1968- Eye Hotel

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  Someone tilted his head toward Edmund, to which Edmund responded while trying to keep an ear on the president’s speech. “Do you speak English?” the nisei asked Edmund.

  “Pardon me, sir?” Edmund tried a British accent on the man. It was a reflexive response, a haughty survival tactic learned on the job. Edmund caught himself; maybe this guy had taken the president’s words to heart and wanted to bind his English to their shared American citizenship.

  But the nisei replied with controlled agitation, “Ah, the toilet, the men’s room?”

  “Yes sir. Right this way, sir.”

  Edmund ushered the man out. Beyond the doors of the banquet hall, the ruckus was a low roar. Police were stationed at the entrance, and clients slipped in and out with amused babble or testy exchanges, the din rising and falling into the foyer. Edmund thought he saw Paul with his picket sign but ran back to hear the president’s closing remarks.

  “Now I’m not talking about change for the sake of change, but about progress, progress that is a forward-thinking process of time-binding in which we pool all of our technical and intellectual resources and support the freest cultural exchange between all races and creeds and classes for the purpose of solving the world’s problems.”

  At this moment, the puppet sewn from rags was splitting its guts. Long red ribbons sailed into the foggy night, flung across the wharf with spraying clouds of sparkling crimson confetti. The poor puppet heaved his entrails over the dancing protestors in a bizarre display, an Oriental Mardi Gras.

  As the JACLers rose to applaud their speaker, Edmund ran into the kitchen, positioning himself at the salad bar to accost the acting president as he moved quickly along with his entourage.

  “Sir, Mr. President.” Edmund stood in the narrow aisle and called out like a reporter.

  The voice, coming from the bins of lettuce and tomatoes, caught the president’s attention. Who was this young waiter?

  “I listened to your speech with great interest.” He fumbled quickly with a pertinent question. “I was thinking, won’t it be necessary to promote a civilization of people who speak multiple languages in order to translate and exchange ideas and technology?”

  “An excellent question. Who are you?”

  “Edmund Lee. I’m a student at your college.”

  The president nodded to his nisei bodyguards. “This is what I’m talking about. Intelligent and hardworking students like this young man. Studying by day, working by night. That’s what we’re about, not that minority of rabble-rousers.” He patted Edmund on his padded white jacket shoulder. “Ed, come to my office and we’ll talk about your question. But tell me just one thing: what did you learn tonight?” He began to walk on, pushed along by his bodyguards.

  Edmund, following, ventured awkwardly, “Well, I think you said that the winning civilization will be the one that keeps its history going.”

  They climbed the stairs to the roof, and Edmund could hear the deafening roar of propellers. The president placed his hand over his tam-o’-shanter and looked back at Edmund, yelling something incomprehensible, his mouth a grin and a grimace at the same time, then ducking away into a whirring fog, tiny bits of crimson confetti glinting here and there.

  “Fuck,” Paul exclaimed. “I can’t share that byline with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was outside. You were inside.”

  “So? That’s the beauty of it.”

  “My participation is about ten percent. The whole article is yours. And besides, who reads his work? Now you’re inside his goddamned head.”

  “Pretty weird, huh?”

  Paul read from Edmund’s draft. “‘To paraphrase the president, he states that conflict is essential to growth, but unresolved conflict over time results in emotional disturbance (i.e., you become crazy) as one’s self-concept departs from the reality of the self. Your territory separates from your map.’” Paul looked up from his reading. “What’s this map/territory thing?”

  Edmund’s face scrunched up. “It isn’t very clear yet, is it? O.K., it’s like the territory is the real land and the map is just a representation. So you got a map in your head about yourself, but there is the real you or self that is the territory. So this conflict he’s talking about is when the territory is changing but the map stays the same. It’s this disconnect between the two, between the abstraction and the reality, that causes one to be insane.”

