“East vs. West”
breaking, broken
bare bricks on the Berlin Wall
collected from the ruins
to build a transparent bridge
between the past and the future
broken, breaking
earthen bricks for Badalin Ridge
baked in a dragon fire
to repair and strengthen the long wall
separating the prairies farther from the Gobi
“Dao: An Other Origin of Species”
before that big blast
there was neither time
nor space
nor matter
nor laws of physics
nor gods of course
so they say
or believe
but somewhere
out of all that void
Dao grew into one point of being
divided into two
two into four
four into myriads
until it has become
a whole universe
still growing
together with man and god
alike
Changming Yuan, a two-time Pushcart nominee and author of Chansons of a Chinaman (2009) and Politics and Poetics (2009), grew up in rural China and published several books before moving to Canada. She teaches writing in Vancouver and has had her poetry featured in Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, Cortland Review, Exquisite Corpse, London Magazine and 270 other literary publications worldwide.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
A Lesson In Racism
By Nathaniel Tower
“So I was at this buffet with my fiancée, and she got pissed at me because I only left one dollar on the table for a tip.”
Parker was on one of his anti-serving class power trips.
We were at lunch break from the firm, at some large Chinese restaurant probably with “King” or “Panda” in the title. It was a hotspot for all the firms in the metro area, likely for its ridiculously creamy crab Rangoon. Parker had been a little late, a sign that he was probably with another woman, so I had ordered without him.
“I mean, all the bitch did was ask me if I wanted more water and clear my plates after we left.
She didn’t even earn the damn dollar, and now Clarissa is pissed at me.”
Parker’s complaints were flying faster than I could chew my eggrolls.
“You know, Parker, you do make well over six figures, and you hardly do jack shit. You could have thrown her a fiver,” I suggested, siding with Clarissa mainly to piss him off.
A short Asian woman, probably Chinese, with short brown hair tied back in a ponytail interrupted our conversation to take Parker’s order.
“What you have?” she asked impatiently.
Parker placed his order, mispronouncing General Tsao’s chicken, likely on purpose. He had ordered it at least fifty times.
“Steam lice o’ fly lice?” was the next question.
“Fly lice? That’s disgusting. What the hell are you people serving here?” Parker said without a smile.
“Steam wice o’ fwy wice,” the woman repeated, rolling her eyes as much as she could.
“What the hell is wice?”
“Parker, you ass, what kind of rice do you want?” I whispered with a swift kick under the table.
“Ohhh, fried rice,” he said, somehow making the words polysyllabic. “I love me some fried rice. Bring me some extra,” he added with a wink.
The woman wrote down his order and stormed away with a grumpy face. If the rice wasn’t as sticky as usual, we would know why.
“Parker, you’re a dick. You knew what she was asking,” I said with a sigh.
“That’s not the point. The point is that she should learn the damn language. I mean, come on. And how is it that she knows that I’m saying it wrong if she can’t say it right?”
“You’re just an asshole. It’s a cultural thing. You ruined her day. Did you see how grumpy she looked?” This was a part I was used to playing when around Parker. Were it not for me, I’m not sure how many times the man would’ve been sued for sexual harassment. He certainly wouldn’t have a job anymore.
“They always look grumpy. Either that or slutty. And the only people that come to their restaurants are good ole fashion American bluebloods like us.” He slapped me on the back. “My culture is her culture.”
“You’re an arrogant prick.”
“And that’s why you always go to lunch with me.”
“No, I always go to lunch with you because I know that I need to save your ass.”
When Parker’s food came, he ate silently, not wanting to test my patience. Besides, I had been finished eating for a good ten minutes, and even though I knew I would be hungry again in twenty, I didn’t bother to order anything else partly because I didn’t want to be in public with Parker any longer than necessary and partly because I wasn’t sure which one was our waitress.
“We better ask the waitress for our check,” Parker said before his teeth had even begun to chew his last bite.
“Yeah, we don’t want to be late getting back to the office. Lots of work to do,” I said with a roll of the eyes. I knew he only wanted to leave because he wanted to have enough time to rendezvous with Melissa in the elevator before the lunch break was officially over. The bastard liked to begin and end every lunch with a quickie, although I wasn’t really sure what precisely he had time to do in the few minutes he piddled around with the office assistants.
