Too long of a story...

The Conard File [begin November 15, 2019]:

Sarah made her first batik and gave it to me as a present. It was a fish. She was unilaterally in love with me. She was 43 and I was 28 and this was in San Francisco. We were residents of the halfway house Conard for mentally ill people.

Before I moved in I was at the Chinatown YMCA, renting by the month. My father had put me there after I was released from Napa State Hospital. The year was 1977 and I already been homeless once. When I lived at the YMCA I ate mostly Chinese cream-filled buns at a pastry shop at Wavery Lane, an alley off of Grant Avenue, the main street of Chinatown. My father had given me $1,000 and some nice clothes. He figured that I would bounce right back into economic life, but I disappointed him, because even at age 70 today, I never made it back to the workforce.

How do you account for yourself, mister? When I take occupational preference and skills tests I always get accounting and it tells me to work for the FBI and the CIA. A bit of forensic accounting will flush out the criminals and their money trail. I smell the money, I smell the green. It is because I am good in math. But such a job is drudgery as far as I am concerned and it is not that I am unable to work physically or mentally, but it is that I am emotionally unable to work. And there is a reason for it.

“They told him to go back to work, and he pleaded that he wasn’t ready. They said that his disability compensation was over and he needed to go back to work. That night he jumped off the roof and died.” It was not Franz Kafka who juried his disability; it was the State. And the man who related this story was the brother of the said dead man. This was not a major event in a big US city. It was the small town of Aberdeen. When logging and fishing ceased in this small town, there were a lot of alcoholism, teen pregnancy, and crime. I lived here and when I was very young, I started working. An independent contractor was my first job at age 12. I had a paper route. Then the jobs got heavier and heavier but that wasn’t why I broke down.

It was a built-in genetic time bomb. It reminds me of the cartoon in a terrorist training camp. The teacher demonstrating suicide bombing said to the student terrorists around him and said, “Now watch very carefully! You are only going to see this once!”

And when I was exploited by my family and the State sufficiently I judiciously broke down. Even a machine needs oiling but I was not perceived to have any needs. And when one is pulled from both ends vigorously enough, he will snap in the middle. All that is left of this man now is the sad and urgent lesson not to treat others this way. For in the long run, you cannot whip the horse forever to go at top speed and never feed it grass. But maybe “grass” was part of the problem. The government didn’t take care of its youths well enough and offers no guidance. Thrown to wolves are many young and impressionable young men and women. They are sold a false paradise.

                                                                                               

                                                                                                                                             

                                                         

Yellow

Yellow

     Honest, I wear the same yellow waiter’s jacket that’s been worn for three generations. The jasmine tea is tepid and yellow too. I bring egg drop soup and that’s yellow with bits of green onions floating in it. And the white sauce, all day on the steam table, turns into various shades of yellow.

     But I am really dark and brooding like soy sauce, especially during the slow hours when I sit in a back booth reading Nietzsche. Maybe we have to re-evaluate this. Maybe we have to re-evaluate Nietzsche. Maybe we have to re-evaluate the whole thing. I mean, what is this liberal arts education getting me into? Now I can quote Schopenhauer and Freud, Locke and Hume, and a bit of Kant. He is always difficult. Daily, I still fill the napkin holders, the black pepper shakers and the salt, and I make the hot mustard for barbecue pork, and that is yellow and hot.

     Customers come in and want to see the Chinese menu. In English translation of course. And they always ask me what the Chinese scroll painting on the wall says with its calligraphy. It is really deep stuff I say, but I am not a Chinese scholar. In fact, I doubt if I am Chinese anymore. My dad calls me “bamboo.” And he says the more I am educated, the less he knows me. Why couldn’t we have started a chain of fast food Chinese restaurants in the Midwest? He lamented often.

     He is old now. He retired from standing in front of the wok for forty years, stirring chop suey. He looks sallow now. A salad doesn’t taste green to him and a steak doesn’t tastes red. His yellow pajamas hang around his neck like a noose. He tastes the bitterness of ginseng, and that is yellow too, and that is supposed to be good for his health.

