Lucky Tang-The Biography of a Novel

Chapter 8b Origins

2008-08-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

After consulting his closest advisors just before sunrise each day of the harvest season, the Emperor sends down the decree. Messengers, each bearing a sealed copy, a hundred for each province, set out on foot from the imperial city. Within three months, they must visit every place where civilized men have settled.

They stand in the village centers, just before the sun goes down, when the peasants return from the fields, when the fishermen moor their boats, when mothers gather their children, and when elders wrap robes around themselves to fend off the chill of impending night. In each of these places the messengers read the emperor's words, but never in exactly the same way. In the mountains to the south, the ceiling of the earth, they chant to a beat as slow as the movement of the heavens. In the deltas they sing in the up?tipped tones of the musical dialect used by those who live along the rivers. In the west, they shout and bang their chest at the end of every three sentences. Near the capital they speak in a voice barely above a whisper: obedience is not an issue within a day's ride of the emperor. In those places where the dialects have degenerated into mutual incomprehensibility, the messenger shares the stage with a local magistrate, who translates simultaneously, while the villagers look on in wonder. For these villagers, the emperor barely exists, yet they too listen obediently. In every province, in every village, the messengers deliver the emperor’s proclamation,

"The emperor, holder of heaven's mandate, decrees that a corvee made up of one of every ten adult males in this place be sent at the height of the full moon to that part of your province that is closest to the capital. They will arrive there before the illusion moon, the fullest of full moons. Once at the border, the corvee will be met by an imperial army detachment who will make a count to ensure that you have sent the specified number of men. If you fall short, the army will execute the entire group and you will then be expected send a new corvee. If you exceed your number, the emperor will send extra supplies of grain and live fowl to more than make up for any food production lost.

Once the men are counted , the army will accompany them to make certain that they make it to the project in safety. There they are to help dig a trench, the longest and deepest trench in the history of the world. It will be so long that it will span the western border of the renegade province and it will be deep enough to pry it loose from the edge of the River Empire forever."

Each day, a thousand new men arrive at the digging project. The nomads from the western desert, men who have never before broken the ground appear at the site with waist high pointed sticks. The mean from the plains bring wagons for hauling out the displaced earth. Their digging implements are made from bronze. The delta peasants, prove to be the best, most have spent their lives building levees to control the river floods which determine the prosperity of their farms each year. Their strongest men work in tightly coordinated groups with fat iron- tipped shovels. The hardwood handles of their shovel are so worn that deep grooves in the shape of fingers have worn into them. The smaller quicker workers pass the dirt out of the trench in buckets. Each man knows his task, and they sing as they toil, the same song for hundreds of li. You can walk from one end of the line to the other then back again and hear each man joining in just at the moment when the notes peak.

The northerners are bigger and more individualistic by nature. They tie oxen to deep troughs, and pull out canyonfuls of dirt twice each day once in late morning, again just before nightfall. Each group keeps to itself, paying attention to the others only on the days when the different work crews from each of the emperor's provinces race one another. The evening before, a representative from each province runs from camp to camp placing bets on the outcome. Pottery from the north gets exchanged for a southwestern forest root that has the power to restore a man's vitality. A brace of perfect tender marsh ducklings roasted in purest wild sesame oil is bet against an entire field of silk spun into all the colors of the rainbow.

The emperor appears once a year in his red and purple sedan chair. He has three full militias of guards, forty seven concubines , and a hundred and nineteen eunuch attendants. Like most nine year olds, the emperor loves the unusual. A flock of geese flies overhead. It's a common enough sight in this part of China at this time of year, but these geese are harnessed to a kite the size of a rice field. Thirteen eunuchs hold up a canopy that covers the emperor's sedan chair to keep their master from being bombarded by the offal from the geese. Two full armies of archers patrol the edges of the ditch, one to keep the diggers at their task, and one to keep the other army of archers concentrating on theirs. At the end of each year, the emperor stands inside the trench at a pre-designated spot, kept secret from the workers. In this way, he measures their progress with their digging. Between visits, the workers pray that the emperor does not grow again this year. If the emperor shakes his head at the end of the measuring ritual, new messengers scurry across the provinces.

"More men, bigger corvees, you must send more men or face the consequences."

In the fifteenth year, the quota system begins. As long as a group of villages digs its share of the trench, they need send only as many men as it takes. The emperor's ministers base their standard on the best, the chanting southern work gangs. Some regions attempt to copy, making up their own chants, substituting baskets of dried rushes for the sturdy brown clay vats used by the southerners. Others are stubbornly keep trying to develop their own ways to make the task easier. Each year the northerners appear with a new solution, one year their hollowed redwood tree breaks in half, and it buries thirty seven men. In the twenty seventh autumn of the digging, the men from the northern coast divert a river and flood the trench to soften the dirt. Some say a hundred thousand men drown, but after that the digging does indeed go more easily, and somehow too a hundred twenty five thousand new men appear even before the next rain. Within forty years the trench spans 100 mu wide and thirty five mu deep all around the province. Still, the emperor is not pleased.

"It will never be done in my lifetime."

He closes his eyes and shakes his white haired head. He stands in the window of the tower specially constructed in the imperial city so he can everyday with the aid of a mirrored convex lens monitor the progress of the digging.

Walled cities appear next to the digging sites where mere camps once stood. In the fifty third autumn of the project, the imperial advisors establish a special academy in the northeast where students, men and women, construct models, design new tools, find new ways to organize the task. When for the fifty third time, the emperor's messengers appear in the far provinces, they need no translator. Even in those provinces beyond the western deserts, they have come to understand that they are citizens of the River Empire, the diggers of the trench. Instead of standing in bewilderment, they now approach the messenger with a thousand questions, "Was it true about the flood? What song do these southern men sing that makes them as strong as dragons? What new machines had come from the north this last digging season?"

Even after the emperor dies, his successor understands the real significance of the trench. In turn so does the successor to the successor, as do his successors, until finally, the original reasons for the digging, the reasons for the mandated exile of this one province are as forgotten as the pointed sticks once used by the nomads of the western desert. Only the project matters and only the River emperor, and the people of his River Empire, would dare to dream of reshaping the earth.

Generations pass, and the trench deepens enough to stand at least a dozen emperors on top of one another. In the middle of winter, the men at the bottom of the trench now have to dress as if they were working in the desrt sun, so different are the conditions at the bottom of the trench than the surface. Some even claim to have felt the center of the earth tremble beneath their feet. For twenty five years, a plague spreads among the diggers, hiccoughs so violent they can not work with their hands. Millions of bewildered men, walk the edges, their echoed hiccoughs mock them from the bottom of the trench. More are sent, boys whose voices squeak uncontrollably, men with white hair and curved backs, women just past childbearing, anyone who might be immune, but the hiccoughing will not stop. When one key northern province runs short of laborers, a levee system just beyond the capital fails. Floods, famines, and revolts follow.

The new emperor, watches from his high tower, the mirror lens now improved to the point where he can see to the western edge of the world where the earth seems to curve. He consults his advisors, his shamen, his own special bureau of diggers, now the most powerful ministers in his court.

He listens quietly as one by one they came to him with suggestions.
“Let us abandon the project,” insists the minister of canals. It has outlived its usefulness to the empire.

“We must refill the trench and start over again,” we must regain the spirit of the boy emperor who started this project," pleads the minister of state.

One minister claims that a woman from the southern forests has a magic potion to cure the plague of hiccoughs. Another insists that a wizard from beyond the desert must be consulted.

For a thousand mornings, the emperor hears at least a dozen new suggestions before his noon meal of sweet quail's eggs and blue emerald tea. He tries some of the suggestions. Once an entire year's crop of silk is dropped into the trench. Sheet by sheet the silk floats downwards, great subterranean butterflies. The silk is then set on fire so that the smoke will soothe the worker's throats, but their hiccoughs only smell of silk and smoke. The same year, a million chickens are drowned in enough rice whiskey to fill a lake as a sacrifice to the gods, but only the rat god listens and hordes of rodents fill the trench while the workers still hiccough from above.

For seven straight months, the emperor meditates as he searches for some means to save his empire. Then one evening just before winter, he emerges from his chambers, calls his advisors before him, and sends out new messengers dressed in robes of the Emperor's own purple cotton, the symbol of authority.

"The plague is a message from the heavens that we have dug deep enough. The time has come to pry the banished province loose."

In secret the advisors laugh at this decree. For weeks they have prepared, sending their favorite concubines, their younger sons, the best jewels off to their home provinces safe from what they are certain will be a revolt that won't be put down. They tell one another that the emperor's decree will accomplish nothing, new rebellions will break out as soon as the demand for more corvees is announced and what of the millions of hiccoughing diggers?

But the plague of hiccoughing stops as suddenly as it began. Within years, redwood trees said to be older than the oldest river dialects are floated to the edge of the trench. Crews made up of mixtures of men from every region, the best graduates of the academy, set the trees in special notches. Ropes thicker than a wealthy landlord’s waist made from strands of a rare desert hemp are tied to the trunk of each redwood. Provinces unaffected by the floods begin to share their surpluses, as the empire now feeds on possibility. Their generation will be remembered as the one that completed the task.

But the optimism is short?lived. The ropes break. The trees bend, then snap into a thousand pieces, some large enough to crush the men below, and still the banished province moves less than the width of a man's fingernail.

The emperor himself journeys into the desert. He takes just thirteen camels and seventy three attendants. During his absence, a caravan of traders starts a fire just two li from the walls of the imperial city then loots the marketplace so thoroughly that even the rats abandon it. The rumor spreads that the emperor has fled. Inside the imperial walls, the ministers begin planning their own rebellion. Everyday at noon, they meet in the emperor's own favorite afternoon courtyard to discuss and prepare. With each meeting their plans become bolder. They are arguing over their rightful shares of the remaining empire when the entire imperial city is thrown into darkness deeper than night.

"An eclipse, an eclipse!"

The imperial astrologer shouts. Reassured, most venture back into the courtyard where an old man points to the heavens with a red lit divining stick.

"It's only the moon."

Had it been only the moon, the faithless ministers would not have run the second time, and certainly none would flee benath the walls of the imperial city or take poison when they realize that it is not the moon at all, but instead a horde of dragons each as big as a cloud. When the light returns, they can see the emperor himself perched on the neck of the biggest one.

"I have made a pact with the dragons," he announces as he glides just inches from his best loved observation tower.

"They will pry the banished province loose and in exchange River men will give up hunting for their teeth and bones."

Only the magicians whose most powerful potions depend almost exclusively on ground dragon bones dare to protest.

This time, even before they can announce it in the most isolated provinces, the messengers are overwhelmed with questions about the dragons.

It takes three harvest seasons. The River men devote the first to the design and construction of dragon harnesses. Thousands of men melt copper and zinc together, tan leather with horse urine, sharpen ox bone needles with diamond-edged knives as the idle dragons wait by the trench, exterminating the rats with blasts of their fire breath. After nightfall the beasts play simple gambling games with the workers, betting gold mines against a dozen maiden daughters, spare teeth and bones for a few thousand pounds of baby flesh. Perhaps the games might have turned tragic had the men not quickly discovered that dragons can not count beyond twelve without difficulty (the dragons have just three toes and fingers on each appendage). In a week, half the dragons are toothless.

The second harvest season, the northerners divert yet another river and fill the trench with water. By then the dragons have given up gambling. Instead, they spend their mornings learning from the River men how to sing in unison. In the afternoons, the dragons teach the men, introducing them to paper, showing them how to make their own fire breath from bits of sulfur and saltpeter.

The third harvest season, the dragons harness themselves to the banished province and start to pull. The first day, just the width of a man's hand opens up. Frustrated, the dragons breathe their fire through the banished province, turning the rainforests and grasslands in its center into desert. On the fifth day, the earth shakes. The dragons strain at their harnesses. Two die from the effort, crumpling in mid?air, crashing to the ground, and crushing an entire village, but the banished province breaks loose from the River empire. A tidal wave, as high as a mountain destroys half the coast. The sky turns red and the earth cracks. Salt water fills the widening trench between the banished province and the empire. Dead fish cover the surface of the water. But within a month, only the emperor's special lens, now mounted on the edge of the shore could even see the freshly torn shoreline of the banished province. By the beginning of the harvest season, even the mackerel fishermen in their two?masted junks have lost sight of it.

Most believe that the province simply floated into the ocean off the edge of the earth. But there are rumors. Two thousand years later, a eunuch admiral, first master of the magnetic compass, sets out with a fleet of a hundred ships in search of the lost province. Even the Marinheiros the first explorers from the west, equipped with their lateen sails, and deep water keels, hear the rumors of the floating island. One chart maker even includes this El Dorado on his map, an island, a terra incognita between the great Eastern Empire and the new lands.

Inside the Empire a legend which no one doubts passes from mother to children, from children to father, and back again. A group of monks, they say once set out in small boats and found a warm water current. They landed on the lost province, made contact with its people, only to return in shock.

"They still looked like natives of the empire on the outside, but they had a kind of amnesia. They had forgotten their language, their true identities as people of the Chinese empire."

"The Lost Province Curse", they call it.

The second time the monks return, those from the first discovery party who stayed behind might as well have been natives. They could barely communicate in any dialect. The province, they reported had finally docked, pressed up against a land of which it is clearly not a part.

But the last bit, they only tell in whispers.

"Only the ground remembers," they say.

Only the ground remembers, sometimes it shakes violently with longing, struggling to break free again, to return to its true home.

Chapter 8a Host Unknown

2008-07-30T23:27:00.000-07:00

From: Ltangled@aol.com
To: Jgrady@howard.org
Re: Really Confused

Jan,

Yes, I was really excited after we left the Illusion Factory the other day. Even thought Peter’s demo had the virus problem, I got home and did indeed begin writing something for the subjective virtual reality program. In fact, that’s pretty much the only thing I’ve done for the two days since we last saw one another.

At the same time, I’m absolutely certain that I didn’t send any of it on to you by fax, regular mail, and definitely not e-mail Why would I suddenly start sending you something this important through a completely different e-mail address? I assume that a place like the Howard Company would have a spam filter anyway.

Now this is the really really scary part for me. You seem to be telling me that whatever you got in that e-mail was “amazing!” How can that be? I’m not aware of anyone else who would write about Paperson. Even if there were, how would such a person send it to you? Not only that, I’m not good with attachments (the computer kind, but both kinds actually). I always just paste things into the body of the e-mail.

I assume you got my voice mails. Can we talk some time very soon? I’m going a little nuts here.

Lucky

From: Jgrady@Howard.org
To: ltangled@aol.com
Subject: Oh oh…

Lucky,
I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, but I’ve done something really embarrassing and I didn’t know how to tell you. I got too excited when I got that e-mail (I’m pasting it in below and attaching it since you need to get good at attachments if we’re going to make this project work). Yes, the address was different, but I had every reason to believe that it came from you.

Once you read, the e-mail from Paperghost@ col.com, you'll see what I’m talking about. You were the one who told me that your Grandfather used to insist that California was really a lost province of China. I also remember your telling me stories about dragons that had come through your family. I suppose I should have noticed that the attachment didn’t mention Paperson, but when I read it I was convinced that it could only have been written by my friend, Lucky Tang.

Okay, here’s the bad news. I was so impressed by what I thought you’d written, that I forwarded it directly to Luke. He was getting antsy about the project. I thought I'd surprise you by getting you on the project as an independent contractor, maybe even get you paid a little.

So before you read the e-mail from Paperghost (yes, I thought it was one of your jokes), I sort of have good news-bad news. The good news is that Luke loved it and he wants you to meet with us over lunch this Monday.

The bad news, of course, is that we don’t know who Paperghost is. You’re sure that it wasn’t you? I’m going to have the tech support guys check the ISP’s in the meantime. I’m going to call you in a few minutes, but first read over the attachment so we can talk about it.

It might be a year before we get another meeting with him.

Jan

“Motherfucker!”

“Lucky, are you okay?”

“It’s fine, just a problem with the computer.”

Marie stands outside my mostly-closed study door.

“It’s no wonder, you’ve been on that computer for almost two days in a row."

“I just need to get this done.”

“You’re not having a relationship with someone online?”

I pressed control-alt-delete on my keyboard, but the screen was frozen with Jan’s e-mail right on the screen in an oversized font.

“No, of course not.”

“Well, I saw it on Dr. Phil. Sometimes, it’s like you’re not even here when we’re together.”

I pulled the plug from the power strip and the monitor went black.

“Marie, just give me twenty minutes here….It’s a really important e-mail.”

“I thought you were turning the computer off.”

I glanced over at the cordless phone on the other side of my desk. How was I going to read this mystery e-mail in the next few minutes before Jan's call?

“Just remember the last time you said twenty minutes you came out of there after sunrise.”

I prayed that whatever e-mail that Jan had sent on to Luke wasn’t going to be more than a few pages. The operating system reloaded. I heard the whirr of the printer diagnostic as the red and green led on its front panel blinked. I was able to dial out. I got into the e-mail, started downloading the attachment then minimized the window. If only real life let you minimize windows and every now and then just let you reboot. Once the download completed, I pushed print, looked at the bottom right corner of my computer and noted happily that the entire process took just four and a half minutes. I grabbed the first page off the laser printer only to realize two things First, I’d been running out of toner for the last five weeks. The text was somewhere between light gray and unreadable. Second, I’d forgotten that the last page prints first. I started to swear again, then caught myself.

Chapter 7 Contact

2008-07-17T11:45:00.000-07:00

Chapter 7 Contact

I'd expected something way cooler than a card table, a small and not very detailed posterboard model of Paperson, and a roll-down screen for an lcd projector. Jan, Peter (the technical director), and I were the only three people in this cross between a room and an equipment closet. Even if Luke Howard’s Virtual Reality Project happened to be stuck in the back of the warehouse known as the Illusion Factory, this was not necessarily a sign of disrespect for the project in the odd culture of special effects wizards.

On the drive over, Jan had warned me, "At a money meeting, the man or the woman in the most expensive suit is the one you listen to. In a production meeting, you look at the sunglasses and the keychains. At the Illusion Factory, the guy with the most pizza stains on his t-shirt and the mismatched pair of running shoes is gong to be the heavy hitter. It’s almost always guys too. We’ve had a couple female technicians, but they’re still very rare. After a couple weeks here, even the women start wearing baseball caps and t-shirts after a couple weeks. It’s just the culture.”

“As in the culture of illusions?”

“Yeah, it’s one of those weird things. Years ago, Luke wanted to do away with coats and ties. He hates uniformity. He would wander around his production facilities in jeans, a Pendleton, and a pair of clean work boots just to make his point. In two years, everyone on the business and production end was dressing exactly like Luke and there was a whole status thing about the color and models of work boot and whether you ran the laces all the way to the top or not.”

There was, however, only so much that Jan could explain verbally about Luke Howard’s kingdom. I’d had the tour of the Turkey Farm, the company’s official headquarters, that included a gym, a pool, and three restaurants. The name “Turkey Farm” was a movie joke, of course, but the site had also really once been a Turkey breeding farm. When Luke bought it fifteen years ago and turned it into his alternative to a Hollywood studio, he’d insisted on keeping the name. The Turkey Farm still honored its roots in various ways. A set of pens housed a variety of domesticable livestock stayed in place behind the red brick editing building, although Luke had added llamas and peacocks to the mix. On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Luke’s employees would line up to drive by what had once been the barn where Luke and his assistants would personally pass out twenty pound organic turkeys for the holiday, though these were thoughtfully packed in a white cardboard box rather than dressed and hung from hooks.

Luke’s own office was in a five story Victorian at the Turkey Farm complete with glass-enclosed gazebo, hidden elevator, and theater in the basement. Luke had insisted that the structure appear period authentic which meant that all the light switches and wiring remained hidden and the door and window hardware looked retro even though they were cast from stronger more modern alloys. This might have seemed an odd choice for a man who had made his fortune popularizing images of intergalactic life in the distant future, but this kind of contradiction was, according to Jan Grady, one of the keys to dealing with Luke Howard, the man.

“Luke likes to turn expectations on their head,” Jan had told me. “It’s something you have to be ready for, but you won’t really get how it works with him until you experience it some.”