“Which one is our waitress?”
We looked around and spotted three short Asian women waiting on nearby tables.
“I don’t remember,” I lied, “but I’m sure she’ll come back.”
“They all look the same to m—”
“Shh, she’ll hear you.”
“Yeah, don’t want to offend the woman who brought me this delicious meal before you give her a big fat tip for doing jack sh—”
“Here’s your check,” a suddenly friendly voice spoke before he could finish. We looked up hesitantly, cards ready to hand to her, and saw a goofy smile plastered crookedly across her face. Neither of us could muster a word, but it wasn’t long before she broke the silence. “And don’t worry, you all look the same to me, too.”
Parker had never left a bigger tip.
And he didn’t have sex with Melissa that day either.
Nathaniel Tower writes fiction, teaches English, and manages the online lit magazine Bartleby Snopes (www.bartlebysnopes.com). His stories have appeared in dozens of print and online journals.
“So I was at this buffet with my fiancée, and she got pissed at me because I only left one dollar on the table for a tip.”
Parker was on one of his anti-serving class power trips.
We were at lunch break from the firm, at some large Chinese restaurant probably with “King” or “Panda” in the title. It was a hotspot for all the firms in the metro area, likely for its ridiculously creamy crab Rangoon. Parker had been a little late, a sign that he was probably with another woman, so I had ordered without him.
“I mean, all the bitch did was ask me if I wanted more water and clear my plates after we left.
She didn’t even earn the damn dollar, and now Clarissa is pissed at me.”
Parker’s complaints were flying faster than I could chew my eggrolls.
“You know, Parker, you do make well over six figures, and you hardly do jack shit. You could have thrown her a fiver,” I suggested, siding with Clarissa mainly to piss him off.
A short Asian woman, probably Chinese, with short brown hair tied back in a ponytail interrupted our conversation to take Parker’s order.
“What you have?” she asked impatiently.
Parker placed his order, mispronouncing General Tsao’s chicken, likely on purpose. He had ordered it at least fifty times.
“Steam lice o’ fly lice?” was the next question.
“Fly lice? That’s disgusting. What the hell are you people serving here?” Parker said without a smile.
“Steam wice o’ fwy wice,” the woman repeated, rolling her eyes as much as she could.
“What the hell is wice?”
“Parker, you ass, what kind of rice do you want?” I whispered with a swift kick under the table.
“Ohhh, fried rice,” he said, somehow making the words polysyllabic. “I love me some fried rice. Bring me some extra,” he added with a wink.
The woman wrote down his order and stormed away with a grumpy face. If the rice wasn’t as sticky as usual, we would know why.
“Parker, you’re a dick. You knew what she was asking,” I said with a sigh.
“That’s not the point. The point is that she should learn the damn language. I mean, come on. And how is it that she knows that I’m saying it wrong if she can’t say it right?”
“You’re just an asshole. It’s a cultural thing. You ruined her day. Did you see how grumpy she looked?” This was a part I was used to playing when around Parker. Were it not for me, I’m not sure how many times the man would’ve been sued for sexual harassment. He certainly wouldn’t have a job anymore.
“They always look grumpy. Either that or slutty. And the only people that come to their restaurants are good ole fashion American bluebloods like us.” He slapped me on the back. “My culture is her culture.”
“You’re an arrogant prick.”
“And that’s why you always go to lunch with me.”
“No, I always go to lunch with you because I know that I need to save your ass.”
When Parker’s food came, he ate silently, not wanting to test my patience. Besides, I had been finished eating for a good ten minutes, and even though I knew I would be hungry again in twenty, I didn’t bother to order anything else partly because I didn’t want to be in public with Parker any longer than necessary and partly because I wasn’t sure which one was our waitress.
“We better ask the waitress for our check,” Parker said before his teeth had even begun to chew his last bite.
“Yeah, we don’t want to be late getting back to the office. Lots of work to do,” I said with a roll of the eyes. I knew he only wanted to leave because he wanted to have enough time to rendezvous with Melissa in the elevator before the lunch break was officially over. The bastard liked to begin and end every lunch with a quickie, although I wasn’t really sure what precisely he had time to do in the few minutes he piddled around with the office assistants.
