Viewers of this blog on Oct 19, 2025

China	863
Singapore	596
United Kingdom	415
United States	320
Brazil	202
Germany	157
Vietnam	83
Netherlands	66
Sweden	65
Other	327

China

863

Singapore

596

United Kingdom

415

United States

320

Brazil

202

Germany

157

Vietnam

83

Netherlands

66

Sweden

65

Other

327

keeping things straight

KEEPING SOULS IN A LEDGER

In the colorful blur of St. Mary’s Square, a message on the clock said, “Know son the evil and flee thence!” I had been sleepless in SF entering Grant Avenue the entrance to Chinatown. I lugged my suitcase through the crowded street like an assassin on a mission. Inside my suitcase is a leather-bound ledger, where I make the infinitesimal notation of entering a soul. I made a mark “+” if the soul merits recycling and a mark of “-,” if it should be returned to the fires of Hell.

Mother, my eyes are pierced by the sunrise between two corporate buildings, and my legs grow weak.

Mother, if I transmigrate, how would you know me if I came as to your door as a puppy?

 

In the matter of mothers, schizophrenia is allowed. And in the matter of souls kept in a ledger with their merits and demerits the world keeps a record of harm done. I am sworn as a notary, and my commission expires when the seas consume the land. When all is said and done, I was a good clerk in the ethereal realm.

Essay -- you are nothing!

YOU ARE NOTHING!

It was a building in San Franciso speaking to me. The building was all white and it was a hospital on Pine Street, a mile south of downtown. I shouted back that it was nothing. Some nothingness is stronger than other nothingness, and in this case, the building was stronger than me; it was a fortress, an invincible construction where it housed labs, blood, needles, and people. Some people go in in some condition, and they come out in another condition, about that this is all we can say.

 

The Tao says that health cannot be bought, it must be earned.

 

I was the tai chi master of the supermarket and not only that, but I was also the reader of souls, and Jimmy Carter was president. I said that I would read his book someday. Some time later, after all of this, I received a card from Jimmy and Rosalind that was simply signed. They could write their own signatures. But I don’t know about that buffoon in the White House today. It is like monsoon rain, a lot of inconvenience and we need it to soften the hardened mud, but despite its heavy volume, it ends rather quickly when it ends, and things go back to a tolerably drear.

 

Things are really like that – come thingness and go nothingness. In Chinese sensibility, whiteness is death, the funerial color. Even so, I was so out of it, I was not afraid, because I was even more afraid of life.

Dispatches from the mental health center

Dispatches from the mental health center...

 

(Fragments from Koon Woon’s existence):

 

 

 

 

The first time

“You are nothing!”

Keeping souls in a ledger

Conard

Genius at the Triple L

You can always TRY

Helping nephew play chess

The Car Man

Clean Start

Juneau House

Under the weather in Aberdeen

Morrison Tales

Times with E, S, and V

MDR, minimum daily requirements

Director of the NSA

Napa revisited

......................................................................

THE FIRST TIME

Sewers spieled steam in our most gentle city of San Francisco. Sometimes I had a bed to sleep on, like at the Chinatown YMCA, and sometimes I slept without a bed or companion. Fog and rain assailed me, but I am as thick as the NY City Directory. Family correctly diagnosed me as incorrigible and left me at the foot of the dumpster.

 

It is here at the Stockton Hotel at the intersection of Stockton and Vallejo that I breathed the vehicle exhaust from my third-floor window propped open by a can of pork and beans. My furniture adhered to the minimalist cot, zinc bucket and wash basin. The shower room had no windows and was lit by a weak incandescent lamp. You need to bring your own toilet paper to the shared latrine.

 

Then you wrote, “They confiscated his deck of cards, jailed him and disallowed all communications with his pregnant wife.” They also said to him, “Women and children are building socialism, and you are so idle you have time to gamble? Just as you have no empathy with the poker loser, we have no leniency with you.”

 

The Port Master of New Amsterdam embezzled a million dollars from the port but was not imprisoned for the crime.  

 

But democracy has triumphed. Black ops keep it lively – a debate between Margaret Atwood and Billy the hillbilly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Water Chasing Water --- 2014 American Book Award by Koon Woon

