Blog – Page 44 – Clara Hsu

The #11 Bus

Stick shift and bad back do not make good bedfellows. But I’m the kind of person who likes to sit in front of the computer until the last minute and then dashes out the door. When I am forced to abandon my “third leg” because of back spasms I have to reevaluate my priorities.

The world has always been what it is. Only when I enter it at a different portal do I notice new things like fresh air, the fog, the wind, sunshine, the moon and the rhythm of my heart. As a poet I write about these elements often enough. But they are through the imagination and not so much the body. Taking the bus I find an entire community of its own as we rub shoulders and smell each other’s odor and listen to each other’s conversation. A long walk navigating between people and animals, observing the glorious old cinemas that have deteriorated into garages and sundry stores on Mission Street, I find my slowing metabolism speeds up. It is all good. #11, as we call legs, is the bus I’m taking these days. Unlike Muni, I can depend on them.

Deadline?

There’s no deadline in art. Creation is a continuous process with periods of quiescence and activities. Sometimes the medium changes from one form to another and you never know if you’re standing on the threshold of change. Deadline is for functionality, demanded by those who feel they must have something tangible. If you believe in art, you have to believe it all the way. There is no justification. There is no road map. Faith is the only thing you hold on to.

Artists are misunderstood creatures often being labeled as dreamers and lazy bums. No wonder they are depressed, living in an organized world that is measured by the dollar and goes by the ticking clock. Pragmatic parents withholding their financial support or threatening to ostracize their children in order to kill the artistic tendency is one of the saddest things I witness being a teacher. They have failed to see the courage behind the artist, taking the road least traveled, making a difference in the world.

Photo credit: Lei Chen

Personal Trainer: Li Po

My stepmother, a spunky woman, lived well into her late eighties. During the last years of her life she complained about her weakened memory and was concerned that she would lose her mind before her body. “Read poetry.” I suggested. “Memorize them. They’ll make your brain ache.” Strangely, her ability to read and write English was diminishing with time, even though she had lived and worked in San Francisco for over half a century. “Read Chinese poems then. The 300 Tang Poems is a good start.” She went to East Wind Books and found a very nice annotated edition.

In Hong Kong where I grew up we were taught to memorize famous poems and prose. It was a terrifying process where a student would be picked to stand up in a class of fifty and recite. I have forgotten all of these passages now, except for one.

2001. I was accepted into the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. During a traditional dinner at the residence of Oakley Hall (founder), we were asked to recite a poem not of our own. As we went around in a circle I was near panic. And then this little tiny poem slipped into my mind: Li Po’s Night Thoughts, the first poem I learned as a child. I recited it in Cantonese. It was an emotional recitation as I reached back in time and touched the root that was my heritage.

Here’s my translation of the poem:

Night Thought by Li Po

Moonlight casts on bed/ bemused as ground frost/ head tilt to bright moon/ bow to homeward thoughts.

My stepmother passed away two years ago. I kept her book of 300 Tang poems. It was bulked up with paper clips she had placed on the pages she liked.

An Ordinary Life

Friends and family puzzled over the announcement that I have written a memoir. “I thought memoirs are written by people who have already lived a life.”—was the general sentiment, and, “What have you done in your life to fill three-hundred pages?” Do my friends and family who are not writers live a life without drama? I think not. Mostly, I think, they don’t consider their experiences important beyond themselves.

Alcohol, drugs, sex, obsessions of the fatal kind and high profile people make it into the bookstores for readers to devour their rise and fall. But each one of us in our little world are struggling every day with all kinds of emotional and physical challenges. What is perceived as ordinary takes great patience and endurance to accomplish—The bakery that provides fresh bread every morning, a 9-5 job, or the old woman who carries her grandchild on her back.

My cousin, who was a judge, once chuckled at the jury process. When asked who were the people who made it to the jury box, she said they were the ones you saw standing in line in the DMV. An off-hand remark separating us and them for a good laugh, until my aunt said, “I was picked three times.” We are as ordinary and extraordinary as we want to be.

Romanze

Liu-Fang — Liu Fang. Click image to go to her site.

Risheng Wang was a research scientist living in Germany. On one of his trips to China he happened to listen to a cassette of pipa music. The playing literally touched his soul and he knew he had to find the artist, whose name was Liu Fang. He wrote to her, as a fan, but deep inside he knew he had fallen in love. The two met during Risheng’s subsequent visits to China. They married and moved to Canada. Risheng gave up his research and devoted his time in promoting Liu Fang’s music. I met the couple in 2001 at WOMEX, a world music conference in Rotterdam. Risheng told me this story. We are now friends on facebook. Have I told your story correctly, Risheng?

I was a closet poet when I first began writing. Eager to find a community, I happened upon an internet site where I could read other people’s work, post my own (be anonymous) and receive comments. After a lot of lurking I began to post and “befriended” a variety of characters. One in particular, judging by his poems, was a half-crazed Chinese poet called “Rain”. I had just finished a poem about a devastating experience in China and wanted to share it with him privately. We began corresponding one Sunday morning. He answered immediately, happy that someone valued his opinion. We emailed back and forth, finding concordance in each other’s point of view. The keyboard heated up. He proposed marriage. I told him he was too rash. Then we started arguing and everything went sour. By evening we had a divorce. Do I remember this correctly, Rain?

