sprout snow on our heads, we find that insoluble stuff in my tea is love…

 

Koon Woon, April 18, 2026, Seattle

 

 

 

Diaries of Koon Woon

 

 

Beef tomato diary

 

After work, I took a few tokes before I ate my beef tomatoes in the Bay Avenue house. Sometimes I listened to freight roaring through the night air by the slough, only separated from me by the dirt field and the cyclone of blackberry vines. My immigrant forebears could have laid the railroad tracks. They came as far as Washington State and settled in Hoquiam, the twin town of Aberdeen.

 

Now the Georgia-Pacific line comes to the Port of Grays Harbor, where timber is shipped to Japan on Hong Kong merchant ships, and Hong Kong sailors sometimes come to our restaurant, the Hong Kong Café on Simpson Avenue, and sometimes, in a hushed tone, they asked how they can jump ship. I was naïve, even though I was in my late twenties.

 

Years later I took a U.S. history class at the University of Washington in Seattle for someone else. They paid me to do it. I read about the “Underground Railroad.” I then put two and two together and questioned my parents’ integrity. Then things began to make sense. I knew then why my father told me, in the wee hours after the bar rush, while we are eating our late meal while sitting at the makeshift table on milk crates, that during the Sino-Japanese War, he was bookkeeper to an illiterate criminal, one who had murdered an old woman he robbed and then was later hung for the crime.

 

My father told me between mouthful of white rice, from the platter he put a rib steak on top of a mound of it. He was matter of fact, telling me about the “real” business he was in but without telling me.

 

Later, I was diagnosed mentally ill, and I myself questioned my own thoughts and judgment, so insidiously was the illness that I cannot know reality for certain. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simonson’s coffee diary

 

Gene Miller was our coffee man. He brought Simonson’s condiments and coffee. He was the son-in-law of the owner. Proudly talkative of his older daughter who was chief accountant for King County, Gene bragged how no one can figure out his daughter’s bookwork. The transactions must have been like the interconnected tunnels of prairie dogs. Not visible at first glance but there is a subterranean series of tunnels, entrances, and exits that only she knew. And as you know, prairie dogs alert one another through their tonal language. The pitch of a sound mattered in its meaning, like Chinese language.  We were a Chinese-American restaurant, and we served coffee because it was American and hot mustard and sesame seeds with sliced barbecue pork; that was Chinese.

 

Gene had another daughter. The younger one was Marti, and she was my classmate at Aberdeen High School. Gene knew that because Marti talked about me at home no doubt because I was the literary chair of the creative writing club of which she was a devoted member.

 

Four decades later I went back to the Aberdeen Public Library to give a reading of my poetry, celebrating my second book of poems. Marti came and she did not look well. She was now a self-proclaimed artist. I knew she must have been bipolar, like me. The librarian was upset Marti took so much time talking during the question and answer period following my reading. I told the librarian later that Marti had been my classmate. The librarian then said, “It is truly remarkable you can talk everybody’s language. I told her I had been around and that a poet needs to know a bit of everything. Disenfranchisement seemed normal to me, and so I got “in” with the “out-crowd.” There are some still out there, but a tremor or a facial tick gives them away, even before they become talkative of nothing in particular and then suddenly lapse into a sullen mood because no one cared to listen. Drinking coffee to excess can also make one chatter much. Gene the father never talked about Marti. And so Marti talks a lot to define herself.

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Poem

Sometimes the Window is International Beer can on rooftop, restaurant garbage bins, sexy woman on billboard with petrodollar veins, whilst the homeless dig deep into Gaza for scraps; desert storms imminent. Inside my room is a goldfish, facing the bent differential of glass bowl and world, but I can reach for a lichee fruit in the South China monsoon, and kiss my wife as she stands on the riverbank of the Pearl. Here great comforts are sought and they never arrive. Instead, pitch battles are fought, just to own these rooms. Wake up, friends, let us open our hearts instead. Koon Woon

The Chinese Mafia

Friday, August 8, 2025 The Chinese Mafia They are surnamed "Ma." They engaged in rape, murder, plunder, but they offer "protection." Money is their ultimate aim. They may smile and shake hands and pat you on the back, all the while coveting your wallet. Once they stripped you of everything, they offer to lend you money. The next game is activated. While you gamble and whore around, they shark you to death!!!

Your view of "Poet"

What makes a poet? Can you, in a paragraph or two, state what you think are the primary qualifications to be a "poet?" Send email to koonwoon@gmail.com with the subject "Poet." Thank you and we will give you the consensus.