Frank Chin INTERVIEW with Koon Woon

`SEPTEMBER 5, 2007

KOON WOON (1949- )


For some reason he’s dropped his family surname Locke (Horse with a woman on top of a mouth) from his name Gok in Cantonese or Kuo (nation) in Mandarin. Kuan ( Lum on the left. Don’t know meaning). Locke Gok Kuan born in the village of Nom On became Koon Woon when he came into the United States by plane in 1960.

CHIN: OK this is once again. It’s uh August…Septempber. September what?
KOON WOON: 5th.

CHIN: September 5th…

K: 2007. Wednesday, at the Panama Coffee Tea…Coffee or Tea House…

C: Right.

K: 605

C: …and a half…

K: 605 1/2

K: South Main Street…

C: in Seattle. A little overcast. With Koon Woon and Frank Chin. Uhhh. Well, let’s start at the beginning. With your name. So, I see the “mah”

K: Lok. Kok

C: Yeah.

K: No, I mean…I think it’s Lawk.

C: Lawk tawk is a camel. And lawk is a part of a camel?

K: Gradations of a camel, or a white horse with a black mane.

C: Gawk, the nation or country. And Koon (kuen).

K: (cellphone gives an orchestra. Kooon answers ) Hi Betty. … We’re in the middle of an interview, Betty. … Okay.

C: So…Eh! So…you learned to write before you went to school.

K: No, actually I learned to…I went to grade school in China for five years. So I learned it there. I learned ahh…what I did learn,

I learned how to play poker before I went to school.
I became the best poker player in my village. And I became the poker player in my grade school.

But the thing I was best at was mathematics. I was the best student in mathematics in my gradeschool in China. The best in uh Canton, and the best in Hong Kong, in the private school I went to.

And when I came to the United States, I was the 2nd best in the high school. They found my math was so good that the uh MIT asked me to join them a year early out of high school.

Today…Unfortunately I had a genetic defect which caused mmental illness in my twenties. And I’ve been on medication ever since. My late twenties. So that chapter of my just sort of evaporated.

C: Explain how your uncle taught you to write “Liao”

K: Well actually I went to my…The grade school I went to was in my grandmother’s village. My maternal grandmother’s village. And one of clansman, the teacher that taught to write…to remember how to write the last name “Liao” He says…He says, “One point. One horizontal stroke. One slant to the left. Two half moons. One person. And three half persons.” So if you follow that instruction in Chinese you would have the character “Liao”which is just a family surname. There’s no other indication in the dictionary having any other kind of meaning.

C: What was your village name?

K: Nam On. Which means “South Peace.”

C: Where was the village in relation to Kuangzho?

K: Okay. The village is in the Sirbo district of Toishan County. Toishan County is about 100 miles southwest of Kuangchow, which used to be Canton. Called Canton.

C: What was the climate there like?

K: It’s semi tropical. And we go things with you get think…the tip of a… you know the bottom part of this country…part of Mexico…semi-tropical. We have lot of… it’s hot and humid. And it’s uhh we get monsoons in May an’ which literally floods the whole villages. There be water everywhere. You can’t see land at all. The wells would be flooded. The pond would be flooded. The road would be flooded. The rivers would be flooded. So you can’t see where you’re going. Then theoretically you could catch a fish outside your own house…with a…with a net. The all the rivers have overflowed. So when the monsoon recedes the water’s trapped in the rice paddies. The rice paddies have dikes in them.

C: Right.

K: So some of the fish gets trapped in the rice paddies. So when the you and so when the sun comes out, you know, when the weather gets hot, the fish will swim up near the surface groggy headed, so you just go to with a bucket and pickemup, and bring your bucket. That’s your biggest harvest of fish a year.

C: Monsoon season’s what?

K: About May. Chinese calendar May.

C: And the paddy…

K: The water recedes from the monsoon and some of the water be trapped in the rice paddies. And so he can plant rice seedlings in the mud.

C: And other things in the village?

K: We well…green gardens, we have dry gardens, and we grew seasonal vegetables. We grew bok choy, lettuce, winter melon, peas and corn things like that. Then we grow dry…in the dry garden we grow yams and peanuts and things like that.

C: Would there be different levels?

K: Terrace? No. No. No. We would put the gardens right next to the village pond. So we could dip the sprinkler in the village pond and sprinkle water in the garden, and later the water would flow right into the village pond. And so I did that twice a day, for my grandmother, uh… watered her plants.

C: Was there a brick wall around your village?

K: On one side of it, there’s a brick wall, but not, I mean there’s no doors or anything. Just a brick wall. The wall. The next village. So, it demarcated the next village. But parts of the village is open, you know. Completely open.

C: And you said the Manchus had uhhhh

K: Oh, yeah. We were talking about the uhhh. The manchus conquered China, but uhh where we were, the southern coast revolted. Some of the people driven to Formosa, what was still called Formosa. Or Taiwan these days. So the…the Manchus are afraid that these people will come back and revolt again. So they import a lot of northerners, to southern China. And they’re they’re a different tribe of people, they’re much taller. They’re called the Hakka. That’s what they’re called. Hakka.

So the uhh constant struggle between the Hakka and the local people….in the late...in the early 1800’s is sort of a war between the Hakka and indigional people. And so a lot of people…the salmon decided…a lot of people from my area of China emigrated to the United States. And so that’s why you find so many Toisahnese in these country. Original founders of this country were Toisahnese.

C: So, you were born in China.

K: Yes.

C: And you came over…

K: 1960.

C: And you were how old?

K: I was almost 12. I was 11 in ten months….eight months or something…I came on Halloween night, in China. And I came to the United States, it was still Halloween night, although it was twelve hours later, cuz of the time differential, so I gained a day.

C: Do you remember a story of how people were made?

K: Yes. How people were made. That’s uhh sort of like a uhh…I don’t remember, but my mother told me in this country…the people told me in the village, but the god that made people, you know, I guess he was lonely, so he made people out of dough, so he put’em in the oven to bake’em to make’em come alive. The first batch he put in, he took’em out too soon. So they’re white people. So, the second batch he said I gotta leave a little longer. So he took’em out, they became the black people. The third batch he put in, he time it just right, it came out that they’re Asian people. Heh Heh. So that’s reverse racism.

C: Did you come directly from the village to America or were there steps in between?

K: There were steps in between. The immigration was very stringent at that time, because in the United States and China they’re very hostile relationship. So we had to…even back in the village when I was a little boy nine years old, we were, you know, doing the paperwork to get out of China. So like then we have to go to Canton, the City Kuangchow, for two years to continue the paperwork there. I lived in Canton for two years. The we finally was able to make it out to Hong Kong. We waited ten months in Hong Kong before allowed to leave the country come to the United States.

C: What were conditions like in Kwangzhao?

K: Kwangchow was a Mao Tse-tung’s Five Year Great Leap Forward plan. He wanted to quickly industrialize China, because at that time the United States were flying B-2 (Sic) bombers or…with nuclear weapons over China. You don’t have to believe me, you can ask other people who actually flew those planes. I have a guy a editorial….a editor of the HASMET Magazine in New York, upstate New York, he told me, that he flew one of those planes. B-52’s whatever they were called, you know, over North Korea and China. With lethal weapons on them.

C: Wow!

K: Uh yeah. We uh the newspaper announce everday “The US has violated our airspace for the 155th time! When are we going to do something about it?”

(HUGE LAUGHTER)

Course, they couldn’t do anything about it, so Mao Tse-tung wanted to quickly industrialize China and build a modern army. So he got all the people from the villages to go to the cities to take on the industry…unit. In the… So as a consequence in the not many people were farming the land and they were also hit with a –bike- bad famine day. So a lot of people starve to death. The food was rationed, and we had to stand in line. We were issued food rations. Besides paying for the food. I had to stand in line for my grandmother’s food. Couple hours in the morning just to buy food.

C: And what would the food be?

K: Well, you were rationed, right? Four ounces of meat a week, or something. (Train horns) And you would just get rice. And the you know that’s bo(?) a lot. But you couldn’t very much, you know.

C: Was the rice in Guangzhao as good as the rice in the village?

K: Well. I suppose that’s where it came from. It’s just as good. But thing is, you know what the congee is right?

C: Yes.

K: Those are the years we ate a lot of congee.. So you’d be eating essentially water. To make the water…the rice go a long way, you just make congee.

C: So, you were in Guangzhao two years?

K: Two years. Yes. Some of the time was okay. I mean, there was food one year. But one year was rationed. Yeah.

CHIN: How did you spend your time.

K: Well, school and at the uh…We had the, you know, China was in the socialist era, at that time, so, okay, we had uh..we had to like a…we had to work for the school. We had to volunteer. We had to help campaigns and like I myself and a bunch of other boys we issued tickets with the people spit on the street. We went out and to make fly swatters. We killed flies …on the street. And we helped the uhh drain, you know, standing water. We were janitors for the school. We work half a day for the school, shelling peanuts or scraping bottle caps and… do various things like that, and the uh. But, I remember one thing, I was kept after school to do math. I said, you know, I says, I don’t seem to have trouble with math. That I would keep… They keep me after school with a couple of kids. Cuz I was exceedingly good in math, where they were teaching me complex fractions and things like that…so…So when I got to this country, I you know, they put me in the third grade, and say, you know, I didn’t have to think. You know, I was still…They were still learning the multiplication table I learned in the first grade in China.

C: How large were the classes in China?

K: In the village we had fifty…We just…all the villages we just have one school. All the villages we just have one school, the several villages, so maybe a coupe hundred people in the whole school. So the fifth grade, that would be about, I know, about thirty or forty people a…a room.

In the Kwangchow…the students..we had about, um maybe about twenty thirty people in the classroom. Yeah.

C: Were the teachers women teachers or men teachers?

K: Both women and men. Yeah.

C: What was the etiquette in the classroom?

K: Uh Well, uh…in…in… In Kuangchow…In… In the village it was kind of a, you know casual. In Kwangchow it was very strict. We had to sit with our hands behind our back. We could not speak, and we could not, you know, pass notes. And when you want to speak, in the class, you have to raise your hand. You get recognized by the teacher, and you have to stand up. And you have to say what you want to say, as quickly and as succinctly as possible.

And as soon as you say, you have to sit down. And the teacher will make an account of what you say, and then nobody else can speak in response to what you say, unless they’re recognized by the teacher.

C: Hmmm!

K: However! After school, then you go …you split into study groups, and you quiz each other. What you learned of… uk….during the day.

C: Hmmm!

K: And the teacher would not, you know, would not correct you, or anything like that. So, it was a good learning experience. But the reason we, you know, we had this…raise our hand is to learn discipline, is to learn to pay attention.

C: So these groups…did you find yourself becoming a teacher of math?

K: Well. Actually, we uh…Actually, we…we didn’t have a study groups in math.

C: Umm.

 K: Because as Uh. Yeah. We did have study groups like uh, you know, “literature”

C: Mmmm!

K: or umm “History” or something like that. …was open to interpretation.

C: Umm hmmm.

KOON: Math is, you know, either you got it right, you got it wrong.

C: Right.

K: So, you don’t argue with somebody about it. You know?

C: You talked about Monkey.

K: Yes.

C: Yeah. Uh, Uhh. When did you encounter Monkey?

K: I believe I read the JOURNEY TO THE WEST. Three sets of books, right? In the Canton Public Library. It was between 9 and 11. In Canton. I was too young to check books out at the library, so I had to go to library to read it every day. It’s a real fascinating book, you know, cuz it’s all about fantasy and it’s all about supernatural, well you know, tales. So that was just like…Children like comic books. The kids in this country.

CHIN: SAI YOW GAY has another meaning?

KOON: It sounds to me in Toishanese as Say Yow Gay. Say means, you know the number four. Well, West (say) sounds like the number four. Which means “Death” in Chinese.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, is like that…the journey of the Dead. Cuz sounds to me in my own mind, sounds like…Journey of the Dead. Which to me in Buddhism, you know like uh, Buddhism, the whole idea of Buddhism is to reach enlightenment, you know, after suffering becuz we have suffered because of the human body.

The Human body is just like a corpse. You carry it around, you know, it’s a burden of a body. You carry it around like a corpse.

We feed it, you know. Especially those indulgent people, you know, they eat all those fatty food, drink a lot of whiskey, smoke a lot cigarettes, all those vices, you know.

C: Everything I do.

When we met you were living across the street at the International Terrace.

