Ene Riisna introduced a small gray man at a toney PJ's bar -restaurant. It was Tom Wolfe. I didn't recognize him. His name didn't click with me.  He quoted George Woo quoting anonymous Chinatown Chinamen saying George was the reincarnation of Kwan Kung. C.H.Kwock, told me of an opera performer who convinced all the tongs in San Francisco that he was the reincarnation of Kwan Kung. He agrees to rehearse a cast and perform Kwan Kung and the Oath in the Peach Garden opera. While all of tongmen and their families wait for the performance, the reincarnation of Kwan Kung is cleaning out each tong's safe. - The point of C. H. Kwock's story: One doesn't announce they believe they are the reincarnation of Kwan Kung, like the actor.  George never said he was, rather he said other people said he was.  And the Shakespearean Silence of Chinatown, opens and shuts. George Woo, Tom Wolfe, Kwan Kung and the reincarnation of Kwan Kung: To be, or not tube he.  Didya hear something funny about the Shakespearan Silence?

 

The Horde and the Fox Spirit brought to mind something I intend to rewrite as Chop Chop in THE FADE. 

 

 

 

“DRAW YOUR ENEMY AS YOU WOULD DRAW YOURSELF”

A CHINA BOY COMMIX

In Chinatown A China Boy Commix comic book catches Tam Lum’s eye.

 “DRAW YOUR ENEMY AS YOU WOULD DRAW YOURSELF: The True Story of George Woo’s Chinatown Dinner with Celebrity writer, Tom Wolfe,” by Harold Young.

On the cover, the comic announced “32 pages in vibrant black and white.”

Hal Young cartoons himself the way Tam used to, but better. He should have drawn this comic book.  But he was no longer capable.

The pictures Tam Lum sees in his brain no longer translates into motions of his fingers and a pencil, that used to work as one, and used to result in a drawing that satisfied.  But no more. He thinks he’s penciling the straight line of a desert horizon only to see he’s drawn a dead cat.  The fingers are no longer one with the pencil..  His eyes and his hands are no longer friends.

A yellow note on the  slick, four color, comic book cover says the cartoonist Harold Young is at a Chinese restaurant in the Richmond District in San Francisco.  An arrow points to him with earphones on.  In one hand, he holds a long stick-like shotgun microphone pointed into a crowd of eleven Chinese and one White man seated at a round table.  The shotgun microphone is wired to a cigar box size tape recorder strapped to his side. Hal sits close to the biggest man at the table, bearded, bespectacled, looking fine motheaten iand battletested in his pullover green sweater, George Woo. The Founder of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State College holds court in a hot Chinese restaurant with large glass windows against the cold rain of the Richmond district His open hands say he’s buying dinner for everybody.  “Dinner is on me,” George Woo says.

“He has the back, shoulders and dangling chinwhiskers of a buffalo,” Judy, his girlfriend bellows out of a face full of admiration and love magnified by the glasses she wears.  She gives George a for- show slow elbow in the ribs.  “Huh!” she says.

George Woo says, “I’m a buffalo and not a Panda bear because I’m American.”

A dialog balloon emerges over the crowd at the round table, “Don’t you mean you’re a ‘Bison?’ ”

“Bison? You call me a bison. Buy son?”

“Buy son means worship in Chinese.”

“I’m from Hong Kong.” 

 “Oh, boy!  Another Chinese fresh from China who knows more about America than the hundred years of stupid Chinese all around her,” Judy says and her eyes roll magnified by her glasses.

“You mean I’m not the first?”

“Very funny. Remember White racist C.Y. Lee?”

“Why do you call him White racist?”

“Why do you think he came to America? Why San Francisco? He knew how to use America’s vision of itself as the White man imposing the rule of the religion of Number One over the colored peoples within reach, to his own advatange.”

“How?”

“To get rich writing FLOWER DRUM SONG Chinese culture all cute Walt Disney and making rich White woman swoon and peel his grapes.”

 “Oh, that C. Y. Lee!”

“You can’t tell Chinese assholes from White racist lickspittles, but insist Americans have it wrong about buffalo.”

“Hey!” George stopped all talk in the restaurant. “Angela Tom is the guest of the first Asian-American Studies Department in America. Be nice.”

