A TALE OF TWO LOVES (one fictional and one very real)

TALE #1 (fictional)

Now that summer has hit in all its full summertime thermal fury, the local course of daily activities here demands that one takes care of most of one’s more effort-dependent concerns in the cool of the morning’s relatively mild weather, since by noon the same solar furnace that apocryphally melted Daedalus’ waxen feathered wings some eons ago tries to unleash all its powers of Hydrogen fusive hell on us Earth-bound humming beans.

The usual routine for me has become one of taking in the High Noon local news on the chube, once the solar zenith has been reached, but I’ll also occasionally check out the local (‘free’ commercial broadcast network) movie channel to see if by some quirk of luck, something of genuine merit is showing. Yesterday the fickle finger of fate winked favorably at me when I dialed up that channel, in the form of a 1994 movie titled ‘GOLDEN GATE’. Hmmm, thinketh I, that’s (the movie’s title) a bit amorphous, allowing little or no pre-inkling of what the film’s content concerned itself with. But, giving a virtual forebrain shrug, I stayed put there for a few minutes to watch events unfold and rather suddenly found myself caught up in one of those rare movies that profoundly MOVES me. The title (‘GOLDEN GATE’), which only rather loosely hints at the plot, refers specifically to San Francisco, and even more specifically to the large Chinese-American population found in that fabulously storied city by the bay (where I was born, actually).

‘GOLDEN GATE’ concerns a young Federal Bureau of Investigation agent attached to the San Francisco Office, back in the post-war 50s era, when America was obsessed with the notion that there was a dirty rotten ‘Commie’ hiding behind every pebble on the beach. In the course of this agent’s work, the ‘bureau’ decides to investigate the Chinese-American community in the city, due to the emergence of Mao Zhedung’s uniquely Chinese form of Communism (the Chinese Peoples Republic in 1949) and assigns the young agent to surveil certain individuals in the Chinatown so as to determine whether there is an active cell of Chinese Communist sympathisers.

One of the Chinese men the agent investigates is named Song, who along with a great many others in the Chinatown community sends a large part of his meager wages back to his mother (or family) in China. However, try as it will, the bureau fails to find any overt evidence of actual political activism in support of Mao, despite immense pressure from J. Edgar Hoover himself to produce something tangible. The FBI remains stumped, finding nothing legally admissible as evidence to document that suspicion, until the young agent, in reviewing the facts of Song’s life, unintentionally provides the bureau with a gambit to prosecute Song (by mentioning that ‘…all he does is send money back to his mother in China’). Seizing upon that politically meaningless and entirely innocent action, the bureau soon succeeds in charging Song with illegally exporting US currency to support the Communist regime.

A trial ensues and Song, illegally and wrongfully framed by the FBI, is convicted of the charges and sentenced to 10 years in Federal prison. The agent, meanwhile, finds himself haunted by a strong sense of having wrongful carried out his duties by the time sentencing has been completed and Song remanded. Collapsing to his knees after the arrest, filled with intense personal regret in a small rainy alley of Chinatown near Song’s tenement, he encounters a small Chinese girl of about 8 years who approaches him, pulls out a handkerchief, and offers it to him, dabbing at his eyes with apparent concern and sympathy. The scene fades and 10 years pass.

During those 10 years, the agent has continued to maintain his surveillance of Song’s family, owing to a strong and conflicting mixture of intense personal regret and curiosity about the awful results of his own moral duplicity.

One day he notes a beautiful young Chinese woman who emerges from the top of the tenement to hang laundry on the roof’s clothesline to dry. In the midst of this, she appears stricken with sudden grief and collapses, sobbing inexplicably before returning to the roof’s exit, overcome with intense sorrow. The agent shortly discovers that this is Song’s daughter, now a graceful and lovely woman of about 18 years, who has carried on for her father, supporting the family while he was in prison.

