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.

Mon Ami

Mon Ami Diary entry Mon Ami, in high school, I smoked just a few puffs of grass, a good student, and had the usual amount of acne. But I was lonely beyond constipation. I sat in comatose coffeeshops instead of going to games or dances, didn’t even drink illegally. Didn’t date at all because my parents were reversed racists. They talked of family all the time how the whites weren’t like us the Chinese. “They got no family,” my dad’s favorite pronouncement. “They are like a pack of dogs, when one comes, they all come, yelping and barking ‘til they got served.” I had no ambition to go to Paris, or to fall in love, I was still dreaming of my village water-buffalo and the muddy rice paddies. We were peasants there. Here I wear the yellow waiter’s jacket, which has been worn for three generations. Else I am in a white apron in the kitchen, stirring chop suey. Secretly I was reading Freud and a book I picked up at the drugstore called Psychosexual Infantilism. Case histories, you know. You couldn’t find a single book of porn in the entire town of Aberdeen. So, I went to the “alternative bookstore” to buy a copy of the Detroit Free Press, where there were funny ads about AC-DC hookups. Something about prostate massage, and ads for various “toys.” I was browsing the bookrack at the Highway Grocery, an all-night mom and pop grocery and café, and I fingered Portnoy’s Complaint, and George, the owner, beamed with approval and blurted, “Great book. I finally found someone with more problems than me!” But like I said, I was more “clinical,” because I read Freud himself. I read Nietzsche too, because although I doubted the existence of God, here is someone that said God is dead. It freed me from unnecessary doubt. The Beats were in San Francisco, and I was in the small fishing and logging town of Aberdeen on the Washington coast. We got paper and pulp mills that stank up the whole town and spewed sulfur fumes into your lungs. I heard about the Beats, but I was a few years too young for them, sort of like the “teenyboppers” of the later Hippie era in Seattle I was in. In Aberdeen, I was in the crucible of the chemistry class and the insular womb of the Chinese American family. My parents are first generation, and I was what they called generation 1 and ½ because even though I was born in China, my formative years were written in the US. My father was Confucian and macho. He smoked Marlboros and went duck hunting with a shotgun. Before he started his own restaurant, he was a fry cook for the mayor’s Smoke Shop Café, he was a bookie to the selfsame man. Making odds for football point spreads. My dad taught my brother Hank too. Hank later joined the Army and became a supply clerk. Even though Hank could write the longest Cobol computer programs, he couldn’t keep track of the army provisions and all kinds of things were missing. At the end of his tour, Hank came back to Aberdeen already a drug addict. My mom struggled with English. She worked as waitress and cook and housewife. With eight kids, all she needed was four hours of sleep a night. But my mom genuinely loved people and their money, and was after all, culturally subservient as a proper Chinese woman. That is why I laughed so hard when I saw the movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” where the mother in it said, “Yes, the man is the head, but the woman is the neck, and she can turn him any way she pleases.” I also like the part where the father said to the prospective son-in-law, “We were philosophers when you guys were still swinging on trees.” We Chinese can brag about the abacus, because a group of mathematicians at Cambridge University in England had shown that it was mathematically equivalent to Markov Chains and the Turing Machine. That makes the abacus the first computer in the world. In school, I was known as a “brain,” a quiet one, one that waited on tables for his classmates’ parents and occasionally his teachers’ families. This makes me think of “The Monument of the Unknown Citizen,” a poem by W.H. Auden. I never complained. I battled against myself in the middle of the night, playing a chess game out of the book Chess Made Simple. I also wish that there was a book called Simple Simon Made Simple. In some sense I was a leaky boat, peddling to the middle of the ocean. I didn’t even know that I myself carried a genetic time bomb. Later when I went up to Seattle to pursue a university education, the freedom made me wild. But in spite of my ambition to be a coffeehouse intellectual, I read serious books in literature and in mathematics and philosophy. My manic spells distorted my view of myself. I thought I could be a guru without meditation, an athlete without workouts, and I actually believed in a “castle in the sky,” when I took my first hit of acid. [Actually, things started on October 31, 1960, when my plane landed in Sea-Tac Airport. It was Northwest airlines. You know, I was loyal to them for decades until they got subsumed to Delta. Their hub was Minneapolis, Minnesota, where many years later I would navigate the airport on the way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That was when my real life began, a story we would eventually get to. [What is life, the philosopher asks: is it the “appropriate arrangement of matter?” My second life is a literary life. I often mused that all you need to be a writer is a pen and paper, but you don’t even need that once you become famous; you can dictate your words to the secretary. We always forget about the brain /mind. And language, and language assumes a community, a shared history. And that’s why I think the Russian Formalist were not far off. The “text” is floating out there in the communal linguistic pool. Someone is bound to come along and write it.] Don’t sweat it, Koon. You are never going to be Jacque Derrida. Just do what you can. And you know if you ever meet Derrida on the plane, you better not say “Hi” to him, you will get arrested for attempting to “Hi Jack” the plane. Best to stay anonymous, my friend, and do work quietly. That way you can continue to claim your disability, get student loans to go to school, learn differential equations that link a function and its derivates all into one equation. There is something unforgiving about that, almost like a blood debt to the Mafia. You will go far into the world before you are recognized in your hometown. As I was saying, or didn’t say yet, I was born in the hour of the Rooster, the Year of the Rat in 1949 in a small village in southern China near Canton (Guangzhou). Not long after my mother’s teats were withdrawn from me because she immigrated to America with my father. Left to the care of my grandmother and uncles, I was a precious crybaby, and my grandmother never let me out of her sight. Everyone treated me well because someday I was to go to America, the Golden Mountain, as it was known in China. Alternatively, it was known as Mei Kuo, meaning “beautiful country.” But because we used manure for fertilizer in our village rice paddies, we called our land “fragrant.” I mean, of all things, we misnamed everything, not heeding what Confucius said, “The first step to knowledge is calling things by their correct names.” Sometimes you should just “free write” anything that comes to your head. Because you can revise, edit, and rewrite, and so nothing is wasted. A gem cutter or a sculptor creates art by discarding what’s unnecessary. That reminds me of a story of a jade carver in ancient China. You see, the Chinese consider jade to be magical and it is the most precious stone to the Chinese, and never mind for the moment that there are nephrite and jadeite. Jade carvers in ancient times were looked to with reverence because they can see the inner soul of a piece of stone. They fast and meditate for days to envision what a hunk of stone contains. The story has it that a rich man had a very large piece of stone, and he greedily wanted it carved into a mansion. But the jade carver told him, rubbish, there is only a bunch of grapes here, not a whole mansion. What is unsaid, of course, it is not only the owner can’t get what he wants, all he gets is sour grapes.

