1968- Eye Hotel

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Although no one took his dismissal of Chen seriously, it was cited as a further example of our acting president’s autocratic highhandedness. During the strike Chen used a café in North Beach as his classroom. The Brighton Express on Pacific Avenue was a popular café and hangout for the bohemian crowd. A nisei woman named Joanna ran the café. In the past, when the president enjoyed the local jazz scene, on occasion he too frequented the café. Joanna, always good-humored and friendly, called him “Professor.” One supposes she called Chen “Professor” too. During the strike, they were all teaching their classes off campus somewhere, in their homes or in churches. This business with the strike was nonsense. No student wanted to lose a year of coursework. No teacher wanted to waste his time on a picket line.

  Students gathered around a couple of tables, and Chen began his lecture, “Mao Tse-Tung on Literature and Art.” “Comrades!” he both addressed the students and quoted from Mao. “You have been invited to this forum today to exchange ideas and examine the relationship between work in the literary and artistic fields and revolutionary work in general . . . This,” he said, “is how Mao addressed the Yenan forum twenty-six years ago on May 2, 1942.”

  One of Chen’s young protégés, Paul Wallace Lin, sat among the students with a notebook and fingered the pages of Mao’s talk.

  Chen moved around the tables confidently. Two or three patrons were huddled in the corners with coffee, reading their newspapers but still listening to Chen. Even Joanna was seated among the students. “It’s important to consider the date of this talk. May second, two days before the May Fourth movement anniversary. As we have previously discussed, on May 4, 1919, a student uprising in Peking and Shanghai protested the Versailles Treaty. The Versailles Treaty marked the end of World War I but also relinquished previously held Chinese territory to the Japanese. This was the beginning of a Chinese nationalist movement driven by Marxist antifeudal, anti-imperialist political forces.”

  Paul nodded and underlined student uprising. His father had been a student then too.

  “And 1942. The United States had just entered the war against Japan, a war the Chinese had been fighting already for five years. Mao identified the principal enemy of this period: Japanese imperialists.”

  Paul scribbled the dates into his notebook. Imagine Professor Chen pontificating on Mao, adding fuel to the fire already destroying our campus.

  Chen continued, “Taken in this context of war, Mao continues . . . ‘In our struggle for the liberation of the Chinese people, there are various fronts, among which are the fronts of the pen and of the gun, the cultural and the military fronts. To defeat the enemy we must rely primarily on the army with guns. But this army alone is not enough; we must also have a cultural army, which is absolutely indispensable for uniting our own ranks and defeating the enemy.’” Indeed. But to be fair, Chen never had the teeth for violence. He would never have jumped on a truck and yanked out power cords and destroyed equipment. He was much too refined. He really believed in the cultural army, in liberation by means of the pen. So he continued.

  “I realize, considering the violence we have sustained in recent days under the severe measures of the current administration—”such an oblique reference to our acting president—“it would seem to some that the gun might be the more appropriate tool. I want to make it clear that I am not advocating the gun. We are here to discuss contemporary Chinese literature, but we cannot examine that literature without also examining the political and social context that drives its formation during this time period.”

  The students loved Chen. Suddenly his knowledge of the Chinese revolution and his Marxist point of view were in vogue. They sat around him mesmerized, as if he were Confucius himself, Chinese wisdom coupled with his contemporary knowledge of revolution. They all wanted revolution, but they didn’t know what revolution was. Paul, for example, wanted revolution, and he wanted this revolution packaged in the poet intellectual. But was he listening when Chen again quoted Mao? “Many writers and artists stand aloof from the masses and lead empty lives; naturally they are unfamiliar with the language of the people.” The language of the people was exactly the language our acting president had spent his life studying. Unlike Chen, he knew this language and how the common understanding of this language controlled society.

  Accordingly, what Chen was not telling his students is that any war of words will ultimately be resolved in society’s decision to define those words. Art and literature. Mao Tse-Tung and the Cultural Revolution defined those words in the service of a political agenda. Poetry for the Marxist-Leninist must be written for the proletariat. Everything that Chen loved about art and literature had to be destroyed or changed. He knew this, but he didn’t tell the students.

  Chen’s class was over. Students paid for their coffees and mud pies and wandered out, back to the picket line or to the next noon rally. Paul remained behind.

  “Where’s Yat Min today?” Chen queried, using Edmund’s Chinese name.

  “Working. Always working. He sent his apologies, and here’s his paper.”

  Chen nodded. It was a thick treatise written entirely in Chinese. “Since he’s mastered two languages, maybe he should study a third.” Chen said this as if thinking to himself.

  “Right. I’ll let him know.”

  “It’s not necessary. He’ll figure it out for himself.” He packed his papers away in his briefcase and announced, “Do you have some time for a short walk? It’s just down Montgomery.” As they passed out of the café, he asked, “Did you know the Brighton?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe not. Your father used to hang out here, but then after your mother died, I guess he never came around again. Do you know Janis Joplin?”

  “Not personally.”

  “She was here the other day. Everyone’s been here. Now you too.”

