In later, grimmer years Francis would go to jail for infiltrating a U.N. Security Council meeting and throwing plastic bags filled with pig’s blood at the U.S. and Soviet council-members.
Francis’s acquaintance, the filmmaker Cletus Dong, arrived at the same time as the twice-cooked pork and honey walnut prawns. As he approached their table, conspicuous in cowboy boots and big silver belt buckle, Francis muttered under his breath, “Cultural nationalist,” which to Michael was a codeword for “reverse racist.”
Cletus introduced himself as “the Chinese-American Jean-Luc Godard,” which struck Michael as an odd thing to aspire to be, considering Cletus was the only Chinese-American filmmaker he’d ever heard of. Couldn’t you pretty much call yourself the Chinese-American anything? But with a name like Cletus Dong he wasn’t going to be the Jean-Luc Godard of anybody.
Michael’s attention was immediately taken away from Cletus anyway, because he’d brought a girl. At first Michael had taken her to be his girlfriend, but it later came out she was his sister, in the literal sense. Unlike the girls Asian “movement” guys tended to hang out with, the ones who wore granny glasses over humorless expressions, she had all the qualities of a classical Chinese beauty: green eyebrows, reedy silhouette, straight ass-length hair. There might be something too brittle about her, as in one of those lamenting maidens in a poem by Li Po, but on closer look one saw this was not the case, especially in the eyes, which were steely and unsentimental. Thick, bold strokes made up her face. She had dark eyes and a full mouth. Her name was Candy. She chewed gum.
Michael immediately fell in love with her.
She stuck her gum to a napkin and smoked a cigarette with heartwrenching elegance, while Cletus and Francis went over the details of the party platform. If it wasn’t for the entertainment Candy provided, Michael would have quickly grown bored. He respected Francis, because he knew he was dedicated, but even then, he always thought the worst thing about being a Communist were the endless meetings, speeches, and discussions over total abstractions. Despite his own class background, which he was still trying to live down, he tended to connect more with ordinary working-class people, the good citizens who lived on his delivery route.
“Your idea of revolution, like most people’s, is romantic,” Francis concluded. “In fact, our work is like ‘washing one’s face,’ as Chairman Mao put it; that is, it takes place on a daily basis. Chinatown is capital-scarce, deteriorated, urban terrain. We have to be frugal and diligent and, as Mao says again, ‘do more with less money.’”
“What’s so different about that from your run-of-the-mill penny-pinching Chinaman?”
“Well, there are comrades, even when talking about revolution, who only see it in terms of economics and benefits. Of course, we should try to do more with less-as guerrillas we have no choice about that-but not at the expense of political awareness. Getting results is one thing, but isn’t it as important to understand how all the pieces fit together? The correct path is to see economic pragmatism and political consciousness as a dialectic. My point was, we can’t achieve our goals with sweeping gestures. That’s what the capitalists did when they wiped out Japantown and the Fillmore.”
“Speaking of less money,” Candy suddenly broke in, “I have to get to work.”
Francis acknowledged her existence for the first time by nodding his head.
“I was giving her a ride to the Richmond,” Cletus mumbled apologetically.
“Who do you think’s supporting this kid?” she went on.
“And what do you do?” Francis asked.
“I’m a bartender.”
“What kind?”
“What do you mean, what kind? What kind of question is that?”
“I meant, are you happy with your work? Is it a good job?”
“What do you mean? It’s the kind of job that makes money. What do you do?”
“We’re postal workers.”
“You mean mailmen?”
“Okay, so you make a lot of money. And what are you going to do with all of that money when, if, you get enough of it?”
“Get outta this place! A girlfriend of mine just moved to Vancouver.” She pronounced it Van-koo-fah. “She says it’s real nice. Plenty of jobs. Big houses. No Chinese. Once I save up some money, I’m moving there.” She gestured theatrically to that promised land, like one of those actors in the opera house wrecked by Red Guards. “This time next year, I’ll be there, I promise. I hate this place. It stinks.”
Michael was impressed. He was always moved by hope. He introduced himself and held his hand out. She didn’t take it. He took a deep breath. He didn’t normally give in to impulses, he was one of those people who tended to mull things over and act only when it was too late, but it was as if a spirit had taken over him. He wrote something down on the back of a chopstick wrapper and handed it to her.
“Here’s my number. Call me when you get to Canada.”
“What for?”
“I just want to know if you get there, like you said.”
“Who are you?”
He looked around. “The only white person in this restaurant, it looks like.”
She laughed at that. She wrote something on the wrapper and handed it back to him. “This is the number of the restaurant my girlfriend works at. Call a year from now and ask her if I got there. Okay? Bye bye.”
With that, she dragged Cletus off into the cool San Francisco night. Only after they were out the door did Michael realize everyone in the restaurant was staring at him. Francis just went about opening his fortune cookie. Michael couldn’t help grinning. He was aglow. Here, in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant he in all likelihood would never be able to find his way back to again, in Chinatown, where it seemed, for someone like himself, it was all but impossible to make a human connection, he’d had one. Not just any connection, either, but with her. The people in the restaurant eventually went back to their business. Michael couldn’t understand a word above the din they were making. They could have been talking about anything within the confines of those four walls, and without.
The following summer, Michael traveled back to the Midwest to see some old friends and to have his draft physical. He wore a T-shirt with Mao Tse-tung’s face silk-screened on the front and the phrase, “All political power grows from the barrel of a gun,” on the back. He flunked the physical.
Before he flew back to the Bay Area, he took a detour to see a fellow RU member of high standing.
Ariel Rabenstein was a former CPUSA member, who now lent RU a certain legitimacy. Like Michael and Francis, he was employed by the post office. Unlike most of the young cadre, he had actual experience with mass organizing mayhem on a grand scale. The rest of RU were in comparison children, working in a vacuum, sealed off from history by McCarthy and the fact that the Soviet Union had stopped being revolutionary. Ariel was hiding in Chicago after having been out of the country for a number of years. He had run afoul of the police in San Francisco when a reporter for the Examiner, acting as an FBI informant, had exposed him, and he had to leave the country. He took a freighter to China and somehow made it into circles that reached as high as Chou En-lai. There had been a handful of Americans in China then, a collection of outright defectors, Korean War deserters, double agents, and old CPUSA and Soviet sympathizers who’d run into bad police situations, all of whom knew each other and did similar things like teach English. The Chinese premier’s group became Ariel’s main contact, and they arranged for Ariel to bring $600,000 back to the States, where he was “to start organizing a new revolutionary group.” This was in 1968. It wasn’t clear what the significance of the six-hundred-thousand figure was, but when Michael first heard the story, he assumed it must have been a round or lucky number in Chinese.