For the last decade, Luke’s real income hadn’t come from making movies. In fact, he hadn’t produced a movie of his own in seven years. “The RCA in the Parlor” had homaged radio mysteries of the thirties, but it didn’t even make it to general theatrical release. “In the Parlor’s” main virtue was that the movie had been shot entirely without sets of any kind. The actors would sit in a chair and special effects would backfill the scene with period details. Instead of making the extraordinary happen on film, this had been an attempt to use special effects to recreate the ordinary and the expected details of a movie set, items like bookshelves, upholstered sofas, floor lamps, and even wardrobe in a couple instances. Instead of noticing the clever special effects, the challenge was for viewers not to notice the presence of CGI at all. The handful of reviews that the movie did get mentioned that it looked surprisingly like a movie made in the thirties only the script and the acting both sucked.

In any case, the Howard company now made most of its money in two ways. The bulk came from licensing toys, cereal box promotions, soda cups, and what could best be described as branding cultural junk. The second more active source of Luke’s income came from doing contract special effects for other film companies. A logo saying “Special Effects by the Illusion Factory” could actually enhance a popcorn movie’s gross receipts by up to twenty million dollars. Even the digital film editing, the sound editing, and Foley effects done in the faux 19th century factory across from the Victorian accounts for nearly as much revenue as whatever comes from Luke’s movie residuals

“That’s sort of sad. Don’t you think?” I told Jan.

“Heck no. Luke loves it that way. He thinks it's a symbol of some new age in the entertainment business and he’s the guy at the head of the parade. Anyway, the Illusion Factory is now the production center for Luke’s Empire, so naturally he houses the enterprise in a dump. Anyway, welcome to the gold mine.”

At the time, we were in what appeared to be the back parking lot of Circuit City, a retail store that sold cheap electronics, but whose grand red brick facade and big display windows made it look for more upscale than the warehouse that once housed the retail clerks union before it became the Illusion Factory. If space aliens from one of Luke's movies ever landed beneath the Highway 101 overpass in search of advanced human technology, they would likely never guess that the elaborate building sold hundred dollar televisions and car stereos while the other building held multiple state of the art Silicon Graphics works stations.

After a brief tour of the blue screen where a group of workmen were spending the day cleaning a spot in one of the corners and the server room, we were in the Virtual Reality project room which Jan had told was the key to the future of the Howard Company. Even with her carefully-laid prologue about the anthropology of the action movie business, the room was a disappointment. The room wasn’t a glimpse of the future, it was a thirty year old dungeon's and dragons nerd still living in his mother's basement.

By the way he dressed, Peter, the technical team leader couldn't have been very far up the pecking order. He wore shoes made from actual leather and instead of a t-shirt he was wearing a pressed and clean Pendleton. Also, in a culture generally powered by the younger employees, Peter had to be at least forty. During the small talk, he'd even mentioned picking up his kid from soccer after our meeting. I figured that Jan was doing her best to break me in easy with Peter. Just plopping some kid in front of me who can’t make eye contact and whose idea of dress up is to put on his black Megadeath t-shirt instead of the white Alice in Chains shirt with the holes in it really might have been too much for me to comprehend. On the other hand, Peter did sport a long pony tail that fell well beneath his collar.

I had, at this point, figured out that Peter was a team leader rather than a "specialist". Jan had explained that there was potentially more money in being a "specialist", because the fledging effects union had won them the right to overtime for the ninety hour weeks just before final cut. Team leaders, as management, nominally got a percentage of the gross, but their shares were diluted to near irrelevance because they were always calculated against a percentage of screen time in the film or the DVD release. As much as people came out of the theater talking about the thrills of exploding building, tornadoes sweeping away live cows and camper shells, or talking sharks, the actual scenes were usually surprisingly short.

Peter motioned for me to take a seat on the office chair in front of the table.

"So Jan, did Lucky sign the disclosure?"

"I'm not a confidentiality problem. We're the licensor here," I did my best to sound like a lawyer.

Peter looked over at Jan and shook his head.

"It's not that kind of disclosure. This is just in case you don't return to this reality. We lost two people in France during the Hundred Years War a couple months ago. There's also that woman who had the heart attack during the alien invasion when the doctor with the tentacles put her in the stirrups."

"Uh, Jan didn't mention any of those things."

Peter then flicked his wrist as if he were doing a parry with a fencing foil, did a little hop, and gleefully shouted, "Got another one!... I thought you told me this guy was smart."

"I told you that he went to Harvard with me. That's not the same thing."

Peter then broke out laughing. Jan joined in. Eventually I did too if only not to appear to be a complete idiot. It was clear that this wasn't the first time they'd run this routine.

Peter then flipped open a panel on the arm of my chair. "Lucky, the first thing we're going to do is calibrate. We're going to show you some slides on the screen there. You're going to push the red button if it feels less familiar and the blue button if it feels more familiar. "

"Familiar compared to what?"

Jan tapped me on the shoulder, "Lucky, that's my cue to leave this demo for a bit here. Have fun with Peter. He's a very nice guy, once you get used to the sense of humor. He doesn’t bite."

“Yeah, but does he slice?”

Jan poked me on the shoulder with her finger flirtatiously then closed the door behind her and the lights in the room went out. The slide projector started and an image of a circle appeared on the screen mounted on the wall.

"So how do I know which button is red and which one is blue in the dark like this?"

Peter jumped onto a ledge just to the side of me, "Such a silly question, just feel the two buttons."

"Whoa, I get it. So which one is the smooth one and which one is the bumpy one."

"Red is smooth or less familiar."

"Okay...."

"But I still don't get this familiar, not familiar thing. All I see on the screen is a circle."

"So impatient ! What's happening to kids today, they can't wait for anything? Reality should never be in a hurry, even when it’s virtual."

I waited and then I noticed that the circle was subtly pulsing as the edges went light then dark. After a couple minutes, it occurred to me that the circle was starting to approximate the rate at which my eyes were blinking. I felt for the rough-edged button and pushed.

"Lucky, this time can you close your left eye. "

The circle then shifted to the right side of the screen and I repeated the process for each eye.

"Peter, what happened to the helmet and the gloves."

"Man, you've been watching too many movies. Helmets are totally old school."

"What's the matter with helmets and gloves?"

"Astronauts wear helmets, pest control guys wear helmets, deep sea divers dress like that., but who dresses like that in their real life? That sort of stuff is great if you want to fake a three dimensional environment, but we're talking "reality" here not special effects. Other companies are obsessed with “objective” virtual reality. This project is a little different, we take a person's subjective experience of events and more or less try to clone it. A helmet would only get in the way of that because it feels unnatural to the subject. Unless, of course, you happen to be a deep sea diver."

This time, Peter slashed at the far wall with his imaginary sword.

I noticed that the bottom of my chair had a heating source and that when I flexed my knees that the stem of the chair rose and fell with my movement. I shifted around, then pushed with the soles of my shoes against the floor and found that the mechanism in the chair was so reactive that the pressure between my feet and the floor itself stayed exactly the same. I then tried to lift my feet up, but it was as if the floor came with me.

"In case you were wondering, you're sitting in a five million dollar chair. It's worth more than the Queen of England's throne, give or take a couple circuit boards."

“Is it true that she's actually a cyborg who died in 1987?”

“Naw, that's just one of those urban legends. We haven't gotten that far yet....Besides, if you were going to fake someone why would you replicate someone as boring as members of the British royal family? I'd do Mr. T, Jose Canseco, maybe Grace Jones....”

“How about Annie Lennox?”

“No Way....” Peter's voice turned into a chirp. “Did someone tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“About the Eurythmics being cyborgs.”

“What?”

“You remember when she blew out her voice?”

“Not really?”

“Well, never mind.”

Peter then dropped into silence for several moments then said casually, “Did you know that your pulse rate jumps when you ‘re confused?”

“So Annie Lennox and the queen were just a way of calibrating me?”

“I’m good….I’m damn good.”

Peter held his pony tail out like a prize. I was starting to like the guy.

“For five million dollars, you'd think they would have gotten the coffee stains out of the upholstery."

"What can I tell you Lucky, the techs around here are total slobs. I spend half my time here keeping them in line."

We then went through a series of pictures of different sensory glands, nose, mouth, heart, then fingers and ears. I hadn't really noticed how much my fingers moved even when I thought I was being perfectly still, but I was nervous.

The next item on the screen was a picture of an old trailer.

“That looks familiar.”

“It should be, you saw it less than an hour ago on your way in here.”

“Why do they keep an old trailer outside the main building?”

“It's the model shop. Old school stuff. It's actually where I started.”

“Wow. History doesn't count for much here I guess.”

“Time and 27 frames per second march on. The model guys and the matte painters, the ones who did it on glass with real paint, used to be the stars of this place. CGI started taking over in the last half a dozen years or so and now they’re like carriage builders. Digital is just cheaper, but the old stuff was truly glorious. Digital’s really sort of a brute force thing, doesn’t take nearly as much imagination.”

“So you've been here a while.”

“Since the beginning. I was a high school kid with a talent for blowing things up…on a small scale of course. Luke rescued me from a life sentence of video games, red bull, and paint ball.”

The slide of the trailer then gave way to a bunch of images of classic special effects, only the shots were pulled back enough or close enough so you could see the wires, the matte screens used for land or space scapes, and the actual scale of the models.

“When we do the calibration for this stuff, I like to make sure everyone sees this. I don't know that anyone's going to remember how we used to do it. When I started, they had a guy Harry Houdini (that's what we called him) who could do in camera effects that you wouldn't believe. It took years before you could do digital slow motion to match what he could do by hand and I still say that his jump cuts are smoother and more elegant than anything you can do with an Indigo.“

“Harry Houdini, never heard of him.”

“You remember those tv shows during the black and white era where the main character always had magic powers to make things appear and disappear, walking through walls, be identical cousins,that sort of thing, Martians, witches, genies.”

“Yeah, I loved that stuff.”

“That was Harry Houdini or people who studied under the guy. We used to have film editors who would hand paint the frames just to get a color shift. They used to use like the single hair from a brush and magnifying glass. We’re talking hands like a brain surgeon’s.”

“Wow.”

“Anyway, that was the real Illusion Factory. Luke still lets a couple of the oldtimers, who won't learn the new ways build models and stuff in that trailer. Every other movie, they get a few frames to do their thing. We can't charge what it costs in man hours of time and the film companies could give a shit, but it’s his way of honoring the past.”

“Well, thanks for the lesson.”

“Before you start on this thing, I just want you to know that your town isn't the only history that matters around here.”

“Sure.”

I reached towards the paper model of Paperson on the table in front of me.

“I take it that this wasn't made by the old time model guys.”

“No shit.”

Peter took an imaginary slash at the model and then quickly cut it into sixteenths.

“This one was done through some sort of computer program. It's similar to the way they make children's pop up books. No refinement. If this were a real craftsmen's work, even the shadows would be right. You'd think that you were just oversized all of a sudden not the other way around.”

My office chair suddenly was starting to feel like a dentist's chair. I could see Peter as one of the three musketeers only with a dentist’s smock replacing that Musketeeers blouson thing with the fleur de lys print.

“So, we ready to get going here?”

I nodded.

There was a clicking sound, the screen went dark and before I knew it Peter was stabbing at the keyboard.

“What the fuck? Must be a memory overrun.”

The next image on the screen was a picture of a man. As it slowly came into focus, it looked increasingly familiar. I pushed on the blue button repeatedly.

“That's not supposed to be up there. Lucky, do me a favor. Please don't touch anything for now. It might be some kind of virus.”

I recognized the picture immediately. It was a photo of my grandfather in a dark suit, from some time well before I was born.

“Peter, that's amazing.”

“What's amazing?”

“I know that picture, where'd you guys find it.”

The next picture was a dragon. That was quickly followed by what looked to be Chinese food and some sort of gun. I pushed the blue button out of instinct despite Peter’s warning.

“Shit.”

“This is really cool Peter.”

“It might be, but something’s not right. It's the ghost in the blue screen again.”

“The what?”

“You need to ask Jan about it. I'm going to have to hard boot the system here. You're going to have to come back another time.”

“Are you telling me that there's some sort of ghost wandering the Illusion Factory?”

“Let’s just say that things happen here from time to time that defy explanation.”

I followed the fog into the back room this morning and naturally, he was there. Is this what I would have looked like? Is this how I would have sounded? I hope not. It's better to be an ethereal than some middle-aged loser.

It's a pity the swordsman with the pony tail turned off the work station. We were just starting to communicate. I never learned English and this Lucky never learned on Chinese, maybe on purpose so he wouldn’t have to pay attention to me. I could feel that he was beginning to understand what I was trying to show him, maybe just a little bit, through this machine of theirs. Does that hot rodder, Luke Howard, have the faintest idea what he just made possible? I now know why I left Paperson to come to this Illusion Factory.

Inside the Box (Chapter 6 Part2)

2008-07-02T23:35:00.001-07:00

Inside the Box Chapter 6 part 2

I see Don sitting alone at the kitchen table in front of multiple plates of food. In any other household, I would wonder when the other twenty people joining us for dinner will come through the door. I've come to accept the fact that my mother's sense of proportion just isn't like other people's. She can be generous to the point where it becomes so uncomfortable for new friends that they start avoiding her. She can be so wary of people especially family members that ordinary dinners or parties turn suddenly hostile because someone didn't say good bye to her loudly or individually enough. It strikes me that her inability to modulate the way she relates to others has something to do with her experiences in Paperson, but it occurs to me now that mom was already like that in many ways before we moved back to my grandfather’s house when I was a teenager.

I start to head towards Don and the table, but my mother steps between her kitchen and me, “I want to talk to you about something.”

Historically, this has meant that she wants to talk about one of two topics. Most often, she'll pull me aside to talk about money issues. My mother was a housewife. She never worked a regular job after she married my father when she was just twenty. She's very aware of money, but not very secure about her capacity to either make it on her own or manage it. She worries constantly that Don is going to leave all of his own money to his children and not make certain that she's taken care of. She also knows me too well. Despite my insistence that I'll take care of her, she never exactly trusts it.

Now and then, she'll bring out some brochure for a modest retirement home and ask me what I think. I should know that she wants me to say “No, never not for my mother!”
Instead, I tend to say “If that's what you want, Mom, but it's not the time yet to worry about things like that.”

In the meantime, she talks about wills. There's Don's will. There was my father's lack of a will after he died unexpectedly a year after I graduated college. My mother was forty eight at the time. There's her mother's very weird will that not only left everything to her brothers but literally disinherited all of her daughters except my mother who received a tiny interest in a single building. There's my will, over which she worries that I'll leave money to Marie who will in turn leave it to some non-relative. She also talks about her own will from time to time, but that’s never quite as compelling for her.

Topic number two is the fortune tellers. Whenever my mother travels, she goes to Chinese fortune tellers. She's always been quite convinced that she has psychic powers in her own right, so it started out as an exercise in reporting back that the fortune teller had confirmed the fact that she has a good heart. After my father died, her visits to the fortune tellers got darker. It didn’t matter if they were reading sand, making her drink tea, or were simply looking into her eyes. In that time, I’ve heard the fortune tellers confirm my mother’s belief that Marie doesn't really like her, how Don's children don't like her, and how my father didn’t want her to remarry and that he’s lonely and unhappy in the other world.

My mother’s reports from the fortune teller routinely include details that are simply impossible. I never hung out at a malt shop with Pops, Archie, and Veronica when I was in high school. I’ve never flown an airplane on my own. We never had a german shephard. Still, she clings to the items that might be right as if this is all the guidance she’ll ever get in this world.

When I was in my early twenties, I did on two occasions get her a session with non-Chinese psychics just because it was something she liked. In my later adult life though, I’ve tried different strategies to discourage my mother’s talk of fortune tellers. For that reason, I’ve never told her that I occasionally see things in dreams that eventually sort their way into my life. I don’t tell her, for instance, that my father’s heart attack wasn’t a surprise or that every few years I have dreams about him being still alive, alone, and wandering his empty restaurant like some prisoner out of a Christmas Carol.

Marie was the one who pointed out to me that my mother was out of balance in certain ways and I’ve since learned from her not to send my mother spinning in certain directions.

My mother says it directly enough, “Don and I talked the other day. We’ve decided that we want to be buried together.”

I’ve always had it in my head that my mother wants to be cremated. My father and I once read a book together called “The American Way of Death” and he was quite taken by the whole idea of the Neptune Society. We wound up burying him partly because there are any number of Chinese customs about the bones of dead loved ones and partly because my father at other times when he wasn’t reading Jessica Mitford had said that he’d never want to be cremated. We compromised instead by giving him the simplest funeral possible as I tried to talk to the Funeral Home salesman about Jessica Mitford.

“Mom, whatever you want to do with your body is fine with me,” I tell her.

She, however, wants to be convinced that it’s okay with me. My mother has a tendency to read facial expression and tones more than listen to what anyone says. At the level of the rational, it’s probably a big part of why she thinks she’s psychic. Most people don’t convey all of their feelings in their words alone.

“I just wanted you to know. It’s nothing about your Dad.”

“Well, you’ve been married to Don almost longer than you were married to Dad.”

“I just can’t stand the idea of being buried with the rest of the Tang family.”

I nod.

My grandfather was still alive when my father died. To be accurate, my grandfather had two months left but was still very much conscious. It was enough for me to tell him that my father, his oldest son, had died. I remember not wanting to have to explain that we’d decided to bury my father didn’t want to be buried with his own family. I made a hasty decision to allow my Dad to be buried in one of the nine plots that my Grandfather had bought for himself, my grandmother, his three sons and their wives, and a mysterious individual known as “Mike Tang” whose real name was “Hagerty” more or less like the Robert Duvall character in the Godfather. Mike Tang was my Grandfather’s one true non-Chinese friend. He trusted him so much that it was “Mike” who lived in the house that fronted the road that led to Paperson from Sacramento.

They had measured the distance and time precisely. The house was as close as it could be to the gambling house in Paperson while still giving Mike enough time to make a warning call in the case of a raid.

At the time, I had simply figured that my mother whenever she died herself would want to be buried next to my father. Now instead, the family plot consists of my grandfather, my grandmother, my dad, and Mike Tang. Uncle Persy’s on his third wife. I only met the second one once. I have no idea what Uncle Leon and his wife’s plans are.

“So, where do you want to be buried with Don?”

“We haven’t worked that out yet.”

I nod again.

“I don’t have to put the directions in a will? You can remember that?”

“Of course, I’ll remember,” I tell her.

I’m aware of the fact that the tone of my voice says otherwise, but this time my mother believes me anyway.
I give my mother a hug and tell her, “Mom, I don’t think anyone would expect you to spend eternity with Dad’s family.”

Mom heads towards her kitchen. As I watch her walk away, I notice that her walk has turned ever so slightly unsteady, as if she can’t just assume that the next three steps will happen on their own. I imagine anyone who didn’t know her wouldn’t notice. It’s not a matter of her being off-balance, it’s more that she’s become just a bit more careful on the tile floor. I’d forgotten that she slipped and sprained her ankle a couple years ago. Strange how you can see time just in the way someone walks.

I make my way over to the grand piano in the living room and begin to improvise. I know it’s an odd thing to do for someone who’s been waiting for the last fifteen minutes to have lunch, but I play an a minor drone for about forty five seconds then come to the kitchen. It’s as if I need to make a few more sounds after my conversation with my mother.

I get to the table where my mother has somehow combined roast beef, with a pile of chow mein, and is that chocolate cake? A large salad adorns the side table and I think there’s a bowl of Chinese turnip soup in the mix.

“See, all the things you like,” she says.

I shake my head and want to say, “But not together…” then stop myself. It’s Marie’s influence. She’s explained to me that this is something my mother will never get and to just look at it as her way of showing love. When my mother was a small child, my grandmother needed time away because she’d had too many children in not enough years. She came from China with four children then in six years in San Francisco had four more with my mother being the last. When my mother was a year old, my grandmother had her live with another family for a few months. The woman used the money my grandmother sent to feed her own sons extra meat and milk. My mother got rickets. When she came back home, they fed her frantically. She shouldn’t remember it, yet the body remembers in ways the mind often does not.

I ask after Don’s health, his children and grandchildren. We talk about his RV. Having been interned at Tule Lake, Don likes the idea of having a motorized house. As he puts it, “I like to be able to go where I want.”

My mother is the one who interrupts, “So you were going to tell me what your Uncle Leon is up to.”

“Mom, I really don’t think it’s anything bad. Paperson’s sat there for almost twenty years. I just want the estate and trust to be done with.”

“I know you want it done with, but you have to make sure that you get your fair share,” my mother’s tone is brittle even menacing, her way of letting me know that she worries that I won’t fight hard enough.

“This is the first time the place has had a named buyer. Luke Howard isn’t a shyster. He can’t afford to be one.”

“What makes you think that? How do you know that he’s not in cahoots with your uncle?”

