I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (7 page)

body. Good belief. Good letter.

A happy civilization, glad to see

one and all, every morning. “Help me

farm rice?” asked Brother Lai Lu.

He took Wittman’s hand. 2 men

are walking China hand in hand. They walked

to the field for planting on this hopeful day.

They wrapped seedlings in cloth, settled the bundles

in baskets, tied baskets to waist, and waded

into the paddy. Oooh, the mud, the pleasureful

mud, my free and happy toes. You trace

in water a square, and at each corner embed

one rice plant. Oh, my hands

rooting and squishing silken luscious mud.

Look up: A line of rising and bending

people—kids too—are coming toward

our line. (The kids are all boys.

The girls have been adopted out to the most loving,

well-educated parents in the West. Chinese

girls will take over and improve America.)

Children, everybody growing mai.

Plant toward someone who’s planting toward you,

and make straight rows. Perfectly quiet,

we’re sighting and pacing one another, and organizing

the water into small and large rectangles, stitching

a silvery quilt over Mother Earth.

Every jade-green spikelet has its jade-

green water double. 2 infinite

blue skies. Slow white clouds

form, move and change, and wisp away.

Me, the one amid all of it taking

note. In the silence, critters peeping,

buzzing, chirping, humming, seem to be

my own mind idling and making it up—

but a frog jumps, a dragonfly zooms.

Tadpoles—schools of tadpoles—hurry by.

A mudsnail gliding and sliding. And me

planting rice, helping to feed a fifth

of the world’s people. All, all related.

This planting food together is heart

center. Hour after hour, eon after eon,

doing the same thing, plant, plant,

sink, loft, into water, into sky,

I am one of the human race that has always

done this work. Stay, let this life be

my whole life, and these people my people.

That other life, the one in America, the wife,

the son, the Berkeley education, that

complex life is dream. Stay

and see the rice through to harvest. How

long does it take for rice to grow through

its seasons? A year? Two years? Now

that I’ve found this lost possible self—Chinese

rice farmer—let me stay with it. Keep

doing this most basic human task

til satisfaction. When used to that life

and don’t
see
it anymore, then leave.

Once more, away,

out on the open road, Wittman enjoyed

his walk with fellow travelers. Millions errant,

looking for work, some on paid vacation.

The driver of a pony cart slept atop

his produce; his pony knew the way. A buffalo

or ox pulled a tumbrel of logs and rocks;

woodcutter and wife dozed side by side.

A bicyclist carried one bar of steel

under an arm. Another bicyclist was delivering

a circus of chairs. Motorbikers covered

faces, and entire heads, with gauzy scarves,

no helmet law. 100

big white ducks or geese rode

on the roof of a bus, feathers ruffling; they

did not try to fly away. A stake

truck and a flatbed truck, both

honking hard, drove head-on

at each other, veered to drivers’ right,

and passed. They’re right-laners, like us.

People walking carried twigs, furniture,

baskets, pots, live fish in buckets.

Wittman changed his walk to be like other

Peripatetics. Cut out the American

attitude. Quit the truckin’, the I’m-walkin’-here.

Send the strength away from macho shoulders,

and will it down to butt seat chakra.

Walk bent-legged, loose-kneed,

loose-seated like kung fu.

Hands behind relaxed back. Oh,

it feels so good, giving in—bent old

China Man at long last. A pickup

truck bounced, braked—off popped

a giant pig, a hog. PLOP! Burst?!?

But it got to its feet, jiggled, breathed loud,

coughed, coughed, and screaming, ran off.

Some men in the laughing crowd gave

chase, Wittman too. They were running

after a big fat naked person.

Her pink Caucasian ass and hams rolled

and pumped. Hurrying ahead of the hooting, joking

crowd, she screamed, grunted, wheezed. Internal

injuries. Ran toward people who were assembling

a market. Help me. Help me. Please. She

was It, the big fat naked dumb one. Caught.

The redoubling crowd herded the sow back

to the truck. She climbed the ramp. Her owner kicked

her legs out from under her, thanked the people,

and drove off. No pig basket for

her. So what if she’s hurt? On her way

to slaughter anyway. Wittman reentered

the village that the sow had led him to. Today

was market day; farmers were arriving with this day’s

harvest. Cooks were boiling up noodles

for breakfast, throwing in handfuls of meat and choy.

There was an empty stool in a hovel restaurant;

he sat down amid the slupping, slurping men,

and let himself be served what everybody else

was having. (You’re charged extra for the seat; sitting

is a luxury.) (No ladies. Ladies cook

and eat at home.) The men sat close,

knee to knee, thigh to thigh, but not

quite touching. Did bump elbows.

They ate fast. 2 fingers tap-

tapped the table—another luxury, a table—

got refills. Tap tap. Thanks

thanks. The cook himself came around

with the tea. Some people lift-lifted it

toward the others. Sociable Wittman lift-

lifted, nod-nodded to one and all.

Tap tap. Thanks thanks. Abruptly,

eaters pushed away from the table, paid,

and left. Lazy guys stayed on,

lit cigarettes, talked. One man

folded himself up on his stool, arms

wrapped around knees, and slept. Chinese

can sleep anywhere. Our American

did not understand any of the speaking,

he’d traveled that far. Can’t stand to be

left out. Act as though you get it.

They spoke a spit dialect, like Daffy Duck

and Sylvester the Cat. And they held long notes,

ho-o-o, who-o-o-o. Laugh when they laugh.

They didn’t seem to be talking about him; they

weren’t referring to him with their squinty sly

eyes. The spitter with yellow tobacco fangs,

Sylvester, looked straight at him, and asked

something. Yes, nodded the agreeable American.