KOON: Yes.

CHIN: And now you’ve been moved out.

KOON: I moved out. Yes. I moved out.

CHIN: What was behind that?

KOON: Well. Okay. I got a notice, one day. Says that the uh from the property manager, she said, “I got the notice on you. You’re being investigated for fraud and perjury.”

C: Hmm!

KOON: And then, uh, “You have 3 days to bring us your financial records.” So, I thought that was very strange, that the uh, that I had only three days to gather up my things to uuh for a, you know, from a uh fraud investigation.

C: Right.

K: And then uh..I didn’t show up because uh uh because I was so upset, I was meditating to my computer. My computer has a meditation website that sounds of medidating and I fell asleep at the hour I was supposed go down to the office, in the building to do the interview.

And they didn’t call my room. They didn’t call my phone number. And they didn’t come to my door, to knock on my door, to get me down there. So, I missed the meeting.

So, they send me another letter. This time they gave me a date, you know, to come down. It was this time was a more “Notice.” But still I had no idea of what they were looking for. So, so I considered that a fishing expedition. Okay? The uh …You know. The…Legally you call “fishing expedition.” Where you’re just trying to gather information on somebody. Hopefully you find something derogatory or detrimental to that person.

So, the uh. So I brought all my financial records. And they said, you know, uh, “It seems like you have extra money. That you’re not reporting.”

So, I said, “Well, you know, as you can see, these are debts. These are credit card debts. These are student loans. And none of this would be considered income.”

And they said, “Well, you have a trust. Don’t you?”

I said, “Yes, I…here’s the paper to the trust. And then uh…And then later on, they says, “How come you didn’t report your trust?”

I said, “I report my trust every year that they income review.”

And that they said, “We don’t have any record of it.”

I said, “Now look at the logic of the situation. It does not mean that I burglarized you place and removed all the records, right? It could mean that you removed all the records. It could mean that you never put the records there. Okay? Just because you don’t have the records, doesn’t mean that I didn’t give you the records. Okay?”

So, they said they have no records. However! Uh. My room was burglarized, and the checks to my trust were stolen. So, I had to change the account to my trust. And then they uh…At the bank. They have records of it at the bank. And then they come back to me later, subsequent time, Seattle Housing they says to me, says, “How come you changed your trust account?”

Now how would they know I changed it unless they had the old account and new account?

Chin: Mmm!

KOON: So they have records of my trust.

CHIN: Right.

KOON: They. So they…they uh you know they made a mistake that they contradicted themselves.

CHIN: Right.

KOON: So they do have proof. They do have records of my trust. So.

CHIN: Who runs the…

KOON: The property managers that I was dealing with, her name is Pamela Rohrbeck. And she is charge of several sites, besides this one.

CHIN: For…

KOON: Seattle Housing Authority, which is now just managing the property for a private owner. Because the building has been privatized. The Seattle Housing Authority is part of…HUD…I believe. And then uh the jurisdiction of HUD, which is a federal agency, although the HUD Director, I understand is appointed by the mayor. But once appointed by the mayor he no longer answers to HUD….I mean, to the mayor, he answers to HUD which is directly controlled by the White House. Ultimately.

CHIN: Um! And HUD can sell the building or convert it to condos or do anything they want?

KOON: Uh! Let’s see. Now the uh. Well the…Actually it’s owned by a private owner. The private owner, if they have approval by HUD, I imagine they can convert it to condominiums, you know with the…because they’re the legal owners now.

CHIN: Uh huh.

KOON: And act…actually probably because…they probably could even uh, you know, stop Seattle Housing from managing it. And if they can just pull from under out under them…I think the legal …the legal loophole is that you get uh they get these buildings for provide low income housing to serve people for tax credit. So that’s what the incentive…you know, providing low income housing. But ah but they… but…but the way I figure it, I might wrong on this…they say they get the buildings for free over a mil a certain number of years, because they don’t have to pay taxes. You know, they get tax cuts. So they actually acquire the buildings for free.

CHIN: Hmm!

KOON: Now you. Just take a step back. It means the political cronies of George W. Bush gets these buildings for free.

CHIN: How many tenants in the building?

KOON: It’s approximately a hundred units, so most of the units have one or two people so maybe about a hundred to about a hundred and twenty people.

CHIN: And are they all low income people…or what are they?

KOON: They all low-income people. Now, they’re kicking out the people who they [think] have more money. They think they have more money, so they kicking out. Well they actually didn’t kick me out. They said I no longer qualify for rent subsidy. So I will have to pay the market rate, which is $1200. a month. Before that I was paying $154. a month.

C: The building you saved. Let’s talk about that. That’s located where?

K: 2016 1/2 7th Avenue South. Called the Republic Hotel. Built in the 1920’s and the 1930’s.

C: It had cockroaches and mice…?

K: When I first moved in it was an empty room with a cot and one small table. Um I said, you know I looked at the small table said the … that would be a nice place to put the typewriter. Maybe I will take this room, since rent is only $60. a month, for a single occupant.

After I start cooking I had a lot of uninvited guests. They stay with me. Cockroaches and mice.

C: What did you have to cook on?

K: I have a hot plate. That didn’t come with the room. I had to borrow from my mother…the hotplate. But they do have one of the washbasins in the corner of the room. It used to be like a single room hotel for travellers.

C: Bathoom down the hall?

K: Yes, bathroom down the hall. And a tubroom down the hall.

C: Was that clean?

K: Well, the relatively, for, you know, that kind of rent. However there was a 95 year old man, living you know there. He had to climb…there’s no elevator. He had to climb the stairs every day. But you know, several people in their eighties, you know had to climb the stairs everyday.

C: Rents were so low, was it all Chinese…

KOON: They owned by several family associations, because they let the relatives rent there first. Okay?

C: Right.

K: It just so happens though, my mother’s cousin is part owner of that building.

C: Um.

K: So they let me live there.

C: What happened to the bulditng to cause you to save it?

K: Well, the uh owners decided to uh uh renovate so that’s because of incentive, because they can get a matching fund from the city. Which, I don’t know what it is, I just make a rough guess, they you know, Needs over a hundred thousand dollars.

They found out I was a writer that wrote for the Seattle Chinese Post. So they said, well, you know, Koon, You know, you know you do an article for us. How were going to, you know, upgrade the living conditions of the dependents.

So I say “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” And they took me out to dinner, you know, the people, the housing people of Chinatown. Couple of young people. Those people that come to Chinatown to do good, you know. They mainly they come here to do good for themselves, you know.

So they says, “Koon, were going to make you the manager. When after we renovate it.”

“That sounds good, you know.”

The rooms are going to be bigger. You know, more modern, you know. All that. Then I thought about it a little while. “But what about those guys that can’t come back that can’t afford the rent. There’ll be fewer people living because the rooms will be bigger. And what about future immigrants who, you know, come here to live? And I know that the reason people living here like my cousin’s living here, that they want to save money on the rent, so they can buy a house. For the future, you know, so they can have kids, and grandkids in this country. So they want a house, you see.

So, I said, for these and other reasons, Maybe it’s not a such a good idea to renovate.
I uh spoke up against it. The tv station KOMO caught the news of the story somehow, I don’t know how, but they came to interview me on Prime Time Newstime three days in a row. They filmed my room. It just so happened they filmed my tv my little tv I got for ten dollars in my room. There’s cockroach walking on the tv screen. They filmed that on Prime Time Newstime.

CHIN: What year is this?

KOON: This is 1992, I believe. Remember, I was not well at that time. And my psychiatrist, you know , he uh, he said, you know, “Koon,” you know, “You’re writing so well. I don’t believe you have mental illness. At least not schizophrenia. I think you’re pure bipolar. You really don’t need anti-psychotic medication. We think your lithium will do.” So he took me off my anti-psychotic medication. I slowly went off the deep end, you know, I became psycotic.

Then I went into the hospital. When I went into the hospital, they put an eviction notice on my room. So, I came home, I was evicted. The deputy the sheriff’s deputy came to see me and says, “You know, I didn’t really want to do this to you Mr. Woon. This is my job.”

I said, “That’s all right. In China, we do not kill the policeman, we kill the mayor.”

(LAUGHTER)

C: And so you on tv for three days. What was the reporter from KOMO

KOON: Yeah. She was a Chinese woman.

CHIN: What was her name?

KOON: I can’t remember now.

CHIN: And uhh

KOON: The funny incident was I considered myself a poet at that time. So I said, “I want to read a poem on tv. I think it’s relavent.” Well, one point of the poem is about the Republicans, were in power at that time, disappeared. One of the poem says, “Have the art/ Have the fart/Love and leave these lands..”

(LAUGHTER)

And then she says. “Oh we haven’t got time for a whole poem. Maybe just read half a poem.”

(laughter)

CHIN: Were these poems in a book of yours?

KOON: No not that poem. One’s lost. When I was evicted I placed everything was lost. Except a doctor’s stub, kept the uh At Luke’s Pharmacy I gave to my…I get my medicine there I said, “Judy,” you know, she works there. “Can you keep this box of stuff for me till I get…come ad pick it up?” She kept it there for me a long time. So I went back and got it.

CHIN: Hmmm! Ahh! Yeah.

KOON: But I lost a lot of writing that way.

CHIN: The book…I forget the name of the book that you…you gave me

KOON: THE TRUTH IN RENTED ROOMS? You mean my book?

CHIN: Yeah.

KOON: My poetry book. THE TRUTH IN RENTED ROOMS.

CHIN: Did you write about your rented room at the Republic Hotel?

KOON: There’s a poem in there called A MOMENT IN MY RENTED ROOM. I compare myself to the astronaut. The room’s so small it’s like being in a space capsule.

ťťťťťťťťťťťťťťťťťťť

A Moment in my rented room

I sometimes think of myself as an astronaut
In my compact, rented room and look upon the bookshelf
With its deep mathematics books for deeper space
As from a voyage one cannot return.
Then multiply by serval million men who cannot marry,
Men who cannot own home, or work, or go to college.
This is almost equal to the space effort.
But why all that money? I can go to Pluto bu just
Being in a bad mood.

Sometimes I think of the loneliness of deep space
In my rented room. The neighbors have busily gone off
To Epsilon Centauri or Galaxy X-2137 or to the 7-Eleven.
Sometimes I look at my 16-oz. Jar of coffee, I know
What the minimum daily requirements are. Cybernetics
Steers me to avoid collisions with black holes or stars,
And my hot plate sustains me with pinto beans and bacon rinds,
And on my mini-stereo, always the Blue Danube.

It is rainy today. My room is a bastion. I am filing
The sparse bars of prison. I am building a mental atom bomb.
I am designing spaceships. Multiply this by several million.

ťťťťťťťťťťťťťťťťťťť

CHIN: What were the dimensions of your room?

KOON: About 10 x 12. I did all my cooking, eating, writing. I did my laundry. If the wet be out, I hang my laundry up, in the room, to dry.

I lived there for seven years. I was helping other people live there. I helped with things from the Government. My uncle family, my uncles younger brothers whole family came here, they lived there [at the Republic?] I taught my two cousins ESL and I taught a couple other women ESL for two years. No pay. Just volunteer. I did all the uh you know the financials… you know uhh legal errands for them. I took them to school. I took them to get jobs. I did everything like that. I helped them get adjusted to life in America.

CHIN: You said you worked in restaurants.

KOON: Yes. I began working in restaurants 12 years old. That’s my family business. The whole thing is I learned how to do sidework, wash dishes, cook, wait on tables, manage restaurant. I essentially didn’t quick work in restaurants. I was drunk 28 years old. (??) And even when I was a mental patient and in a health clinic, I volunteered to cook lunch. I cooked for 30 people in two hours time. All by myself. But we’d order the food, and cook the food, and served it, all in two hours. 30 people.

Yeah, in Seattle. Dotel. CDC Dotel. That’s the worst characters in the mental health system.

CHIN: What’s CDC?

KOON: Psychiatric Community Center or clinic Community Psychiatric Clinic or something like that.

CHIN: You said you worked in San Francisco also

KOON: Yes, in…in a restaurant. Soo it’s….A Chinese-Filipino restaurant.

CHIN: Where was this restaurant locacated?

KOON: At Battery and California. Financial District.

CHIN: How long did you work there?

KOON: I worked there for about six months.

CHIN: So you were right here in Chinatown.