[Only near the end of the movie did it dawn on me that this beautiful young Chinese woman was the same small child who had comforted him 10 years earlier in the alley, but he appears not to have noted this fact himself; so great is that yawning chasm that separates puerile childhood from mature womanhood that it often blinds men to the obvious]. At any rate, the agent continues to keep a close watch over the young woman, given that her convicted (and blameless) father has now been released from prison. The father (Song) for his part has been completely devastated by the wrongful accusations of Communist sympathy and the effects on him of his diminished self-respect and personal dignity are such that he shortly jumps to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge, suffering from intolerable shame. Just before he does so, however, he turns upon the agent who has been shadowing him and curses him to a fate of suffering what it is like to be a Chinese person in white America…

The agent’s already strong sense of guilt thus further strengthened, he arranges to meet the young woman and offer his help, claiming that he was an attorney who had worked her father’s case and knew of his innocence. The woman (played rather sublimely by lovely Chinese actress Joan Chen), quickly warms to him, believing his explanation of why he wants to help her, and rather quickly finds herself romantically drawn to him as well.

After several months, however, she suddenly discovers his true identity and become enraged by what she perceives as a most cruel deception, wrecking his apartment and painting wrathful Chinese ideogramatic slogans in blood on his walls while he is at work, before departing forever. When the agent returns to find this, he is overwhelmed with even stronger and more intense grief than before, but she is now permanently gone and there is no possible recovery of their mutual former love.

Flash forward a few more years to the late 60s and the agent is still in the San Francisco office of the bureau, but the young woman has by now enrolled in graduate courses at Berkeley’s University of California campus, where in the course of taking Asian studies she encounters a fiery, radical young Japanese-American man whose naturalized American parents had suffered unjust internment at the hands of their adopted country during the war. He soon discovers the story of her father’s unjust persecution and persuades her to work with him to bring the story out in hopes of vindicating her father’s ruined reputation.

Their confabulation takes place on the UC Berkeley campus, right in the midst of the student unrest stemming from the Vietnam War and during the throes of the Free Speech Movement initiated by student radical Mario Savio (a period I actually lived through myself as a resident of Berkeley and student there at that time). Meanwhile, the agent’s surveillance partner reveals this fact to the bureau who then sets about entrapping the young man by raiding his apartment and taking a ‘lid’ of grass found there as evidence to arrest him. Fortunately, the young man has wealthy parents and he is soon released on bail, but still faces prosecution on drug (possession of grass) charges.

Shortly after the young man is released, during a violent student protest on the campus championing Song’s persecution, the daughter’s new activist friend is chased into a campus washroom by several riot police, who begin to savagely beat him. Their violence is interrupted by the agent, who intervenes and tells them to ‘go have fun elsewhere’, confronting the young man himself. Asking him if he loves her, and determining that he does, the agent then throws the FBI dossier containing Song’s case at the suspicious young man, telling him that he is giving this evidence to him to right a long-standing wrong, and suggests that he take it to the media. Before he leaves the bathroom, he also flushes the baggie full of evidence down the toilet.

The agent, meanwhile sees the young woman one last time in passing, at which time she offers to return the folio with the evidence of the bureau’s misdeeds regarding her father’s case to him, saying that she cannot possibly redeem her father without simultaneously ruining him; touched by his act, she finds she still loves him. They kiss passionately, but it is, as he points out, ‘an impossible love’ and wishes her well before they part for the last time, telling her that he is content to pay the karmic price for his earlier deceits and deceptions.

The movie closes with a scene showing the young woman marrying the young student activist (he Japanese-American and she Chinese-American, a symbolic statement of changing ethnic traditions characterized by the 70s), followed by the final scene in which the agent, his own life now thoroughly ruined, retraces the same path her father took to an abutment of the bridge and himself leaps to his death.

