Kevin the Viet Poet:

US ASIANS a Sociologically correct online  U.S. magazine pitching for all people to become one, “for all people. For all worlds” interviewed David Henry Hwang, the only Yellow playwright in the White world, and my lesser name came up.

 

 

US ASIANS: Acknowledging that one of your main critics is Echo Park playwright and novelist Frank Chin (first major Asian American writer to be produced off-Broadway), could define what he considers as "real" Chinese American writing and how you feel it differs from your style of communicating within the written word?

 

DAVID HENRY HWANG: I don't think any of my work contradicts Frank's definitions of "real" Chinese American writing. Frank labels it as "fake" primarily because he didn't write it.

 

US ASIANS: What literary and visionary qualities do you feel that Amy Tan ("Joy Luck Club"), Maxine Hong Kingston ("The Woman Warrior") and yourself have in common that would prompt Frank Chin to define this group of writers as "fakes?"

 

DAVID HENRY HWANG: The quality which annoys Frank about this group of writers is that our work has been more commercially successful than his.

 

US ASIANS: What is your definition of "authentic" and/or "real" (in Frank Chin's words) Chinese American writing and what is "fake" - along with your opinion on the differences between your opinion(s) versus Frank Chins?

 

DAVID HENRY HWANG: Frank seems to believe there is one definition of "authentic," his own, and that all others are "fake." He also ostensibly believes that root-culture traditional material needs to be utilized with absolute felicity to the source material, rather like Khomeni objected to Rushdie using Islamic source materials creatively in "The Satanic Verses." The reality is, however, that just as different cultures experience different realities, so do individuals within these cultures. No one has a monopoly on authenticity, not even Frank Chin.

 

FRANK CHIN REPLIES: Why is Hwang talking about me?  I am no part of Khomeni’s quarrel with Rushdie, or Rushdie’s quarrel with his religion.  I am not a Muslim.  I never was. Rushdie seemed to be exposing the insides of his faith for all, including an infidel like me to read. That was a crime by Komeni’s way of thinking,

 

Diversion.  It’s the only “argument” the Whites and their fakes use against me. Divert attention away from the facts that Kingston’s character “Far Mulan” in her autobiography THE WOMAN WARRIOR and Hwang’s “Kwan Kung” from his play “F.O.B.” are identified with specific Chinese texts of specific Chinese works.

 

Kingston’s Far Mulan comes from 550 AD and the publishing of THE BALLAD OF MULAN the first statement of male-female equality in the world of children’s chants, and adult poetry. For the stupid like me, annually translated into English since 1925.  Hwang’s Kwan Kung is a character from history.

 

After the fifteen years of Chien  Hsi Huang’s first empire, the hated Qin, came the beloved Han, which lasted for 400 golden years. The Han was so beloved, in Chinese history, the Chinese called themselves “Han people.” and yearned for the good old days of Han rule.  In 220  AD the Han broke into 3 Kingdoms, with three kings contending for the throne of the Han empire that became the popular opera (five nights long) that spawned the world’s first novel THE ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS, by Luo Kuanchung  in 1366, at the beginning of the third unified China under Chinese rule, the Ming.  The second was the Tang, whose end was predicted in JOURNEY TO THE WEST another novel written the Ming dynasty about the corrupt past.

 

200 years before Gutenberg printed the Bible as the first book off his press of movable type in the West, Chinese had become used to reading history, poetry, heroic novels and satire.

 

Compare the story told by Gutenberg’s first printed book THE BIBLE with the story told by the first novel in the world THE ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS of the Ming Dynasty. Compare Jesus Christ as the favorite character from the first printed book of the west with Kwan Kung the favorite character from 3 KINGDOMS.

 

If the novel was new in China, it was new in Korea, new in Japan the whole world.  Kwan Kung is not a stand alone character. He is associated with Liu Bei, the whiteface, as first brother, Kwan Kung, the redfaced, is the second brother and Jiang Fei, the blackface the third.  The Korean and Japanese use of the Chinese written language evolved into a comfortably Korean and Japanese mode of writing, and the first novel, likewise inspired Korean and Japanese genius.  Korea and Japan respect Chinese text as they would have the world respect theirs.

