i wrote this to show how sterio types on Chinese were viewed in the 19 and 20th century america. the song was writen by john prine off his pink Cadillac album. all historical content was from "the things they carried" by takashi.
My Fu Manchu
I stepped outside the confection shop and sat down on a crate in the alley so I could squander my treasure. I pulled from my pocket a handful of meticulously wrapped gum. I ripped away the gold lining and threw it to the air. The wind took it up and carried it a million miles away. My sticky dirty fingers thumbed the wad, molding and distorting the character of the gum in such a way that it took on new meaning. I popped it into my mouth and bit down on it. As I chewed, my tongue manipulated it, twisted it, and contorted it in such a way that it took on a see-through form. I opened up my lunges and blew some life into it. It expanded and grew into a large mass. This bubble grew and grew to an unimaginable size that it blocked my sight in every direction. All I saw was this bubble. No alley way, no California, no Angle Island, just me alone and this expanding bubble. I blew harder and harder but it would not burst. Crazed by the thought that this bubble would eventually reach the Far East coast, I pulled out my jack knife and stabbed it in the back. The bang was loud, almost deafening. Everyone must have heard it, but people were still walking the streets as though it was nothing. I sat there trying to pick the gum from my face and hair, then I noticed a strange man peeping around the corner of the building at me.
“I hear ye bang. Aiya hear it to”, he said.
A Fu Manchu, I thought. I was scared at what stood before me; a sneaky little man dressed in silky night clothes with a long black braid atop his narrow sinister face and two thin whiskers that flowed down his ras-callion chin.
“I hear ye bang!” He said again. He cupped his gold bladed fingernails together, bowing his head with those red slanting eyes as if he was a sewer rat.
In my fathers voice I yelled to him, “Chinkie, Chinkie, Chinamen! Where do you come from, where do you live? My teacher says you’re the spooky crook! My neighbor says you’re the murderer of little boys in the back of the laundry shops. Do you own a laundry shop?”
“Ahh”, he said. “Me wash-ee all, me clean-ee all”, in his naïve, childlike way.
“Me show ye Chinatown, my Canton slum, my Gold Mountain. Ye come quick!” He pulled out hundreds of gold wrapped sugar candies from a white pillow case and handed them to me. Big bold letters stamped on the tops “made in Hawaii.” I stuffed them into the dark brig of my pocket until they could no longer move. My mouth began to salivate and fill up like an ocean while I thought of my bound treasure.
“Me show you the way”. He handed me is long black braid and we skipped down the street. I yanked and swung the queue from side to side as I kept in step with him.
He began to sing again.
“Well, the moon is yellow and the people are too. They roll eggs on a barb-b-que. I was feeling kinda cocky with the head full of sake. Down in Chinatown”.
As we rounded the corner and stepped into Chinatown, the sky went black. The streets were made of railroad ties and painted in fake gold paint. I tripped on a rail road spike. As I fell I bit my tong and smashed my knee. I spit out some blood and then it disappeared, without any trace. When I turned back, the spike had turned to gold with a Irish flag stamped on its top. My fall had opened up a crack in the pavement and I could scrape the yellowy paint as if it was paper. Underneath the thin layer was cheep iron. The gutters were overflowing with garbage and plague. There were echoes of muffled coughing through the drainage grates.
“My butcher says there are opium dens and caged women down in your tunnels! Is that true?”
The Fu Manchu began to sing again,
“There were dragons flyin’ kites high above the stores. Dead fish heads laying on the floor. I got a sideways hickey from a slant-eyed Chicky. Down in Chinatown. They smelled like fish. We smelled like meat. Sucking on a soda pop, oh so sweet. Got a sugar rush that’ would make a nigger blush. Down in Chinatown.”
We walked along the sidewalks where the shop keepers stood. Merchants sold red lacquered bowls, witch doctors grounded baby bones, shoe makers hammered skin into soles, oranges and grapes, too expensive for purchase was out for diplay, mountains of dead fish with open mouths and bulging eyes had been piled high. Thousands of dried rats hung from the ceiling by their tails ready for purchase. The smell of death was intoxicating.