 https://kaya.com/books/water-chasing-water/

Paper son poet

About Advertise Careers Distribution IE Archives Subscriptions Newsletter Signup Donate International Examiner Home Community News Arts Opinion Classifieds Community Voice Awards (CVA) 2025 Home Arts Koon Woon’s Paper-son Poet explores shadows, realities of the past Arts Koon Woon’s Paper-son Poet explores shadows, realities of the past By Russell Leong -October 27, 20161249 414wsidsril Koon Woon’s Paper-son Poet: When Rails were Young, A Memoir, a poetic, multi-genre memoir of his growing up both in China and America has finally reached the shores of all who read English in the Pacific Rim. He continues in this newest book to “tell the truths” of life as it is lived—but if you are a new reader do not mistake his writing for a raw, unfiltered immigrant biography. In prologue to this book that consists of prose stories, poems, and an extensive transcribed interview by Frank Chin that comprises the second section, Koon Woon characterizes himself thusly: “You are the dragon on the wall / You are the railroad when America was young.” Koon contextualizes his own coming of age as a boy in Southern Guangdong Province with his coming of age later in America, working, studying, and struggling with poverty, mental illness, and loneliness in America, with early Chinese railroad workers who had arrived a hundred years prior. Koon Woon’s great-grandfather, Lock Lick, in fact had gone to Hoquiam, Washington to run a laundry and restaurant. Later, Lock Lick’s son, however, was an alleged wastrel and died somewhere in Canada without reporting the existence of his China-born son, (Koon Woon’s father). Thus, when Koon Woon’s father needed to immigrate to the United States he had to buy a “paper-son” immigration paper from the Woon family. Like other Chinese, Koon Woon’s father then was detained at Angel Island in San Francisco, the Ellis Island of the West. Koon Woon writes with the wisdom of a 66-year old man who retains in his bones and blood a much younger mastery of form: what I call “word gungfu”–muscular, dynamic, and versatile, springing with alacrity or moving trance-like in meditation. His poetry and prose in the first half of the memoir draws from the wellspring of childhood in the village under Communism: helping his father plant and harvest rice, as well as attending Party meetings as a young child, amidst playing cards and poker games, fishing, eating, washing, and, of course, fighting, only to have “to try to wash the blood in the lotus pond.” Then, on October 31, 1960 his plane lands at Sea-Tac airport in Washington State after a journey from Hong Kong, Taipei, and Tokyo. That flight marks the beginning of his journey both away from Asia, and his later return, through poetry and memory, to rediscover the meaning of his life and consciousness of being a man treading water that overlaps upon dual shores. Koon Woon was born “Locke Kau Koon” in Nan On Village in Guangdong Province and was part of the 19th and 20th century migration of Toishan peoples from the Pearl River Delta to America. His actual surname is Locke, and his family in fact is related to Washington’s most well-known politician, Gary Locke. Koon Woon himself immigrated to the United States in 1960 to Aberdeen, Washington, worked in the family restaurant, and studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Washington. Later, he completed degrees in creative writing and began to publish books of poetry, which were well-received by literary critics and readers alike. While some of the concerns of his work (migration, displaced family, and harsh journeys) recall earlier poems from “Songs of Gold Mountain” (1911-1915), or poems written by sojourners on Angel Island before World War II, Koon Woon work differs in that it is written entirely in the English-language. More important, his writing is also tempered by the irony, humor, and brashness of the West Coast beat generation poets—including Kerouac and Ginsberg together with ancient Tang poets and classic Chinese novels such as the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West. This all makes for an intoxicating, caffeine-rich East-West brew not unlike the Hong Kong drink “yin-yang” which combines the bittersweet taste of both tea and coffee in one satisfying cup. Koon Woon’s lyric artistry surprises and delights, here is one example in his long poem, “Song of the Village (In Water Buffalo Time),” an ode to his growing-up in Nan-On village: She gives me crackers and tea, and draws the mosquito net. I hear a faint moan from the water buffalo. He too will be librated… Dragonflies hover over chrysanthemums Like helicopters over a burning forest. Bananas and grapes bunch together like families. Women splash buckets into the well. I look for the faint prints of water buffalo … Extending the range of his previous two books of poetry, Paper-son Poet provides us with a contemporary, allegorical Asian version of Plato’s “cave,” whereby people chained and facing the wall of a cave begin to interpret and give names to the shadows they see, mistakenly taking shadows for reality rather than ascertaining the philosophical truth behind. In Koon Woon’s book, the “shadows” include both the fractured memories of his Asian past, as well as the realities of the American present that include daily encounters with good or bad feng shui at work or in love, coupled with bouts of mental illness, and observations on the highly stratified class structures of traditional Chinatowns in Seattle and San Francisco, whereby the merchants count their profits, and male and female workers are systematically exploited both by their own kin and by the society-at-large. In essence, then, Koon Woon in his daring first memoir unveils the cave’s shadows to reveal spiritual and psychological truths of being a man, a poet, and a modern Asian American dancing on the tightrope of consciousness. In so doing, he must call out the shadows of race, class, and politics for what they are—illusion—and replace them with his own names, his own words, his own sentences, his own being. Each reader, through perusing KoonWoon’s Paper-son Poet can step out of the cave of festering, hackneyed old stories, thus freer of the illusions that have bound him or her. To borrow from the author, “The rails are still young,” and it’s time to board the train—to Asia, to the Americas—seeing them in a new light. Koon Woon will give two readings from his new memoir ‘Paper Son Poet’ (Goldfish Press). On Thursday, November 3, he will read with Dan Raphael and Willie Smith and an open mic preceding the reading at Couth Buzzard Books (8310 Greenwood Ave. N) at 7:00 p.m. On Thursday, November 10, he will read with Katie Tynan and Roselle Kovitz and an open mic at an “It’s About Time Writers’ Reading Series” event at Ballard Branch Public Library (5614 22nd Ave. N.W.) at 6:00 p.m. Free. 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