the son, the Berkeley education, that
complex life is dream. Stay
and see the rice through to harvest. How
long does it take for rice to grow through
its seasons? A year? Two years? Now
that I’ve found this lost possible self—Chinese
rice farmer—let me stay with it. Keep
doing this most basic human task
til satisfaction. When used to that life
and don’t see it anymore, then leave.
BAD VILLAGE
Once more, away,
out on the open road, Wittman enjoyed
his walk with fellow travelers. Millions errant,
looking for work, some on paid vacation.
The driver of a pony cart slept atop
his produce; his pony knew the way. A buffalo
or ox pulled a tumbrel of logs and rocks;
woodcutter and wife dozed side by side.
A bicyclist carried one bar of steel
under an arm. Another bicyclist was delivering
a circus of chairs. Motorbikers covered
faces, and entire heads, with gauzy scarves,
no helmet law. 100
big white ducks or geese rode
on the roof of a bus, feathers ruffling; they
did not try to fly away. A stake
truck and a flatbed truck, both
honking hard, drove head-on
at each other, veered to drivers’ right,
and passed. They’re right-laners, like us.
People walking carried twigs, furniture,
baskets, pots, live fish in buckets.
Wittman changed his walk to be like other
Peripatetics. Cut out the American
attitude. Quit the truckin’, the I’m-walkin’-here.
Send the strength away from macho shoulders,
and will it down to butt seat chakra.
Walk bent-legged, loose-kneed,
loose-seated like kung fu.
Hands behind relaxed back. Oh,
it feels so good, giving in—bent old
China Man at long last. A pickup
truck bounced, braked—off popped
a giant pig, a hog. PLOP! Burst?!?
But it got to its feet, jiggled, breathed loud,
coughed, coughed, and screaming, ran off.
Some men in the laughing crowd gave
chase, Wittman too. They were running
after a big fat naked person.
Her pink Caucasian ass and hams rolled
and pumped. Hurrying ahead of the hooting, joking
crowd, she screamed, grunted, wheezed. Internal
injuries. Ran toward people who were assembling
a market. Help me. Help me. Please. She
was It, the big fat naked dumb one. Caught.
The redoubling crowd herded the sow back
to the truck. She climbed the ramp. Her owner kicked
her legs out from under her, thanked the people,
and drove off. No pig basket for
her. So what if she’s hurt? On her way
to slaughter anyway. Wittman reentered
the village that the sow had led him to. Today
was market day; farmers were arriving with this day’s
harvest. Cooks were boiling up noodles
for breakfast, throwing in handfuls of meat and choy.
There was an empty stool in a hovel restaurant;
he sat down amid the slupping, slurping men,
and let himself be served what everybody else
was having. (You’re charged extra for the seat; sitting
is a luxury.) (No ladies. Ladies cook
and eat at home.) The men sat close,
knee to knee, thigh to thigh, but not
quite touching. Did bump elbows.
They ate fast. 2 fingers tap-
tapped the table—another luxury, a table—
got refills. Tap tap. Thanks
thanks. The cook himself came around
with the tea. Some people lift-lifted it
toward the others. Sociable Wittman lift-
lifted, nod-nodded to one and all.
Tap tap. Thanks thanks. Abruptly,
eaters pushed away from the table, paid,
and left. Lazy guys stayed on,
lit cigarettes, talked. One man
folded himself up on his stool, arms
wrapped around knees, and slept. Chinese
can sleep anywhere. Our American
did not understand any of the speaking,
he’d traveled that far. Can’t stand to be
They spoke a spit dialect, like Daffy Duck
and Sylvester the Cat. And they held long notes,
ho-o-o, who-o-o-o. Laugh when they laugh.
They didn’t seem to be talking about him; they
weren’t referring to him with their squinty sly
eyes. The spitter with yellow tobacco fangs,
Sylvester, looked straight at him, and asked
something. Yes, nodded the agreeable American.
Yes. Sylvester and Daffy glanced at each other.
Complicity. Good, they seemed to say, let’s
go, let’s do it. They stood, paid,
waited for Wittman to pay, saw his wallet,
watched him pay with a bill that made
the proprietor use up all his change.
He walked deliberately step by step up to
the suspected muggers, and said in English, “Don’t
you mess with me, bro. You’re gonna get what for.
You’re gonna get what’s comin’ to ya.
You mess with me, you messin’
with the Man.” He reached inside his shirt
for his gat. The bravos vamoosed. Onlookers,
who will gather at any commotion, gave way.
And spread the word: armed man, American
with a gun, come to town. Whichever twisty
turning meandering path he took, Wittman
felt people keeping slant eyes on him.