Certain archaic American words stuck in my parents’ vocabulary. With my father it was calling young women “Janes” and to a group of friends as a “cats”. My mother uses “cahoots”, “bigwig”, and referring to soft drinks as “pop” and alcohol as “hooch”. Sometimes they would sound bizarrely like Midwestern gangsters from the Capone era. I think it was because they learned most of their collogquial American English at Saturday double features.

“Mom at least let me tell you what’s going on before I have to stop whatever it is you think Uncle Leon’s going to do.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. He’s always up to something. He always has an angle. You’re not asking enough questions .”

“Mom, believe me, I ask questions.”

“Then you’re not asking the right questions if you think he’s on the up and up with this.”

“Luke Howard wouldn’t get involved if he thought he’d be taken advantage of.”

“Your mother’s not talking about Luke Howard getting taken advantage of. She’s talking about you,” Don pushes his plate to the side, “Lucky, there can be a lot of angles in a land deal.”

Before he met my mother, Don sold his farm to a developer. No one’s really sure how he came away with as much money as he did. All anyone knows is that he retired while most of the people who farmed near his land had to take jobs after the deal for the subdivision.

Platters of more food cover the counters. There’s a plate of melon slices, more roast beef, and another mound of chow mein sits atop a bright orange platter next to half a chocolate cake.
“You must be hungry,” she tells me.
“Not really, “ I tell her.
“You like roast beef. I know you don’t get it at home. I know you never get chow mein. I made the other batch for you to take home to Marie.”
Marie doesn’t cook well and she definitely doesn’t cook Chinese food well. After all, she’s not Chinese.

“I’m not that hungry mom.”

Even as I say it, I find myself piling food on a plate while my mother sits across from me at the table with her pre-measured meal from Weight Watchers and a cup of hot water.

“It’s good roast beef. I got it from Corti’s. You remember Corti’s.”

I roll my eyes and nod my head. At the moment, I’m facing the two ton metal dragon also salvaged from my father’s restaurant that’s mounted on the fence and whose tennis ball sized green eyes stare fixedly at our kitchen table. It was a few years before I realized that my mother did it this way so that she could feel like my Dad was with her when she ate. He was the one who loved to cook and to talk about food.

“Mom, you know who Luke Howard is?”
She looks up from her hot water and drops a sliver of chocolate cake next to the chow mein on my plate.

“Try this. It’s from a new bakery. I need to know how you like it. They said they’d give me the recipe. It’s supposed to be the best chocolate cake according to Kathy.”

“Mom, can’t I wait on the cake.”

The older my mother gets the less willing she seems to be to wait on anything.

“Just try it.”

Again, even as I argue with her, I find myself taking two bites of chocolate cake. My palate knows what my mouth and mind can not. My mother always wins these struggles.

“Why should I care who Luke Howard is? Your Uncle Leon is up to no good. Whatever he’s doing with that town, there’s something in it for him.”

“I don’t think so. Uncle Leon didn’t even know that the woman who came to represent Luke Howard went to Harvard with me.”

My mother’s face lights up.
“Someone you went to school with.”

“Yes, Jan Grady was a friend of mine.”

“But she’s so young.”

“Mom, she’s not that young and I’m not that young.”

“Well she must have done well for herself.”

It occurs to me that my mother still supposedly doesn’t know who Luke Howard is, so how can she be commenting on Jan Grady’s success simply as someone who works for him?

“I also don’t think Uncle Leon has any idea why the Howard Company is interested. He thought they wanted to buy Paperson to develop a shopping center.”

For some reason when it comes to family matters, I never manage to explain anything to my mother in logical order, but this at least gets her attention.

“You never mentioned any Jan Grady when you were in Cambridge.”

“Well Mom, you never met all of my friends and I didn’t talk about everyone I met at Dunster House or everyone I ever had a class with.”

That’s not exactly true. On their trips east, my parents insisted on meeting as many of my friends as they could, always offering to take them along to dinner, quizzing them about their lives before Harvard, their plans beyond graduation. It became a running joke whenever my parents came back there.

“You would have mentioned a girl.”

This is certainly true enough. If there had been a girl to mention or introduce I would have.

“Well, we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend or anything.”

My mother shrugs. “I didn’t say that. I’ve just never understood why we send you to Harvard and you’ve never used any of the connections you could have made in a place like that.”

I want to tell her there’s a difference between being good at school and having actual social skills, but it’s the sort of thing we’ve never much talked about. I was so shy as a child that my mother used to insist on finding me possible friends. I just never had much to say to them nor did I like hanging out with people my age much until I was well into college and away from Paperson. Among my cousins it was worse. At family gatherings, they would cluster in small groups and I would skirt the perimeters of their conversation never able to find an angle to join in and those circles never quite opening either to let me talk about the stupid things that friends of theirs I’d never met had done or would do.

When I got to Harvard, it was hard enough for me to make friends much less girlfriends in a place where the males still significantly outnumbered the females.

My mother, Don, and I eat in silence for several minutes. I then remember Marie’s complaint that I tend to visit my mother, get frustrated with her ways, and walk away from the table leaving her to deal with my mother and stepfather.

“Jan is in “Acquisitions” for Luke Howard. Uncle Leon assumed that meant real estate because it’s what he knows. Jan doesn’t acquire land or buildings for Luke Howard, she’s buying ideas.”

“Ideas? What kind of ideas would anyone want from that old place? It’s just a bunch of old mildewy buildings and your Grandfather’s house.”

“When she brought it up, Uncle Leon was in complete shock. I don’t see how he could be working an angle if it’s something he knows nothing about. Luke Howard wants to do some sort of multi-media history thing with Paperson.”

Don and my mother look at me blankly.

“You mean like a newspaper?”

“No, that’s the media. Multi-media is where they have pictures, sounds, and other stuff.”

My mother nods then says,“You still better be careful.”

“Mom, this is Luke Howard, the most famous movie producer in the world. He makes movies about other planets and stuff.”

“I don’t see those kinds of movies.”

“Mom, Luke Howard’s worth billions. There’s nothing Uncle Leon has that he could offer him.”

“Why would someone who’s worth billions care about an old abandoned town run by a selfish old man? Something doesn’t make sense. You say your Uncle Leon found these people?”

“Mom, you don’t understand,” exasperation boils in my voice.

My mother says nothing for a few moments, then begins cleaning crumbs off the table. I struggle to stay in chair.

“Why would I, why should I? Maybe you do, but I don’t.”

“Mom, it still has history.”

“Not everything needs to be remembered.”

“Mom, I seriously don’t think Luke Howard is interested in anything that happened in the Tang family. He wants the other history.”

“There is no other history in that place. There was nothing in Paperson that ever happened that your Grandfather didn’t have something to do with.”

My mother measures out a second packet of food for herself then asks if I want a cup of hot water of my own. She believes that plain hot water has purifying properties.

She looks back at the dragon and tilts her head.

“What was her name again?”

“What was whose name?”

“Your friend who works for this Howard guy…”

“It’s Jan Grady.”

My mother shakes her head.

“I remember that name.”

“I know you never met her.”

“Maybe not, but I think you mentioned her….She was someone you liked.”

Weirdly, my mother remembers a moment that I’d buried. One evening my parents were there and I was walking down the staircase with them towards town when I stopped briefly to say “Hi” to Jan Grady on the landing where I normally had my conversations with her.

Jan said “Going somewhere with your parents?”

I shrugged, but my Dad noticed Jan Grady.

“Who was that?” he asked twice.

“It’s Jan, she’s from New York City.”

“She’s more like it.”

I exhaled loudly.

“She has a boyfriend. I’m probably not her type.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Lucky. She smiled at you.”

“She smiles at everyone. Can we talk about something else?”

My father died before I ever had the chance to introduce any woman to my parents.

I gulp down hot water that’s a bit too hot to drink.

“Mom, if she was someone I liked, nothing ever came of it and I don’t think she ever noticed me that way.”

My mother takes an expanding breath. “It seems like she found you this time. It’s not a coincidence.”

“Mom it’s a business deal. I told you she’s doing a project for Luke Howard.”

“Is she married now?”

“I have no idea. We haven’t talked about it.”

“Have you mentioned Marie to her?”

“Of course, I have….Why wouldn’t I?” I say it as forcefully as possible, but the truth is that I don’t know the answer to my own question.

Darned Detours

2008-03-21T11:42:00.000-07:00

So what happened? I swear that I'm going to speed this up and instead I stop for almost two months. First, I decided to work on a long short story that turned out to be emotionally exhausting. I couldn't work on the draft at the same time for some reason. The second reason is in the realm of the strange. My mother is 78 years old. For whatever reason (I can make sense of them, I just can't talk about them in a public forum), shes decided to tell me something that's pretty significant about my life that I knew nothing about. Her own memory of the events is very hazy and yeah there are bits of this story that draw on real life, though far less than most people assume or think. In any case, there's probably a psychological reason that I've been so slow with this novel - at some level there was an important part of the story missing.

Way back when, I kept running into what I thought was a huge handicap in taking on this subject matter: I simply didn't know a lot about the incidents. In particular, a lot of the people only spoke Chinese or in some cases Tagalog or Spanish. I had no idea what they were talking about and thus thought I couldn't possibly understand what they thought or felt. A haze of languages I couldn't understand or speak surrounded the core of my story. Over time, I've come to see the haze as the most interesting aspect of the story itself. Memory is never clean or perfect. Feelings are often complicated and difficult even impossible to understand. At the same time, that doesn't make them any less valuable.

The weird thing is that for the last couple weeks I've been faced with the fact that the things I thought I knew and that we're in a language I understood weren't quite as clear as I'd assumed. My Grandfather's generation was always the mystery generation for me, but the older I get and the more I find out it strikes me that my parents' generation is much more complicated than I could have imagined. No doubt, I'll learn the same thing about my own or at least my daughter might come to realize that.

My writer's group often reminds me that the “town” around which the novel revolves, Paperson, California, is based on what for most readers is an inside joke. They ask “Are you going to explain that somewhere in the book?” I haven't yet. Due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese coming into the US had to show that they were the son of a merchant, scholar, etc. After the San Francisco earthquake destroyed most of the immigration records, a sizeable business grew up in forging identities for young men who wanted to come to America. These folk were called “Papersons”. Almost all of the Chinese coming through the town were “Papersons” and they often came to the countryside to avoid immigration officials.

I've always had two models in mind for the town in the novel. One was Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude. The other was Sutpen's Hundred from Abaslom Absalom. Over the last week, I've been listening to Absalom via book on mp3. It's been interesting to see how much I'd misapprehended the book and how much I'd forgotten, but it's helped to go back there.

I think the hardest thing in this process has been knowing when to “push forward” and when to “sit back and consider”. So, I spent a bit longer doing the latter once again, something that I've spent far too much time doing in this process. Hopefully, it gets me closer to not further from my goal.

Inside the Box Chapter 6

2008-03-19T18:26:00.000-07:00

Item #1
For fifteen year's Sam Share's black and white photo of Paperson's 1950 fourth of July picnic hung on the walls of most Chinese American households. The picture, which appeared on Life magazine's Miscellany page, should have merited a thousand words, at least according to that tradition of Chinese proverbs that only Americans seem to quote. Instead, it got a two sentence caption.
"The town of Paperson celebrates the 4th of July and both the American revolution and the Chinese revolution of 1911. This year's picnic in America's last self-contained Chinatown raised over ten thousand dollars for the cause of democracy in China."
This is what was in the picture. A statue of Dr. Sun Yat Sen holds the center. A Chinese boy in a baseball uniform and a girl twirling a baton sit on his lap and turn Dr. Sun into a cross between a Chinese George Washington and Santa Claus. Behind Dr. Sun a group of Chinese men dressed in sportshirts and women in bermuda shorts and sundresses wave a mixture of American and Nationalist flags. In one corner a woman hands out slices of watermelon next to a table filled with bottles of soda and cups of tea. A man in an apron grills hamburgers and hot dogs while those in line carry paper plates filled with a mixture of chow mein, rice, and cole slaw. In another corner, an impromptu baseball game is being played. If you look closely, the bases are twenty pound sacks of rice. There are almost as many women as men. Young families outnumber the handful of elderly men. It must be noon because there are no shadows.

This is what isn't in the picture. Three quarters of the population of Paperson was male and over the age of fifty five. The gambling house, the heart of the town's economy, can't be seen. Several of the women in the photo were prostitutes recruited to pose for the picture for five dollars each. Most of the children came from Sacramento and Stockton. The photographer chalked an “O” on the grass where each child was to pose just to keep the spacing right. Henry Luce was angry at Madame Chiang for raising millions in the United States for Chinese relief and then finding that almost none of the money made it to China. It devastated Luce that the country he had been born in as the son of American protestant missionaries was now communist. My grandfather hired a publicist to encourage Chinese families to settle in Paperson. For three thousand dollars, the publicist got a hold of Sam Share, the man who had photographed the explosion of the Hindenburg. The editors at Life saw a way to make Luce happy about promoting democracy in China without invoking Mr. and Mrs. Chiang Kai Shek. The watermelon slices were painted wood, because they held their shape better in the heat. The photo was done night for day with bright spotlights to make for sharper outlines than natural light could provide. In actuality, it is all shadows.

This is what I learned from Sam Share's photo. This is not a picture of Paperson at all. Despite the many times he sat for pictures with various members of the family, this is the most revealing portrait ever taken of my grandfather even if he isn't actually in the photo. My grandmother refused to have anything to do with the photograph. She was angry at my grandfather for having given the ten thousand dollars to a charity that would never use the money to fight communists or help refugees. None of the old men in the photo ever returned to China. A few of the children grew up and visited after ping pong and Richard Nixon made it possible to return. One of them was astonished to find a faded copy of the photo in his cousin's old photo album. "Why did you keep this picture? When we'd never even met?" he asked. "How could you have saved this from the Red Guard? Why didn't you throw it out? You could have been killed."

"It was my dream of America. When they forced us to move to the village for reeducation, I told myself that I would survive and someday move to Paperson."

Two cardboard boxes sit on the top of the Danish modern desk-bureau set that fills the long wall of what used to be my room. A year ago, my mother gathered up the artifacts of my childhood, gave me a call, and announced, “Lucky, it’s time for you to take these, you have your own home now.”

Over time, I’ve gotten most of the items- old toys, baby blanket, Halloween costumes, school certificates, a wax-papered bag containing six pomegranate seeds, a model of a Flying Tiger airplane, a Chinese beanie and a pair of white duck pants from a Chinese Marching band, a baseball glove, and a set of elementary Latin books. For various reasons, I’ve left these last two boxes despite multiple intervening visits to Sacramento and my mother’s house.
A few weeks ago my mother caught on to my excuses and just said, “I’m going to throw them away if you don’t want them. They’re not mine. They’re yours. I don’t need them.”

She means that she doesn’t need them in her second life. Although my mother still lives in the house she bought with my father, she remarried two years after he died. It surprised me that she met someone and married so quickly because my parents were so close and so devoted to one another. It might not have been healthy, but she even used to refer to my father as “Dad”. Her own father, my grandfather, died when she was ten. I never met my other grandfather, but my mother worshipped him as the one truly kind male on her side of the family who always defended the “girls” when my grandmother wanted to give everything to their sons. A few years ago I asked my mother why my grandmother didn’t share the same high opinion of my grandfather and I was shocked to hear that my grandmother never forgave my grandfather for cheating on her back when they lived in China.

My mother was also in her late forties when my Dad had his heart attack. Don seemed like a nice enough fellow and I never imagined her growing old alone. When Don moved in, they agreed not to keep any mementoes of either my Dad or Don’s late wife around the house. It was part of their fresh start. My boxes weren’t physically in the way, but they did stand in the path of my mom putting behind the past and her difficulties with my dad’s family. It was clear to me that even the good memories for her were still painful. It was even clearer that when it came to Paperson, my grandparents’ house, and our time there, there were no good memories.

It didn’t surprise me that the Life Magazine photo of Paperson disappeared from the hallway wall soon after my dad died. It was more of a surprise that my mother had kept it at all in its black wood frame. The photo is a year older than I am and I suspect it’s held its age somewhat better. Within fifteen years, Paperson was all but a ghost town. My Grandfather’s gambling house was the town’s one real source of revenue. After they completed I80 to Reno even the farmworkers figured it made more sense to spend a couple extra hours in the car and gamble legally rather than drive the levee road to a darkened venue that always smelled of mildew from the river.
Had Jan Grady and Luke Howard known about the Life Magazine photo? It seemed likely enough. Did they know anything of the story behind the picture? It was possible, yet it still hardly seemed like a Luke Howard project even if he did grown up in Ralston just an hour east of Paperson.
I sat back on the bright red platform that used to be my bed. My parents had bought the bedroom set when I was six years old for their first home of their own in the suburbs. At the time all the white formica with the metal and dark wood accents looked a bit futuristic. I realize now that it was something of a pointed message about what they wanted for their child. Even then, they didn’t want to look back at where we came from only to wherever our family was going.

My mother has separated the contents of the two remaining boxes according to a simple organizational principle. One is filled with old baseball cards, (unfortunately she gave away all the ones that would be worth anything to some kid who came to play at the house when I was away at school some thirty years ago), ticket stubs and programs for sporting events and car shows, prizes and announcements from my regular school, and various childhood art projects that only a mother would save. The other box has the Chinese stuff, the remnants of our life in Paperson. I have no choice. I’ll have to pack them in my car. It’s just that I have no idea where to put them now or what to do with them.
I hear my mother’s voice from the kitchen, “Time to eat.”

My mother obsesses over food. If you walk through her front door, she makes it a fetish not to let you leave until you consume some bizarre variety of food at unhealthy levels. I ignore her call.

“Lucky, it’s time to eat….Don and I aren’t going to wait. He’s hungry.”
I ignore her then make my way out to the front entry way where my mother waits for me in a red apron that says “Bitch, Bitch, Bitch” in white letters.

“You know your Uncle Leon’s up to something,” she tells me, “You better watch out.”
I shrug. According to my mother, my Uncle Leon is always up to something. For my entire life my parents warned me not to trust any members of my father’s family.
I find myself standing parallel to the five foot tall statue of a sitting Buddha which once watched over the bar at my father’s downtown restaurant for twenty years. I sometimes wonder what the Buddha has seen and heard in that time. He must have witnessed any number of conversations my father had with friends, customers, his various workers. I miss my father. It seems perfectly logical to me the Buddha made the pilgrimage into our living room after the sale of the restaurant. I’m sure that like me Mom figures that one day the Buddha will just start talking and share the memories of my father neither of us had the opportunity to witness. In the meantime, Marie has reminded me that our house has no room for items as large as life-sized Buddhas regardless of sentimential value. We’ve never discussed space for talking Buddhas though.

On my right side, I am dwarfed by

a larger than lifesized painting of a seated blue-robed Mandarin who overlooks the entryway.

The Mandarin came from the period when my mother turned to Gump’s, the high society San Francisco department store, to take over the task of decorating my parents’ first house after we moved back to the suburbs from Paperson. Gump’s specialty was to sell furniture and other household decoratives to American homeowners who sought an oriental flare. My mother never picked up on the irony of hiring Caucasians to add oriental flare to her home. She mostly liked the idea that Gump’s was San Francisco old money taste instead of the sectional sofa, chrome lamp, nouveau look that was becoming increasingly common in suburban Chinese homes in the late seventies.

In most things, my mother never had the confidence to trust her own taste, so she hired Gumps to supply it. If you understand the WASP culture she was trying to emulate, this might have been the height of bad taste. I only happen to know that because I went to a boarding school in New England for my high school years to give me the kind of breeding and opportunities my father and mother also felt they couldn’t provide. Had they only known that New England boarding schools in the seventies mostly imparted the drug and music culture of the late sixties rather than the country club and debutante ball niceties that supposedly once got you to the board room and partnerships. Fortunately for my parents and unfortunately for my popularity, I stayed away from all those plastic bags filled with green buds that got consumed in the woods around the campus and even the basements of the dormitories.

