Koon Woon
(Learning Autobiography)
LNT501
Professor William Kline
University of Illinois at Springfield online
Early Childhood
I was born in a small village in Toishan, China in 1949. At the age of 5, I witnessed a public execution of a landlord. The Communists came to power and instituted land reform, winning the hearts of poor peasants. Thus, their hold on power was secured.
I went to public schools in China and in 1960, came to the US to join my family, who had immigrated before me. My parents had left me to the care of my maternal grandmother. My siblings were all born in the US. Because of historical prejudice against the Chinese immigrants (they actually came as “indentured servants”), I was what was known as a “paper son.” I came under an assumed name. My legal name is Koon Woon, but my real name is Locke.
I arrived in the US at the age of 11 and I began public school education in Aberdeen, Washington, a small logging and fishing town on the Pacific coast. I previously had not spoken a word of English. I made that my first priority out of necessity. Though I also played like other children that age, I learned responsibility early, for I was the oldest of 8 siblings. Immediately I took on a paper route to augment my family’s income, because the only income was my father’s job as a fry cook, at the Smoke Shop Café, owned by the mayor of Aberdeen.
Our family finally, through a loan from a family friend, started a small café when I was 16, and called it the Hong Kong Café. I began working for my family as cook/waiter/chief bottle washer. I learned every phase of operating a café by the time I was 21; I was able to be in charge when they went on vacations.
High School Days
I was a loner from the age of 14 onward, because at that time, before my family had the capital to open up our own restaurant, my father worked as a cook for the China Doll restaurant in an adjacent town. The restaurant was a “cover” for a house of prostitution upstairs. I had to help my father work in the kitchen on weekends until the wee hours of the morn. I saw prostitutes doubled as waitresses, the madam Sally, the bouncer who doubled as a cook, the clients who after a few drinks claimed to be the mayor or the sheriff and eventually the madam got run out of town for blackmailing people.
So, in high school, I hit the books hard because I had no real friends with this kind of secret knowledge and nascent cynicism. I was appointed the literary chairman of our creative writing club in high school. I also excelled in everything else. I went to night school to study calculus with Tom, whose brother later won a Nobel in Physics. I had no social activities, because I had to work at the family restaurant. The last year of high school I got a job with the US postal service. I learned a little about business from family obligations, and later on I was to take only one course in economics, microeconomics, and I received an A+. I remember on one occasion, I read a book called The Economic History of the United States. For my first course in college (I was attending college and high school concurrently), I studied philosophy, and the text we used was called The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner, in addition to the regular introductory course book to philosophy taught by a Stanford graduate. I rather enjoyed the course. I was 18 at the time, going to high school during the day, working a few hours for the post office after school, and attending the local community college in the evening. And on weekends I cooked at the restaurant. And no dates with girls. It is easy to see now how an emotional crisis was in the making.
During high school, I was selected to go to science seminar for bright and gifted high school students, meanwhile, my friend Tom who, at the age of 16, did some original research in Physics and was published in “Science” magazine. Unquestionably Tom was the best science student in our Aberdeen high school, but I was second. My honors English teacher in my senior year, Ms. Gwin, a spinster who taught continuously at Aberdeen high school for over 30 years, wrote on my report card that I was the best student she had in 30 years. I guess I was gifted in languages. I took French for a year and I received national honors. I had taken Spanish in middle school and a year in high school and I was able to get along in Mexico later on when I hitch-hiked there at the age of 21. But that’s getting ahead of our story.
I was awarded a science scholarship when I graduated from high school, which I did not apply for. I did not apply for anything nor volunteer to do anything in school, even though quite a few girls wanted to be my “lab partner” in chemistry. I was also the best chemistry student in high school, and so at the invitation of MIT, I attended their conference in Seattle during my Junior year in high school, when MIT suggested that I apply to their school a year early, but I didn’t do so because I felt obligated to my family, and my father wanted me to go into business with him. And so in some ways, my father had sabotaged my college career.
