King-Kok Cheung: “Afterword” to Pangs of Love and Other Writings by DWL
David Wong Louie: A Remembrance followed by Afterword to Pangs of Love
King-Kok Cheung (adapted from the one delivered at the UCLA Memorial on Thursday, 10/25/2018)
The Chinese have an expression called yuanfen, referring to individuals destined to meet. David and I had a “chance” encounter at the 1991 Modern Language Association Convention in San Francisco, when Sau-ling Wong was unable to meet him as arranged and asked me to notify him in person. (That was before cell phones). In response to my query about his looks, Sau-ling said, “好靓仔 [Very dashing].” Having read most of his fiction by then, however, I would have been thrilled to meet the author had he been a yahoo. David told me he was teaching at Vassar but was looking for a permanent position. I informed him of an opening at the UCLA English Department for someone who could teach creative writing and encouraged him to apply. A long shot, I thought, for up till then there was not a single person of color who had taught Creative Writing in my department, where I had been the only Asian. To my joyous surprise, David got the job.
Talking about yuanfen, it was also during an annual MLA Convention (San Diego, 1994) that I met Viet Thanh Nguyen, at the time a doctoral student at UC Berkeley, my alma mater. I was so impressed with his paper on “remasculinization” in Gus Lee’s China Boy that I went up to tell him. It was another happy chance when, twenty-seven years later, my colleague Mona Simpson gave Viet and I a ride to the Hammer Museum on January 30, 2018, for the Pulitzer winning author of The Sympathizer to read from The Refugees, his collection of fiction. During our ten minutes together Viet, who had been turning down most speaking engagements in order to keep writing fiction, generously offered to write the Foreword to the expanded edition of Pangs of Love. When I saw David for the last time on September 17, 2018, The Refugees sat alone on his coffee table—the last book he read. I met two geniuses of letters in the early nineties, unbeknownst to me at the time, and the three of us will have an immortal reunion in the 2019 edition of David’s book.
It might seem odd or inappropriate to talk about Asian American Studies on this most personal occasion. But there’s a reason. For David and me, newcomers to an emerging field, the personal also reflects the professional and the historical, especially Asian American literary history. That Viet would so readily offer to pen a Foreword amid his hectic schedule for a literary predecessor signifies both his regard for David and the supportive interdependence fostered by ethnic studies. Knowing the crossing of history and literature would make us appreciate all the more David’s legacy, as a pioneering writer and as an empathetic human being who had braved the “full catastrophe living” (title of the textbook for a “Mindfit” class I was taking). The UCLA Asian American Studies Center, with which both David and I held a joint affiliation, was an early haven for us when Asian faces were rare, if not out of place, in the Humanities. The communal ethos at the Center, under the directorship of the late Don Nakanishi, made us feel at home at a time when writers and literary scholars of color were still few and far between, especially within the literary establishment.
This background of invisibility inflects (and is encoded in) David’s early work. Pangs of Love is a creative capsule (metafiction if you will) of such fraught Asian American history and literary history, as noted in my Afterword. Furthermore, both David and his characters inspired my own scholarship on alternative masculinities. Because I was born and raised in Hong Kong, my masculine ideal differs from the Hollywood models, even for Asians, for the most attractive men in Chinese literature and popular media during my formative years were not Bruce Lee or Jet Li but poets and literary talents who are gallant, attentive, witty and humorous—and therefore irresistibly seductive. It was disturbing to me that so many early Chinese American male writers were obsessed with “remasculinization”—associating manhood with martial arts rather than literary arts, with physical aggression rather than the ethic of care.
David is an exemplar of this ethic, often pegged as “feminine” but which I deem as behooving all genders. I note in the Afterword how food and culinary imagery permeates David’s writing. During the October 25, 2018 memorial for David I was further struck by how many of the remembrances, particularly the ones by my colleague Ali Behdad and by David’s son Julian Louie, revolved around cooking. Ali called David his best friend and recounted lovingly how he and David bonded in the kitchen. He recalled how David continued to prepare meals for his daughter Sogna long after he himself could no longer eat, smell, taste, and talk. Ali then read from the ending of “Birthday,” the first story in Pangs, about a wannabe father who finessed from scratch a birthday cake for his girlfriend’s son, an act which epitomizes paternal regard. Julian (Jules) Louie adopted his father’s advice to “write what you know” in penning his evocative remembrance:
I know that, despite careful note-taking and numerous stints as his sous-chef, I will still never be able to make his chicken marinade exactly as he did.
I know that I have mastered his Cantonese steamed fish, and I will make that dish for the rest of my life.
I know that having him cook for me was just the best.
