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
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