LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR BY ALVIN LU
Chinatown
For K & T
Face à face avec la profondeur, l’homme, front penché, se recueille.
Que voit-il au fond du trou caverneux? La nuit sous la terre, l’Empire d’ombre.
– Victor Segalen
The young people in Chinatown are afraid and confused. We don’t know what to do with our lives,” Michael Munroe read in the February 1970 issue of Getting Together, a mimeographed newsletter published by I Wor Kuen, a Chinatown-based anti-imperialist group somewhat ludicrously named after the late-nineteenth-century Chinese secret society whose members believed mystic rituals and spirit possession would make them invulnerable.
Three years out of Princeton, Michael had thrown in with the revolution. He had turned his back on a life of privilege, by any standard, and left his home in Illinois for the West Coast.
He worked as a postman in the East Bay, inside a stretch of black neighborhoods, and organized there. Recently he had been coming across the bridge to discuss tactics with another postal organizer, Francis Chao. Organization was effective in the post office. The P.O. had a high percentage of black workers, who in those days were highly politicized.
Meeting Francis in Chinatown, coming from the East Bay, was an abrupt transition. Walking routes in West Oakland, Michael felt he had miraculously made the great leap from one world to another; his role as deliverer of welfare checks afforded him access to ordinary black lives few white men experienced. But Chinatown was different. There were a few of the cadre there, both American- and foreign-born, who could move, not always with ease, through that underground world, an entirely other country only two blocks wide extending from Bush to Broadway, and they offered Michael glimpses of how it worked. Francis was one of them.
The struggle for Chinatown’s soul between Kuomintang and CPC (Communist Party of China) sympathizers was then at its peak. IWK and Wei Min She (literally, the “Serve the People” Association) opened storefronts in the basement of the International Hotel, located in Manilatown on the corner of Jackson and Kearny Streets, and plotted to overthrow the power structure. Radical activists, propelled by Third World strikes at San Francisco State and Berkeley, descended on the bewildered community, some of them calling themselves Red Guards, talking about Yellow Soul. Politics in turn exacerbated already existing petty rivalries between American-born and foreign-born gangs. A pool hall-soda fountain run by a group of reformed American-born at 615 Jackson was adorned with posters of Huey P. Newton and Mao Tse-tung, while a large gang known as the Jo-Boys amounted to strongarms for the tongs, who continued to assert their fading influence.
What all these groups, including the ruling Six Companies oligarchy, fought to represent could be narrowed down to one square block, Portsmouth Square, in the heart of the community, which had been recently defaced by stenciled graffiti bearing the image of Chiang Ching. It was the site of innocuous fairs, well-meaning rallies, and, increasingly, conflicts. One could imagine, in the years of the Barbary Coast, when it was the makeshift center of San Francisco’s gambling traffic, a gallows being erected there. But most of the time now, it was just the immortal old men, playing Chinese chess or a variation on bridge. Some nights, the fog would stroll down the hills of Washington and Clay Streets, you could hear the foghorns, and the Stockton bus would roll up. No one knew the future.
Michael and Francis regularly met at the Hunan Cafe, across the street from the I-Hotel, but the atmosphere there had grown too thick with intrigue, and Francis suggested a little-known restaurant elsewhere, frequented entirely by locals who spoke only in Toisan dialect. The two of them were to meet an acquaintance of Francis’s there, who was researching a documentary film on the nascent Asian-American “movement” and wanted to interview Francis incognito.
Francis wore a blue Mao tunic, jeans, and black kung-fu shoes. He was clean-shaven, and a helmet of straight hair covered his ears. Though smallish, he projected confidence and power-rumor had it that he was a black belt, and even Michael, who was a big man and a star college lacrosse player before he blew out his knee, felt tough walking beside him. The two of them, as members of the rather rigidly Maoist Revolutionary Union, worked closely with WMS, their Chinatown affiliate, and tended to regard IWK, who after all were from New York and were behind the curve that way, as suspiciously reformist. Nevertheless, at this optimistic time, there was still hope a united front could be built in Chinatown.
“I hear you’re going to be sent somewhere,” Francis said.
“Where?”
Francis leaned his head to one side, then made a kind of quarter-turn with it, his abbreviation for shaking his head. He took a gulp of very attenuated jasmine tea from a porcelain cup with the faded image of a red, green, and yellow dragon printed on it.
“Why?”
“To retrieve something.”
That could mean anything. To San Leandro? For burritos? But Michael had an idea of what Francis was talking about. Both of them had joined RU around the same time, coming from very different directions, and they’d risen quickly through the ranks. In the spirit of competition, Francis liked to keep Michael off balance with hints that made it sound as if he were closer to directives being made in the inner circle, but Michael knew it was just smoke. Michael had personal ties to the upper echelons of the leadership that Francis didn’t have. On the other hand, one never knew what one faction might be planning without another’s knowledge. And there were plenty of factions.
“So tell me about these Red Guard guys,” Michael said.
“They have a lot less to do with the Red Guard in China than with talking black and acting like the Panthers, but without half the political commitment. Most are ex-Leway and are in it strictly for the image.”
Francis had a way of sizing up, dissecting, and dismissing someone in a sentence or two that matched RU’s reputation for sectarianism. Michael, who was prone to see both sides of an issue, thought there was truth to the accusation that they didn’t get along with anybody, because they didn’t cut anybody any slack. He also knew it was worse cutting everybody slack all the time, over anything. One needed parameters. But even in their own group, Francis was thought to have a very refined palate.
“Look at their position on militancy.” He pointed to a line printed in the newsletter. “Our Constitution says we have the right to bear arms. Our? This is about bringing the whole system down. As far as their politics go, it’s strictly ‘black cat, white cat.’”
He was making reference to rifts that had grown within the ranks of the CPC itself, demonstrating a fairly high-level awareness of issues that Michael only understood in a blurry way. Groups like IWK and elements within RU’s own national ranks reflected the rightist thought of the Liu Hsiao-chi/Teng Hsiao-ping revisionist party clique that the radicals, including the student Red Guard and Mao himself, were resisting. Somehow that internecine struggle had radiated out from the capital of worldwide revolution to this remote outpost.
Michael had only heard of the Red Guard less than two years ago, before he joined RU. He didn’t know much about China then, much less the Cultural Revolution. But there had been a great deal of hoopla around an American, a white man, who had returned to the Bay Area from China and had participated in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a Red Guard himself. By chance, Michael had gone to his presentation and was mesmerized, particularly by the photos that were passed around, clipped from Life magazine. One showed a group of Red Guards in surgical masks ham-mering apart a Peking opera house. Michael didn’t understand exactly why they were destroying the building, but he thought it was probably because opera was something for rich people.