Love can be found in the daily details and the recognition of change as inevitable in 7 Continents 9 Lives (Bowery Books 2010), by Fay Chiang, a genre-defying collection of poems, prose poems, journal entries and dramatic monologues that includes work from the poet’s previous two volumes published by Sunbury Press. It’s a brave, beautiful, compassionate, harrowing, imperfect and impossibly generous piece of work. Chiang, an activist in the multiethnic communities of New York City’s Chinatown and the Lower East Side since the 1970s, has composed the poem of a fulsome life.

The volume’s personal narrative tells of her family’s immigration from Southern China and Singapore to Chinatown; it encompasses the diasporic Chinese communities in Italy, Germany and throughout the world. The poems recount Chiang’s travels and, through her good ear, capture the voices of working women, interlacing the narrative with their stories. Among the finest poems are the deft portraiture of women, including “Mrs. Oltrani” and the two grandmother poems, “Orchard Street” and “Grandma.” The latter ends with the stunning close, “We continued our walk, admiring the peaches and apples hanging in other people’s gardens,” as good an image of envy and otherness in America as I’ve ever read.
Chiang mourns the deaths of her father and her brother’s Hodgkin’s disease, mental illness and suicide. In the poem for her brother Peter, “Tall Grasses Rippling in Wind”—what a lovely title!— she writes, “past tomatoes /fallen off the vine / too soon,” that becomes a prefiguring of his premature “ripening.” Chiang recounts her own experience living with stage IV breast cancer, while in “David” she laments the state of the health care system and the condition of cultural silence by describing an HIV-positive client’s passing. What saves the narrative from utter grimness and despair is the poet’s remarkable understatement and acceptance of mortality. I’m reminded of essayist Richard Rodriguez’s comment that AIDS had somehow “Mexicanized” San Francisco in its confrontation with a generation’s death. Chiang has envisioned a future in which “You tell me, / Buddha said, / There is no heaven,” even imagining her own departure, saying, “No I could not bear this,” that is, the well-rehearsed rituals of yet another Chinese funeral and wake.
In “Midnight Blue Sky,” the poet contemplates her own suicide, but is drawn back by the awareness of change, the lightness of a Coney Island beach scene, the anti-nativist observation that “Each wave of newly arrived immigrants gracing these shores, the cold steel blue Atlantic, would settle and fiercely claim the city as its own.” In place of a politics of polarization, Chiang offers a poetics of inclusion, hence hope. In “Magic,” the poet observes the ways in which children, including her own daughter, reawaken adults to the loving details of the world, in “practicality and shrewdness.” The wonderful short lyrics, “Landscape” and “Home,” have the economy of Chinese and Japanese poetry, and a wistful ancestral longing.
The poet’s voice is conversational, accessible, deceptively simple and unadorned, modest, and sometimes raging, especially in the early poem, “Chinatown,” with its withering critique of the American culture’s homogenizing effect: “american tv sold mickey mouse and donald ducks / to little dick and janes and run spot run / in the suburbias of white picket fences / and automobiles.” But by and large, hers is a storyteller’s voice. Formally, Chiang favors a shorter line that isn’t often justified along the left margin but broken along the page, signifying movement. The collage of genres recalls Jean Toomer’s classic Cane, which also ignored or transcended questions of genre and convention.
The autobiographical narrative often circles and backtracks, so that “Journal Entry Jan. 1, 1975” describes her father’s death, while “Autumn Dusk,” which follows immediately afterwards, fictionalizes a conversation between father and daughter that remained unsaid during his lifetime. The latter poem gives itself over to the father’s elegiac voice: “in this light /in this autumn light / this September.”
There’s a satisfying wholeness to Fay Chiang’s 7 Continents 9 Lives, the arc of an active and conscious life. If I were to identify a single quality that marks the poet’s perspective, it would have to be full acceptance and inclusiveness: working class communities of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, those living with HIV, cancer or mental illness, the dispossessed, artists and creators as a force for social change. In the first section of “Images,” for example, the poet paints a carnivalesque scene on St. Marks Place in the Lower East Side in which she encounters an “old woman in raggedy coat and kerchief” who proceeds to tell her that she’s an artist-nun who sang “jesus light my fire in a lesbian bar.” The story is told without irony, grotesqueness or meanness, but with a common laughter; Chiang’s level, democratic gaze restores the homeless woman’s full humanity, and effects in the reader a “healing [that] has its own pace; / nothing to do with logic” (“Tall Grasses Rippling in Wind”). If that isn’t the poet’s task, I don’t know what is.

I’ve known Fay Chiang since 1974 when she was executive director of Basement Workshop. At the time I was coordinator of Basement’s Writers Workshop.

by Christopher Heffernan

The cult classic Trout Fishing in America, written by Richard Brautigan and first published in 1967, has been released in a new edition by Mariner Books, a subsidiary of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.  The book has not been published on its own since the early ‘80’s when Houghton Mifflin began packaging Brautigan’s books together in single volume sets with Trout Fishing in America set together with The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar.  The new standalone edition, costing $13.95, and running 112 pages has a warm introduction from former poet laureate Billy Collins but also comes with a startling peculiarity.  For the original edition and the subsequent packaged editions after the covers had been a picture of Brautigan with a woman in front of a blurred statue of Benjamin Franklin.  It may at first seem like it does not matter but the first chapter of the book speaks directly about this cover, so it seems strange that Mariner decided to change the cover to the childlike drawing of a fish that was used for the dedication page and instead put the photo that is the theme of the first chapter called “The Cover for Trout Fishing in America” inside the book, just before the introduction.  Of course the book business demands that as time goes by and tastes change so must covers change but with a post modern tour de force that uses meta as one of its key elements and has the first chapter titled and dealing directly with the cover, it is self defeating to change it. 

The book is divided up into 47 sections or chapters, each with a title, and ranging in length from one page to roughly six.  It is a quick read and a fun read and it is a read you can always go back to as the undercurrents that Brautigan deals with offer a depth that lurks in the back of each chapter and the back of the reader’s mind so that there are always new connections to be made and new feelings to be felt.  The sections are split into different threads and themes with some recurring but with no over all coherent story, making it lyrical.  But this does not make it any less of a novel.  What engages the reader is, first, Brautigan’s prose style; smooth, light, with easily read and digestible sentences that move easily and naturally from one to the other.  Then there is the clash of themes where, here, drama does not build in the character’s lives, it is built in the reader himself as the different images and scenes, descriptions and events constantly push into and pull each other along.  And then there is the aspect of metafiction, fiction that reflects upon itself.  Brautigan takes it and puts in the first chapter and references the cover, as mentioned, a photo taken in front of a Benjamin Franklin statue in a park in San Francisco. 

The self referencing is important as it starts the function of building the book as an experience in the reader.  Good books make reading an experience so that the reader is not following a story but actually having emotional reactions to the work, is actually feeling and creating memories of feeling; so what Brautigan does by opening the book with a discussion of the cover is telling the reader that the event isn’t a story, or the book, but is actually the reader, as the reader must go back and observe the cover and now knows that the author who is now the narrator knows that he is writing a thing and he’s telling you he’s writing it so that like all good metafiction he points out that the thing is not the Thing but is a reflection of it and that the real Thing is life itself.  And then he goes on with the other themes, most particularly the degradation of America, as an optimistic description of the statue of Ben Franklin statue and the word WELCOME facing the four directions, are coupled with bums at a church across the street waiting for free sandwiches.  It is a scene of poverty and a clash with the manufactured image of America that moves throughout the book.  The image is then heightened by a Kafka quote that reads, “I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic.”

This degradation through its many facets, the rise of technology, loss of value, loss of a connection with something more natural or organic, etc, runs the length of the book and is paralleled and contrasted with the other large thread that is of pastoral scenes of fishing.  Many of these scenes involve a family, moving around from campsites in America, illustrating the splendor of the country and the depth of its natural beauty while at the same time reinforcing the book with the metaphor for fishing, sustenance, a theme as old as Christ.  What is remarkable about the book is that although Brautigan has forgone classic structure he retained one of the oldest themes, that of life returning life to itself with the symbol of fish.  That this lost connection with nature can be retrieved through fishing.  Over the centuries this theme often involved a redemption, usually of land or character but always in the end of life.  Brautigan knows this but does not state it.  Instead he gives the reader events and description so that instead of being told what the problem is it is made implicit and instead of being told what to do about it the book, being set up as an event itself, activates the reader’s own sympathy or empathy or even urgency.  This is one of the key elements that made it such a hit in the ‘60’s.  It was a true cry, a sign, pointing directly at the clash of technology and nature and that nature was loosing—as Brautigan points out when addressing the camping craze in America that the Coleman lamp has become the beacon of these people and that it is “unholy”; and as he points to the rise of consumerism which is wonderfully illustrated in the section titled “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard.”  In this chapter the narrator finds out about a place that sells streams for trout fishing, that you can go there and build a stream, paying for it by the foot, stock it with fish and even surround it with trees and shrubs and wildlife to make a perfectly manufactured natural setting.  Brautigan’s light style makes these few pages seem almost cutesy as the narrator is picking out what he wants and discusses options as if buying a car with the salesman.  But those Brautigan undercurrents begin to creep up and the astute reader will begin to realize that it is a simple but poignant and strong commentary on, what was at the time, a rising consumerism that is now our everyday way of life.  Though we do not buy trout streams by the foot, almost everything else in our society, including our health and our bodies, has become commodities for profit. 

