LIMERANCES
Zac June 7th, 2009
“And thereby hangs a tale.”
Embracing or Erasing Race?
October 22nd, 2009In the bad old days, where racism is concerned, even though they frequently wore white hoods to cover up their faces, we knew exactly who our enemies were. In public, they were unafraid to call us “Nigger” and all its equivalents–”Chink,” “Jap,” “Gook,” “Flip,” “Spic,” “Wop,” “Kike,” “Polack,” ad nauseam. Then came the Age of Political Correctness. The white hoods disappeared from view, and the racial slurs went into hiding.
With the election of President Obama, we briefly fooled ourselves into thinking that this was, indeed, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. It’s now clear, however, that we’ve been hoodwinked, and the hateful epithets and images are back, uglier than ever. In some quarters, they are even worn and displayed proudly, as badges of honor, shows of patriotism, signalling a call to action, perhaps even a licence to kill. Aquarius never felt more like Armaggedon.
I grew up with overt racism in the Philippines. Being Chinese, belonging to the wealthier middle class, I was taught to distrust the Filipinos, whom we all referred to as “primitive dogs.” The Filipinos, in turn, taunted us with a sing-song chant which I can still hear inside my head, over half a century later. Intsik beho, tulo laway! which I can only roughly translate as Chinky workhorse, saliva drooling! Odd as this may sound, I did not know the meaning of racism until I saw the movie adaptation of South Pacific in 1958. After I heard the anger, the pain and the outrage as sung by John Kerr in the song “You’ve Got To Be Taught,” I would never be the same again. I began to dream about what life might be like in “the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave.” But it would take another ten years before I could finally leave for the United States.
In all honesty, I cannot say that I have ever been discriminated against, overtly, here in America, not the way I see and hear stories about how other People of Color continue to be treated in certain parts of these United States, not just by the ignorant and the ill-educated, but also by people who really ought to know better, some of them our own elected State Representatives and Members of Congress, all of whom claim to be right-thinking and right-minded Christians. Is this why they are called The Religious Right? What’s wrong with these people? Have they never seen South Pacific on stage? In the movies? On television?
There’s discrimination, and then there’s discrimination. Some subtle, some not so subtle. I remember Luci Tapahonso, a senior colleague of Navajo descent at the University of Kansas, telling me about salespeople following her vigilantly in department stores, suspicious that she might be a shoplifter. She also talked about a particular grocery store in town where she was frequently informed by cashiers who probably meant well, that she might want to “check out the week-old fruits and vegetables in the back of the store because they are cheaper.”
After Luci told me about these embarrassing encounters, I recalled that I too had had a peculiar experience at this same grocery store. It had happened a while back. As I remember it, on that particular occasion, there were a couple of people ahead of me at the checkout line. While waiting my turn in line, I picked up a copy of TV Guide which was on display near the checkout counter. As I was leafing through the magazine, the young cashier, who looked like she might have been one of my students, suddenly yelled at me. ”Are you going to buy that magazine, or are you just going to stand there and read it for free?” Everyone heard her, and now everyone was looking at me. I mumbled an apology and quickly put the magazine back on the rack. I could have abandoned the groceries in my cart but I didn’t. When my turn came, I paid my bill in silence and left the store in silence. Driving home, and for a couple of hours afterwards, I seethed. Why didn’t I throw the magazine in the stupid cashier’s face? Why didn’t I demand to see the manager and insist that the employee be fired for her rudeness to a customer who had been shopping in that store for years? And then, of course, I found myself wondering if the Caucasian cashier would have treated me the same way had I been white and comely, not yellow and cowardly. But, the moment had passed, and now I’ll never know.
When CONPERSONAS, my first play, won the National Student Playwriting Award of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival in 1976, the prize included representation by the William Morris Agency in New York, the best in the business. Biff Liff, my agent, said he was happy CONPERSONAS had won the award, but that he would have a hard time marketing the play because it was much too “intellectual.” He said I should capitalize on, and write about, my own unique Asian background. That particular scenario, he said, he could sell. He mentioned Frank Chin, whose plays Chickencoop Chinaman (1971) and The Year of the Dragon (1974) had been produced successfully in New York, and whose book Aiiieeeee: An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) had also just been published. I told Biff Liff that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as an “ethnic” writer, that I was already hard at work on two other plays, neither of which drew from my own unique Asian background. He urged me no further and, shortly after that, we had a predictable parting of ways.
