Fighting Kite (pages 18-19)

The previous poem, "A Visitor on Ash Wednesday," was set in the Philippines . . . some time after my birth in San Francisco, we moved to the Philippines for some years, where Mama practiced as a doctor (a pediatrician), and Papa worked on his law degree. This poem, on the other hand, is set during that same time but in the US, where my dad, in the context of the poem, is re-establishing residency in the US as a naturalized American citizen. More on that below. Incidentally, there's a blog post from 2008 on this poem that gives more background info.                     Naturalized American citizens living overseas             must return periodically to re-establish             residency by living one year in the States. There were the usual screaming kids, tugging on their Mom's and Dad's arms, whining for a Davy Crockett coonskin cap or six-gun with holster, a Shirley-Temple-curled doll that really wets. His son's probably playing in the toy department, the other parents must have thought about this lone man in line at the San Francisco Emporium — in line to see Santa. Between children jumping off and on his lap, Santa looked off to his left where a troupe of silvery Tinkerbells skated, the ice cooling the air of this huge room, a cathedral to free enterprise. I look now at this photo, faded thirty years, of the man who livened up Santa's workday: my father in a double-breasted brown suit, his red tie spangled with fireworks. In Santa's lap, Papa's holding a briefcase, blonde leather fastened with buckle straps. Papa beams at the camera with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. Santa's smiling at this marvelous prank. Everyone in line laughed to see a grown man sitting on another grown man's knee. A snapshot meant for a son, half the world away in Manila. Your son who could hardly recall your face. Papa, after you whisper your Christmas wish into Santa's ear, shake his hand man to man, then step back into the world of business suits and residency rules, I want Page 18         the breeze from the skaters' ice to part your hair — shiny and black — caress your lovely face as you glide down the Big E slide, hugging the briefcase to your chest like a lonesome child. Page 19 Here's what I said about this poem in the 2008 blog post mentioned above: My father, as a naturalized American citizen (i.e., a citizen by law rather than by birth), had to re-establish residency in the US every so many years. He would spend that year living in San Francisco's International Hotel, among the manongs, male Filipino immigrants who had established this bachelor community on the edge of Chinatown. During one of those residency trips, my father sent me a photo of him on Santa's lap at the Emporium department store, just as described in the poem. I no longer have this photo, but I remember it vividly as one of the defining images of my childhood. It's memorable not only because, as the poem says, it's a "marvelous prank," but because it shows Papa's love for me: Filipinos can be very shy, almost to the point of shame, a profound cultural emotion called hiya, and the very fact that Papa did this, despite his hiya, says volumes about what he would do for his absent son. Papa and I never talked about the Santa event that I can remember. And so all the details are wholly imagined. The word "blonde" (female rather than the more accepted "blond") is intentional; the manongs had a slang term for their white girlfriends — "blondies" — and I don't doubt that Papa, himself a kind of honorary manong, had blondies. The poem is also about manhood and the dignity of work. My father, as a Filipino immigrant citizen, was not always able to work in the US at a profession he felt he could respect. At the time the Santa photo was taken, however, he was working as a civil servant for the Navy and was quite happy during his residency year. By having Papa and Santa shake hands "man to man," I am symbolically lifting my father out of the daily experiences of racial prejudice he probably had during those times — the late 1950s. The poem is thus simultaneously familial and political. I do remember that when I wrote this poem — probably in the early '90s, in Arcata, California, where I was teaching at Humboldt State University — I borrowed from the Santa scene in the movie A Christmas Story (the slide, particularly) as well as childhood memories of visiting Santa in San Francisco's downtown department store, The Emporium. As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.  FIGHTING KITE   INTRO FRONT CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Fighting Kite (pages 16-17)

