I Love a Broad Margin to My Life - Maxine Hong Kingston [24]
language, the lingua franca taught in schools.
The cats are hip and up-to-date.
They wear their colors on worn, torn denim.
Some long hair. Some skinhead.
Black beards. Purple beard. 5
o’clock shadow, designer stubble. The old man
bewhiskered like that handsome Commie, Ho Chi Minh,
is home among his own kind. The artists
get to the extent of their English. Pots and buckets
plink and plunk; the roof drums. The paintings
are hung and stacked on the dry sides of the room.
Mr. Soul Patch brings to his lips
a xun, around which his hands fit perfectly,
and blows a music, old from long, long
ago. Our first male ancestor,
Bao Xin Gong, made the xun
of earth, made it earth-shaped, and gave
forth this sound that is the sound of time, from
far off to now to far after, the sound
of the animate winds, the yin wind and the yang
wind, the sound of the first man and this man
breathing song. Hear it, and it belongs
to you, and you belong to all of it.
The music ends on a long long
outbreath. The musician coughs and coughs,
spits a lunger onto the dirt floor,
rubs it in with his foot. Lights up
a cigarette. Urges the guest, Go on, go,
try it, blow. Wittman holds the earth xun
in spread hands, fingertips over some
holes, brings it up to his mouth. Pásame
la botella. The sound he gives out
is low, definite, smooth, clear, loud.
“Koo.” “Koo.” “Tell me about xun.”
The artists—they are masters of many arts
in this commune of makers—speak with numbers.
7,000. Xun was unearthed? invented?
7,000 years ago? In the year
7,000? 40. The xun in your hand
is 40-something—generations? years?
Cough cough. Pat-patting the lungs,
the heart, me, myself. 40. The musician
who takes up the xun will die in his 40s.
All artists die young. We sacrifice.
The painters, the model too, have coughs. The smoke,
inhale, cough, exhale, cough, cough.
The elder artist can’t help lecturing
the younguns about their health. “No wonder
you Chinese chronically cough and spit.
You, with every breath, you’re drawing microbes,
germs, disease from that old, used instrument,
into your respiratory system. Those xun
players died young because they caught an illness
from this infected instrument, which they passed on to you.
You guys shouldn’t be living in your studio.”
Points at the beds, the stove, the tables loaded
with cans, bottles, tubes of chemicals, food.
“You’re handling poisons all day,
and breathing fumes all night. I know.
My wife’s an artist. We’ve been poor,
but she keeps her workplace, her art lab,
away from where we eat and sleep. She wears
a face mask, a respirator. Just like
Chinese do in traffic. And, come on,
don’t smoke. Don’t smoke. If you
knew your history, you wouldn’t smoke.
Only 3 grandmothers ago,
BAT, British American Tobacco,
forced our people to buy opium, and tobacco-
opium mix. We had two wars
Chinese versus Anglos,
Opium War I and Opium War II.
We lost both times. We fought back
poison against poison, and guns, sold
bread with arsenic at the bakeries for Westerners.
When I learned my history, I stopped smoking
cigarettes, pot, any kind of shit.”
The young artists don’t understand
a thing he says, else they’d laugh over
the bakerman, bakerwoman guerrillas.
They do know, they give their lives for xun,
for art. They take his waving and pointing to mean
admiration for them and their work. They open
albums full of photos of paintings with prices.
Their brushwork takes your breath away.
The lines and angles of Picasso. The impasto
of Van Gogh. The colors of Rothko.
The icing of Thiebaud. They can do anything.
But where is the new, the never-before-seen
that we’re counting on the post-Liberation
post–Cultural Revolution generation
to give us? Art schools in the U.S.
are folding their painting classes, teaching computer
and industrial design. The young artists show
the old artist (buyer? patron?) their portfolios.
Chinese kids selling their art
on the streets of Sydney, Florence, San Francisco.
On these walls, their latest work: dark
pictures.