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…