Photo credit: Sife Elamine

Reading Langston Hughes Out Loud

“Sun and softness”. Carlos Ramirez gave me his beatific smile when I hesitated. He had invited me to assist him in his performance reading of Langston Hughes. Carlos has put many of Hughes’ poems into songs. His usual partner Greg Pond was unavailable on Saturday to read with him.

“I love Langston Hughes’ poems.” I said to Carlos. ” But I’m Chinese and he is black. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do the poems justice.” Carlos’ smile broadened even more and I burst out laughing. Carlos is Latino.

At our Monday rehearsal I wanted to read Hughes’ Merry Go Round in a child’s voice. Carlos listened and commented that it sounded like there were a grown woman and a child mixed up in the poem. In other words, the effect didn’t work. I asked him for suggestion.

“Use your own voice.” Carlos of great white beard looked deep into my eyes. “You’re grown, but in your memory there was a time when you were small and you weren’t sure about the merry go round. Tell this memory to the audience.”

I read the poem at MAPP (Mission Artists Performance Project). There was no applause at the end. It was not to be. The audience was stunned by the memory of confusion, when a child looked for the Jim Crow section and found “there ain’t no back to a merry-go-round. Where’s the horse for a kid that’s black?“

Whose Words Were These?

Xu Zhimo2 — Click image to read more about Xu Zhimo

The vast resource of foreign films and documentaries from Netflix have been both educational and entertaining for me. I am especially drawn to the ones on artists and writers. Films like Black White + Gray, Camille Claudel, Modigliani, Quills, I the Worst of All, Seraphine are historical dramas I eagerly digest. When Nietzsche Wept is one that stands out among the others. The movie is full of surprises in the way the director handles the two characters: Nietzsche and his doctor, Josef Breuer. But the ultimate kick for me is at the very end, when the two men became friends. Out of Nietzsche’s mouth came a famous poem that I had translated from the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo, entitled “Chance”. Now, Xu was born three years before Nietzsche’s death in 1900. Did Xu lifted Nietzsche’s words, translated it into Chinese and made it his own poem? I don’t read Nietzsche so I can’t be sure. Here is the poem. It has always been credited to Xu Zhimo:

Chance

I am a cloud in the sky/ by chance it casts a shadow in your heart./ Don’t be surprised, or happy,/ in an instant it all vanishes.

We meet at sea, in the night/ traveling in different directions./ You may recall, or perhaps it is better to forget/ the glow when we cross paths.

Writers, Not Beggars

creacion-de-las-aves-remedios-varo-1957 — Creacion de las Aves by Remedios Varo

Publishing is a big business. Writers know that. Agents know that. In this age of Internet most submission is going electronic, and with it comes an attitude—the demand for pristine manuscripts with specified margins, spacing and formats. With it comes threatening remarks of deleting queries that are formatted incorrectly, and a writer’s chance of being snickered at if the agents deem you incompetence in following their simple instructions.

I’m sure agents are swamped with queries to the boiling point. Otherwise they must not forget that writers are artists and their work is a creation of art. To discriminate and incriminate based on their own guidelines is to exclude the possibility of discovering some true talents who are not wired to follow instructions or go online. Some writers are too poor to spend $600+ to go to a writers conference. Others work in obscurity and don’t have time for a “platform”.

You may say too bad for these writers. They’ll never see the light of day. But I say the publishing industry is the loser. Long ago it was the emperor who set out into the mountains to seek the advise of a hermit. Writers are not smoochers, least of all beggars.

This Funny Thing We Called The Brain

To get to know a friend is to try finding things in common. Pick a topic–hobby, age, birth signs, politics–between two people there has got to be something you can talk about. My friend Andy and I are excited over our dyslexia. It may be too broad a term to describe the sense of loss in our childhood, but we definitely were not wired optimally and timely. I remember eating an interminable lunch at my desk, while the rest of the class lined up to go somewhere. But more tragically was the lack of comprehension on all subjects (except music) no matter how hard I tried.

For some, the wires of writing, reading, remembering, comprehending, interest, drive and skills in the “jelly-mold” may never touch. The disconnect is real and surreal. I don’t understand why I write poems and not be able to read others’. My love of sound does not help me in learning a language. People said if you can play the piano you can type. That’s an assumption that I can prove them wrong. Anyway, I tell my piano students the brain is a separate entity of the body. In order to make it work for you, you have to command and repeat an action over and over again. That means practice, practice, practice.

The Old Druidess

Sometimes we live in magick and we don’t even know it. It is because we are mundane and unable to perceive the fantastical elements. Unlike falling in love where there is a heightened sense of pleasure, most magick is subtle, coming and going without creating too much of a stir, except when it is gone.

Jehanah Wedgwood had long silver gray hair. She sat at the head of the table at the Sacred Grounds Cafe with a piece of sign up sheet in front of her. She had sat there like this every Wednesday night for nearly twenty years. Once in a while I gave Jehanah a ride home after the reading. She lived not far from the venue but I could never find it on my own. I blamed myself for not paying attention. Sometimes I would pick her up during the day for other outings and find the street and the houses looking all together different from the night.

After Jehanah died we had a druid ceremony at the Monarch Bear Grove at the Golden Gate Park. While we memorialized Jehanah, Rodney the celebrant pointed out that he had trouble driving Jehanah home. Many hands shot up at once, as we all had the same experience. “It was because she lived in both worlds.” The magick was explained but the realm had already passed on.