KOON: Yeah. Yeah. In Chinatown. I lived in the Grant Avenue. I stayed with my aunt. She had a flat on Grant Avenue. 1362 Grant Avenue…something like that. 1632 Grant Avenue. That was North Beach. Cuz you know that place very well.

CHIN: OH! YOU’RE A POET.

KOON: Right.

CHIN: YOU’RE RIGHT THERE IN NORTH BEACH.

KOON: That was before I did any literature. At all. I went there mainly to uh Ferlinghetti’s bookstore after uh you know after work to read psychology books. Because I was slowly going crazy. I didn’t know I was going crazy. But, I knew something was wrong. I was trying to read psychology books trying to figure myself out.

CHIN: Compare Chinatown Seattle with San Francisco. Was San Francisco more Chinese or less Chinese?

KOON: More Chinese. More Chinese. More real. You know, but, however, it’s hard to make a living there. Because, you know, whenever you’re more people competition labor competition keener. Wages are lower, you know, and the living space is smaller you know, and then here uhh it’s not as much commerce but fewer people here. And then people can get jobs outside of Seattle’s Chinatown.

CHIN: Did you enjoy San Francisco?

KOON: Yes, I did. The part of the time I was crazy. I was hospitalized. I was released out I lived in a half-way house in a Jackson and Fillmore, I believe.

CHIN: Oh, yeah.

KOON: You know where that is right? I lived there old Victorian house with 30 other uh you know, a colony there. Was called the Connor House.  The cream of the crop of halfway houses. The uh…These are dropouts from Columbia, Berkeley, uh Yale

CHIN: Huh!

KOON: Mills College…I mean, I was with those ivy league schools…or kids. And I had the most money!
(Laughs)
CHIN: Hmm

KOON: Cuz I knew how to make money. I worked at a donut shop at night, nearby. In one of the poems of my book is a …it’s called THE SPY’S RELIABLIBITY. It’s based on my experience working at donut shop at night.

CHIN: Ah ha

KOON: You know why?

CHIN: Why?

KOON: Because there was uh there was actually Iranian chess master went there to play….chess. He was…he was whisper to me, he says, “They give me a drugs. ‘nd they’re…They’re trying to control your mind.

(LAUGHTER)

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The Spy’s reliability…

He was at the corner donut shop; that was his assignment. He watched the donut-maker Buck and the chess players, in particular the Iranian chess master; the other hangers-on, the drug dealers and so forth were only of minor importance. He comes in the day, ostensibly to pay chess and talk of psychotherapies. At night he comes, ostensibly to read a book on economics by Samuelson. Everyone knows he is a spy, however, since most of them are spies themselves, and it takes one to know one, as the saying goes. The Fillmore District was full of spies, because the newspapers were a printed there, in all languages that were popular in the city.

He plays chess sometimes in off-hours at night, and on weekends when he pretends he can’t sleep in his rooming house nearby, he comes to see Buck, to play chess and say his school books are driving him crazy. He purposely loses to Buck, a black guy who never really had time to study chess, and Buck will feel good and whisper things to him, that there’s saccharine in the donuts in place of sugar, and that this little donut shop is really owned by a black church, not the little black guy they called Steve. The spy never seems to be prying. He always seems to be unimpressed, so that Buck tells more and more, juicier and juicier tidbits, hoping to make him happy…

The spy himself has had no communications with command for a long time. There could have been changes in command structure or channels of communication, breakdowns, paralysis due to infiltrations by hostile forces, or just an inadvertent oversight, meaning he is lost in the paperwork. Or, the most satisfactory explanation to him, he is so deep in the bowels of the investigations that he is miles under ground, beneath the beds of rivers and dinosaur fossils, so close to the fire itself that they don’t dare jeopardize his cover…

The Iranian chess master plays the other players blindfolded, ten at a time, while smoking imported Iranian cigarettes. He of course has no chessboard; he just shouts his moves, the mind is all. The other players play him for money and they smoke Marlboros and Camels and Kents and drink coffee and eat saccharine donuts at the little tables in the Fillmore and Vallejo donut shop while cars go in four directions outside, occasionally a thug-thug teenaged music car slouches around the street corner slowly, like Yeat’s Beast in his metaphysical poem to be reborn. The Iranian loses all ten games, and pays the money that has been wagered. It seems the money has petroleum stains on it. The Spy makes note of it.

Usually, unless one’s a mole, a spy is to be transferred frequently so that his objectivity and consequent usefulness is not jeopardized by inadvertent and undesirable attachments to his subjects. So, since the spy hasn’t been notified of nay transfers, in fact, has had no communications whatsoever, he begins to think his cover has been blown, in a deep and profound way that could damage the entire apparatus, and more and more, he comes to the unattractive but forced conclusion that he’s been written off, forgotten and abandoned, and therefore he is free at last, to see what he sees without a fixed format of interpretation, to simply live among the people as if they were his brothers and sisters. It is difficult to say which is the cause and which the effect, the net result in that when Buck asks him to play chess, he says yes. He’s no longer reliable…

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CHIN: Did the fact there were more people more Chinese around did you find that stimulating or depressing?

KOON: Well I think in uh in San Francisco, you know, there’s uh…uh…uh. Things are more open. Everything’s open. Life styles. Uh, you know. Different persuasions. Different philosophies. All things are more open. Different cultures. More open than…Seattle. Little bit more. Seattle’s you know quite liberal in the old days. Now it’s got too much political correct.

(CHIN LAUGHS)

CHIN: In the old day’s it was more liberal. When were the old days?

KOON: Well, you know, you were here, back in the late 60’s early 70’s. That’s when you wrote for the SEATTLE Magazine. I remember you then… The first time I saw you, you were at the Sky [River] Folk Rock Festival playing the flamingo guitar with a bunch of gypsies. And the second time I saw you was at the Last Exit on Brooklyn. And somebody says well that’s Frank Chin, he’s a…he’s a writer of the SEATTLE magazine.

CHIN: Hmm

KOON: He was my next door neighbor from Aberdeen, Washington. He was in English. He was an English major. I was a math major, so I didn’t, I was not into literature at that time, so. I was not into literature at al until I was 30. That’s because, after mental illness I had such, you know, difficult feelings.

CHIN: UM HMM.

KOON: I would try to write in my diary, you know, “I feel so terrible. I wonder why” ‘nd this and that. “If I had…If I could do this, I would do this.” “I hope things will be better tomorrow.” Jus’ Jst write down my feelings. And over a five year period, I started writing little images. “If that is a toilet, I’m flushed.” That’s how my poetry started. Really bad, like that, you know? As bad as toilet unflushed. That’s how my poetry grew.

CHIN: Right.

KOON: Then in 1985 decide to take a poetry workshop from uh Nelson Bentley at University of Washington. The first month I was there, some kids in the room started a magazine. So they said, Well, Can we have one of your poems? You know it was with in the first year they published. And then they uh Then I decide to enter the Bumbershoot. I was chosen at Bumbershoot. I was the kind of people as one of the three chosen. So. Bentley says, “Well, you know, maybe you should uh, you know, try your hand at poetry. And then uh. That was 1985. I didn’t collect enough poems until 1998, to have my first book published. And so far it’s the only book I got published.

CHIN; Uh huh.

KOON: Uh huh.

CHIN: With what publisher?

KOON: Kaya in New York city. Which is mainly a publisher of Asian diaspora.

CHIN: What was the first thing of mine you read? (Laughs) If you have read anything of mine at all.

KOON: Yeah, I think I read uh . I don’t remember if I read the whole thing was The CHICKECOOP CHINAMAN

CHIN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How did that strike you?

KOON: Well you know uh. I really don’t remember. Mental illness did a lot of things to my memory. The years of my life I don’t remember. Back in 1996, I was convinced I killed two people in my sleep. But don’t remember who. For two years I was absolutely convinced I killed two people.

CHIN: Wow!

KOON: I walked around every day. I wonder, you know, if they’re going to get me. Get me for it, you know. So I must’ve killed ‘em in my sleep.

CHIN: Wow!

KOON: I threw them off my roof. I know I did. You know, so.

CHIN: My writing drove you crazy!

(HUGE LAUGHTER)

I thank you for remembering me. The Last Exit. Wow.

KOON: See the things that are a long time ago remember better than things recently. That’s that’s. I think I got electric shock treatments. That’s what that’s something, you get a short term memory.

CHIN: You, yourself play guitar…

KOON: Yes. I play the blues. Folk and blues and rock’n’roll, yeah. I gave you a cd you can play it yeah.

CHIN: I sent it home already.

KOON: (Sings) Unchain my heart/ Baby let me be/ Darling you don’t care about me/ Unchain my heart/ Baby, set me free…

CHIN: Now, we’ll see if we got anything.

CHIN; Anything I missed?

KOON: We can make aother session sometime. You can go over your notes and then see what else you need and talk about some more. Yeah.

CHIN: Oh, ah! You said the Locke family is settled mainly in Seattle…

KOON: Oh, ahh… in the state of Washington. It started in Hoquiam my great grandfather’s the godfather of the Locke family. He came to Hoquiam, Washington. The mayor of Hoquiam , Washington when was to his village is because, five hundred men to come over here. One of them was Gary Locke’s grandfather.

CHIN: One was Gary Locke’s grandfather.

KOON: That’s right. My great grandfather brought him over here.

CHIN: Okay Gary Locke’s grandfather

KOON: Yeh.

CHIN: is different from your grandfather.

KOON: Right. But they’re the same clan. The Locke clan.

CHIN; And there are other Locke’s in the area?

KOON: Yeah, there many Lockes that settled in the small towns. Aberdeen. Hoquiam. Satsup, Raymond, Centralia, you know, Elmira and uh up in Seattle. Then it branched out to California. In fact the main manager at San Francisco Chinatown, was a Locke, was a relative of mine. He was responsible for the Miss Chinatown Pageant in San Francisco.

CHIN: And so. Does the Locke family in Washington duplicate the Locke family in the vailage?

KOON: They’re all descendants from the people in the three villages. The Locke family in the villages, in China.

CHIN: So there Locke famiy in three villages. What are the names of the three villages?

KOON: I can’t remember. Two I don’t remember. The third…Nom On, is my village. See Non is the next village. I don’t remember the third one.

CHIN: It’s all around Toishan?

KOON: Yes, in Toishan county. Just like we have King County here. Most of the Chinese immigrants in this country are originally from Toishan because. They had kind of a war there. And they had a famine very badly one year, so they all came America.

CHIN: My geography sort of messed up so, I know in Kwangtung Province there’s Chungshan…

KOON: Chungshan is next to us.

CHIN: AHH!

KOON: Next to Toishan. Un hmm.

CHIN: And theres Lihoi?

KOON: Lihoi…?

CHIN: Jihoy?

KOON: Since I left China at 11, I don’t know much geography.
CHIN: Your life in the village was really all in the village or how far out of the village did you travel? Say you were going on a holiday…

KOON: Well we generally. I go my maternal. My mother’s side of the family. That’s just three miles away. I would walk there and see my uncles. Usually people, in the old days, people usually very seldom more than a hundred miles from their own place. Because the transportation and communications so poor.

I did not leave my village at all until we went to..immigrated to Canton. Which is like a hundred miles away.

CHIN: When you walked 3 miles to wherever you walk, did you walk alone?

KOON: Yeah. It was safe. I mean it was safe at that time yeah. It was under Communism. There’s only one scary part, there was a…house you know that didn’t seem much windows that it was very dark inside. And people whisper to you, to kids, says uh, you know, “Be careful you walk by there. Fot mahngs live there!” What the hell’s a fot mahng? I never until about now, you know it’s a crazy person. They lock’em up. They don’t have mental hospitals. They just lock’em up in a house somewhere and they feed’em, you know. And come to think of it I’m a fot mahng myself.

(LAUGHTER)

CHIN: Luckily you have a house with windows. Could you see mountains from where you were?

KOON: Uhh let’s see. No. Hills. Just hills. Toishan means “a raised mound” Elevated mound.

CHIN: Oh, “Sahn” mountain.

KOON: Yeah. Hills. Toishan.

CHIN: You could see the Pearl River?
KOON: Not from where I was. We have to go to Canton. We lived in Canton for two years, actually swim in the mouth of the Pearl River. We saw dragonboat races…in the uh in the uh Pearl River.

CHIN: Do you remember Chinese New Years?

KOON: Yeah, Yeah. That’s the big thing in the kid’s life. You get ‘lucky money,’ I mean that’s about the only time you get big money, that’s the only time you play poker for real.