“Which one is our waitress?”
We looked around and spotted three short Asian women waiting on nearby tables.
“I don’t remember,” I lied, “but I’m sure she’ll come back.”
“They all look the same to m—”
“Shh, she’ll hear you.”
“Yeah, don’t want to offend the woman who brought me this delicious meal before you give her a big fat tip for doing jack sh—”
“Here’s your check,” a suddenly friendly voice spoke before he could finish. We looked up hesitantly, cards ready to hand to her, and saw a goofy smile plastered crookedly across her face. Neither of us could muster a word, but it wasn’t long before she broke the silence. “And don’t worry, you all look the same to me, too.”
Parker had never left a bigger tip.
And he didn’t have sex with Melissa that day either.
Nathaniel Tower writes fiction, teaches English, and manages the online lit magazine Bartleby Snopes (www.bartlebysnopes.com). His stories have appeared in dozens of print and online journals.
Admiral Cheng Ho’s Lost Compass
By Marko Fong
When I was a child, Yeh-Yeh, my grandfather, reminded me nine times that the Chinese invented the compass. The last time, I lost patience with the story, “Yeh-Yeh, it’s just a magnet, they occur naturally.”
“Lucky, you know Cheng Ho?”
“The eunuch admiral? He sailed to Cape Horn, first navigator to master the compass,” I repeated a line from the Encyclopedia Britannica that Yeh-Yeh made us read aloud over and over. At ten, I didn’t understand what a eunuch was.
“Cheng Ho didn’t go just Cape Horn; treasure ships visit Australia and America. His very advanced compass. Not just point north-south. Show east-west too.”
“Magnets don’t point east-west, Yeh-Yeh.”
“Not just magnet, case made from dragon bones. Cheng Moslem. He pray Mecca five times a day. He had to know which way pray at sea to find his God. He know world round, look for eastern route Mecca. That why called Ameccans.”
“So what happened to the Admiral’s compass?”
“Big storm. Cheng claim saw Buddha just before flagship find shore. He land then bury prayer compass in Californ. After Cheng see Buddha, compass no tell east from west. He go home by follow coast up Bering Sea and never find Californ again. Cheng Ho compass, the one he use find God, he bury right here.”
Paperson, California, my home town, has the mysterious capacity to escape detection by authorities. My parents' generation called it “old-country superstition” until GPS revealed the genius of the town’s builders. Paperson refuses to keep stable coordinates. Its latitude stays constant but the longitude twitches as much as 121 degrees. The most eccentric reading coincides with my grandfather’s native Toisan, the district from which Paperson’s builders also came. According to GPS, Paperson swings between the banks of the Sacramento River and Southeastern China several thousand times a day. It blinks too rapidly for the naked eye to detect.
As peasants in Toisan and as displaced-railway workers near Sacramento, the men who created Paperson knew how to go unnoticed. They had little book knowledge and no access to magic. If they had expertise in anything, it was in the art of being overlooked. Until 1875, what we now know as Paperson and the thousands of acres around it spent most of the year beneath the Sacramento River. After tying the coasts of America together with steel track, the same Chinese workers transformed the Delta mud south of Sacramento into farmland.
Their efforts earned them the privilege of toiling in orchards and fields they had made possible near Orchard Vista. Later, the Exclusion Act turned their successors into America’s- first-illegal immigrants. For fifty years, any new Chinese worker had come to the Delta either with false papers or none at all.
When Orchard Vista’s Chinese quarter burned in 1911, the residents seized their opportunity to move out. Dr. Sun’s revolution had returned China to Chinese rule and it gave them confidence. They built five-hundred feet downriver acreage leased from Franklin Edwards, grower of the Emerald Water Pear. The variety, firm on the outside and juicy on the inside, the first pear suitable for shipment by rail to the East Coast, had really been created by Bing Tang.