Sometimes as a waiter at our café, I donned on a waiter’s jacket and filled the salt and pepper shakers, washed the drinking glasses and made tea. During the slow hours I read philosophy. I enjoyed philosophers with a literary bent, people like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and later on John Wisdom. I did not understand much of what they said, but it paved the way to intellectual curiosity in a drab, logging and fishing town, where, in the slow hours of the afternoon in low-blood sugar days, the loggers slapped their silver dollars down on the bar for schooners of Olympia beer. I became interested in the “other worldliness” of thought.
These periods of my life were characterized by seriousness, industriousness, and intense introspection. My father was a typical Confucian who expected his sons to follow his footsteps in scooping up all the riches in America that he can. America, not surprisingly, was originally called “Golden Mountain” by early Chinese indentured servants as well as other immigrants. But history tells us that the rail links in the American West were built by the Chinese, who when they became ill, were thrown off the mountains because food was limited. In the small conservative town of Aberdeen, my mother was forever telling people, “He my son, he good boy.” So, as long as I lived at home, there was a mystification of our real status in America. The loneliness became even more intense, as exhibited by my often driving 50 miles to nowhere and then driving back home. The crab grass along the beach roads in Ocean Shores and the swampy lands near Duck Lake seem to echo my moods. It led me to later read Theodore Roethke’s poetry, his poem “Dolor” made a serious impact on me. I discover the reading of literature. This became the beginning of my real life’s work.
College: a 40-Year Venture
I began college when I was still in high school and when I graduated from high school, I was a sophomore in college. I transferred from Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, Washington to the University of Washington in Seattle in 1969 and majored first in electrical engineering and finding that I had very little enthusiasm for engineering. I switched to mathematics as a major when a couple of graduate mathematics students and I became friends. Actually, I saw an inspirational film about mathematics in high school wherein it was shown that a mathematician could “work” anywhere. That is to say, in the film, the applied mathematician was studying erosion of the river bank and so he was outdoors making notes of vector fields to represent the flow of the river’s water. I thought to myself, “To do this kind of work, all you need is a pad of paper and pencil and your imagination; that’s really far-out!” So, I started spending a lot of time at the Last Exit on Brooklyn coffeehouse in the University District in Seattle, a couple of blocks from campus, where so-called intellectuals hung out.
At the Last Exit coffeehouse I did my homework during the slow hours of the café. I learned to play chess and Go, read books on philosophy, and held conversations with a variety of people who frequent the place – from drug dealers to occasional commercial fishermen, from intellectuals to hustlers, and from students to street people. I got to make friends with people who stayed friends with me until this day --- a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, a mathematician that went to The Advanced Institute at Princeton, the son of a documented CIA agent, and a parade of coffeehouse musicians and poets. So, I took up the guitar. I read books on Zen Buddhism by Dr. Suzuki. I read plays by Jean-Paul Sartre, Ionesco, Beckett, and books by Camus, Kafka, Lorca, John Fowles, Theodore Roethke, and Pablo Neruda and many others. The books roughly fall into two categories --- Philosophy and Literature.
I also spent two consecutive summers in San Francisco, living in North Beach, and hung around Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. I was also in the periphery of the drug culture. But I only did so-called “soft-drugs.” I had an occasional girl friend. And so things were good. I was living off my savings and got a job tutoring math and grading homework papers from the math department. I was blossoming. I attribute that to getting away from my parents and Aberdeen. I was let loose in a university and in a city like a child was left alone in a candy store. Little did I know that I would see “the dentist” in the future.
Disappointment with love led to alcoholism for a number of years. Actually the alcohol merely “masked” my incipient mental illness. I often felt anxious at this time and was not able to carry on a job I had in a psychology lab. I got depressed often and I sometimes slept around the clock. The war in Vietnam was going on and I was ordered for induction. I fought the draft and was given a 4F for administrative reasons. I drifted around for several years, going in and out of school at the University of Washington and also 2 years at the University or Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. Sometimes I would also work for my family at our café. Mental illness was ticking in me like a time-bomb. I had a full-blown psychotic episode in San Francisco at the age of 27 and was involuntarily committed for paranoia delusions at Napa State Hospital. When I was discharged 4 months later, I was diagnosed and given a form of disability payment called SSI and Medicaid. I had to take psychotropic medication religiously.