(Laughter)

CHIN: Did they have celebrations did you do lion dances or dragon…

KOON: Well not in the villages too much. I think the women did the flower drum songs there were the girls who were dressed up and put on their drums and dance and play the drums. I think the men did the acrobatics the tai-chi the kung fu whatever. Rumor has it my dad always carried the first flag in the village, during the holidays. He was uh this is what my maternal grandmother says, you know how the Chinese talk, they talk indirectly.

CHIN: Right.

KOON: The doorway has a little… jamb atop you know.

CHIN: Yeah.

KOON: You’re tall for a Chinese, right? You’re fairly tall right? My dad’s not that tall, he’s only five eight. So he’s not as tall as the door…the top the door right?

But my grandmother would say to me, she says, “You’re father’s so tall, that when he goes through the door, he has to nod [lower] his head.” What she’s saying to me is, “He is the leader. When people see him they have to nod their head.” Chinese…everything like that. Coding. They do not let you know for sure what they mean. So all your life you cannot know for sure what’s happening. If you know that’d be a danger to yourself.

CHIN: Did you bai sun to the family?

KOON: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right! Right!

CHIN: Describe that. Did you set out tea for the dead?

KOON: Oh yeah, we uh. Generally you boil a chicken with the head on it.  And then ah (coffeehouse is filling up.) And then you bring uh, you know, food and you make offering…incense and you put your hands together and you supplicate several times. And then you uh…after you uh…after your prayers and then you can share the food. And you get to eat the food there.

CHIN: ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS PRPARE A CHICKEN AND RICE?

KOON: Mostly chicken, yeah. Anything that you like to eat that’s good. Is it a good food. Suppoesdly your ancestors and supposedly in Heaven they cannot eat but they can…they live off the fragrance. The incense fragrance is a food. So that’s how they could eat.

And you could anything that you eat they want to use in heaven, you make paper offerings and burn them, right?

CHIN: Right.

KOON: You burn money. Hell Bank Notes and things like that.

CHIN: Yes. Okay. Ah! There’s a map over there. Yeah. Yeah.

KOON: You know what ThinkingChicken means, Frank, you know your … your ….

CHIN: My e-mail address?

KOON: Do you know what that comes from?
CHIN: ThinkinChicken?

KOON: Yeah.

CHIN: No.

KOON: You don’t know where that comes from? What do you call that when you know something by …by sixth sense. What do you do you know that. ESP? What do you call that?

CHIN: Awww!

KOON: When you know something by ESP? You know what I mean. Like a mindreader, you know, right?

In China, our teacher said, “Look at China. That’s the shape of a rooster.” See that’s the head of a rooster. That’s a chicken, man! Do you know what chicken means? In China?

CHIN: No.

KOON: Nay Hew hong goy muh? Goy!

CHIN: Goy?

KOON: Goy means strategy!

CHIN: Awww!

KOON: Thinking chicken, man! Chinese strategy!

CHIN: (LAUGHS) WOW! I did’nt know that…I thought that…yeah. So, I just hit on a name. And it turned out to be a good name.

KOON: That’s the way language works.

CHIN: Yes.

KOON: If you’re a Polick you pick that up

CHIN: Cuz you know, come with me, (walks across room to globe) look at the map. Now I see this as a camel’s head.

KOON: Uh huh.

CHIN: And the Yellow the Wong Haw is…forms the camel’s back.

KOON: Um hmm.

CHIN: And Leongshan Marsh is right there.

KOON: Um hmm. Um hmm.

CHIN: But look at where the camel’s looking. Right at Korea.

KOON: Uh huh. Well, before this is the rooster. The head here.

CHIN: Yeah.

KOON: Now, when you got a Mongol sitting on your chicken what do you do? (pause) That’s time to worry, buddy!

(LAUGHTER)

CHIN: It seems there dual meanings for everything you can say or or or…

KOON: But that’s Taoism. That’s the Tao. That’s the Tao.

You know the particle at the end of a sentence. They said they all say “um-muh” “how um how ah.”

CHIN: Oh oh! You said uh. There was. “Sick jaw fon may uhh.”

KOON: Um hm.

CHIN: And the answer is…

KOON: Gee gun uhh.
CHIN: Jur (the city dialect) gun uhh.

Oh, what’s that mean?

KOON: Gee is control. Aw means the chairman. The chairman of the control. Means uh it’s under control. I’m handling it okay. It means. “Have you eaten yet?” “Did you overcome?”

CHIN: Aha.

KOON: When people when they finish. They go (claps hands) Heck guh luh! That means “Done!”

CHIN: I thought it was. “Let’s eat!”

KOON: When they finish doing something they say (clap hands) “Heck luh.” If you ask them if you build a house, “Heck luh. Jang goong luh.”

CHIN: I’m ashamed to say I guess I don’t know Chinese at all.
There’re these other shadow meanings or other meanings

KOON: I urge you to read, just if you have time, one of these days, read Wittgenstein what he means by private language. All language. It’s a hopeless task for philosophers who have a hundred years to invent a perfect language with every grammatically correct sentence has a definite meaning.

But it was a futile effort because every language would generate its own metaphors in time. That’s the darkhorse of language out there.

If it’s in use long enough it will generate metaphors. In the country evolving language constantly.

CHIN: Right.

KOON: If you read the Tao te Ching. There’s a lot of hidden language in the Tao De Ching. “Ruling a large nation is like cooking a small fish.”

What does cooking a small fish in Chinese Cantonese. “Gee siyew yur..” Siyew yur (small fish) means “small talk” means “conspiracy” controlled conspiracy. “Ruling the big country is to control the conspiracies.”

Chinese languages. There are 50 thousand characters in the dictionary, approximately. To be a literate person you need about five thousand of them. So a lot of words, you know, these bigger words I only went to five years of British school. And I only speak to my parents and they speak to me like a little kid. So a lot of adult words I don’t understand.

However there are things I understand that even a scholar don’t understand.

Depends on what kind of background ….of family background comes up.

CHIN: Ah, let’s see… “mo bahn fot.”

KOON: Means uh, “without…” “unable to do something” without the ability to ..without the means to do something.”

CHIN: Does it have another meaning?

KOON: Uh…Mo bon fot. Means….uh No method to do something. Uh…generally that’s pretty neutral. When you say that. There’s another way of saying that. “Oy mo nung jaw” Which means I love to do it but I can’t help it.” I mean, “I’m not able to… I sure wish I could help you but I can’t.” “Oy mo mung jaw.”

That’s a more polite way of saying.

CHIN: When did your grandmother die?

KOON: She died when I was….I think she died in about 1975 at 83 age 83…I was like 27.

I’ll tell you something, very strange. That night I had a dream. I saw an old woman laying down on a dead floor to sleep. I said isn’t that kind of strange, the floor is cold, you know. Sleeping on a dirt floor is kind of cold. So I put a blanket over her.

And two weeks later, my parents told me that my grandmother had died…that night! That very night!

CHIN: Were you closer to your grandmother or to your parents?

KOON: My grandmother, yeah. My poem THE MEMORY OF THE HANDS is in the SEATTLE REVIEW. Nelson Bentley put that in there. He says. “We’re very lucky to get this poem.” So… “Very lucky to get this poem.”

It’s about me and my grandmother leaving China.

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The Memory of hands
  In memory of my grandmother

I. In Water Buffalo Time

Honey-Auntie collects bees in her palm:
When she says Go! They fly off to sue the flowers,
And when she says Come back! They roll their honey-
Bellies in her hand.

Uncles arc in race paddies, itching where leeches suck
Their legs.

I sprinkle Grandmothers’s garden of bokchoy, cabbages,
And wintermelons heavy like little buddhas.

Grandmother gets wood and gossip from Firewood-auntie,
And pays her a few bronze coins to light incense.
Both women’s husbands died three decades ago.
Leaving them the void of Confucian hands.

At dusk my grandmother trots out in her bound feet to retrieve
The drying vegetables hung on a bamboo pole like the character
Jen (people).

The sun drops behind the last rice paddy
As the water buffalo sinks in the vegetable pond,
Dropping dung for black shrimps.
And at last grandmother draws the mosquito net
In the lychee-pit night.

II. Sampan

A journey in yellow water. I am sick
And grandmother tells me to think of not moving.
Think of a place far away like Gimshan, she says.
Do not move against the river and you will be still.
Your head was so big we used forceps,
And now you are a cavern
For three bowls of rice and pig’s feet stewed in rice vinegar!

Grandmoter is not moving although the boat moves.
She tells me to think of lemon.

The boatman, pushing the river bottom with his long bamboo pole,
Carries all the land he cares for in his sampan.
As I become better, I awe at his calves.

The river I know must have fish.
The fish must look up at the shadow that moves.
The fish move in a moving river,
But I am stil because grandmother is still.

We are leaving the village for Canton.
The chrysanthemums are in bloom just now.
And Gimshan is where I must soon go.

III. The World’s Longest Alley

For a snip of cloth Grandmother took my hand
And led through bicycle-laden streets,
Past shoppers by fours, past wine and vinegar stores.
Buses overtook us.
And finally, walking as far as three rolls
Of cloth would unroll,
We arrived at the entrace of the world’s longest alley,
Where vendors on both sides set up
Painted fans, brilliantly glazed pottery,
And cloth of every color
As they haggled with shoppers,
Squeezing the alley like a tourniquet on a blood vessel.

Grandmother: “The five colors blind the eye!”
But she doesn’t heed Lao Tsu and slides her fingers
On the rolls of exquisite cloth.
We hear it is exported.

But there are no candy vendors, though there’s a man
Who has taught his monkey to beg with a tipped hat.

The alley is long as a conversation with a river.
In the colorful blur, she assents to an ice-cream bar.
I am then happy for coming along,
For the first time I see
Grandmother as a maiden of sixteen,
Her young eyes dazzled by the dowry of cloth.

IV. The Momory of Hands

If you fold a piece of paper once, then unfold it,
It will tend toward the folded position. That’s because
The paper has “memory.”

The memory of hands, of ancient vine,
My monsoon eyes, my face, tilled by fingers.
A chicken plucked gently naked.
Hands , unable to sign a legal signature,
Close the fan,
And draw the mosquito net.

At the Hong Kong International Airport, I took a mental
Photograph fo my grandmoter. A young gir swrings free of
Her mother’s hand and runs along, laughing.

Her index finger wrote a whorl on my back to designate an ox.
My hands, curved upward to suggest valley of space,
Would squeeze water,
Would cling to ancient vine,
Would throw
  A marble across the river.

The loudspeaker aannounces, announces last call, last call,
Third-aunt says hurry, hurry, or you will miss your future.

The past folds up like an origami bird,
Will not dissolve like candy.
Grapes cling to the vine, hands weave bamboo baskets,
Hands supplicate and light incense,
Buddha holds her in his palm.
I fold paper for hands of ancient vine,
Hands that couldn’t come along.
And hands will open gates if I should return.

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CHIN: How old were you when you were reunited with your parents?

KOON: I was twelve. Eleven something. Yeah. 1960.

CHIN: And did you have good relations with your parents?

KOON: Over the years I became, you know, more distant from them because of the uh, you know, Chinese family, are patriarchal, they own it, they want you to…You know, the first generation immigrants, they want you to go to the restaurant business or real estate. Okay? I was like you, I wanted to be a, I don’t know, I wanted to be mathematician. They didn’t see anything in that. They said to me, my dad always say, “How much does a professor make? I make 30 thousand a year!” You know. At that time PhD’s were making 17 thousand a year. He says. “I make 30 thousand a year! I mean, How much does a professor make?” and he’s always saying, when I read books, novels and stuff like that for school, he says, you know. “You’re always doing things that don’t need to be done.”

CHIN: Umm.

KOON: You know, I was trying to play the guitar, I was trying to read books, trying to learn how to play chess. He says, “You’re always trying to do things that don’t need to be done.”

CHIN: How do you say that in Chinese?

KOON: “Seng yee do um hung soy guh!”

CHIN: Ah!

KOON: Seng yee dole um hung soy guh

CHIN: Um hung soy guh.

KOON: Um hung soy guh.

CHIN: Huh! Aha! Did your mother participate in judging you?

KOON: Yah! Yeah. She’s at that…she uh she said that…she just wanted me to make so much money, so I just got mad, I says, “Okay, by the time I’m thirty I’m going to have a million dollars. Will you be happy then?”

