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Talking Story  by Polo

From The Asian Reporter, V18, #11 (March 11, 2008), page 7.

I’ve got to admit I’ve been looking at my baby. I’ve been looking hard. At her. My woman.

I’ve been looking with a critical eye — examining her conduct, calculating carefully my costs and benefits. I’m thinking about trading up.

And thinking back, I can recall exactly when it all started. I can tell you to the day and hour.

It was last weekend. Friday night. 6:32pm Tigard time. The date, time, and place, some American friends took us to dinner and a movie. It was my birthday. They are a thoughtful couple.

We went to P.F. Chang’s restaurant, a Chinesee-sort of place fronted by two frightful Ming-like war ponies, super-sized and set into a façade of a quaint New Hampshire downtown district — oaken sign boards, brass gas lights, tidy sidewalk planters, the works. Actually, I know nothing about New Hampshire, or even New England. I’ve been to London and I love the Beatles, but I guess that’s old England.

They call it Bridgeport Village. It’s a couple miles south of here, just off I-5.

Inside P.F. Chang’s, lights are low and shadows fall just so across statuary almost alive with Oriental subtlety. Waitresses wear something you might imagine a Forbidden City courtesan could’ve worn before Chairman Mao and all those humorless Reds.

We were shown to our seats. It was dark in there. I held tight the back of my nonya’s blouse as we wove through all that dark, and mystery. The exotic East. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.

At the next table, a waitress stood like we imagine an Imperial court attendant might, because I’ve never seen one of those either. She humbled her shoulders, she held her order pad up front like a modest prayer. That white girl made tight, tiny, bows like punctuation. She might’ve answered (all mousy, you know, as good Asian girls should): hai … hai … hai, after each order. I don’t know. I couldn’t hear her for the din in there. Imagination counts for a lot.

I gotta tell you, she didn’t do any of that at our booth. Lucky for her, my nonya would’ve seared two 12-gauge shotgun barrels clean through her bobbly head. Our ladies, ask anyone, don’t go for it. For that mumbly-humbly Asian-chick thing. I mean, no one in our neighborhoods’re buying it.

Dinner was nice. Not really Han or Sichuan or Hong Kong, but good all the same. Al’hamdulilaah.

After eating, we went to our friends’ home in leafy Irvington. Old Portland Victorian. Very big. They said they were so excited about us watching an Asian film with them. He said it’s brilliant. She said she read the book, a big seller. The New York Times loved it.

"Oh," I said.

Also big was their TV. Fifty-two inches of Philips. LCD HDTV. 1,920 pixels per each of its 1,080 progressive lines of widescreen resolution, that’s what he said. That’s a lot, I said. And it was really nice.

She took out a slim DVD and fed it to their Philips. It sipped in the promised movie, smooth as an Emerald Tree Boa taking back its tongue.

The disc player clickity-clicked twice before that film burst onto their giant screen. It was that geisha girl. Ogh! — I thought. I slid my peepers right, where I met my baby’s eyes. She’d slid hers left, also without otherwise giving any movement away. Ogh! — her lips read.

Memoirs of a Geisha: three Oscars out of six Academy nominations, all breathless. A Golden Globe too. Even an NAACP Image Award for Zhang Ziyi, a Chinese woman playing a Japanese one. NAACP? — I asked myself, those same folks pretty upset about white guys blackening up with shoe polish to play negroes in minstrel shows?

And so too, Geisha was interesting entertainment, costumes were terrific, its musical score was charming.

And it got me thinking. In fact, as I was telling you at the top of this column — it aaall got me looking at my baby. Looking at her hard. Examining carefully the costs and benefits of keeping her. Imagining my life with one of their wimpy Asian girls.

In fact, I started considering, seriously, dumping every one of those ladies elbowing their way around my life. Take our muscular mother, now a grandma, indeed a great grandma. Take all our vigorous Viet, and ambitious Hmong, and ferociously focused Khmer sisters. Take them all. Please. Because there’s not a submissive rice picker among them. Not a single whimpering wahine.

Dang, where do I get me one?

I want a wife like that P.F. Chang Dynasty princess. Hai … hai … hai. I want a woman as totally selfless, as quietly sacrificing as that Bisquick kabuki in Memoirs of a Geisha. In short: I want what white folks have. I’m entitled to it. To one of them.

I woke from that awful film just in time to watch the credits roll up, just as our friends’ family room lights rose. We thanked them for our dinner, for this film, for their kindness. I am always moved by white folks’ generosity. America gives at a scale unprecedented. They have so much to give.

We drove through the dark to our end of town, without a word. I sat behind the wheel of our tired old Toyota, wondering when we might try being as big-hearted as our hosts. A bit more honest too. A little more trusting in our friendship. Because, you know, a people can’t go for as long as white folks have, into our Asian homelands, into our American ethnic minority neighborhoods, and still be so mistaken about us — unless we’ve let them. Allowed it, all that silly Orientalism.

Unless we benefit from the misfit. From their stereotypes. Of us.

* * *

* * *

al’hamdulilaah (Indo patois from Arabic): thanks to God’s grace.

Bisquick kabuki: Bisquick is an all-purpose baking mix. Kabuki is a classic Japan dance, thick-white face.

hai (Chinese, Japanese): yes.

Minstrel show: a form of popular American entertainment (1830s to 1950s). Slapstick performance, blackened-faced white actors playing infantile African-American characters.

NAACP: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an almost 100-year-old U.S. civil-rights organization committed to ensuring political, educational, social, and economic equality, and eliminating racial hatred and racial discrimination.

nonya (Malay, Javan): indigenous woman.

wahine (vah-hee-nay. Hawaiian): woman.