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

 

 

 

Koon's Diaries

 

 

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.

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.