I could not set foot in a classroom for over 20 years because of anxiety disorders and paranoia ideations. To put it mildly, I was not well. I was hospitalized 12 times. (Here is a poem that may capture something of this experience):
“A Season in Hell”
“When you come in to work each morning,
you got to remove your bodily organs and limbs
one by one, hang them up on the hooks provided
in the walk-in box, and then put a white apron
onto your disembodied self, pick up a knife
and go to the meat block,” said Alex the manager.
I was also drained of blood and other vital bodily fluids.
After the morning rush preparing pork adobo and chicken curry,
I ate lunch with Fong the chief cook and Lee the dishwasher.
In the afternoon I examined souls and kept the merits and demerits in a ledger.
For the three months I worked at City Lunch near the Bart Station,
I paid my rent and gradually I became robust enough to walk to work.
The entire city of San Francisco swung with the rhythm of my walk.
And stars appeared in the middle of the afternoon with a sliver of the moon.
Meanwhile, at Fisherman’s Wharf the stingrays came to the jetty
and whipped their tails against rocks; tourists paid me to dance
on the waves. I carefully treaded water and remembered to breathe.
In the end I was evicted anyway from my castle that glowed at night.
For a lack of a better thing to do I walked from hill top to hill top,
burned newspapers to inhale the smoke, then climbed down to the water
beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and harvested seaweed.
I waited until one sunny day when the water was warm and calm.
I swam all the way to Asia and got replacements for my disembodied self.
I did not forget that I was a ghost.
And that was my first season in Hell.
Koon Woon
Despite these hardships, which included 3 times of homelessness, brief jail experiences due to the acting out of my illness, and dire poverty, I kept myself intact by writing poetry and doing volunteer work until I published a book of poetry at age 49. This eventually gave me confidence to return to college and finally earned my BA degree in Liberal Studies at Antioch University Seattle. Now what I need to talk about is my literary development.
Learning Styles: Good and Faulty
I am a paradoxical learner in the sense that I am a book learner on the one hand and on the other hand very much an experiential learner. Sometimes I hit the right combination and sometimes they mishmash.
Going way back in childhood I was not a person who respected authority, unless authority demonstrated reason as well. It probably was that my father was absent the first 12 years of my life, and I was the “little emperor” to my maternal grandmother who reared me. But my maternal uncle, Uncle Sum, I dearly loved.
On any pretext, I would walk 3 or so miles, beginning at age 5, from my village to his in Sui Poh. My Uncle would instruct his wife to slaughter and cook a chicken and give me one of the thighs for dinner. The other chicken thigh goes to his youngest son. Before dinner, however, there will be a session on the abacus. He taught me the numerical chants that went with the flicking of the beads on the tray of the abacus, which literally went faster than conscious thought. This way, one made oneself into a “computer” that follows an “algorithm.” In addition to abacus lessons, Uncle Sum would recap stories of his life as a merchant and later as a farmer. He had done many things during the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930’s to the successful Communist take over in 1949. He had been an arms runner. When the Communists took power in 1949, they asked him to be “mayor.” He refused their offer, as my Uncle is a strict Confucian and a Taoist. They asked him why he would indulge in such a “rich refusal.” He said, “Undoubtedly you will ask me to name my relatives who have money, but I do not wish to generate animosity with them.”
The authorities said, “But we are in power now!”
To this, my Uncle Sum said, “Yes, but I do not know how long your government would last, but my relatives last forever!”
He was a village leader, the same way my own father was a village leader. My great-grandfather had immigrated to the US back in the 1860’s and was instrumental in conscripting 500 men from the Locke clan to work in the logging industry. Later on, these men settled in many small towns of Washington State and in time, “grew” the first US governor of Chinese descent, Gary Locke, who is the current Secretary of Commerce under President Obama.
Perhaps some of the leadership traits are in me also, for I founded a multicultural literary magazine, Chrysanthemum, and I operated a Goldfish Press in Seattle since 1990. My own work in poetry reaches out internationally. I have published an award-winning book, The Truth in Rented Rooms, which was given recognition by the Poetry Society of America.