Although I have no regrets about the chronology or the subject matter of my plays to date, I must admit, grudgingly, that Biff Liff was a visionary of sorts. In the same year that I rejected his offer to market my ethnicity, Maxine Hong Kingston burst onto the scene with The Woman Warrior, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 1976; followed by China Men, which was given the National Book Award in 1981. Then came the plays of David Henry Hwang, among them M Butterfly in 1988; and the novels of Amy Tan, starting with The Joy Luck Club in 1989. And, of course, the movies of Ang Lee were waiting in the wings.
What’s interesting about Ang Lee is that he made three wonderful movies about Chinese Americans—Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)—before he broke into the mainstream with Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Brokeback Mountain (2005), etc. I am a great admirer of his work, and I sometimes wonder what might have happened to my own career had I taken Biff Liff’s suggestion and written MOTHER TONGUE first, the one and only play which draws almost completely on my own unique Asian background; and which, ironically enough, is also my most-produced play to date. Is MOTHER TONGUE really a better play than CONPERSONAS or CHAMBERS or HOMERICA or FLESH FLASH AND FRANK HARRIS? Or are audiences more willing to embrace MOTHER TONGUE because it’s an Asian-American play by an Asian-American playwright?
Is racial profiling “bad” when the profile is meant to be complimentary and flattering? In America, Asians are frequently referred to as “the model minority” because we are quiet, we don’t complain, we are non-threatening sexually, we are conservative and vote mostly Republican, we are studious and hard-working, we all excel in math and calculus. After all, didn’t we invent the abacus? I don’t mind it when people seem surprised that, at K.U., I’m teaching English literature and creative writing instead of anything dealing with numbers. Go figure.
There are in fact four other Asian-Americans at K.U. who are in the arts, not the sciences. Unfortunately, three of them are now retired—Roger Shimomura and Norman Gee from the Visual Arts Department, and Andrew Tsubaki from the Theatre Department. Pok-Chi Lau in the Design Department and I are the only ones left. Although the five of us look nothing alike, in town as well as on campus, we are frequently mistaken for one another. I guess it just comes with the territory. And so, in class, at the beginning of each semester, I always jokingly tell my students that it will take me a while to identify them all properly, because “all white people look alike to me.”
But, sometimes it’s hard to laugh things away. I remember a dinner party I gave at home some years ago, when another senior colleague from my department ooh’d and ahh’d over a dish which I had prepared. “What is it?” she gushed between happy mouthfuls. “Ratatouille,” I said, and offered to share my own special recipe with her. “Ratatouille!” she shrieked merrily. “What are you doing in French territory? You should stick to soy sauce!”
For many years, first as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and then as a part-time Lecturer, I was allowed to teach only Freshman Composition and Intro to Drama at K.U. Meanwhile, on my own time, I had written and published about half a dozen short stories, many of which went on to win major literary awards in the Philippines. Also, I had now written a number of plays which were getting modest productions Off Broadway in New York.
And then it came to pass. Sometime in the mid-1980s, when the English Department decided to hire a full-time tenure-track creative-writing person, and a national search was being conducted, I asked the Chair of the Department if I should apply for the job. He seemed surprised by my question and, after a while, he said, “Why, yes, of course, by all means, apply. You’re about as qualified as anyone else. Besides, it would really make Affirmative Action happy!”
I did apply, but I didn’t get the job, not once but twice. Apparently, the pool of applicants was so impressive, the administration gave the Department permission to hire not one but two creative writers, one male and one female, both of them Caucasian. I have no idea if my application was ever taken seriously. I only know that my application was never formally acknowledged, and that I was never actually interviewed by the search committee. But, I’m sure Affirmative Action was really “happy” that I too had applied for the job.
Four years later, when the Provost at K.U. was genuinely dismayed by the lack of People of Color within the faculty, and was determined to do something about it , word went out that any Person of Color who was “qualified” and who was ”already around” can bypass a national search, and can be brought in as a Direct Minority Hire. And that, to make a long story short, was how I finally came on board in 1989 as a full-time faculty member at the University of Kansas. Shortly after that, I had a startling encounter with a junior colleague in the department, another creative writer who, like me, had been slaving away for years as a part-time lecturer; but who, unlike me, was Caucasian. She stopped me one day in the hallway and said bitterly, “All things being equal, I may be the right gender, but the color of my skin is wrong, and the shape of my eyes is wrong.”