  “That makes sense,” Paul nodded. He was thinking about how he himself could be defined as insane, but he read on: “‘The man’s entire body of scholarship—ideas that can be said to be largely utopian—has been demolished by his actions. His map is that he’s an effective communicator, a great scholar applying his theories to active duty. His territory is that of a convenient minority banana used by the white power structure. Even if that’s an exaggeration, his recent displays of buffoonery and arrogant affectations take on that role. He’s abandoned his principles of human dignity and self-concept to play the fool. So even by his own terms, he’s insane.’”

  Edmund started to pull his jacket on. “I’ve got to revise this for the paper. What do you want to do?”

  “It’s not my article, Edmund.”

  “Yeah, I better take full responsibility. Probably nobody will read it anyway.”

  “It’s brilliant, really. Only you would do that sort of homework.”

  “I’ve got these photos that Professor Chen took that I’m going to use. He’s got the students being handcuffed, lines of police with batons, injured students, blood on the concrete, teachers marching with armbands, paddy wagons.”

  “Talk about the territory,” Paul scoffed.

  “Exactly.” Edmund stood in Paul’s living room, staring for a long moment at an oil portrait of a mustachioed man in a suit and tie, his tilted head and ochre colorings against the brushstrokes of an olive green background.

  “Paul Valéry, a French poet,” Paul commented, mystified as Edmund that this canvas left by his father should be his personal window.

  Edmund adjusted his jacket and stuffed the article into its deep pockets. He muttered a partial thought, “The winning civilization—” opened the door, and left.

  3: Analects

  Authors sometimes take strange liberties.

  —Charlie Chan

  I

  The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

  —Karl Marx

  1.1She said: Who am I if not the dowager empress, called upon in modern times to weave a brocaded wisdom? Admit it: you step lightly, fearing to see my visage in the carpeted tapestry; you suspect me to be hiding in the wings of every drama; you want to believe my tiny stinking feet and painted peony lips have long decayed, chopped up with my decadent remains, but language recuperates me again and again. I am hidden in a library left behind over time, incrementally established with great care and then abandoned as if its librarian had suddenly escaped. Indeed he fled, left his great collection in this great sitting room overlooking a craggy scene of California cypress framing the stately Golden Gate, a play of red arches in the blue Pacific. Two young men—let’s say his scribes—were left to tend these archives, and in offering his home for their services, they had already begun to assume the robes of their hopeful futures: poet and scholar. Truly a library is a room of dreams.

  1.2Poet: Paul Wallace Lin stretched himself out in the cushioned embrace against one end of the expansive bay window, puzzling over the mind of Monsieur Teste and his creator Paul Valéry. He wondered if his father, who had painted the French poet’s portrait, had ever read Monsieur Teste, and if reading it himself would illuminate his father’s expectations for his son. Even the man who is free of his father’s will desires some direction.

  1.3Scholar: Lee Yat Min, similarly stretched at the other end of the window, did not speculate on his father’s ambitions for his son. After establishing a laundry business, his father sent for the family in China, and when Yat Min arrived in Cali
fornia at age twelve, his father sat him down between the damp steam rising off pressing irons and the reeking shirts stained in sweat and growled very plainly that if Yat Min ever worked in a laundry like this, he’d break his son’s legs. Yat Min learned that the mind can run faster than the legs. He turned the pages of Lu Hsun, running a finger down the printed characters of a story entitled “Diary of a Madman.”

  1.4In such a fashion, two young men framed the sunlit entrance to the library, one seeking to decipher a Western mind and the other an Eastern, only to discover that neither was more inscrutable than the other.

  1.5Now, let us pull away from this great window as if riding the soft fog that creeps into the bay beneath the Golden Gate, and observe the stunning house against the cliffs. Professor Chen Wen-guang designed this custom-built palace for his second wife, a wealthy Austrian baroness. It’s engineered in three split-levels on a hillside beneath Mount Tamalpais, great windows on every level overlooking the San Francisco Bay. On the first level, a dining and living room; on the second level, the library and bedrooms; on the third level, an artist’s studio and gallery. The Baroness lived only briefly in the finished house, Europe and China meeting in cordial feng shui, before she died, leaving a comfortable stipend to her learned and beloved Chinaman.

