I’ve developed a ravenous appetite for Asian Studies. I hunger for understanding. Reading is my way of coming to grips with reality. Yet, I recently found that books may not be the magic bullet for every problem. Yet… Books beckon. Today, I went again to my absolute favorite business location in San Diego. There is an Asian area of town, I gravitate toward the Asian quarters, of any town that offers the cosmopolitan luxury of Asian markets, spas, and bookstores. I enjoy trying to make sense of the Japanese writing, Korean Letters, and Chinese Massage Parlor offerings. The bookstore I go to more often than any other, a passionate love of books and reading is my OPEN secret, I will not name because, then EVERYBODY might become obsessed with collecting used books on Asian Studies, as I am. Then, where would I be? Locked out of a spiking market for intellectually rewarding reading. Hah! The bookstore is where I sneak off to replenish myself and my stash of life enhancing reading material. After a delicious trip to Mitsuwa Market, where I always pick up two rice balls with salmon for my offspring and a big bowl of UDON for Frau Kolb, I hit the books!
There is one creepy element, at the used book store… the place I dig, so ardently! My favorite used bookstore in San Diego, is haunted by a homeless woman. She looks to me to be a North African woman, perhaps Ethiopian or Egyptian, she looks like she was once very pretty. She wears a handwoven dirty plastic gown of garbage bags, twisted with shopping bags, and ingeniously fastened together with rubber bands. Day after day, she hide, lurks in the safety of the bookstore with its timid staff of international bookworms, mostly Japanese.
She is to be seen snatching at books and muttering to herself, wedged in the long skinny isles, there is no way to get around her and her filthy baggage. I try to avoid her. She looks feral. She might bite. Poverty is no stranger to most of us. Yet, what is really scary is raving mental illness which distinguishes this specific homeless woman, it is thick like a nimbus around a medieval saint. To see a person engaged in a violent argument, snapping and hissing, against THIN AIR… is rattling. We may have homes but seeing people that are clearly in desperate need of psychiatric assistance, wandering urban areas, muttering ancient curses and twisted mantras, protestations to alien courts, accounts of villainous murders committed in outer space, in the isle of benign bookstores, makes me THINK about how flimsy the social safety net of our great nation is.
Yet, all over the world, an untold number of people are without shelter, without homes. (Or, labor under unacceptable conditions, it is only recently that workers had rights to defend.) In Europe, where the social net is stronger, homeless humans crowd train stations and sleep on urban streets. Every book, I’ve ever read on Asia features human suffering on a colossal scale. What is it that makes it so that so many humans are without homes, alone?
I was recently accused of being, “out of touch,” with the plight, the struggle for survival, of a particular individual— perpetually—struggling to make ends meet. I am keenly aware of the cost of privation, poverty is the ultimate luxury lifestyle, because if TIME is MONEY, those without money often lavish inordinate amounts of time on agonizing over it. Yet the homeless seem to be a class above or outside this equation of money and time. The homeless seem to have ETERNITY on their hands… day after day of nearly dying… until, their end is like all others, final. Most “working stiffs,” one encounters are not too far from being destitute, yet as long as health holds out, most of the people can continue their struggle with money for a lifetime. What is interesting to me is that the poor, with access to public libraries, never become interested in the nature of compound interest or the fluctuations of the stock market, topics everyone should study. Money is for the financially struggling an utter mystery. Yet, via books, anyone can learn to GO WITH THE FLOW, invest wisely, and live within a budget. Therefore, it seems to me that in a lack of desire to confront a topic they find thorny, CASH FLOW, every accuser is pushing away viable opportunities, actively seeking, to live outside the flow of currency. Yet, I know my perspective is that of a hot house flower, sheltered and unreal to those that do not share it.