 

3 KINGDOMS has always been translated into English, always been accessible. The latest unabridged translation is a University of California Press “Centennial Book”, by Moss Roberts. Amy Tan fakes all of the Chinese children’s story, Chinese culture, ducks geese and swans and specifically the Kitchen god’s wife. 

 

Instead of inviting their readers to follow their trail of names to a translation of the original texts brought back to American English by Monkey, Kingston, Hwang and Tan change the subject by accusing me jealousy.

 

White America has lapped up and taught the lies and stupidity of Kingston, Hwang, and Tan in their White schools for 35 years. Not one white magazine, newspaper, critic, literary scholar, writer has read the BALLAD or 3 KINGDOMS in that same 35 years.  (Yes, there were White Chinese scholars, but not even the Whites listen to them.) They’d rather say I’m jealous of liars than read the texts the liars themselves point to.

 

I learned texts are the proof of texts watching Edmund O’Brien in Michael Anderson’s 1957 film of George Orwell’s 1984 in the Times Theater, an all night rerun house on the border between Chinatown and Broadway. My father had a liquor store next door. My mother owned the corner building, O’Brien removes a man from a photograph and destroys the original.  He makes a face.  Text, the words on a page, signed or unsigned, text is the source. The photograph is text. He removed a face from the original and passed on the doctored photo, as the source.  THE BALLAD OF MULAN has a monopoly on the authenticity of THE BALLAD OF MULAN. THE BALLAD OF MULAN is it, when it comes to THE BALLAD OF MULAN.  If her book were a novel and the author was not the narrator, her keeping secret her stealing the story of his tattoos from Yue Fei could be argued. But she wrote a book published  as autobiography non-fiction.

 

Individuals are responsible for their knowledge and telling of the real Chinese children’s stories or the fake.

 

The “real” and the “fake,” the words that started Chinese and AsianAmerican reviewers crediting me with inventing the phrase.  ME! as if they don’t know the real and the fake comes from MONKEY. A Chinese children’s novel one would think the Yellows knew and Hwang had read, at least once, since he adapted it for the Hallmark Entertainment TV production of his script THE LOST EMPIRE.  Broadcast as a 2 part miniseries on NBC.

 

His story of the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy Kwan Yin played by Bai Ling panting the hangtongue hots for the White man Hwang creates for this Monkey story.  Bai Ling looks anorexic batting her eyes as Kwan Yin.  She was sexier in black leather cap, black leather squish’m bra, and those blackrimmed eyes, those dripping red lips in THE CROW.  Bruce Lee’s son in the movie that saw that star Brandon Lee shot dead  by an unloaded prop pistol. This creepy comic book movie was finished by movie technology in Brandon Lee’s place. The son of Bruce Lee the bare-chested curio shop king of balletic kung fu kicks and poses, follows his father into a comic book death while making a comic book movie that opens following the nightflight of a crow over a strangely Gothic American city being dreamed by a mind like mine on pot. I’m along for the ride. The electronic hum of women over deeply moaned old church hymns lifts the flight of the crow and gives Brandon the power to heal his wounds and recover. Bai Ling is no wispy Kwanyin here. She’s a sadistic and voluptuous black widow girlfriend plumping her redlips and her breasts against the cheek of longhaired spidery badguy Michael Wincott. The dark of his voice is lower still and more menacing than his karate was to Pat Morita’s “Mr. Miyagi” to Ralph Macchio’s Karate Kid in John Avildson’s THE KARATE KID.  Wincott is home in THE CROW as a longhaired  pithily philosophical deep sounding religious crime boss with long barreled, large bored pistol  and a sword.

 

Hwang stands on the line between the limits of a White bowdlerization of MONKEY by Arthur Waley in the famous New Directions edition that seems to climax when Monkey flies beyond Buddha’s reach and pisses on the third of the five pillars at the end of the world. He returns and Buddha points to a wet spot by his second finger, and  the Yellow knowledge of Monkey that comes with the Chinese children’s story in the Chinese childhood and grows from there to where nobody knows.