Course, I’m never going to have a million dollars.

CHIN: (laughs) Yeah. Join the club.

KOON: But uh one of my brothers did have a million and when he got a divorce, his wife got half of it. So, you know what he did? He remarried her!

(Laughs)

CHIN: So your brothers and sisters were born in America?

KOON: Um hmm.

CHIN: Are you close to any of them?

KOON: No, not really. Not really. Over the years because the financial transactions in the family. Well…I don’t want to get too much into that part of it because I don’t have all the facts.

CHIN: So let’s stick with your uhhh. You say you’re publishing magazines and and uh…

KOON: I did. I did. The uh now I’m not uh. I’m completely in debt. Heavily into debt. And then I…I thought it was easy, you know, if you get a good author, you know, it’ll sell like hotcakes. I mean, you know, maybe a big publisher, you know, will buy your copyright. Sell like hotcakes.

So that sort of thing. I knew nothing about it. I get hypomania. I still get hypomania, when my judgement’s kind of impaired. I spend too much money. I do things…the thing about me is I was born a village boy, when I give my word, I follow my word. To the tee. I promise somebody that I’d do something even though it was made out of bad judgement I still try to fulfill my obligation. So. That’s the way I am. So.

CHIN: What’s the difference between you …yeah…what’s the difference between you and me? We both say we’re Chinese.
We’re both Chinese-American.

KOON: The thing is, Frank, the uh. I don’t know who wrote that poem, but uh, something to the effect that something about, you’ll walk into a room one day. You’ll see your friends there. And they all have their seats. Everyone’s got their own place in the universe. So the you’re Chinese, I’m Chinese, you’re a liitle bit different than me, in the Chinese way. I’m a little bit different than you, in Chinese way. That doesn’t mean you’re a worse Chinese you’re not as qualified Chinese as I am. Or I’m a better Chinese than you are. You’re obviously more noted About the Chinese in this country, than I am. And you know, and so. In that way you’re better Chinese because you’re uh I mean, you more, I mean,have spread the word about China…your version of it, I mean, which is good, I mean it’s like, I mean, they would, okay, et me. Let me put it in terms of uh an anecdote, Okay? We have a Chinese-American restaurant. What in the old days we called a chop suey house, okay? The people that used to eat in a chop suey house, they’d come to eat chop suey and chow mien, right?

If you give ‘em some real Chinese food, and “What is this garbage! I don’t wanta have to…I don’t order.” And “This is not Chinese food!” I mean, “That’s something you eat. But it’s not what I eat. It’s not what I consider Chinese food.” You see? See what I mean? If I give’em the real stuff they would think, they would not take it, see. You give’em the stuff….you lead them in. See? You lead them to me. I give’em the real stuff.

(Laughter)

CHIN: Yeah.

KOON: Yeah I mean. That’s the way it goes. You don’t wanta. I mean when you want to send a Chinese ambassador overseas, he has to speak English. He’s got to present the good side of China to people. He doesn’t say, well you know, China’s just as bad as you guys. You are criminals, you have racism, you have this and that. We got arsonists, and we have disaster on our mind! We sell fake blood in hospitals. You know. You want to come China to do business?

(Laughter)

They say “Oh, we can give you tax credit. We can give you credit breaks. We can subsidize your company. We’ll give you loans. You know. You come to help us develop our country.

You coming to help us, man. We want you in China. See? But…but that’s the way it is in the world.

CHIN: Have you been mistaken for Gary Locke?

KOON: Not mistaken, but they uh they uh maybe a couple of times, people uh when I mentioned I’m related to him they will say, “You look alike.”

CHIN: Do you have any contact with him?

KOON: Not since he threatened to put me in jail.

(Laughter)

CHIN: Oh!

KOON: He called the cops on me. They came up to my room to try to arrest me.

CHIN: This was when…When?

KOON: No, in 1992. I was going off the deep end, because my doctor told me I’m mensan (?)

CHIN: Which room?

KOON: Well at the uh at the uh Republic Hotel. The tenement building. He was King County Executive at that time.

And he said. You know, I call him up on the phone every morning. I says uh. He says uh. He said, “Rumor has it your America’s best mathematician.”

I said, “Yeah, provided you’re the President of the United States.”

(Laughter)

CHIN: You know when I first met him. He was a student at Franklin High School. And we got to talking he doesn’t remember it but he said that he wanted to be President of the United States. And after seeing him, his career his rise through politics and his developing charm…and he really is, he’s developed this quality. I…I think he could be President of the United States.

KOON: Yeah. Yeah. He could be. The only thing is the uh, you know how it is, the uh is not ready for a minority, is not ready for a woman. At this point.

CHIN: I think what’s holding him back, is there are no newspapers in town, here. I mean no Chinese newspapers …the Chinese newspapers the Japanese newspapers really aren’t real.

But you say you used to write for the Chinese Post?

KOON: In the English version. They become now days in a weekly, you know.

I was the first reporter for them. Assunta Ng. Assunta Ng. But she just wanted me to write tourist articles. I wrote a story on jade, Chinese museums, Chinese furniture things like that.

I did have a uh Asian American writers, the Seattle area, the special issue. I don’t think you were in town, at that time.

CHIN: How much did she pay you?

KOON: Thirty dollars an article. That was a lot of money back then. 1990…I mean for me I was only getting SSI was three hundred dollars a month. So that’s one tenth my income for a week’s work. You know. cuz it took me a long time to write. I’ve always been a slow writer.

I’d research my stuff well. And I’d, you know, she said, “You know, you’re a good writer, but you’re too slow. I’d better let you go.”

You know she has got to have the article every month every week, you know.

CHIN: So you know Assunta.

KOON: She said… she was a little bit afraid of me, because at the uh when I went off the deep end, I uh, I wanted them to put an ad in the paper. “My father’s name is not Fay Lung Woon but George Bush is the President of the United States.” And they didn’t to put that ad in there.

And then I said uh, “Why not?”

They said uh, “Well we just don’t want to put that ad in there.”

“Isn’t that against freedom of speech?”

“You get your lawyer and talk to us.”

I says, “Okay. When you want a lawyer, you get a lawyer. When I want a lawyer, I get a gun!”

(Laughs)

C HIN: Okay! We got a lot of stuff.

KOON: Yeah. So anyway, I gotta call somebody.

CHIN: Do you consider yourself a Buddhist?

KOON: Well, you know, Frank is uh, you know the philosophies, you know in the world, that uh could work for a lot of people , you know, in the uh I’m kind of uh eclectic you know, I mean, the uh. Essentially I believe that if it’s alternative life, it’d be sort of like string theory, you know. Alternative, parallel universes. But I don’t know, you know, it’s just mathematically convenient, I mean. It’s beautiful. To have that kind of conception, that you know. If you really really attract me, I just say, it’s impossible to know.

Okay, let me put it this way.

There’s a joke that goes like this: Life has always been in doubt. Only fools assure the case….” You know. Have you seen that? “Yes, absolutely.”

“Life has always been in doubt. Only fools assure the case. “

CHIN: Right.

KOON: Have you heard that? Yes, absolutely. //he visited a mental asylum, asked the director, How can you tell when you bring somebody in here that he’s really really crazy?

He says he’s about appear by the window. There’s a thimble, there’s a dog, there’s a bucket.

“Oh I get it.” So the same guy so when I used a symbol to build a backup I used a bucket.

No no no, the same guy unplugged the tub because he wanted the seat next to the window.


We walk up past the sign to the empty Tokuda Pharmacy and the other empty Panama Hotel storefronts up the hill, turn to walk down the broad brick side of the Panama on what used to be a red brick alley as lick as spit in the rain, but today the air is humid but not wet. Instead of a wall on the other side of the Panama, was a parking lot. Koon’s voice bounces lightly off elements in the Panama’s red brick that vibrate to his words about the Chinese tenants of the International Terrace across the street from Panama’s front, composing a petition to restore garbage down-chutes on every floor that were a service that tempted the elderly tenants the tenants getting rickety and rickety to take apartments and fill the building. Tenants of the fifth, fourth and third floor should not be forced to walk down to second floor to chute their garbage into the dumpster, and elevator back up to their floor. The petition was all written in Chinese and they didn’t want it thrown out because the manager’s don’t know how to read. So Koon translated the tenants’ petition. And that was when the managers started to pry him out of the building. We come to Jackson Street. Maynard to the left. 6th Ave to the right. I want noodles at Mike’s Noodles on Maynard. I can see the old half a block wide and a block long Uwajimaya, now a gallery of Asian antiques. I want to show Koon the bronze crazy eyed Kwan Kung showing his teeth and holding a pot of gold ingots in his left hand, disguised as the Buddha of Seven Stars, symbolized by a pagoda in his fighting right hand, but the pagoda is Monkey in disguise.

Have I gone too far in interpreting Kwan Kung? I want to see Koon’s face when I show him the bronze. I interrupt his story and take him across the street. The Kwan Kung is gone. He’s been moved to the more expensive store in Bellevue.


and left on Jackson against traffic to Maynard turn right and cross on Maynard to Mike’s Noodle House.

ťťťťťťťťťťťťťťťťťťť
KOON: I can sympathize. For ten years, Frank, I uh I couldn’t play the guitar, either. Cuz the medicine. It gave me no ability to feel. I laid on paper Zombie I just eat. No appetite, I go to sleep, it’s like passing out on the street or something. And I’d sleep for 36 hours at a time. And I had anxiety so bad I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t read. You know, I couldn’t listen to music, you know, I couldn’t do anything. Wherever I am, I want to be somewhere else. Whenever I get there, I want to be somewhere else. If I was doing one thing, I want to do something else.

The only thing that saved me was I forced myself to sleep24 hours 36 hours as long as I sleep just to avoid that anxiety. They tried everything. All the drugs that they uh, acupuncture , you know, everything, everything. Nothing worked. Therapy… nothing worked.

So as I had no feelings, of course, no sexual feelings, no uh, you know, no uh, . Just total nothing! Just uh total zombie like. And that was not just people like me, you lived you lived the Thorizine shuffle people like this (he hangs his arms and lifts and plants his feet) ghosts all day long. I wasn’t so bad. I was on Lithium I just shake all the time. And people thought I was afraid! Nervous or scared! I mean, you do feel you’re scared because you’re shaking. But, am I scared, you know, cuz I’m shaking like a leaf.

CHIN: WHEN DID YOUR MEMORY BEGIN?

KOON: About four. Right before I went to school. Because I only remember three times in the village pond from they pull me out of the village pond, and my grandmother comes and said uh and she buys, you know, burns incense and pray to the gods and that they, you know, protect me from falling into the pond again, you know.

Then she finally took me to this school. I was four and she begged the teacher. “My grandson’s not yet five but accept him as a student cuz I can’t watch’em. I have to go to work in the rice paddies, and this and that. And he might drown in the village pond.” So then the teacher accepted me. I started school early. A year. And then I was such a hyperactive kid I never, I remember never be in my seat. And then finally they have me repeat…I passed kindergarten, then I had to repeat the first grade cuz I couldn’t, you know, sit still.

CHIN: HOW MANY STUDENTS WERE IN THE FIRST GRADE WITH YOU? This was right in the village?

KOON: Yeah, yeah. In the village school. Yeah. We had to walk uh. Well here’s the routine in the village. You get up in the morning and you actually cook a full meal for breakfast, rice and everything. You eat that, and you get one canteen of water. That’s all you get. One canteen of water. Plastic canteen of water. Of course it’s boiled water. There’s a lot of germs in it, you know. Dysentery. All kinds of diseases. That costs money to boil your water. Cuz where you gonna get the wood. You have to pay for the wood. So it cost you money. So that all you’re allowed, just one canteen of water to go school. And that’s all the school allows you to bring. And you have to ratio that for the whole day in school. So you don’t want to drink it too fast. What people do is put dessicated plums in there. You had a dessicated plum?

CHIN: LOM?

KOON: Mooey. Him shurn mooey. Sweet’n’sour mooey. So you start stretch the water, cuz there’s a thirst quencher, see?

CHIN: Him shuren mooey?

KOON: That’s Toishan. Tim shurn mooey, that’s Cantonese.

CHIN: I GUESS I SPEAK MORE CANTONESE THAN TOISHANESE.

KOON: There’s Sam yup Say yup. I don’t know which is which. But it’s pretty close. When I went in the village in Canton took me about two months I get used to the Cantonese right away.

