Читать книгу Homebase - Shawn Wong - Страница 9

INTRODUCTION TO THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS EDITION

WRITERS ARE NOT VERY GOOD AT WRITING ABOUT THEIR OWN work. Over the years excerpts of Homebase have been reprinted in textbooks and often there is a set of discussion questions about the meaning of the selection. When I read the questions, I pause to think about how to answer them. What usually first comes to mind is what I was doing when I wrote that section of the book rather than any kind of sophisticated literary analysis. If the publisher sends me the teacher’s edition, I look up the answers and sometimes say to myself, “Wow, that makes sense. I’ll have to remember that the next time I talk about my novel.”

A few years ago, Homebase was chosen as the freshman book at Whitman College and I was asked to submit a list of discussion questions. I was at such a loss to think of any questions that I sent e-mails to several professors who use Homebase as a text and asked them to send me their discussion and exam questions. (Those questions are at the end of the book as there’s no teacher’s edition).

In this introduction to the new edition of Homebase, I’ll stick to the how and why of its publication rather than explore, as many introductions do, the scholarly meaning of the work. The literary history of this novel is important because it came out of my knowledge of Asian American literary history as do all my books. Why is this important?

Ten years ago I was approached by a young graduate student who was writing part of her PhD dissertation on Homebase. I was, of course, flattered and asked about her theoretical approach to the work. She said that, in her mind, Homebase was paternalistic and represented my efforts to legitimize the Asian American masculinist position. I thought for a moment before speaking. Should I simply say thank you for your opinion of my book or should I declaw the literary jargon on the spot? I’m a professor so I took the educational position.

“That’s interesting. How many Asian American novels have you read?”

“Five.”

“Why would you say my work is paternalistic?”

“Your novel only has male characters and deals mainly with issues of Chinese American male identity.”

I decided to work with that number. “You’ve read five novels. Do you realize that when Homebase was first published in 1979, it was the only Chinese American work of literary fiction in print in America?”

She shrugged. The 1970s were probably closer to the ice age than her world.

I began again. “If you were a Chinese American novelist and you knew when you were writing your novel that there were no novels by a Chinese American in print in America, what do you think you would write or what do you think your job would be?” My voice had changed from writer meeting fan to professor giving lecture. “In fact, when I started writing Homebase in the late ’60s, there were one or two obscure books about Chinese in America in print. And, the only two works of literary fiction were Diana Chang’s The Frontiers of Love, originally published in 1956, and Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, originally published in 1961, and both were currently out of print.”

I was on a roll now. “Well, maybe your job would be to educate an audience about something called Chinese American literature and Chinese American history. Homebase is, in part, a work of historical fiction. Why are most of the characters male in the book?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “The early Chinese immigrants to America were mostly male and racist immigration laws later created a bachelor society in America. Therefore, it is wrong to dismiss Homebase as being masculinist and paternalistic without first knowing the historical context—both the literary history of Asian America and the history in the story. In addition, by focusing only on your point of view of the book as paternalistic, you’re completely ignoring one of the major characters in the novel—the mother.”

I stopped my impromptu “lecture.” At public readings, I am most often asked whether my work is autobiographical. I usually say it is a work of fiction with autobiographical elements so that I don’t have to get into facts about my life. But, the reality is Homebase is a story about my mother and father and it hurt me to hear that the student hadn’t considered the role of the mother in my novel or worse, ignored her for the sake of cramming my novel into her literary theory. I wrote the book for my mother and father, to honor their lives. My father died when I was seven and my mother died when I was fifteen. Neither one lived passed their fortieth birthday. I wanted to tell the graduate student that by ignoring the character of the mother in Homebase she was using a pair of scissors and cutting her out of my family portrait.

At the other end of the spectrum of reader responses, I once received a letter from a reader who didn’t mention any aspect of the historical parts of the novel dealing with Chinese American immigration and the building of the Central Pacific railroad over the Sierra Nevada mountains. Instead, she simply wrote that reading my novel helped her understand how to handle grief. That kind of intimate and personal response and the fact that the novel is still being read thirty years after its publication is very gratifying.

