Chinatown vignettes

Koon Woon Vignettes of Chinatown and Slices of Chinese American Immigrant Life Chinatown, Seattle (a poem) When the light is with you, the dust is behind an old gift shop. Faded memories are displayed in the window. Persistent footsteps have descended these curbs for humbow retreats. Footfall killing time. Frayed stairs of tenements bring down bitter strength. Through alley doors furiously wokking, below Chinatown family association halls. Pigeon feathers and other disorders flutter down these streets. Footfall killing time. On Weller Street roast ducks are hung, headless, dripping fat, next to The Proprietress of Love; three flights of stairs lead to a den of poverty. Unwashed windows face out at tarry streets. Footfall killing time. Construction workers face-lift the train station and the sports dome is about to be imploded. All discussions of dim sum before the tea kettle whistles, drainage pipes complain of rust and leakage on these back streets. Footfall killing time. On a spring day the sun mild and modest, tender green foliage reappear on inner city streets. On a fall day at sundown warm and emberly as the ferry traverses the Puget Sound, the maples turn three or four shades of yellow and brown, when lightly you walk upon these streets, footfall killing time. 1. Rooms and Occupants Up four flights of the rickety, winding stairs of 416½ is a den of poverty in #317. There lives a not-so-recent Chinese immigrant asleep on a cot with a cockroach crawling on his face. He is in a medicated stupor, while the roar of the traffic down on Jackson Street going east and west, and the I-5 freeway likewise rumble over Jackson going north and south. His room has only one window without shades. He uses a cardboard to block out the light. Pushed against the window is a small restaurant table, the kind for a solitary customer. On his table is an opened book, Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabakov. Come to think of it, this old hotel is a firetrap. But because of the grandfather clause, this hotel doesn’t have to be up to code to have inhabitants. In the next tenement #319, an old frail man is coughing, while reading the Longacres’daily racing form, before he will negotiate the stairs and out the narrow double entrance doors of this tenement to catch the bus to the racetrack. Built in 1920, ostentatiously called the Republic Hotel, when there was a lot of money floating around in Seattle, and in the 1930’s, it sported an all-night dancing ballroom. The old man is thin and tubercular, but he is still smoking. He washes his clothes in his room and hangs it on a wire to dry. To the left side of #317, the occupant of #315 is a svelte youngish woman, who has just finished eating a bowl of sweet barley soup and is blow drying her long black hair, minutes before she has to rush off to catch a bus downtown to transfer to Virginia Mason Hospital where she is a housekeeper. The able-bodied tenants have gone to work in restaurants and garment shops. Some old tenants are babysitting their grandchildren. Here they are hidden from Chinatown streets. The occupant of #317 is taking his afternoon nap. He has a mental disorder, and his medication tires him easily. He has been reading all morning because he is taking a correspondence course in autobiographical literature from the University of Washington. He had lunch not long ago, lunch that he had cooked on the hot plate. He had rice and fried bacon rinds. The cooking grease odors make the roaches active. One is now crawling on his forehead. He is oblivious to the world. When Shui washed her bowl in #315, the bowl that held her sweet barley soup, she rinses it several times more than necessary in her basin in the corner of the room. The room measures 10 feet by 12. This is the total sum of her real estate besides the communal tubs at the ends of the hall and the communal toilets. She even has to bring her own toilet paper. Now she opens her door, gets out, locks it, and then checks it. Then once assured that it is secured, she starts running down the hallway and down the tenement stairs. Out on Seventh Avenue South when she pushes open the tenement doors, she runs to King Street and runs downhill to 4th Avenue South to catch any of the buses that go downtown, where she will transfer on a bus to go to work. She wears a blue windbreaker, making her a streak of blue in the rusty streets of Seattle Chinatown. She shields the sun from her face with the left hand holding a folded newspaper to her forehead. People turn and stare. She is also oblivious to the pedestrians and drivers on King Street and her only thought is to get to work on time. There just never seems to be enough time to get everything done. There’s always so much washing to do. The tenants hang their hand-washed laundry on the fire escape, different colors like the different flags of the U.N. But poor Chinese immigrants have little representation in America, let alone the U.N. 2. Introduction to Mr. K There’s what the sociologists called the “drift-down theory,” that is, the mentally ill and the less able drift down the economic rung until they find the level at which they can function and operate. And so according to the logic of this theory, the people in Chinatown, albeit it is a glittering ghetto, are there because they can’t function anywhere else… And so when K, the occupant of #317, wakes up because he has to go and urinate, he goes down the hall to the communal toilet stall. He normally counts as he urinates. This time it is a count of thirty. He counts like this: one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one thousand…and so on and he finishes urinating at the count of thirty. So, he knows that he has been urinating roughly about thirty-seconds. After zipping up, he goes over to the window in the alcove that leads to the fire escape for a breath of air. He absent-minded looks down on Jackson and 7th Ave. S. and sees a military tank coming up the street. It looks like a tank wants to stop and take up position. Just then, a motorcycle police speeds up and escorts the tank up Jackson Street. K wonders whether they wanted to blow up the Republic Hotel. But he doesn’t think about that for long, for he wants to get back to his correspondence course. He is taking a course called Autobiographical Literature, and now he is reading Franz Kafka’s letter to his father, a very convoluted and detailed letter like a legal brief. The rug on the tenement hallway is thin and frayed. Passing by the manager’s and #319, he enters into his room and sits down at the only chair in the room at the only table and it is pushed against the only window. He likens the window to the eye of Cyclops on the world. He boils some water on the hot plate for some instant Folgers coffee. Folgers is the cheapest brand he could find. He goes back into his reading, making notes, and occasionally, a cockroach would crawl around the bookshelf above the bed to the