     Yellow is the river where Mao used to swim to reassure the Chinese people, all six hundred million of them, that he was still healthy and able. Yellow was the river where Li Bai dropped

 poems written on bamboo slits, and thereby naming all the children of China. But the poems were drowned in the swift downward water, washed out to the Yellow Sea…

Koon Woon

koonwoon@gmail.com

August 30, 2019

Published in Work Literary Magazine Oct 14, 2019

Koon Woon diary notes Oct 23, 1991

Koon Woon's Diary notes --- 26 years ago on October 23, 1991

Diary notes of Koon Woon for Oct 23, 1991:

A father’s hand covers a son’s hand, and his length laps the son’s. He is stirring a wok of chop suey in the Chinese-American restaurant kitchen. The son, in the slow hours, in a waiter’s yellow jacket, secretly hopes that business will never get better, that the quarrelsome customers will stay home and cook their own hamburgers and spaghetti, drink Coke instead of tea, as he, in the fugitive hours, ponders the texts of Ludwig von Wittgenstein, Hughes and Creswell, and Immanuel Kant thrown in for good measure. He is home from the erudite university for the summer, in the folds of the reversed prejudices of his Chinese-American family; however, it must be said, the father does not confuse chop suey with potato salad, mortgage with taxes, firemen with insurance salesmen, for dealing with various realities he has become to a degree objective.

While the son seeks truths that last longer than the life of a restaurant in a small town, or longer than all the McDonalds in all towns, but alas, he will find in books only in the phantom hours, when traffic has slowed to a halt, when husbands are exhausted from work at pulp and shingle mills, tired from demanding wives and unruly children, only small towns facts that go unrecorded, such as the locals betting with the local bookies on Team A, and his truths in books that exist only in books, giving that he wears thick glasses. And he is all too busy thinking that he is thinking and all the while never thinks about what his father is thinking.

The son doesn’t imagine the day will come years after his father’s death, when a long-trusted family friend will casually say, “You walk like your father now.” Now, suddenly like a cloudless day in October, he is free, free from the tangles of bickering philosophers, the webs of literary jealousy, when he thinks of his late father, how his back had, in the span of forty years bending over the wok, had become a bow, like the bow of William Tell, and he shall take his children and grandchildren like he would take and positions arrows, set them firmly in place, and shoot them, shoot them toward the stars… 

Frank Chin interviews Koon Woon

Click on this link for Frank Chin's interview with Koon Woon

The Old House on Bay Avenue

THE OLD HOUSE ON BAY AVENUE

THE OLD HOUSE ON BAY AVENUE

I slept in the anteroom because the bed was there and early in the morning while still in bed the freight train would rattle by just across the dirt fields, cycloned by blackberry brambles. When the roar of the engines died, I would gradually hear robins or sparrows chirping and singing. Those days I was 21 and 22 and I didn’t need coffee or strong tea to wake up yet and I would linger in bed relishing the morning deliciously because my strength was still in my brain and my eyes and limbs were good and young though my loins were still virgin and it was to be another 3 years before I have my first sexual experience with an older married woman from Aberdeen.

For now group and ring theory filled my head and no one has licked the Pacific Rim of my cock yet. I had many women and girl friends and I mean just Platonic friends because I made friends easily and I was not a threat to them; I did not demand sex, though a few would really want to initiate me. I was that shy. I remember Reed who taught me how to kiss in my car before I went down to Eugene to attend the University of Oregon and maybe the trouble was that it had started with Eileen. I will talk about that in a little bit. That was my first frost in the telephone booth, but in retrospect, I still love her, because she came back to me twenty years later and made it up to me.

Well, let me continue with the story on Bay Avenue then.