And now, of course, Affirmative Action is viewed with great suspicion by many in this country. There is much talk of “reverse discrimination.” It may or may not be amusing, depending on whether you are on the inside looking out, or on the outside looking in. Filipinos who continue to revere their colonial masters are said to be “coconuts, brown on the outside, but white inside.” And among many Asian-Americans, those who are perceived as erasing what makes them unique while they are busy embracing the mainstream, are said to be “bananas, yellow on the outside, but white inside.” Those apples in the Garden of Eden…the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil…what color were they?
Sit On Me When I Am Dead!
September 15th, 2009Although my brothers and I were born of Chinese parents in the Philippines, the three of us emigrated to the United States, separately and for totally different reasons, when we were all in our mid-twenties. It was in the United States where we all established our professional careers; where John and Peter met the wonderful women they married, had well-behaved children (two each) and saw them all graduate successfully from college; and where we will in all likelihood die and be buried—John and Vivian in New Jersey, Peter and Bing in Florida, and me in Kansas.
In life, we who teach and toil at the University of Kansas are paid only modestly, but one of our more attractive fringe benefits is that, when we finally drop dead, those of us who’ve put in time for at least fifteen years at the university, are entitled to be buried FOR FREE at Pioneer Cemetery, a grassy knoll owned and maintained by the university, situated between the five student dormitories on top of old Daisy Hill on Mount Oread, and the new development known as West Campus. Let me tell you about the bridge which connects the two campuses.
There’s a rumor that foot traffic on the bridge is busiest at night, when students living in the five dorms find themselves sneaking over to the secluded cemetery to indulge, first in alcoholic beverages and other controlled substances, and then, if they’re not too inebriated or stoned, to dangle their participles and split their infinitives, maybe even learn new ways of conjugating not just their verbs but also their nouns. That the life cycle gets reenacted nightly at Pioneer Cemetery, with the learned spirits of dead professors continuing to have a seminal effect on their young (dis)charges, is something which might give comfort to the aging faculty and staff at the university. Who needs Cinemax or the Playboy Channel in the afterlife when the frisky students are providing live entertainment for free? In truth, this is where many of my free-thinking friends and colleagues are buried—Ed Grier, Bud Hirsch—and this is where I too will be inurned, underneath a small rectangular slab of marble. In earlier, more promiscuous days, I thought my epitaph should read: “He finally sleeps alone.” But, these days, I think the Bard will get to have the final say: ”The rest is silence.”
In the Philippines, the tradition among the Chinese is for entire generations of families to be buried together, if the clan can afford it, in elaborate mausoleums. The ones at the old Chinese Cemetery are truly ostentatious, outdoing each other in sheer red-and-gold garishness. The ones at the Manila Memorial Park are equally expansive and expensive, but in better taste, which means that you get more peace and tranquility by way of landscaping, and thus a lot less marble to house your loved ones. When my father died in December of 1969, eighteen months after I left Manila for the United States, my mother carefully studied the feng shui at the Manila Memorial Park before buying a double burial plot, one for my father, and the other for herself when her time comes.
I thought this was all settled until my brothers John and Peter decided otherwise. Since the three of us are now in the United States and will presumably be buried in the United States, they argued, shouldn’t our mother also be buried with us in America? But where? With John and Vivian in West Windsor? With Peter and Bing in Orlando? With me in Lawrence? The University of Kansas extends burial privileges at Pioneer Cemetery only to its employees and their spouses, no other beloved family members, not even pets.
Quite fortuitously, one year back in the mid-1990s, when my mother just happened to be visiting Peter and Bing in Orlando for Thanksgiving, John and Vivian and I all flew in to join them for the holiday weekend. Peter had done his homework, but we were all a bit apprehensive about how my mother would react to yet another discussion involving her own mortality. The Chinese are superstitious about these things. Peter assured us he would broach the subject subtly, casually. And so, while we were all out for a leisurely drive one afternoon, he said, “By the way, why don’t we all pop over to Woodlawn Memorial Park and Funeral Home? I have a friend who works there whom I’d like you to meet.”
We all expected Mommie Dearest to crackle and explode, maybe even to spontaneously combust, as she is wont to do on such occasions, but she surprised us when she smiled approvingly and said to Peter, “You have a friend who works on Sunday afternoons? What a hard-working boy! His mother must be very proud of him.”