I know that I would give anything to be able to cook with him one more time. (my italics)
The diverse ingredients that went into these dishes account in part for the myriad colorful and aromatic images that flavor the prose of our piquant author. David’s cooking was so deeply etched in his children’s and his friends’ memories not just because it rivaled Wolfgang Puck’s but because it expressed his painstaking care through culinary labor—at once a universal way of bonding and a nonverbal expression of affection peculiar to many an Asian household. In this case it also shows the blurring of David the finicky chef, David the loving father, friend, and teacher, and David the outstanding writer. Last but not least, David the spouse, on the receiving end of care in his final years. It takes two for caring to work effectively and affectively. Throughout David’s harrowing illness, his wife Jackie had been an indefatigable companion whose unstinting solicitude fueled David’s will to survive valiantly for so many years notwithstanding the grueling quality of life. It also took someone like David to bask and continue to grow and glow, albeit in pain, in Jackie’s abiding care.
Two days before his passing, David and I were holding hands tightly for almost an hour; his grip was unusually strong for someone whose life was draining away. We then hugged each other goodbye, as it happened, for good. Despite all the physical ravages, David was still the man I had known and adored for decades, if anything, more then and now than ever. Because he was still so fully mindful, affectionate, and expressive with his eyes and gestures shortly before leaving this world, our final meeting was palpably affirming, of friendship, of literature, and of love with all its pangs.
Afterword to David Wong Louie, Pangs of Love: Expanded Edition. Seattle: U of Washington Press, 2019. Printed in advance with permission from the University of Washington Press.
King-Kok Cheung, University of California, Los Angeles
Included in this volume are works that span three phases of David Wong Louie’s career, reflecting the changing literary landscape of America with regard to Asians and writers of color. Many of the tales in Pangs of Love: Stories (1991), which feature male protagonists who feel out of place in both white America and Chinese America, at a time when real Asians, upstaged by yellowface actors, were seldom seen or heard in American popular culture, characterize the first phase. “Cold Hearted,” a short story later incorporated into The Barbarians Are Coming: A Novel (2000), is representative of the second phase. It traces a native son’s journey from misgivings about Chinese parentage to self-renewal, an arc that follows the contours of the rise of ethnic consciousness in the wake of the civil rights movements. “Eat, Memory” (2017), an essay from the third phase, when British and American writers of Asian descent were beginning to turn heads all over the world, speaks volumes about a passion for eating and another form of excruciating marginalization. It is especially fitting that this expanded edition is introduced by Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, who is uniquely qualified to take in Louie’s doubly self-conscious art of storytelling or the penchant for catering an erotic feast with words.
Pangs of Love not only puns on the Pangs (Mrs. Pang and her progeny) in the eponymous story but also riffs on Hamlet’s signature soliloquy:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? (III.i.71-77)
Most of the male protagonists in the 1991 collection suffer from white “contumely,” especially white women’s “despised love,” so much so that these speakers, like the Prince of Denmark, think often of extinction, albeit not by their own hands. Despite their linguistic legerdemain, they feel dressed in borrowed robes, for the Western literary and masculine accoutrements hang on them loosely. Notwithstanding their full immersion in European American culture, Louie’s amorous men are constantly subject to the slings and arrows of their Caucasian lovers and associates. In trying to “pass” as white, whether literally, symbolically, or imaginatively, they are plagued by a nagging sense of illegitimacy and thwartedpaternity.
The masculine anxiety that afflicts these speakers, whose felicity with English matches the author’s, may be read through a psychoanalytical lens, as Sau-ling Cynthia Wong and David L. Eng have done, and as metafiction. Louie is acutely aware of the publishing industry’s prejudice against writers of color. He observes that his favorite authors such as Kafka, Günter Grass, Céline, and Flannery O’Connor all articulated a certain kind of alterity stemming from a marginalized place: “This kind of strangeness and oddness tapped into my own sense of difference and alienation” (Hirose 193). Louie discloses why his earlier stories did not have identifiably Chinese American narrators, though in his mind the speakers are not unlike himself: “I did that in the belief that the publishing world wasn’t interested in hearing stories by folks like me…. So I thought that if I could just cheat a little bit, I might be able to get things published” (Hirose 196, 209). Pangs of Love received the 1991 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and the Ploughshares John C. Zacharis First Book Award. But the glass ceiling persists: “They [white critics] don’t talk about you as writing beautiful sentences or having a sense of humor because … what Asian has a sense of humor anyway? … The mainstream literary world has managed to ghettoize me… It’s like putting us in the Chinese laundries” (Hirose 199, 200, 201).