We ALL experience suffering in our lives. Pain is the absolute confirmation that one is ALIVE! In recent memory, health concerns, and financial struggles, squeeze the life out of some. Yet, The Glorious Present, when anxiety is at bay and memory is not strangling it, is always blissful. However, the wall between having and not having is thin…feeling safe and being in danger is separated by a flimsy membrane, don’t look at the potential danger, stay here with me… in the NOW, which is where the decision to keep looking for obscure printed words on Asian Cultural Studies, while deftly ignoring the mental illness of others, may be the way of keeping one’s own equilibrium.
What do I know? The homeless African woman, creeping about my favorite bookstore, may be perfectly happy. She may live under the most sheltering bridge. Her days may be better than those of the frustrated office workers or Walmart employees. Yes, she looks feral. She looks like she might bite. Yet, she is in a book store, a center of civility, learning! What a paradox! So, I don’t leave. I studiously avoid her. Yet, I’ve made up my mind to find that book, “Cheerful Money,” a memoir by Tad Friend on the passing of the WASP age of cultural dominance in America. At the check out, I tactfully mention her presence to the employees up front and they looked frightened. “She’s still here?” asked the sweet woman with the loose orange curls. I nod and keep moving.
Public Libraries… in California… in Santa Monica and in New York can be like train stations and other, “points of mass transit,” where mentally ill people are “allowed,” to perch with their filthy packed baggage and without being charged with loitering. Bookstores often serve as refuges for me and other readers, spending time in them is one of my favorite means of relaxation, education, and of preparing myself to live in grace and gratitude, but how can one relax with a living zombie muttering to themselves in the corner isle? She serves as a reminder, that no matter how much I want to avoid DEATH, I too am just a person seeking the shelter of the bookstore’s apparent security. Moreover, I ask myself, “how does that woman, wearing a garbage bag gown FEEL about being without home, alone, abandoned inside a portable hell? How different is her day than the day of a Wall Street broker after a series of monumental declines and crashing after snorting a mountain of lines, lies, chopped on a hand held mirror? What does it say about our society that this woman would seek shelter in a public place, day after day, and that somehow no one stops or aids her? Is this good? Bad? Beyond judgment?
In the face of the ugly truth that some people live with close to nothing and they find a different kind of refuge indoors in public spaces where staff are not quick to shoo them away… away to where? That is a question we don’t want to ask. Yet, that stale question lingers in the air around my favorite hobby, book hunting, amassing, collecting information!
Now, before you start thinking I’m some kind of spoiled brat… I might be, actually but not really, my parents were not rich, by an means, except perhaps in their cultural heritage. I left home at seventeen and I was HOMELESS, for the first three (summer) months. I squatted with the PUNK KIDS and other street people at 3BC’s (A legendary Punk Squat House) on the Alphabet Streets of The Lower Eastside in Manhattan. Later, I had a Drunk boyfriend, twenty years my senior, and desperately handsome, that with his suave sound and big green eyes led me into the thick of poverty, no money I earned was enough to keep up with his drinking habits. After that break-up, I decided to AVOID such company, no matter how fetching and started making conscious choices to align myself with the abundance that is New York. Since my early twenties, based on reading all kinds of books on finance and experience of moving into different circles, where FLOW called, I have managed my reality via deliberate measures aimed at creating well being, establishing a status quo, I care to maintain.
My father, a direct descendant of literate house slaves from the isle of St. Croix, always encouraged me to carry a book with me, everywhere, every day. In his understanding, books were salvation. Literacy was the key to gaining power, acceptance, and recognition. Thus, I am forever reading. I had a wealth of books in my room, to chose from as a child. I read them all before entering Kindergarten. So… spacey as I always looked, I always had a lot to think about.
