Can't Tell Us Apart
On Maxine Hong Kingston and doppelgangers
“The moment his feet touched ground
The Chinese earth drew him down to her,
Made him fall to his knees,
Kowtow and kiss her.
Gravity is love force.
It bends light, time and us.
Mother pulls us to her by heart roots.”
-m.k.h.
Berkeley Hills
I went for a walk down from Spruce St in the Berkeley Hills to Solano Ave. I found my way to Pegasus Books and I asked one of the bookish, multi tatted-pierced, rainbow colored attire’d employees there to point me in the direction of Maxine Hong Kingstons books…
“Ahh, yes we cannot keep her “Birding” book in.. Here it is.” He handed me a hardback book of Amy Tan’s recent exploration in the world of Birds..”
“Excuse me this is Amy not Maxine.”
“Oh I am so sorry, you are absolutely right.”
He turned to me and “bowed” and then motored off to the stacks on the right side of the store and pointed to where “Woman Warrior,” “China Men,” “Tripmaster Monkey”and her memoir, “I Love a Broad Margin to My Life” lived.
I recounted this to Maxine in an email exchange. I mentioned to her that I also added as descriptor of un-sameness to this young man:
“….One has a black bobbed hair cut, with the carrying type of dog under her armpit and the other full, flowing white locks imbuing a sense of Chinese immortality and wisdom.”
We do not all look alike.
I am not offended.
Not offended that he bowed.
I am interested in knowing the hardened neuro-pathways set into the confined jelly master controller mystery quantum computer of grey matter’d proportions that sits high under cover of calvarium….a few millimeters thick as life’s precious minerals hardened casque that thinly protects all the innate in us.
With her memoir in hand, I crossed Solano Ave and I found a window seat at Ajanta, an Indian restaurant I have come to know since arriving in the East Bay some thirty-five years before. A Lamb Korma lunch, naan and rice pudding with chai tea! I was the last service of the lunch hour and as I settled in I watched the remaining diners shuffle out and say their thanks and goodbyes. Just me now.
I began to read into Maxine’s memoir of eloquence and connecting tapestry of her life from when and now and what if’s, would be’s. A sixty-five year journey of wonderment in a world of words and phrases playful, serious, sing songy colorful Chinesey-Americanized embellishments of a storied life turning a cauldron of experience into a loving witches wisdom.
It was her story to tell in her own way in her own critique. Why would anyone care to knock her down the totem pole…but yet they do.
Who has criticized you? Your work? Maybe the thinness or the density of the work within limits? Maybe?
But,
The story line never one to put into question by another…Why? in the perennial words of a two year old.
Why mama?
Is it heard and deeply cared for,
might it heal a world, Worlds.
Her story is woven in me because it is here in the Bay Area, Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, the San Joaquin Delta of our beautiful California. She takes us there to the Islands of Hawaii on Oahu and away in the Motherland of our roots. She is a cousin to me, a doppelgänger to one of our own? Jadin?
Our homeland cousins.
We do all look alike? We do, sometimes.
It would not be far fetched if we believe the story that Ghengis Khan sired a third of the world!! Oh the Hans!, Homs, Toms, Tams, Tongs and Lyms, Lims, Lums, Lams, Smith and Jones’. Who knows?
Maxine asked me if I might know Bonnie Tom. She was a childhood friend of hers when she was growing up in the Stockton area, taught her and her sister to sing the poem songs of Chinese dynasties dressed in Cheongsam. I mused back to her that her friend may be related to the Kirksville Toms. There were 15 in that brood back then at the turn of the twentieth century. Odds are?
The waiter turned the sign from open to closed. The door remained open to the breeze that cooled the entry way. The golden gauze brocade partition filtered in the remnants of the waning afternoon sun. Time ceased. Sounds of silverware, hindi music and faint conversations amongst the staff disappeared. I found myself leaning into her words…calmed down to absolute quiet. Mute.
Time passed on.
I turned my gaze to the interior of the restaurant and saw that the staff was under white blankets, bare-feet sticking out at the ends, bodies in sidelying between the tables taking a nap on the floor before dinner service. It was a scene of serenity, a sense of necessary caring, natural order, ritual to life and existence on the backdrop of a hurried American existence.
I gathered myself up and gently left the quiet and gentle for the walk up Indian Rock Path, a 600 foot climb up into the hills of Berkeley to a perch overlooking a most beautiful meditative scene of this one life.
quote from pg 76 I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
video time “lapse” of a Summer day, August 2024 in the Berkeley Hills
Terry: Can we correspond privately in email?
My paternal grandmother was born and raised in Kirkville/Colusa along with her 12-14 or so siblings in the late 1890's, early 1900's. All ABC and Tom's. They are most likely the family referenced here!