  1.6Chen Wen-guang modestly insisted that he was but a historian, a witness to events, a chronologer, if such a title exists. In that role, predictably, he created a chronology of those days in turmoil at San Francisco State College as if such a record would create an enlightened path by which to walk through and finally leave behind disturbing events. By such chronology the puzzle of history was stretched out, one factual account stepping after another factual account, moment by moment, day by day, month by month. But upon scrutinizing his own work, he discovered but a single and continuous silken thread pulled away, unraveling at every tug the very fabric of a robe once splashed in calligraphic dreams.

  II

  When dealing with a man who is capable of understanding your teaching, if you do not teach him, you waste the man. When dealing with a man who is incapable of understanding your teaching, if you do teach him, you waste your teaching. A wise teacher wastes no man and wastes no teaching.

  —Confucius (15.8)

  2.1The wise Professor Chen read with great interest a position paper on the establishment of Chinese Ethnic Studies, presented to him by the Intercollegiate Chinese Students Association. He approved of their proposed curriculum in sociology, social psychology, community counseling, and Cantonese language. He supported their argument that eighty-three percent of Chinese in America speak the Cantonese of the streets. But he could not help but notice the absence of the study of mainland China, Taiwan, and Chinese living in Southeast Asia. Even if the students had not forgotten that he was a scholar of contemporary Chinese literature and political thought, they could not see how this learning was connected to their desire to serve the people. There are situations for which a Mandarin’s knowledge is not required.

  2.2Professor Chen resigned his high post as chair. It is the Confucian belief that enlightened intellectuals should naturally conduct the political life of a just government. However, the American egghead is perhaps not such an intellectual.

  2.3Professor Chen applied for his long-delayed sabbatical and accepted a scholar’s invitation to the Sorbonne. In making arrangements for his house, he entrusted its financial upkeep to his student Paul Lin, who had inherited the business of overseeing his father’s properties, and he hired Edmund (Yat Min) Lee as a caretaker in exchange for free rent. The teacher with trusted students is surely fortunate.

  III

  See Paris, die happy.

  —Charlie Chan

  3.1Chen Wen-guang strolled the old Parisian streets where he was born and raised within the formalities and rituals of the Chinese legation in the 1920s. He was a boy of fourteen when he left; the next year, the Germans crossed the Meuse River and bombed and occupied Paris. The boy who returns as a man sees with a boy’s eyes.

  3.2To Paul, he wrote: I heard Charles Mingus at the Palais de Chaillot the other night. Marguerite Duras, whom I happened to meet there, sends her regards. “Paradoxically,” she says, “the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.” And yet, I am lost in this familiarity.

  3.3Contrary to his questionable recognition and usefulness at his own institution in the United States, Professor Chen was everywhere in Paris, and as they say, the talk of the town. Thus it was proven that a man’s wisdom is rarely appreciated in his own household. His French colleagues wanted to compare student movements. They gave him an office at the Sorbonne, although the school was closed intermittently by student protests. But was this not the case the world over? This was the rise of a new Communist movement inspired by Mao and the Chinese Revolution. And what of China that had so inspired Western Marxists? What did he believe to be Chou En-lai’s possibilities to succeed Mao Tse-tung? What was his analysis of the Cultural Revolution? Of the Russia/China split? How should one predict a revolutionary future? Three steps forward and two steps backwards.

  IV

  The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

  —Paul Valéry

  4.1It was not Monsieur Teste but a poem by Valéry that aroused an awakening in the spirit heart of the young poet. Paul Lin wrote enthusiastically to his mentor Chen Wen-guang at his address in Paris. He did not think it was a mere coincidence, that is, the poem’s title, “Le Cimetière Marin.” He knew himself to be in the same hills of California’s Marin County, in a beautiful cemetery of books overlooking the salt-breathing potency, that fresh exhalation of the sea.