left of the table. The small table also serves as the dining table and for writing letters to his Uncle in China. He writes one letter every two months in very rudimentary Chinese, since he only studied five years of grammar school in China before he emigrated to join the rest of his family here in the U.S. He moved into Chinatown when he left the crack house in the University District five years ago. Immediately his rent dropped $130 a month, and with that he was able to take a correspondence course every six months and have a little bit of money to send to his Uncle. Meanwhile, cars go up and down Jackson Street down below and their chrome gleamed aggression. And there are enough sirens here to last a lifetime. The police station of the South Precinct is only five blocks away; the fire station is only a few blocks away and the hospital is just up the hill. And in the morning, the huge, long Gais’ Better Bread truck negotiates its way up Jackson. And buses roll down the street, and finally, he began seeing homeless people sleeping on the top of the building across the street, a foreign car garage… A Moment in My Rented Room (a poem) Sometimes I think of myself as an astronaut In my compact, rented room and look upon the bookshelf With its deep mathematics books for deeper space As from a voyage from which one cannot return. Then multiply by several million men who cannot marry, Men who cannot own homes, or to work, or to go to college. This is almost equal to the space effort. But why all that money? I can go to Pluto just by Being in a bad mood. Sometimes I think of the loneliness of deep space In my rented room. The neighbors have busily gone off to Epsilon Centauri or Galaxy X-2137 or to the 7 – Eleven. Sometimes I look at my 16-oz. jar of coffee; I know What the minimum daily requirements are. Cybernetics Steers me to avoid collisions with black holes or stars, And my hot plate sustains me with pinto beans and bacon rinds, And on my mini stereo, always the Blue Danube. It is rainy today. My room is a bastion . I am filing The sparse bars of prison. I am building a mental atom bomb. I am designing spaceships. Multiply this by several millions. 3. Miss Miao “My sad friend,” Miao sighed, “It is my misfortune you are unable to work and I have to garment shop work and cannot go real school.” She said this when the English ESL tutoring session was over. She still had to hand-wash her laundry and to hang them in her room. She normally obtains water through a hose from the corner washbasin of her tenement room, with the water separated into two plastic buckets she retrieved from a restaurant nearby, one bucket with soap and the other one holds water for rinsing. K would sit at the edge of her cot and converse with her and she would sit on a small stool and wash away, underwear and all right in front of him. They were both from Canton. He had come twenty-five years earlier as a young boy. There was little pretense between them. K told Miao he would marry her if he could. Miao had been a police clerk in Canton. One time when K explained a new vocabulary word to her, she suddenly searched under her bed. Among the boxes of papers and notes she found just the right piece of paper and the exact word under discussion. Her father, who lived in the adjacent room, had been a minor official in China that was imprisoned by “The Gang of Four.” Miao explained it this way: “One time my old father was a little bit crazy. He thought all the radios and speakers were saying, ‘Old Kuang, you are a bad man.’ My father went to hide in a garage. And after a long, long time, I looked for my father and found him, and I say ‘Father, it is all right now, you come home.’” One day Miao was working at the garment shop near the Kingdome stadium when she went out into the hall and ran into Kathy, who owned the Artex import company, which operated out of the warehouse a floor above the garment shop. Kathy is Taiwanese Chinese and since Miao speaks Mandarin, they got talking. “How is your English?” Kathy asked. Miao said that she is studying ESL at Seattle Central College and that she had a tutor. Kathy then asked, “How is your memory?” Miao said her memory is normal. “Good!” Said Kathy, “You need to remember many items of imitation leather vinyl goods for office products we receive and ship. There is some moderate lifting and some faxing requiring elementary English. I do need someone. Would you like to try?” By a stroke of luck, Miao became a warehouse shipping clerk. Rather than to work with forty other noisy women in a hot stifling room, Miao now is able to work alone in a cool warehouse with more of a future. Miao’s enthusiasm for learning English was doubled. 4. More at the Tenement Crazy Hom, his schizophrenic wife, and challenged daughter live in #321, just around the corner from the communal toilet and tub in the east end of the apartment building. The daughter sorts plastic poker chips and flings them into the metallic bins. K hears this “bing, bing” when he goes by to go to the alcove for air. This time in his life, he smokes two packs of Camel straights a day, down to the bitter end so that his fingertips and fingernails are yellowed. And living in such a small room, he needs to get out once in a while for the feeling of space. But he is manning his fort as his paranoia saw the entirety of Chinatown as being run by gangsters who employ the martial artists and their students for protection racketeering. He doesn’t even feel safe among his “own” people. In fact, his life had been threatened by a two-bit punk, a self-appointed vigilante Chinese. The day K got a job as the English reporter for the Seattle Chinese Post, he received a telephone call from a certain semi-public figure. The call was a threat. “Hey, listen,” said the caller. “Because you live in Chinatown, we won’t bother you, but if you write nonsense, you know what’s going to happen to you.” K knew what the caller meant. He did not reply, and the caller hung up. K decided to write about Chinese furniture, dim sum, Chinese jade, and innocuous things. He did not investigate gambling and money-laundering and exploitation of recent immigrants in sweatshops and restaurants. He got paid thirty dollars for an article, which takes him a week to assemble together. But that is ten percent of his monthly disability income. When he received the first check, he took his cousins to lunch. They had just arrived from China. Faye, upon seeing her cousin’s handwriting, said, “Your writing is as cursive as chicken intestines.” Faye and Zhu are his female first cousins on his mother’s side. He began teaching them English and his mind was thus brought back to a certain amount of reality as he interacted with them. A mentally ill person needs social support, his therapist told him. “When you are paranoid or depressed, go where there are people around.” That was the advice of Miss Chan, his therapist on a work visa from Hong Kong. (To be continued…)