Dad would visit famous used bookstores in New York, like The Strand. Having trained as an attorney, with his eye on political power, dreaming of prestige, in the government of our island nation, my father, in actuality, worked successfully as a furniture salesman in New York City for decades. Yet, father aspired to BIG WEALTH, so by his standards, we were, “poor.” (It took years for me to understand that my father just had distorted ambitions, which prevented him from savoring his achievements.) Therefore, we always felt rather pinched by his big dreams, and dissatisfaction with his level of attainment, sort of like the characters in a D.H. Lawrence’s novel, about The Rich. Father married Mother in a vain attempt to secure for himself a bride from a prominent Dominican family. How shallow! Yet, don’t we all make such cosmic miscalculations when we put materialistic considerations is the seat of primacy? My parents immigrated to the United States via Dominican Republic, which is the verdant half of the isle of Hispaniola… blah, blah, blah… I don’t want to bore you. I’m sure I’ve already lost the less determined visitors to this… yes, very personal… intimate meandering artist’s blog.
Now let us return to the cave, with the products of our book hunt. What do you have? What did you find? You plop down with aplomb and begin to sink into a thick paperback on China, a New History. You wake up in Japan, Land of the Rising Sun! The martial aspects of culture are not so interesting to me. I love the stories of Geishas, an artistic elite, trained to listen, to serve, and entertain. Reading, I lose all constrains and wander from nation to nation, crossing oceans of time. Fired up, Frau Kolb settles into a pattern of voracious learning. The questions propelling Frau Kolb, deeper into the green tea, are “Who is Asian? Am I Asian?” an appreciation of calligraphic letters as pictographic conduits of layered meaning, the personal knowledge of pure silk’s transcendent quality, a historical interest in everlasting jade, and its healing properties, with a momentary flickering thought on the power of embroidery, the monumental tombs, ancient bronzes, the overriding centrality of the Emperor(s) and the, at first, hidden power of Empress Wu, who ruled during the late Tang (my favorite) dynasty. And the concubines, sheltered possession of rich men by Mandate of Heaven. Divinity in the person of an all powerful ruler. How does one become Asian? The founders of the Wei Dynasty were actually Turkish, they adopted Han, Chinese ways. Studying Asian Cultures one can legitimately ask, “Who are the quintessential Asians?” I could ask similar questions about “Blacks…” Who are they? I’ve heard that I am, “A Black Girl.” Does this render me the same as every other, “Black Girl?” Perhaps. I am happy to agree, but what does that mean, exactly…when Spanish is my first language, your are reading my English, and German is my third language conquered, mastering it, via daily self motivated study, the same personally effective method I am now applying to the learning of French. What if I told you I feel most at ease in Europe? It appears to be like there is a push to lump people into these big racial categories, which often obscure the individual’s personal identity. I understand what Euro-Asian means. Do you understand what “Waspy Afro-Latin,” means?
Fraud! Fortune! Famine! Oh! What romance… Lost in the history of China, Japan, Korea… I find myself reading up on India, you can understand Asian without having a grasp, however slippery, on Buddhism… I get lost, trying to figure out how these locations, cultures, and peoples relate to each other. Monks. Monasteries. Rebellions. I see that this is a lot like European history, a complex story of nuanced WAR in which brothers fight for crumbing empires, and frail wives, while the universe wails, singing, its eternal and infinite abundance of budding universes.
I have departed, entranced by my readings, my sacred books. I am FAR OUT! I LOOK toward the East and what do I see? I see me. I see myself, my values… the appreciation of rice as a source of life. My need for incense and meditation. Yoga. In order to flesh out the dry bones of history, I read novels, and recently I read, “The Good Earth,” by Pearl S. Buck, a book that puts poverty, firmly in the cycle of Fortuna’s cruel whims. I went through an intensive phase of reading “Judge Dee, ” highly stylized novels by Robert Van Gulik, a Dutch diplomat and “Authority on Chinese Culture,” and have recently invested many an hour into the contemplation of bound feet in the historically appealing novels of Lisa See.
The homeless woman, finding temporary shelter in the bookstore is no different than me. We both know where to go to find shelter. We are both free to roam! Imagine having your feet broken by your mother as a child, in order to make you into a virtually crippled sex object, unable to run, unable to flee? Or the fact that until recently in China and elsewhere, literacy was a luxury few enjoyed. We can be certain that LIFE has never been easier, that it is here and NOW.
(and John Halliday, on “Mao,”)