Thus, I am able to learn by myself. First, I learned English well enough within a few years to become literary chairman of my high school. With the same literary interests, I was catapulted into national recognition for my poetry. In a similar vein, I had taught myself guitar, journalism, editing, and publishing. And in business formations, I have now a sole proprietorship, an S-corporation, and a charitable, nonprofit organization devoted to the advancement of literature and world peace.
However, the down side of this is that I do not ask questions and I am generally afraid of authority. I have an ego problem that is also paradoxical. Most of the time, I think I am reasonably intelligent, but sometimes, I swear on my mother’s grave that I am as big of an idiot as they would come, like the hillbilly song, “Well, it is T for Texas and T for Tennessee, but it is W for women, who made a fool out of me.”
Learning Traits
I am mainly a self-directed and self-taught person, despite the fact that I have attended many schools and have taken many subjects. I would say that I am a life-long learner for several reasons. These reasons will explain why I am still a student at age 61, why I still have so many different interests both academically and non-academically, and why I covet intellectual achievements.
One may not be far from the truth that I am reaching very high because of self-doubts of my worth. It is as in the poem by the French poet Henri Michaux, who penned: “It is because of a little lack, my hopes go way up, to infinity almost…”
Because mental illness struck me at the most creative and intellectually productive years of my life (in my twenties for a mathematician), I always felt “cheated” in a way. A lot of self-doubt crept into my psyche. The remedy seems that I learn and relearn the basics over and over again. And that’s why today I still have my hands in math (the simple stuff) by being a tutor for hire. I work privately as well as for a tutoring agency
Purpose of the Writing Life
The literary magazine, Chrysanthemum, that I published for about twenty years, is an attempt to include poets and writers of every persuasion, whether it is racial, cultural, or sexual orientation. I am most interested in the idea of a writer’s identity. Because of the fact that I am bicultural and bilingual, in addition to having had a variety of life experiences, that sometimes I truly cannot know “reality” as such as the fall-out from my mental illness. Thus, I am interested in psychology, philosophy, and literary theory to the extent of understanding the nature of literature and the writer. For Literature, I use the old definition – the study of life. Therefore, it is imperative that a writer knows who he is and whom he writes for. Moreover, I see literature as a form of healing of our psychic wounds from the daily toils of living, sometimes very competitively.
I have taken various psychology, anthropology, sociology, humanity, philosophy, and literary theory courses in order to embark on a serious study of the identity of the writer. A writer writes mostly because he is compelled to. Whether a writer is afflicted with that irresistible urge in his way to set the world right again or whether he writes only for his own enjoyment, I believe that no writer comes with carte blanche. He pays his dues. And his dues are exactly what he owes humanity for being what it is. And so my aim is to point out, to say, “Look! There is the truth. It is not theorizing, it is what you know by looking.”
To this end, my degree will be interdisciplinary – literary theory and the writer’s identity. I shall borrow from psychology, philosophy, and any of the humanistic studies to produce literature. I believe I have set the course for myself, and if an observer merely looks, he or she can see that I have studied and applied literature to good use – the chief among those uses is therapy. In this search for wholeness, the idea is to write, read, write, to live, and to write, and to live!
The Value of Self-directed and Experiential Learning:
This I think is where I have an advantage. What was bashfulness in speaking with professors and higher authorities turns out in my favor as far as experiential learning goes. I am not suggesting that being stubborn and never asking questions is the right way to go, on the contrary, what I am saying is that that is the way to go ultimately, but only as a last resort. Let me explain.
Self-discovery is a wonderful thing. And ultimately, what works for me is excelling in a field that I have chosen for myself. And this came at a great financial and an economic opportunity loss for me. But I don’t regret it. I have discovered who I am and what my goals in life are. I have chosen a literary life.
A literary life is merely a life in books, or is it? Let me go back to the old definition:
“Literature is the study of life.” Then, in this, there is no difference between literature and philosophy as Socrates had said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Therefore, experiential learning is the examination of one’s life – its values and its worth as one lives it.
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