I did however learn from visits to classmates’ homes that even if one paid an interior decorator, upper class mothers pretended that they just threw things together themselves and didn’t really care about which table matched the wingback chair.
When it comes to my father’s side of the family though, my mother has never had any reticence about expressing her own judgment. It’s taken me more than twenty five years but I’ve learned that it’s better to be secure in your judgment about people than furniture and window coverings.
“Your father always said that your Uncle Leon is always looking for a way to take advantage of a situation. He even told me that he doesn’t care who he takes down in the process.”
Years ago, Uncle Leon married the wrong woman, the only Chinese girl within ten miles of Paperson who was built anything like Jane Russell. My Grandparents told him the thought it was a bad idea and wanted him to wait. He ran off with her anyway and swore that he’d make it as a mechanic. Three years later, the marriage failed and my father drove out to Denver to coax his younger brother back into the family. He came back, but he wasn’t the same guy.
“Mom, you’ve told me that a few hundred times before. We still have to sell Paperson and Uncle Leon’s still the executor of the estate.”
My mother shakes her head. I look away from her and at the blue corduroy couch in the living room. I’m reminded that the painting of the Mandarin was really chosen to match the couch. I have no idea if the interior decorator from Gumps had any idea that the Mandarins in a Cantonese living room were the rough historical equivalent of holocaust survivors hanging portraits of storm troopers in their house. When my Grandfather first saw the painting in our house, he got upset until my father convinced him that we’d bought it because the guy in the picture looked so much like him. Actually, it really did look like my grandfather. Apparently, that erased whatever historical significance it had and he did not command my father to get the painting out of our house.
I let my mother go on about Uncle Leon and my father’s five other brothers and sisters for a bit more. She hasn’t seen any of them in at least fifteen years, but she still warns me about trusting any of them in any way.

Once when my father was alive, I asked what was in retrospect a sensible question. “If everyone on Dad’s side of the family is so untrustworthy, why don’t we just move away from all of them. Why do we still have so much to do with them? All you guys ever do is argue over money.”

My father thought a moment then just said, “Because Chinese families don’t do that sort of thing.”

Apparently, American families frequently committed the sin of being so fractured that first cousins sometimes had never even met simply because their parents had had some disagreement. Chinese were expected to respect familial responsibilities regardless of anything they had said or done to one another. Interestingly, both Uncle Pershing and Uncle Leon had been married and divorced, but that was somehow different. One could divorce a spouse in my father’s family, you couldn’t however divorce your blood family.

I suspect others who knew Paperson might have seen it differently. They certainly whispered that my father’s hanging in there was less driven by Confucian filial piety than the fact that he needed my Grandfather’s money. Who knows? What’s clear to most anyone who knew my dad was that the stress of Tang family inner-politics played as much of a role in his heart attack as his love of cigars and rich food. After my Grandfather and father died in the same summer, the family stopped being Chinese. For several years, I’ve only seen my father’s family either for meetings about the estate and funerals.

My mother scowls at me as I try to explain the prospects of selling what remains of Paperson. Several minutes ago she yelled to Don that he should go ahead and start eating. We decide to call it a draw and head to the kitchen table, but not before I tell her, “Mom, this time is different. Luke Howard is involved.”
She looks at me blankly.
“Who?”
“You know those Outer Space movies. He’s got a lot of money.”
“I don’t go to the movies. Don doesn’t like sitting in dark theaters.”
It strikes me that my mother wants to be rid of the last of the boxes that contain her last remnants of Paperson and I just want to sell what’s left of the town. Life Magazine was replaced by People. Luke Howard is threatening to replace the mere movie with something involving virtual reality and Paperson. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a three dimensional experience in dolby surround worth?

The Dotted Yellow Line

2008-01-15T09:58:00.000-08:00

Okay, it’s clear to me that I need to speed this up a bit. Lately, I’ve been running a chapter a month instead of once every two weeks. Part of that is that my regular in person writing group hasn’t been able to meet as often. The bigger part is that I’m fighting my usual tendency to start something then veer off in multiple directions. It could be way worse, I could still be sitting around thinking about what to do with Chapter 2.

I’m okay with where things are story wise, but I’m feeling like the story is still about to happen and that’s not really a good thing. No, I’m not trying to write a thriller. It’s just that I want to stop feeling like I know where it’s going and what scenes eventually have to happen, but I’m still choosing from any number of routes for getting there without quite being there. In very loose terms, the best stories push forward and outwards all at the same time. It’s a bit like Einstein, as you approach the speed of light mass gets bigger which prevents you from ever going beyond the speed of light.

The other twist I threw myself was the bit about Absalom Absalom which I haven’t read in like thirty years. I’ve always had Absalom in mind along with One Hundred Years of Solitude, both books that are in one sense about the rise and fall of small towns in remote places. I’d mostly left it to the side (where it belongs). Now that it’s slipped in, I need to at least make sense of the saga of the Sutpen family and its impact on Quentin Compson as he tries to explain his world to northerners. So will I divert myself into studying Faulkner (an endless task) or will the wikipedia suffice?

I am pleased that two characters who I’d avoided Jan Grady and Marie are both moving forward. I’m still not sure whether I have the grooves slipped in for the more fanciful bits of the story, like the ghosts.

In the meantime, every week that passes is another crisis of confidence. Writing this has always felt uphill and I’ve imagined that there would be spots where the process would coast. I don’t think it’s straight downhill once you hit a point in a draft, but most of my own writing that I’ve liked acquired a kind of momentum of inevitability. As I’ve written sections of this I have had that, but writing a draft is like choosing a single highway and I keep wanting to go off on one of the side roads or at least see them before I step on the gas pedal.

Chapter 5 Sammy Wong's

2008-01-09T18:32:00.000-08:00

It wasn’t until I got to the half-moon-shaped doors that fronted Sammy Wong’s restaurant in Sacramento that I felt guiltier than I expected. No, it wasn’t Marie. Yes, when I had suggested to meet Jan Grady at Sammy Wong’s for lunch, Marie’s stare might have melted the telephone receiver. Yes, her initial response was, “ I thought this was a business meeting.”

Still I had at least in my opinion managed to save matters by asking Marie if she wanted to come along. After asking me why I would want her at a business meeting, she declined. Marie then shook her head and told me, “No, I want you to tell me more about why you don’t like talking about your father’s family or about money. Besides, if we go to Sacramento, you’ll want to go see your mother.”

Naturally, I agreed though I’m not sure it was the kind of thing where my agreement mattered. I don’t avoid topics like that because I choose to. It took many years for me and considerable training to get this way. I figured I’d save that explanation for another day. It was also true that Marie would go to great lengths to avoid dealing with my mother.

Not taking any chances, I had finished my phone conversation with Jan by saying quite loudly,” Sorry Jan, just needed to check with my wife on the date and time.”

I was feeling guilty for a very different reason. Even though my Dad’s restaurant, The Lost Province, had served its last customer twenty five years ago after he died, I was still used to thinking of Sammy Wong’s as my father’s restaurant’s arch rival.

It was more accurate to say that Sammy Wong was one of my Grandfather’s arch rivals among the leaders of the valley’s Chinese community. The three wealthiest Chinese men in the Sacramento Valley were my Grandfather who made his real money running the gambling house that served as the economic heart of Paperson, Wilson Tang the man who turned his corner grocery into a chain of supermarkets across three states, and Sammy Wong whose name was now associated with a dozen restaurants across California and one in Shreveport, Louisiana. The rivalry between the three took many peculiar turns. For instance, Wilson Tang was arrested in 1971 for trying to open a gambling house in Sacramento. Wilson already had nine successful markets and was seventy four years old at the time. No one really understood why he even tried since the Chinese gambling business had dwindled since the completion of Highway 80 to Reno.

Given that context my Grandfather buying a Chinese restaurant of his own in 1952 that was literally around the corner from Sammy Wong’s was just typical of the way the three men communicated by deeds instead of words. It was perhaps more than a little twisted that my Grandfather eventually turned over management to my father, his eldest son, in 1958. The problem was simple enough, my father had little chance to outshine Sammy Wong and he never did. One of the big questions in my life was whether or not my Grandfather did that on purpose.

So, here I stood about to have a potentially important business lunch with an old friend and I was the one who had for some perverse reason suggested that we meet at Sammy Wong’s. It was a bit like spitting on my father’s grave, yet something else told me that it was important to meet Jan there and not anywhere else. I figured and hoped that Dad would understand and forgive me. My reason came out as soon as Jan spotted me.

“So this is the famous Sammy Wong’s of the General Mo’s chicken?” was her greeting to me.

“This is the place,” I said as I held the door open for her.

Jan was not dressed for business and she was not dressed for a date either. She wore jeans, heels, and a brightly-colored blouse. I had come dressed for work though without a coat and tie. In heels, Jan was maybe an inch taller than I was at 5’9”. With Jan it was never so much what she wore or any of the individual details of how she looked, she just had a confidence about her. She seemed to both expect to be looked at and not to care about it. I had once listened raptly when she admitted to someone in the dining hall that she’d once been approached by a photographer when she was sixteen and that she had politely refused him. It was, of course, the sort of story once told in a dormitory that would never die.

She was heavier and considerably older than that now, but I’ve always believed that those sort of perceptions of yourself by others imprint when you’re a teenager. Jan was comfortable in her own body and it seemed that she always would be. In other words, she was the exact opposite of me. In terms of the social-sexual hierarchy of the college dormitory, she’d always been well out of my league.

I had picked Sammy Wong’s as a kind of test of Jan’s memory and the Howard Company’s interest in Paperson. I had told the General Mo’s chicken story just once to exactly one person some twenty five years ago.

“I can’t believe that you remembered that story and the name of the restaurant.”

“I’m Jewish. We have an ear for stories about forbidden food…It’s not the only story of yours that I remember either.”

We took a seat at a table. Sammy Wong’s was built into a narrow-windowless building three blocks from the State Capitol. It hadn’t occurred to me, but without the tables and the Chinese waiters the inside of Sammy Wong’s bore an eerie resemblance to the darkened corridor of a college dormitory which just happened to be where Jan and I had once had most of our conversations. My senior year, Jan had dated a rugby player named Jamie who lived in the suite across from me. Jamie usually fell asleep before eleven. Jan was a late night person. I had roommates who went to bed early. I was a late night person. We would run into one another in the hallway.

We actually talked quite a lot and often at three in the morning. Perhaps by design though, it was as if our friendship didn’t exist in the daylight or at least the public life of Dunster House. In many ways, our entire relationship didn’t exactly happen in a regular sense. When Jan came to Paperson two weeks ago, it might have been the longest conversation I’d ever had with her when the sun was out. From that perspective, it’s not all that surprising that I didn’t recognize her immediately.

We sat down. Jan ordered a glass of wine and I ordered a Coke.

“You still don’t drink?”

I nodded. “I’ve never felt old enough and I grew up around a bar.”

“You’re going to have to show me your Dad’s restaurant too later.”

“Sure, but I think it’s a credit union now. It hasn’t been a restaurant in years. The dragon’s now sitting in my mother’s back yard.”

“So, are you ready to order?” she asked.

“Aren’t you going to look at the menu?”

Jan shook her head. When our waiter appeared she quickly told him, “I’ll have the General Mo’s chicken.”

Against my better judgment, I ordered the same.

“So here’s a test. Do you remember the family that brought me here?”

“It was Jeff Feinstein and his father was a Doctor of Public Health who worked with the State of California.”

“Do you just have an incredible memory or what’s going on here Jan?”

“Lucky, I remember your stories. I told you I’d never forget them.”

“Okay.”

As I said it, I was scrambling to remember personal details about Jan Grady. Obviously, she had told me stories about herself too.

“Is it wrong if I don’t want to be the only other person who ever hears them?”

“You could have written or e-mailed me instead of well arranging to buy the entire town of Paperson for the Howard Company. It’s not exactly the usual way to contact someone you knew from college.”

“That’s a long story. Let’s just say that we have a chance to do one another a huge favor here, because of a gigantic coincidence. Lucky, I know you don’t want your stories to languish. Luke Howard is the most famous director in the world.”

“But no one said anything about a movie.”

“This is bigger than that, Lucky. Movies are just entertainment. This is something beyond that. It’s a new way to educate.”

“Why do I think you’re doing a pitch here? Aren’t we really just talking about some version of an amusement park ride?”

“Virtual reality is a lot more than that. Yes, they use it to create faux roller coasters in some amusement parks, but Luke wants to explore possibilities beyond that. He’s talking about recreating experience.”

“And why in the heck would anyone care about my experience?”

Jan looked at me for a moment as if she genuinely didn’t know the answer to that. The waiter brought us a listless looking two order of General Mo’s chicken in the meantime. The dish was exactly as I remembered it the one other time I had been to Sammy Wong’s more than thirty years ago. It was deep fried, but the crust looked slightly soggy. The red of the sauce was too red to come by its color by natural means. Jan was picking at hers skeptically. I dug in immediately.

“Lucky, we lived in Dunster House like almost thirty years ago right? So, who was the guy I was seeing then?”

“You were sleeping with a guy named Jamie.” I stressed the word sleeping as I said it.

You know the other day, I was trying to remember his name or most anything about him other than the fact that he played rugby and fell asleep ridiculously early. I remember you and your stories perfectly. What do you remember about me?

“You’re from Manhattan. You’re Jewish and some guy in Central Park once asked you if you wanted to model.”

“Shit.”

The funny thing was that as I looked at Jan, I was surprised to see that she had quite possibly never been all that conventionally attractive or had tastes changed that much in a generation. The whole confidence thing was what made her, but I could actually see that she might not photograph well at all.

“Why shit?”

“It’s like I made the mistake of telling that story once because I was pissed at Louise Craig for bragging about guy’s always hitting on her. It shut her up, but even now it’s about the only thing anyone remembers about me, isn’t it?”

“No, absolutely not.”

“You probably ought to know the whole story. I didn’t turn him down. I went in for a test shoot and they never followed up….So, now that you know that. What do you remember about me?”

“I remember that there was this really attractive woman in my dorm who actually seemed to like talking to me.”

“But you don’t remember any of my stories.”

I was caught. Maybe I did at one time, but I didn’t now.

“What’s that tell you Lucky?”

“I don’t know.”

“I know you’ve tried to write.”

I nodded.

“So….I’m in a position to let you do that and to help your family sell off an abandoned town that may be worthless.”

“What about Uncle Leon’s development study?”

“What about it?”

“Doesn’t it say that it has tremendous potential as an outlet mall or for housing development?”

“Do you believe it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Have you wondered why it’s been for sale for more than twenty years?”

“You know Jan, I don’t know that I remember my own stories that well.”

“Bullshit.”

I’d finished all of my General Mo’s chicken. Jan had barely touched hers.

“Lucky, do you want to do this or not? I know you’re not all that serious about practicing law.”

“What says I’m not?”

I looked it up. You didn’t even pay your bar dues one year.

“I feel like I’ve been stalked.”

“In a way, yes.”

“I’m not complaining. I’m actually sort of flattered.”

“Lucky, do you remember telling me that you had spent most of your life listening to other people’s stories, that the one thing you were good at was drawing other people out about themselves.”

“Well, everyone except my Grandparents.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“It’s true.”

“Do you wonder at all about the fact that we spent all this time talking and you started telling me all these stories about your own family? You even once joked that you were playing Quentin Compson from Absalom, Absalom.”

“I did?”

“Where did that Lucky go?”

Jan was looking at me straight in the eye, something that has always made me generally uncomfortable. It took me a while to answer.

“I don’t know that that Lucky every existed except late at night in the Dunster corridor. I’ve never really been like that any other time.”

“You don’t miss it?”

I’m not sure why, but I chose to lie.

“I’m not sure I’d even remember it had you not turned up.”

Jan then grabbed the check and paid it with a gold-colored credit card. The waiter looked at us a bit oddly.

“Lucky, this really is my job and I don’t have a lot of time not to do my job. I need to know if you want to do this or I need to move on.”

“Do what?”

Jan exhaled pure exasperation.

“You have my e-mail address.”

I nodded.

“Tell me the story of General Mo’s chicken again in the next three days, then maybe we can talk again.”

She picked up her credit card, got up, and motioned for me not to follow her out. I waited a minute, took a piece of her General Mo’s chicken, then left too. On the way out the darkened corridor that is Sammy Wong's I had the strangest feeling though. It was as if I was being followed by a ghost. I don't mean a metaphorical one either.

Connecting the Dots

2007-12-07T13:54:00.000-08:00

I’ve always been one of those people who has imagined that drafting a novel hits some critical point where everything coalesces and then the task becomes more like skiing than rock climbing. Maybe this is true, but I’m having the opposite experience I’ve been really busy in my non-writing life, but thus far it’s gotten more rather than less difficult. I actually write short stories and other things very quickly. I’ve even been known to complete story drafts in two hours. If you think of a novel as maybe twenty five short stories, I should be able to do this in about six weeks. Right now, it’s taking me about a month a chapter.

There are several phases to any fiction project. I’ve come to realize that I’ve very fond of the “explosion of ideas” phase. If you’re old enough to remember them, kids project books used to have these pages with a bunch of points with numbers attached to them. If you drew a line from number to number, a picture would emerge. Some people would start at one and find two then three, etc. Others, like me would try to connect the numbers that would reveal the picture as quickly as possible. Once I figured out what the shape was supposed to be, I sometimes wouldn’t take the time to line in the still unconnected dot/numbers on the page. I love recognizing connections and shapes. To me, the rest is just something you do. I remember there were other kids who would painstakingly fill in all the lines then spend even more time coloring the shape in. Coloring was just never for me.

In developing a draft, I’m having to force myself to go one, two, three, four this time. When I’ve skipped around in the past, I’ve always had some notion of what goes in between, but I couldn’t settle down to fill in the connections that most other people would need to see the picture. The single hardest thing for me though is that as I’ve moved in more linear fashion, each chapter has felt less like an opening out of the material than a shutting off. Let me offer an obvious example. Once Marie appeared in this last chapter, Lucky now can’t be married to someone else, not involved with a woman, etc. At a more serious level, each chapter also commits you to certain themes and stylistic decisions for the rest of the book. It’s hard for me to give up the shuffle of possibilities where any plot card can turn up at any given moment.

Fascinatingly, chapters three and four were parts of the book that I’d refused to fill in for some time. I’d started chapters that included Luke Howard “present time” and Marie, but I’d never sustained them. It feels good to finally set them into the flow of the book. Of course, I may well change my mind soon. It’s also been a struggle.

I did want to mention that blogging the draft has been very helpful. For one, it’s actually very useful to have a single “ordered” draft up that I can access from any place that I can get on the internet. I get to view my “process” including the length of time it takes between chapters, but it also holds me accountable in an odd way. Very few people visit this page (I don’t make any attempts to link it), but I know they can and that if too many weeks go by between installments they’ll see that.

Two of my blog friends, Mr. Pogblog and Bellarossa are, whether they know it or not, doing a similar thing with blogs. Mr. Pogblog is doing his 88 days to Druidic enlightenment and has gotten more or less half way there. Bella’s been documenting her “creative” life since her decision to move to Chicago. She includes pictures, links to articles she’s gotten published, and more recently video clips of performances, events, friends’ performances, shows she’s helped produce, etc. It’s certainly been inspiring to follow and it’s a really interesting way to track someone else’s creative process. I know this notion of “blogging” as something other than an end in itself isn’t exactly novel, but I believe that it has great potential. I think Orson Scott Card, a much better known writer, has also been putting his drafts online so this technique is not limited to those of us who blog in obscurity.

In the meantime, I’m on to Chapter Five and trying to find a way to let the various streams of Lucky, Luke Howard, the Ghost in the Blue Screen, etc. run together for a bit while still moving forward.

Chapter 4: The Answering Machine

2007-12-05T18:49:00.000-08:00

Over the next four days, my answering machine had six phone calls from Uncle Leon and one from Jan Grady. I don’t always return Uncle Leon’s calls, but he usually waits a couple days before trying again even if the matter happens to be important. According to Uncle Leon, it’s always important. I wouldn’t expect him to phone me just to see how I’m doing. We’re very Americanized, but this is one of those Confucian customs that isn’t written anywhere yet everyone observes it. As far as I can tell, Confucius didn’t know about telephones, though my Grandfather would have disputed that. In fact, he used to insist that the Chinese invented everything from the computer, to the movie projector, to chocolate milk. Anyway, the younger generation is supposed to call the elder generation to pay “respects” which is the Confucian equivalent of just saying “Hi”. You don’t do the reverse because that would well just reverse everything.

It is, however, okay to call younger members of the family on a business matter. I know that Uncle Leon has a non-business life, but I’ve never been part of it. He used to take regular hunting trips and he’d return to the house with various brothers in law and some of my male cousins dressed in camouflage and bearing assorted dead birds and an occasional mammal carcass, but my Dad never liked the idea of shooting things. As I got older, I could have gone on my own. My cousins loved talking about guns and I’d never fired one. It was just that I thought about the constant level of hostility within my Dad’s family and determined on my own that a hunting trip was something better done with non-relatives. I’ve still never gone hunting.

