Dear Gentle Readers,
We pick back up with Dr. Wong. He's been invited by Big Mei to participate in their folk dancing practice for an upcoming festival.
Today's section is rather short, but it will wrap up this chapter. For those of you who are not from L.A., you will probably not understand these brief bits of Clete's conversation, but let me just say that everything anyone has written about Los Angeles or California being a place where people reinvent themselves is true. That is, except for natives. Immigrants to the area think they are living in the Great State of Flux, Vacationland, Summerland, Lotus Land, whatever, so they're slightly off center, working outside of their normal boundaries, and mildly euphoric. Natives have lived with recent star-struck immigrants all their lives and we think it's normal to be around so many people "acting out." We natives find it somewhat disconcerting when we visit or move to a place where the boundaries poles are not on rollers.
Anyway, that's enough chatter. Let's complete this entry
as the story continues ...
So I tagged along to a highland plateau in Ting Ting’s
territory where they rehearse and perform the dance. It was a place chosen to
give an unobstructed view of the sky and the ocean together—one of the areas
where they did their regular morning exercise routine.
I assume that the exercise they were do every morning is some kind of
Tai Chi that has survived onto this island. They never invited me and I never asked to participate and that was
just fine with me. I don’t know much about Tai Chi except that there are several
forms. I did take a short class once. I took a tumble off a motorcycle and
jacked up my ankles. My therapist suggested a Tai Chi class to get back some
range of motion so I signed up for a neighborhood class. It was run in some
run-down community recreation center taught be an old 70-ish Jew named Mort
dressed in sweats and a tweed driving cap. I remember on the first day of
class, while we were taking the mid-session break, a young woman maybe 20 years
younger than me struck up a conversation as we got Cokes out the ancient metal
vending machine they had in the lobby.
“You’re Chinese right?”
“Last name is Wong, so I guess that
qualifies me then.”
“You’re pretty funny.”
“I’m just old is all.”
“I can’t believe we’re learning Tai Chi
from an old white guy.”
I assumed she was likewise of Chinese descent as I was. She
had not bothered to say. Unfortunately, my parents forgot to teach me the
“Secret Chinese Handshake” rather like the Masons have so that you can tell. It
would be really handy in situations like that.
“How long you lived in L.A.?" I asked. "This is pretty typical. My favorite French bakery is run by Japanese on the Westside. And I’m
pretty sure there are more Yoga instructors of Celtic background in this town
than South Asian.”
“Doesn’t it all bother you?”
“Eh. I teach. As long as he knows more
than me about the subject, he’s qualified.”
“What do you teach?”
“Math. Do you think it would be better if
I were Greek or British or German to teach my subject? I mean, that’s where a
lot of the current ideas were articulated and later developed.”
“Math is different. It’s universal.”
“It’s not universal to shift weight from
one foot to another and sweep your arms in curves?”
“You don’t worry that it’s inauthentic?”
“I’ll have to think about it. Let’s pick
this back up as class progresses. I’m more worried about getting my ankles to
move like they used to. Don’t dismiss him so easily.”
She did not return to class. I felt like I had failed to
convince her. Maybe I wasn’t a very good teacher after all, but my ankles do
work today. Thank you ancient Taoist masters of pugilism.
Not surprisingly, Ting Ting was the director of the dance
rehearsal proceedings. And as advised, it was not a Chinese dance. Most
everything I had ever seen on a stage that was billed as Chinese dance really
seemed more like gymnastics and circus acrobatics—utilizing flips, spins, and
exaggerated turns—all stuff that you’d see in large-scale pageants. Anything
that looked like a more subtle form was nearly always explained “Oh, this is a
dance of some ethnic minority group.” I think martial artists of Tai Chi
cornered the market on subtlety in ancient China and the poor old Han
choreographers had to fall back on somersaults to differentiate themselves.
If you’re not familiar with Tai Chi, it’s basically
slow-motion boxing. I can’t help but admire this sometimes wacky culture I came
from and how it managed to turn a utilitarian discipline for soldiers into its
expression of high art in human movement. Very practical. The moves are all
natural.
The Seven-Seven dance is likewise slow-motion movement, but
the movements tend to be highly mannered and not so natural. Especially
unnatural are the positions of hands and feet. The Khmer-inspired dances of
Madame Jorani basically made the girls all look like statues from a Hindu
temple had all come off the walls and started moving about in snail’s-pace
unison. The feet were all about having the toes curled backward—totally the
opposite of a Western dancer’s feet where toes are always pointed straight.
There were essentially twelve episodes of narrative movement which each
culminating in the story principals (the cowherd, the weaver girl, the cow, the
grandmother) being held in closing-scene tableau postures.
Much of the rehearsal time at the beginning was spent with
the Cousins splitting themselves into two teams of four, with one team holding
me in a position in tableau, like arms extended above my head, left leg
extended, and right leg bent, and the other team holding one of the cousins in
a complementary position. They all knew what they were doing. I just had to be
like a big Ken-doll being positioned into place opposite Barbie.