Axiom of Choice

Koon Woon 11m · Shared with Public Paul Cohen the reknown mathematician proved that the axiom of choice is independent of the other axoims of set theory. This means that you can either believe it or its negation. This is analogous to Fox news and CNN. You got to think hard about this.

AI Robots

To those, who are worried about AI robots having no humanity, hey, it is already too late. We are human actors with less humanity.

The danger of listening to literary figures:

The danger of listening to literary figures: I don’t see why Voltaire should make fun of Leibniz in Candide when the latter said that God made this “the best of all possible worlds…” Voltaire cannot logically do otherwise, he wrote the play that this is the best of all possible worlds, simply, because the rest of them suck even more. Literary figures think they have a duty to comment on philosophers and thinkers. They are without shame. They don’t know what’s going on any more than you or I do. They don’t know what’s real either, Descartes, in his Fifth Meditation, asks, “How would you know, when you wake up, that an Evil Genius hadn’t rearranged the world while you were asleep?” We are all living in the Matrix and we don’t even know it.

Diary which begins a long insight...

Donald Justice wrote, “This poem is for me. You may find yourself wander in and out of it, but it really is about me.” What follows is a satori that makes sense solipsistically. You may think you have the same psychiatric symptom. Well, you may, or you may not, but really it makes sense to me and if you find it may apply to you, it is OK but it is really about me. You ask me where I have been. I have been to Dylan’s hard rains are gonna fall. I have lived the life of a mental patient, albeit one that tells the psychiatrist that he takes my psychosis away for a fee. One doctor tells me that it is so good to talk to me. And his wife, who is also a psychiatrist, said to me, when by chance she substituted for her husband once at the mental health center, exclaimed, “So you are the one who David talks about at the dinner table!” I thought she was beautiful. I was envious of Dr. R. But then suddenly I recall how sexually I was attracted to my own mother. Dr. R was so on top of it; he realized that my mother preferred my intelligence over my father. I realized then the Oedipal thing was real. My hindsight was that my father was proud of me but he was also competing with me, and I suddenly obtained the realization that my father set out to sabotage me. Mrs. R the psychiatrist in so exclaiming told me that my mother pitted me against my father. She was a real narcissist.