It was however obvious from all those phone messages that Uncle Leon was hunting for something. Somehow, the sale of Paperson suddenly depended on me or whatever my connection to Jan Grady happened to be. He wanted to know as much as he could about Jan Grady, project manager for the Howard Group. I doubt that it was because he cared about Jan Grady, my long lost dorm pal, or our time in Dunster House at Harvard, he simply liked to be the one in any business transaction who controlled the information. Uncle Leon had spent most of his adult life trying to finally become the family member who took care of the business. Suddenly and entirely by accident, or so it seemed, I found myself in the intriguing position of having some sort of influence over the process.

While this aspect was certainly fun, I’d managed to get through adult life by minimizing my formal responsibilities. After all, who else let’s someone leave him six phone messages in a row?

“So, Lucky. Aren’t you going to call your Uncle Leon?”

Marie was in the backyard preparing to plant tomatoes. As a concession to being together, I’d built her two redwood planter boxes. Dirt was already pouring out of one unjoined corner. I had hit that corner twice with the back end of a shovel. Twice a year whether I need to or not, I do time in Marie’s garden in the spirit of being a good boyfriend. As I mentioned, formal responsibility has not been one of my adult strengths. We’ve shared a bedroom now for five years, three crops of vegetables, and one year where I forgot to water when Marie went to visit her family for a week without me.

“Did he leave another message?”

“I told you about the first four. You’re not even listening to them.”

“Why should I rewind the tape to listen to them. He’ll tell me what they’re about when I call him.”

“Look, there are two things you always avoid. One is anything to do with taxes or money and the second thing is anything that has to do with your Dad’s family. Why do you do that?”

I stick one end of the shovel into a slab of black compost and transfer it to the planter.

“I don’t know. I just don’t like dealing with those things.”

“You think maybe I’ve figured that out after five years? You won’t even talk about those things…..And who’s Jan Grady?”

Marie stands on top of the far end of the planter box with a pair of hedge clippers. She’s been out in her garden since the sun came up. She wears a pair of shorts, a blue work shirt, and a not necessarily flattering sun hat which obscures her face. She’s naturally on the pale side, so takes care to ration her exposure to the largest object in our solar system. The travails of blonde-haired people remain very exotic to me.

I don’t answer at first, well aware that this is not the kind of question one answers casually. It’s not like anything bad has happened with Jan Grady. It’s more that Marie is the sort of woman who will read what might happen into my answer. Naturally, I have to make my answer sound as casual as possible but only after I have taken some care in my choice of words.

“She’s the project manager from the Luke Howard organization. I thought I mentioned her when I went to Paperson the other day.”

Marie looks at me suspiciously. She tugs at the brim of her sun hat and snips the air with her shears.

“Paperson?”

“You know, my grandfather’s estate. That’s the name of the town. I lived there when I was a kid.”

“I know your grandfather’s estate has never had a name before….And why would she call you instead of your uncle. Isn’t he the one who takes care of everything?”

I find myself instinctively placing the shovel between my body and Marie’s shears. I take another angry scoop of compost and slap it into the planter.

“I thought you wanted me to help you out here….”

Before Marie can react, it dawns on me that I’ve just made things look far worse than they actually are and soften my tone, “Jan Grady turned out to be an old friend from Harvard. I was totally surprised that she showed up. I hadn’t much thought about her since we graduated.”

“Hadn’t much thought about her?”

Marie can be on the jealous side in both senses. We come from very different backgrounds. My father screamed at me when I admitted to him that I hadn’t applied to Yale or Harvard Law School because I wanted to come back to the west coast and didn’t have the grades anyway. After he stopped yelling at me, he called me at two in the morning to keep talking to me about how it was embarrassing for him to tell people that I didn’t want to apply to places like that. Marie’s parents didn’t even talk to her about going to college after high school. She got married instead, divorced the guy after several years of trying, then finished college locally a few years after we met.

When we first met, I still talked to an old girlfriend. Marie made me stop. It was a reasonable request even though it was just talking. After that, I’d gotten in the habit of not going out of my way to mention other women even business associates unnecessarily.
The fact that Jan Grady had been to Harvard with me made the situation many times worse. Even worse, I was going to have to confess that Jan more than twenty years out of college was probably more attractive now than she was then.

“She’s just someone I knew from the dorm. I hadn’t seen or talked to Jan Grady since graduation at least until the other day.”

Marie looked at me and shook her head. Once again, I pretended to be diligent about filling the planter box with compost.

“Then why’s she calling you at home? How did she get our number?”

“I didn’t say we we hadn’t been friends. She probably just wants to catch up.”

Marie nodded. “You never went out?”

“Actually at that time, no one exactly went out.”

I swallowed as I saw Marie’s eyes widen underneath the brim of her sun hat. I’d said the right thing the wrong way. I quickly reminded her.

“I never slept with anyone until I was almost twenty four. You know that. That’s three years after I left Cambridge.”

“But did you want to?”

“No, she was just a friend in the dorm. We’d sit at the same table in the dining commons sometimes. Jan had a boyfriend. It wasn’t me. I knew her boyfriend, Jamie.”

That answer was finally good enough for Marie even though it left out a key fact or two about my friendship with Jan Grady back when she was Jan Free and when it wasn’t strange to talk to a near stranger for two hours over dinner about making the University divest any stocks it held that had investments in South Africa or say alone in a dorm room at three in the morning. I finished my time in Marie’s garden and we even kissed some at the end when she came to bring “Manolo” ice water. Manolo is the imaginary illegal Mexican laborer who works in her garden twice a year who looks exactly like me and does her bidding both in the garden and in certain parts of the house.

Once in the house and in sight of the telephone message machine, I had a problem. Obviously, I couldn’t call Jan Grady first with Marie around. I had to call Uncle Leon.

“Lucky, how are you?”

“Hi Uncle Leon, I was away for a couple days. Sorry, I didn’t get your call earlier.”

“Your wife was very nice. She didn’t mention you’re being away.”

“Marie’s sort of absent-minded sometimes.”

“Well, I hope I get to meet her one of these days.”

“Sure, one of these days? How are your kids?”

“Good, good….Did I tell you that Mikey’s working in Manhattan? He recommended Microsoft and Cisco a few years ago. Smith Barney loves him.”

I doubt that Uncle Leon knew that one of my friends insists that he’d seen my cousin Mikey at Studio 54 a decade earlier in the bathroom with a razor blade and a powdery substance. He only told me because my friend Ambrose is the sort of east coast guy who is sure that every Chinese person from Sacramento has to know every other Chinese person from Sacramento. As it happened, I did know my cousin Mikey, who had once been Uncle Leon’s “overweight” son whose mother used to embarrass him about it.

“You know, I had a friend who sort of knew Mikey. He said he was having a really good time in the city. I’m glad to hear that Mikey’s doing well.”

Truth is that most of Manhattan did cocaine in the Studio 54 bathroom that decade. I felt like I was one of the few college graduates who managed to avoid that sort of thing entirely which may have had something with my keeping my virginity until I was twenty four. It’s not like Mikey was an addict. He was probably just a pretty typical Go-Go Wall Street type of the era.

“We’re really proud of him. Who would have thought that Mikey would make it on Wall Street?”

Uncle Leon’s other sons probably weren’t doing as well in “parent” terms as Mikey. One was in the retail clerks union and another worked for the State of California. The youngest had managed to stay in junior college for seven years. They seemed happy enough, the couple times I’d seen them in the twenty years since my Grandfather’s funeral, but I wouldn’t really know.

“So, it must have been a surprise for you to run into someone you knew from college.”

“Well, it was a big school.”

“Jan Grady must have done very well.”

“I assume so.”

We had crossed over into the seemingly casual part of our phone call that really mattered to Uncle Leon only he wasn’t going to show it.

“How did you know her?”

“She lived in my dorm. We used to talk once in a while.”

Marie was at the sink washing lettuce. As I mentioned the dorm, she turned in my direction and watched me intently.

“Uncle Leon, is there something I need to do here?”

“Well, yes…but we can talk about that later.”

“Okay, I just have a few minutes though. I have to deal with a client in a little bit.”

Marie looked at me quizzically and mouthed “Client, what client?”

I waved her away with my non-phone hand.

“I didn’t know you were practicing law again Lucky.”

“Well sort of. It’s not a big deal. I just promised to call this guy back.”

“What is it you were doing again these last few years?”

“Well, I took time off to write a you know kind of a book.”

“And how did that go? Did you ever finish? Did you find a publisher. You know I remember that eulogy you gave for your cousin Chucky. You’re good at that sort of thing.”

“Thanks, Uncle Leon.”

“No really.”

I was very close to saying “Uncle Leon, what exactly do you want from me right now? It’s not like you to smooth talk me about stuff like that”, but I resisted the temptation.

I was now twisting the phone card in my free hand. In the meantime, Marie was shaking her head. We went through almost two years of my taking the day to write and my not really writing anything. I was perfectly sincere about doing the writing, I had just found it hard to say exactly what I wanted to say.

“No, it’s a big project and it needed a little more time.”

“Wasn’t it going to be about your Grandfather?”

“Yeah, more or less.”

“Well, I’d love to see it some time. I’m sure it would be really interesting.”

“Sure, it’s got to be ready though…So is there something going on with the Estate Uncle Leon?”

There was enough of a pause over the phone that I wondered briefly if Uncle Leon was still on the line.

“Well, I know you have a client, but Lucky I need to ask you something.”

“Ummm…sure.”

“You know how important this sale is. Paperson’s been in the estate and trust for almost twenty five years. If we can sell it or license it whatever these people want, it means we can close the Estate finally. I’m sure you want that.”

“I think we all want that Uncle Leon.”

“Okay….I know you and I haven’t always cooperated on this.”

“Uncle Leon, I filed that petition almost twenty years ago. We worked it out.”

“Lucky, look. This Jan Grady seemed to be very friendly with you. If she winds up talking to you on your own, would you mind letting me know right away what she has on her mind?”

“What?”

“I mean just about the things that pertain to Paperson.”

“Uh…”

“Look Luke Howard is a big fish. He’s supposed to be a very shrewd businessman. They say he’s been so successful because he manages to bring his productions in under budget. You’ve got to be a tough negotiator to do that.”

“I thought it was because of those furry aliens he created.”

“Lucky, this family’s going to need every edge it can get if it’s going to get what it deserves in this deal. You know what I mean? Whatever you can find out, I need to know. I don’t know if you know this, but in real estate timing can be everything.”

“Honestly, Uncle Leon, I haven’t talked to Jan Grady since we were in Paperson that morning. I doubt that I’ll ever have anything to tell you. She’s someone who I haven’t seen or spoken to since Boz Scaggs was on the radio.”

“Who?”

“I’m just saying I don’t know anything more than you do at this point and I don’t expect to.”

“Lucky, I was there. She’s going to call you.”

“Is that it Uncle Leon?”

“Do we have an understanding?”

“Sure, why not?”

Marie was already hand shredding the romaine and dropping it into a paper bag for me to shake out the moisture. This was perhaps the first time in five years, I would have preferred to be out working on Marie’s garden instead of having her around for my next phone call. In the meantime, the message light was on and that last message from Jan Grady was still on the tape.

“Dear, you didn’t happen to write down Jan Grady’s number when she left that message?”

“You mean you didn’t write it down yourself? Maybe you were too busy with your client?”

“Okay, I’ll answer your questions. Can I just make this call first?”

“Lucky, I know you think I’m being jealous. It’s really not that. It’s just like there’s this whole part of your life where I don’t seem to know you.”

“I’ve talked about it.”

“Honestly, maybe you have a little, but you hardly say anything about it. I’ve never met most of your father’s family.”

“Well, we’re not that close.”

“But, you and I are. You’re the one who claimed you wanted to write about it. How do you expect to do that if you won’t even talk about it with the woman you live with?”

That should have made me feel better, but it only made me feel worse. I had never dated Jan Grady never even hugged her before a few days ago in Paperson. At the same time, Marie had a good reason to be jealous. I just wasn’t sure how or in what form it was going to come out.

Chapter 3 The Ghost in the Blue Screen

2007-11-08T09:40:00.000-08:00

Americans have no idea about this, but what passes for their imagination is completely contained in an old warehouse building just off an overpass of highway 101 a few miles north of San Francisco. A cash register and check out counter still sit in front of the building’s lone window that faces the street. Before it became the home of Luke Howard’s Illusion Factory, this was the headquarters of the retail clerk’s union Local #1138. Their hand-painted sign remains the only identifying marker on the outside of the warehouse.

As you get closer to the front door, you’ll see a reptilian hand reaching out to the checker side of the counter. It’s Luke Howard’s idea of a joke. Having observed him here from the days since he was excitedly building models and matching matte paintings for his first movie, that weird combination of car chase scenes and space aliens, I’ve only seen the man actually make people laugh a handful of times. After he became famous a lot more people do laugh, but it’s not actual. I can tell the difference.

For the first few years, Luke refused to acknowledge my presence in the warehouse. Perhaps he was so focused on the illusions one can project onto a two dimensional screen in a dark room, he forgot that we exist in other forms. Could there have been a better place for me to hide than the Illusion Factory? There aren’t many places for homeless ghosts to go. When the last business closed in Paperson and the last resident moved to Sacramento, it took me three years to find this new home. Ethereal travel only permits us to move a few hundred yards a day and then only in fog. Can you imagine the traffic jams if that weren’t the case?

I’m sure that Luke saw me in those first few years. If you look at some of the matte work thirty seven minutes into that first movie, you’ll see my silhouette in the upper right hand corner of the shot. Arguably it looks like a discoloration in the film stock, but Luke Howard is a perfectionist. He examined every frame of his first movie with a magnifying glass. Those who aren’t in the business of illusions always underestimate the level of precision involved. I watched as he worked frantically to get it out of the master. He even re-shot the scene twice.

Still, it wasn’t until about three years ago that Luke was forced to acknowledge my presence in his Illusion Factory. I wasn’t a virus in one of the Silicon Graphics Indigo Workstations. I wasn’t a shadow from some unaccounted light source next to the blue screen, canvass for America’s mass imagination. I wasn’t some special effects technician’s prank with the lariat in Image Maker. He called in a Feng Hsui specialist from Hong Kong. For three thousand dollars a day, the woman ordered the server room reoriented, made them run network wires transversely instead of parallel to the walls, and forced them to move the trailer for the model-making shop away from the Best Buy parking lot behind the Illusion Factory. That poor shyster never saw me and I’m almost certain that she never really tried. At the end, she deposited his check immediately before he took the next flight back to Hong Kong.

I knew then that Luke Howard had begun to understand that he was dealing with a real ghost, not the kind you make with CGI or in-camera effects. That was when I began planning my return to Paperson.

Even when he shows up at the Illusion Factory by surprise, it seems that everyone there knows he’s coming. In most any other workplaces, they’d be clearing out the empty pizza boxes and half-emptied cans of Pepsi and Jolt Cola from the conference table. The programmers would be taking down the video games they play while brainstorming. With Luke, that’s not what they worry about. He doesn’t care how things look in the building. He’s never minded the spike-haired graphic artists or even said a word about the number of his employees who have purple or pink hair. The only thing that matters is what shows up in the dailies. Luke hits the door and they cue up the screening room as if they run the dailies there 24/7.

Luke’s own project isn’t going well. To be honest, none of his own film projects in the last thirteen years which happens to be since the day I took up residence in the Illusion Factory have made much of a dent either financially or critically. Once in a while the supervisors even dare to whisper that Luke’s done. When special effects genius consisted of paintings, models, and even blue screen, Luke was the master. Ever the visionary in this realm, Luke was the first major movie maker to insist on going full CGI. It’s just that he doesn’t have the same feel for effects that are purely digital. Others insist it’s the scripts. Luke Howard hasn’t put his own name on a movie in close to seven years. The last one, a parody of a nineteen thirties detective story done with live actors playing on digitized backgrounds, went straight to VHS.

At one level, it doesn’t matter. The Illusion Factory does contract work for other production houses and still has no peer. Thirty seconds of a house going over a waterfall is three days work and half a million dollars. A two minute segment of an underwater city being destroyed by an earthquake went for seventeen million. It’s easy money. Even if the bit isn’t done all that well, the director uses “special effects by the Illusion Factory” in the promos. It’s not the quality of the work. It’s the brand name that sells the tickets and gets them a spot in the rotations at the multiplexes. The money in commercials is even better. Much of the time, that’s just a matter of taking stock bits and flipping the perspective or changing the lighting and it’s a quick fifty thousand for what amounts to fifteen minutes work by a sixty eight thousand dollar a year junior graphic artist.

Taco Bell paid Luke Howard a billion dollars just to put the characters from his new trilogy on their napkins and drink cups. Financially, he doesn’t need to make another movie. In fact, it might be even more lucrative if he didn’t.

In the screening room, Luke never sits in the front row. Usually, the supervisors sit at the table that takes up the front middle with their notepads. Luke’s spot is in the peanut gallery, a seat in the upper right hand corner. His routine goes like this. He has them play the daily at normal speed three times in a row, beginning to end. The fourth time, he looks at it in slow motion with no volume. He then makes everyone leave the room except for the projectionist. The fifth time, he uses a series of signals with the guy in the projection room to let him know exactly when he wants the run stopped, slowed down, sped up, or repeated. He makes his notes. After that, he watches at theater speed and volume alone before he invites the crew back in to view the run again.

As he watches run four, I’m certain that Luke Howard is trying to figure out where I’ll show up on the daily. I don’t make an appearance in every one. I do it just often enough to remind him of my presence. I wonder too if he’s trying to figure out where I am in the screening room as he watches. If he only knew. If he only understood.

Luke raises his right hand and waggles two fingers at the projectionist who goes back twenty frames to a spot where a woman is rolling down a hill in a tornado. The flying cow is about to appear from the left side of the screen. The cow’s a bit out of proportion and the shadow doesn’t match the maelstrom around it. Luke’s eye is so good, he usually picks it up in a run or two.

“Dammit…it’s not quite in synch,” Luke mutters.

He means the sythesizer chord that plays atonally in the background. Luke is the one director in America who understands that moviegoers see with their ears as much as they see with their eyes. For this bit, they need to feel the cow before they can see it.

“Run it brighter,” Luke tells the projectionist by pointing to his eye and making an upward motion with his right palm.

I think my most famous appearance in a Luke Howard movie was in his first big outer space epic. There was a long line of starships getting ready to attack. Luke used models that he ran in endless loop, an old technique that he made fresh by painting in little variations in each ship on the film stock. With most of them, the frames are moving too fast for the viewer to even see this sort of detail, at least in any conscious way. It was the crazies who found me in the scene. I was surfing on top of one of the starships, arms up, robes blowing in the solar wind, and at one point I wave to the audience. I’m there for less than five frames, just above sumbliminal. The crazies caught it the first time the print went to VHS.

Luke still doesn’t acknowledge it. What they don’t know is that Luke spent hundreds of hours trying to get me out of the VHS transfer and again seven years later in the initial DVD release in the boxed set edition, he tried to edit me out. I’m not sure when, but he got obsessed somewhere along the line.

This time, Luke signals for a stop frame. “Where are you, you fucker?” he mutters.

It’s a good guess, but I’m not in the frame yet.

“Luke, is there a problem?”

The projectionist pokes his head out the sliding glass window of the booth.
“No, nothing.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s in this one Luke.”

“And you were going to tell me when exactly?”

“We would have, but.”

“But what?”

“Well, it’s like he’s in a different frame every time with this one.”

Luke shakes his head angrily and I laugh hysterically.

Luke pulls out his cell phone.

“Look, can you contact Jan Grady. I’d like her to meet me down here.”

One of my favorite games in the screening room is to sit right behind Luke and to do exactly what he does. He moves his left hand over the arm rest. I move my left hand. He scratches himself, I scratch myself. He turns around, I slip behind him and turn around. I’m convinced that he feels my presence at this point, but he still can’t seem to catch me.

Movies are based on an optical illusion. If still frames move at a rate above a certain speed, the eye and mind conspire to see them as continuous motion by implying connections between the frames that don’t actually exist. Human beings blink up to hundreds of times a minute. I show up in between. In a sense, I’m a counter-movie, that which exists but only appears when the eyes are momentarily closed. There’s nothing you can do about it, the blinking is autonomic. I do remember hearing once that Japanese scientist did some live experiments during World War 2 with prisoners turned into human subjects. They forced their eyelids open with clamps and kept the subjects pupils dilated. Every one of the subjects went insane in a matter of hours. Some bits of experience, we’re simply not meant to see.