And so, as the bad stranger, he arrived at
the meat market. The halves of a boiled hairless
dog hung by meat hooks through
its eye sockets. Paws in begging posture.
German shepherd? Labrador retriever?
Parents have brought children to watch the butcher
do something to it with a knife. At another
stall, a tub of piglets, like human babies,
some dead, some but stunned, alive
and moving, bloodied. A customer chose a snake
from jars of live snakes, haggling price
all the while. The snake man squeezed
the sides of its head, the jaws opened,
the fangs shot milk, which he caught in a bowl.
Just when you’re feeling relief, they aren’t harming
those snakes, he killed one, drove
a nail through its head. (So this
is the ancient culture that Chinatown defends
against the Department of Public Health and PETA?)
Wittman stayed in that town. Don’t turn away.
Face what’s real. Fix my reputation.
He found a hotel, a house with door wide
open, showing a front room with cots as
furniture. The crony witch widow woman
pointed at each bed, choose, choose,
you choose, first guest, no
other guest. Ah, but there’s more;
she led him to a ladder, indicated up
up, you up. The loft was the private
one-bed room, fit for a rich tourist.
He paid her, held out money, let her take
however much the charge. Then up ladder
again, and fell into the rag nest bed.
Sick. Gave in to illness, every
part o
f his body ill. Ceiling and walls
waved, buckling, fluttering. He’ll tilt
and roll off the edge of the loft into
darkest China. Hot. The roof? Fever?
Time spirals in China. In America, it shoots
straight out, like the line on the heart monitor
of the dead. The line faded between forever
and instance, awake and asleep, actual and dream.
It seems, at some twilight, the widowlady
witch fed him a brew, a medicine or a poison.
So kind or wicked of her, too old
to be climbing ladders, yet climbing the ladder
to take care of him. The ladder was missing.
No escape. He had memory of it: one pole
taller than the other, for climbing up to the mesa-
like rooftop, and down into the kiva,
when I was an Indian, a San Ildefonso
Indian, former life. I’ll make the witch
happy, recognize her, she and I were
girlfriend and boyfriend. I know
she recognizes me too, ministering to me so
nicely, palming my brow. I hear voices.
I can understand them; they’re plotting to steal
my money. All she had to do was ask.
I fanned out my money, take, take.
But she wants my life. Do I have a soul?
I can’t feel my soul. I think soul
is something we have to imagine. Want
soul, imagine one. Like imagining I have
it in me to be a husband, a father. Imagine
the peaceful dark, and you go into the peaceful
dark. Imagine the white light, and you enter
and become the white light.
May all beings be safe from danger.
May all beings be safe from danger.
May all beings be safe from danger.
May all beings be safe from danger.
A gold ribbon arises and flies and winds
around the woman on the ground floor and around
the man in the loft, and shines through walls
and curls and twirls around every neighbor
and neighbor’s neighbor and the big pig
and her baby pigs and the dogs and snakes and geese
waddling the earth and geese flying in air, and
spans oceans all the while looping
dolphins and whales and sharks and small fish
and the flying fish spangling and leaping like the ribbon
itself lacing and embracing each and every
living thing all the way to the other
hemisphere to hug my own true love
and our own dear child and all people
our own people and returning to include me.
Aloha kākou. May there be love
among us, love including me.
Oh, I am loved. I am loved.
With such good feelings, the pilgrim recovered
from illness-at-the-world and illness-at-China.
The pig chasers, the would-be thieves, the dog and
snake butchers, the witchy innkeeper
took their places as ordinary people, as ordinary
as himself. Wittman got up, well, and traveled on.
Now, I, Maxine, could let Wittman die,
let him die in the China of his dreams,
and proceed on this journey alone. He’s lived
a full life, life enough, China
enough. Loved wife and child; they
loved him back. Planted rice. Read
some good books. Felt happiness, felt
gratitude. Enough. But I don’t like
traveling by myself. I ought to learn to go
places on my own, good for my character,
to be self-reliant. (A translation of my name,
Ting Ting, Self-Reliance. I should
live up to my name, Self-Reliant Hong.)
Why I need a companion, Monkey, along:
He’s unafraid and unembarrassed to butt
and nose into other people’s business.
He likes chatting with them and partying with them.
(I would rather hide, and spy, and overhear,
find out who people are when I’m not there.
Responsibly, sociably among them, I’m wont
to correct them, teach them, tell them Be happier.)
And he’s able to enter the many places
in this world that a man is allowed and a lady
is not. And Wittman, a fiction, is free to befriend
anyone, and tell about them; he has no relatives
to be held hostage. I don’t want to leave him dying,
sick and poor, destitute of health and money.