“You mean bison, not buffalo,” the reporter from Hong Kong pointed her eyes at Judy.

“Buffalo or bison. They smell the same,”  Malcolm the gawkey self-confdent son of a Bureau of Indian Affairs sociologist who had been raised on Indian land that used to be a concentration camp for Japanese Americans, that led him to research the WRA administration of the camps, learn to read Chinese as old Japanese and speaking Japanese and reading Chinese led to his being hired as a Department Intern to design and organize the Japanese American section of Asian American Studies at SF State.

“What is this power we give to words and spelling over the truth of our senses? Is ‘Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey’ or ‘Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy? Whites argue with Chinese over the spelling of Mao Tse Tung in English.  Is it Emm ay oh Tee ess eeh or Emm oh double-you  Zee  eeh dee oh en gee?   It’s the Chinese name that counts, not the English language or the spelling.”

“Oh, please! A rose is a rose is a rose.”

 “Think of it: all these years I have have stupidly mistaken Bison Bill for Buffalo Bill,”  Malcolm the White boy next to George Woo’s smiling girlfriend says.  She wears glasses that enlarge her eyes into a smear.

 “The Buffalo nickel is actually the Bison Nickel.”

“Here in America there’s the language that people like us speak. And there’s the italicized Latinate lingo of science talk.  You can call me ‘Sean’ or ‘John’ if you like.  I can tell you’re talking to me.”

George Woo says, “ ‘A buffalo by any other name, would still smell like buffalo,’  I say to Tom Wolfe.”

“When did you say that to Tom Wolfe?”

George says “Shut up!” with tone and resonance of a standup bass. The voices around the table shut up. “Angela come from Hong Kong because she read what Tom Wolfe say about his dinner eat with me, in Esquire the magazine.”

“ THE NEW YELLOW PERIL.”

“We read it,” Judy says.

“She is here to write what I say about my dinner with Tom Wolfe , and go home and write about her experience of tonight for her Hong Kong  magazine. I talk to her already.  So, you wiseass of the Asian American Studies Department, go ahead and pick on her all you want.  She loves it.

“I do not.”

“I was joking.”

“Joking?”

“I’m here to eat .  My turn to and listen.”

“To you he was joking.  He told the rest of us to cool it.”

“Cool it?”

“To talk nice  to you….with you.  Is my talk nice? Huh? Huh?”

The yuk after yuk on the the China Boy Commix comic cover tickles Tam Lum.   Harold Young is the cartoonist Tam Lum might have been.

Arrows point at the tape recorder, at the microphone and begin in a note: “Every word spoken at George’s story of his dinner with Tom Wolfe is on tape. Tom Wolfe is the author of the famous “Kool Aid” book and the Esquire article about his Chinatown dinner and conversation with George Woo, known as the “reincarnation of Kwan Kung.”

“This could get ugly,” putt putts a note from the note to the bubblegum bubble filled with Hal’s inner thoughts, “Did Tom Wolfe really know Kwan Kung?”

All this on the cover.   Hal Young might be the catoonist that Tam Lum could be.

 Chinatown was full of Chinese come to get rich quick and go back to China. Tom Wolfe said.  That reminded Wolfe of ARAMCO, the Arab American Oil Company and their American company towns appearing mirage-like in the desert. Entire American hometowns, complete with shops, sidewalks, streetlights and ranch-style homes, to give the American oilmen the illusion of never leaving home.  Fountains and trimmed trees in the desert of Arabia for the American oil workers.

George Woo scoffed at Wolfe’s ARAMCO Theory of Chinese Immigration to America.  “We leave home in China, to look for a home, not a job.”

Tom Wolfe ventured alone into the depths of darkest Chinatown. San Francisco’s own foreign country between Broadway and California Streets.

“I took Tom Wolfe out to dinner in Chinatown to one of the oldest restaurants in Chinatown.  In one of the oldest buildings on Washington Street. The owners were old. The waiters were old. The wood was old. The wood smelled of years and years of soap gone real old and the cooking. There was a table hidden behind the stairs to the mezzanine floor where one row of very small tables are crammed against the wall to let the waiter by. The ceiling is too low upstairs.  People pass out.  I have a table under the stairs near the kitchen.