Am I going to let Luke Howard find me on one of the frames for his tornado movie? Maybe I could hide behind that flying cow or the spinning newspaper?

Luke makes another cell phone call, “Did you find Jan Grady?”

In a few years, Luke or maybe his competitors at Magyc City, the ones who used to be his employees, will announce that it is now possible to put any event you can visualize onto a movie screen. Maybe a generation from that date, you’ll be able to sit at home, choose some options off a menu, and create any scene you care to. Think of the porn you could make. The only problem and it’s one that Luke Howard is all too aware of himself is this. Only certain people have the kind of imagination that makes these sort of capabilities worthwhile. It’s just that Luke is starting to wonder if he’s still one of them.

It was three months ago that Jan Grady sent Luke Howard the e-mailed memo.
“Luke, I think I have a way to deal with that ghost in your blue screen. I need to drive to the Sacramento Delta, but I’m pretty sure that’ll work out. You now how they say the things you pick up in college don’t really matter. Well, I’m not so sure.”

“Let the Adventure Begin” I say.

I wonder if Luke hears me. I’m standing right behind him. He’s not even blinking right now.

Where I'm at

2007-11-05T10:43:00.000-08:00

I made a decision to push forward to Chapter 3 and just fix the problems with chapter 2 after I generate more momentum. 3 is not one of the chapters that I happen to have an earlier draft for. Well, actually I did have an earlier draft, but I misplaced it between hard drives/computers somewhere along the way.

This one was known as "The Ghost in the Bluescreen" and it disappeared in a rather ghostlike fashion. The hard thing has been making sure I get the time and energy to get it moving.

Over the weekend, I had a story accepted by the Summerset Review. That was definitely encouraging.

Aaargh....

2007-10-18T17:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, that was frustrating. I had an extremely busy month with more pressure at work and various family events. I also have been sending out a bunch of my stories to journals. They’ve all been getting rejected. On top of that, I’ve had a couple longtime friends who asked for copies of my stories like a year ago. They’ve never said a word about them and we even had dinner together over the weekend. Ouch!

Writing fiction is a test of self-confidence. Most of us who try this imagine that everyone who reads us will at least like what we do. The truth is that no writer is universally appreciated. In the meantime, I have my own inner critic, that thing that sits inside my head and does its best to stop me from embarrassing myself. “If it’s not perfect, it won’t be universally acclaimed by those who read it, “ says the inner critic.

It’s diabolically circular.

I feel good that I kept pushing nonetheless, but I found myself perpetually rewriting the same few paragraphs. I’d have some thought about “fog”, “walls”, “the passage of time” and want to get it written down and I’d hear this thing tell me that it didn’t fit or that it impeded the flow of the story. I began to forget that there are times to fix that sort of thing and times to simply let ideas flow and set their own shape. I certainly have times when I don’t seem to have any ideas, but having too many ideas can look like the same frustration, the inability to move forward.

So here I am again, I pushed through chapter two and still feel like it doesn’t do what I want it to do. Have I waited too long to start the conventional part of the action? Probably so. Is there a mood shift from chapter one to chapter two that’s not accounted for? Possibly. Am I closer to my goal or not? I have no idea.

The current chapter two has any number of problems, including the fact that I haven’t worked out the logistics of why Jan remembers Lucky better than he remembers her. I probably have more worries than “Wow, I did thats” in the chapter. Right now, I’m trying to decide between just moving on to chapter three or fixing the slow sections of chapter two and running the risk of taking myself sideways once again.

Sometimes, it just isn’t fun.

At Home in the Fog ( a stab at Chapter 2)

2007-10-17T19:00:00.000-07:00

If you’ve ever been to Paperson, California, you know about the fog. Regardless of temperature, the town is always covered in fog. Scientists will tell you that fog is actually a low lying cloud that forms when the temperature of the air is within a few degrees of the dew point. Those who have lived in Paperson for any length of time will tell you that the fog that matters most there isn’t necessarily visible.

The fog here is no accident. If fog, as the rest of the world knows it, is a substance that’s part air and part moisture, it’s only natural that Paperson is buried beneath a persistent fog. First, Paperson is artificial in the most literal sense. Until the 1880’s, it was part of the Sacramento River. The only people who ever used the occasional islands that would form on the river there during the summer were a small group of Indians, arguably they weren’t even a tribe, who went up and down the river in their canoes trading with gold miners, farmers, and railroad workers. Around that time, a Stockton banker named Andrew Bowen recognized the possibilities tied together in the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the development of mechanized farm machinery, and the very rich soil of the Sacramento River Delta.

Andrew Bowen took an option on the land underneath the river, brought in the Chinese workers from the completed railroad, sold the dredges, and nearly two decades later helped turn malarial swampland into thousands of acres of farmland. The Chinese drained the swamps and built the levees. Their reward was to be turned into illegal immigrants on land that they had made possible. Paperson, the land leased from the Evans Ranch in 1908 by Morris Tang, became the one part of the Delta they thought of as their own. The town actually has no legal name. “Paperson” comes from the fact that most of the Chinese who took up residence near there were in the country either with false papers or none at all.

The truth is that the natural state of Paperson is mud or water suspended in earth. It’s no surprise then that such a place is constantly covered in water suspended in air otherwise known as fog. When Morris Tang leased the land from Dan Evans in 1908, he was not only aware of the persistent fog, he chose this spot between the levee and the Sacramento River for it. Morris was a shrewd man. He recognized that such a fog had its uses. While the fog might make it harder to find the general store he had put up there, it helped to hide the gambling hall next to it. Patrons would like the fact that the hall and its occupants couldn’t be seen from the levee road easily. Morris Tang was right. In fifty five years of continuous operation, the gambling hall would only be raided once without notice. Even then, it was closed for less than a week after the raid by a squad of police officers dressed in black face. Equally significant, none of the many illegal residents of Paperson were ever picked up in the town by the Immigration and Naturalization Service or its predecessor agencies.

Morris was already an old man at the time. No one knew exactly how old. He also spoke very little about most things. Morris had found ways to communicate about most every aspect of daily life through some combination of nods, hand gestures, and facial expressions. Rumor had it that before he had come to California, Morris had grown up in a family of street performers in Canton. They had found ways to entertain the foreign sailors and merchants by acting out entire dramas without words. It was said that this unusual education accounted for Morris’s success in California.

The only thing that anyone remembers Morris talking about at length in the conventional way was the fog. Given that so little happened in Paperson and the persistence of the fog, Morris’s preoccupation with it wasn’t out of the ordinary. At least a hundred days a year, the tule fog lay in pockets along the river so thickly that it prevented vehicles from moving along the levee road for hours at a time. One fog had been so persistent that it lasted two days in 1918. Some insisted that the fog had inoculated the residents of the Delta from the great influenza epidemic that had mysteriously killed millions across the world that year. It was true that despite the mix of origins among the farmworkers there, the Delta did not see a single fatal case of the flu that year. Every year there was at least one story of people, pets, and even buildings somehow disappearing in the fog. Even more disconcerting, there were sometimes claims that whole portions of the river would be altered between bouts of thick fog. Orchards would go from being barren to bearing huge crops. Bends in the river would appear. Fishing piers would move as much as a mile down river.

Morris though didn’t limit his talk to the more extreme and obvious effects of the fog. If he trusted you, Morris would tell you, “It’s not the fog that you see, that makes this spot special, it’s the fog that you can’t see.”

My Grandfather, two generations younger than Morris, and recently arrived from Toishan village, happened to be one of the person in whom Morris entrusted with the deeper secrets of Paperson’s persistent fog. When I was young, he would warn my father before we drove back to Sacramento at night, “Be careful driving the road. Even if you can’t see the fog, it doesn’t mean that it can’t keep you from seeing.”

I remember my father indulging his father, then as we got further away from Paperson driving us home in pretty much the way he always drove at night, one hand on the steering wheel, the radio on to what would later be called an “easy listening” station, and his free elbow hanging out the open driver’s window. My dad was of the generation that thought of Morris Tang’s “fog” as old timer’s superstitions, the sort of things that should have been left in China, barriers to the Chinese becoming fully modern and respectably American. I doubt that he ever understood the real importance of the fog or the role the passing of its secrets played in Morris Tang’s giving the nominal “mayoralty” of Paperson to my Grandfather.

Just as my father failed to heed everything his father tried to pass on about the fog, my Grandfather had himself failed to understand something that Morris Tang had warned him about the fog. Morris had understood that Paperson lacked the elements of real permanence. As a place where land, water, and air were always in transition from one state to another, Paperson would never sustain a single form. For some reason, my Grandfather insisted on giving a place made of fog and mud the trappings of continuity. He paved the street and built sidewalks. The town acquired a school, a newspaper, a movie theater, and even a six story community center. The more he tried to set the town of Paperson towards an identity that would sustain and grow, the more the place became shrouded in fog.

As I grew up, I sided with my father about the fog. If I thought about the mysteries of the fog at all, it was just to fantasize that it might some evening come through at a time when my grandfather and grandmother happened to be in Sacramento or San Francisco and make the town of Paperson itself disappear. Otherwise, I was simply convinced that the fog was just low-lying moisture and little more, the sort of thing they talked about on Sunday morning television shows like Mr. Wizard, in which a man dressed in a lab coat would explain all mysteries of the natural world to small children.

Still, as I got old enough to drive to Paperson myself, I started to notice that no matter how careful I was and regardless of the time of day, temperature, or presence of the sun, I consistently managed to miss the town along the levee road despite the fact that I had spent four years of my life there. Given the fact that Paperson included the six story Chinese community center and that it stood a few hundred yards from what had once been the tallest television tower in the world, I began to suspect that even Mr. Wizard wouldn’t have had a ready explanation. Though by that time, I had learned enough about real science to understand that even science is least as much about mystery as it is about certainty.

Each time, I couldn’t find some longtime landmark along the river that would lead me to Paperson, I thought a bit more about Morris Tang’s fog. I would remember walking with my Grandfather along the river bank one evening when the fog had begun to build and his skipping a generation by telling me, “It’s not the fog that you see, it’s the fog that you breathe here. Wherever you go, it stays inside you.”

I didn’t exactly begin to believe in the mystery of the fog, but I got to the point where I didn’t disbelieve it either. I didn’t actually believe it until Uncle Leon spent seven thousand dollars to cover the levee side of Paperson with this six foot high cyclone fence.
Uncle Leon is a far more practical man about material things than my father ever was. He has never believed in the power of the fog to protect the now abandoned Paperson from intruders.

I wedge the point of my vibram-soled walking shoe into a diamond of steel wire just above what would ordinarily be the height of my knee. My hands curl around the top bar of the fence. I have known people who take on a fence like this in a single fluid motion. Once they put the tip of their foot into the diamond, they grab the top cross bar, and somehow fling themselves upwards almost vaulting the obstacle while barely touching it with their anything but feet and hands. They land on the other side and then wave for you to follow.

I was always the one they wave at. I wasn’t built for climbing fences. Despite the fact that I’m of average height even by American standards, my arms and legs are shorter than average. Some people refer to it as short-waisted, a condition that makes it especially embarrassing to buy Levi’s. In addition, my upper body isn’t especially strong. Oddly, my legs and thighs are unusually muscular. Perhaps it’s a sign that I was meant to stay on the ground. Although I swim, I don’t much like water. Other kids always had to coax me into the river. I’ve also never liked heights. On those occasions when other kids would get me to climb a fence, I always did so with an uncommon deliberateness that simply served to make the feat that much more difficult.
“You can do it,” they would call out to me. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

This of course only embarrassed me further. I even remember being shown a photo of the Berlin wall in Look Magazine and hearing my cousins talk about the possibility of simply pole vaulting the barrier between Communist slavery and western freedom and prosperity. “Just one vault and you’re free for the rest of your life,” he claimed, “I’d train a couple hours a day.”

I was the only one of us who seemed to think that it was worth the misery of East Berlin and the Stasi if it meant not having to scale the Berlin Wall. As I tried to keep up with other boys my age and even girls my age, I failed that early childhood marker of status. I couldn’t scale even the easiest fences and thus never got to lead anyone anywhere.

I learned too that I had a peculiar knack for hesitating at the worst possible moment, something which only added to the terror. Instead of completing the climb up my neighbor’s fence, I sometimes would even pretend that I had to go home for dinner or worse yet I’d shrug and try to convince them, “I don’t want to be up in that treehouse with you. I’ll guard the approach in case bandits come.”

I’m way too old to be climbing fences anyway. The only people my age who do it are generally on some sort of Reality TV show or a Japanese game show. It’s just that I’ve lost the key to Uncle Leon’s padlock and I’m already an hour late for the meeting on the other side of the fence. My car is parked along the levee road where it could be sideswiped easily enough by a truck bearing crates of pears from the Evans ranch or by some pleasure boat-bearing trailer. I look back at my car and consider the fact that mine is the only car parked along the cyclone fence and the gate remains padlocked. Could Uncle Leon and Uncle Persy have driven in and locked the gate behind them once I failed to show on time? Could they have taken the entrance through the Evans ranch?

I had considered the latter possibility, but figured that I would only get more lost in the fog and that would make me even later for our appointment. When my grandfather died, the bickering over the fate of the estate had been so extreme that he had named all three of his sons as co-executors. When my father died before my Grandfather, a comma in the will and the words “or his heir” had turned me into the third signature on all transactions involving the estate. Over the years, all but one asset of my grandparents’ estate had been sold, the town of Paperson, which technically isn’t even a town. My Grandfather realized that it was in Paperson’s interest to never be incorporated. As a result, there are no road signs that mark the approach to the town and there is no town limits sign. In fact, this is one of the very few occasions since I started to drive to Paperson on my own that I haven’t gotten lost. Uncle Leon’s fence gave it away.

Other than my waffle-soled walking shoes, I’m more or less dressed for a meeting. My shirt has buttons and a collar. I’m wearing a belt and my pants have cuffs. I’m definitely not dressed for climbing fences. Still after much hesitation, I pull myself upwards. On the way over, my cuff catches on the edge of one of the wires and tears. I reach across instinctively and cut myself on the rough cut edge of another bit of cyclone wire. Much to my surprise though, I make it over and find myself off the fence. Instinctively, I wave to the other side, but the only object on the outside of the fence is my red Nissan Sentra with the bad radio.

After three years with no new prospects, Uncle Leon claims to have found a serious buyer for the town. He made a point of calling me a couple nights ago, “Lucky, you need to know that this is very important. If you don’t mind let me do the talking.”

“Don’t you usually?”

“If you have questions, I was hoping we could use this call for you to ask them now and I promise I’ll figure out how to ask them during the meeting.”

“Well, for one. Who’s the buyer?”

“I shouldn’t say yet.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“Of course, I know who it is. I’m just not sure I’m at liberty to say. He’s a very big player.”

“Okay.”

“Lucky, I’m glad we had this chance to talk first.”

“Sure.”

I step onto the high sidewalk that fronts Paperson’s one main street, Prosperity Boulevard. My Grandfather named the town’s three streets for each of Sun Yat Sen’s Three People’s Principles, the San Min Chui. The family house was located at 10 Democracy Drive. The third street was named and signed as Nationalism Avenue, but no buildings ever went up there. Much to my surprise, there’s no sign of either of my uncles or Uncle Leon’s blue Mercedes sedan. As strange as it seems, this is the first time I’ve ever been alone in Paperson.

As I walk I hear voices coming from what I know to be abandoned buildings. There is Benny Tang, wire-rimmed glasses, gray hair, and white shirt with a bow tie, standing behind the candy counter at the town’s liquor store, his palm is opened to the counter, “Your choice, you pick something, anything you want. You can have it. Just for you.”

It’s all the English he seems to know. I remember the pleasure of the struggle of deciding between a pack of root beer lifesavers and a Hershey’s bar with almonds. The lifesavers could last an entire afternoon. The Hershey bar tasted better and you could use the silver-wrapped paper to make toy gun barrels. Was it the Hershey Bar that had the silver paper or was it wax paper? There is the cook at the diner that fronted the gambling house, The Imperial Kitchen, asking me what I wanted him to make for me if I didn’t happen to like the food he’d made for everyone else that day. I was a prince in Paperson yet never managed to understand or appreciate that fact. I hear Mona, the woman who sold tickets at the movie theater calling me over to tell me that next Friday, they’d be showing a new “Roadrunner” only with the “r’s” mangled.

It had never occurred to me that they were ordering the cartoons just for my cousins and I. The movies themselves were Chinese sorcery dramas complete with combatants flying off of tile roofs, soap operas about family devotion, and war stories filled with Japanese treachery. The audience was mostly old bachelors munching on pine nuts and talking through all the scenes. Of course, they had no interest in the fate of the coyote, his latest purchase from ACME, and the impossibly fast roadrunner with his talent for just missing danger.

The buildings remain, but the people and establishments who go with the voices either died or left for Sacramento and Stockton at the end of the seventies not long after Jimmy Carter recognized Communist China. I take a moment by a metal tripod that used to dispense newspapers, The China First Weekly, the only weekly in America that published twice a month. The plastic that kept the papers dry in the fog cracked to pieces years ago. There is no slot for coins.

The China First Weekly was always distributed free. The newspaper itself had a circulation ten times bigger than the town of Paperson itself even when the town was the largest self-contained Chinatown in North America. It’s just that it was never clear that anyone actually read it. When I was in junior high, I used to make fun of the headlines in the English language portion of the paper. In its last years, China First managed to combine fervent Chinese Nationalism with the Weekly World News. Typical front page stories alternated between tales of the hundreds of million mainland Chinese who were awaiting a secret radio signal to assist in Mao’s overthrow when Chiang Kai Shek began his re-invasion of the mainland to gruesome stories about the Communists that always seemed to involve severed body parts and unnatural acts.

I still remember the China First headlines the day the estate sold the linotype printing press and Royal typewriters that had been sitting around the China First building to a scrap dealer. I made the trip to Paperson just to see how they'd get all that metal out that little door. China First’s last edition bore a headline claiming that the Communists had started using Chinese political prisoners as an involuntary source of involuntary organ donations for wealthy and desperate westerners and Japanese.

Four years at an Ivy League college in the late seventies had so convinced me that China First was an anti-communist's Weekly World News or the Nationalist Enquirer that it never occurred to me that those stories might be true. The tales of Koumintang sympathizers being fed to the pigs, forced abortions, and adults who had never seen an orange had simply been one of the staples of old man conversation in the mini-park that stood between Prosperity Boulevard and Democracy Drive.

I remembered hearing them repeat these bits of China First editorials when we'd walk by them to retrieve stray baseballs or as we threw pennies off the bottom of the statue of Sun Yat Sen in the middle of the park. We didn't believe their any more than the filial piety parables they forced us to read in Chinese school. After all, the only American kid who would ever take seriously some story about good sons cutting off body parts to put in stews for hungry parents had to be Anthony Perkins in Psycho.

I was thirty before I realized that China First also published that book of Confucian parables that set out to make every kid born who grew up in Paperson before 1965 feel guilty for being too selfish and too Americanized. Instead, the little red book (China first chose the color quite purposefully), strengthened our resolve to waste our youths here in the Sacramento Valley by mastering un-Chinese activities like roller-skating, watching the Monkees, or turning our Stingray bikes into Harleys with baseball cards in the spokes. I was convinced that some of my cousins had third degree black belts in watching Roadrunner cartoons.

I suppose too that my college professors never predicted that the Berlin Wall would come down. The day that Grandfather waited for, the fall of Communism in China, may have lurked just beyond his lifetime, but it seems that some of my old professors are now insisting that it might happen during mine. That may be the irony of the cyclone fence around Paperson and the not so discreet for sale listing these last eighteen months in the investment section of the Wall Street Journal. Now that it's about to happen, there's no one left in Grandfather's town to celebrate.

I hear two real voices. It’s my Uncle Leon and Uncle Persy. Uncle Leon wears a brown business suit with a striped tie. His shoes are a polished mirror black. He wears a gold Rolex that looks like a big gold doughnut. He’s seventy years old. Uncle Persy is two years younger. He wears a gray Italian suit, the jacket of which is folded over his arm. He’s not wearing a tie. He looks like the successful Seattle industrial stylist that he is.

“Lucky, you’re early. Good to see you taking today so seriously.”

I open my hands and shrug. “Actually, I thought I was late.”