a draftboard diary

The draft-dodging diary I couldn’t let myself get inducted because I could be facing my cousin Fong across a rice paddy. Whoever kills the other is a tragedy. I also had some Vietnamese friends in the U district. Believe me, I feel more comfortable sharing a latrine with any Asian than a white dude. They don’t think their shit stinks. So dropping out of school caused this problem. At the Army induction center, the sergeant exhorted, “You men, I don’t mean those of you who are boys, if you step across this line, I will welcome you into the Army!” You know, for a split second of macho, you could find infinity in the jungle. No thanks. I went back to the Aberdeen draft board, which in its history never gave a C.O. I screamed at them and told them not to fuck with me. I am the oldest son in my family and Chinese filial piety forbids joining a death-meting group, especially the Americans because I am the legitimate family line. And I can’t die without siring a son or adopting a godson. They knew I was angry and unhinged it seemed. And my good friend told me to see a psychiatrist and have him write a letter of disqualification. The letter I obtained later said I was passive-aggressive (moderate) and schizoid in personality. The good doctor said it didn’t apply to me, but the Army likes to hear things like that. The draft board gave me IV-F, meaning administratively unfit. I didn’t know if my father greased the wheels for me with cash. My dad was a businessman and his wallet burgeoned with $50 bills. Even though I am problematic, the CIA tried to recruit me when I went back to school in Oregon. They said I would ostensibly be working for the State Department, and they didn’t care if I espoused a Marxist line, as long as I was convincing. I said no thanks and forgot all about the incident until twenty years later. I was having lunch with a lawyer friend, a prosecutor, and he joked, “When you are twenty and you are not a socialist, there is something wrong with your heart. But when you are forty and still a socialist, there is something wrong with your brain!” Suddenly the CIA incident flashed across my mind. Now I am not a socialist, I am the most self-serving poet there is. I’d sell my ass to get published in Poetry (Chicago).

an old diary piece

A New Neighborhood Diary "There is the same foreignness ..." June 20, 2017 There is a same foreignness about this town, the same as the town I came from that I didn’t feel I belonged. The streets are not paved according to code and the shops give one an askew feeling. And any time one could encounter a wild lion pouncing out of a men’s clothing store. I tread gingerly. I have been here for nearly a year now, but I don’t venture out except on the first of the month when I receive my disability check. My ego is inflated when I have some cash in my pocket; yes, I feel harder and more erect and one meal above the homeless man. But mind you, forty years ago, in my hometown of Aberdeen, the fog and rain assailed most of the winter, there were jobs in the fish cannery as the salmon found their way back to the spawning grounds, and yours truly kept going back to the sandy beaches to dig his limit of razor clams at Ocean Shores. But now, Ocean Shores is an investment property, attracting strangers even with strange kinds of money. The foreignness keeps invading these lands. Should I now declare, but to no one’s urgency actually, that I am a different man in the same body or the same man in a different body, as my identity keeps morphing into something unrecognizable, as I become less and less useful, sort of like a crabapple shrinking into itself? Or is this the culmination of a found wisdom, such as a grossly underpriced item in a gift shop run by volunteers for the benefit of the local senior center? And what about the farmer’s market on this block every Sunday to add vegetable colors to the sidewalks with tents erected on the pavement? The greens and cobs and fruit cost you twice as much you know as they do at the local Safeway or QFC stores. Still, it is worth it to help the little organic guys and to remove some of the drudgery of everlasting commerce, when these condos are filled with high-tech geeks, who will soon go to higher grounds. Still, the sea will not drown us out for some time yet, even as global warming gives us no more warning. I am in West Seattle now. Koon Woon

Simonson's coffee diary

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.

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.

poem

A Mirage People make monuments out of clay. In idleness, I study the sky. Dark clouds portend rain. The history of clouds is the history of rice crops below. The unknown poet Du Fu thought seagulls, suspended between heaven and earth, had traced his signature in the sky. Still, he is unsure if his poems will fly down the ages… What does all this matter to me, for I have even given up wine. Whose praise do I need, as I am too poor to take a wife. Still, I am glad I am not a figment of someone’s imagination, and I, I have a cold stream nearby. I have set the fish trap. It contains no mirage. Koon Woon Oct 5, 2024

Handiwork by professional quilt master Larry Warrick $30 art

The use of "the escape artist"

Like Houdini who pitted himself against self-induced calamity, but unlike Houdini, I had no choice. Escape was not an art but a necessity.The precious title can very well expand into a book wherein my hidden and darker life endured. So, my friends if you can live under Reagan, you can live under Trump. Just figure these are blips in history, they, like homeless vagrant bands, will be extinct from their own machinations.

"The Escape Artist"

The most productive period for writing I had I lived in an SRO. My total real estate was a 10x12 tenement room in a grandfather-claused old hotel at 416 1/2 on 7th Avenue South in Seattle Chinatown. I cooked, studied, wrote, and slept in that single-occupancy room. But I did not live alone, for I had my assortment of roaches and mice which came later after I started cooking and that stale odor stays in the room as I lay comatosed in my cot during the mid afternoon because of the psychiatric meds made me so spent.