The movie is a powerful one, the screenplay having been written by Asian-American dramatist David Henry Hwang and itself a brilliant attempt to weave many complexly contemporaneous events into a strongly compelling story. Sadly, the Movie suffers from rather inept direction (so we are told in several reviews of the film) by Englishman John Madden (Ethan Fromme, etc.). Chen, a scintillatingly lovely woman and skilled actress, is compelling in her role as Song’s daughter, although the agent (played by actor Matt Dillon) fails to convince us, ultimately, that the right male actor was selected for his role. As for me, despite my vaunted attempt at playing the ‘strong silent male’ type person I like to feign I am, I was more than somewhat moved by the film and the exquisitely poignant pathos that underlay it. I would strongly recommend this film to any and all who consider themselves students of Asian and Asian-American culture, and most particularly to any and all who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, or who attended UC Berkeley back in the raging torrent we today call the ‘Free Speech Protest Movement’ that eventually hastened America’s withdrawal from that unpopular war in Southeast Asia.

TALE #2 (a true one)

After I returned to the Bay Area in 1969 from my service in the Air Force, I settled back into the comfortable Berkeley digs that were for me such a cathartic experiential catalyst in forming my own adult outlooks and perceptions.

It was during the course of my work at what is now the Summit Medical Center (near the Oakland/Berkeley border) that I got involved in the student protest movement then raging in Berkeley. Since I was maintaining a demanding daily schedule of work and instruction at that facility, my far-left-of-center political sentiments were of necessity tempered by the imperative of NOT getting arrested (and have my own reputation and career opportunities thusly damaged), so I was always quite careful to stay close to, but somewhat away from the dead-center eye of the storm that usually fixed on Sproul Plaza (and/or Telegraph Avenue, near Sather Gate). Despite this needful caution, I was still in fact right there taking everything in and peripherally partaking in the daily protests.

Meanwhile, while living and working in Berkeley, I was also studying Asian studies, having found myself captivated at first by the far eastern philosophy that inspired the Beats (especially poet Gary Snyder and writer Jack Kerouac), a personal focus that shifted more broadly to include the cultures, histories and civilisations of both China and Japan. When I found the opportunity, I also managed to wander around Berkeley and the campus taking pictures, photography being another of my hobbies at that time. As my interests in Asian culture expanded proportionately, I began studying Asian-American culture as a natural extension of my focus on things Asian and it isn’t difficult to guess that I was also quite smitten with the graceful beauty and internal strength of Asian-American women, many of whom I was surrounded by on the Berkeley campus. Early on, I resolved that if I ever married, it wouldn’t be to a Caucasian woman, but to either a Japanese-American or Chinese-American woman, and my activities on the periphery of those cultures in San Francisco and Berkeley simply affirmed that this was in truth a perfectly rational and fulfillable quest.

Of course, as a relatively poor (if employed) medical person who wasn’t an MD (I was a technologist), my value to any prospective Asian-American parents was absolutely ZERO, a fact I well knew augured strongly against any such ultimate success, even if I did met ‘the right woman’. The fact that I tend to be a rather low-key, somewhat reserved person didn’t help much, either, since at that early point in life women usually are not as interested in finding a serious mate than they are in hitching up with a suitably ‘dangerous’ and exciting ‘bad boy’ type. It wasn’t that I was inherently interesting, since after all, I was a rock-climber, a photographer, a social revolutionary (plenty of time spent at local Irish bars and student hangouts), an aviation person, a surfer, a writer and artist; however, even if Asian-American women may have been hormonally drawn to ‘dangerous’ types, their parents, whom they were compelled to categorically obey (at least back in those days) efficiently saw to it that only potential future doctors, lawyers and wealthy young men had access to their daughters. My personal (and honest) preference for Chinese & Japanese cuisine, hours spent taking Chinese & Japanese language lessons and studying Asian art & history cut me precious little slack with potential Asian in-laws, but the fact that I was also a dreaded white barbarian (the common Cantonese term for which is ‘Guai Loh’) also doubtless earned me no small amount of additional serious parental disapprobation on that score!

So there I was, continually being edged out by canny Asian parents preferentially fixated on young Asian suitors who were future doctors or lawyers. Needless to say, it wasn’t my idea of how things ought to be going, despite my knowledge of all these biases and prejudices maintained by Asians against non-Asians, but these were formidable barriers to overcome.