 

Chinese know that when Kwan Yin was a Taoist Immortal of Merciful Navigation, she was a he. She became a woman when he became a Buddhist, when two sects of Buddhism and the Taoists struck a deal to bring down the Shang Dynasty and serially written history began.  But the Whites don’t listen to a Chinaman, talk about lowdown Chinese lit especially when they have a David Henry Hwang, a Maxine Hong Kingston an Amy Tan and Holllywood bulging in their pocket.

 

Cover-THE REAL AND THE FAKE MONKEY adapted by Zhang Chang from the Classical Chinese novel JOURNEY TO THE WEST by Wu Chengen of the Ming Dynasty. ZHAOHUA PUBLISHING HOUSE Beijing. (1983)

 

A picture is worth a thousand words. There are more pictures from more pictorial interpretations of THE REAL AND THE FAKE MONKEY chapter of MONKEY, including these from a 1975 edition of a four volume (400 + pages per vol) set by Canfonian of Singapore.  Cut the pages in half, between the panels of drawings, and arrange the drawings by chapters and one has a pocket sized comic book, as were sent in tins of Danish butter cookies, from Canada to China during the Cultural Revolution.  There were parents willing to risk their kids, and kids willing to risk it all to carry and learn and trade THE REAL AND THE FAKE MONKEY for another chapter. There were kids caught in the cities with comic books. They and their families were divided and sent to different re-education farms.

 

PIX-Canfonian-Monkey and fake before Buddha Kwan Yin

 

Monkey kills the fake Monkey, in front of the Buddha whose “Thou shalt not kill.,” is  Samzang aka Tripitaka, favorite quote.  He’s the Tang Priest devoted to Buddha and the nominal leader of the party headed west for Buddhist texts. “Thou shalt not kill.” the Priest said  each time Monkey saved his  life.  Finally Monkey looks Buddha in the eye before he kills the fake Monkey and challenges Buddha, under his nose, directly, eye to eye. Not by word or deed.  By circumstance. By fate. The Buddha won Monkey’s last challenge.  This time Buddha is afraid of Monkey besting him. Else why does Buddha turn to Kwan Yin, the Goddess of mercy, to carry his commands to Monkey?  Why is Kwan Yin asking, Monkey to return to leading the three pilgrims and a horse, west to India and bring back copies of Buddhist texts made from the original, any different from Buddha asking for himself?   Is it because she and not Buddha  is doing the asking?

 

PIX-MONKEY AND KWAN YIN

 

MONKEY was written anonymously and suspected of carrying secret messages. It was the perfect form. Monkey was an ape born of stone. He was less than a man, and not even an ape. He was a rock.  He might have urges, and his appetites suggest he would, but he’s not equipped to satisfy his urge for children.   Kwan Yin the only woman he shows any affection for, by circumstance, if not by word or deed, wasn’t always a Buddhist. When she was the Taoist Immortal of Merciful Navigation, she was a he.  A man. There’s a certain humor to Monkey, who’s not a man, and Kwan Yin who’s not a woman capable of bearing children.  Seeing them together is more suggestive than anything they say or do.

 

Enclosed is a Hmong creation tale from Minneapolis [THE FLOOD: HOW HMONG NAMES BEGAN Storyteller: MAY YANG. Translation: TOU DOUA YANG AND CHARLES JOHNSON (Linguistics Dept.,Macelester College)]that is very much like Chinese and Japanese creation tales. It’s offered as a measure of comparison to any brother and sister from the Unknown come to earth, and have-to-have-sex-or-die story you find told among your people. How they roll down the hill, go round the pole, accidentally or purposely break the taboo on sex between brother and sister because the earth (or wherever) must somehow - by splats of mud, chopped  meat  out of  a bag-  be populated.

 

I suggest you learn from the Chinese failure to take charge of the Chinese children’s story before Sociology appeared on the scene. The Viet children’s story is the beginning of Viet writing.  You either train and become a Viet American storyteller of the town, or Our Church of Sociology’s gonna catchya.  How to generate a Viet telling of children’s stories into an American art?