  They walked down Montgomery to Washington and stared at a parking lot. “Remember what I said about the Monkey Block? It used to be right here. There was a huge building, four stories, occupied most of the block. Your father lived here. It’s where he painted his best work. Where he met his friends. He knew everyone. William Saroyan, Diego Rivera, Kenneth Rexroth. Well, Rexroth is still around anyway. When Rivera came to paint his murals with his wife, Frida Kahlo, your father got the Chinese Revolutionary Artist Club together to host them. He was going to name you Diego, but your mother favored Paul. It was Paul for Paul Cézanne and Paul Valéry. Painter-poet. They had romantic hopes for you. You know, he knew Valéry in Paris.”

  “What about Wallace?”

  “Wallace? Middle name? Must have been Wallace Stevens. Your mother studied him at Stanford. It was her thesis.”

  Paul shook his head because he didn’t know any of this. Chen could have been making it all up. The building was a parking lot, gone, Chen said, for about ten years now. All Paul ever knew during his years growing up was this parking lot. And there was more history before that, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain. The names read like his American literature textbook. A history of artists and writers had been swept away, and now Chen was saying his father had been the rare Chinese American artist to add his name to the Monkey Block.

  “Chinatown is just over there.” Chen pointed. “One day, your father went inside and closed the door.”

  “Why? I don’t understand. I didn’t even know.”

  Chen was silent for a moment. “I didn’t consider that. Of course, nothing was ever different for you. You never saw the change.”

  “I feel I knew someone different. I know the paintings. Found all of them. I put them up, but I don’t know the person who painted them. I found his old easel and a box of dried-up tubes, but I never saw him paint.”

  “You know, Valéry was a poet, then one day he quit, just like that, and never wrote a thing for the next twenty years. I think your father admired that sort of resolve to find another path. Does that make sense?”

  “Maybe.”

 
; “Some of those men at the funeral know your father’s past. They were in the artists’ club, but they might not admit it today. People like Rexroth and the North Beach crowd didn’t even know he died. For them, he disappeared.”

  Chen crossed the street and Paul followed. They walked in silence over to Kearny, weaving around the old Chinese and Filipino bachelors emerging from the pool halls, barber, and cigar shops. “Like this building, this International Hotel.” He pointed to the sign on the central door and gestured up. “Occupied the entire block. The Monkey was taller, another story higher, and a more beautiful, stately granite structure, but like this, with businesses below, offices, restaurants, and when your father was there, the general motley crowd of bohemian types.” They turned the corner at Jackson to get a sense of the size of the building.

  Some Chinese kids were hanging outside a storefront, smoking in a group. “Hey, Paul,” they nodded in recognition. He knew them from the Y. Now they were hanging out at Leway’s, playing pool after school every day.

  “Hey,” he answered coolly.

  “You at State now?”

  “Right.”

  “Cool, man. Heard it’s tripping there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I could do that. Cherry bombs. Shit.”

  The group all simultaneously puffed into the air and laughed.

  Paul shrugged and walked on. “Back to my history lesson,” he prodded Chen, who had conveniently become momentarily invisible.

  “I lost touch with your father for a while after your mother died. But he promised to raise you. And I suppose the Monkey Block didn’t seem like a place to raise a child. Not that you were living there. He had already given up his studio. He was probably under investigation by the FBI. You were born right in the middle of those years when Joseph McCarthy was active. Remember, your father had a history in Paris with Chou En-lai, and he was friendly with all the wrong people: Rivera, the revolutionary artists’ club. They had us all running scared.”

  So this was the avuncular role Chen took on with his friend’s son, now his student, as if he could retreat into a romantic past, escape the revolution that threatened his bourgeois intellectual role. In any case, Paul was about to live his own youth.

  Paul met his friend Edmund. “Are you thinking about learning a third language now that you’ve mastered English and Chinese?”

  “I’m working on Mandarin. Does that count?” Edmund spoke with a Shanghai dialect.

  “I guess so.”

  “Our acting president is going to be honored by the Japanese American Citizens’ League at a banquet on the wharf. We’re going out there to protest. Coming?”

  “I’ve got to work that night.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve started writing articles for the newspaper East West. If you take notes about the protest, I’ll write the article. We can share the byline.”

  “Good idea.”

  As it turned out, Paul’s notes were interesting but useless. Edmund Lee discovered that the banquet he was waiting tables at that evening was the very JACL banquet in question. Paul covered the one hundred protestors on the cold, wet wharf outside the restaurant that evening, and Edmund listened to the president’s speech and briefly interviewed him in the kitchen as he snuck out the back and up to a waiting helicopter on the roof to avoid the angry hubbub. Only Japanese Americans would go to so much trouble to avoid conflict. Edmund thought if it were the Chinese, the Six Companies would have just hired their goons to take care of business.

  Edmund listened to the president’s speech with interest, scribbling notes at intervals and stuffing them into his white coat pocket. It all made beautiful sense. For example: What kind of language we speak largely determines the kinds of thoughts we have. He went on to explain that the informal and formal structures of our language determine the way we interpret our experiences and therefore the way we act in any given circumstance. Edmund thought about himself, his accented English and the Shanghai Chinese that ran under and around his speech and writing. How was this speech controlling his thinking and actions?

