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.
- Rooms and Occupants
Up four flights of
the rickety, windy 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..
- 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.
- 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.
When Kafka Is Unhappy…
When Kafka is unhappy, he paces about his
room in the rooming house known as
“The
Castle.” He shares the carpet with a little girl ghost as she runs back and
forth, stepping over his slippers, humming Leonard Cohen’s tune “Suzanne,” and
ignores the writer/lawyer altogether.
She has a mind of her own, thinks Franz. But I have to keep my windows shut so that caterpillars can’t get in here and eat what’s left of my bagel with cream cheese.
Being a lawyer and working for the Disability Compensation Bureau, Kafka sees many people down on their luck. One mistake in the workplace can cost you your hand or an arm. And a ton of bricks can fall on you at the factory if the forklift guy isn’t looking out for you. And so you join the union. Safety in numbers.
The other day Max Brod came over and wanted to be literary executor of his novels. Franz is not so eager to publish his works in his lifetime. “Just think, my dear Franz, with your clean prose, elegant and Spartan, and your ideas, what ideas! How can you deprive the world of this literary feast?” Franz remains mum. He is afraid that success, if it does come, would spoil his anonymity and even misrepresent him. I wrote because of these maddening ideas, and in no way am I going to betray my little girl ghost in my room.
Kafka does lament that the door of his room leads to the communal den. And when he leaves or comes he needs to see other boarders eating at the communal table where Joe leans his bicycle. He is careful not to let the girl ghost out of the room. He always worry that she is too thin and has an eating disorder. He usually buys a loaf of bread, cheese, and liverwurst and hides it in his lawyer’s bag for the girl. She never touches the food.
And so Kafka ends up eating what he brought for the girl ghost, and thinks about justice in a small way. It is overly misrepresented, he thinks. We lock ghosts up and they haven’t done us the least harm. He thought about a passage from Leonard Cohen’s early poems, “I wonder, when I look out the window of the furnished room, how many people are looking back at me?”
Kafka kept on writing throughout the
night. He knows that on a cold, cold day, his manuscript can make a pale fire.
The thought of that makes him feel warm. He ignores the little girl ghost as
she raced up and down the carpet. Writing was his real job.
Koon
Woon
Published
in Gobshite Quarterly
De
la Mancha
Paper
was invented when a tree fell into a pond
Ink
was invented when a berry dropped onto the ground
Don
Quixote was born when Miguel Cervantes picked up the pen
But for four hundred years we still not learned a thing
What
we invent that don’t kill we still have not utility
We
double-down on the lethality of monstrous cruelty
The
practical thing to do is still to endlessly augment our wealth
Never
mind the environmental damage to our health
When
the drones come out from the local police departments
We
must stay home and read about the knightly news
Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza the pair de la Mancha
We count on you!
Koon
Woon
(previously published in Quixotica, Hong Kong)
The North Beacon Hill Canto
I
will pay for the breeze, brief as it is,
rippling
across the shroud of green leaves
over
the ravine, on this sun brightened day,
in
my Beacon Hill neighborhood,
where
life is idle, and Dylan Thomas would pronounce it good.
On
rainy days even, it boasts of a solitary café:
[The
Station],
as
in a station of the metro,
“the
apparitions of these faces in a crowd”
(a
small intimate crowd it is),
“petals
on a wet, black, bough.”
And
would it have been worth it,
to
order a tea, coffee, or cocoa,
marshmallow
or orange marmalade
that
will take you to another level of glad?
Like
a walk from the house at a fresh hour of the morn,
inclined
so slightly is 18th Avenue South,
spritely
I jaunt past houses with eaves and green paint,
past
shrubs manicured and the variegated roses that grace
communal
pledges that we made
to
rescue each from days that are sad,
as
the gardens were mastered by gardeners
who
measure without malice and weigh without hate.
Cross
Beacon Hill Avenue with me to the Red Apple,
a
house of plenty on this hilltop.
Take
your sums from the Wells Fargo ATM,
go
inside the store and give your eyes a feast,
and
remember to purchase a book of stamps,
for
letters to connect with Texas and Tennessee.
Let’s
now continue past the branch library,
but
we will not linger now, for there is time,
time
for you and time for me,
time
for the hope of the woman,
even
though the principle has been hijacked
by
the congressional corporations.
O
Ezra Pound, where are you now?
Thou
were the CEO of Modernist Poetry.
Why
did you take up residence at Saint Elizabeth?
Oh
well we won’t go see the Muse,
and
even without a single glimpse of the Muse,
the
walk must go on; we shall go on.
Inside his mind was the Muse.
And
she moves on, as the river;
as
the water, she moves on.
Stones
will not impede her.
Shameless
she provides,
in
the estuary,
when
birds rest from their flight.
That
was another time.
He
was on an island most of his days,
protected
from unprivileged eyes.
She
called for the sky,
there
came the sky.
She
wanted rain.
She
became fertile again.
As
I walk now past the bicycle shop
again
on Beacon Hill Avenue,
I
am of this place and of this time.
There
is another coffee shop,
but
I won’t mention it by name when
the
streets parade by with their designations
Horton
and Hinds, Spokane at the Fire Station.
This
is the loneliness of a long-distance intellectual,
the
prelude with the pen that can enslave
better
than an interminable sentence.
De
la sierra, morena
Cielito lindo vienen bajando
Un par de ojitos negros
Cielito lindo de contrabando
Ay,
ay, ay, ay, canta y no llores
Porque cantando se alegran
Cielito lindo los corazones
We
do not object.
We
do not object to its price.
Jin
tien wo men cher fan
Wo
men do shih cher fan
“In
the café the women come and go,
Talking
of Michaelangelo.
Koon Woon
Published in South Seattle Emerald
