Pancreatic File of Koon Woon

 

Pancreatic File [BOF May 3, 2026]: 

 

The end is near. V is telling me that characters on Wagon Train are her sons. Television can give us another possible world to ponder, but it is an implausible world.

I still go see V everyday at the nursing home except the days I have chemo. I fear the chemo is no longer effective. This makes V and I have about the same timeline.

 

I got bad news last November. The chemo helped for a while, but now it looks like palliative care.

 

The question is “Now what?” Everything is accessible – memories, possible worlds, the actual world, and there is perfect knowledge as it characterizes the S 5 Modal System.

 

She said, “You can see the world through the eye of the needle.” She was a seamstress most of her life. The needle was her livelihood. And she was my grandmother who rubbed my forehead to fearless sleep. She spooned me cod liver oil, and her garden greens were loved and abounded.

 

At the Triple L

 

Snow drifts down

Settling in crotches of the birch

Temperate drop as the cab enters the compound

 

I found my way to Mr. Schuler’s office.

It was an austere room.

He peered over his glasses and motioned me to sit down.

This is a memory, when I was sick, but not as sick as I am today.

Mr. Schuler is not a literary figure; he was a colonel in the air force.

“I don’t think you will be here very long,” he said, “you can think your way through problems.”

Then he asked me if I had a will.

After the interview he called Roy to take me to my room in one of the cottages.

 

When I got there, I saw three small beds in the same room.

There was a clicking noise, sounded like Morse Code. But it was just the heater trying to come on.

It was a cold January with the biggest snow in 20 years, and the cab did not make it all the way to the compound when I arrived. I lugged my suitcase the rest of the way, weakly, as I was in the mental hospital for three months.

 

At the cottage, I heard noises from another room. I peeked into it. Three televisions were going simultaneously, and three motley fellows were engrossed in television life. They did not even see me.

Then I backed up and went by the alcove. There was a jigsaw puzzle in progress by some insomniac.

 

I decided to lie down. Soon I was asleep and dreamed that I was Dr. Zhivago in the coldest of Soviet winters.

 

Stan Burris woke me when he came into the room. He was dressed in a dirty corduroy overcoat and boots. He is the reason I am at Triple L.

 

I thought Stan was a spy from Canada when we were in the hospital.

 

He told me that this compound was a great place to roam in because of the land size. And it was peaceful. He did not tell me by peaceful, it means “half-dead.”

 

I thought he was my friend. He needed support only. And it took me another twenty years to realize that what he said about being a baby in an orphanage and was not held the first six months made him cold. Not in temperature but in lack of empathy.

 

I will be stuck with him for another twenty years. That was how difficult it was for the mentally ill to find a friend and companion. We are ghosts that live in isolated Gulags all over this beautiful land of America.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memories by Koon Woon

 

There is something insoluble in my tea that you poured

 

I don’t know what it is. Could be a memory of the cold tea in our China village of Nan On, in the bedroom on the teakwood table from the teapot spout I drink in childhood as a schoolboy, when our rooster crowed daylight, when getting up to the winter cold air was the first test of the day…

 

The tea is hot now like the anger I feel in this country when called a racial epithet. This country now has lost all its rights to be a world citizen, and in self-defense, I must be a world citizen and not a denizen of this country, where the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” came from motherland Shakespeare…

 

But more than this, it took me so long to find you, like a rose surrounded by brambles and a yellow chrysanthemum just beyond my height, radiant, that across my childhood years, the pond water was the right tepid temperature to swim in, and the love of ferns I found in these woods nearby as I wandered into it to the hidden waterfall we called the Diamond Falls, near the PUD in Aberdeen, on the foothills of the Olympics, where Darren the Native American fellow would disappear for a month at a time with bow and arrow to test the survival skills of his forebears, like I surreptitiously read the Chinese dictionary to see familiar faces, all 50,000 of them…

 

But long ago I also received my first rejection in a box of a phone booth when she sent icy words up my spine, as the winter booth is fogging up with my breath. Tea is pronounced incorrectly by foreigners as the Cantonese dialect has 9 tones, and each tone has a different meaning and “cha” could mean error…

 

But later I came back to my native culture when my poem, “A Smoke Break at the Nuclear Command,” was published in the Hong Kong online journal “Cha.” So now comparing cultures and phonics I found your love is quenching of thirst as the land of tea…

 

All in all, our love is not a mistake, after a lifetime of them, and now as we sprout snow on our heads, we find that insoluble stuff in my tea is love…

 

Koon Woon, April 18, 2026, Seattle