One day, however, things changed rather dramatically when I left Summit Medical Center, accepting a position as the technical director (vice ‘medical director’, who is always an MD) of the cardiopulmonary laboratory at the Alameda County Medical Facility (nee Highland General Hospital, a sort of ‘Cook County Hospital’ of the East San Francisco Bay Area). My new duties included directing and carrying out all pulmonary function lab diagnostics there, as well as scrubbing in on all invasive cardiac procedures (read: cardiac catheterisations, pace-maker implants, etc.). In this capacity, I circulated daily with the house staff and attending physicians, as we carried out the critical care aspects of our hospitalized patients' treatment. Since Highland Hospital was a premier west coast teaching hospital, we extensively employed residents and interns in our operations, drawing post-doctoral students from all over the United States.

Among these were a handful of Asian-American residents and interns, naturally enough, since both New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area have particularly large Asian subcultures, with a consequent need for physicians to provide them with suitable health care. It didn't take me long to spot one in particular, a Chinese-American named Ma Su-Ling, whose lovely looks and graceful nature quickly caught my eye as she shouldered the traditionally horrific burdens borne by all resident and intern house staff in completing their residencies.

Su-Ling lived in San Francisco, sharing a flat with another Japanese-American intern incongruously named ‘Cookie’ (I was told NEVER to use this pet name, for reasons unknown) and she certainly turned my head with her lithe figure, long dark hair and cute little snub of an almost-nose. Hidden behind that very lovely Chinese face, however, was a formidable intelligence, as well as a strong determination to succeed that few discovered in her at the onset. In that sense she was the perfect epitome of what I like to call the ‘iron fist in the velvet glove’, or internal fortitude and strength that often belies the beautiful Asian feminine exterior. [I compare this to the typical American WASP female counterpart, who maintains a fierce and assertive exterior over a very soft and tender core: quite the opposite of the typical Asian woman who wears her strength internally, where it is hidden from view.]

Su-Ling, I soon learned after asking her out for Chinese noodles (at a cheap Richmond District Chinese restaurant where a huge bowl of Chow Fun, enough to feed three, was to be had for only $2.25!), had accepted her internship at Highland after completing her undergraduate and medical studies in New York City (U of NY, Brigham & Women’s Hospital/Peter Bent Brigham). Little would I have guessed that throughout her undergrad studies she had been an ardent Young Maoist, a political proclivity fostered by her then-boyfriend, a fiery radical New York Chinese Maoist student similar to the one in the story about Song’s daughter (i.e. in the movie ‘GOLDEN GATE’). To visualise this remarkable young woman as a barricade-mounting, slogan shouting supporter of Mao’s Chinese radical Communism certainly took a considerable stretch of the imagination, but it was a plausible indication of the youthful fire and determination she formerly possessed, although now considerably mellowed by the sheer necessity of hewing to traditional, customary medical education practices that demanded qualities more in line and compatible with the hide-bound American Medical Establishment.

Thus, over the course of several years (beginning in the late 70s), Su-Ling and I found ourselves drawn together on a path that seemingly promised marital permanency at its terminus. After we had been together for a while, she finally shared with me that she was what is known as a ‘paper daughter’, a status relating back to the virulently prejudicial Chinese Exclusion Laws of the early 1900s, whereby one had to prove one’s status as a close relative of a Chinese person already in the country in order to be granted legal US residency. A ‘paper relative’ often took the name of a non-related Chinese person who was already in the US and claimed to be a member of their immediate family (i.e. son or daughter, in most cases).

Su-Ling, despite her formidable academic accomplishments, lived in substantial fear of being discovered as a ‘paper daughter’ and hence this was something no one other than a VERY close and implicitly trusted person ever found out. The fact that Su-Ling entrusted her future and safety to me by virtue of this confidence was therefore, in one sense, an act of supreme love and trust.