What stands out in the book, though, as truly astounding, is the relationship that “Trout Fishing in America” has with the reader, that it is a thing, not only the book itself, but in the book “Trout Fishing in America,” exists as an object to be explored, a personification, an event and even an entity unto itself.  Brautigan begins this creation of Trout Fishing in America as an entity right in the second chapter where the narrator wonders about when he first heard about Trout Fishing in America and there is a response after his brief musings by Trout Fishing in America itself.  This sets the stage for Trout Fishing in America not being simply an activity or even a pastoral state of mind to be reached in the tranquility of nature, but an actual entity, running around out there.  It moves, it talks, it does things.  It is at the same time a hotel and a bum named Trout Fishing in America Shorty.  It is all these things and more and Brautigan does not waste his or the reader’s time by trying to define it or explain it so that the reader may on his own grasp it.  This is where his having the book as a true experience comes into play, because it is the event of reading all of the chapters and sections against each other where Trout fishing in America is all of these different things and exists as different things, undefined and explained in their relationships that, in the end, the reader must put it all together into the actual experience, the way that any person who lives through an event puts the pieces together for a full understanding. 

It is not all completely out of bounds.  In the end Brautigan brings the pastoral family of campers to the city and the park in San Francisco with the Franklin statue that starts the book, pinching the whole thing off almost as it had begun.  Here, with their little girl, they come across Trout Fishing in America Shorty who, old and broke and nearing death beckons to the child who at first pays him attention then with a flippancy and frivolity runs away.  It is a scene of contrasts and foils, of warmth and desperation, of family and loneliness that is offered to the reader, so typical of this book and Brautigan, with no implicit meaning other than what the reader can get from it with his own senses.  

Over all the book is short and accessible, easy to read, and easy to read on many levels.  It is an exquisite example of post modernism and a triumph of literary themes and explorations that edge into the prophetic.  It is almost sad that this book is a cult classic, that its association with the 60’s and the counter culture movement has basically trumped its validity as solid work of fiction.  Hopefully, now, enough time has gone by and with the publication of this new edition by itself the up and coming generation of readers will see Trout Fishing in America for what it truly is.

JUST KIDS –Patti Smith

Harper Collins, New York, 2010

279 pps.

Reviewed by Bonny Finberg

     Patti Smith has kept her promise to Robert Mapplethorpe to tell their story. By doing so through the lens of a generation of artists in New York at that time, she’s written our story as well. Her book could be subtitiled: “Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation,” the Pete Townsend song she covered as if she’d written it herself.

     The book opens when, as a very young girl, Smith sees her first swan gliding then taking flight from the Prairie River in Humboldt Park. The sight of it “generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan…its whiteness the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings.” This prescient moment, almost allegorical, is later played out in her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe whose place in her life was in some sense that of a fairy godfather, transforming her from insecure, self-effacing duckling to magnificent swan with wings from whose powerful beating rhythm comes an artistry of overwhelming beauty. Ironically, and typical for the times, Smith makes the conscious pledge to herself to support her artist/lover by giving him the freedom of not having to hold a job while she does. She works at various jobs so he can develop his art and afford studio space, while in the evenings, accompanying him on their routine visits to Max’s Kansas City. Their first, decidedly uneventful foray into Max’s was in 1969. Andy Warhol was no longer a regular after being shot by Valerie Solanas, though his second string, so to speak remained. Hanging out in the right places in order to meet the right people, though extremely important to Mapplethorpe is only something Smith does for his sake. She describes her reticence and painful social awkwardness. They start out in the front room near the bar spending their time drinking Cokes and trying to figure out how to work their way into the back room where the art world stars drink and commiserate, engaged in repartee that resembles a Looking Glass version of the Algonquin.

     Despite her self-consciousness in the presence of the royalty holding court in the back room, she rises to the occasion, spurred on by Mapplethorpe’s relentless pursuit of entering their inner circle. After a self-executed haircut, she describes the attention and approval that finally delivers her into the sanctuary of their Mad Tea Party.

     Patti Smith’s early religious training redefined events in clearly revelatory ways. She saw art as her “calling.” Her first confrontation with art was on a family trip to the Philadelphia Art Museum. Like much of Smith’s encounters, this was an epiphany. After a short stint in a factory in South Jersey, where she lived at the time, she left for the bus stop to take the bus to New York. Her mother had given her a white waitress outfit, complete with shoes, to ensure her survival. (They ended up in the bathroom of the first and last restaurant she would ever work in.) The going was rough and she slept in the park and in doorways before finally finding a place in Brooklyn to share. Her first meeting with Mapplethorpe happened while working behind a jewelry counter. It’s the kind of meeting that romantic movies are made of and begins a deep and long relationship that spans over twenty years.

     Among other things, these two were drawn together by their commitment to art as primary over all other pursuits. They shared musical tastes, sometimes playing certain records over and over again, and supported each other’s vision. The happy balance between their differences was maintained by the admiration and recognition of the other’s perspective and method. Smith recalls the snowy Christmas night when, walking in Time Square, they came upon the billboard “WAR IS OVER If you want it. Happy Christmas from John and Yoko.” She remarks that Mapplethorpe was impressed by the idea of artists taking over 42^nd Street. She was struck by the humanity of the statement. “For me it was the message. For Robert the medium.” This was 1969. The end of the Sixties when Smith and Robert both turned 23. With the uncanny certainty and foresight he often shows in this story, Mapplethorpe declares at the beginning of the Seventies: “This is our decade.”

     Smith and Mapplethorpe’s days at the Hotel Chelsea provide one of the most compelling and evocative aspects of this book. Their time spent with Harry Smith, encounters with William Burroughs, Viva, Candy Darling and scores of others are funny and insightful. Even when Smith was not on intimate terms with some of these well known artists, her observations from her perch on a couch in the lobby opens a window into a time when the New York art world was an accessible, diverse universe for anyone with eyes and ears. She is privy to Shirley Clarke, Diane Arbus and Jonas Meekas, as they each pass through the lobby. Viva enters like an unapproachable diva in order to intimidate Stanley Bard, then owner of the Chelsea, so as to distract him from the fact of her outstanding rent.

     An interesting revelation about Smith here is that she was not so much the wild child that her stage persona suggested. She drank little, if at all, and never smoked dope. In fact, her descriptions of Mapplethorpe and Harry Smith readying to go out after smoking a joint is pretty funny. They try on various outfits and look for keys while she, having thrown some simple but hip outfit together, sits waiting impatiently. It isn’t until much later that after having smoked herself that she thinks back and understands their distraction.

     Smith’s development as a poet/performer informs some of the most fascinating sections. Her meeting with Lenny Kaye and their first performance at St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project is a Punk version of “A Star is Born” without the tragedy. There is little evidence here of struggling to become famous. It seemed that all who knew her were pushing her to go public. Once she did, she inspired adulation from the outset, and never stopped. She continues to give radioactive performances all over the globe.

     The larger part of this book covers a time of cheap all-night diners and five and dime stores full of cheap housewares, toys and kitsch that could be recycled into art objects. I’d forgotten some of these places until I read them in these pages: Benedict’s, Child’s, Lamston’s. It was a time when we made our own greeting cards and gifts by hand and paid rent that equaled about one week’s salary. It was New York at a time when you might have to struggle to survive and do your art, whereas now it seems more necessary to sacrifice your art in order to survive. It was a place where misfits from everywhere else could co-exist, if cynically, with those who came to make their fortune. You met people in the street or the park and were friends for life. You could work for two weeks as a waitress at Max’s (even if only in the front room where people got their own drinks and stiffed the waitress as I sadly learned) and make enough money for a cheap (illegal) charter flight to Europe. Pot was $15 an ounce.

     It all sounds so idyllic even in the writing of it here. Of course, being in your twenties and thirties makes any decade “the” decade. But this was before the AIDS epidemic, Rudy Giuliani, overdevelopment and, of course, 9/ll. So many were lost — people and places. But thanks to Patti Smith’s detailed records from journals and notebooks, photographs and drawings, we have them here for all time.

Sam Shepard’s new book of stories, Day Out of Days, is a romp through the highways of America, through the personal history of the narrators, as well as through the historical past of the many areas of the States that the highways touch and pass through, that is often as brutal and violent as it is insightful and illuminating. Published by Knopf and covering 282 pages, this new work of fiction is broken up into 133 sections that range in length from a paragraph to ten or so pages with the majority of them being only one or two or three pages and mixed in with a few titleless poems (reminiscent of his earlier work Motel Chronicles) and nonnarrative based dialogues that go untethered to any particular character, a technique used in both of his previous books of short stories, Cruising Paradise and Great Dream of Heaven. Names are rarely used and a name for a narrator or narrators is never brought up so though the steady voice of the pieces holds without much variation one cannot assume that they are all being told by the same voice, in the same vein that one cannot assume that they are all different. There is an ambiguity to who is doing the telling, but it is not an ambiguity that stumps the reader or clouds the experience of the stories with being obtuse or opaque but rather enhances the themes and the overall structure of existential query and self reflection, and by not making it the personal journey of one man, or the shared experiences of many that can be compared against each other, he does both. By never explicitly stating whether the sections are linked by one or many voices the reader must digest the stories, the journey, as both, as though it is one man traveling the heart of America, traveling his past, and as the many, the multiple people whose emotional landscapes are inextricably tied to the shared experiences of what it means to be human. And for Sam what it means to be human (or at the very least, what this book investigates as the plane of the human living condition) deals tremendously with memory.

The first story, “Kitchen,” a lyrical piece, talks mainly of the past of the narrator who lists the things around him in the kitchen, many of which are photographs, that lay out a snapshot of his past as well as a dip into the historical past with references to Sitting Bull, Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. This story is almost an archetype for the entire book as it deals with memory, the past, horses, the historical past and isolation, as the narrator says now no one comes around and that they know better and alludes to having engineered this isolation that is the fulfillment of the way of life that the narrator describes as a sinking ship, by putting a pit bull out front to keep these visitors away. In the last story of the book, called “Gracias,” the reader finds a narrator who, after driving for miles ends up in a small town with an ancient church, “ . . . walking hand in hand with our children, . . .” where having gone down a narrow side street, the family hears a piano that, when it stops, they all applaud, after which they hear a small voice from somewhere in the house say, “Gracias.” The one paragraph piece ends with the line, “That was one of those days I remember.” So here, the reader is given many of the themes that run through the book but they have resolved. They have gone from a self inflicted crippling isolation to a simple scene of music and togetherness. But the path between these two is anything but straight.

The journey along this path is literally a journey for many of the characters in the pieces themselves. Many of the sections of the book are titled with place names designated with highway numbers, “Haskell, Arkansas (Highway 70)”, “Williams, Arizona (Highway 40 West)”, “Alpine, Texas (Highway 90)”. But these places, many times, serve no real importance to the narrator, they are truck stops and gas stations, they are diners, where the narrator through the weight or sublimity of travel has become self reflected and introspective, is grappling with the greater understanding of his own life through the desolation of the place or in some cases the historical significance, which in many cases is tied directly to Native Americans. Though the narrator(s) are not Native American, it is the theme of the struggle for life, as it is now instituted in the American cultural mythology that Native Americans were systematically wiped out, that they were smashed to pieces by an overwhelming force that when fought against destroyed them even more, that binds the narrative voices together in an understanding of an impending doom, of a death that will wipe out the individual. And with this exploration goes the idea of simpler tribal times, as the journeyman grapples with modern life and is often seduced by the noble savage ideology in order to combat this awful destruction that is not lurking, but is waiting, often, in plain sight, in the faces of those around him, in his own face.

The doom is signified in many cases by memory. Memory is a major component of the book, through all the themes, pieces, characters, narrators, they are all linked by their memory of their lives, not haunted by individual events, but haunted by memory itself, by the life once lived, by the path gone by so far in what has been lived, and tied to the dysfunction of memory as many of the narrations have an inability to either remember with accuracy or to know that things have been forgotten, or that they are not being recalled properly, which in many of the sections is itself a certain death; that not only does the breakdown of the memory signify the onset of age and the impending end, but that as the events are remembered inaccurately, or with a tremendous effort to bring back the tiniest pieces, as is the case in “Indianapolis (Highway 74)”, where the narrator cannot recall a lover who he had lived with when she is standing in front of him, enormous existential anxiety is created that often defines the narrator’s emotional landscape.

Fathers and sons find their way into many of the sections of the book, a theme that riddles much of Shepard’s earlier fiction as many times there are sons learning how to deal with the disappointment of an inadequate father and fathers dealing with the profundity and, at times, absurdity of being a parent. A striking example comes from the piece “Bernallilo” which mimics an older piece from a previous collection, where the narrator’s father is stumbling drunk out of a bar and is struck and killed by a car. Here the father’s death is framed in his inadequacy as he has ended up a drunk and the son must forever live with it as it has cost him his father and a small psychological disorder as he explains at the end that he is now forever afraid of being blindsided by cars. The violence with which this event occurs is wrought throughout the book. And it is not a violence that spreads itself against the action of a story in order that the characters or even reader learn from it, that it has some intrinsic value as to educate us in life or mature us, but is rather presented as simple fact, as what is a gross base part of life that has no value in growing consciousness but is simply one other thing that we as humans must digest. In dealing with this more specifically there are two running stories through out the book, though in their sections, they are more lyrical than narrative. One is of a decapitated head found on the side of the road and the other is of a mercenary. In the decapitated head thread the sections themselves do not have much violence but violence is the backdrop as the head had been violently removed from the body and the head, through an all permeating voice, gains the aid of a passerby to bring him to a lake and toss him in. It is the aftermath of the violence, the consuming horror of the ripples from the event that is concerned here as at first the passerby must deal with what is happening, then the narration moves on to the head itself and his concerns and regrets. The mercenary is straight violence, where this man is hired to kill a man, skin his face off his skull and bring it back to his contractors. He does. Later the mercenary becomes more self reflective, but never about the way he makes a living, the violence, as that is the sustenance of his life, not something to be derided or avoided. And between these two threads are the inevitable arguments and confrontations that lace every type of relationship of a tough and violent world where Shepard often delves into the historical past, of the battles and destruction that have shaped the landscape that is being driven through, observed and examined.

But the book is not all hardship and destruction, destitute anxiety and a meaninglessness that must be dealt with the best way a person can, there is also the triumph. Many of the pieces are lyrical, many without a specific narrative direction that lets the event portrayed unfold in what, at times, is close to being imagistic poetry. Here there are birds and rivers, there is the moon and memory is not something shot full of holes as it fades away, it is something not even considered as the world, many times with music, played or listened to, is exposed as a thing not destroying us with an inane and senseless self destructing rage, but a place, like many of those places along the highways of the American west, of a beauty that comes on unfathomable and satisfies some undefined thing in all of us.

the winter wind sits in the living room
so we huddle in the kitchenin our winter coats looking silly
and too cold to do anything
but light a candle eat melon seeds
as I wonder
what do we wear when we go outside?
— poem by Frances Chung, p. 25, 1970
from “Crazy Melon & Green Apples”

On November 8, 2009, I picked up the Village Voice because of its headline “The Great Walls of Chinatown Living in Cubicles @ 81 Bowery” by Elizabeth Dwoskin . It reminded me when while traveling through India, a rich X-boyfriend exclaimed, “How can they live like this?” (see photo-”A Delhi Untouchable”) I smiled & knew how & why because I grew up in Chinatown, NYC. Since then, after making me homeless, the X lives comfortably in Provincetown.

Meanwhile, reading the article, I find the writer makes landlord-tenant relations a Catch-22 even with the intervention of Dept. of Buildings’ evictions and judicial system’s re-installment of tenants. It’s a no win unprofitable game for the Chinese in America. Where are the low-income housings? Ms Dwoskin only describes the Bowery as its traditional vicinity for “losers”….never describing the evictions as a racist act benefiting the landlord. Obviously, it is a continuum battle for low-income families. Now, there is every reason for gentrifying the nabe.

An Untouchable in New Delhi, India © photo by Susan L. Yung

“Plenty” in her short life is what she wrote, knowledgably. She was emerging as a public figure to become a spokesperson for life in Chinatown, which is the Chinese immigrant story as reflected like the Jews of Lower East. In 1977, inside a “slum” ghettoized neighborhood, Frances prepared her first manuscript that she had “written a secret book entitled “Crazy Melon”. She submitted to various funding sources for publications and routinely, had been rejected. It would be a social class problem where at that time, (is the norm) … to be reckoned as amateurish writings by elite writers like Kimiko Hahn, graduate of Columbia University, or Kenneth Roth. Nevertheless, by 1980, Frances began to receive a poetry grant from New York State Council on the Arts-Creative Artists Public Service (NYSCCA CAPS) in 1980-81; A New York Times Co Foundation scholarship (1986); and a NYSCA Writer-in-Residence fellowship (1987-1988). This gave her confidence to submit her second manuscript, “Green Apple” for “conventional poetry competitions” such as the publication Walt Whitman Award sponsored by the Academy American Poets in NYC. Her brief poems, short vignettes and prose reflect her precise selection of words. Her sparse lines describes a single Asian woman’s (maybe feminist) subtle thoughts during the Ethnic (Black, Hispanic and Asian) Civil Rights movement of the 60s-80s. Her work is “not prophetic, but the creation of deeper silences in which to safeguard personal or community thought, feeling and relationships from the onslaught of real estate speculation, … exploitation by the garment industry, and the ideology of a nation at war against yet another Asian populace, the Vietnamese.” She never joined a union, a NGO organization or participated in Chinatown worker’s issues. Her sole participation had been in women’s writers groups of LES or whenever they had blossomed in the late 70s. Eventually, such women’s intellectual groups diminished in late 80s. Maybe, she lacked political motivations or to participate in any activities such as attending marches, rallies; demonstrations and other radical/revolutionary changes would stunt her career as educator.