Bing was Edwards’ orchard man and the second son of the inventor of the bing cherry in Washington State. His father returned to China after anti-Chinese violence in the northwest forced him into hiding. Edwards feared that his foreman would do the same unless he granted Bing's request for the ninety-nine-year lease. The Delta’s Cantonese workers took refuge in Bing’s town. Here, they could eat their own food, speak their dialect, purchase traditional medicines, and gamble without interference from American authorities. Because so many of its residents used false papers identifying them as the “paper sons” of merchants, scholars, or diplomats (the only legal Chinese immigrants), Bing jokingly named his town Paperson.
The understanding of the hidden properties of sunlight, soil, and water that went into making cherries reliably sweet and pears impervious to bruising certainly contributed to the town’s mysterious ability to stay hidden from the authorities. One of Bing’s first acts as Paperson’s “mayor” was to plant a line of trees just above the levee to cast shade and shadow at strategic moments. Although Paperson is just five-hundred feet away, you can’t see it from Orchard Vista even from the third floor of the Japanese Presbyterian Church built on what had been that town’s Chinese quarter.
As Bing’s-last successor, my grandfather, no horticulturalist, used his own techniques to hide Paperson. After he bought the land beneath the town in 1936 in my American-born grandmother’s name, he tricked the title company. By using an 1882 map from prior to the completion of the dredging, he persuaded Delta Title and Trust to show Paperson as a skinny-triangular parcel off the Edwards Ranch. The actual-post-1882 shape of the Edwards lease was a rectangle. The map's quarter acre is really fifty acres. For sixty years, the town never appeared on even the most-detailed maps of the region and my grandfather’s gambling house stayed hidden in plain sight.
The wizardry behind Paperson goes beyond any of Bing or my grandfather’s tricks. If one visits the now empty town for any length of time it becomes apparent that the town is not made from wood as much as it's constructed from shadow. When it came to shadows, the builders of Paperson were wizards. They understood that the mind casts the most impenetrable shadows, and they used mind shadows to turn their town despite its six-story-community center, fire house, newspaper, movie theater, four blocks of businesses and gambling house into a shadow hole for memory.
Maybe the generation of laborers who filled the swamp and built the levees sowed Paperson’s capacity to elude both maps and memory into its soil. Maybe it was yet another Bing secret: old timers once talked about his selling a seedless mango in his grocery and then acting as if the fruit didn’t exist.
I choose to believe that it's because Cheng Ho's broken compass is buried there. Whatever ferrous metal a magnet touches becomes similarly polarized. Last year, I drove past Paperson three times before I could recognize the town where I grew up.
Please accept these as the best directions I can offer.
Marko Fong lives in Northern California and published most recently in Eclectica, Kartika Review, and Grey Sparrow Journal. His fiction has been nominated for both a Pushcart and a PEN/OHenry prize.
When I was a child, Yeh-Yeh, my grandfather, reminded me nine times that the Chinese invented the compass. The last time, I lost patience with the story, “Yeh-Yeh, it’s just a magnet, they occur naturally.”
“Lucky, you know Cheng Ho?”
“The eunuch admiral? He sailed to Cape Horn, first navigator to master the compass,” I repeated a line from the Encyclopedia Britannica that Yeh-Yeh made us read aloud over and over. At ten, I didn’t understand what a eunuch was.
“Cheng Ho didn’t go just Cape Horn; treasure ships visit Australia and America. His very advanced compass. Not just point north-south. Show east-west too.”
“Magnets don’t point east-west, Yeh-Yeh.”
“Not just magnet, case made from dragon bones. Cheng Moslem. He pray Mecca five times a day. He had to know which way pray at sea to find his God. He know world round, look for eastern route Mecca. That why called Ameccans.”
“So what happened to the Admiral’s compass?”
“Big storm. Cheng claim saw Buddha just before flagship find shore. He land then bury prayer compass in Californ. After Cheng see Buddha, compass no tell east from west. He go home by follow coast up Bering Sea and never find Californ again. Cheng Ho compass, the one he use find God, he bury right here.”
Paperson, California, my home town, has the mysterious capacity to escape detection by authorities. My parents' generation called it “old-country superstition” until GPS revealed the genius of the town’s builders. Paperson refuses to keep stable coordinates. Its latitude stays constant but the longitude twitches as much as 121 degrees. The most eccentric reading coincides with my grandfather’s native Toisan, the district from which Paperson’s builders also came. According to GPS, Paperson swings between the banks of the Sacramento River and Southeastern China several thousand times a day. It blinks too rapidly for the naked eye to detect.