I recall this poem in Fighting Kite was written in MFA school in 1986 or 1987. I think this was probably in a workshop led by Yusef Komunyakaa, who was friendly to this kind of magical realist material. (Incidentally, there's an earlier blog post on this poem that would help to give a fuller picture of the specifics surrounding this poem.)         Papa faced the devil again on the stairs to the living room. Seven years old, I couldn't sleep. Papa shouting: "Make it now, damn you, end it here." I saw clenched in his hand a buntot pagi, the long tail severed from a sting ray, the Filipino's traditional weapon against spirits. Papa kept his on the living room wall, and when neighbors would visit and talk of his monthly standoffs with the devil, he would take the buntot pagi down, let them touch it. When I was over at my friends' houses, I would hear people talk about Papa: "So brave, that Mang Martin," they would say, "Did you hear last night he took on the devil again?" When my great-uncle Tay Birco died, we prayed for nine days, a novena of dinners and dancing. Late into the night, the grown-ups told stories of encounters with demons. Eyes glistening, my grandfather Tatay described how when he was a boy, church bells woke him one night. Peeping out his window, he saw on the plaza facing San Antonio Church a man in flames, dancing in red-hot chains on the flagstone steps. Next day, all the neighbors asked each other, "Did you see that burning man?" then rapidly crossed themselves. Tatay's mother, my great-grandmother, once met a man in a hooded robe on the stairs in her house as she left for morning mass. Page 16         "Who are you?" she asked. "Can I help you?" When he threw back the hood, his face was like molten copper. She shrugged, walked on. But that Ash Wednesday when I was seven, I recall I stood rooted to the shadowy floor of Papa's bedroom. Half-heard voices downstairs, a glimmer of light wafted up. I could see the tusks, its eyes like glowing coals, as it climbed the steps. I could hear Papa praying below: "oh jesus save us from the fires of hell lead all souls to heaven help . . ." I can still see its red eyes. I'm sure if I had reached out, I could have touched spiny hackles — it was that close. Gliding by, the pig entered my dim bedroom. Page 17 Here's some of what I said about this poem in that 2009 blog post mentioned above: I was born in the US but lived in the Philippines as a small child for some time. While there, I eventually realized that my father would periodically have visions of the Devil. And that in these encounters he would take the Devil on as his nemesis. It was also clear to me as a child (the poem says I'm seven) that people did not write Papa off as a lunatic. Instead they believed in these visitations and saw my father as a visionary man, tormented as well as honored by the Devil. . . . Filipinos customarily believe in such occult happenings and in fact treat them as everyday occurrences. The speaker's great-grandmother is not at all surprised at meeting the Devil in her house. The speaker is also a participant in these Filipino beliefs. This speaker, in fact, is not a persona . . . it's really me. Seeing the devil pig . . . that's an actual memory. I remember that distinctly. My father was downstairs with the Devil, shouting at him. And then I saw the pig. It was dark. It lumbered right by me, very close, ignoring me. And then it went into the darkened door of my bedroom. Where it disappeared into blackness. I swear to God. This memory is one of the strongest, most vivid remembrances of my life. Looking more at that previous blog post, I see that I mentioned my great-grandfather being a priest and then promised to tell more of that story later . . . which I never did, it looks like. My great-grandfather was a Catholic priest, Father Timoteo Gotera. His "wife" — common-law wife, I think, not legally married — was Martina Gasataya. (In the poem, she is the woman who sees the devil in her house.) I don't know all the details, but I imagine that Fr. Gotera's parishioners thought of Martina as, perhaps, the housekeeper in the rectory? Though they had four kids together, who all had the surname of Gotera, so people must have known and not thought of her as a servant; I understand that she came from a wealthy family. A Gasataya relative who is doing genealogy research thinks she may have found some other kids besides the four I know about — my grandfather Felix and his three siblings, Encarnacion, Purita, and Joaquin (my two great-aunts and great-uncle). As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.  FIGHTING KITE   INTRO FRONT CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Fighting Kite (page 15)

This seventh poem in Fighting Kite is a Petrarchan sonnet. I'm not certain now when it was written but it might have been in MFA school, like some of the first poems in the book. I was certainly working at that time on achieving a good sonnet. (By the way, there's an earlier blog post on this poem.)         