And so it went for several years, as we explored life together in our off hours, going on mountain hikes, trips to the seashore with my Alaskan Malamute dog (‘Chugatch’) and outings to the Nature Friends Touistenverien (NF/TVN) chapter clubhouse I belonged to in Marin County. I was hopelessly in love with her, myself, despite the fact that a number of her closer peers among the residents, interns and attending physicians gave mild evidence of being somewhat scornful of my status as a mere ‘high-grade chimpanzee’ (or non-MD), regarding us as professionally somehow ‘unsuited’ for each other. I merely tolerated their high-hatted disdain, since I was quite firmly determined to share a life with this gorgeous and capable young woman (but I think their disapprobation eventually did influence her to an appreciable extent).

Perhaps setting the stage for future misunderstandings, we never discussed our intents in life together to any serious degree and I do know that a few of my rather eclectic hobbies (aviation life support technology and the collection of relevant artifacts such as aircraft ejection seats!) rather worried her. However, Su-Ling was there for me during what was perhaps the most disturbing breech of character (I won’t go into detail, since I am still loathe to discuss this event that lies deeply buried almost 35 years in the past; suffice it to say it dealt with a sportscar club I belonged to and leave it at that) I have ever experienced, and her support was ample evidence of not just love, but loyalty of the sort I would hope to have in a spouse or mate truly closest to my heart. I still recall lying there in bed with her in that small flat in San Francisco, trying hard not to cry as she comforted me with loving words of understanding and ancient grandmother wisdom; it is a scene that will always reside inside my brain, amidst all the shields of denial and disavowal that now secure it.

By this time, she had traded her decrepit old Volvo in for an equally old, but far classier VW micro-bus (at my strong behest, of course), and had bought a small home in an Oakland neighborhood not far from Highland Hospital. Moving in with her, we began a hopeful new phase of our domestic life together. To make it all even more perfect, directly adjacent to ‘our’ new home lived a couple consisting of a Jewish-American man and a Chinese-American woman, who had a very small and delightful daughter named Shannia. Shannia quickly became everyone’s precious little darling and many were the times when we ‘borrowed’ her to take kites up into the higher slopes of the Berkeley Hills to catch the strong on-shore breezes that delighted all of us. She was exactly the sort of wonderful little daughter that I told myself I wanted to eventually create with Su-Ling.

Sometime between moving into the new home and the date of our eventual break-up (about two years subsequent), Su-Ling came into contact with a fellow who had come to the door one day seeking gardening and home handyman work. As it turned out, this fellow was a pre-law student at UC Berkeley and was supplementing his income in this manner, employing a modest range of skills and abilities that included carpentry, horticulture and odd-jobbing. Since I was a typical ‘Berkeley guy’, socialized into accepting the prevailing PC wisdom that the women’s movement promulgated (e.g. that women could have strictly platonic male ‘friends’ with no deeper erotic overtones), I paid scant attention to him as he puttered around the house, building a deck and doing some repairs on the exterior. Until, that is, a time when Su-Ling announced that she would be taking off in the VW van for ‘a few days with the girls’ (presumably her female intern friends) at the beach near Big Sur. OK, fine. No problem. Until I noticed after she was gone that the sexy new emerald green tank-suit I had gotten for her as a birthday present (she used to wear a horrible old cloth two-piece suit that looked like Queen Victoria’s hand-me-down bloomers) was conspicuously missing in the drawer with her garments.

Why, puzzled I, would she suddenly take that very sexy and alluring Lycra suit with her to play around with a bunch of women? Of course I didn't grasp the more obvious clues until she returned and asked her about the trip. After a bit of digging, it finally came out that she and the young pre-law guy had gone to Carmel in pursuit of a private affair they had initiated!

Without going into unnecessary details about all this, this constituted to me a heinous betrayal of the sort that typically pains 'macho' men more than any other domestic transgression, marital or otherwise: the thought that a man’s woman would go to bed with someone else..! Women, naturally, are a bit different in their understanding and interpretations of such sexual indiscretions, and also true, this was a time of sexual revolution as well; but to a man, a betrayal like this is invariably the utmost and most supremely unforgivable insult to his vaunted masculinity. It was not long afterwards that I moved out of her home into a small apartment on Grove Street (now Martin Luther King Street…of course).