No airline ticket home. Passport
and identity stolen. The life of lowest poverty
is a meditation practice, a discipline, another
tale. Let me take him to one more
village, give him the commune of our bohemian
dreams.
ART VILLAGE
Ming Ming. Bright Bright.
Double bright. He arrives at Ming Ming
in a rainstorm. Wind is driving the bamboo
and ginger and cane flat. No moment
between lightning and thunder. A logo
flashes. Ming Ming. A word we know,
sun and moon together, bright. 2
suns. 2 moons. Bright Bright.
Following the way the sign points, the wet
traveller runs to a village mired in mud,
into a courtyard that’s a sty of mud. Ming Ming
seems to be a ghost town, yet
another ghost town whose denizens left
for a global city somewhere. He bursts in
to find an art studio, and artists painting
indoors during rain. They shout and laugh
like Welcome! Look at what the mew dragged in!
Like Get the man dry clothes and hot tea!
The nude model throws on her robe, and dashes
away to do their bidding. The men set
down brushes and palettes. Take 5.
They pull up stools and crates around the stove.
Wittman takes off his clothes, soaked
to the skin, and dons the robe the model brings
along with tea and wood and coal. “Thank you.
Thank you,” the guest says in English,
his natural language, the best for giving
heartfelt thanks. “You well come,”
says a goateed artist. No, not
goatee. Let’s give him a soul patch.
“Well, well,” says a fellow with a ponytail.
“Koo. Koo. Koo.” Cool. Cool.
“How are you?” “I am fine.
Thank you.” “You well come.”
“I come from Heilongjian. And you?”
Black Dragon River. The artists, communal
around the fire, brothers, smoking Peace
brand cigarettes and being served tea
and pastries, delight in trying out the Brave
language, the lingua franca taught in schools.
The cats are hip and up-to-date.
They wear their colors on worn, torn denim.
Some long hair. Some skinhead.
Black beards. Purple beard. 5
o’clock shadow, designer stubble. The old man
bewhiskered like that handsome Commie, Ho Chi Minh,
is home among his own kind. The artists
get to the extent of their English. Pots and buckets
plink and plunk; the roof drums. The paintings
are hung and stacked on the dry sides of the room.
Mr. Soul Patch brings to his lips
a xun, around which his hands fit perfectly,
and blows a music, old from long, long
ago. Our first male ancestor,
Bao Xin Gong, made the xun
of earth, mad
e it earth-shaped, and gave
forth this sound that is the sound of time, from
far off to now to far after, the sound
of the animate winds, the yin wind and the yang
wind, the sound of the first man and this man
breathing song. Hear it, and it belongs
to you, and you belong to all of it.
The music ends on a long long
outbreath. The musician coughs and coughs,
spits a lunger onto the dirt floor,
rubs it in with his foot. Lights up
a cigarette. Urges the guest, Go on, go,
try it, blow. Wittman holds the earth xun
in spread hands, fingertips over some
holes, brings it up to his mouth. Pásame
la botella. The sound he gives out
is low, definite, smooth, clear, loud.
“Koo.” “Koo.” “Tell me about xun.”
The artists—they are masters of many arts
in this commune of makers—speak with numbers.
7,000. Xun was unearthed? invented?
7,000 years ago? In the year
7,000? 40. The xun in your hand
is 40-something—generations? years?
Cough cough. Pat-patting the lungs,
the heart, me, myself. 40. The musician
who takes up the xun will die in his 40s.
All artists die young. We sacrifice.
The painters, the model too, have coughs. The smoke,
inhale, cough, exhale, cough, cough.
The elder artist can’t help lecturing
the younguns about their health. “No wonder
you Chinese chronically cough and spit.
You, with every breath, you’re drawing microbes,
germs, disease from that old, used instrument,
into your respiratory system. Those xun
players died young because they caught an illness
from this infected instrument, which they passed on to you.
You guys shouldn’t be living in your studio.”
Points at the beds, the stove, the tables loaded
with cans, bottles, tubes of chemicals, food.
“You’re handling poisons all day,
and breathing fumes all night. I know.
My wife’s an artist. We’ve been poor,
but she keeps her workplace, her art lab,
away from where we eat and sleep. She wears
a face mask, a respirator. Just like
Chinese do in traffic. And, come on,
don’t smoke. Don’t smoke. If you
knew your history, you wouldn’t smoke.
Only 3 grandmothers ago,
BAT, British American Tobacco,
forced our people to buy opium, and tobacco-
opium mix. We had two wars
Chinese versus Anglos,
Opium War I and Opium War II.