Homebase. Shawn Wong
“a pathbreaking work of Asian American literature” and listed the preface to the anthology as one of 155 key historical documents of Asian American history from 1790 to 2001.
Also in 1969, Frank Chin introduced me to writer Ishmael Reed and Ishmael introduced me to a whole range of writers such as Victor Hernandez Cruz, Alex Haley, Al Young, Jessica Hagedorn, Leslie Silko, Ntosake Shange, and even musicians like David “Fat Head” Newman and George Clinton and Funkadelic. Ishmael later founded the Before Columbus Foundation, a literary organization dedicated to the promotion of American multicultural literature, where I served as one of the founding board members in the mid-70s and continue to serve on the board of directors today. Most of this activity happened when I was still in school. Imagine, as an undergraduate student at Berkeley: I was studying the dead white British authors—sitting in Spenser class, writing papers about Chaucer—and outside of class, I was encountering all of the exciting literary life going on in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, I think my real education was out in the arts and literary communities of the Bay Area where there were no grades, no credit, and no classes.
During my senior year at Berkeley, I took a job as editor of the Glide Urban Center newsletter, which was part of Glide Memorial Methodist Church. I doubt if there was any place in the Bay Area more exciting than Glide in 1971—it was the hub of community activism lead by the dynamic and charismatic Rev. Cecil Williams with Janice Mirikitani as the executive director of Glide Urban Center. It was Mirikitani who first invited me to read my poetry to an audience.
While still in graduate school in 1972, I was offered my first teaching job in the newly formed Ethnic Studies Department at Mills College in Oakland. The dean of the faculty at the time asked me what I could teach and I answered that I could teach a class in Asian American literature. I was offered the job even though I did not have any teaching experience, a graduate degree or any publications, and I was about to teach a subject that I did not learn in college, rather had taught myself. At the time, I was working as a part-time gardener to support myself, so I had a decision to make. I could continue working as a gardener or teach at a private women’s college. I was twenty-two and single; I took the job. Jeff, Frank, Lawson, and I had completed the manuscript of Aiiieeeee! and I used that as the foundation for the course.
After several trade publishers turned down Aiiieeeee!, Howard University Press decided to publish the anthology as part of their inaugural list of ten books in 1974. It instantly became the most reviewed book on their list with reviews in every newspaper and periodical from The New York Times to Rolling Stone to The New Yorker. Aiiieeeee! was later published in paperback by Doubleday.
I graduated from San Francisco State in the same year and started circulating Homebase around to publishers with no success. Ishmael Reed and Kay Boyle both introduced my book to various editors at large publishing houses, but all turned it down. While waiting to publish the novel, I rewrote it eight times, each time making the language in the novel work harder and using my training in poetry to get the most out the narrative. Finally, in 1979, Ishmael decided to publish the book himself with his own small press, I. Reed Books. The novel won two literary awards and was later published by Plume, a division of Penguin Books. In 1975, Frank Chin and I co-edited an edition of The Yardbird Reader, a literary journal started by Ishmael Reed, Al Young, and other African American writers and artists. It was no accident that my first three books were published by African American publishers. They were the first to recognize the legitimacy of Asian American literature.
In the early ’70s Frank, Jeff, Lawson, and I formed the Combined Asian-American Resources Project, Inc. (CARP) dedicated to the rediscovery of Asian American literature and preserving oral history interviews with writers and artists. Our CARP oral history interviews are collected at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. When we couldn’t find a publisher to reprint John Okada’s landmark 1957 novel, No-No Boy, we used our own money, borrowed money from several sources, and published a new edition in 1976. No-No Boy was published by the University of Washington Press in 1979 and recently sold its 100,000th copy.
The literary history cited here is, of course, not just about one novel, but rather about the dissemination, preservation, and promotion of a whole field of literature. As a young writer, who started writing Homebase almost forty years ago, I realized very early on that I was responsible for educating an audience to Asian American writing as well as for writing it.
SHAWN WONG
Seattle, Washington
November 2007
HOMEBASE
CHAPTER ONE
I
BACK IN THE EARLY FIFTIES, WHEN I WAS FOUR, MY FATHER AND mother drove from Berkeley to New York and back. The sound of the car’s little engine is still buzzing and working away in my head. My sense of balance comes from lying asleep in the back seat of that car, my unsteady heartbeat comes from my father’s night driving and my watching the chaos of passing headlights floating by on our car’s ceiling and gleaming tail-lights reflected and distorted in the windows. In those nights, sleeping in the back seat of my father’s car, I heard conversations my mother and father had, saw places I visited later, and remembered it all when I started driving. And the places I’ve never been to before were dreams, were whole conversations my father and mother had.
I will eventually travel to all the places I’ve dreamed about. I will meet my friends and know them as if I’d known them all my life.
I was named after my great-grandfather’s town, the town he first settled in when he came to California from China: Rainsford, California. Rainsford Chan (Chan is short for California). Rainsford doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no record of it ever having existed, but I’ve heard stories about it. I’ve spent many days hiking and skiing through the Sierra Nevada looking for it. I’ve never found exactly where it was, but I’m almost sure I’ve seen it or passed by it on one of those days. I recognized it from a hill. It was one of those long, wide Sierra meadows. A place of shade. The sound of a stream reaches my ears. Dogwood trees make the place sound like a river when the breeze moves through the leaves.
My father knew all his grandfather’s stories about the town or towns like it. Stories of how they survived there, of how they were driven out of the west and chased back to San Francisco. As they rushed back across the land they worked on, they burned their letters, their diaries, poems, anything with names. My father never told me these stories. He died too soon. He only taught me to sing “Home on the Range” and I’d teach him the songs I learned in school. But I knew all his stories because my mother told me all his stories and later I found stories he had written down and put away in an old shoe box.
The year before his death we moved from Berkeley to Guam. In 1956 my mother called the dirt road in front of our house on Guam “Ocean Street,” and gave the only house on that street the number “25.” We began to receive mail there from home. I was six and until we had moved to Guam I remembered only a few isolated events out of my childhood in Berkeley, where my parents were students. When we returned to Berkeley in 1957, Father was dead. And I remembered everything.
In 1956 my father taught me to sing “Home on the Range” on that island in the Pacific Ocean. Standing there in the heat of an ocean lagoon, I sang out for my father about our home on the range and my friends the buffalo and antelope. The sun was shining, it was raining, and the steam of the humid day filled my lungs. The waves washing up on the edges of the lagoon made the green grass seaweed between my toes.
I must have been calling my father “Bobby” for a few years before we arrived in Guam, but it was there that I actually remember for the first time calling him by that name. I had given him that name when, as a baby, I mispronounced “Daddy.” That wasn’t his real name, just my name for him, it made him the object of my play, a friend I learned my imagination from. When we lived on Guam, I got the last good look, the last clear view of my family at the age of six. On Guam, my world was a boy’s paradise and I remember all of it and its memory is constant. In 1956, World War II was still on for me. If I dug beneath the fallen leaves and loose earth near the base of the tree, I always found gleaming brass bullet