When it came time to run through the dance itself, the
Cousins took a look at themselves and decided that Feng should play the role of
the Weaving Girl this year opposite her. They thought in size, physique, and
stature, she best complemented me in appearance. Being together seemed awkward
for her at first, things lightened up as she became comfortable berating me for
my clumsiness and not moving properly in time. I got really tired halfway
through, so they called a break and allowed me to rest. Feng took a seat beside
me on the ground.
“Have you ever participated in anything
like this before?” she asked.
“Organized folk dances like this stopped
for me in 6th grade. After that, your folks have to sign you up for
special programs if you want to do that kind of thing.”
“That’s a shame.”
“So why isn’t this a Manchurian dance?”
“Madame Sun was not fond Manchu steps. But
she did mix a few in.”
“What does Manchurian dance look like?”
“Ting Ting! Can you do a bit of the
handkerchief dance with me?”
They got up and started moving. Lum and Lian could not help
but join in making it a quartet. They completed what would be equivalent of one
movement of a sonata, stopped, and broke into applause for themselves.
“That dance you basically work a box in
large naturalistic steps then? Very up-tempo. Not slow and languid.”
“I don’t disagree. We also do a dance with
fans. Much easier to do than the Seven-Seven narratives.”
“It looks a lot like country western
dancing back home.”
“You do that?”
“Only when a business associate has plied
me with too much alcohol. Hey, does this dance have music that goes with it?”
“Yes. You probably heard us humming it.”
“No instrumentals then? I always remember
Southeast Asian dance being accompanied by gongs, xylophones, and drums.”
“There is a score that Dr. Sun came up
with. I’ve played it on the guqin before. But we don’t have enough people to
stage it with music.”
“Is the music written down?”
“No. He thought the music should change
over time as people would remember it but add to it to keep it fresh and
current.”
“You said ‘he.’ I thought Dr. Sun was
female.”
“I’m sorry. There are two Dr. Suns. I call
her both Dr. Sun and Dr. or Madame Jorani. Her husband was Sun Lao Shih. He was
a dissident scholar who found exile in Cambodia where he met his wife before
they emigrated here.”
“A dissident? What did he do?”
“I think his patron governor simply fell
out of favor, and there some kind of purge. But my mother always like to say he
was thrown out of China for being a pornographer.”
“Porn? But isn’t China one of the places
that INVENTED illustrated sex manuals?”
“I can’t verify that, but she did say he
was a defiler of virgins and a lech. She never let me be alone with him, or any
of my cousins for that matter.”
“Did he live up to that reputation?”
“By the time we were of age, I think he
was pretty harmless. He was, what’s the English word for unable to summon one’s
full manhood?”
“Impotent.”
“That’s it!”
“Poor bastard. He was probably frustrated as fuck. You were probably cute as a
teenager.”
“Are suggesting that I am not now?”
“Don’t start. Leave all that schoolgirl earthiness
to your cousins.”
“And just how earthy have they been?”
“Y’know Feng. I’ve really missed you. We
were supposed to start cultivating a friendship, remember?”
“May I remind you, you went to jail. We
even had to invent the idea of jail here just because of you.”
“I’m doing what I can to broaden your
horizons.”
“We do not lack for broad horizons here.
But I do want to apologize. I was probably needlessly distant. I’ve been having
a hard time lately.”
“Hard
time?”
“I can’t put it into words.”
“I know exactly what’s bothering you.”
“What?”
“Easy. Your daughter is college age. I see
this all the time in my work. Your essential parenting work is done. You’re
wondering what’s next? Or is this all there is? She is the personification of Woman
Ascendant. So what does that make you?”
“That’s not it at all.”
“Ooo la la. then. My mistake. You’re special then. Just
like I always knew you were.”
“What do such parents do? The ones you
talk to? Just out of curiosity?”
“The women? They take long vacations to
Tuscany, Italy, learn to cook with olive oil, and have affairs with Italian men
15 year younger than they are. A lot of them take writing classes so they can
eventually self-publish a memoir of their sex lives back when they were single
ingenues.”
“And the men?”
“They divorce their wives, buy sports
cars, and date young women they have no chance of keeping satisfied in bed.”
“How incredibly disloyal! How can you
stand to live in such a place?”
“OK. It’s an exaggeration but it’s a general
tendency. Some fight it, a lot give in at some level.”
“It all sounds not only immoral, but expensive.”
“The alternative is psychotherapy. In your
case, I recommend a trip to Guam or Hawaii to go see a dentist, an internist,
and a immunologist. That’s pretty doable. And you’ll feel a lot better.”
“THAT IS NOT a good cure for what is on my
mind. AND … you have a one-track mind
Professor Busybody. If you can make jokes like that you are obviously rested.
We don’t have much daylight left.”
© Copyright 2012 by Vincent Way, all rights reserved.
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Be truthful and frank, but be polite. If you use excessive profanity, I'll assume you have some kind of character flaw like Dr. Wong. Tks!