Peter’s friend turned out to be a Latino who knew exactly how to flatter aging Chinese women. YOU! THE MOTHER OF THREE SONS? IMPOSSIBLE! SO YOUNG! SO BEAUTIFUL! SO RICH…IN BLESSINGS! He could have sold my mother a swamp full of crocodiles but, wait a minute, only if the feng shui was right, with gentle winds blowing from here to here, and soothing waters flowing from there to there. After what seemed like hours, mother finally found a spot which met with her “good feng shui seal of approval.” It was a corner lot on the corner of which was a scraggly weeping willow tree in desperate need of fertilizing. But there was another, more serious problem.
This particular corner lot had room for only FOUR coffin spaces. Mother said she would gather the bones of my father from his resting place at the Manila Memorial Park, and that these can be interred with her in one of the four spaces. My brother John and his wife Vivian said their particular branch of Protestantism forbids cremation, so they would need two of the four spaces. My brother Peter and his wife Bing said their religion has no special burial restrictions, so the both of them can be cremated and placed within the same space, the fourth and last available space on that corner lot.
So what about me and my dogs? Where’s our resting place in this developing subplot? The corner plot wasn’t cheap. After adding up all the hidden costs, the three Lim brothers would be splitting the bill equally, roughly $6,000 each. So what do I get for my $6,000? Peter’s friend shook his head gravely. And then he had a voila! moment. Sorry about mixing my metaphors, but I can’t think of what a voila! moment might sound like in Spanish.
“Oye! of little faith,” the man suddenly exclaimed. “Do you not see the beautiful weeping willow tree in the corner? Imagine a marble bench in that corner, underneath the tree. There can be as many as FOUR urns inside that bench! You can have the ashes of all your dogs with you inside that bench! Together, you will be guarding the final resting place of your loved ones! And all your friends and relatives can sit and rest on the bench as well, admiring the view, thinking only good thoughts of you and your family!”
“Gee, thanks,” I growled under my breath. “All my life I’ve wanted people to sit on me, and now I get to have my wish when I am dead!”
“Don’t be petulant,” my mother said, although there is no such word as “petulant” in Fukienese, the Chinese dialect that we speak. I was fighting a losing battle against her notions of feng shui. I could feel the wind blowing against my face, and it wasn’t fragrant. I could feel the blood flowing through my veins, and it wasn’t thicker than water. So what’s a dutiful Chinese son to do? I acquiesced, and spent the next couple of years sending in the monthly payments for my $6,000 bench.
Ultimately, I don’t know if it really makes any difference, after I’m dead, whether I’m inurned at Pioneer Cemetery in Lawrence, or at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Orlando. In one scenario, future generations will be fucking on top of me. In the other scenario, they will be sitting on me. In either case, purely for hygienic reasons, I hope they’re wearing clean underwear. Ay, caramba!
Beauty and the Beast
September 4th, 2009Some friends who’ve been journeying through time with me, after looking at the many pictures of ourselves which I’ve posted chronologically on my website, seem startled and dismayed by how we’ve all aged. “My God,” one of them exclaimed the other day, “we were all so young and…”
He paused for a long time and, as he seemed unable to continue, in my mind I went through a list of words about what we might have been like all those years ago. Idealistic? Romantic? Innocent? Naive? Stupid? Unreasonable? Unrealistic? Untainted? Unblemished? Unbearable?
“Beautiful,” he said finally. “We were all so young and…beautiful.”
To be honest, this took me by surprise. I have never been vain about my looks. When I started to gain weight after I gave up smoking in 1994, and to lose my hair shortly after that, it was of no great consequence, and I didn’t stay up nights worrying about it. But now, thanks to the ugly rhetoric which keeps coming out of the mouths of people like Carrie Prejean, the ex-Miss California USA 2009 who won’t shut up or go away, I’ve been looking again at the pictures on my website, not of me but of everyone else, trying to determine who’s beautiful and who’s not, and by what standards. In the Philippines, for example, given the country’s white colonial masters—first the Spaniards and then the Americans, which one witty Filipino writer said was akin to living three hundred years in a convent followed by fifty years in Hollywood—fair or unfair, guess whom the mirror says is the fairest of us all?
