Foreigner?

A New Neighborhood Diary "There is the same foreignness ..." June 20, 2017 There is a same foreignness about this town, the same as the town I came from that I didn’t feel I belonged. The streets are not paved according to code and the shops give one an askew feeling. And any time one could encounter a wild lion pouncing out of a men’s clothing store. I tread gingerly. I have been here for nearly a year now, but I don’t venture out except on the first of the month when I receive my disability check. My ego is inflated when I have some cash in my pocket; yes, I feel harder and more erect and one meal above the homeless man. But mind you, forty years ago, in my hometown of Aberdeen, the fog and rain assailed most of the winter, there were jobs in the fish cannery as the salmon found their way back to the spawning grounds, and yours truly kept going back to the sandy beaches to dig his limit of razor clams at Ocean Shores. But now, Ocean Shores is an investment property, attracting strangers even with strange kinds of money. The foreignness keeps invading these lands. Should I now declare, but to no one’s urgency actually, that I am a different man in the same body or the same man in a different body, as my identity keeps morphing into something unrecognizable, as I become less and less useful, sort of like a crabapple shrinking into itself? Or is this the culmination of a found wisdom, such as a grossly underpriced item in a gift shop run by volunteers for the benefit of the local senior center? And what about the farmer’s market on this block every Sunday to add vegetable colors to the sidewalks with tents erected on the pavement? The greens and cobs and fruit cost you twice as much you know as they do at the local Safeway or QFC stores. Still, it is worth it to help the little organic guys and to remove some of the drudgery of everlasting commerce, when these condos are filled with high-tech geeks, who will soon go to higher grounds. Still, the sea will not drown us out for some time yet, even as global warming gives us no more warning. I am in West Seattle now. Koon Woon

https://youtu.be/q7rJXjq-Qxs

https://youtu.be/q7rJXjq-Qxs

"The Warsaw Pact" by Koon Woon

The Warsaw Pact

 

There are losers from Eastern Europe living in this apartment building, as well as Asians, and Blacks and a couple of indigenous people. We are sometimes a conflicting community. But the Whites, albeit poor, rule. The Russian is seldom home for this reason? I am China-born Chinese and my age should command respect, but it doesn’t. Things are not like they are in the old country.

 

In some ways, this is a Jean-Paul Sartre story. There are a few viable exits and so we wait for Godot. Sometimes one can smell death coming on and sometimes one can narrow it down to which of the nine floors. And when an occupant is not seen for a prolonged period of time, their worried relatives will find a putrefying mess in that room. And so it goes, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

 

It seems though that the formula 3% Chinese living here is both admired and resented. According to Emily the Black lady with one functioning eye, the Whites and the Chinese got all the money. It could be so, but the Chinese who don’t play along with the white agenda remain in Chinatown, where massage parlors mushroom in recent times when smuggled aliens are well hidden in the Chinatown conclave where the police seldom assess unless it is horrendous enough of a crime such as Wah Mee.

 

There are all kinds of misconceptions here, of course. Approximately half of the people here are disabled and of those, half are mentally ill, and the other half are seniors enough they either don’t care or unable to care. But it is like Roethke’s “Root Cellar,” the Congress of stink here struggles to survive.

 

(To be continued…)

 

- Koon Woon

January 7, 2022

 

 

Koon Woon's Diary notes --- 26 years ago on October 23, 1991

Diary notes of Koon Woon for Oct 23, 1991:

A father’s hand covers a son’s hand, and his length laps the son’s. He is stirring a wok of chop suey in the Chinese-American restaurant kitchen. The son, in the slow hours, in a waiter’s yellow jacket, secretly hopes that business will never get better, that the quarrelsome customers will stay home and cook their own hamburgers and spaghetti, drink Coke instead of tea, as he, in the fugitive hours, ponders the texts of Ludwig von Wittgenstein, Hughes and Creswell, and Immanuel Kant thrown in for good measure. He is home from the erudite university for the summer, in the folds of the reversed prejudices of his Chinese-American family; however, it must be said, the father does not confuse chop suey with potato salad, mortgage with taxes, firemen with insurance salesmen, for dealing with various realities he has become to a degree objective.

While the son seeks truths that last longer than the life of a restaurant in a small town, or longer than all the McDonalds in all towns, but alas, he will find in books only in the phantom hours, when traffic has slowed to a halt, when husbands are exhausted from work at pulp and shingle mills, tired from demanding wives and unruly children, only small towns facts that go unrecorded, such as the locals betting with the local bookies on Team A, and his truths in books that exist only in books, giving that he wears thick glasses. And he is all too busy thinking that he is thinking and all the while never thinks about what his father is thinking.