But here when we speak Toishanese, all the Cantonese people, they “Non ting? Ho non ting. Gaw dee Toishan law. Ho non ting.” It’s “difficult to listen to.”

CHIN: OH, “NON TENG.” Yeah. Okay.

KOON: well let me tell you this, Frank. Being Chinese is not what you look like. Even you could be a white person. It’s in the heart, man. It’s in the heart. It’s in the heart, you know why. You, you’re really Chinese. I mean, if I’m Chinese, you’re Chinese. Now, I say that from my heart.

Some of my white friends have more Chinese than my brothers. The way they treated me. I…I wouldn’t call them Chinese.

It’s like that poem I was trying to write, you know, my grandmother spent 32 years trying to distinguish between us all, you know. It’s like that, I mean, you know uh. If you’re Chinese you can zone into another Chinese. My uncle, he immigrated when he was twelve years old to Peru. He came back…We sponsored him he came to this country when he was 50. And he said wherever he went, I mean that he spoke Spanish, man! Pure Spanish! He spoke Chinese perfectly! And Spanish. Not a word of English. So he goes to Yakima he was supposed to work. He just goes there. Guess where he went. When he got lost, he went to the police station.

Says “I’m looking for so and so. My other relatives in Ellensburg, at a restaurant there. I’m looking for so and so, so they brought him to the restaurant.

CHIN: Okay were in school. How large is the school?

KOON: Well there’s six grades. There’s a grade school. I was in…first second grade. Up till the third grade, in the village maybe spend about the first semester in the third grade, then a maybe about twenty thirty each room, and then that. But sometimes we have the big room. Like everybody’s in the same room, I think math. Something like that. I remember. Cuz we had a math bee, which is like a spelling bee. You go up there, choose sides, you go up there do problems. I remember I was always the first one chosen.

Because I last…outlast everybody. I solve all the problems. I never get to sit down.

CHIN: WAS IT A TWO STORY BUIDLING OR A SINGLE STORY BUILDING?

KOON: Single story.

CHIN: Tile roof?

KOON: Yeah. Yeah. Tile roof. It’s a kind of a maybe built after the Communist took over. The first thing we did was calisthenics. The whole school did calisthenics out in the schoolyard, you know?

CHIN: Concrete blocks?

KOON: Either brick on the ground or uh dirt ground. I remember uh the back the school there’s a bunch of trees, you know. I don’t know the big trees got little berries on them. We called’em yoong see in China. The teachers would like…cuz it’s semi-tropical it’s very hot. So we sometimes have a…uh…like a uh literature class. We have it out underneath a tree. All these kids, you know, the teacher would tell a story. That was….that was the fun part. Nice and cool. You don’t have to sit, and you sort of shift around with your friends.

CHIN: THE BERRY TREES THAT YOU SAT UNDER. WERE THEY TALL TREES OR

KOON: They were massive. They’re not too tall but they were. Just massive.

CHIN: SPREAD OUT. DID THE BERRIES FALL ON YOU.

KOON: There were a lot of ‘em on the ground. I don’t know if they fall on you when you’re just there. But there are a lot of’em on the ground. Yeah.

CHIN: DID YOU EAT THE BERRIES?

KOON: No. They were not edible.

CHIN: WHAT COLOR WERE THEY?

KOON: They’re red.

CHIN: AND THE TEACHERS DO YOU REMEMBER ANY TOF THE STORIES THEY TOLD YOU?

KOON: Well, you know they told us about the uh when the Japanese occupied China, they uh, you know, the uh the people had nothing to eat. So cook up their little babies and ate sold…make candy of them and sold it to some…I don’t know if it’s true or not, but then you know.
CHIN: YEAH.

KOON: I don’t know if it’s true or not, but then you know. They tell all kinds of weird stories. See, they just dramatize how bad the Japanese were, see? You know. Might not be true. They exaggerate. You know what I mean. Nobody liked the Japanese at that time.

(LAUGHTER)

KOON: That’s another. That’s a tactic…political tactic to shift the blame to somebody else. Maybe somebody was didn’t like Communism so shifted the blame on…

CHIN: ON THE JAPANESE

KOON: to Japanese. Scapegoating.

CHIN: AND THERE WEREN’T ANY JAPANESE AROUND?

KOON: No. No. Absolutely not. Zero.

CHIN: HOW LONG WAS THE DAY AT SCHOOL?

KOON: Let’s see, we uh we go there early in the morning. I don’t…Seven or eight. And then we come home to lunch for an hour. Then we have to go back. And then uh. Then uh. And then have to. It’s about as long as long as the grade school year. Except on Saturdays, we have to go half a day. That’s the routine in China and in Hong Kong. You have to go to school half a day on Saturday.

CHIN: DID YOU WEAR UNIFORMS?

KOON: Not in the village in Hong Kong I did. I went to private school in Hong Kong.

CHIN: SAY YOU GOT OUT OF SCHOOL AROUND THREE O’CLOCK.

KOON: Right. Right.
CHIN: AND YOU GO HOME.

KOON: Um hmm.

CHIN: AND WHAT DO YOU DO AT HOME?

KOON: Well, I didn’t do much. [Chin laughs] But the uh. I had two chores. The morning I water my grandmother’s garden. And in the evening I water her garden. The rest of the time I help around the house. Do housework. She’s cooking I do little things for her, like you know, Sometimes when on holidays we make pastry. I would get up the same time she gets up. Like three in the morning. Or four in the morning. Make pastry. That’s why I get up so early these days. I’ve always been an early riser. I wanta get up early.

CHIN: SO WHEN YOU GET UP IN THE MORNING DOES THE AIR REMIND YOU OF THE VILLAGE?

KOON: Not when I was living in the International Terrace. But here, I’ve only been here, like, less than two weeks. It reminds me I’ll show you. [pick up and walk outside] My my uncle’s uh. My uncle Back of my uncle’s house is a bamboo grove. So… This is not bamboo. But…it reminds me of a bamboo grove.

CHIN: YES.

KOON: It’s rectangular like that, see? It’s this, you know, it’s uh like you know, you know, rectangular. It’s not… thick! You know what I mean?

So that reminds me of a bamboo grove. I look at that. See the little berries, red berries, in there?

CHIN: yeah.

KOON: That reminds me of the tree at school. I just finished talking about. So…down toward the whatchacallit the PEARS. And they reminds me of some fruits and fruit trees. We had a lot of fruit trees in the village. Because it’s semi-tropical. We had oranges, tangerines and the bananas and all kinds of stuff. Grapes. Now the ladies grow the grapes there. Grapes in China means “po haw dee” Po hoy dee sounds like “Grandmother’s children.”

Your mother’s mother is “PO”

CHIN: AH PAW, yeah.

KOON: “Hie dee” means children. Hie dee.

Now, in one of my poems I use “Bananas bunched together like family” you know the uh “Grapes and bananas bunched together like family” so. They grow in clusters. Then when my dad worked for somebody that exploited him, a Chinese guy, his uncle, and then he wanted to leave, you know. My… His uncle said, “Well he can go he’s got so many children clinging onto him like grapes.”

CHIN: RIGHT

KOON: You see the grapes cling to the vine, and they drag the vine down.

CHIN: RIGHT

KOON: What can my dad do? He’s got so many things pulling him down.

CHIN: RIGHT

KOON: Children.

CHIN: YES.

KOON: Big responsibility. He’s got eight children.

CHIN: WOW! Okay. Read one of your poems.

KOON: I’ll read from my chapbook that I didn’t show you before.

CHIN; Okay.

KOON: Some of these are more like Chinese poems. //When my cousin Sue and her family came to this country, uh. She was 19 er 18 and her sister was uh 17 – 16 and uhm my uncle my mom’s younger brother, and his wife, and that uh..And two sons came also. So I was in charge of the settling in this country. I got jobs for them. I taught them English for two years.

CHIN: WOW!

KOON: I took care of all the legal the financial paperwork, everything.  I even took’em to job interviews. I did everything for them. And that’s why she gave her…her son to me as my godson. Henry. So I pretend I was this is was her talking when she first got to this country, and how different it is from China.

In my country, it was not like this,
In my country it was not like this.
Neighbors separated by little white hospital rooms.
But one festival will flowers
paint the color of cooked shrimp.
Lychee pits the dancing eyes of children.
The warm sweet smell of water buffalo dung,
In summer ripe bananas bunched as families.
In my country I was a weaver,
a young girl with budding breasts to hide with a coarse shirt,
We did not read by tungsten light.
We read only the stars and the fireflies.
It was not guilty conversations
that receded the speed of light
but a warm river I warm in the August heat
Electric brains do not warm my blood.
But the receiving of mooncakes and the kite-flying harvest
That’s pure reason a better cluck than roosters or cicadas.
The moon bathes in our cool flowing rivers,
In my burning cheeks surrender to autumn breezes,
It has mathematics the power to reverse what I lost.
It was not snow on Seven Hills. In my country as we have seen
Someone by my heart. Here cousin, take this apple.
It is the only thing I like in this paradise.
In my country, it was like this.

CHIN: HMM!

KOON: Pretend it’s my uh cousin Sue that was reading that.

CHIN: RIGHT.

//

CHIN: YOU MENTIONED FIREFLIES. DID YOU HAVE FIREFLIES?

KOON: Yeah, I used to catch’em and put’em in a little, you know, a little medicine bottle, and carry it around. First you make a little holes in there. You know, the cap.

CHIN: I SAW FIREFLIES IN THE MIDWEST. I DON’T KNOW IT THAT’S TROPICAL OR NOT. WERE THE FIREFLIES SEASONAL?

KOON: I think so. I remember that. They were seasonal. Yeah. I think they come out after the harvest. You don’t see them in the winter. But they’re either spring or the fall.

CHIN: AND YOU MENTIONED THE SMELL OF BUFFALO DUNG.

KOON: Well, it’s clean, you know. They eeno [ only ] eat grass. You know. They don’t eat other things.

CHIN: RIGHT.

KOON: So they…smell clean. And we claimed them. When we see them in the village yard. They drop some dung in the village yard. We put a stick in it, and we claim it. This is ours, you know, and we use it for fertilizer.

CHIN: AHA! SO THERE WERE BUFFALO IN 1949 IN YOUR VILLAGE?

KOON: Only one!

CHIN: ooh, only one! (LAUGHS)

KOON: That was the communal buffalo. Plow…hauled the wooden plow that plowed the rice paddies for everybody.

CHIN: oh, so you didn’t have tractors or

KOON: No, no. It was a family. One family was responsible for plowing. They were responsible for taking care of the one buffalo.

CHIN: AND THE WATER BUFFALO. HE OR SHE WAS WITHOUT A MATE?

KOON: Yah! In our village. I don’t know what happen…with the situation in the next village, when you’re a little kid you don’t pay attention to everything.

CHIN: DID A BUFFALO EVER DIE?

KOON: Oh, yeah. The one we had died. Then we had to get a new cow.

CHIN: SO WHEN YOU GOT THE NEW BUFFALO IT CAME AS A CALF THEN?

KOON: // I just read that part okay? Let’s see, uh…. (Reads) The water buffalo got old and died. It was shared by the whole village. Lucky money for a calf conscripted. A sad note crept into the men’s drinking songs. (end read)

But here I have the little, I have the little internal dialogue of the water buffalo. (Chin laughs) He comes back to the village after a day of work. My dog cuts in front of’im. So he’s startled like that. Then he goes in there. The internal dial…the internal monolog.

CHIN: OKAY

KOON: Oh beast, I am. Humble beast. Some man, he must have been an emperor. Or the son of such an emperor, said, “the original son is the mother of the universe. The sword that divines light from chaos, the mother of all things. The sun atop the tree is east. The mountains seek comfort in the hills. The Yellow Peak rusts in the valleys. And the valleys beget rivers.
The mountains that descends into the long rails. And the sea mikes looks up for honks in the darkened earth looks for the moon.