“You didn’t get the call?... Ms. Grady had to attend to something first.”
A five minute silence that takes the form of a conversation about children and houses follows. I haven’t seen any of my cousins in ten years, but we talk as if that weren’t the case.

We are standing beneath the twenty foot neon dragon that hangs bug eyed above what used to be a movie theater. The six story Community Center is directly across from us. Uncle Persy breaks our non-conversation to look at his digital watch.

"What time did she say she'd get here? ..She's running late."

Uncle Persy has a habit of answering his own questions. It may have something to do with his being the youngest of the six children in Dad's family, although now that he's sixty eight it's harder for me to think of him as the youngest anything.

"Have you met this woman?" he asks Uncle Leon who shakes his head.

Uncle Leon pulls out a stack of blue appraiser's reports from a rectangular leather briefcase, "I've put fourteen years into this sale. This is the first looker that has the money to do the deal. You remember, we spent the money on a development appraisal. This is where it comes in handy."

"Is that it?" I ask, pointing to the thickest of the blue reports.

"I thought I sent you a copy," Uncle Leon says.

"I don't know, can't tell you until I see it.," I say.

My uncles shake their heads, but Uncle Leon hands me a copy of the report. I read the first paragraph and look at a table of numbers detailing the costs involved in bulldozing Sam-Yup, sub-dividing, and turning it into a promising riverside development less than half an hour from downtown Sacramento and within commuting distance of the Greater Bay Area. A paragraph in bold type near the bottom points out that the value of the property quadruples from two million dollars to eight, if a proposed bypass to Highway 80 goes forward. Naturally, I try to calculate my undivided one fifth interest for either possibility.

“Leon, I thought they contacted us.”

“But I’m sure they contacted me because they saw the development plan. This is a very shrewd group. I’m sure they recognize the potential here.”

Ms. Grady is now an hour and a half late. Uncle Persy has twice remarked on how hard it is to take a day off from clients like Boeing and fly from Seattle. Finally, Uncle Leon can't contain himself, "You might both be familiar with the Howard Company?"

"I guess not," I say. "Should I be?"

"Well, I thought you might have seen some of their movies," Uncle Leon tries to hide his smirk, the same expression my Dad always hated. Dad insisted that his younger brother would always break it out any time he knew something about my Grandfather’s financial plans that my Dad didn’t.

"Why didn't you tell me that this was Luke Howard's Company?" Uncle Persy shakes his arms as he says it. For the first time since I got here, he seems to be smiling.

"I didn't tell you the best part," Uncle Leon continues, "I found a contact at CalTrans. He golfs with Harvey, my brother in law."

"I thought you didn't talk to Harvey," I say.

When we were younger, the cousins used to whisper about Aunt Sunny's sister who married a "Hok-guay", a word our elders used casually and that we repeated innocently enough until we grew up and bothered to translate it with our limited Cantonese into its literal meaning, "black devil". Sunny and Uncle Leon had tried to disown her sister and Harvey only to run into the fact that they lived three blocks away, sent their kids to the same school, shopped at the same stores, and the fact that Harvey was the only non-union electrician in their part of Sacramento.

Uncle Leon shakes his head. "Times change. Harvey's okay. His buddy says the bypass is going to happen, they're already doing the crew assignments."

"Does Luke Howard know the same thing?" Uncle Persy asks. "Probably does, wouldn't be coming here if he didn't." He answers himself.

Before we can speculate further, a brown Toyota Corolla sedan pulls to the sidewalk along Prosperity Boulevard. A woman, who's voice and bearing suggest that she's no older than I am, hops out of the car, "Mr. Tang," she calls out, "So sorry to be late.”

“No problem Ms. Grady, everyone gets lost near Paperson,” my uncle’s voice oozes with a business-inspired over friendliness.

“Actually, I got stuck on the Bay Bridge. Once I caught the levee road, it was easy.”

I start to say something about the fog, then catch myself.

“You know the nice thing about working for Luke Howard, is I can never be too late for any of these meetings. Everyone is incredibly patient with me.”

Janet Grady laughs at her own joke. I laugh, but my Uncles don't at first. Uncle Leon finally smiles and answers her, "Well, I hear that it's not going to be so hard to find soon. I guess renting a car and all...."

The representative from the Howard Company doesn't seem to respond to his hint about the bypass.

"Renting a car? I don't understand."

Uncle Leon is a bit flustered. "Oh, I just assumed...."

"He thought someone from the Howard Company would be in a BMW," I jump into the conversation. Jan Grady has now made it on the sidewalk and she moves directly for me.

Uncle Persy looks at me in horror. Uncle Leon starts to apologize, "That's just Lucky's sense of humor. Toyota Camrys are great cars. I almost bought one myself.”

“Instead of your Mercedes SLK?”

Uncle Leon gives me another look. “Lucky, we talked about this,” he whispers.

Janet Grady shows no signs of taking offense. "Well, my Toyota does have power windows and a CD player."

I hold out my hand. "I'm Lucky Tang, I'm one of the nominal trustees."

Uncle Leon steps between us as quickly as possible without turning it into a shove. "Janet, thank you for coming out. I'm Napoleon Tang, we spoke on the phone a few times."

He hands her his business card. Janet Grady hands us each a copy of hers.

Uncle Leon's card reveals far more than he intends about himself. His full name appears in flat black letters across a plain white background, Leonardo Woodrow Wilson Tang. Just beneath that, his title fills several lines by itself, President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman, Trustee, Tang Investments Inc. At the bottom of the card, Tang Investments claims offices in Hong Kong, Newport Beach, Honolulu, Seattle, and Sacramento. When I was younger, my copy of Uncle Leon's card had high school graduate scrawled between the title and the offices.

Janet Grady's card offers as strong a contrast in style as possible to Uncle Leon's. Her name is printed in raised letters on two-toned stock. Her title follows the current vogue by implying importance through its simplicity, Project Coordinator. The card offers no physical address, just a phone number and jgrady@howard.org. The Howard Company logo, an "H" somehow stylized to look like an extended multi-colored hand, appears in the otherwise blank left side of the card.
Janet Grady barely glances at Uncle Leon's card as she slips it into bright blue nylon bound organizer. As a peek across Uncle Leon's shoulder, I can see that it has dedicated pockets for the things I always tend to misplace, business cards, pens, a calculator, a trio of labeled three and a half inch floppy disks. Uncle Leon starts to follow suit by slipping the Howard Company's card into his thick black leather wallet, but stops himself. Instead, he holds it up in front of us seemingly admiring the printing. After nearly two years of having Paperson on the market and after several members have repeatedly questioned his real estate judgment, Uncle Leon wants to revel in the pleasure of having managed to attract the investment interest of the most famous movie maker in the world.

As I stuff Janet Grady's information aged business card into my front pants pocket, I am reminded that at almost forty I have no card of my own to toss into he mix. My business identity hasn't changed much since twenty years ago when dad first started bringing me to family business meetings. I think he did it partly hoping that I'd get interested in business partly because my Grandfather never did the same for him. The only real changes are that Dad's passed away and that I've gone from being his son to a Tang nephew.

Uncle Leon quickly sets in to show Janet Grady a series of charts and numbers supporting the value of Paperson for development. He tries to hand her a copy of the development plan/appraisal, but she refuses him politely. I tag along a step back my two uncles between Janet Grady and myself until she stops walking for a moment, steps in front of Uncle Leon, and starts to talk to me, "Lucky, your name is so familiar and so is your face."

I shake my head. My uncles shrug. I look at Janet Grady. She tilts her head, stares at me again. I stare back. It's a pleasant thing. She's quite attractive in a business-like fashion.

"Did you live on the third floor of Dempster House in the late seventies?" her voice rises into a kind of casual girlishness.

I nod.

"I'm Jan Free. Do you remember? We used to share notes from Craig's Modern Asia survey class."

"I think I used to borrow your notes. I don't think you ever had to borrow mine," I say.

She laughs. We are now walking together and my uncles are walking slightly behind us. Uncle Leon keeps rubbing his forehead with his fingers. Uncle Persy keeps asking and answering questions in Cantonese that translate roughly into, "What did he get all that money for school for? So, he could make connections like this. Why did I fly down for Seattle. For a college reunion."

Jan Free and I are now laughing and talking excitedly about classmates. At one point, she spontaneously gives me a hug. I hug her back awkwardly. I'm not sure just how hard to hug a prospective buyer. Uncle Leon bumps into us just as Jan Free-Grady pulls away from me.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt."

I take the opportunity to move back to my former spot, something that seems to make Uncle Leon stop touching at his forehead. As soon as he gets Janet's attention again, he begins discussing possible lot sizes and zoning ordinances.

Janet Grady is pleasant, polite, but curiously uninterested. She nods her head as Uncle Leon speaks, but takes no notes and asks almost no follow up questions. The only questions she does ask are about the buildings that do stand. She comments on the moon-shaped entrance to the restaurant that my father once owned. She asks about the statue of Sun Yat Sen. Uncle Persy starts to explain something about Sun Yat Sen being the Chinese George Washington, but Janet surprises him, "I understand he came here to Paperson to raise money."

Uncle Leon whistles and decides to downshift from his investment banker mode to more of a small town boy act, "Gee, your company sure does its homework. I guess you probably already have all the numbers yourself. What else do you know about Paperson."

Janet shakes her head and smiles "Well, I looked into it a little bit. I understand that this was once the fourth biggest Chinatown in North America and that there's a story that Chop Suey was invented here, that some of the locals believe that Dr. Sun might have fathered a daughter during his stay here, that the town had a movie theater and a newspaper. Lucky probably doesn’t remember, but I first heard about this place from him.”

My uncles are staring at me. I’m staring at Jan Grady.

“That reminds me."

Luke Howard's project coordinator pulls a modest auto-focus camera from her shoulder bag.
"Would it be all right if I took some pictures, Luke always prefers to look at pictures before we discuss possibilities."

She then begins snapping photos of the peeling paint and broken windows that now amount to Paperson. She seems to take a special interest in two buildings, the community center, once the largest and most expensive Chinese community center in America, and the non-descript lunch counter, the Emperor’s kitchen, that served as the front for Grandfather's gambling house. Throughout this, she keeps asking me to pose in front of the buildings to establish scale or some such thing.

I've seen Uncle Leon this puzzled before. One time just before I went off to college, he was trying to find out if Dad was going to get a loan from Grandfather to remodel the restaurant. At the same time, Uncle Leon needed money to fix up one of the duplexes that he'd bought as an investment in Sacramento. Grandfather then announced that he wanted to visit both of his sons and see how they were doing. Uncle Leon, who had just finished a night accounting class, busied himself with a profit and loss statement, cleaning gutters, repainting a kitchen. Dad, on the other hand, did nothing. A week later, Grandfather announced that he would lend my father what he'd asked for and lent Uncle Leon only half the money because someone had told him that Leon's duplex faced the wrong way for the money spirits to work prosperously.

As Uncle Leon pointed however, things change. Twenty years ago, he blew up and yelled at Grandfather for being a "superstitious old fool".

As an old man, he hides his frustration better. In twenty five years as co-executor, I have watched Uncle Leon work at least half a dozen real estate sales. Whether the buyer was a retired school teacher or representatives from the Teamsters Pension Fund, believe it or not we did make a deal with them, Uncle Leon has always taken complete control of the transaction from beginning to end. He answers all questions, has all the facts at hand, and works up all the projections. At least twice, Uncle Leon's perseverance got him a price at least twenty five percent higher than even an optimistic appraiser. But, in all of those deals, Uncle Leon was working with buyers who like him slipped their business cards into steak and martinis wallets, who wore business suits, and drove Cadillacs or Mercedes.

As Janet Grady photographs Chinese street signs and facsimiles of the Nationalist flag, I can see the uncertainty in Uncle Leon's eyes as he struggles to find the approach that will let him feel like this encounter is back under control.

As we walk past a row of houses, we stop in front of the largest one. Actually it's far larger than the rest and closer inspection reveals that it's not just one house but a cluster of four houses joined together by a shared courtyard.

"This was our house," Uncle Leon says. "I think my father would be happy to know that whoever redeveloped his town still appreciated its history like you do, Janet."

Janet barely seems to hear him.

"Lucky, I can't believe it. Is this where you grew up?"

I squirm slightly. When I was younger, I was always very self-conscious about having spent any part of my life in a Chinatown. When I went to Sacramento private schools, I never even told my closest friends there that two nights a week my mother drove me the half hour down the river to a special Chinese school in Paperson. I even missed half a year of Little League because of it.

"Well, sort of...We moved to the suburbs when I was 8 or 10."

Grandfather's family complex. (My Dad was the one who came up with the name and the joke).is really the one part of Paperson that now looks like it could be moved straight from China. For the most part it is shaped and colored like a traditional wealthy man's home in Southern China. The odd thing about Paperson is that it has little of the tourist's eyed Chineseness of San Francisco Chinatown and yet it does not look fully Americanized either. For the most part, little details have always set it apart as neither Chinese nor American. Stores and streets are a little to tidy to be in South China, building's are too close together to fit into the Sacramento Valley. More than anything it's the colors. The concrete blocks are a lime green. Wooden buildings are a dark-stained redwood. Whenever Paperson, in its dying days, would get its occasional newspaper article or local news report, reporters would always comment on the sense one always got that it looked and felt like no other place on either continent.

"Boy, I can't believe you lived here. It must have been so fascinating," Janet continues.

"Would you like to take a look inside?" Uncle Persy offers.

"Absolutely."

"Just understand that no one's lived here in ten years," Uncle Leon warns.

"Well, it wasn't that exciting really," I mutter. “Before we go in though, I should warn you about the squatters.”

Uncle Leon gives me a dirty look.

"We had a little problem with squatters after the last Chinese family moved out of town eight years ago. It was a family of illegal immigrants who were picking pears for the Evans family. They were harmless once I found a Spanish translator, we found them a place to stay. Ever since we put the fence up, it hasn’t been a problem again.”

"I'm not worried. I've been in my share of abandoned buildings." Janet says.

Uncle Leon reaches for the key.

“But have you been in haunted buildings?" I ask.

"Really?"

Uncle Leon shakes his head.

"Well there was a story about thirty years ago about a group of robbers who tried to break in to find the safe, having things mysteriously thrown at them keeping them away from the house.”

For the first time, Janet Grady pulls a pad from her organizer and takes notes. They start to go in. I don't follow.

"Look, I don't understand why you're interested in all of this, if you're just going to take it all down for houses?" Uncle Leon doesn’t hide his exasperation well.

Janet stops at the entryway. Uncle Leon and Uncle Persy are already standing inside the door. Uncle Persy brushes a cobweb off the suit jacket that he still holds in the crook of his elbow.

"But, we're not. The Howard Company isn't in the residential housing business."

"Well, I'd wondered what a movie company wanted with this property anyway,” Uncle Leon jumps in with new confidence. "The development plan we commissioned looked at the possibility of turning the site into an outlet mall. You guys are right on top if it. In some ways, that might be the most promising use of all. It's the only land for fifteen miles that can be zoned commercial. Paperson isn’t a town, it’s not controlled by county zoning ordinances."

Uncle Leon begins to spouts off an entire paragraph from the report surprisingly quickly. Janet Grady’s answer pushes him back into renewed confusion, "I'm terribly sorry. Please unerstand I couldn’t make our interest clear over the phone. People take such an interest in anything to do with Luke Howard projects, we have to be extraordinarily careful. Naturally, you were thinking that we were interested in buying Paperson as real estate?"

My Uncles have stepped back out of the doorway. My mind speeds wildly, in a way that has not always been helpful in my adult life until a single possibility pops through, "You mean you're thinking of making a movie?"

"A movie? A Luke Howard movie? "My uncles open mouths reveal their half dozen gold fillings.

"Not exactly." Now it's Janet Grady's turn to pull paper from her shoulder bag and start passing it out.

"I'm sorry, I actually only brought two copies with me. She hands one to Uncle Leon and starts to hand the other to me.

"That's okay, I'll get a copy from my Uncle," I say.

Uncle Persy clicks his tongue at me anyway and shakes his head.

"I have to confess, I really don't know much about real estate Mr. Tang. We're interested in licensing Paperson. We'd like to...."

As Janet speaks, my uncles have opened their brochure to a brightly illustrated artist's rendering that folds out to the size of a road map.
"Well, for want of a better phrase for it. We're interested in developing Paperson into a kind of theme park. I apologize for not going into more detail over the phone. I was little afraid that you'd think I was crazy."

My uncles are talking rapidly and heatedly in Cantonese. They are speaking too quickly for me to even attempt to understand them. They have now turned one of the reports to a page that seems to be describing some sort of Silicon Graphics computer system.

"I imagine you've heard something about virtual reality," Janet starts in.

They nod cautiously as if they don’t dare reveal the fact that they know nothing about virtual reality.

After several minutes of folding and unfolding brochures and disconnected spinning questions, Uncle Persy is the first to recover. "Miss Grady, how big a deal is Howard film talking about? Are we talking Disneyland here?"

"Well, if you'll sign the non-disclosures I've brought along here....I can tell you that we're not talking about spec houses and agent's commissions here. We're hoping to make this something like nothing anyone's ever imagined

I look at my uncles, at Jan Grady, at the booklet from the Howard Company. I take a second to close my eyes and inhale, but on the inside, I am nothing but fog.

Chapter Two Blues

2007-09-18T13:40:00.000-07:00

I spent a good part of the weekend tinkering with chapter 2. For whatever reason, I’ve always struggled with the second chapter. No, that doesn’t mean that I stopped there. I’ve tried a variety of strategies including going ahead and writing chapter 3, 7, 9. I’ve written an ending. I’ve redone my opening chapters.

Chapter two keeps feeling like the moment sculptors sometimes have with a block of granite. Once you get to a certain point a lot of your possibilities disappear. The opening chapter lays out a basic situation and piques interest. The second chapter always feels to me like it’s the moment when the story sets a direction.

In any case, I found myself literally writing about the origins and purposes of a cyclone fence for close to a day. How’s that for a metaphor?

In the meantime, all manner of bloggable topics float past me. There’s Barry Bonds’s auctioned baseball with the online poll, OJ (the guy who was the subject of my very first blog post), the progress of my daughter’s volleyball team, the strange state of the war and the attorney general appointment…..A few months ago, I would have been posting away about any of these items. These last few days, I’ve been telling myself “focus”, make sure you work on the “big thing”. Grrrrrr…..

In the midst of my writing day on Sunday, I got a reply for a story that I’d submitted to a journal on 9/4. They had it for all of 11 days. Their e-mail to me used my name, mentioned my story by name, said they really enjoyed it, but it wasn’t quite right for them. Essentially, they said to try them again. I then spent a couple hours puzzling over whether this was just a very diplomatic, but canned brush off, or if it was a genuine act of kindness on the part of some “editor” or “slushpile” slave. Who knows? I do know that it reminded me of why I really liked blogging in the first place. I could at least just get the story out there and not screw with whether or not some gatekeeper felt it was was worthy and what it meant if they didn’t.

So despite the fact that my life has turned insanely busy, I’m going to get chapter 2 of very very rough drat out. Just to warn you, I’ve done this before then felt like Chapter 2 just wasn’t good enough. Anyway, back to climbing that cyclone fence.

Oh geez, I forgot, I also spent an hour writing a fax to google legal to see if someone would help me reclaim my old blog address and/or help me recover the hundreds of posts there. In the meantime, I check my e-mail constantly thinking that someone might have replied to either my e-mails or the fax.

American Name (the very rough draft begins)

2007-09-14T18:20:00.001-07:00

“Lucky, is that your Chinese name?”

I’m used to the question, but I’ve never had a snappy answer as in “No, it’s actually Albanian” or “I was named for Lucy Ricardo, my grandmother’s favorite tv character. The person filling out my birth certificate was either dyslexic or improvised a way to save me the indignity of a girl’s name.”

Instead, I assure them that “Lucky” is an American name. It’s not a transliteration of “Lew-Chee”, “Lu-Qui”, or “Liu-kee” and not some odd variation of “Luke,” the sort of Biblical name all too popular with the missionaries and their associated organizations. My parents were both born in California and thus were not misguided immigrants confused by the conventions and occasional mysteries of American naming customs. Even if the circumstances of my birth were peculiarly Chinese, they chose my name for American reasons. While I was born well before California families started naming their kids Zen, Harmony, and Spiritwalker, I sometimes like to think that my parents were just a bit ahead of their time.