An Interview T & F

An Interview T & F Preamble: Anywhere there is water, there I dip my line. Life can skim the surface. Life can reside in depths. And truth is a bad deal, my friend, it ruptures the Bohemian night. Precision was what he was after, like an imprisoned felon seeking reprieve. It’s been so long; memory could be wrong. So, fuzzy wuzzy was he, but logically he was not he. Sorry, my line drifts… Note: Neither Franz Kafka nor Tao Qian knew of each other and neither cared about fame. They lived literally worlds apart both in time and in space. What follows is a brief fictional interview Franz did of Qian: F: I heard it said, the more things change, the more they stay the same. T: Yes, the I-Ching, The book of Changes. F: Yes, things transform; they undergo metamorphoses. By the way, are you afraid of roaches. T: Only of the kinds that move about, only of the kinds that dwell in high places. And I smoke them out. They pass legislations and suddenly the illegal becomes legal. They eat a meal, walk as far as half a block, and consume another meal. Their entire life is a repetition of meals. F: Interesting. I understand that you are a famous poet in China. Is that correct? T: Look at it this way, my friend, if you are a successful traveling salesman of restaurant cookware, then I am a poet who has drowned himself many times in wine. F: I understand that you gave up a high government post to become a rustic farmer of chrysanthemums. T: Yes, my friend, just as you prefer Prague coffeehouses, I prefer the anonymity of village dung. Confucius said there is beauty in all, except some fail to see it. F: Quite true, my friend. I have learned from you. Have you written any of this down? T: Though I have scribbled volumes, it is literary lightweight. Burning it will only produce a pale fire. F: Thank you, my friend, I have learned from you. Now I must find my friend Max and give final instructions. T: Goodbye, my friend, when you come this way again, look for the house surrounded by five willows. Epilogue: Friends can be as eloquent as the long Great Wall of China or as terse as a legal brief. You can hear each murmur in a crowded courtroom or the silence of a bamboo leaf.

