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.