 

 (1) you get together with the Viets of your choice, and dredge up a common past and common texts to stories you all have in common. (2) You begin telling stories to kids (and their parents). This you'll have trouble accomplishing because the parents have given up the definition of themselves and their people or race or color --to Sociology.  Sociology only tests the assumptions of Christian dominance---it either works or doesn't work, it’s the call of science and it’s your fault.  Anthropology and Sociology are the literary descendents of Social Darwinism. Sociology operates like a four-barrel tune-up machine.  It goes nuts on too few or too many barrels. It can’t test what it doesn’t know.  And it doesn’t know a lot.

 

A people’s stories are the stories of the people for a reason. The stories are the people. Lose the stories, you've lost the people.  Can you restart the people simply by learning them and telling them to your kids?  Yes. That's why the stories were written.  The stories that held the people together as one by being forbidden to be set down in writing or to be told to outsiders, have died and the culture become a guessing game.

 

The Chinese have believed that being Chinese is knowledge and learned learning against the laws of the snobs and gods since Confucius. The comparison of the rule of government being like the rule of the family, from the father and mother on down, became separated in Confucian thought during the first Emperor’s first Empire, the Qing.

 

 Ch’ien Hsi Huang Di burned all the copies of Confucius in a fire that flamed the pool of oil the Emperor threw all who taught Confucius’s books into because he was the Emperor and he could. The real book he feared was by a contemporary of Confucius, Sun Tzu , the strategist, who wrote an ART OF WAR, so full of valuable martial military information that the Emperor distributed the book to his field commanders though he suspected every copy of carrying a secret message to a conspirator against his throne.

 

The family became the government to the individual. The Empire and all who served it became the government that ruled by force and terror.  The illiterate families had a number of secret teachers that read and secretly taught a few in the family to read.  Reading was used as a strategy for survival as a family. Each family made it’s own rules. Confucius’s “The Emperor is like the Father in the family,” became, “the Emperor is the Father in the family.”

 

As far as the government knew, the Emperor controlled reading and the writing of history.  All cultures arrived at the conclusion that written history will survive. It’s the only history that has survived.

 

That's why the Christians assert the Bible was written by God.  That's why the stories you tell, as the real, have satisfied you, that they are Viet, or Chinese pirate, or criminal on-the-run claimed by no one and claiming no one, and have stood your test of reality and time.  Just a looking for a home.

 

Easy for me to say. I have failed at giving the storytelling bug to my people. The Chinese-Americans don't want to learn the Chinese stories their Chinaman ancestors brought to America. They've been taught by Sociology not to trust "activists". They've been taught to believe in White Sociology by Sociology since 1889 and the Social Darwinists got the Chinese Exclusion Act passed. They've been taught that Chinese-Americans have no literature but what Sociology allows us.  I fear the Viets have yielded to Sociology.

 

And to be told the Viet don't know the stories of a Viet childhood, after they have become Doctors, crammed themselves with the learning of Lawyers, memorized every number in the universe to be told they don't have the knowledge that gives them the name Viet is too much. And to be told this by a Viet! And an orphan!

 

A Viet orphan is what the Viet story is about, of course. Vietnam. A nation where a kid is born with a choice.  Your parents are dead. Who you gonna choose?  When you learn it, as a child, or as a balding old man going blind, doesn't matter. The moment you recognized the story as genuine as a telling look in the eye, if you're a writer a poet, one who knows words and tales well told and true. If you're really moved by the story, you should be able to tell it.  Telling a Viet kid story to an audience of Viet kids is the test of a Viet writer.  The first test of a poet.  Telling stories to the kids of a writer’s people is every writer’s first test.

 

Telling a Viet story to Viet kids who've never heard you tell a story is a your test of your understanding. Then add your learning and your art and little of this little of that and write. If you've found your way to tell the stories of the Viet childhood, you'll have reason to hope your poetry is for the living and not the dead.

 

Maybe parents or parent-age-adults is too old. Jr high and under. Boyfriends and girlfriends.  Couples playing at coupling. The age when sex raises its hairs all over the body.

 

You don't want to face the day you realize everything you've written has been the epitaph for American Viets.  Sociology is looking for the epitaph they said you'd write.

 

The flooding in the Hmong story is not a flood in desert country. It is a country of rivers running down its legs to the sea.

 

FCC