And lovely grasses, I have for thirty years, first owned by one man then by his son. While the mountains are unvaried with mud caked on my loins trudging a maze of rice fields. A block dot against unvarying mountains. The filial furrows, my eyebrows moisten, the bittersweet song of my masters. Tensile feet and mud. The fury of work calculated. How many bolts of rice the harvest would give. A beast is not able to calculate mos, catties and grains. Work begins when the monsoons recede. In the evening when I’m sufficiently grazed, I sink into the village pond and drop dung for black shrimp. Yet a man, with all his skill and an abbacus is afraid of things he cannot see. The man and his family afraid of dark plumed gods handed down to them by copious amount of incense and charms. And my mother whose teats I suckled for only a brief while gave not such dark or thunder to fear. I don’t even fear tigers. And man is cursed with worry. Thieves because they have too much. Fires because he’s careless. Indulged because he’s sent to others. But I with the gold pleated sky for a blanket, sweetsmelling rice straw a bed. And bream from the river. I have recompense for my toil. With the village symphony of crickets, cicadas and bullfrogs, I shall say these hoods are as good as Buddhahood.

And so on and so on…

CHIN: WE USED TO HAVE FROGS AND I GUESS THEY CAME OUT IN THE SPRINGTIME.

KOON: Um hmm. Yah! They uh…you know. The uh. You know the gollywogs, you’ve seen gollywogs?

CHIN: POLLYWOGS

KOON: Pollywogs, yeah.

CHIN: DID YOU HUNT FROGS?

KOON: We fished for them. The older boys did. I was nine when I left the village. I tried, but I had no luck. What they do is they catch a little frog. They cannibals you know.

CHIN: YEAH.

KOON: Tie with string. They bob it up and down in the tall grasses. And have hold net in the other hand. So when the frog jump up and swallow it, they put the net underneath it and then take it home. That way.

CHIN: AND HOW BIG WERE THEY?

KOON: They weren’t very big.

CHIN: ABOUT THAT BIG?

KOON: Maybe. At most. At most.

CHIN: AND THE LEGS WERE ABOUT THAT LONG?

KOOON: Maybe, yeah. For me was more trouble than it’s worth.

CHIN: YOUR GRANDMOTHER DIDN’T COOK THEM?

KOON: She did. She steamed it. You cooked the rice. You put it the on top of the rice. Then uh steamed it that way, yeah.

CHIN: WOULD SHE STEAM THE WHOLE FROG, OR DID SHE STEAM JUST THE LEGS?

KOON: Well she…She’d clean it. Clean the gut out. And then steam the whole thing, yeah.
CHIN: THE HEAD DOO? WE ALWAYS THREW AWAY THE HEAD.

KOON: I don’t remember. That. I don’t remember. I don’t particularly like to eat frogs.

CHIN: (LAUGHS)

KOON: Every once in awhile they eat you can get’em in Chinatown.

CHIN: YEAH.

Koon: Yeah. I like to eat bigger things. Chicken. We had chicken in the house.

CHIN: Oh, in the house.

KOON: Yeah, in the house. We had a…the house was a duplex. The house was like this. Here’s the entrance here. And here’s the kitchen, here. Here’s the bedroom here. And there’s a door which we can lock from outside. And here’s the utility room shared by both duplex owners. In the utility room, there’s a drain here. The uh the uh… the roof is open, that part of it. Cuz the monsoon, you know, you don’t want any water to collect too heavily on your roof.

CHIN: RIGHT.

KOON: It could damage your roof. So we just let the water just drop right down, and drain underneath the house. We had the farm implements there. ( ) any implements. The next door neighbor, who was my father’s cousin’s mother, they lived there.

CHIN: WHAT WERE THE FARM IMPLEMENTS?

KOON: Just hoes. Shovels. Little things. Ordinary gardening.

CHIN: WERE THEY MANUFACTURED OR …

KOON: They were manufactured. There was a town nearby. A small town. They call it Sir Bo Huey. Our district is called Sir Bo. We just go into town and buy your little. Buy hardware items and medicine and things like that.

CHIN: SO UH . WHAT TIME OF DAY WOULD YOU GO TO TOWN? WOULD IT TAKE ALL DAY TO GO TO TOWN?

KOON: Where we are, just like about a fifteen minute walk…ten fifteen minute walk, yeah.

CHIN: WOULD YOU GO ALONE?

KOON: Oh, you can go alone. It’s completely safe for children at that time.

CHIN: WOULD YOU GO WITH A BUNCH OF CHILDREN, FOR FUN?

KOON: Sometimes. It. On special occasion we go there for fun. You know like uh. We never did like…After a heavy rain, you know, like uh. Sometimes the river gets, you know swollen up. We like to go watch the river. We like to watch people fishing with the net, you know. They uh they lift the net. Tied to a big bamboo pole, you know, and the net’s like this you know, they lift it. They wait for awhile. Then bait some fishes, maybe they put a fish head in it or something in the net or something. Fishnet they just lift it up.

CHIN: SO IT’S A NET AND WHEN THEY PUT IT DOWN IT BUTTERFLIES OUT,

KOON: Yes.

CHIN: AND THEN WHEN THEY LIFT IT UP, THE WINGS…FOLD IN.

KOON: Yeah, it doesn’t completely fold in, so that, so just lift all the water so the fish cannot jump back in.

CHIN: WHAT KIND OF FISH?

KOON: I don’t remember now. They all kinds of little ones, like uh. There’s carp. There’s dace. Dee eeh cee eeh. There’s uh I just know the uh. I just remember there’s a catfish. There’s probably something like perch, you know things like that. There’s there are freshwater fish where we were.

CHIN: CATFISH ARE BOTTOMFEEDER

KOON: Yeah.

CHIN: PERCH ARE BOTTOMFEEDERS TOO.

KOON: They eat the shrimp that eat feed off the seaweed, in the ocean, anywhere. I don’t know what it is with the freshwater perch.

CHIN: AS THEY GOT BIGGER DID THE TASTE OF THE FISH CHANGE?

KOON: Yeah, Yeah. Yeah.

CHIN: AND TASTE MORE MUDDY

KOON: You mean catfish and carp. After a certain size of carp people don’t eat’em.

CHIN: THIS IS A STUPID QUESTION. WERE THERE SUPERSTITIONS ABOUT THE FISH?

KOON: Ah, let’s see. Carp is supposed to be uh you know you see all these Chinese uh greetings, you know uh papers? The carp is supposed to be longe…longevtivity.

CHIN: LONGEVITY, YES.

KOON: Yeah, longevity. Ah. Ah. Catfish. I don’t know what that is. I don’t think there’s anything related to catfish. You know, that reminds me of poem. Not a poem but a story.

There’s two kinds of fish. I can only say in Chinese I don’t know what they are in English. Dot….Dot nguy, tiyew nguy….Dot nguy tiyew nguy.” One of it’s catfish and one is say carp, okay? Two fish at the in the uh. Supposedly this guy uh said he could know everything. I mean he uh he could, you know, find out, you know by uh uh sixth sense whe…where everything is. So the…

The king! Heard about that. I mean…. He was a con-artist or something like that okay? So the king…the emperor heard about that, and the emperor, something along. The story, and the emperor’s gold or something valuable, that belong to the emperor.

So the emperor heard about this guy, so he uh. He sent two guys to conscript him to go the palace. Uh you know…Use his sixth sense to recover his loot or whatever it was.

So these two uh I don’t know what you call’em…soldiers? Or whatever they call them. So he brought this…bring in this guy to the palace. So along the way, this guy saw a pond. It was being dried up.

And there was two fish in the bottom of , you know, the mud. So obviously the water’s gonna be, you know, evaporating and they’ll die there. Just two fish.

So he so…So he says…So this guy the uh the seer, right? He says, then well, he was making the comment about himself. He says uh. When he was talking to the fish, he says uh, “Ah dot yut say. Ah tiew yut say. Nay say yeh gong wooey.” Which means the Dot fish will die, the Tiew fish will die. They’ll both die before I will.”

However that Dot and Tiew were the surnames of those two soldiers. So they said, “Maybe he does know! He can predict, you know, what’s going on.”

So they got scared. You know how they kowtow on the ground? “Please, we’ll help you.” They the one’s that stole the valuables. They said, “We think we’ll them back to the emperor. Just don’t tell’m who stole it. We’ll concoct a plan to give it back to the emperor.”
So, he goes back there. Says, “Oh, yeah. It’s hidden. I don’t know who stole them, it’s hidden. The emperor get it back, so (he ) declared amnesty.

But the poetry is this, “Ah Dot yut say. Ah Tiew yat say. Nay say ah gong wooey.” Which means, in Toisahnese, is “The fish will die before the speaker says.” But another interpretation….another translation, he said, “They are staying because he will carve it to happen.” Because he know he stole they stoled it. It’s accidental that the language is like that. You see what I mean?

CHIN: ALMOST

KOON: You know Chinese have a lot of homonyms. The Chinese language because it only has so many characters. It cannot create new words like the English alphabet. You know, just make the word longer, right? You have a new word. They can create many many new words in the English language.

But Chinese have so many characters, so they double up meanings for each character. So they all have the same sound, even though they have different tones. So they have a lot of homonyms. A lot of the words sound the same, but they have a lot of different meanings.

So that’s what in this case, what he just said sounds like something else. So these guys uh meant thought he meant something else. So they thought he knew they’d stolen it. And they confessed to him. So that’s what happened.

CHIN: RIGHT. UH. THE BUFFALO THAT DIED.

KOON: yes.

CHIN: DID YOU EAT IT?

KOON: Yeah. That was the custom. It was shared by the whole village. And everybody who ate it contributed money for the new calf.
CHIN: WHAT DID TASTE LIKE?

KOON: It was tough. You probably have to cook it, you know chop, you know, mince it up, and chop it and steam it, or something. Cook it with that turnip or something.

CHIN: WHAT DO THEY CALL THAT?

KOON: Ngoy choy. Mooey choy.

My grandmother like to chop up the beef really…mince it. She steam it with mooey choy, you know. For me. Yeah. We very seldom eat beef. We’re not in a grazing area. You know, we just have to, we…we raise pigs and chickens and fish.

CHIN: HOW DEEP WAS YOUR POND?

KOON: Yeah. Yeah. It increased in depth. It was not a vee shape. Parabolic shape. It was over somebody’s head. We raised fish in it. It was fed by underground water. Maybe the same water as the well water. So there was a cool stream of water going into the pond.

And there was a drainage. To drain into a little creek, and if flows into the river.

CHIN: AND YOU SAID WHEN IT FLOODED IN THE MONSOON FISH WOULD GET INTO THE POND.

KOON: Also trapped in rice paddies too.

CHIN: OKAY. IT’S AFTER 3: YOU’RE BACK FROM SCHOOL. YOU’VE HELPED YOUR GRANDMOTHER.

KOON: Yeah.

CHIN: IS IT GETTING DARK?

KOON: OH WE HAVE SUPERSTITIONS. GHOSTS. Oh, we have superstitions. Ghosts. Everybody’s claimed they’ve seen a ghost. I never. But a lot people claimed tey’ve seen a ghost.

CHIN: HOW DO YOU OCCUPY YOUR TIME, YOU WATCH TV?

KOON; No tv. No radio. No bicycles. No running water. No electricity. No books to speak of. Just schoolbooks. Didn’t even have paper. Wrote everything on a slate. And an abacus that I you know, you know kids don’t to study. Don’t like to practice.
Just play in the village yard. Games you know like jacks, you know with uh little rocks. I used to play jacks. Play uh kickball, our version of soccer, you know like in the village yard. Hide and seek when we’re really small.

Swimming. Physical activity. Little kids climb trees. Make things out of bamboo. Popguns out of bamboo.

CHIN: DID YOU HAVE SNAKES?

KOON: Yeah, We had snakes. We had regular garter snakes and these innocuous snakes. But but we had water snakes. They’re poisonous. They swim on top the water. They’re really scary. And their really swift. Swim right on top the water. Course they’re not on every pond. Where they are we don’t go near them.

//The pond where we swam didn’t have snakes we were careful. There are grown up, “These ponds off limits.” You know, you don’t go to that pond. Not to swim anyway. Go to go fishing. We don’t go swimming there.

And they all say that the uh if somebody’s dies in a pond that’s bad luck to swim there.

CHIN: DID YOU HAVE SNAKEHUNTING PARTIES?

KOON: NO. You know some people make a profession to catch snakes and sell them. You know. For food. I guess the restaurants you know restaurants in snake call’em the snakemeat. I’ve never had snakemeat. It just never appealed to me.

CHIN: WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE MEAL?

KOON: You know when I was a little boy my favorite food was pigs feet stewed in rice vinegar. Sweet rice vinegar. With peanuts and lotus needles.