Not in Stanza Form

SoRRY, DUE TO THE LIMITATIONS OF THIS BLOG, NO STANZA FORMS ARE REALIZABLE.

The Hand Disembodied

The Disembodied Hand The hand that creeps across the sterile hours, in a ward for the insane, that wanders over the bare breasts of mad women, that hungers to touch, something, anything! There were those among us who are not the preferred kind, Locked doors locked them forever out of the collective consciousness of those who toil in broad daylight for a loaf of illogic, so that the fat mouths of children can go on sucking… Yet, they are there, they stand in a row, and stare and stare… Their parents had no clue when siring them. They seem like the hands that pause on the defunct clock, signifying nothing but ill repair. But there are hands that can wind the old-fashioned clock and then deconstruct it in scarcely more time than it takes to blink an eye. They are old hands, others say, warts and fungi and all, but make no mistake, they cannot disconnect from the wrist’s body politics just as the world’s economy cannot dissociate itself from the earth’s land masses. Because there is a plastic prosthetics factory in Hong Kong, in the impoverished sector near the city dump, where at the docks, the Haka* load freight, tax-free to Louisiana, to a third-tier medical school, where in each graduating class of doctors, there is a worst one. Psst, don’t let him operate on your hand. The recent immigrants who have not yet sworn allegiance, not having been here for long, nor do they see the new country as a permanent place in their hearts, they too, have hands… The hand that is penning this, the tired, effete, and worn hand betrays a heart that is becoming callous as the opposition calls for its severance from body politics that the hand has been feeding… All hands shall be on deck then to be judged, and should they be tired of being Judged, then abandoned, locked away, and then the hand, the disembodied hand, the hand that belongs to no one, and yet it belongs to everyone… The hand, the hand, the hand… The hand that will finally pick up a weapon, because this disembodied hand belongs to no one and everyone, the hand, the hand, the hand… Give us a hand… __________________________________________________________________ *Haka: “guest people” – indigenous people in Southern China.

Hear You Are Leaving...

Hear You Are Leaving Even in the cold blast of winter wind, the gulls and garbage of the seaport hear you are leaving. Hatless statues in the rain and I shiver out of grief, and the city convulses its enormity. You, the single plow in Mesopotamia, is leaving us to plow with our hands as we must. Often when friends go into the next room, I become afraid I can never see them again. I think of leaves carried by a swollen stream, as great ships with broken masts, their captains stark naked, and their sailors never will sire children. Clinks from chinaware being fitted into boxes, and the van’s tailpipe spewing impatient exhaust. Write now in datebooks times we will confer again. And the rain keeps falling; it becomes water. Water distends into years. I hear you are leaving. The busses of a growing city wait for no one. Tunnels will reach completion on time. Even in this awkward damp, the city goes on living. Garbage is picked up. Newspapers go onto new stories. Church bells will ring of weddings as ships recede from the harbor. Koon Woon 1990 / 2024

Visiting places we been

Sometimes we lose track of who we are,and say, hey, how did I get here? We then recall things and ideas we done and toyed with but they all took place at a locality and we were in that epoch in that vicinity. We located ourselves again where we were. And that's the way we were, and from that point on,it seemed we had innumerable choices but think again! In any case, we were where we were at that time, and there might be a lesson in that.

Koon Woon readinng at the Couth Buzzard, Seattle circa 2022

Koon Woon at AWP with Kaya Press in Seattle, circa 2020

Koon Woon, rural China circa 1954