  The president looked out on his Japanese American audience and gave the example of his Meiji Japanese immigrant mother. “Shikataganai,” he intoned, for example. All the nisei nodded and thought about mama. “‘It can’t be helped.’ Or, ‘don’t cry over spilled milk.’ The sanseis who are out there rabble-rousing against me hate this idea of shikataganai. They have their points to make, but they don’t understand the source of strength that this idea comes from, the ability to endure suffering and sacrifice. Our parents, the issei, interpreted it to mean endurance, but we nisei probably interpret it to mean don’t cry over spilled milk, so let’s get on with it and move to the next thing.”

  The audience murmured approval. They fancied themselves a bunch of positive pragmatists. How else could they have come so far?

  “But the sanseis,” he continued, “interpret shikataganai to be a show of weakness. You hear it from the students all the time. They say, We don’t believe in shikataganai; that’s why you all got sent to camp, because you gave in.’ But you all know it’s not so simple. Well, what is shikataganai anyway? It’s just a word, or series of words, and we’ve got to communicate better with each other about what we mean when we say or think it. And until we have this honest exchange with our children, when we really listen to each other, we won’t bridge the gap that is growing between us.”

  Edmund bused some abandoned dessert plates and hurried back to fill the glasses with ice water. He could sense the approval of the nisei as they stirred the cream into their coffees. They were willing to take a little browbeating from the president. After all, here was a very reasonable man who wanted communication and exchange, and they should follow his example. Obviously those sansei on bullhorns out there were incapable of listening.

  Edmund did everything slowly and carefully and obsequiously, nodding graciously to every guest like an invisible immigrant. No one suspected he was a brilliant student in Chinese studies at the president’s college. He was going to make himself necessary as long as possible. Meanwhile, Paul was outside chanting to keep warm, leafleting the tourists and standing next to the signs that said, “We Orientals may look alike, but we don’t all think alike.” Someone had created a life-sized puppet complete with tiny mustache, tam-o’-shanter, glasses, suit, and tie. The puppet was held aloft in the air with poles and entertained the crowd with foolish antics while someone screeched into a bullhorn: “Don’t touch me! I’m the president!” And the crowd answered in unison: “No! You’re a puppet! You’re a puppet!”

  Inside, the president was explaining something he called time-binding. “Time-binding is what distinguishes human beings from other living things. Plants,” he said, “survive by their ability to energy-bind, that is, a system for taking energy from the environment to feed their organisms. Animals survive by the hunt, or their ability to move around to get their food; this is what we call space-binding. But humans are unique in that we survive by our ability to time-bind, that is, by using and controlling time.”

  About this time, Edmund slipped around the tables and poured coffee, as if coincidentally to nudge a few from nodding off to sleep. They gratefully brought the cups to their lips and regained their alert and interested composures. Edmund rushed back to fill his carafe with hot coffee and jotted time-binding into his notes.

  “What are you doing?” another waiter queried.

  “Getting more coffee,” Edmund parried.

  “We get paid by the hour for this. No tips.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a goddamned banquet. Relax.”

  “Right.” Edmund rushed back to hear more about time-binding.

  “Humans,” the president continued, “have created language to communicate, to pass on vital information to each other and to the next generation. That’s how we survive over time. This time-binding capacity is another name for our ability to create society and civilization.”

  One
JACLer waved Edmund over and asked for an ashtray. Edmund returned with the ashtray, popped a lighter from his pocket, and lit the man’s cigarette.

  “For example, the JACL is a society of citizens that depends on communicating your purpose and your history. This, I agree, is the difficult task ahead.” Outside, the president’s puppet was going through the motions of ritual disembowelment while the crowd chanted, “Haya-kiri, haya-kiri, haya-kiri . . .”

  The JACLer puffed in the air away from the half-eaten slices of apple pie and nodded appreciatively to Edmund.

  The president adjusted his bifocaled vision, scrutinizing his crowd in various dispositions of alertness. “You of the Japanese American Citizens League have an important history and mission to communicate. If the youngsters outside could hear your brave history and mission, they would join your ranks and extend your proud history.” This comment brought about some grunting and scattered clapping. The youngsters outside had gotten their puppet into a kneeling position with a knife stuck in his belly.

  Inside, the president continued. “If you fail to communicate or become stagnant in your thinking, if you lose your ability to think toward the future, this league is doomed to pass away without change.” He paused to let the doom of it all sink it.

  Edmund jotted down with some glee: Nisei dinosaurs. Extinction.

  “But”—the president wagged a telling finger—“I know that the JACL is an association that knows great change, and you have not and cannot be afraid of change. After all, you survived World War II.” More grunting and clapping. “But think about one of the reasons you survived the war—”

  Edmund panned the room, wondering what these second-generation Japanese Americans could be thinking.

  “English,” the professor announced. “As nisei you were able to speak English and communicate your concerns to the American government. The English language: a small thing we take for granted, but a key to our survival. Your ability to communicate effectively in English binds you to your American citizenship.”

  Outside, the poor puppet protested, “Ouch ouch!” while the crowd cried out the Japanese translation, “Itai itai! Aiyaiyaiyai, itai yoooo!”