CHIN: TOMORROW I’M GOING TO SEE ASSUNTA.
//

CHIN: THERE IS NO SUCH SAYING IN CHINESE AS “THE WORTH OF A WOMAN IS MEASURED BY THE LOUDNESS OF HER HUSBAND’S BELCH.” BECAUSE WOMEN ALSO EAT. AND BELCH AND SLURP.

I think what they’re trying to say is the uh Chinese culture is chauvinistic. All that crap. I tell you in my family. My mom worked right alongside my dad. Doing dishes and chores he did, in restaurants, and then she goes home and take care of the kids. And she has a garden besides.

In the village you know. Although my grandmother’s feet was bound she was part of the aristocracy. After the Japanese came, they were poor. They bombed the distillery, bombed the store. The reduced everything to rubbles. She had to work. She had to be a peasant. Feet that look like a common ginger. She took care of me. She loved more than my own parents did.

She had to work in the rice paddies. She grew her vegetables. She made pastries to give to a few kids.

CHIN: There are several books by whites about the agonies suffered by women with bound feet. Did your grandmother ever complain about her bound feet?

KOON: Well see at that time when the feet were bound, they’re considered the part of the upper class. “A woman’s worth” in terms of a dowry. A “Curtain Marriage” , means marrying for money for position, that was worth more but in her family what that means, she was not to do peasant work. So her family could afford it. So at that time you remember China is a feudal country. So that was a feudal practice. Okay.

Do we complain about King Arthur and his practices? No, we don’t. That was the historical times. That’s what was believed at that time. That was the socio-economic conditions at that time. I mean that’s how…how…you know the evolution was at that time the socio-economic system. But we don’t complain about that. I mean we do, but we don’t. You see what I mean? We have to put everything in context.
 We take things out of context. But because the revolution in China, the foreign invasions, and so forth, people have to work even if their feet have been bound. So of course she would not walk as well as somebody whose feet were not bound.

CHIN: DID SHE LOOSEN THE BINDINGS?

KOON: Oh yeah. Loosened the bindings. But it looks like a common ginger. The toes overlap each other.

It’s like in this country if you’re born poor, you’re down in the ghetto and you need the money to live. And you commit a crime. You go to prison. Twenty years later they release you. Well,, you’re gonna have that mark on you. That you’ve been to prison. So they ask you where have you been? What jobs do you held in the last twenty years?

It’s the same kind of thing. Social stigma.

CHIN: HOW OLD WAS YOUR GRANDMOTHER DID SHE COME OVER HERE?

KOON: No, we couldn’t. … It costs money to bring somebody over here. You have to support them, see? She was old, and by the time I came, she was in her sixties. So, the uh…you know…She would not be productive in terms of making money. And we as a family of ten people with one include income. And that was being a frycook. Imagine one frycook supporting ten people. So we lived in the housing projects. So here’s something I tellya. When I was fourteen. My dad was a partner in a house of prostitution. And I had to help him out. The front…the cover of the place was a restaurant. I had to help work there after school when I was fourteen years old.

I worked there Friday, Saturdays, and Sundays. Work until three in the morning. That could be explain one of the reasons I have mental problems. I did not have a regular childhood in this country.

And another thing was we had some, you know, …problems, with some people when I was fourteen. And my dad took me aside, says, “The gun is in the dresser. So, somebody tries to come in the window you shoot’em.”

CHIN: HMM. WHAT TOWN WAS THIS?

KIOON: Aberdeen, Washington. And the sheriff, you know. Years later, the sheriff comes to the restaurant. He says, “I Wanta see your dad.”

I said, “Well, my dad’s asleep now. So, I don’t want to bother him.”

So he gets real mad at me, you know. Real mad at me. Cuz I didn’t know the connection. I didn’t know he was getting paid off for things my dad was doing. I didn’t know he was getting paid off for things my dad was doing. See Iwas very naïve, you know. The Chinese have the uh monkey, uh you know uh don’t see, monkey don’t hear, monkey don’t talk. That’s the Chinese saying.

CHIN: HOW MANY GIRLS DID YOUR FATHER AND HIS PARTNER RUN?

KOON: Well actually it was run by a madam. She was half Mexican. Her name was Sally. There were three girls that were actors. Ginger, Lee, and Suzy. I remember their names.

CHIN: WERE THEY CHINESE?

KOON: No, they were white girls. See my dad and I the restaurant was called the China Doll Restaurant in Montesano, Washington. Back in 1960… well I was in the fourth…the 7th grade so I was 14. I came here. See, I was born in 49, so I was 14, so it’d be round 1963 or 64 around there.

So I used to have to take the bus p to school to go to Montesano ten miles away, and start working after school. And work till three or four in the morning. My dad drive me home, and then. I couldn’t sleep. You know, because of all the tension.

And my brothers and sister began waking up early in the morning. You know, I’ve been going… Come Sunday. I go out into the woods by myself. Everything would be pitch black. I couldn’t see nothing. That’s how bad it was.

I somehow I just supressed it. I forgot all about it. Then became the star pupil at school. I don’t know why.

My dad didn’t want me to join these clubs or turn out for sports after school. Although I was asked to turn out for swimming. You know, just my dad, you know like the president of the literary club in high school. I had one meeting after school. My dad said, “Where’ve you been?”

I says, “I been… Had a meeting of the literary club.”

He says, “From now on, you come directly home. You have a family and eight children. I can’t do it all buy myself. You gotta help me. So you come directly home.”

That’s when I realized the uh what kind of burden he had. But you know, but he wanted me to uh to follow his footsteps. He had six sons. So. My dad is one of those Confucian guys. He wanta impart back to six sons, right? So he wanted me to be uh you know. Take over his restaurant someday and expand the business.

He took me to the bank after he came back from the University of Oregon. And he took me to talk to the bank manager. The manager says, “Yeah, I can give you credit for a hundred thou.”

A hundred thousand dollars back in 1971‘s a lot of money! And my dad says, “See, the manager trusts us. You don’t have to get an apartment. If you don’t like the restaurant business you can go into real estate.

My dad was actively sabotaging my car…college career.

CHIN: HOW BIG WAS HE? WAS HE TALLER THAN YOU?

KOON: Yeah, he was 5’ 8”. He’s a musc…not muscular. He was athletic. He was the captain of the San Francisco Chinatown volley ball team. Yeah, he was the number one kung fu guy in the village. He carried the first flag.

CHIN: SO HE WAS A MEMBER OF A TONG?

KOON: Well he’s a member of one Triad. I don’t know how many triad’s there are. They claim there are 26 triads in Hong Kong. The last time I heard, there might be hundreds now. There might be hundreds in China.

The triads were started to overthrow the Manchurian dynasty. But I saw reference they chart it back to Li Po (700 ad).

CHIN: AT THE WHOREHOUSE. WERE YOU INITIATED BY ONE OF THE GIRLS?

KOON: No. No. I was 14. I wanted to, but you know but. 11:13 PMhe girl that I liked the best was Suzy. She was 20. She helped me wash dishes, after after we close. I was dead tire. You know I get up at about 6-7 in the morning, work till three in the morning washing dishes. By hand at that time. She helped me wash dishes. I liked her quite a bit. She was nice.

The other girls. They had troubles. The cops start coming in. The madams you know uh… “Well it’s too hot in here. It’s too cold in here.”

My dad says, “Oh, she’s taking too much drugs.” Then there’s people that come in, says, “Oh, I’m the mayor of this town.” “No, I’m the sheriff of this town.” You never know who they are. They’re drinking. They have the bar there. You know, never know.

And they come right through the kitchen they go upstairs the backstairs to the upstairs.

CHIN: HOW MANY PEOPLE WERE IN THE KITCHEN?

KOON: Just me and my dad. We have to take care of like, I don’t know…60 you know 60 customers. Maybe 60 –80 customers. I don’t know. I mean my dad was always shouting me. You know, like “Get this thing done! Quick responsible. I’m waiting for this. I’m waiting for this.”

Can you imagine that? I’ve only been here for two years two and half years, and I don’t know English. I’m getting shout at. And the uh you know…

CHIN: SO SIXTY CUSTOMERS. WERE THEY FOR THE WHOREHOUSE OR THE RESTAURANT?

KOON: Some was for the whorehouse and some for the restaurant. Some don’t even know it’s a whorehouse.

CHIN:

KOON: Well actually I thought that my dad was just work for the madame as an employee. But actually later on just recently I figure, well he was actually a partner.

The madame got run out of town. She called my dad from somewhere she claims she was working for Bob Hope. She wanted my dad to work for her.
Who knows? You can’t trust those people.

CHIN: WAS SHE A GOOD LOOKING WOMAN?

KOON: No she was in her 50’s. And half Mexican. She wasn’t good looking.

But I know why she was run out of town.

The first thing she gave me when she closed shop. She gave me a tape recorder. She was blackmailing people.

CHIN: AHH!

KOON: That’s why she was run out of town. If you pay off the cops, pay off the mayor, you won’t get run out of town. Even though the people complain. But if you’re blackmailing people you get run out of town.

She got greedy, in other words.

CHIN: YES.

KOON: Aberdeen is known for prostitution in the old days.

CHIN: WHAT DID YOUR FATHER DRESS LIKE?

//

KOON: THE ONLY COMPLIMENT I EVER GOT FROM MY MOTHER WAS, “HE DRESS LIKE AN HONEST MAN.” Losut. Not a showoff. Honest. Just like you, the way you dress.

//

CHIN: WOMEN?

Well I had this Japanese girlfriend when I came to Seattle. I met her at the Last Exit, as a matter of fact. Japanese American, she was born here. I was 20. I had a couple of girls after that, but nobody was a really…most of it’s in my book. Nobody was…well I had some bad luck. I couldn’t afford to support anybody. Cuz of my mental illness.

I had a dream which was to be a mathematician. And I was 28 years old I was hospitalized and I realized I could never be a mathematician.

Well there’s one I met in the hospital. She was really. She was from Hong Kong and she worked for when you get visas, would that be the consulate, the Hong Kong consulate.

The Love this abode contains….

We have lived in 32 abodes, Susana, red brick, four square,
Nearly a palace, or 32 pages of thin paper, a small book.

And in each story, there’s an abode of red brick, inside
Which are a set of 32 books, and the love each book contains

Is more solid than a red brick, and four squares together make
A foundation, and so, Susanna, why did you say our love

Cannot exist in paper or fenced by red brick, and is that why
You sold jewelry because you were convinced it was good jewelry.

And stamped visas because we needed more investments in Hong Kong?

Now I’m alone in a single abode of wood and iron nails,
And lone and lonely the cold air seeps and my pen fails.

And, Susanna, where are you since the hospital in 1993?
Should I print your last name and shame your father, who took you

Out to drink with his buddies on the eve of the Chinese New Year?
And wanted to know if I coud get SSI if I went with you

To PSU? Where I would live and you would annotate my mishaps
In your sociology book; and I would tell you everything about

“Michellle,” the woman you were so jealous of, and asked me
Is it true. It’s half true, Susanna, and only half, for half of us

Live in abode s of paper and half of us live in abodes of brick,
And where the truth is, Susanna, is underneath your left breast.

Where you let me put my right palm in the hospital, because
That’s where your heart is…

CHIN: WE’RE BACK ON THE FARM. IT’S TIME TO GO TO BED. WHO SAYS IT’S TIME TO GO TO BED?

KOON: Well, first of all. You can’t see anymore. So you have to light up the kerosene lamp. That costs money for the kerosene. If you don’t have money they won’t let you in again. You have food and have to barter food, for items like cough (?) We could sell things for a little bit of money. But mainly we depended the money from my parents, overseas. But we had kerosene lamp. We try to get to bed as soon as we can. So my grandmother would feed me some cod liver oil. Rinse it down with some boiled hot water. In the winter that does two things. That keep you warm while you fall asleep with the hot water. And the other thing is that the. It rinse down the cod liver oil.

We sleep with all the clothes on, and socks too. Cuz there’s no indoor heating. So we sleep with all the blankets we have. And I slept with my grandmother until I was eleven years old.

CHIN: OH, SO YOU SLEPT IN THE SAME BED?

KOON: It’s not a strange a custom. Even kids would sleep with the mother until they’re eleven twelve years old.

KoON: The only thing that I remember vividly is cicadas. Cuz they make a lot of noise. We try to catch’em with uh stick stuff with a long babmboo pole and just get’em stuck on it. They roast them. They eat’em, you know.


CHIN: WHAT’D THEY TASTE LIKE?

KOON: How’d they taste? Kinda burnt.


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