Yes. Sylvester and Daffy glanced at each other.

Complicity. Good, they seemed to say, let’s

go, let’s do it. They stood, paid,

waited for Wittman to pay, saw his wallet,

watched him pay with a bill that made

the proprietor use up all his change.

He walked deliberately step by step up to

the suspected muggers, and said in English, “Don’t

you mess with me, bro. You’re gonna get what for.

You’re gonna get what’s comin’ to ya.

You mess with me, you messin’

with the Man.” He reached inside his shirt

for his gat. The bravos vamoosed. Onlookers,

who will gather at any commotion, gave way.

And spread the word: armed man, American

with a gun, come to town. Whichever twisty

turning meandering path he took, Wittman

felt people keeping slant eyes on him.

And so, as the bad stranger, he arrived at

the meat market. The halves of a boiled hairless

dog hung by meat hooks through

its eye sockets. Paws in begging posture.

German shepherd? Labrador retriever?

Parents have brought children to watch the butcher

do something to it with a knife. At another

stall, a tub of piglets, like human babies,

some dead, some but stunned, alive

and moving, bloodied. A customer chose a snake

from jars of live snakes, haggling price

all the while. The snake man squeezed

the sides of its head, the jaws opened,

the fangs shot milk, which he caught in a bowl.

Just when you’re feeling relief, they aren’t harming

those snakes, he killed one, drove

a nail through its head. (So this

is the ancient culture that Chinatown defends

against the Department of Public Health and PETA?)

Wittman stayed in that town. Don’t turn away.

Face what’s real. Fix my reputation.

He found a hotel, a house with door wide

open, showing a front room with cots as

furniture. The crony witch widow woman

pointed at each bed, choose, choose,

you choose, first guest, no

other guest. Ah, but there’s more;

she led him to a ladder, indicated up

up, you up. The loft was the private

one-bed room, fit for a rich tourist.

He paid her, held out money, let her take

however much the charge. Then up ladder

again, and fell into the rag nest bed.

Sick. Gave in to illness, every

part of his body ill. Ceiling and walls

waved, buckling, fluttering. He’ll tilt

and roll off the edge of the loft into

darkest China. Hot. The roof? Fever?

Time spirals in China. In America, it shoots

straight out, like the line on the heart monitor

of the dead. The line faded between forever

and instance, awake and asleep, actual and dream.

It seems, at some twilight, the widowlady

witch fed him a brew, a medicine or a poison.

So kind or wicked of her, too old

to be climbing ladders, yet climbing the ladder

to take care of him. The ladder was missing.

No escape. He had memory of it: one pole

taller than the other, for climbing up to the mesa-

like rooftop, and down into the kiva,

when I was an Indian, a San Ildefonso

Indian, former life. I’ll make the witch

happy, recognize her, she and I were

girlfriend and boyfriend. I know

she recognizes me too, ministering to me so

nicely, palming my brow. I hear voices.

I can understand them; they’re plotting to steal

my money. All she had to do was ask.

I fanned out my money, take, take.

But she wants my life. Do I have a soul?

I can’t feel my soul. I think soul

is something we have to imagine. Want

soul, imagine one. Like imagining I have

it in me to be a husband, a father. Imagine

the peaceful dark, and you go into the peaceful

dark. Imagine the white light, and you enter

and become the white light.

May all beings be safe from danger.

May all beings be safe from danger.

May all beings be safe from danger.

May all beings be safe from danger.

A gold ribbon arises and flies and winds

around the woman on the ground floor and around

the man in the loft, and shines through walls

and curls and twirls around every neighbor

and neighbor’s neighbor and the big pig

and her baby pigs and the dogs and snakes and geese

waddling the earth and geese flying in air, and

spans oceans all the while looping

dolphins and whales and sharks and small fish

and the flying fish spangling and leaping like the ribbon

itself lacing and embracing each and every

living thing all the way to the other

hemisphere to hug my own true love

and our own dear child and all people

our own people and returning to include me.

Aloha kākou. May there be love

among us, love including me.

Oh, I am loved. I am loved.

With such good feelings, the pilgrim recovered

from illness-at-the-world and illness-at-China.

The pig chasers, the would-be thieves, the dog and

snake butchers, the witchy innkeeper

took their places as ordinary people, as ordinary

as himself. Wittman got up, well, and traveled on.

Now, I, Maxine, could let Wittman die,

let him die in the China of his dreams,

and proceed on this journey alone. He’s lived

a full life, life enough, China

enough. Loved wife and child; they

loved him back. Planted rice. Read

some good books. Felt happiness, felt

gratitude. Enough. But I don’t like

traveling by myself. I ought to learn to go

places on my own, good for my character,

to be self-reliant. (A translation of my name,

Ting Ting, Self-Reliance. I should

live up to my name, Self-Reliant Hong.)

Why I need a companion, Monkey, along:

He’s unafraid and unembarrassed to butt

and nose into other people’s business.

He likes chatting with them and partying with them.

(I would rather hide, and spy, and overhear,

find out who people are when I’m not there.

Responsibly, sociably among them, I’m wont

to correct them, teach them, tell them Be happier.)

And he’s able to enter the many places

in this world that a man is allowed and a lady

is not. And Wittman, a fiction, is free to befriend

anyone, and tell about them; he has no relatives

to be held hostage. I don’t want to leave him dying,

sick and poor, destitute of health and money.

No airline ticket home. Passport

and identity stolen. The life of lowest poverty

is a meditation practice, a discipline, another

tale. Let me take him to one more

village, give him the commune of our bohemian

dreams.