Papa said, "You know I would have to kill you," to Mama, who sat quietly, head bowed. I was just a kid — five or six — and cried deep gut-wrenching sobs. The moon, like a new coin in the window, sliced in half by blue knives of cloud. "You're too young to understand, Vin," he smiled. "It would be my duty as a man." A tear on her cheek, Mama whispered, "That's true." To this day, I don't know if there was another man or if they were only talking possibility, in case, for example, Mama felt her face begin to flush downstairs with a repairman. Her only safety net then — Papa's motto, A place for everything, everything in its place. Page 15 In the earlier blog post mentioned above, here's some of what I said about this poem: [T]he incident recounted in the first stanza did happen. I remember my parents talking in these words or something very like them. I was indeed five or six, and you can draw whatever inference you want from parents talking about such matters in the presence of a kid in kindergarten or first grade. The event certainly stuck with me. I think this was probably, from my father's point of view, part of my indoctrination into maleness, into machismo. Part and parcel, I think, of US Army training as he saw it, from the dual perspectives of trainer and trainee . . . father and son, in the way his father (my Lolo) taught him to be a man, through hard knocks and a thick belt. I mentioned above that this is a Petrarchan sonnet; in the previous blog post, I wrote, "I am using this form because of the tradition of sonnets as love poetry. In this case, though, the sonnet is being used as a vessel for 'anti-love,' for control and oppression in the name, allegedly, of 'love.'" I continued: To be more specific, this is a Petrarchan sonnet with an octave (or eight-line stanza) rhymed abba acca, a small departure from the norm, an octave made up of two envelope quatrains (abba abba). The second stanza is a more standard Petrarchan sestet (or six-line stanza) rhymed cde cde. There is also the usual turn (or volta) at line 9 . . . in this case, a change in time: the opening octave set in the speaker's childhood and the closing sestet set in the present. If the poem was in fact written while I was pursuing my MFA, this is pretty cool experimentation for a student. By that point, I had written quite a few sonnets before grad school, but usually Shakespearean ones, so this Petrarchan sonnet is nice journeyman work. Of course, this is all surmisal . . . I may have written it when I was more experienced as a poet. Sorry I can't be more precise here. In any case, do check out the earlier blog post about this poem. Lots of other interesting material there, such as the Salvador Dali allusion in the poem. Pretty heady stuff! As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.  FIGHTING KITE   INTRO FRONT CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Fighting Kite (page 14)

This poem in Fighting Kite was orginally written in 1998 for an anthology titled Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, edited by M. Evelina Galang. The backstory of the anthology (described more fully in this blog post) has to do with a 1998 restaurant review in Milwaukee: the reviewer called a Filipino restauranteur's child a "little monkey," setting off an online brush fire of protest by Filipino Americans. Eventually Galang compiled and edited the anthology in reaction and response.         In birdsong my father strolled the Presidio of San Francisco, a Filipino in the U.S. Army, sharp in parade dress, lieutenant's bars riding his shoulders like sun cresting clouds. A corporal in dingy fatigues walked past my father, snickered, kept his right hand by his hip. "Hold it right there, soldier!" my father barked. "Where's that goddamn salute?" The corporal smirked, looked him in the eye and said nothing, but my father could read it in his face — I'll be damned before I salute a little brown monkey who ought to be climbing a fucking tree. My father growled an order. The soldier jerked to attention. My father slipped off his jacket, draped it on a hedge. The rainbow of ribbons reminded him not of crossfire and the soldier he saved on patrol, not of the forced retreat to Corregidor, not of the weeks evading Japanese capture, not even of the Bataan death march, nor of the concentration camp. Instead he recalled the American jeep that tried to run him down in a rainstorm. Get out of the road, monkey! My father said, "You might not want to salute me, young man, but you will salute this jacket, these bars. Do it!" Birds sang. "Again." Sun shone. "Again." The corporal's arm swept the air, a wiper blade trying to swipe brown mud from a windshield.     Page 9 The blog post mentioned above talks about this piece: The poem itself relates a family story. When my father was stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco immediately after the war, a soldier on the street refused to salute my father (who had been recently promoted into the officer ranks of the US Army). It was quite clear to Papa that the refusal was racist — the soldier, a white man, was not about to salute an officer who wasn't white. So my father took off his uniform jacket and draped it on a nearby hedge, then ordered the soldier to salute the jacket, affixed with lieutenant bars, again and again. Which the soldier did. My father always told this story as a parable about "thinking out of the box," as we say these days. The photo above is a very small snapshot I have of my father in his US Army officer's uniform, in front of the San Francisco Public Library downtown, in 1946, around the time this event happened. I'm sorry it's blurry . . . there is very little detail in the snapshot itself. In terms of poetic craft, the aforementioned blog post describes how the poem employs pentameter that has been intentionally "roughed up" [in] alternating couplets and tercets (all