In Frances Chung’s 40 years, she poetically, with a touch of sardonic humor, described the boundaries of NYC’s Chinatown from Canal St to the diverse culture of Lower East Side during the years of 1966-1990. She died in 1990. However, there is only one posthumously book that has been published by Wesleyan College and edited by Walter K. Lew, a poet and Korean-American scholar. He had total access of her two manuscripts to print this singular book entitled “Crazy Melon & Chinese Apple-the Poems of Frances Chung”. The book came out in 2000; 10 years after her tragic death and it took me twenty years later to find the book to peruse. By now, any trace of this poet’s qualitative experiences are forgotten and there are more writers of Asian American descent in NYC capable of writing about the same perpetual struggles as experienced in the 60s & 70s.

The paperback book has 144 pages of Frances’ poems, vignettes and prose writings with 30 pages of Walter K. Lew’s titles of “Commentary”, “About the Text” and “Appendix.” His intensive research and faithful chronology of her writings portrays the writer’s development from adolescent to a matured woman with speculative lovers as perceived by Walter K. Lew. He even directed her cover design that trivializes her manuscript into a small illustration. Frances’ intent is to utilize a Chinese wrapper’s design where she had scotch taped for her front manuscript, “Crazy Melon”. The wrapper enclosed dried sweet plums where Westerners are unfamiliar with its tart sweet taste and flavor. (Hard to explain.) I would prefer if the artwork had been blown-up full size to appreciate the candy wrapper’s artistry since it reflects the art of Asia. The cover’s design is important for marketing of the book’s contents especially if it is a foreign culture to an ignorant mainstream American culture.

Luckily, I had survived NYC’s various stereotypical labels and can enumerate or reflect the similar experiences as well as go beyond the melding compatibilities or incongruence of Eastern (mainland China) and Western cultures due to my various travels to third world nations. I seem to complete the cycle of growing up in a Chinatown and returning to the same ghetto/barrio problems that are also inherent throughout the world.

Frances and I were classmates in Junior High School and High School. I had moved into the Chinatown neighborhood at the age of 12 from 2 years in the Bronx and 10 years in Portland, Oregon, my birth state. NYC’s cultural shock had affected me grandly since my family in Portland, Oregon were the only Chinese living within a mile from another Chinese family. The NYC culture of finding Asian families of 7-10 people living in close vicinities crammed in three room apartments can be disorientating and especially in a classroom of 30 Chinese students who were highly smart with competitive grades. In addition, most of my classmates went to Chinese schools to learn reading and writing calligraphy as well as speak Cantonese from 3:30-5:30 at the Consolidated Benevolent Association on Mott St. Thus their capacities to be studious, smart, intellectually observant, lacking leisure time to enjoy competitive sports, artistic activities, attending social functions and events such as rock concerts, dating, dance mixers, and other social activities to mold and meld into mainstream culture. Instead, they became the model minority for other ethnic groups in NYC. These were high achievers whose parents were employed in the laundries, restaurant businesses and garment factories. There were some students whose parent’s were from Chinatown’s small businesses that lined the streets of Chinatown retaining the village traditions of Mainland China. Rarely, were their parents in the professional professions such as MDs, PhDs, lawyers, professors, architects, engineers, corporations, etc. Thus, the environment and experiences that Frances Chung grew up motivated her to be a role model for her classmates. Being a straight “A” student enabled her to escape a future of poverty. She expresses her hopes, childhood traumas, “observations” of the local, residential eccentrics and/or “eccentric.” happenings She traveled as a tourist or “was it a jet-setter lifestyle”? Upon her return to Chinatown as her home base, Frances makes comparisons of her world wind travels and her life in provincial Chinatown, as cited in the following lines:

The echoes of the night trucks
bouncing off the cobblestones
on Canal Street play on the
silences in my bones. Playing
games with the red and green
light on the corner of Mott and
Canal, we find an excuse to run—
we who know that those who are
brave cross Mott Street on a
diagonal. (page 4)

Her quick terse observations become humorously timeless. She purposely focused on her subjects depending on quick descriptions that embodies the brief moment, lingering the experience with unforgettable words different from her mother tongue. Her sensitive observations can, to a Westerner, be considered neurotic. She could be bipolar, a schizoid silently suffering the contradictions while developing a voice contrary to the Chinese traditions, as well as develop a vocabulary to emote feelings and subtly suggest a precocious mind.

…the young man stopping her in the street to say “Arigato” and then looking hurt when she explained she was not Japanese. And then the man whispered as she walked past on Mott Street “do you ever play with yourself? You and me … I could really sock it to you.”

Friends wrote from Europe wishing her a Happy Valentine’s Day. (p. 41)

…..blue mannequin eye. Some brides stood proudly without
heads, one-armed, even one naked bride with no nipples. (p. 34)

He will jump out of his hospital window. Before
you leave, he will ask you to bring toothpicks the next
time you come. (p.70)

the Mexican night
fresh smell of el campo
luciérnagas (p.118)

Her sharp wit encompasses the years of living in a confined, stifling community describing bitter hardships and taboo traditions that need broken as in:

There is a group of Chinese-American men who think of
themselves as Chinese warriors. They are beautiful
anachronisms. They study the martial arts, practice
calligraphy, consult the I Ching and go to sword flicks to
blow their minds. (p.61)

The reader can decipher double innuendos subtly expressed with select words as in

“…see her taking care of teacups in the
association. She seems imported.” (p.67)

These lines suggest the dormant domesticity of an immigrant woman. Frances abhors the servitude by highlighting the activity and ending in a simple statement. The word “association”, for a Chinese person, automatically indicates the family’s village name of colloquial China and their patriarchal history of migrating to America. It is the alternative social services provided in an insular community behind the gift shops, restaurants, & grocers familiar to tourists. However, due to the Exclusion Act of 1864 the sojourner men had to organize a methodology to legitimize a system of protection for their assimilations and survival in White dominating America. These family associations provided loans for small businesses, shelters for family arrivals, filed paper works for citizenships, provide translators, keep records of village members with same name sakes, locate separated family members, etc.

Often, Frances references the exotic teas, foods: Hispanic and Chinese as only some readers can experience due to their individual family upbringings. She reminisces her childhood of identifying peculiar actions as normal such as “banging on the kitchen table” and observing roaches scattering in seven directions which she states “I must reread “Metamorphosis”. She describes stealing a snail from a grocer’s stall and once in the apartment, “spraying drops of water from our fingers to see if it was home.” (p.28). These childhood memories are unusual little moments of joy for a ghetto child to ruminate.

Frances’ quick observant words express feelings that many Asian artists and writers lack. Most major AA writers only write about their ID crises whereby they are constantly dependent and too busy finding a role model to emulate. For example: for men it would be “Bruce Lee” and for women “Suzie Wong”. There are other occupations to be pre-occupying as filmmakers, photographers, writers, or musicians, poets etc. So in American history Asians will be portrayed or considered as some form of enemy as oppose to being just American. Maybe it is a rites of passage to call a Chink “Chink”, Japanese “Jap” and so on “whatever….” Thus we’ll be stuck as templates Bruce Lees and Suzy Wongs, the fundamental stereotypes for Americans to fall back on and thus stalemating the cultural definitions of Asian Americans. In the following poem, Frances indicates her rebellious attitude, minimizing the words:

We use newspaper for a
tablecloth. And when I
want to make my mother
sad I tell her that I’m
going to cook American
food when I get older. (p.52)

In the afterward section, Walter Lew did an intensive research of Frances short-lived life where many of her poems express the static turmoil of living/growing up in a ghetto and her desires to go beyond the boundaries of Chinatown as well as travel before settling into a sedate profession.

Frances had prepared two manuscripts for publications, “Crazy Melon” and “Chinese Apple”. The latter has “a richer conception of the scope and achievement of Chung’s writing” as described by Lew. He footnoted and charted France’s chronological progress of writing each poem, prose etc. This can be quite obsessive and stringently limiting for further interpretations since we will never witness Frances’ full maturity through her writings. Her early form of expression and early writings of an Asian American woman is obliterated by other living women writers. Frances Chung’s sensitive works precedes the west coast notables Maxine Kingston Hong and Amy Tan. These two women write about the first generation Chinese coping with an unfamiliar culture in a new country while Frances reflects the struggles of living in a ghettoized neighborhood. Her subtle words slowly stings with angry. Unfortunately, she never expressed it through participatory demonstrations, joined any grassroots organizations, be a political activist or bona fide artist. She just became a teacher in the Lower East Side and slowly submitted her ms to various funding sources. It took awhile for recognition but by then it became too late. To know the source of her brain tumor … was it from too much overuse in being a straight A student or the adult stresses of being Asian in a Hispanic community or never understanding a loved one?

In her poems, Frances’ last lines as experienced in the ghetto, constantly stings the mind with ironies that reaches a certain level of timeless miseries. Often it can be stifling and her escape route would be

“…every cockroach that runs across
my mind
whispers that I haven’t seen Peking.” (p. 44)

Here are a few other extracted last lines:

“everything in life being guesswork
cooking without teaspoons
eternal windowshoppers
we women were sometimes like children (p.60)

Chinese New Year …….Banners
across Chinatown. So many dragons to
follow. Oranges to cut. Shrimp chips
flowering. (p. 24)

When I went to JHS 65 on Forsyth St, many of my friends were fascinated with Frances’ straight A grades and her competitiveness to outshine their intelligences. I seemed to only surpass her with my math and history grades. However, I felt her quiet complacent solitude disturbing as an introvert incapable to speak out or make complaints as I became rebellious to NYC’s education system and often spoke my mind to various teachers. Even when we were in Washington HS, an all girl’s school, Frances kept to herself and achieved all the straight A’s. After graduation, she managed to go to an elite school, Smith College with scholarships while I attended Hunter College. After college, I participated in a non-profit cultural organization, Basement Workshop to become an expressive artist. Via this organization, with other peer groups of identical begrudges, we were able to culminate in a Confucius Plaza demonstration as our civil rights movement.

However, Frances shied from such demonstrative activities and would submit her manuscripts to the Basement Workshop in the hopes of publication. The organization was too busy dealing with internal logistics of mobilizing volunteers into a collective consciousness and administering an arts space to prevent street gangs rather than finance a publication. At that time, she had finished her 2 years foray in the Peace Corps situated in Central and South America. In addition, she taught in LES as a trilingual teacher, Spanish, Chinese, & English. Poetry became her outlet of expression and she taught poetry at St. Mark’s Project and Henry St. Settlement. She was able to receive 3 poetry awards: NYSCA CAPS (1980-81), NY Times Co. Foundation scholarship (1986) and a NYSCA Writer-in Residence fellowship (1987-88). Besides South America, she traveled extensively to Europe, Asia and Africa. Frances was slowly becoming acknowledged until she was overtaken by her brain tumor. Thus after her death does her poems become a significant testimony to a life style that is slowly disappearing due to encroaching gentrification of Chinatown after LES’s final gentrification.

I find myself falling into Frances’ affinities and identify closely with her struggles that it often becomes painful to reflect how our lives are parallel of self-destruction and resurrections. However, in the late 80s, Frances fell a victim of an institution’s negligence. Once diagnosed, she underwent surgery. While in a coma, Frances was injected with antibodies that the doctors had unknowingly been unaware of her allergies. During her unconsciousness, she died with the poison burning through her veins. I also had the same allergy reaction when recuperating from surgery and luckily; I was conscience to complain the burning sensation coursing through my veins. The doctors were able to counter the poisonous drug with the correct antibody.

As Frances relies on selected words to describe a lifestyle in Chinatown, I tend to record with a camera, stills and videos. Thus, I been able to also travel, record and compare similarities of foreignness and isolated observations on the hopes that social changes would be evitable, especially in the socio-economic improvements. However, little has evolved through such expressions in the arts to expedite these social changes. As Asians, we are still imbued with stereotypical labels due to mainstream resistances. Recently in the past year of 2008, there had been a rash of fires and evictions occurring in Chinatown. For example, in 2008, on a very cold winter night, prompted by a landlord’s complaints, the Department of Buildings evicted 50 Chinese men from their SRO rooms and relocated them up in the Bronx. These men were unable to read or speak English and were alienated in a Hispanic community. With the assistances of the young determined community activists of Chinese Americans Against Anti-Violence (CAAAV) and the rallying efforts of Chinatown Tenants Union (CTU), it took a year for the men to return to their familiar environment-Chinatown.

There are more Chinese bums
In the neighborhood now. No
one knows where they come from
but they appear with crazy
smiles and unshaven faces.
One of them looks like a poet. (p.19)

Did ALL these poems caused her brain to develop a tumor? Was it the wait and frustration of submitting her ms to publishing houses and the constant rejections? Or the wait until other Asian friends could print them in “another Asian” collective anthology every 10 years. She had been a member of Ordinary Women, Basement Workshop, St Marks Poetry Project, and Henry St Settlement. Like Iris Chang’s tragic suicide in 2004 (a well known published writer of Chinese American History who died at the age of 38. See my written article entitled: Iris Chang: A Deceased Role Model Minority). Both died in the same age range which can be suspiciously speculative. Frances’ goals were the same … to explain 20th century modern hardships in order to become an artistic entity as a writer & poet. In the 21st century, Chinatown is being gentrified where many prime properties are converted to skyscrapers leaving nothing to be preserved or become historic landmarks, to retrace and hide the miseries of the still inherent oppressions of an ethnic immigrant slum life.

Frances Chung subliminal speculative poems & prose writings describe the barrios/ghettoes like Jacob Riis’ photos of LES. She praises or glorifies no mentors, persons, or spiritual beings. The reader is introduced to a lifestyle that Luc Sante, writer of “Low Life”, might write if he was Asian. Frances might be described as the sweet, romantic Asian American “muckrakers” who unlike the anarchist, Emma Goldman, wrote about her present situation in the hopes of being published as a contemporary writer.

Like an American pioneer, Frances Chung’s writings are before her time. Her narrative voice preludes the writings of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Frances’ enduring words have historic significance as her voice transcends and echoes the 20th Century innocence of life in a slum/ghettoe/barrio during an era of restitution and reconstruction of an American eye sore called “oppression and racism” which leads us to our present situation of Age of Terrorism and Anarchism. As gentrification encroaches and eradicates areas of ol’ Chinatown starting from Park Row’s middle class neighborhood to Mott St’s small businesses, Frances words will haunt my generation while the next generation welds with the New Recession with unemployments, scapegoatings, glass ceilings, inflationary rent increases, lack of labor skills, lack of artists reflecting a minorities’ subculture.

RIP, Frances Chung

Welcome to the Labyrinth of multiple negatives. Books so bad they’re
perfect to pillory populate the latest Unbearables anthology, a
lavish production whose reach tries strenuously to exceed its grasp; but
nobody grasps like an Unbearable. The world is their oyster and it isn’t
easily digestible.
Even without counting graphic artists such as David Sandlin, Kaz, and
Ken Brown, over 70 contributors take pot shots at the books that bother
them, and they don’t waste time on trash. Each takes a tangent off the
concept and few look back, that’s not how they roll. Some state their
premise clearly like a survey response or an assignment, others go after
imaginary titles (Jerome Sala) or their own work (Ron Kolm). The work is
at its most enjoyable when core members wallow in self-mythologizing,
inventing characters out of each other. bart plantenga turns in a
novelesque tale of proofreaders driven too far, Mike Randall paints the
Unbearable Big Fish as “relentlessly cruising the shallow water for
talent that will cough up some ‘edgy’ material for less than scale.”
Tribulations of the writer’s life are the one keen constant.
Despite some targets being hit more than once, like the Bible, James
Joyce, and the Chicago Manual of Style, no two entries are alike. Some
of the Beats are back for another drubbing, along with their parasitic
hangers-on, taken out by Gerald Nicosia and Mike Golden, while Henry
Darger and Barbie hide behind Gertrude Stein. Lit pop-stars like Sedaris
and Chabon, icons like Ballard, Borges, Mailer and Calvino are roasted
as well, more for being distracting or disappointing than execrable.
By digging into the books that have riled them up, this pack of
writer/proles has levitated a pungent Pentagon of provoking prose out of
a hole greater than some of its parts.

Published by Autonomedia, paper, 16.95$

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
Reviewed by Poonam Srivastava

Amitav Ghosh is a world-renowned best selling author. After reading Sea of Poppies I see why. He is a damn good storyteller. The subject of Sea of Poppies is vast and rich. Despite the huge intellectual effort that is required by the writer of such a historical epic, readers are served a tale that takes them easily by the heart. Ghosh sets his work in the world of the early global economy at the beginnings of the nineteenth century, India 1830s. The economy of the British Empire is in its transformation from the export / import of slaves from Africa to indentured servants from the subcontinent. The first Opium War is a mere decade or so away when the Ibis sails into the Hooghly River preparing to load up.

The ship is named for the ibis bird. The mascot of the University of Miami is an American White Ibis. The ibis was selected as the school mascot because of its legendary bravery during hurricanes. The ibis is the last sign of wildlife to take shelter before a hurricane hits and the first to reappear once the storm has passed. Miami’s sports teams are nicknamed “The Hurricanes”(Wikipedia)

The Ibis is about to face many hurricanes. This majestic ex-slave ship is meant to carry a cast of passengers and crew that include an unlikely amalgam of souls: from both the East: India and China; and West: Britain – of course, but also France, and the U.S. — from every class: from the Raja who exults in the noble art of flying kites with his heir apparent to the lowest of the low — a giant of a Dalit who eats road kill and dares to disobey society’s dictums. A hurricane is brewing that will cause these souls to choose sides on their voyage across the Black Water. A hurricane is also gathering between the forces of these economies: the Chinese, the Indians, the merchants and the governments.

The writer presents all the key players in a story about the basics of human existence. He shows the various existences that keep them true to their stations. There are beautifully crafted moments portraying fully the effect of Erwin Goff’s understanding of institution. (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959) Ghosh’s brilliance is that he doesn’t content himself with description of the everyday. He goes further. He shows the raw passions that rule despite the social pressures and norms; he studies the inner mechanisms of meaning-formation. His women are free even within their total subjections to their men. His men are powerless whether mere kings of their households or actual sons of royal blood holding lands as far as the eye can see.

Sea of Poppies opens up with Deeti’s vision. She is called Deeti, short for her given name. She is also called mother of Kabutri. She has married well and is a dutiful member of her new home, a village near Ghazipur – an inland suburb of a medium sized city nearly two days journey away. Her husband is a respected worker of import in the local opium factory that has in the past generation appropriated the lands of this fiefdom. Where people had gardens that allowed subsistence as well as money, there is now only debt. So, despite Deeti’s being well off and dutiful she has her own pool of troubles. Not the least of it is that her husband is an addict to the stuff he produces. He is completely incapable of any of his duties except to go to work and come home. How she conceived Kabutri on the night of her wedding, which took her virginity, is something Deeti would rather not think about. In the ten years of married life she knows that there were more than the usual bride and groom present in her opium drenched wedding bed. The bruises on her wrists that first morning after her wedding night given her husband’s physical reality suggested a mystery that she uncovers much to her disgust and shame.

The vision of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean, came to Deeti on an otherwise ordinary day, but she knew instantly that the apparition was a sign of destiny, for she had never seen such a vessel before, not even in a dream: how could she have, living as she did in Northern Bihar, four hundred miles from the coast. Her village was so far inland that the sea seemed as distant as the nether-world: it was the chasm of darkness where the holy Ganga disappeared into the Kala-Pani, ‘the Black Water.’

This first paragraph sets us up so quickly for the great adventure that is this book; for the many great adventures that it contains. Deeti’s journey is just as important to the reader as that of the raja, or the servant boy of the French botanist’s estate, or the half Negro sailor that brings the Ibis physically in front of Deeti’s eyes, or the big hulk of a man who is whipped and raped by the royal guards for falling out of favor, or the British shipping mogul that has just converted his slave ship into opium carrier only to discover that the Chinese aren’t buying it any more. The action moves quickly towards fortunes made and lost; loves betrayals and surprises, and the ineffable surfacing and resurfacing of the human spirit being slapped by wave after wave of circumstance.
Jodu was not among those who was hoping for an all-out fight, and he was unreservedly glad when another voice rang across the deck to put an end to the altercation: ‘Avast there…Bas!’

With the two malums going at it hank for hank, no one had noticed the Kaptain coming on deck: …He was much older…for the effort of climbing up the side-ladder had robbed him of his wind, sending streams of perspiration down his face…“Stash it there, you two! Enough with your mallemarking.”

What one is treated to through the 468 pages is a delicious attention not only to plot and historical accuracy but to voice and sound. The book gracefully incorporates the various versions of language of the colonized and the colonizers and brings the sound quality to a higher resolution to give each character his or her distinct cadence and tone. Sea of Poppies is a delight to the inner ear as well as the inner eye. It is a soulful book that can be digested on many levels. No mere rant, this novel moves the reader to a place beyond understanding. The ending is a cliffhanger that has this reader aching to begin the second book.

I highly recommend this novel to all but the most prudish.

AMERICA’S CHILD by Susan Sherman

      reviewed by Bonny Finberg

       The phenomenon of the Sixties did not arrive via Zeus’s head, pre-fab with a face and a name. It was the frisson created between dissidents and revolutionary thinkers, from both the political and cultural spheres, and the powers that be. And let’s not forget those whose survival depends on the powers that be, at any time in history, which covers just about everybody.

       The Sixties were a bend in the river—-a river that seems to be in danger of going the way of the Rio Grande—dried up. Susan Sherman traces the gathering currents of this river at the confluence between some of its major tributaries. For her it begins in Los Angeles in the Forties and Fifties, which was by then the heart of America’s image-making machine. Her transformation follows the larger social trajectory of a country that rose victorious and prosperous from a world war. First are her frustrated early attempts to keep step with the world of toothpaste smiles, tidy lawns, backyard barbeques, martini cocktail hours, and non-filtered cigarettes. With her move to Berkley at nineteen, and the ensuing, age-specific progression of influences, relationships and their resulting liberations and limitations, she begins her five-decade investigation into political and social change and the power and beauty of language.

       America’s Child, Susan Sherman’s moving and engaging book, begins in a movie theater watching the documentary “Control Room.” This takes her back to a memory of sitting in a similar room in Havana in 1969. As one of a small group of Americans among a larger group of Vietnamese students, she watches a documentary about the American bombing of North Vietnam. There is footage of an American plane being shot down. The audience, both her American companions and the Vietnamese, applauds and cheers wildly. In her characteristic way, Sherman doesn’t leave it at that. She reminds us that she is recalling these events from an older and wiser place, explaining that she remained silent, feeling conspicuous and conflicted. This is very much a personal history not an analytic one. We are never left to wonder about her perceptions and reactions. Her memoir reads like a novel where the depth of its characters and the way they initiate or react to events are windows into a historical place and time. Considering the current, sometimes scandalous, fashion of offering fiction as memoir, Sherman’s ability to weave together events and people provides the merits of both.

       1969 was a pivotal year of the 1960’s. It was post May ’68 when it could be said that the Flower Children went postal. It was many complications after the underground burblings of a few, isolated individuals found each other and began constructing communities made up of intellectual revolutionaries dedicated to social change. By 1969 the media had created its own version of “rebellious youth,” Hippy Fashion had pervaded large department store windows and had taken root in the very suburban lifestyles it meant to undermine.  Starting with that glimpse of where she had landed in 1969, she then takes us further back to Berkley 1958. We are allowed an intimate view of the awaking of a young girl: a developing poet increasingly involved in acts of peaceful civil disobedience, also discovering that she loves women. Her romantic enthusiasm, not yet fully activated, had yet to find its wave. At what point might she have realized she was part of its force?

       In 1958 “Nonconformist” had become a buzzword for a relatively small group of ”free thinkers” and dissenters. They challenged the material and social achievements of the post-war middle class, threatening to dismantle most of the fundamental beliefs in the American ideal. The American character had transformed itself from the struggling, industrious, average Joe into the white-collar corporate ideal living a cookie cutter, suburban lifestyle. This was actually just an updated version of the poor worker enslaved by 19^th century industrialists transplanted into the expanding corporate, service industry structure. The only difference was that now the slaves wore grey flannel suits and ties. This new group of bearded, long-haired people who didn’t clean under their nails or wear make-up saw themselves as the true “rugged individualists”—Americans who would exercise, and, thereby protect, the U.S. Constitution as fervently as any Conservative Republican ever claimed to.

       Sherman sets out to bridge the separation in time between who she was and who she has become. The turning point for her is moving to Berkley where she fortuitously meets and lives with the poet Diane Wakowski and her lover, avant guarde musician, La Monte Young, also students at the University. Wakowski and Young take a somewhat protective role, much like surrogate parents. The apartment building on Telegraph Avenue is filled with artists and writers who pass their work around, reading aloud in dark, candle-lit rooms strewn with empty bottles of cheap jug wine. This living situation provided a sense of finally having found one’s true family. It was as if, despite having grown up with one’s birth parents, feeling you’ve been left with foster parents, you now discover a new, exotic life—the one you can and will choose:

    To discover the world you have known since childhood is not the only world is probably the most important discovery in a person’s life, because it is to discover the possibility of, not one, but many alternatives. It is to discover the possibility of choice.

       Of course this was at a time when the American economy was booming and it was possible to work just enough to pay your rent and live on the fringe if you didn’t mind eating rice and beans and whatever you might be able to shoplift now and then. It was a generation that prided itself on rejection of TV and advertising, creating its own, alternative media. The phenomenon of the internet might not have evolved in the free-for-all, anarchistic way it did, at least in its early days, without the preceding flood of grassroots media, like The East Village Other, WBAI, street and avant guard theater, most importantly, the Living Theater, decades before. Art and literature thrived with new blood and ideas; movements were started. There was cross germination among writers, painters, dancers and musicians. It was a time of prolific cultural activity in the company of acute political self-education. The Living Theater, the Performance Group, Joe Chaiken’s Open Theater, Larry Rivers, Jasper Johns, La Monte Young, Charlotte Mormon and Fluxus. Among these was Sherman’s IKON magazine. The struggles with financing and governmental surveillance that she describes, the dedication and sacrifice often required for survival, can be applied to all radical artistic venues of that time. Although the Beats had become an icon to the mainstream by then, they still lived and worked within this larger community of poets, visual and performance artists, part of a bigger wave. In a sense it was America’s Renaissance. But, unlike the earlier European one, it flourished in opposition to the Church and wealthy elite, rather than its sponsorship. 

       Herbert Marcuse had written “Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory” less than twenty years before Susan Sherman entered Berkley. But these students and artists had incorporated the idea, whether knowingly or not, that only rational thought should determine the rights and freedoms of the individual, a member of a species whose determining characteristic is the capacity for reason, or rational thought. In the midst of this cultural renaissance and political awaking were sources of moral outrage. Desegregation of the schools had been unanimously voted as upholding the 14^th amendment of Equal Protection Under the Law in 1954. However, true racial integration would still be a long way off.

       The overriding issue was the Vietnam War. Feminism and Gender Politics would eventually grow out of the internal struggles of the movement itself, but in the early stages the perception was that an illegal and immoral war stood for all that was wrong in Western society and economic policy. Sherman’s journeys to Cuba, for example, proved to be not only moving experiences for her on a social and interpersonal level, but on a more practical one as well. Doctors in New York had diagnosed her with an enlarged gall bladder and duodenal ulcer, requiring a month long stay in a hospital. Having no health insurance, she was given some codeine and sent on her agonized way. On a previous trip she’d met Castro’s doctor, René Vallejo. After some correspondence, he invited her to Cuba to receive treatment. It was on this trip, after her recovery, that she was given a private meeting with Castro at a gymnasium where he played basketball with his ministers after midnight, the only free time they had. They spoke for almost an hour about her experiences in a Cuban hospital and the status of the student movement and the New York art community’s reactions to the Vietnam War. The details of this dialogue make for fascinating reading. It is a rare, open discussion between the successful leader of a large revolution, maintaining order and his own power against the antagonism of a larger, more powerful nation, and a poet living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan struggling to keep an underground literary journal going against the antagonisms of the same nations. The accessibility of Castro to someone who had no name or status beyond a small group of young poets and activists is what impresses the reader as much as the discussion itself.

       Sherman’s explorations, and it does almost read like those 19^th century, adventurous journeys into untrammeled territory, covered every aspect of the richly textured time and place in which she lived. It brought her into contact with many of the major figures that formed our current perceptions, attitudes, values and artistic vocabularies. Her experiences with psychedelics, for example, are not merely the same tired hallucinatory revelations of many who tried to convey such experience, but are infused with her characteristic humor as well. She goes to the Fillmore East, a large rock palace on Second Avenue, to see a lecture by Timothy Leary. She’d heard some horrible stories about the man, but tried to keep an open mind. But when he instructs his audience to “Just pretend for sixty seconds I am the wisest man on earth,” she tells her friend, “I don’t have that good an imagination,” and heads for the nearest exit.

       By the author’s own account, she sees her memoir as an imagined conversation between the girl she was and the woman she is now. Fortunately, for us, and for future generations curious about what the Sixties were all about in New York City, she has chosen to write it down.

       -Bonny Finberg

       June, 2008

        Paris

      By Zadie Smith

      Reviewed by Bonny Finberg

      I’ve been thinking about reincarnation and Zadie Smith— wondering if the tremendous insight and breadth of her vision are the result of many lives lived. But the more I think about it, the more convinced I become by the simpler idea that she experiences and processes what she sees and hears more deeply and quickly than most people do. There is always the sense of play as she gives us an unobstructed view of those things that transcend gender, class, and race—that is, most things at the core of being—delivered with immense humor and compassion for all concerned. The narrative occurs naturally out of the various intersections between these people, taking place in this Present World that we all wake up to and sleep as reprieve from, whatever Them or Us we belong to.

      Let’s start with Howard Belsey: an opinionated, hubristic type who knows what’s right, and insists that others take heed, while he fights various losing battles between his sexual boredom and his last stabs (no pun intended) at fading lust, not to mention his interminably “soon to be published” treatise on how Rembrandt has been overrated. He is an Englishman who teaches art history at a prestigious New England University through the lens of his left leaning politics, loves his African American wife, Kiki, and has raised three children, now teenagers, who have variously grown into Belsey-adherents or rebels, depending on their gender and age. Zora is her daddy’s girl, passionately aspiring to academic accomplishment and intellectual vigor. Jerome, being the oldest son, also follows his father’s intellectual path into academia, though he veers into forbidden territory, having gone on holiday to London, where he is staying with the family of Howard’s right wing nemesis, Monty Kipps. Howard and Monty are engaged in an ongoing academic feud about what constitutes Good vs. Bad Art. Easily acclimated into the Kipps milieu, Jerome finds himself in love with Victoria, the luscious Kipps daughter. This becomes further complicated by developments that would qualify as bordering on the surreal. Levi Belsey, 15 years old, is in the throes of teendom, and intent on hiding the fact that he lives in a privileged college town with the privileges afforded the family of a respected academic in a respected American University. He, rather, talks the talk and walks the walk of young Black men 250 miles away in New York City (none of the Belseys can figure out how he learned to talk like that) wears a head stocking, writes Rap lyrics, and gets involved with some African “Brothers,” street vendors, selling pirated DVD’s, CD’s and designer bag knockoffs. Howard and Kiki are both recuperating, at least trying to, from the crisis of Kiki’s discovery that Howard had a one-night stand.

      All the people but one in this novel have some physical flaw that puts their beauty into question, compensated for by some other virtue like wisdom, wit, talent or youth. This is most prominently true for Kiki Belsey, who at 54 has gained considerable weight since the time when she and Howard were young lovers brought together by sex and radical politics. Forthright, wise and emanating a beauty and style of her own, she tries to accept these changes gracefully, particularly challenging in the face of Howard’s own slip from grace. Howard’s attempts at damage control, on the other hand, are poignantly transparent, awkward, and familiar.

      Kiki and Howard, on a family outing, stand in line for a concert in the park, with their three children:

  Kiki began to giggle. Now Howard let go of Zora and held his wife instead, gripping her from behind. His arms could not go entirely around her, but still they walked in this manner down the small hill towards the gates of the park. This was one of the little ways in which he said sorry. They were meant to add up each day.

      Kiki, cautiously inching closer to forgiveness in the glow of a milestone anniversary and its requisite party, is further cast down the rabbit hole. Howard continues to try to “get out of this one,” stumbling, and yielding to temptation with the sad weakness of the 1950’s sitcom husband: Stupid Loveable Louse.

      Though in truth, no one in this novel comes across as a stereotype, quite the opposite, and no one is actually stupid. They only act stupid, often against their own best interests, and some more than others. The smartest choices and observations generally fall to the women. That brings us to the one exception in this book of flawed beauty. Victoria Kipps, possibly named after the lingerie line of the same name, is the ideal centerfold masturbation fantasy and she plays this (most hilariously during a sex scene) to the max. This eponymous Victoria has quite a few secrets of her own. While her characterological flaws mar her physical perfection, all the other paunch-bellied, ass-sagging, bespectacled, prominent-fore headed, awkward teen-aged humans are trying to do the right thing, even if imperfectly, with good intentions and relative humility.

      The Belseys and their friends and foes are people that one could easily know, or at least might have come into contact with. You don’t know how this will all come out until the last page, and even then, just as in life, there is still room for another turn of events, another slip up, a change of mind. It’s not over till it’s over and so, at its end, after you’ve closed the book and these fictional intimates are silenced, you may find yourself wishing for a sequel, or even a trilogy.

Lucky Girls by Nell Freudenberger

   Reviewed by Bonny Finberg

        Nell Freudenberger’s first story ever to be published, the title story of this collection, was chosen as one of four by “debut writers” for the New Yorker 2001 Summer Fiction Issue. Her first book, a collection of  skillfully wrought short stories, is impressive in its insight, honesty, and observation.

      Four of the stories take place in Asia, the main characters being young women, in their early 20’s, enjoying the privileges of their native country and tender age. The only exception is the 17-year-old first person narrator of the last story, “Letter from the Last Bastion.” She is the unacknowledged daughter of a famous writer teaching at an American university and, despite her relatively “under” privileged status, raised by a single working mother, is on her way to optometry school. When Freudenberger writes from the point of view of characters, closer in age and experience, she has a sturdy  grip of her characters. She portrays the parents of her characters with a sharp knife, exposing a little more than expertly carved stereotypes.

      For example, when drawing the character of the 17-year-old girl who writes the letter forming the last story we are told that her single-working mother chose to become impregnated by the college professor so that her baby would have his genes, has worked hard all of her daughter’s life in order to save for her college tuition. All of the following sections of the letter concerning the mother take place in the past, when she was young and tender and impressed by older intellectual professors. This reader couldn’t help but wonder about the unfolding of her life, the adult this mother became.

      “The Orphan”  is told through the mother, Alice’s, point of view. She has gone to her daughter Mandy’s rescue after an hysterical phone call from Bankok,  where she volunteers in an orphanage, claiming her boyfriend has beaten and raped her. Some moments evoke recognizable familial dynamics in a certain class in pre-, modern-, post- and contemporary-modern America. In this, Freudenberger displays a Cheever-esque intimacy with the failings of privilege and comfort. The existentially challenged dealing with too much of a good thing. Alice fantasizes about reconciling with her amicably estranged husband, who has taken up with a much younger woman. Maybe they could adopt one of the orphans and start allover again. On a visit to the orphanage, she is invited by Mandy to hold an unhealthy looking baby, who spits up. She recalls the Bankok mall where they’d shared a family lunch, where she could ride the elevator and be in clean, familiar surroundings. We come back to her at the end in a tense moment in a Bankok hotel in the ambivalent conjugal bed. For Alice, the combined estrangement and familiarity is deep and painful, the thread connecting them fragile. These scenes seem to arise from a daughter’s eyes having observed the mysterious relationship between the two who raised her, interpreting it through her own experience of a broken heart, though most of the people in these stories get their hearts broken and one gets the sense that they will all get their hearts broken eventually.

      There is nothing inherently bad about being born rich, no guarantees one way or  the other whether privilege will lead to fame, fortune and bad behavior instead of enlightened, socially responsibility; anymore than being poor ensures progeny who are insensitive, undereducated oafs. We know this is possible on both sides of the tax cuts. If we refuse to prejudge people, based on something they were born to, we have to do it all the way.

      Anyone looking for the exotic, hedonistic or philosophical exploits of the Spiritually Driven, drug induced or otherwise, will be disappointed. The razor’s edge is blunted, here, for internal use. These stories of infidelity, rebellion, albeit in the form of working in an orphanage in Thailand, not hash smuggling. A teenager loses her virginity with her tutor, not the leader of a Shiva cult. Each character is struggling with being the “other,” whether through the initial shock of arrival or being a long term ex-patriot. None of these characters go native. In fact, even when decrying in adolescent exasperation that her parents just don’t get it, telling her mother that when her boyfriend hit, then raped her, maybe, well just maybe, it turned her on, this is still a naive coed from Connecticut after all. Many have arrived at this sexual awakening on college campuses all over the U.S of A. There’s something patriotic in these ostensible ex-pats living in some American version of the Raj.

By Ava Chin
In Ma Jian’s virtuosic novel “Beijing Coma,” we are locked inside the head of Dai Wei—coma victim and student casualty of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Positioned between the tragedy of Tiananmen and China’s rising economic prominence—exemplified here by preparations for the Beijing Olympics—the narrative finds a comatose Dai Wei, after taking a bullet to the head from a soldier the night of June 4^th, 1989, flashing back upon his life.
Growing up as the son of a “rightest”—a lead violinist in National Opera Company, who under Mao’s Cultural Revolution was imprisoned in a forced labor camp and experiencing countless acts of torture—Dai Wei and his family must constantly negotiate the watchful eye of the Peoples’ Party and its army of corrupt and controlling police that punish children for possessing the wrong kind of literature and encourage citizens to inform on each other.

Later, as a biology student at the prestigious Beijing University (the Harvard of China), Dai Wei becomes a leader in charge of security during the student democracy movement. Here, Ma Jian skillfully illustrates the rising sense of hope and desire for change among the earnest, at times squabbling students—children who grew up in the wake of the Cultural Revolution—as they attempt to organize and convene on Tiananmen Square. But the events that unfold changes all of the characters lives, and a soldier’s bullet lands Dai Wei straight into an iron-bed at his mother’s apartment.
The major bulk of Dai Wei’s memories—his Beijing childhood with an artistic, intellectual father in the labor camps, the various women Dai Wei loved, and the events of the student democracy movement of 1989—are intercut with a present-time narrative where his mother, care-taker and member of the persecuted Falun Gong, sells his urine and one of his kidneys to pay for his medical expenses, student friends who have moved on to become businesspeople visit with less frequency, and the very building in which they live is slated for demolition to make way for the Olympics.
Though comatose, Dai Wei is alert, aware of his surroundings, and shifting through memories. Throughout the narrative, a tour-de-force that leaves you feeling kicked in the stomach—and more than happy to continue reading on the floor—Ma Jian weaves love, despair, and acts of desperation under the threat of death. It’d be a difficult pill to swallow, if not for the sheer poetry of Ma Jian’s prose: “Your mouth is a locked door without a key,” and “Your body is a felled tree, decaying on the ground.”
Ma Jian, who lives in exile in London, has created a tightly woven, incisive narrative that is, like most images and commentary on the Tiananmen Massacre, banned in China. This is the 20^th anniversary of the tragedy where thousands of students and workers were crushed under government tanks and gunfire, but the newest generation of Beijing University students know little about the events spear-headed by their predecessors.
The comatose but very much alive Dai Wei stands in for the Chinese citizenry, witnesses to the changing tides of martial law and economic forces but ultimately left with few alternatives. Some flee, some join the capitalist bandwagon, others practice an outlaw mixture of New Age-y chigong.
In “Beijing Coma,” ordinary people like Dai Wei and his mother are posited in the center, refusing to leave—for where is there for them to go?—even as the bulldozers approach, ripping up trees and pavement, readying the way for Olympic stadiums and Bird’s Nests.

Colson Whitehead

Doubleday

Reviewed by Sarah Goodwin-Nguyen

It’s fun to compare Colson Whitehead’s SAG HARBOR to another recent novel

about the life of a teenaged preppie, specifically PREP by Curtis Sittenfeld. Interestingly, the narrators of both novels are now in their adulthood, looking back at themselves as teenagers. However, PREP’s protagonist, Lee Fiora, is a Midwestern-Caucasion girl on scholarship in a New England boarding school, while SAG HARBOR’s Benji Cooper is an African-American boy who attends a mostly white prep school near his Manhattan home.

Whereas the reader of PREP inhabits the mind of a girl unable to “be herself” in a hostile adolescent environment, SAG HARBOR takes place in a situation where Benji feels most himself. You see, this isn’t about Benji’s life at school; it takes place in an all-black beach community in the Hamptons where Benji’s family spends summers . Though we get glimpses of Benji’s life in prep school, it seems far away and irrelevant (the way school often feels to a kid on summer break.)

Most readers will recognize themselves at fifteen in Benji. Like many fifteen-year-olds, Benji is socially awkward, too fond of junk food, and vulnerable to peer pressure. Benji will reach a few milestones that summer, such as getting his braces off and making out with a girl. He will learn a little bit about himself, and will become a little more the man he’s going to be. SAG HARBOR is not as cuttingly observant or bittersweet as PREP, relying instead on the narrator’s mostly amusing anecdotes about trying to score beer, buddy up to the guys with cars, and avoid losing an eye to a bee-bee gun.

That is not to say that SAG HARBOR doesn’t have its dark moments. Benji’s father is a drunk who is often verbally and sometimes physically abusive. Benji and his younger brother are left alone in the Hampton house for weeks at a time (it is assumed that the community will look after them;) the boys’ young lives are overshadowed by parental neglect. A surprise encounter with Benji’s estranged older sister, Elena, is particularly painful, as Elena’s hip, wise soul plays a foil to Benji’ sadly apathetic mother.

Sometimes Whitehead’s exuberant writing lingers too long and with too much hyperbole on minutiae. For example, here’s Whitehead’s narrator describing his younger self’s love for Coca-Cola: “How could one not be charmed by the effervescent joviality of a tall glass of the stuff–the manic activity of the bubbles, popping, reforming, popping anew, sliding up the inside of the glass to freedom, as if the beverage were actually, miraculously, caffeinated on itself. That tart first sip, preferably with ice knocking against the lips for an added sensory flourish, that stunned the brain into total recall of pleasure, of all the Cokes consumed before and all those impending Cokes, the long line of satisfaction underpinning a life.”

Overzealous rants aside, SAG HARBOR offers a convincing picture of what it was like growing up black in the eighties. Benj’s opinions on television, music, and clothes are a funky time-capsule of pop culture of the era. At first, Benji can only compare his life of affluence to the poor African-American families portrayed on shows like Good Times and Baby, I’m Back, noting “Me and Reggie and Elena tuned in, making room on the couch to verify that we didn’t exist.” Finally, The Cosby Show: “Who are these people? We said: People we know.”

There is little chance of SAG HARBOR joining the cannon of great coming-of-age literature in the vein of CATCHER IN THE RYE. Though Benji encounters some racism and bigotry in his life, SAG HARBOR is not about confronting these issues. Nor does it need to be: it is enough that Whitehead has given African-American youth a genuine, likeable voice in the character of Benji. This is really how teenaged boys think, act, and speak–and it isn’t always pretty or politically correct. There are inevitable moments of violence as Benji and his friends struggle with their identities as young black men, but none of them fall so far as to be unredeemable.

Overall, SAG HARBOR is a perfect light summer read with just enough depth to engage. It succeeds in reminding us of teenaged summers when anything seemed possible. You were sure you could change your life simply by wearing a new style of clothes, and you still had plenty of time to get everything right.