  4.2The poet commanded: The wind is rising . . . We must try to live! / The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave / Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking / Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages! Where, Paul asked, in France was le Cimetière Marin? Would Chen be visiting?

  4.3In Paris Chen felt a strange foreboding, as if Monsieur Valéry’s ghost lurked at his sleeve, even as the memory of Paul’s soft features floated over the flickering sunlight tracing the scaled surface of the Seine. The teacher embraced the exuberance of his young and awakening apprentice. “Yes, perhaps,” he replied. Valéry was born in the port of Sète on the Mediterranean. He had planned anyway a trip to Provence to visit James Baldwin in the coastal village of Saint-Paul de Vence.

  4.4Edmund rolled his eyes but smiled. He asked: “How is it that our teacher knows everyone?” Scanning the shelves for Chen’s American collection, they found a copy of Giovanni’s Room signed by Baldwin: To my dear friend Wen-guang. James. Those who walk in the same spheres enjoy the coincidence of friendship.

  V

  Mind, like parachute, only function when open.

  —Charlie Chan

  5.1Chen collected postcards of predictable sites (the Eiffel Tower) and obscure significance (a bald woman), stood in what he thought to be significant locations, and penned cryptic aphorisms to the boys at home. On the Rue de Fleurus, outside of Gertrude Stein’s flat, he wrote to Yat Min in scripted Chinese characters: “It is wonderful how a handwriting which is illegible can be read, oh yes it can.” So said Gertrude Stein.

  5.2To Paul he wrote in blocky English: “There ain’t any answer, there ain’t going to be an answer, there never has been an answer, that’s the answer.” Gertrude Stein

  5.3The young poet wrote to his long-distance mentor: I am collecting your postcards (please send more) along with my own reflections and jottings, nonsense, and whatnot too, in a journal I have named Analecta. I am adding analecta to it every day. For example, Valéry writes in his analecta: “Reality can only express itself with absurdity.”

  5.4P.S. I met Jack Sung, as you suggested. He hangs out at Il Piccolo with some others. Edmund hangs out at Il Piccolo too, but for other reasons. Edmund calls Sung and his bunch “t
he Poetry Boys Club.” We meet, then head out like a bunch of gangsters, rummaging around used book stores, looking for any discarded book by an Oriental. So far: Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna. Youth has its purposes.

  VI

  Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them.

  —Paul Valéry

  6.1Edmund Lee played tricks with the weekly Chinatown newspaper, published bilingually—English running left to right on one side, Chinese running right to left on the other. On the Chinese side, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, aka Six Companies, promoted the Miss Chinatown USA Pageant with a large spread and photograph of the charming Carole Yung, Miss Year of the Rooster Chinatown, crowned and smiling nervously with a live rooster in her arms, more than ready to turn over her crown, sash, and animal on February 8 at the Masonic Temple at 1111 California Street at eight p.m. to the new Miss Year of the Dog Chinatown. Above the Chinese article about someone voted the most beautiful Chinese girl in the USA, Edmund set the large headline in bold type: GALILEO STUDENTS WALK OUT!

  6.2Two hundred impetuous Galileo High School students walked out on February 5 in a demonstration to make Chinese New Year an official U.S. holiday. As they say, fat chance. Could it be that the lovely Carole Yung, like an impertinent homecoming queen with her crowned princesses in tow, also walked out? Beauty may sometimes be used for political gain.

  VII

  At times I think, and at times I am.

  —Paul Valéry

  7.1Paul Lin signed up for Jack Sung’s creative writing workshop at SF State. The other students in the workshop were confused by Paul’s work. They said: We want to know what it is. What’s this cryptic shit about? Sung said: Leave him alone. He’s working it out. That was how Paul knew he had arrived in the Poetry Boys Club. The reasons for membership were not always explained.