More than anything it was a time of reading. In the summer I worked for Kerns Desoto furniture factory, a mill just a few blocks down in Hoquiam. There was not much to say about that. It was just a summer job and all they demanded was that I didn’t eat in the lunch room because there were a couple of girls worked there in the wood lathes and they liked me or I mean they probably just looked at me and found me a Chinese curio, and so the red necks gave me these mean stares. The tension was so thick that I went outside and leaned about the building with its weeds and wild flowers and all to eat my sandwich and apple by myself. Nobody spoke to me and I didn’t give a shit. I paid my union dues and they needed some robot to sort the wood as it came out of the saw. I discarded the pieces with the worm holes and stacked the good pieces on a pallet eight hours a day. And when I went home I took a short nap with the sawdust still in my lungs and then my brain was so clear that I read Herstein’s Introduction to Abstract Algebra like it was nobody’s business. How I loved that mathematical realm then.

On Saturday mornings I would drive to the Highway Grocery early in the morning and get a bottle of Mogen David blackberry wine and a yellow pad of legal paper and tried to write something. That summer when I was twenty-two I bought a Writer’s Market and daydreamed that someday I will be a writer. But all I need essentially was to drink enough blackberry wine so that I felt mellow enough so that went the emerald light flooded through the bedroom window (I had moved into the back bedroom by then; it was a two-bedroom house), the unnamed tree in the backyard with its foliage and closure silhouetted itself upon the window I was transported to leagues under the sea. The world was dense and its mysteries began to beckon to me. I had also studied philosophy with John Wisdom by this time. But I didn’t know how to write worth beans. But at least in a small town, I was not anomic. I was the son of Bill and Kim Woon, restaurant owners of the Hong Kong Café on Simpson Avenue. Everyone called them Mamason andPapason. But they were neither. They are as Chinese as Chinese can be, for those who know the difference between Chinese and Japanese. I was the Hong Kong Kid, as known to Dixie Wilcox’ parents. Dixie and I were secretly in love, but neither one of us made any attempt to make it happen in the real world. Later when I worked for the Aberdeen Post Office, I could have asked Dixie out for a date, but I was like a sojourner in a temporary land. I never felt I belonged. The freight train was always going by and it never stops and I sometimes fancy that hoboes were on it wishing they could get off and I wished that I was on it – with destination Bangor Maine.

Jose in Our Restaurant Kitchen

Jose in our kitchen

It isn’t kind to call your older brother Jose. It is definitely lack of respect. Yet that was what my mother called my oldest uncle, her brother. Jose had the misfortune of being stuck in Peru for 40 years before my dad sponsored him over. I never forget going to see Mr. Sanderson, the attorney who also arranged for my immigration to the US. I came from China at age 11. I had to memorize a bunch of “facts” about “my village” and which direction my front door faced and who was my closest neighbor in the village and what were the surnames. That was a trick question, for everyone in the same village had the same surname. China is a patriarchal setup. And I was even born the leader of my village of my generation. Tough luck, Gary Locke, you are not it.

The first time I saw my eldest uncle Jose I was living at Albert Yu’s rooming house. Hank had driven my book to pick up Jose at the airport and then they brought Jose to see me. I am the oldest of all my siblings. The duty to help Jose adjust to American life fell on me. That’s the way it works. My mother had a grimace the whole time we were together with Jose at the Tai Tung Restaurant in Seattle Chinatown. Hank had dropped us off at the café while he went to purchase Chinese restaurant food stuff for our café in Aberdeen, and so he did not have dinner with Jose and my mom and me. My mom arranged that private meeting. Jose had two wives. A legal but an unfaithful one in Hong Kong and a non-legal one and also later proved to be unfaithful and she was in Lima, Peru. Later I was to learn her name to be Carmen.

Jose was a storyteller and a good gossip. He read the Chinese newspaper from cover to cover and had brought with him a set of cookbooks from Peru. He had worked in large chifas that catered to Japanese in Peru. They were good businessmen, but Jose said that they always designed the toilets next to the kitchen of the chifas. Chifas is a Spanish word for “cooking rice.” It is a transliteration. Jose said if he weren’t number one cook he certainly was number two. Later we got to know that Jose is a good storyteller. All his life he missed his fortune or luck by a nanosecond or a micrometer. It is bad to be born in the year of the goat. Seems like everyone is getting the better of you.   (More later…).