unrhymed). I have forgotten why I shaped the poem this way, but the pattern does allow me to produce some useful verse paragraphs, for example, stanzas 5, 9, 10, and 11. At the same time, I also get some nice stanza enjambments: "a Filipino in the US / Army," for example, in lines 2-3, highlighting the problems Filipinos encountered during that time, both in the US Army and in US society overall. So, basically,blank verse. In the final stanza above, you can see my use of sound effects. The corporal's arm swept the air, a wiper blade trying to swipe brown mud from a windshield. Alliteration and onsonance in the repetitions of SW and P in "swept" and "swipe"; also assonance in the I vowels of "wiper" and "swipe"; and more alliteration and consonance in the B and D in "blade" and "brown mud"; interestingly, because L and R are related (liquid) consonants, there is also consonance of L and R in "blade" and "brown"; finally, notice as well as the preponderance of Ps and Ds throughout the stanza. Fun stuff! As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.  FIGHTING KITE   INTRO FRONT CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST

Fighting Kite (pages 12-13)

This poem in Fighting Kite has an interesting history. It was written in an MFA poetry workshop in, probably, 1986. Some 20 years later, I was invited to read my poems on 26 October 2009 in the conference "Unsung Heroes: Asian Pacific American Heroism during World War II" at the Library of Congress. I read "Tatay" and two other poems there, as described in this blog post from that time.         My grandfather in a faded photograph is     a centurion blowing a Christmas party horn,         on his head my foil Roman legionnaire helmet. I remember him smiling like a boddhisatva     as he pulled on scuffed brogans to bail out         my uncle in the drunk tank—Tito Augusto had been brawling again. But in 1933,     Tatay seemed another man. My father         at twelve was circumcised with a couple of buddies. The ring of boys.     The penknife. Blood dwindling.         When Tatay heard, he bent my father over the Army trunk again. Set up     the pitcher and glass. He made his         two-inch-wide leather belt lick the boy’s naked back. Resting, he sipped water, then     got up, belt in hand. My father glanced over         at the pitcher to see how much was left. There were other stories. How after     the Bataan death march, they met, father         and son, in the concentration camp near Capas. Tatay shivered at noon, muttering of     bodies mantled with wings, ashimmer.         My father could see two compounds away, they were burning wood—bark the Igorots     use to cure malaria. My father crept         under the wire. A butterfly’s lazy tango in the glare. That itch     between his shoulderblades. A bead         of sweat. The imperial guard’s boots Page 12         a yard to the left. The Philippine Army     regulars who were burning the wood smirked         when they caught him, gathering branches in his arms. With fists and bare feet     pounding his head and back, did he recall         those rituals of trunk and pitcher? Cradling a bundle of sticks, my father     crawled back. I can see the bark dancing         now in water, next to the cot where Tatay moans in his sleep. I hear my father     singing softly. I can almost make it out, but         I can’t quite place the tune, a Tagalog lullaby. Page 13 Here's what I said about this poem in that 2009 blog post mentioned above: As part of my poetry reading at the symposium, I read the following poem, which describes my father's relationship with my grandfather, my Lolo whom all of us grandchildren and great-grandchildren called simply Tatay, the Filipino word for "father," because he was so much the patriarch for us all. He was a gentle, soft-spoken old man when I knew him, so unlike the chilling stories Papa told me of Tatay's brutal discipline towards him as a child. The poem, one of three I read at the Library of Congress, describes two sides of that relationship: first, how Tatay whipped my father cruelly and routinely, and second, how Papa found Tatay in the Japanese concentration camp and cared for him as he would have his own child. . . . In the poem, I highlight an ironic and iconic difference between Filipinos: the Philippine Army soldiers beat my father because he was a Philippine Scout, that is, a member of the US Army. In this context, because the US Army can no longer protect my father, they see him as too big for his britches because he is a Filipino in the US Army — uppity, someone whom they would see as having previously lorded over them. The irony is that Papa is beaten in order to save the life of the man who used to beat him. Along with "Tatay," I read that day "Honor, 1946" and "Refusal to Write an Elegy," poems that will be discussed later in the Fighting Kite blog posts, since they appear in the book. It was truly an honor to be able to read these poems at the Library of Congress, especially "Tatay," which holds a special place in my poet's heart. As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.  FIGHTING KITE   INTRO FRONT CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST