Memories by Koon Woon

 

There is something insoluble in my tea that you poured

 

I don’t know what it is. Could be a memory of the cold tea in our China village of Nan On, in the bedroom on the teakwood table from the teapot spout I drink in childhood as a schoolboy, when our rooster crowed daylight, when getting up to the winter cold air was the first test of the day…

 

The tea is hot now like the anger I feel in this country when called a racial epithet. This country now has lost all its rights to be a world citizen, and in self-defense, I must be a world citizen and not a denizen of this country, where the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” came from motherland Shakespeare…

 

But more than this, it took me so long to find you, like a rose surrounded by brambles and a yellow chrysanthemum just beyond my height, radiant, that across my childhood years, the pond water was the right tepid temperature to swim in, and the love of ferns I found in these woods nearby as I wandered into it to the hidden waterfall we called the Diamond Falls, near the PUD in Aberdeen, on the foothills of the Olympics, where Darren the Native American fellow would disappear for a month at a time with bow and arrow to test the survival skills of his forebears, like I surreptitiously read the Chinese dictionary to see familiar faces, all 50,000 of them…

 

But long ago I also received my first rejection in a box of a phone booth when she sent icy words up my spine, as the winter booth is fogging up with my breath. Tea is pronounced incorrectly by foreigners as the Cantonese dialect has 9 tones, and each tone has a different meaning and “cha” could mean error…

 

But later I came back to my native culture when my poem, “A Smoke Break at the Nuclear Command,” was published in the Hong Kong online journal “Cha.” So now comparing cultures and phonics I found your love is quenching of thirst as the land of tea…

 

All in all, our love is not a mistake, after a lifetime of them, and now as we sprout snow on our heads, we find that insoluble stuff in my tea is love…

 

Koon Woon, April 18, 2026, Seattle

 

 

 

Koon's diaries

 

 

Beef tomato diary

 

After work, I took a few tokes before I ate my beef tomatoes in the Bay Avenue house. Sometimes I listened to freight roaring through the night air by the slough, only separated from me by the dirt field and the cyclone of blackberry vines. My immigrant forebears could have laid the railroad tracks. They came as far as Washington State and settled in Hoquiam, the twin town of Aberdeen.

 

Now the Georgia-Pacific line comes to the Port of Grays Harbor, where timber is shipped to Japan on Hong Kong merchant ships, and Hong Kong sailors sometimes come to our restaurant, the Hong Kong Café on Simpson Avenue, and sometimes, in a hushed tone, they asked how they can jump ship. I was naïve, even though I was in my late twenties.

 

Years later I took a U.S. history class at the University of Washington in Seattle for someone else. They paid me to do it. I read about the “Underground Railroad.” I then put two and two together and questioned my parents’ integrity. Then things began to make sense. I knew then why my father told me, in the wee hours after the bar rush, while we are eating our late meal while sitting at the makeshift table on milk crates, that during the Sino-Japanese War, he was bookkeeper to an illiterate criminal, one who had murdered an old woman he robbed and then was later hung for the crime.

 

My father told me between mouthful of white rice, from the platter he put a rib steak on top of a mound of it. He was matter of fact, telling me about the “real” business he was in but without telling me.

 

Later, I was diagnosed mentally ill, and I myself questioned my own thoughts and judgment, so insidiously was the illness that I cannot know reality for certain. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simonson’s coffee diary

 

Gene Miller was our coffee man. He brought Simonson’s condiments and coffee. He was the son-in-law of the owner. Proudly talkative of his older daughter who was chief accountant for King County, Gene bragged how no one can figure out his daughter’s bookwork. The transactions must have been like the interconnected tunnels of prairie dogs. Not visible at first glance but there is a subterranean series of tunnels, entrances, and exits that only she knew. And as you know, prairie dogs alert one another through their tonal language. The pitch of a sound mattered in its meaning, like Chinese language.  We were a Chinese-American restaurant, and we served coffee because it was American and hot mustard and sesame seeds with sliced barbecue pork; that was Chinese.

 

Gene had another daughter. The younger one was Marti, and she was my classmate at Aberdeen High School. Gene knew that because Marti talked about me at home no doubt because I was the literary chair of the creative writing club of which she was a devoted member.

 

Four decades later I went back to the Aberdeen Public Library to give a reading of my poetry, celebrating my second book of poems. Marti came and she did not look well. She was now a self-proclaimed artist. I knew she must have been bipolar, like me. The librarian was upset Marti took so much time talking during the question and answer period following my reading. I told the librarian later that Marti had been my classmate. The librarian then said, “It is truly remarkable you can talk everybody’s language. I told her I had been around and that a poet needs to know a bit of everything. Disenfranchisement seemed normal to me, and so I got “in” with the “out-crowd.” There are some still out there, but a tremor or a facial tick gives them away, even before they become talkative of nothing in particular and then suddenly lapse into a sullen mood because no one cared to listen. Drinking coffee to excess can also make one chatter much. Gene the father never talked about Marti. And so Marti talks a lot to define herself.

Dispatches by Koon Woon

 

Dispatches from the mental health center...

 

(Fragments from Koon Woon’s existence):

The first time

“You are nothing!”

Keeping souls in a ledger

Conard

Genius at the Triple L

You can always TRY

Helping nephew play chess

The Car Man

Clean Start

Juneau House

Under the weather in Aberdeen

Morrison Tales

Times with E, S, and V

MDR, minimum daily requirements

Director of the NSA

Napa revisited

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE FIRST TIME

 

 

Sewers spieled steam in our most gentle city of San Francisco. Sometimes I had a bed to sleep on, like at the Chinatown YMCA, and sometimes I slept without a bed or companion. Fog and rain assailed me, but I am as thick as the NY City Directory. Family correctly diagnosed me as incorrigible and left me at the foot of the dumpster.

 

It is here at the Stockton Hotel at the intersection of Stockton and Vallejo that I breathed the vehicle exhaust from my third-floor window propped open by a can of pork and beans. My furniture adhered to the minimalist cot, zinc bucket and wash basin. The shower room had no windows and was lit by a weak incandescent lamp. You need to bring your own toilet paper to the shared latrine.

 

Then you wrote, “They confiscated his deck of cards, jailed him and disallowed all communications with his pregnant wife.” They also said to him, “Women and children are building socialism, and you are so idle you have time to gamble? Just as you have no empathy with the poker loser, we have no leniency with you.”

 

The Port Master of New Amsterdam embezzled a million dollars from the port but was not imprisoned for the crime.  

 

But democracy has triumphed. Black ops keep it lively – a debate between Margaret Atwood and Billy the hillbilly.

 

 

 

YOU ARE NOTHING!

 

 

It was a building in San Franciso speaking to me. The building was all white and it was a hospital on Pine Street, a mile south of downtown. I shouted back that it was nothing. Some nothingness is stronger than other nothingness, and in this case, the building was stronger than me; it was a fortress, an invincible construction where it housed labs, blood, needles, and people. Some people go in in some condition, and they come out in another condition, about that this is all we can say.

 

The Tao says that health cannot be bought, it must be earned.

 

I was the tai chi master of the supermarket and not only that, but I was also the reader of souls, and Jimmy Carter was president. I said that I would read his book someday. Some time later, after all of this, I received a card from Jimmy and Rosalind that was simply signed. They could write their own signatures. But I don’t know about that buffoon in the White House today. It is like monsoon rain, a lot of inconvenience and we need it to soften the hardened mud, but despite its heavy volume, it ends rather quickly when it ends, and things go back to a tolerably drear.

 

Things are really like that – come thingness and go nothingness. In Chinese sensibility, whiteness is death, the funerial color. Even so, I was so out of it, I was not afraid, because I was even more afraid of life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                 

 

KEEPING SOULS IN A LEDGER

In the colorful blur of St. Mary’s Square, a message on the clock said, “Know son the evil and flee thence!” I had been sleepless in SF entering Grant Avenue the entrance to Chinatown. I lugged my suitcase through the crowded street like an assassin on a mission. Inside my suitcase is a leather-bound ledger, where I make the infinitesimal notation of entering a soul. I made a mark “+” if the soul merits recycling and a mark of “-,” if it should be returned to the fires of Hell.

Mother, my eyes are pierced by the sunrise between two corporate buildings, and my legs grow weak.

Mother, if I transmigrate, how would you know me if I came as to your door as a puppy?

 

In the matter of mothers, schizophrenia is allowed. And in the matter of souls kept in a ledger with their merits and demerits the world keeps a record of harm done. I am sworn as a notary, and my commission expires when the seas consume the land. When all is said and done, I was a good clerk in the ethereal realm.

 

 

Poem by koon woon

koon woon

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