Jose in our kitchen (part 2)

Whenever Jose works in the kitchen, he leaves a trail of vegetables and water on the floor. My father always say of Jose, he is not a man of planning or vision, when he dies, he will just drop dead somewhere and others will have to take care of his body. My father is not very charitable. He has known very little of charity his life. Jose goes home to his apartment that we own at two in the morning when we close the restaurant. My dad and I stay to clean up and to have our wee morning meal together. That’s the only time my dad tells me of his oppression and humiliation.

He was interned at Angel Island and he was interrogated there. His immigration would in some sense be deemed criminal, but that is because the criminals were making the laws. Suffices now to say that if he was a criminal, he was in crime for other reasons, not because of the circumstances of his immigration. Because our name was changed to Woon, I am a paper son. But the crime was that my great-grandfather had already come as an indentured servant in the town of Hoquiam in 1880 and his son was in all likelihood murdered. We never found the body or the reason he was missing. So my father had to purchased an immigration paper – somebody else’s and for those who don’t know this story and others, Google “paper son.” And/ or the Chinese Exclusion Act. No, it was not drama. It was how an entire nation was banned from entry to the USA.

My father seldom ate vegetables. His big meal of the day, and the only time he could eat it too, was when we sat together in the wee morn and the freight trains would blow their lonely whistles a few blocks away. His grandfather came when the rails were young and he did laundry and cooked for the loggers. North of Hoquiam, in Humptulips, you can go into the woods and find abandoned rails tracks, when over a century ago, these tracks transported lumber out of the woods. My great-grandmother was in China. They were separated by the Pacific Ocean and by American immigration laws. My great-grandfather had a solitary teapot in the backroom of his laundry shop and  he had a solitary teacup.

My great-grandfather’s name was Locke Li, meaning a man from the Locke villages and possess of great strength. He acted as a labor contractor and the mayor of Hoquiam went with him to his village to conscript 500 men for the logging industry. One of the men that came over from China was Gary Locke’s grandfather.

My father used to say to me in the lonely hours of the café at night, “I used to think that we can be president in one generation, but now I know it takes three generations to grow a president. He didn’t like Gary Locke very much because my father despised Beijing. And Gary Locke went to Beijing to be the US Ambassador. My father and I are peasants. We distrust officials. If you come in to our restaurant through our front door and you are a relative, we then know that you have forgotten the old ways. Relatives and close friends come through the back door. That way, any secret business is unobserved.

(End of part 2, to be continued…)

You Are Not Albert Yu

You are not Albert Yu

You are not Albert Yu. I used to know a Albert Yu. I lived in his rooming house. He had been a pharmaceutical sales rep before he became a student slum lord. I did odd jobs for him in lieu of some rent money. He had two huge dogs called "Happy" and "Lucky." He asked me if my father gambled. He said that he and his father in Hong Kong were not on speaking terms because he bought an expensive suitcase and his father criticized him for it. He said he needed that one with the lock. 

He took me to a whore house on Capital Hill. He didn't carry any money with him and he borrowed some from me. I supposed he was afraid that he would blow his wad in a place like that. The cops sounded the siren in the alley and the madam said that's how they make sure that they'd be paid off. She said the "girls" were actually nurses "moonlighting." 

That was my first time. Zsa Zsa treated me well. That's was after the madam had given me some orange orange juice and a "marriage manual" to read. I think the gist of it was "in, out, repeat if necessary juice and a "marriage manual" to read. I think the gist of it was "in, out, repeat if necessary." 

That was my first time. Zsa Zsa treated me well. That's was after the madam had given me some." 

Years later, another former student tenant named Bruce who drove a metro bus at the time saw me at the HUB. I was mentally ill and homeless and I carried and played a guitar. Bruce asked me if I knew what had happened to Albert. I said no. Bruce told me that Albert had blew his brains out.

I thought Albert was happy. He married a beautiful woman from Honan, China and had driven me to his house to talk one time. He said that Herfy's in the U-District was full of "too many ears." I was paranoid. I said I was being followed. A helicopter buzzed above. He laughed and said, "You are being followed!"

When Bruce told me that he had blew his brains out. I said, "Correction. The CIA got him."

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