In 1956, my father attended the River God Festival held in Hellenville’s hundred and thirty three person Chinatown. He was twenty seven years old and had been married to my mother for five years. As the oldest son of Y.P. Tang, the most prominent Chinese man on the Delta, my father felt the pressure of expectation throughout his life. At this point, he was specifically feeling the pressure to produce a grandchild. For two years since their return to Paperson from my dad’s Korean War service in Augusta, Georgia as a clerk typist for the Signal Corps, my parents had been discreetly visiting fertility specialists, both medical and herbal in and around Sacramento.

In general, these celebrations existed for a simple reason - they were an opportunity to gamble out in the open. The Cantonese who came to the Sacramento Delta as laborers enjoyed two forms of recreation, eating and gambling. Eating is perfectly legal and remains a central part of Cantonese identity no matter how removed one is from southeastern China. Gambling has been a different matter in the state of California. Horse races are legal. At various times, low ball poker has been legal. Currently, the state runs its own lottery for the benefit of the public schools and a corporate gaming company. Real estate speculation remains very legal. For whatever reason, traditional Chinese games like fan tan and pai gow have never been legal.

My Grandfather saw the ethnic snobbery of the California legislature as an opportunity to build his own fortune in the Sacramento, Delta. My Grandfather had come to Sacramento as a common laborer just after the San Francisco Earthquake. By 1956, he was so prominent in the underground Chinese gambling industry that even the organizers of this River God festival some seventy five miles from his home in Paperson, understood that it had to cut Y.P. Tang in on at least a token percentage of the gambling take.

This normally meant a brief appearance at the festival, a visit to the pai gow tables to play a hand or two, a few words of advice, an exchange of handshakes and an envelope from the organizers, then the drive home. This weekend, however, the Chinese consulate in San Francisco had called a meeting of its representatives. My Grandfather’s proudest accomplishment was the fact that he had been elected three years earlier to a body known as the Control Yuan as the representative for Overseas Chinese of the Western States.

He voted by proxy, was never asked for or expected to offer opinions, and his single obligatory visit to Taipei once every four years essentially consisted of attending banquets with the other Overseas Chinese representatives. Even those who had long been active in the Koumintang knew little about what the Control Yuan did or how it operated. The position largely existed to ensure a continuing flow of contributions from the millions of overseas Chinese. My Grandfather had won the position by being more than generous. Given a choice of being the big man in Hellenville’s Chinatown or an unimportant though respected attendee at the Chinese consulate, my Grandfather went to San Francisco.

As a result, my father went to Hellenville to help out my Grandfather. Although my dad’s involvement in my Grandfather’s gambling interests had always been minimal, he was quite excited to take on this responsibility. He borrowed my Grandfather’s white Lincoln, put on a blue suit with a handkerchief folded into the chest pocket, and drove the seventy five miles and two hours to Hellenville. Over the years, as they told the story of the events that led to my getting the name “Lucky”, sometimes she witnessed it sometimes she just heard about it. It depended on her mood. She did, however, play a prominent and more certain role in my conception and birth that fall.

Having slipped the envelope into the money belt hidden between his pants and sports jacket and having promised seven different elderly men that he would convey their respects to my Grandfather, my father decided to stay to watch the mid-afternoon dragon dance. The boom of drums, the clang of cymbals, the firecrackers accompanied the undulations of the seven man dragon. Was this what festivals were like in China?

Although he had spent his entire life being identified as “Chinese”first by others, my father had never been to China. With the takeover by Mao, it seemed that he might never go. It didn’t necessarily bother him. Since he could remember, China had been either at war with Japan, in the midst of a civil war, or was being plundered by communist bandits. A visit to the ancestral village in Guangdong held little appeal. Besides, my Grandfather rarely talked about the place of his birth and childhood.

Nineteen minutes later, a pile of green, gold, and red silk lay folded on the ground next to the sidewalk beneath a still open-mouthed dragon head that was roughly the height of a nearby fire hydrant. Seven men roughly his own age dressed in white t-shirts and black pants smoked cigarettes and chatted with wives and girlfriends next to the remnants of the mythical beast and the open bed of a blue pickup truck. The truck would take the dragon back to storage for the next three hundred and sixty four days unless there was a banquet, parade, or some other demand for its reappearance. A four man lion had both the New Year’s and the Moon Festival celebrations to itself. The smell of spent firecrackers lingered in the air and my father’s ears were still ringing.

“Tally, what are you doing here?”

My dad turned to see that the shortest of the dragon dancers was also a friend from the Chinese Students Association at San Jose State.

“Just helping my dad.”

“Wow, so you’re doing pretty well.”

“What are you up to Donnie?”

“I’ve been helping my father supervise the olive picking. I’m still on the waiting list for a state job in Sacramento.”

“Well, good luck. What department?”

“The Secretary of State.”

Did anyone Chinese work there, even as clerical staff? My father chose not to mention that he was serving as the assistant manager for one of my Grandfather’s legitimate businesses, a small take out restaurant on the wrong end of Sacramento. The small crowd around them began to head towards the temple.

“Tally, you going to try to catch a ring? Maybe it’ll help at the tables?”

I should probably mention that my father’s American nickname of “Tally” may sound rather like “Lucky” in that it clearly happens to be an English word with an actual meaning yet is rarely to never used as an actual proper first name. My Father’s Chinese name was Wei Lan Tang which became “Wellington” easily enough. That became his legal American name, but schoolmates shortened it to “Tally,” as in the very British “Tally Ho.” To be clear, my father never went fox hunting either as a child or an adult.

In any case, this is how Donnie Woo played a critical role in my life even though we would not meet for another forty three years.

The ring catching portion of the River God Festival was simple enough, but it had begun to cause controversy. Towards the end of Saturday afternoon, the festival organizers set off a series of small fireworks. Each of the fireworks or “bombs” looked like small sticks of dynamite glued fuse up to a small block of wood. A ring bearing a silk ribbon was embedded near the top of the cylinder. Twenty four bombs were lined up along the middle of the street fronting the River God’s temple. Local police kept the crowd at least twenty five feet from the bombs. A member of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce bearing a three foot long glowing punk stood prepared to light each bomb in order. Most years the mayor of Hellenville would join him in lighting the first fuse.

The tip of the punk would make contact, gold sparks would dance along the fuse, and then the sparks would stop for a fraction of a second and there would be that odd silent pause that comes with all good fireworks. If things went right, the moment of silence would end abruptly with an explosion, smoke, then a ribbon-tailed metal circle would fly hundreds of feet into the sky above the temple. Catching any of the rings was supposed to bring good fortune. Catching the fifth ring, which bore a purple instead of red ribbon, was supposed to be especially portentous.

Gambling and the luck that the rings might bring may had too much of a natural affinity. Cantonese peasant culture which for so many generations was constantly at the mercy of weather, bandits, floods, earthquakes, and bad government had coped with the inevitable sense of helplessness with a strong faith in all forms of omens. They created superstitions around everything. For instance, my grandmother always took care to pick up the telephone with her left hand even though she was right handed because she feared that it would bring bad news if she used her dominant hand. Oddly, it was fine for the rest of us to use either hand. That particular superstition applied only to my grandmother’s use of telephones.

Not surprisingly, gamblers began paying for the rings. In 1951, someone reportedly paid a hundred dollars for the number five ring then won thousands (no one ever seemed to know exactly how many thousands nor did anyone seem to know who the gambler with the ring had been) at the tables that weekend. Unlike American style gambling, Chinese gambling is not at the mercy of a hot run against the house. The players in pai gow rotate turns as the “dealer”. The house share comes off the top of the pot. They only care that people bet and play. The organizers of the River God Festival thus publicized the link between the ring and the subsequent “killing” at the pai gow table. Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences, something that seems to exist both in American and Chinese lore (in the Chinese version it usually takes the form of the Monkey God in America it usually involves either the Democratic party or the San Francisco Giants) appeared center stage.

Instead of contributing to the quaintness of this celebration of the River God and the Chinese invention of gunpowder, the rings became the source of scuffles and even fights. While this did not reach Tolkein-like heights, the scene changed from being a group of happy celebrants hoping that the ring would drop near them like some lazy pop foul at a baseball stadium to a frenzied circus of testosterone, money, and children pushing at the edges of the crowd hoping to see a fight. By 1956, only young men and a few hardened gamblers dared to venture into the drop area. Donnie Woo persuaded my father to join him in the drop zone that day anyway.

“Donnie, you don’t even gamble. Why would you want to get beaten up over a circle of metal?”

“I want that job with the Secretary of State’s office. There’s no work in Helenville for a college graduate.”

My dad nodded as he pictured what his life might have been like with different parents.

“Come on Wellington. Help me out here. You’re bigger than I am. If I catch a ring, you can scare some of those kids off.”

My dad shrugged and took two steps inside the circle of bystanders.

“Okay, but I’m not getting in any fights.”

“You sure you want to keep your jacket on? One of my friends can hold it for you.”

My dad remembered the money belt and the envelope around his waist. It did occur to him that he shouldn’t venture into the drop zone at all, but if he changed his mind it would look like he was chicken.

“I’ll leave it on.”

My father then stepped into the middle of what looked to be a Chinese rugby scrum, the only blue jacket in a swarm of young men in white Brando t-shirts. None of them looked anything like Stanley Kowalski. The first two rings landed well away from them. The third bomb was a dud. How did that affect figuring out which one was number five? If number five was the big one, why did they fire off nineteen more? It seemed like white people would never do it that way.

The Chinese chamber of commerce rep with the three foot punk had a sense of drama around number five. He made a little show of pointing to the bomb itself which instead of having a red paper jacket was covered in red and blue. He waved the punk like a wand, did a little dance, the crowd grew quiet, and the swarm of young men in the center of the drop zone swelled. My father noticed that there was no space to move in any direction. He saw the sparks, heard the sound of the explosion, then looked up towards the sky. He spotted the ring arc upwards as it tumbled across the sky. Much to his surprise, it was right above him.

He felt the bodies press against his then pulled his own arms close to his money belt. It takes about four seconds for an object to fall from a height of two hundred feet. It felt like forty. In his peripheral vision, my dad noticed that the other young men around him had gotten too excited. They were jumping too early. For an instant, my father decided to forget about the money belt and jumped himself, his right hand stretched upwards. The number five ring fell into the flat of his palm, he squeezed it, landed, then thinking quickly acted as if nothing had happened. The men around him had just landed from their second jumps. They were looking around for some sign that the ring had hit the concrete. My father had already stepped away from the scrum, the ring and ribbon in his front pants pocket. He shook his head in mock disappointment as someone in the crowd pointed towards him. He didn’t even tell Donnie Woo when he ran into him again later that day well away from the crowd.

“Tally where did you go?”

“Sorry, Donnie, I forgot I had to check on something for my Pop,” he lied.

As bombs seven, eight, and nine went off, my father found an empty phone booth at the back of a nearby restaurant. Once there, he slipped the ring into a second pouch inside his money belt. Certain that no one had noticed, he decided that he might as well use the luck that had fallen from the heavens a few moments earlier. He went back to the pai gow table, much to the surprise of the elders who first thought that he had returned because he was dissatisfied with their envelope. He then, in his turn as dealer, won seven hundred and fifty dollars on a distinctly mediocre hand, which was three times his monthly income from the restaurant. The ring either worked or the elders had been afraid to let Y.P. Tang’s son lose that weekend.

My father drove back to Paperson with the three prizes from his quest, the envelope, the ring, and seven hundred and fifty dollars worth of folding money packed in his money belt. Despite the valley heat, he left his jacket on even during the drive. He didn’t care that he was sweating. He stopped for gas on the way. While the attendant was looking at the highway traffic, my father impulsively took fifty extra dollars and slipped it into the envelope that he had received from the members of the Hellenville Chinese Chamber of Commerce. He thought that my Grandfather would think he had done an even better job if he brought home more money from the trip than expected.

He slipped in late that night, told my mother the story of his day, then pinned the ring above the headboard of their bed. They treated themselves to a weekend in Monterey. And took the ring with them. I was born late that year, a healthy boy, the first son of an eldest son in a Calfiornia-Chinese family. My parents insisted that “Lucky” was the only name that fit.

As I grew up, my mother and father would tell me variations on the story of my name. Sometimes my mother would be there with him. Sometimes she would slip out of the story. Oddly none of the versions specifically mentioned the presence of Donnie Woo. Eventually, my father framed the ring and ribbon and covered it in glass. Until we moved out of my Grandfather’s house in Paperson in 1961 for the Strawberry Creek subdivision in Sacramento, the framed ring hung over my parents’ headboard in their bedroom on the second floor of my grandparents’ house. Once in the suburbs, it felt too Chinese to keep on the walls. Regardless of the version of the story, it made me feel special. I was the product of fate and the fact that my father had played forward on the Lincoln Junior High basketball team.

I was thirty years old before I realized that there was a problem with my parents’ story of the ring. I was with my friend Grover and his friend Yale. We were sitting at dinner in a dining hall at a college even though none of us were students at the time.

“So Yale, did you get your name because you were conceived in a patch of ivy?” Grover asked.

“No, it’s an old family name and no, I never went to Yale, never even applied…Speaking of odd names though…”

“You mean why was my family named for a powdered orange drink consumed by astronauts?”

“No.”

“I got the name Lucky because my parents had spent the first five years of their marriage trying to conceive. My dad caught a lucky ring at a Chinese festival and I was born not long after that.”

“What kind of festival was it?” Yale asked.

“You know it never occurred to me that Tang is a Chinese name,” Grover, who isn’t Chinese, added.

“Chinese food in space?” Yale shook his head as he said it.

“Did you ever try eating that powder straight up? …. The only thing grosser was trying to eat Fizzies without adding water. Do you remember that stuff?”

Both Yale and Grover made lemon-sucking faces.

“To answer your question, it was celebration of the River God in a little town called Hellenville. I think there were some Greek families who settled there.”

“So when do they have it?”

“In the spring some time.”

Grover looked up and to his right. “Lucky, Isn’t your birthday in late September?”

It had never occurred to me that my mother had to be either two months pregnant when my father caught that “Lucky Ring” or that I was born some twenty months after the event.

So, why had I never counted the months? I guess the answer is simple enough – I wanted to believe in the power of my own name. It still doesn’t seem right to me that a couple months should get in the way of a really good story. I guess that’s something of a family trait.

At that point, my father had already been gone for eight years. He had a sudden heart attack behind the bar at his restaurant when I was twenty two. My mother was remarried despite the fact that she had deeply loved my father. I was already worried that I was doomed to do less with my life than everyone had expected or was it demanded? I had managed to go to the right schools, but never had quite found the right jobs. My first marriage had just ended after just two years. Even then, I hardly felt lucky.

Good Bye to Lucky the Dog

2007-09-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

My blog was called "Chancelucky". The two border collies in the photo are Chance and Lucky. Lucky is the brown one. I have no idea why the main character in my novel also happens to be named Lucky. When my five year old daughter got Lucky as a puppy, she named the animal for one of the more active puppies in A Hundred and One Dalmatians, her favorite book/movie at the time. Had we waited a few years, the dog would have been called "Hermione" and my blog would have been Chancehermione.blogspot.com.

In any case for the twelve years since, Lucky's been a pretty good dog. Okay, she had a habit of killing chickens and finding ways to sneak out of the yard, but people still always commented that she was very sweet-natured. Dogs don't really smile, but it was easy to inerpret the expression on her face as a smile. A year ago, Lucky suddenly slowed down. I took her to the vets where she got shockingly good, cheerful, and attentive care at a more or less reasonable cost. They did make me pay on the spot, but it felt worth it. It especially felt worth it after Lucky suddenly and seemingly miraculously recovered from lying around and being uanble to eat to return to being bouncy though somewhat slower than she had been as a chicken-chasing young dog.

That same weekend, my wife got a terrible migraine and we had to visit the emergency room. The care at Kaiser that weekend was dreadful to the point where the various errors and delays (the Doctor sent the prescription to the wrong pharmacy) compounded with the fact that the various people who saw my wife there kept asking the same questions as if no one was writing anything down. In any case, I wound up posting about the odd matter that veterinary care in America appeared to be a whole lot better than human medical care. For one thing, the people at the vets actually seemed to care about the patients.

In the last few days, Lucky stopped eating again. She seemed alert, but listless. It got to the point where she couldn't move her hind legs. Quite by coincidence, on one of those days I accidentally deleted my original blog (please blogger help me rescue it!) This time the vet had bad news.

Although she's home right now so we can spend another day or two with her, I'll miss Lucky.

Soon the Lucky in this novel is the only surviving being in my real and imaginary family who answers to that name, I am quite aware of the coincidence of timing. The loss of Chancelucky the blog, the rededication and setting a "hard" goal for the completed draft of the novel, and the imminent passing of Lucky the dog all happened in a forty eight hour period.

I just hope that dog heaven has plenty of fences to dig under, things to bark at, and things like birds that don't feel pain to chase. I remember throwing the frisbee in our backyard with Lucky. For years, no matter which dog got the thing, Lucky was the one who insisted on being the one who returned it to me, though when she did she'd play tug of war with the frisbee. We were lucky to have you as our dog.

I don't know if the dog cares, but I did finish a new opening chapter. Of course, the second chapter is always the hard one, but I suspect Lucky the border collie had and perhaps always will have some mysterious relationship to my writing.

Entry 1: Call Me Lucky

2007-09-13T08:05:00.000-07:00

My entire adult life has been defined by a single failure. I lead a happy enough life in most ways. I have a career, almost despite myself. I'm married with three children. The youngest one starts college next year and she even knows where and what she wants to do there (at least for now). Deep into middle age, I still play basketball. In the big picture, my failure is not all that tragic, yet at age 51 I know that I need to take this one failure off the ledger of my existence.

When I was twenty two and the middle of my first year of law school, I decided to write a novel. My father's side of the family was made to be written about. My Grandfather had been one of those individuals who had big dreams in his life and tragically enough had managed to achieve too many of them. My father had the misfortune of being both his oldest son and being nothing like his father, though in a good way. The rest of his family spent much of its emotional energy arguing over some combination of attention and money. It's happened to a few Chinese families in California.

Being an idiot, I announced my intentions before I had even completed ten handwritten pages. It wasn't horrible. The first line was something like "My Grandfather's house is made from whispers."

I could put words together, but articulating feelings was another matter. I was just clever enough to fool myself about my possibilities as a writer.

That summer, both my father and my grandfather died. That may have sealed my fate. I felt that I now had to complete what I had told my family and some others that I had meant to do. I simply didn't understand that I wasn't emotionally up to the task of chronicling a family and a world that I literally didn't understand. Clue one, my Grandparents mostly spoke Cantonese. I spent my entire childhood avoiding learning to speak their language. Looking back at that original first line, I think "Whoa? I knew the problem even then."

So what happened? I've spent thirty years writing off and on. In that time, I've completed many projects, but....That's right, I've never finished that "First Novel."
In fact and this is deeply embarrassing, I've never managed to complete a draft of the thing start to finish. Is it any wonder that this makes me feel like a loser?

In those three decades, I've discovered that I'm a deeply stubborn person. When it comes to this one project, I've been both unable to move on and I've refused to give up. It's not that I haven't tried hard. I have hundreds of pages. I'm very proud of much of it. The sad truth though is that they don't exactly cohere into a single narrative. Some of the parts may be self-contained short stories (not unusual). It's been more that I've wanted to get it just right, which is, of course, the path to lunacy.

Through my forties, I was largely silent as a writer. Looking back, I realize that much of that was due to raising a family and the need to have a career that pays my bills and theirs. After several odd turns, I wound up being a lawyer. A couple years ago, I started a blog. Chancelucky.blogspot.com For whatever reason, having the outlet set me free to write again and I became fanatical about the blog. In two years and four months, I wrote 500 posts, many of which were very long.

These included:
1) political articles
2) book and movie reviews
3) a series of reviews of reality tv that got extremely popular
4) fiction
5) daily musings
6) reviews of electronic gadgets

I had something like 138,000 unique visitors. It was the biggest audience I'd ever reached. Yesterday, quite by accident, I deleted my blog. No, I didn't have backups for everything. I probably lost hundreds of posts and thousands of hours of writing.
Still, the bottom line was that I wasn't finishing "the book." Maybe I did it for a reason? Anyway, I'm still hoping that blogger/google ressurects the thing for me.

Believe it or not, I have a talent for being able to write surprisingly coherently in a very short span of time. How's that for irony? My blog persuaded me that I could write, write a lot, and keep a reader's attention.

So, this is the deal. I'm starting this new blog and focusing it on a single challenge. Can I complete that stupid novel by September 23, 2008? This blog is the record of my progress.