Among the many physically “beautiful people” I’ve known in America, there’s one I’d like to tell you about. I no longer remember his name because this was sometime ago and I knew him only briefly, met with him only twice, spoke with him on the telephone only twice, but I”ll never forget him for what he was, a beautiful young man in his early twenties, a violinist who had been highly recommended by his professors in the School of Music at the University of Kansas.
Back in those days, at least once every summer for many years, I would give these elaborate garden parties in my backyard for seventy or eighty people. Lots to eat, even more to drink, and underneath the tall weeping willow tree, accomplished young musicians coaxing beautiful sounds out of their favored instruments, one year a guitar, another year a cello, and on this particular year a violin. I remember many of the guests wandering over to the beautiful young man, listening to the way he seemed to be communing privately with Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. There’s a picture of him on the website, resplendent in the late afternoon sunlight, as he played my one request, Massenet’s Meditation from Thais, surrounded by the weeping willows. Sadly, the tree no longer exists. It had been dying for years, attacked by termites, and finally I had to have it cut down and destroyed. In its place I planted a flowering Judas Tree.
But, back to my beautiful violinist. When the garden party was over, he came into the house and, as I was writing out a check to pay him for his work, he heard the lovebirds twittering in an upstairs bedroom. “Do you have birds in the house?” he asked, his eyes filled with wonder.
“Yes. Do you like birds?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had any. Can I see them?”
“Yes, of course.”
I led him upstairs and showed him the original pair of lovebirds which I had started out with, and their first brood of six little ones, some bluish-green, some yellowish-orange. The young man was transfixed. Finally, he turned to me and said, “Can I have a couple of them? You have so many.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“I’ll be happy to buy them from you.”
“I wasn’t planning to sell them.”
“Oh please. They are so beautiful.” Beautiful creatures are drawn to each other, I thought approvingly. Maybe they will make beautiful music together.
“If you’ve never had birds, you’ll need a cage to begin with, and the cage must be cleaned at least once weekly. Then you must also buy special lovebird seeds and liquid vitamins to add to their water daily. You’ll also need another cup containing a mixture of gravel and oyster shells to help them digest their food, sand paper for the perches to help trim their nails, cuttle bones to help trim their beaks, special treats like fruits and vegetables to supplement their diet, to say nothing of bird toys to keep them amused, and…”
“I’ll use the money you’re giving me today to buy all that.” He flashed me a beautiful smile. How could I resist?
He returned the next day for two of the baby birds, but he didn’t have a birdcage with him. He said the one he bought was much too big to fit in the car after he had put it all together. Instead, he brought a big empty rectangular aquarium. He said he could transport the birds in this old aquarium, then transfer them to the new birdcage after he got back to his apartment. He flashed me another smile. How can anyone have teeth so white? I really needed to give up smoking.
A couple of days later, I got a peculiar phone call from someone who said he was the beautiful young man’s roommate. “About those birds that you gave him…”
“Yes?”
“Did you know that he has a pet boa constrictor which he keeps in an aquarium?”
“What?”
“He came home with those birds, and when the boa couldn’t catch them, he chopped their feet off.”
“What?”
“He just sat there, drinking his beer, watching those terrified birds bleeding to death as the boa started to eat them.”
“What?”
“He’s going to call you tomorrow, to ask you for more birds. He says you have four more. Please don’t give him any more.”
And, indeed, the young man did call, the very next day, asking if he could have two more. He said his girlfriend had come over to his apartment, had seen the birds, had fallen in love with them, and that he had no choice but to give them to her. So could he have two more? In my mind’s eye, I could see him flashing his beautiful smile, yet again. And then I thought of him feeding my birds to his “girlfriend.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, wondering why I was apologizing instead of screaming at him. “The papa bird and mama bird seem unhappy about the disappearance of two of their young ones. I can’t give away any more of their babies.”
And that was that. I never saw or heard from the young man again. In this story, Beauty not only falls in love with the Beast, Beauty turns into the Beast. Even today, as I retell and relive the story, I find myself near tears. And I am reminded of a poem written by another friend in the Philippines, someone whom all the pretty girls in our group laughed at, when we were all so young, because they said he was so ugly. Here are the final lines of his poem: “Why am I Melancholy/before so much Beauty?”
The poet’s name was Jun Lansang and, like the weeping willow tree in my backyard, he too is now dead and gone. But the young Judas Tree which replaced it and which I can see from my bedroom window flowered this spring, and will continue to do so for many years yet to come.
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