When I was an eighteen-year-old freshman at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) in 1967, I took a beginning poetry writing class from James Liddy, an Irish poet (now at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). I had been writing poetry for several months and I thought I was already a poet and taking the class would only confirm the fact. Once I was enrolled in the class I realized very quickly that I was a terrible poet. Professor Liddy never told me I was a terrible poet—he didn’t have to—but he did encourage me. By the time the semester ended, I was a better poet and I wanted to be a poet. The following year I worked on my writing one-on-one with Kay Boyle and that was the beginning of a twenty-four-year relationship between us until her death in 1992. At various times she was my teacher, mentor, friend, and for a period in the early ’70s while in graduate school, I rented a room from her in her four-story Victorian house in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district (rent was $70 a month). She taught me not only how to be a writer, but also how to live one’s life as a writer. The house was filled with artifacts and memorabilia from her days living in Paris and elsewhere in Europe in the 1920s. One day I came home with a copy of the Dubliners tucked under my arm and she said to me, while we were both checking the mail, “I see you’re reading Jim’s book.” A constant stream of writers, singers, artists, journalists, teachers, community activists, and even letters from Samuel Beckett entered through the front door of her house at 419 Frederick Street. Kay taught me that writing “was about belief” and that everything I write needed to be relevant to our lives. In graduate school, she converted me from a somewhat abstract language poet to a novelist and, in the process, I discovered my narrative voice. The first version of this work began as a twenty-page poem.

Homebase is dedicated, in part, to Kay and her last published book, The Collected Poems of Kay Boyle (1991), is dedicated to me with the following inscription:

This book, both in spirit and substance, is for you, Shawn; for you are my second son, as I cherish and respect you, and rejoice in our friendship. It is you who wrote of your mother’s death: “I did not want everyone’s pity for an orphaned fifteen-year-old boy…after she died I was no longer anyone’s son….” This is not quite true (although a little late) to call you mine.”

It was true that Kay’s writing and my writing during the two and half decades I knew her were linked as she described in “spirit and substance.” Several passages from Homebase, prior to its publication appeared in several of her poems, non-fiction essays, and even in a novel, The Underground Woman (1975). Homebase, of course, has Kay’s influence and mentorship on every page. An earlier version of Homebase was my creative writing Master’s thesis and I treasure the pages and pages of handwritten notes she provided on this novel and other writings throughout our friendship.

If you went to college in the late 1960s as I did, campuses were in turmoil over the Vietnam war, civil rights, and establishment of ethnic studies on college campuses. In my second year, San Francisco State exploded into daily demonstrations and when various college presidents refused to bring police on campus, they were all fired or resigned until S. I. Hayakawa was installed as president of the college and he brought police on campus. Riots broke out and students were arrested and beaten. Students went on strike. The campus closed down. One day, Kay stood defiantly between protesting students and police. She was not only a mentor to students, but also our protector. Disgusted with S. I. Hayakawa, I transferred to UC Berkeley in 1969, which was, of course, like jumping from the frying pan directly into the fire. Even though I left San Francisco State, I continued to work with Kay and stayed enrolled as a part-time student there while going to school as a full-time student at Berkeley. After I graduated in 1971, I went back to SF State, entered graduate school in creative writing, and moved in with Kay. I did work with other writers while in school—Herb Wilner, Leo Litwak, Stan Rice, and Jackson Burgess (at Berkeley), and even took a class from saxophonist John Handy—but none were as influential as Kay as teacher and editor.

When I started writing in college, I realized one day that I was the only Asian American writer I knew in the world and that no teacher in high school or college had ever assigned or even mentioned a book written by an Asian American writer. The whole field of study called Asian American studies was just being formed at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley. It was Kay Boyle who introduced me to the first Asian American writer I ever met. Jeffery Chan was one of her graduate students and teaching in the newly formed Asian American Studies Department at SF State. When I met Jeff, he gave me the phone number of Frank Chin who lived just a few blocks from me in Berkeley. The three of us found poet Lawson Inada and eventually the four of us co-edited Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974). The publication of Aiiieeeee! marked the beginning of the rediscovery of Asian American literature. Franklin Odo, editor of The Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience (2002) called the anthology “a pathbreaking work of Asian American literature” and listed the preface to the anthology as one of 155 key historical documents of Asian American history from 1790 to 2001.