“This is the restaurant where Edsel Ford Wong waits the third floor tables.”

“No, he works at Sam Wo across the street.”

“I was there the other night.   He was yelling at a customer.”

“That is how he charm the customers.”

“ He yelled, ‘People in San Francisco take umbrage at people who call San Francisco Frisco.’

“ ‘I take aspirin for a headache,’ somebody answer Edsel Ford. That joke is old as Edsel Ford. More rough the insults, the bigger the tip.’

“ ‘Is ‘Chinaman’ a bad word?”

“There are the people that don’t call Chinamen ‘Chinamen’ as if ‘Chinaman’ is a bad word.”

“Really?”

“Chinamen live in Frisco since 1849.  Some say is bad manners call my hometown ‘Frisco.’

“I try to impress Tom Wolfe fly in from New York to talk to me by talking about America “The FEDERALIST PAPERS describe’ America between the Revolution and the Constitution as an ‘experiment in democracy.’  I say.

 “He burns a rage silently and cool. Very cool he answers me,   ‘What does being the reincarnation of Kwan Kung mean to you?’ I understand Tom Wolfe is offense I ask about American democracy. He answer my question about democracy with a stupid question about Kwan Kung.  Do  he want to start a fight with me? 

 “I keep my calm.  I answer him,  ‘I am as flattered to be likened to a man from the first heroic novel as I will be to march in the Chinatown Bicentennial parade of 1976.’

“He look at me funny.  I say, ‘Oh. You did not know, I will be the fife player with the bloody bandage on the head in the Spirit of 76 re-creation?’”

 

The drummer boy with a hat, the tall old man beating the drum with sticks, chest out and his white hair flowing, marches next to the fife player, wearing a bloody bandage on his head, was a painting called “Yankee Doodle,” by Civil War veteran Archibald MacNeal Willard. Tam draws

Hal drew all three, the drummer boy, the old man, the fife player all-American, black haired and slant-eyed, in a cloud frame of thought over George Woo’s head.  He arrowed a note: “Apologies to Archibald MacNeal Willard.”  Tam  was impressed..

“MacNeal painted old man in the center as his father beating the drum.  Did George know?  Or was he improvising with Tom Wolfe?” another note from Hal.  Damn! Tam could tell, Hal enjoyed doing that cartoon.  He used to be a cartoonist himself.

George Woo continues his story:

 “ ‘Come on! You’re pulling my leg!’ Tom Wolfe says.

“ Suddenly I get up. I tell the waiter ‘We’ll be back, Ah Bok. Ok?’ and I rush out of the restaurant.

“Tom Wolfe, was short, thin, three quarter sized white man in a white suit. He chased me slow. He run faster than he wanted to run down Washington Street to Grant Street, to a curio shop where different sized Kwan Kungs are displayed in the store’s big window.  Little statues in front and larger and larger ones to the back, in a large window.”

 

Tam Lum would have enjoyed drawing that window.  Bearded George Woo in front of the lit window full of statues of Kwan Kung seated, with a book, statues of Kwan Kung standing with his halberd in his right hand, and checking an approach with two fingers of his left hand. Kwan Kung on horseback with his weapon in his right hand. George looks down from the mountaintop of lit Kwan Kung statues onto Tom Wolfe.  Tam Lum wished he had drawn Young Hal Young’s vision of George Woo looking down his cheeks at Tom Wolfe, watching him shrivel up and melt under the seething eyes of a hundred redfaced Kwan Kungs.

 

“ ‘Who knows Kwan Kung? Open you eyes! Do you see Charlie Chan?’”

“ ‘Whoo! Tom Wolfe launch his zinger question. ‘Is that a racist question?’

“ ‘You ask am I a racist?  Yes. I am racist.  For the Chinese.  And you racist for the White man.’ I explain the statue Kwan Kung’s red face, his armor on his right side like a soldier, and a robe on his left side like a scholar.”

“Would you say Kwan Kung was the Jesus Christ of Chinese religion?”

“No. I would say Jesus Christ is one third the man that Kwan Kung is.”

 

Frank Chin