Duende Arts

Noli me tangere, touch me not, Jesus says to Mary Magdalene in John 20:17. Filipino writer and hero, José Rizal, used the phrase as title for his first novel, a book that frankly I've only heard of and admired from a distance. I tried reading Leon Ma. Guerrero's translation after my second visit to the Philippines since leaving it in 1975. I am ashamed to say I didn't go far beyond the author's preface where his choice for a title is explained. His novel, he wrote, was his "endeavor" to uncover the cancer that afflicted Las Islas Filipinas, a disease that made it untouchable because people dread contact with the sick for fear contagion.

Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'"

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What amazes me is how the Internet has made breaking news just minutes away for someone thousands of miles away from the event. Following the endgadget liveblog, unwashed, unshaven, still dressed in night clothes, I read what Steve Jobs had said just a minute or so before on my computer screen at home.

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Verbal sensitivity, wrote John Gardner, was one quality a writer could use. I like this phrase better than "love for words." It's a closer approximation of what I enjoy when writing.
I do feel a caffeine jolt when I find a new word that captures what I mean. I love the sound of it, the cadence it adds to my sentence, the harmony or disharmony it contributes to the paragraph, or even to the whole work but what I enjoy is bigger than this. Gardner's term includes more than the delight I feel with individual words or group of words. It is curiosity about the structure of language and the mimetic function of thought in putting flesh to experience. I might hazard to say that what I enjoy in writing is intrinsic to living life itself. Living by itself seems inadequate when I cannot put down what I am living into what I see. Seeing is at the core of writing, seeing in the sense like dipping a teaspoon into the surging river that I have a bit of it in my possession, something I can gloat over and dissect and make something else out of because what I have is not the river surely. It's mine now; hence I I can, maybe even must do something with it. It is delight and obligation; it is response and responsibility.

I lost this sensitivity to language and to words for years but it only went underground and took on another form. I wanted to cultivate and understand images. Now I understand why. Language is more than words. It is a tool I was not interested in passing on information or facts. Language rises to its potential when it recreates experience. (Life is, after all, only what we experience, not some absolute thing, certainly not "reality" or "truth." The art of the writer or graphic artist derives from his or her experience of this confounding, frustratingly ungraspable entity that created mystics in the first place. An artist is one who senses in some dark corner of her psyche that there is more to life than just living it. She must imitate what experience hints is it's essence, that animating force that some call God. By imitating it she tries to identify with it and sometimes by God accomplishes this. Or appears to, anyway. Artists aspire to this goal, a goal no one can verify. Publishing what a writer writes might give verity to his success. Selling a movie concept or a video or a painting might make the artist feel he's gotten it. The recognition by another person encourages the artist to try again, and try and try. But I think he tries because he must. Life otherwise would just not be enough. It has to be transported by his imagination and desire into something filtered through his being, through what he represents in the incalculably immense scheme of things.

To descend from hyperbole, I think I am on the right track. Better late than never, they say. Not being a fatalist I still think we do what we do. To feel remorse or dwell on what might have been is senseless. Desire is, like imagination, just a page in the eternally mysterious that changes and moves relentlessly on (or back or sideways). We don't become eternal by cultivating art or achieving financial or business or personal success. It's just life, this short span of time of awareness, of sensitivity.

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Cantonese food is what came to mind when growing up in the Philippines we went out for Chinese with my father. Cantonese was also what Americans had until the last ten to fifteen years when more mainland Chinese have been liberated to come to America and offer us the wider variety of Chinese viands.

Peter Cheung started the House of Cheung in 1989. His grandfather came to America in 1907 and worked at various jobs until he came to the Midwest in the late 1940s and started working in various restaurants. Peter followed in the 1970s, his father arriving later on with his mother. Peter told me that when he first arrived in Indianapolis there were seven Chinese restaurants. Now there are over a hundred. But his Cantonese-American style of Chinese restaurant is quickly disappearing. Sprouting like shiitake mushrooms after the rain, the newer restaurants are smaller with minimal decor to tell customers they sold Chinese food. Peter's restaurant, on the other hand, is a museum of artwork overseas Chinese and Chinese who fled the mainland were homesick for. Reverse glass paintings, scrolls, ornate imperial-style dragons, and the golden lanterns with Mandarin-red faux silk tassels.

My rather confused take - his machine-gun speech left me in the dust - on Peter's family history in America gave me the impression that the seven Chinese restaurants in the city were incestuous enterprises. Owners and chefs came from a small group of Chinese who knew each other and who traded places as necessity occasioned. They maintained a consistent blueprint for what constitutes a Chinese restaurant and its menu. Peter's House of Cheung is one of the last examples.
The story of Peter's family and their associates starting from the late 1800s fascinates me. So much has been written about the Jewish diaspora, largely in the Europe and the Americas, but the Chinese too dispersed from mainland China and their story has been told only in a few books. They came to California in the 1800s and built the railroads that spanned the West. Many ended up finding new ways of making money by starting Chinese laundries and restaurants. These were the equivalents of European explorers fanning out into America and Asia. The Chinese began to leave Manchu China after Europe and the U.S. made contact with the deteriorating Middle Kingdom to seek their own fortune. Theirs is a story begging to be told.

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I watched Simon Chung's End of Love this morning. He wrote and directed this Cantonese-language movie that was featured at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008. Variety trashed the movie, calling it "uninspired. I was going to eject the movie after the first few frames but something about the main character's demeanor arrested my action. I ended up watching the whole movie. It was depressing. The plot didn't make sense. The end brought no closure, as if the threads were left just hanging there.

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