Could we fill the Jacob Javits Convention Center,
We, Chinese, who have come to America,
With the voices of our existence?







Booth # 1 - 	       Chinese Camp -
            100 people, twice the dogs, and a handful of goats.
            Here  - where 5000 Chinese men mined for gold in '49 -
            nothing has been saved 
            by the Tuolumne County Visitors Bureau.
            Only the hot dry wind coming off the Sonora Desert
            Preserves a few abandoned buildings
            with iron gate doors and rings.
            In the City Cemetery, 
            only the graves of the `Bai Guei'+ have headstones. 
            At midnight, the ghosts of those who have seen the elephant*
            celebrate in the boarded Dance Hall House  -
            their guttural shouts and wild laughter -
            why this dead town has half as many people as dogs.




Booth # 2 -             The 1992 Mobil Travel Guide -
            icons for		pets, fishing, and riding,
					swimming, skiing, tennis, and golf,
					weight rooms and jogging trails,
					airports and sprinklers,
					handicapped access, non-smoking rooms
					and discounts.
           In this iconography of a nation in movement, 
           there are no icons for libraries.
            The Ramada at Edison is:
			carpeted grass
			red bricks speckled black
			doors of aluminum and glass
			a large satellite dish in front
			a small pool in back.
            A closed loop video plays a terrible clanging
            from our banging the door,
            "Let us in!", echoes again and again
            on the vacant floor behind the door.




Booth # 3  -	          Empty by default -
            the  sing-songing deprecation of our language
            (how many times a day in the good old USA?)
            lacks a word to describe it
            (to the majority, just a minor event),
            no way      to mark it,
                        	to remember it,
                        	to smear their faces with it
                        	to reduce them to a category .
            The infant, without words, cannot remember.




Booth # 4 -	        The ceiling of glass -
            not the Diaspora in chains,
            the motion of ocean, nausea unto death,
            not the crossing of Rio and barbs of wire
            to pick peaches at 10 cents a bushel,
            not steel or concrete
            but a civilized transparency - where
            we can only see the other side.




Booth # 5 -	       Soil with water an inch below -
            In the Toys `R Us parking lot in Paramus,
            one wrong turn against the dulled traffic arrow
            and out of a car of teenagers 
            comes "Whadda ya doing, ya fuckin' Chink!"
            His three children ask what was said,
            their windows locked.
            The secret of the polite Asian.




Booth # 6 -	        The Michael Jordan elbow -
            In the Finals against the Suns,
            he admired Michael as he flared his elbow out
            against a white Sun who guarded too closely.
            But as he waited to board the 'N, a 6 foot black tough
            did a Michael Jordan elbow as he exited
            and caught him in the throat in a game only he knew about.
            When he shoved back and demanded to know why,
            he threatened to kick his ass, spit in his face,
            and pulled his eyes so long
            they looked like the scars on his grandfather's back.
            We are scapegoats of the slaves.




Booth # 7 -	       The lamb and the lion.
            A Chinese-American engineer in Detroit,
            mistaken for Japanese,
            has his head bashed in with baseball bats
            by two white auto workers out of work.
            At the trial, at the moment of acquittal,
            his mother cries, in her broken English,
            "Jus . tus,  jus . tus.   I .. want ..  jus . tus
            for my Vincent!"





            21 million Chinese killed or wounded by the
            Japanese in WW II.
            Japanese troops bayonet a Chinese baby
            in the arms of her mother on a train they detained.
            My parents applaud Hiroshima.
            But in America, we are all Yellow.


                                             hhc
                                             5-4-92