As peasants in Toisan and as displaced-railway workers near Sacramento, the men who created Paperson knew how to go unnoticed. They had little book knowledge and no access to magic. If they had expertise in anything, it was in the art of being overlooked. Until 1875, what we now know as Paperson and the thousands of acres around it spent most of the year beneath the Sacramento River. After tying the coasts of America together with steel track, the same Chinese workers transformed the Delta mud south of Sacramento into farmland.
Their efforts earned them the privilege of toiling in orchards and fields they had made possible near Orchard Vista. Later, the Exclusion Act turned their successors into America’s- first-illegal immigrants. For fifty years, any new Chinese worker had come to the Delta either with false papers or none at all.
When Orchard Vista’s Chinese quarter burned in 1911, the residents seized their opportunity to move out. Dr. Sun’s revolution had returned China to Chinese rule and it gave them confidence. They built five-hundred feet downriver acreage leased from Franklin Edwards, grower of the Emerald Water Pear. The variety, firm on the outside and juicy on the inside, the first pear suitable for shipment by rail to the East Coast, had really been created by Bing Tang.
Bing was Edwards’ orchard man and the second son of the inventor of the bing cherry in Washington State. His father returned to China after anti-Chinese violence in the northwest forced him into hiding. Edwards feared that his foreman would do the same unless he granted Bing's request for the ninety-nine-year lease. The Delta’s Cantonese workers took refuge in Bing’s town. Here, they could eat their own food, speak their dialect, purchase traditional medicines, and gamble without interference from American authorities. Because so many of its residents used false papers identifying them as the “paper sons” of merchants, scholars, or diplomats (the only legal Chinese immigrants), Bing jokingly named his town Paperson.
The understanding of the hidden properties of sunlight, soil, and water that went into making cherries reliably sweet and pears impervious to bruising certainly contributed to the town’s mysterious ability to stay hidden from the authorities. One of Bing’s first acts as Paperson’s “mayor” was to plant a line of trees just above the levee to cast shade and shadow at strategic moments. Although Paperson is just five-hundred feet away, you can’t see it from Orchard Vista even from the third floor of the Japanese Presbyterian Church built on what had been that town’s Chinese quarter.
As Bing’s-last successor, my grandfather, no horticulturalist, used his own techniques to hide Paperson. After he bought the land beneath the town in 1936 in my American-born grandmother’s name, he tricked the title company. By using an 1882 map from prior to the completion of the dredging, he persuaded Delta Title and Trust to show Paperson as a skinny-triangular parcel off the Edwards Ranch. The actual-post-1882 shape of the Edwards lease was a rectangle. The map's quarter acre is really fifty acres. For sixty years, the town never appeared on even the most-detailed maps of the region and my grandfather’s gambling house stayed hidden in plain sight.
The wizardry behind Paperson goes beyond any of Bing or my grandfather’s tricks. If one visits the now empty town for any length of time it becomes apparent that the town is not made from wood as much as it's constructed from shadow. When it came to shadows, the builders of Paperson were wizards. They understood that the mind casts the most impenetrable shadows, and they used mind shadows to turn their town despite its six-story-community center, fire house, newspaper, movie theater, four blocks of businesses and gambling house into a shadow hole for memory.
Maybe the generation of laborers who filled the swamp and built the levees sowed Paperson’s capacity to elude both maps and memory into its soil. Maybe it was yet another Bing secret: old timers once talked about his selling a seedless mango in his grocery and then acting as if the fruit didn’t exist.
I choose to believe that it's because Cheng Ho's broken compass is buried there. Whatever ferrous metal a magnet touches becomes similarly polarized. Last year, I drove past Paperson three times before I could recognize the town where I grew up.
Please accept these as the best directions I can offer.
Marko Fong lives in Northern California and published most recently in Eclectica, Kartika Review, and Grey Sparrow Journal. His fiction has been nominated for both a Pushcart and a PEN/OHenry prize.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
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