Also in 1969, Frank Chin introduced me to writer Ishmael Reed and Ishmael introduced me to a whole range of writers such as Victor Hernandez Cruz, Alex Haley, Al Young, Jessica Hagedorn, Leslie Silko, Ntosake Shange, and even musicians like David “Fat Head” Newman and George Clinton and Funkadelic. Ishmael later founded the Before Columbus Foundation, a literary organization dedicated to the promotion of American multicultural literature, where I served as one of the founding board members in the mid-70s and continue to serve on the board of directors today. Most of this activity happened when I was still in school. Imagine, as an undergraduate student at Berkeley: I was studying the dead white British authors—sitting in Spenser class, writing papers about Chaucer—and outside of class, I was encountering all of the exciting literary life going on in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, I think my real education was out in the arts and literary communities of the Bay Area where there were no grades, no credit, and no classes.

During my senior year at Berkeley, I took a job as editor of the Glide Urban Center newsletter, which was part of Glide Memorial Methodist Church. I doubt if there was any place in the Bay Area more exciting than Glide in 1971—it was the hub of community activism lead by the dynamic and charismatic Rev. Cecil Williams with Janice Mirikitani as the executive director of Glide Urban Center. It was Mirikitani who first invited me to read my poetry to an audience.

While still in graduate school in 1972, I was offered my first teaching job in the newly formed Ethnic Studies Department at Mills College in Oakland. The dean of the faculty at the time asked me what I could teach and I answered that I could teach a class in Asian American literature. I was offered the job even though I did not have any teaching experience, a graduate degree or any publications, and I was about to teach a subject that I did not learn in college, rather had taught myself. At the time, I was working as a part-time gardener to support myself, so I had a decision to make. I could continue working as a gardener or teach at a private women’s college. I was twenty-two and single; I took the job. Jeff, Frank, Lawson, and I had completed the manuscript of Aiiieeeee! and I used that as the foundation for the course.

After several trade publishers turned down Aiiieeeee!, Howard University Press decided to publish the anthology as part of their inaugural list of ten books in 1974. It instantly became the most reviewed book on their list with reviews in every newspaper and periodical from The New York Times to Rolling Stone to The New Yorker. Aiiieeeee! was later published in paperback by Doubleday.

I graduated from San Francisco State in the same year and started circulating Homebase around to publishers with no success. Ishmael Reed and Kay Boyle both introduced my book to various editors at large publishing houses, but all turned it down. While waiting to publish the novel, I rewrote it eight times, each time making the language in the novel work harder and using my training in poetry to get the most out the narrative. Finally, in 1979, Ishmael decided to publish the book himself with his own small press, I. Reed Books. The novel won two literary awards and was later published by Plume, a division of Penguin Books. In 1975, Frank Chin and I co-edited an edition of The Yardbird Reader, a literary journal started by Ishmael Reed, Al Young, and other African American writers and artists. It was no accident that my first three books were published by African American publishers. They were the first to recognize the legitimacy of Asian American literature.

In the early ’70s Frank, Jeff, Lawson, and I formed the Combined Asian-American Resources Project, Inc. (CARP) dedicated to the rediscovery of Asian American literature and preserving oral history interviews with writers and artists. Our CARP oral history interviews are collected at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. When we couldn’t find a publisher to reprint John Okada’s landmark 1957 novel, No-No Boy, we used our own money, borrowed money from several sources, and published a new edition in 1976. No-No Boy was published by the University of Washington Press in 1979 and recently sold its 100,000th copy.

The literary history cited here is, of course, not just about one novel, but rather about the dissemination, preservation, and promotion of a whole field of literature. As a young writer, who started writing Homebase almost forty years ago, I realized very early on that I was responsible for educating an audience to Asian American writing as well as for writing it.

SHAWN WONG

Seattle, Washington

November 2007

HOMEBASE