Other stores had large steel cages with teary eyed China dolls singing, “Lookee two bits, feelee floor bits, doee six bits”. The sidewalks were littered with Bachelor parties. 4,000 twin brothers sat at small tables gambling, smoking opium, and talking about dreams they could not remember. Pints of brown syrupy sludge caked on the sides of the Glasses were lifted up in celebration.
He led me to the beginning of an alley and he pointed his fingers up the mountaineer’s wall. There were celestials in wicker baskets hanging on strings. Repelling down the steep walls from a thousand feet up. We could hear them laughing. They made a game out of who could get back to the top the fastest. The men on the top scrambled to pull them up as fast as they could, while the looser was blown to bits and rained on us like ash.
My heathen Chinee sang once more.
“Won ton, two ton, three ton, four. Smoke a cigarette throw it on the floor. I killed a pie faced mothey with a shoeshine clothy. Down in Chinatown”.
My Fu Manchu pulled out his long stinky pipe and inhaled a white dream of smoke. He led me along the black scurvy alleyway filled with dead China men who were flung in heaps of chard burnt piles. Babies cried out to them from the dank gutters. Above me, men who hung and swayed like yellow angles off the fire escapes by their braids. Through the tight cramped windows there were Chinese husbands and white American brides locked in an eternal fatal embraces.
Three decades later, we arrived at the shop, his Eight Pound Lively-hood.
We entered his cage where the purest white garments hung millions. Red hot steam rose from the boilers and washtubs. The exhausted gas lanterns burned inside the inferno. A few sharp tooth heathens hunched over their work as they chattered in an uncivilized tongue.
They scurried like rats when they saw me looking down at them. A demoness slithered through the red fabric curtain from the back. Her hair braided up to form two sharp points. She lurked from the black with the same glowing red eyes transfixed on me. The concubine gracefully wobbled with her pointed toes and twisted back, towards us.
“She just like picture, my Fu Manchu said. She no have rash scratch fever, no ichi ichi.”
“I have never seen a dragon lady,” “No Asian Mammy outside the cages in California before,” I said.
She came closer and snached my arm with her boney sharp fingers. “Ah, she said, a plump little demon, he cute. Me in the back, you never see me. Workee, Workee! Seven am to one am all week long.
She studied my eyes, hair, teeth, and clothes. She petted me and smelled my skin, “You smell like meat”, she hissed with her dragon tong. I thought she was going to eat me, so I ran back outside. I felt uneasy in the four block ghetto as though I was a foreigner in this American colony. I caught a wiff of dried boned duck feet and salted duck eggs from the shop next door. I wanted to get away from my China town.
My Fu Manchu came out from his shop.
“Confucius say, we exist only if you come back”.
He let me grab his braid and I gave it a Yankity Yank. I snapped like a whip and yelled “Giddy-up!”
He trotted merrily down the gilded ghetto road colored by a magical golden marker. We stayed clear of the ghostly murals painted on the walls. Hundreds of Chinese stood frozen in time holding their pick axes, hammers, and railroad spikes. We looked up at the laundry lines that cris crossed from both sides of the street that held the colony together. Women and children rushed to work and school in their modern betty dresses. Fathers and Grandfathers sat on milk create staring off to foreign forgotten place. Two China men engaged in a sword fight danced mechanically on the corner. Their costumes so rich in color, became a blurred flash of yellow fusion. Coins flew from the tops of the buses by an audience of hundreds.
Fu Manchu laughed and said, “Ah! Tricky, Tricky.”
At the last step of the block there was a tiny hole cut into it. Just big enough for me to escape through. The curtain was a bloodied red color and above it rained rocks and stones. I was just about to slip through the white glowing hole when my Fu Manchu said, “Now don’t forget what I told you. The moonie is yellow and the people are too. They roll eggs on the bar-b-que. I was feeling kinda cocky with a head full of Saiki. Down in Chinatown”.
“I won’t,” I said as I slipped through the curtain, “I won’t.”
I walked away, unzipped my pocket and greedily ripped open my treasure. I stuffed my mouth with tons of sugar candy made in Hawaii. I threw the wrappers of gold to the wind. It took the golden imitation wrappers once more and carried it off to the far East, far far away.
