Professor Ling-chi Wang of UC Berkeley: Happy Dragon Boat Festival （端午节)! Yes, we observe this and other Chinese festivals. For this one, we make Zongzi (粽子) every years and give them to our children’s families. We actually had a Zongzi-making party over the weekend. Our children and some of our grandchildren participated in making them. To my parents’ generation, the process is a piece of cake. But for us, it is a challenging job. We made about 30. It took one day to assemble and prepare the ingredients and another day to wrap them in large bamboo leaves. But, the reward, consuming them, is well worth the trouble! (In case you would like to eat this once-a-year delicacy, you can buy a very good one at the Clay Pot Restaurant on Clement and 11-th Avenue in the Richmond District of SF. I strongly recommend it. You can also ge authentic Taishan Clay Pot rice in this restaurant owned by the Liu family from Taishan).
Needless to say, the ritual of making Zongzi always reminds me of my school days in China when we had to memorize the famous Chu Ci (楚词) Chu poem, by Qu Yuan (屈原), entitled, “Li Sao (离骚), An Energy of Encountering Sorrows,” the most difficult poem to understand and memorize I had ever tried to master. The 3rd century B.C. poet/martyr, Qu Yuan, is the celebrated patriot commemorated nationwide each year in this annual festival and immortalized by this poem.
Your road trip through five Western states sounds great. I have yet to make one to the Rocky Mountain states. (I toured Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, but not Wyoming, Idaho, Motana, Idaho and the Dekotas. I would like to visit them before I kick the bucket).
I noticed you called your upcoming trip, 西游记 “Journey to the West,” named after one of the four best known novels in the history of Chinese literature. For Chinese Americans making your trip, I would call it “Journey to the Far West,’ the title I borrow from a long revolutionary ballet, composed by the late Chinese American jazz saxophonist and jazz composer. It is an ambitious musical epic of Chinese American struggles in western states of the U.S. in the 19th century. I was fortunate to have a chance to attend the performance of this long piece. Among all the Asian American jazz musicians, I consider him the most talented and best. He was also a Marxist, writer, playwright, and political activist. Tragically, he died young ten years ago.
For those interested in the history of Chinese immigrants in the West, I recommend Chinese on the American Frontier, edited by my late friend, Arif Dirlik (Rowman Littlefield, 2001). Chinatowns once dotted many frontier towns and cities in the Rocky Mountain states. Most have disappeared.
By the way, in case you are going by Bozeman, Montana, see if Robert Vrooman, the former head of Counterintelligence at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico. He bravely told the U.S. Senate, in a public hearing, that there was not “a shred of evidence” that Dr. Wen Ho Lee was ever a spy for China. He called the charges against him to be racist. In my book, he is a hero.
Have a nice and safe journey to the Far West!
Edward Liu: June 14, 2021 Good morning….，buen dia!
As I start to gear up for my upcoming exploratory road trip across 5 Western States, I am cautiously reminded that 2021 this year is a very different America.
西游记 One of the reasons why I am doing this road trip is to feel the pulse of America’s heartland outside of major big cities.
There are many Americas now…. and the cultural-political-ideological- economic divide is a subject that I seek to understand and write about.
On this road trip, I will try to post my blogs if there is wifi signals… some remote parts of the destinations I will travel to may have no or weak signals and broadband.
I will try to do my best.
Some of my good friends have reminded me to be extraordinarily careful and stay safe, given the rise in unprovoked violent anti-Asian attacks all over America in this climate of Asian and China-bashing hysteria.
I have my pepper spray and jungle machete. But I do not want to pack an assault rifle because I do not want to escalate any confrontation in any rage-hate outbreaks.
It is not the four-legged wildlife like grisly bears that I worry about; but the two-legged racist bigots that I worry about the most.
Almost daily now, outbreaks of violent mass killings and mayhem are erupting all across American cities. In rural America, the peace remains stable.
I don’t mind bigotry stemming from ignorance and lack of contact. In Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, some of the ultra-right conservative redneck cowboys can be rough…. but talking it out and connecting on a one-on-one human level is something which can de-escalate confrontation.
It is the southern rednecks, not the western rednecks that is more dangerous. The Trumpist “Crusaders for Jesus” I call them.
To these folks, the rage formed around China bashing and anti-Asian bigoted hate has a fanatical religious component. It is the misguided perception that we Chinese are “anti-Christ.”
These are the Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence types. Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, is also part of this class of “China haters.” They demonize the Chinese as “ungodly.”
Today I followed the news of Fuddy-Duddy Joe Biden on his meeting with the NATO military honchos in Brussels. This one day before the looming “gunfight at Geneva Corral.”
It will be a shoot-out between a 78 year old POTUS with memory lapses against a much younger “Killer,” Vladimir Putin.
I hear Turkey’s Tayio Erdogan, also a mistrusted member of NATO, also wants to meet Biden… to get a first-hand measure of Fuddy-Duddy Joe!
He will be disappointed because the old man is 90% “spin,” and only 10% “substance.”
Worse, Biden’s Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is worse. He is a rabid liberal Zionist ideologue… one of the 5,000 idiots who now formed the Corp of America’s foreign policy “experts”… the CFR- Council on Foreign Relations.
These folks are dis-connected from the real America of youths and the bottom 60%.
These young Americans and working class are opting out. The shifts are most remarkable as more and more of them are resigning and getting out of the treadmill of “rude, brutal, unfriendly, unkindly” work life in corporate and tech America!
There is a new wave of urban escapees today towards less populated states like Montana, Wyoming, Idaho.
Ever heard of Provo, Utah? Or Boulder, Colorado? Or Boise, Idaho?
This domestic transmigration is something that I will study and learn about in my road trip…. in addition to exploring “the yellowing and browning of America’s racial-ethnic demographics.” Yah!
Johnson Choi Biz 