[It didn’t escape me at the time that formerly radical Young Maoist Su-Ling had by this time become the paragon of a conventional, upper middle class American physician, totally divorced from all her former far-left-of-center political views, whilst I, coming from a conservative, somewhat right-of-center Irish-German-French family was becoming an avowed radical in my own right. Two ships passing each other allegorically in the night, steaming in opposite directions. Such, I suppose, are merely further examples of the bemusing ironies of the human life experience. After all, as life has shown so many times, after so many years of observing such things, all human erotic interactions are invariably 25% random, chaotic chance, 50% hormonal urges, and 25% (or so) pure, dumb luck.]

Ironically, a year before this final break Su-Ling had suddenly become aware of the fact that she was pregnant with my child (a year or so before she had completed her residency in Internal Medicine), and had had our newly created spark of human life terminated through an abortion in San Francisco. Although I never had learned whether it would have been a boy or a girl, I remain convinced that it was not the little girl I had so hoped for, but a boy, since the coital maneuvering we had engaged in that led to the pregnancy is almost physiologically guaranteed to result in a male offspring (enough said about that). To this day, I still think about that baby that was never to be and the fact that it is the only child I have ever gladly & willingly helped create, regardless of its gender.

To me, ANY child coming from her would have been a gift beyond value and a priceless affirmation of the exquisite and boundless love I felt for Su-ling at that time. It remains a personal tragedy of the most profound proportion that I lost her in such a betrayal.

Looking back on this personal ‘story of Golden Gate’, I am still filled with bittersweet feelings of a lost love that usually only comes once in anyone’s life. It was, simply enough, another impossible love with a number of similar ties to that depicted in the fictional tale that inspired the movie ‘GOLDEN GATE’…and therein lies the story

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EPILOGUE: Su-Ling ended up marrying that pre-law student after we parted, who eventually became a Juris Doctor and who now has a successful law practice in the South San Francisco Bay Area. Su-Ling finished her residency and now works, as she has for the previous 30 years, as a family practitioner in the Kaiser Permanente Health Corporation. They have one natural daughter of their own and also adopted the cutest little Chinese girl from the mainland, and are, for all I know, living a very fulfilling a mutually meaningful life together as a loving family. I certainly wish all of them well, despite the raw feeling of betrayal that still smarts a bit to this day, several decades after the event. Su-Ling ended up with a suitably affluent husband, one with the requisite income earning capabilities her parents would have approved of and thus ends the story, for all practical purposes. Shannia, that wonderful little daughter of our mutual neighbors, grew up to survive her parents’ divorce, and after a somewhat rocky adolescence, completed her PhD and is today a full professor. As a die-hard romantic of the old school, however, there are still those occasional moments on a fog shrouded beach along the California Coast when I find myself alone and filled with longing and nostalgia, wondering what life would be like now had we remained together. Sigh.

Interestingly enough, during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, time and time again it became obvious that the FBI was actively trying to disrupt student protests through the use of patently illegal actions (i.e. planting evidence, using informants, wire-tapping and trying to entrap and frame certain key protest leaders like Mario Savio, et al). I well recall the distinct shock I felt when undeniable evidence of these illegal FBI activities came to light and were widely publicised. It was a sad epiphany for me to realise that such things were actually commonplace in modern America, and that 'legal illegality' and corruption existed then (as they still do) in the highest halls of 'free America'.

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Note: For some odd and inexplicable reason, my WINDOWS/WORD 2013 document software does NOT like to interact harmobniously with the AUTHOR'S DEN Blog software. It will not permit me to enhance the script as one would normally, nor will it allow me to make the type larger so as to spare you needless eye strain. Pending further explanations from AUTHOR'S DEN, please accept my apologies for this highly annoying status quo.