The son doesn’t imagine the day will come years after his father’s death, when a long-trusted family friend will casually say, “You walk like your father now.” Now, suddenly like a cloudless day in October, he is free, free from the tangles of bickering philosophers, the webs of literary jealousy, when he thinks of his late father, how his back had, in the span of forty years bending over the wok, had become a bow, like the bow of William Tell, and he shall take his children and grandchildren like he would take and positions arrows, set them firmly in place, and shoot them, shoot them toward the stars… 

A Drive to Nowhere

A Drive to Nowhere

Like I would just jump into the car; it was variously a ’55 Plymouth, a ’61 Comet, or a ’68 Plymouth again. Where would I go? There was no one I know on a Saturday. The weekends, the dreaded weekends. My search for psychic sustenance begins with those fifty mile drives to nowhere.

The family restaurant would be busy on the weekends. I would need to work until three in the morning on both Friday and Saturday nights, amid the grease vapors and the clanging of the wok, steam from the noodle vat and the steam table. I was eighteen and still a senior in high school in the coastal town of Aberdeen, Washington. These are the towns that the freeway missed in Richard Hugo’s poetry. The rain was melancholic and it drip and slanted all day, and I was trapped being “Number-One-Son” of a Chinese immigrant family, born to Kim and Bill who operated the Hong Kong Café on Simpson Avenue which was on the Highway 101 as it slices through the logging town of Aberdeen, where logging trucks carried the long logs with dancing red flags on them to warn the drives behind it. This road goes up to Forks, Washington and eventually to Port Angeles as it looped around the Olympia Peninsula. And going south, the same two –lane road would lead to Pacifica, California.

I worked variously as waiter, cook, and occasionally manager. Except for work and study, I was lonely and alone. I was so lonely that I enjoyed reading Silas Marner in my room during the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, the only two days that we closed the café. My parents had undergone the world-wide Depression in their youth in China and then the Sino-Japanese War. I was so lonely that the book on the back seat of my car, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was actually a good dialogue with an imaginary companion. I knew the writer in the sense that he knew me, he knew my loneliness. It was a small town, and there were few minorities in it. There was a black janitor at the Smoke Shop Café, owned by the mayor. I suspect that he was there for a reason, just like the only black student at the local Grays Harbor College was a football player. The black janitor seemed to recede into the wood panels of the café dining room as he mopped it during idle hours.

I remember I kept on filling the coffee cup of the girl with the dark Spanish eyes that came alone or with her sister, mostly alone. She drank her coffee black and I was the awkward waiter in the slow hours of the afternoon. She and I never chit-chat and I never learned her name, but somehow once I summoned the nerve to asked her whether she lived at home. She said she lived away from home alone and as long as she doesn’t get into trouble, it was OK with her mom. She was a year older and had dropped out of high school. I was also a part-time worker at the Aberdeen post office and I drove the truck two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon picking up mail from street boxes. And on Saturday, I had the downtown walking route. I had a regulation uniform on, and I felt like a worker, a government worker.

The way out of town was a windy road, evergreens on both sides, a monotonous green with firs shooting up 30 to 40 feet. These were new growth and I was a fourth generation immigrant to these parts of lands. I was wondering how far I could go and how high I could rise. But all I could envision was driving a modest car to work at Boeing and perhaps have a son and a daughter and live again in a modest house, befitting of an electrical engineer. Everybody in high school said I could have become whatever I wanted to.

I didn’t go that far, I drove to Ocean Shores and back then in 1968 it was only one street along the beach front with the burr of the crabgrass waving in the wind. There were summer homes that people did not live in during the winter. It was fog and winter mists as described in Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion. He was talking about the roads in Oregon. Here the crabgrass rose from the sand, an occasional gull, and the steady sloshing waves greeted my loneliness, and I encounter no other cars.

Koon Woon

November 1, 2016

Open letter to President Xi of China and other interested parties

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Open letter to President Xi of China and other interested parties

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Protection Racketeering ---- Open letter to President Xi of China and other interested parties

There is a nut, who should be evaluated by mental health agencies, named Mar or Ma who stops me when I walk on 18th Ave. South in Seattle and talks about protection racketeering.

President Xi, as you know, we villagers do not go to the police. But we know you have sensors in Seattle.

And by the time I post this post, you probably already know all the facts of the case. Do what is appropriate.

The first thing to do is to clamp down on gambling. As the philosopher John Searle says, gaming is a grim business for some. If they lost too much they want others to bail them out.

It is better to cure them of their bad habits then it is for the law-abiding citizens to rescue them.

Sincerely, 

Koon Woon 
aka Lock Kau Koon