Homebase. Shawn Wong
Asian American masculinist position. I thought for a moment before speaking. Should I simply say thank you for your opinion of my book or should I declaw the literary jargon on the spot? I’m a professor so I took the educational position.
“That’s interesting. How many Asian American novels have you read?”
“Five.”
“Why would you say my work is paternalistic?”
“Your novel only has male characters and deals mainly with issues of Chinese American male identity.”
I decided to work with that number. “You’ve read five novels. Do you realize that when Homebase was first published in 1979, it was the only Chinese American work of literary fiction in print in America?”
She shrugged. The 1970s were probably closer to the ice age than her world.
I began again. “If you were a Chinese American novelist and you knew when you were writing your novel that there were no novels by a Chinese American in print in America, what do you think you would write or what do you think your job would be?” My voice had changed from writer meeting fan to professor giving lecture. “In fact, when I started writing Homebase in the late ’60s, there were one or two obscure books about Chinese in America in print. And, the only two works of literary fiction were Diana Chang’s The Frontiers of Love, originally published in 1956, and Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, originally published in 1961, and both were currently out of print.”
I was on a roll now. “Well, maybe your job would be to educate an audience about something called Chinese American literature and Chinese American history. Homebase is, in part, a work of historical fiction. Why are most of the characters male in the book?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “The early Chinese immigrants to America were mostly male and racist immigration laws later created a bachelor society in America. Therefore, it is wrong to dismiss Homebase as being masculinist and paternalistic without first knowing the historical context—both the literary history of Asian America and the history in the story. In addition, by focusing only on your point of view of the book as paternalistic, you’re completely ignoring one of the major characters in the novel—the mother.”
I stopped my impromptu “lecture.” At public readings, I am most often asked whether my work is autobiographical. I usually say it is a work of fiction with autobiographical elements so that I don’t have to get into facts about my life. But, the reality is Homebase is a story about my mother and father and it hurt me to hear that the student hadn’t considered the role of the mother in my novel or worse, ignored her for the sake of cramming my novel into her literary theory. I wrote the book for my mother and father, to honor their lives. My father died when I was seven and my mother died when I was fifteen. Neither one lived passed their fortieth birthday. I wanted to tell the graduate student that by ignoring the character of the mother in Homebase she was using a pair of scissors and cutting her out of my family portrait.
At the other end of the spectrum of reader responses, I once received a letter from a reader who didn’t mention any aspect of the historical parts of the novel dealing with Chinese American immigration and the building of the Central Pacific railroad over the Sierra Nevada mountains. Instead, she simply wrote that reading my novel helped her understand how to handle grief. That kind of intimate and personal response and the fact that the novel is still being read thirty years after its publication is very gratifying.
When I was an eighteen-year-old freshman at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) in 1967, I took a beginning poetry writing class from James Liddy, an Irish poet (now at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). I had been writing poetry for several months and I thought I was already a poet and taking the class would only confirm the fact. Once I was enrolled in the class I realized very quickly that I was a terrible poet. Professor Liddy never told me I was a terrible poet—he didn’t have to—but he did encourage me. By the time the semester ended, I was a better poet and I wanted to be a poet. The following year I worked on my writing one-on-one with Kay Boyle and that was the beginning of a twenty-four-year relationship between us until her death in 1992. At various times she was my teacher, mentor, friend, and for a period in the early ’70s while in graduate school, I rented a room from her in her four-story Victorian house in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district (rent was $70 a month). She taught me not only how to be a writer, but also how to live one’s life as a writer. The house was filled with artifacts and memorabilia from her days living in Paris and elsewhere in Europe in the 1920s. One day I came home with a copy of the Dubliners tucked under my arm and she said to me, while we were both checking the mail, “I see you’re reading Jim’s book.” A constant stream of writers, singers, artists, journalists, teachers, community activists, and even letters from Samuel Beckett entered through the front door of her house at 419 Frederick Street. Kay taught me that writing “was about belief” and that everything I write needed to be relevant to our lives. In graduate school, she converted me from a somewhat abstract language poet to a novelist and, in the process, I discovered my narrative voice. The first version of this work began as a twenty-page poem.
Homebase is dedicated, in part, to Kay and her last published book, The Collected Poems of Kay Boyle (1991), is dedicated to me with the following inscription:
This book, both in spirit and substance, is for you, Shawn; for you are my second son, as I cherish and respect you, and rejoice in our friendship. It is you who wrote of your mother’s death: “I did not want everyone’s pity for an orphaned fifteen-year-old boy…after she died I was no longer anyone’s son….” This is not quite true (although a little late) to call you mine.”
It was true that Kay’s writing and my writing during the two and half decades I knew her were linked as she described in “spirit and substance.” Several passages from Homebase, prior to its publication appeared in several of her poems, non-fiction essays, and even in a novel, The Underground Woman (1975). Homebase, of course, has Kay’s influence and mentorship on every page. An earlier version of Homebase was my creative writing Master’s thesis and I treasure the pages and pages of handwritten notes she provided on this novel and other writings throughout our friendship.
If you went to college in the late 1960s as I did, campuses were in turmoil over the Vietnam war, civil rights, and establishment of ethnic studies on college campuses. In my second year, San Francisco State exploded into daily demonstrations and when various college presidents refused to bring police on campus, they were all fired or resigned until S. I. Hayakawa was installed as president of the college and he brought police on campus. Riots broke out and students were arrested and beaten. Students went on strike. The campus closed down. One day, Kay stood defiantly between protesting students and police. She was not only a mentor to students, but also our protector. Disgusted with S. I. Hayakawa, I transferred to UC Berkeley in 1969, which was, of course, like jumping from the frying pan directly into the fire. Even though I left San Francisco State, I continued to work with Kay and stayed enrolled as a part-time student there while going to school as a full-time student at Berkeley. After I graduated in 1971, I went back to SF State, entered graduate school in creative writing, and moved in with Kay. I did work with other writers while in school—Herb Wilner, Leo Litwak, Stan Rice, and Jackson Burgess (at Berkeley), and even took a class from saxophonist John Handy—but none were as influential as Kay as teacher and editor.
When I started writing in college, I realized one day that I was the only Asian American writer I knew in the world and that no teacher in high school or college had ever assigned or even mentioned a book written by an Asian American writer. The whole field of study called Asian American studies was just being formed at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley. It was Kay Boyle who introduced me to the first Asian American writer I ever met. Jeffery Chan was one of her graduate students and teaching in the newly formed Asian American Studies Department at SF State. When I met Jeff, he gave me the phone number of Frank Chin who lived just a few blocks from me in Berkeley. The three of us found poet Lawson Inada and eventually the four of us co-edited Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974). The publication of Aiiieeeee! marked the beginning of the rediscovery of Asian American literature. Franklin Odo, editor of The