I Love a Broad Margin to My Life - Maxine Hong Kingston [4]
Do nothing all the perfect day.
A list of tasks for the rest of my working life:
Translate Father’s writing into English.
Publish fine press editions of the books
with his calligraphy in the margins and
my translations and my commentary
on his commentary, like the I Ching. Father had
a happy life; happy people are always
making something. Learn how to grow
old and leave life. How to leave
you who love me? Do so in story.
For the writer, doing something in fiction
is the same as doing it in life.
I can make the hero of my quondam novel,
Monkey King, Wittman Ah Sing,
observe Hindu tradition, and on his 5-times-12
birthday unguiltily leave his wife. Parents
dead, kids raised, the householder leaves
spouse and home, and goes into the mountains,
where his guru may be. In America, you can yourself
be the guru, be the wandering starets.
At his birthday picnic, Wittman Monkey wishes
for that freedom as he and the wind blow out
60-plus candles. Used to telling
his perfectly good wife his every thought,
he anti-proposes to her. “Taña, I love you. But.
I made a wish that we didn’t have to be married
anymore. I made a wish for China.
That I go to China on my own.” Taña—
beautiful and pretty as always, leaf shadows
rubbing the wrinkles alongside her blue eyes
and her smile, sun haloing her whitegold
hair—Taña lets Wittman’s bare words
hang in air. Go ahead, you Monkey.
Wish away. Tell away. Tell it
all away. Then she kicks ass—
“Here’s your one to grow on!”—then
gets quiet. She can be rid of him.
But first, have it out. “So, we’re not
going to be old lovers, and old artists
together till we die. After all our years
making up love, this thing, love,
peculiar to you and me, you quit,
incomplete. God damn it, Darling,
if your wife—I—were Chinese,
would she be your fit companion in China?”
“Hell, Sweetheart, if you were Chinese,
I wouldn’t’ve married you to begin with.
I spurned the titas for you.” Forsaking the sisters.
All my sisters-of-color. O, what
a romance of youth was ours, mating, integrating,
anti-anti-miscegenating. “Bad
Monkey. You married me as a politcal act.”
“No, Honey Lamb, uh uh.
An act of artists—the creating of you-and-me.”
Married so long, forgot how to declare I.
I want Time. I want China.
Married white because whites good at everything.
Everything here. Go, live Chinese,
gladly old. America, can’t get old,
no place for the old. China, there be
Immortalists. Time moves slower in China.
They love the old in China. No verb
tenses in Chinese, present tense
grammar, always. Time doesn’t pass
for speakers of such language. And the poets make
time go backward, write stroke by stroke,
erase one month of age with every poem.
Tuesday, I cried—in public,
a Chinese woman wailing to the streets—
over the headline: LIBBY FINGERS CHENEY.
I gloated, but suddenly stopped moving, and wept.
The stupid, the greedy, the cruel, the unfair have taken
over the world. How embarrassing, people asking,
“What’s wrong?” and having to answer, “Cheney.
Rumsfeld. Rove. Halliburton. Bush.” The liars.
The killers. Taking over the world. Aging,
I don’t cry for the personal anymore,
only for the political. Today’s news photo:
A 10-year-old boy—his name is
Ali Nasir Jabur—covers his eyes
with his hands. He hunkers in the truck bed
next to the long blanket-wrapped bodies of
his sister, 2 brothers, mother, and father.
A man’s bare feet stick out from a blanket
that has been taped around the ankles.
I see this picture, I don’t want to live.
I’ve seen the faces of beaten, cloaked women.
Their black wounds infected, their eyes
swollen shut. Their bodies beaten too,
but can’t be seen. I want to die.
Just last week, 12 sets of bones
from Viet Nam were buried in 12 ceremonies.
At sunset, I join the neighbors—with sangha,
life is worth living—standing at the BART
station, holding lit candles, reminding
one and all that the 2,000th American
soldier has died in Iraq. Not counting
mercenaries, contract workers, Iraqis, Afghanis.