Metafictional references also abound in The Barbarians Are Coming, which charts a Chinese American chef’s journey from “self-contempt”—symbolized by his condescension toward his Chinese parents and impatience with their idiosyncrasies—to an appreciative reassessment. Many Asian Americans have gone through analogous rites of passage, with their self-identity buffeted by currents in the United States, which has traditionally bifurcated race relations as black and white and which has waged several wars in Asia. The civil rights movements and attendant cultural nationalist movements in the late sixties and early seventies have redefined American heritage expansively and inclusively, enabling many a hybrid or hyphenated individual to view their provenance afresh, affirmatively rather than shamefacedly. Louie, who had omitted the telling “Wong” from his earliest publications, created and taught the first Asian American Studies course at Vassar College in Spring 1991. He was also the first ladder faculty of Asian descent to teach creative writing in both the English Department and the Asian American Studies Center/Department of UCLA, from 1992 to 2013.
Alienation in a white world, ambivalence toward Chinese upbringing, and nonverbal expression of affection are recurrently conveyed in Louie’s oeuvre through culinary and alimentary imagery. In “Pangs of Love,” the roast duck sauce stain on a white couch signifies the racial stigma marking the two Chinese American brothers and inducing their sense of displacement. In The Barbarians Are Coming, Sterling Lung, the protagonist, a haute cuisine chef who graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, chafes under the pressure from his Connecticut ladies club patrons to cook Chinese dishes. When he loses his job for refusing to do so, his white father-in-law molds him into a Chinese cook on cable TV and, later, on San Francisco public TV. Sterling understandably takes umbrage at being pegged according to his race (much in the way writers of color have been tokenized in academia), but his annoyance is compounded by his own distaste for things Chinese. Misgivings about origin are especially evident in Lawrence, Sterling’s antecedent in “Cold Hearted.” Louie conveys this shame vis-à-vis parentage in terms of Lawrence’s aversion to the contents of the twin family refrigerators:
On a good day if he was lucky, he might find a bottle of Coke among the paper bags of oranges… bundles of medicinal herbs…what looked like worms bound with pink cellophane ribbon … and dishes and bowls … holding leftovers that had been reheated and re-served so many times not a trace of nutrients or flavor lingered in their pale cells. It was barefoot food…. Rinse off the maggots … It was squatting in still water food, water snake around your ankle food. Pole across your shoulders, hoofs in the house food.
The Chinese victuals, which Lawrence associates with poverty and primitive living, are among the “embarrassments of his youth.” To his relief, “the family flirted occasionally with real food. What real people ate,” meaning: “Food from boxes and cans. The best were Swanson TV dinners. Meatloaf, Salisbury steak.” Like the narrator in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, sixteen-year-old Lawrence’s equation of convenience food with epicurean delights belies his vaunted Americanization. By the end of “Cold Hearted” and The Barbarians Are Coming, the nativist sons undergo considerable shifts in their evaluations of paternal legacies. The novel ends with Sterling attempting to console himself and his sole surviving son (both of them devastated by the successive deaths of Genius and Ira, Sterling’s favorite son) by concocting a replica of the comfort food Genius used to feed him as a child, “especially on cold days”— saltine crackers in condensed milk and boiling water:
I slide a bowl in front of Moses. He lowers his head for an appraising whiff…. You’re psyched up over this?
“It’s Chinese,” I say…. He doesn’t believe.
Trust me… Let the steam caress your face, smell the roasted sweetness, the milk’s own sugar, and feel the glow of well-being radiating from within…. Ah Yeah [Grandfather Genius] used to make it for me. It’s a special recipe he brought from China…. I spoon some of the cracker stew from my bowl, blow, and offer it to Moses….
Moses opens his mouth, and lets me feed him.
This ending encapsulates the passage from father-son distrust and estrangement to patrilineal communion across three generations through a sui generis Chinese American recipe, a distinctive legacy.
Chinese cuisine in Louie’s autobiographical “Eat, Memory” vies with European fare in gastronomical splendor, almost redolent of world heritage:
I am astonished, now, at how many of my first memories of places are related to food: goose in Hong Kong, lardo in Florence, cherrystones in Boston, pizza in New York. And milestones, too: my fortieth at ABC Seafood…my daughter’s haircut party at Hop Li. I fondly remember the ham-and-Swiss sandwich at Bay Cities, the crispy-skin cubes of pork belly at Empress Pavilion, the roast-duck noodles at Big Wing Wong, the grilled prime rib at Campanile.
The mouthwatering inventory is a far cry from the dubious chow that signifies ethnic shame or sham in Louie’s previous works. Yet “Eat, Memory” is not about gustatory pleasures but their visceral absence inflicted by throat cancer, a peculiarly cruel illness befalling a gourmet and self-professed “gourmand” whose food cravings are as insistent as sex: “Eating had been my one enduring talent…. I loved to chew and swallow. My desire for food had the urgency of lust; I was constantly horny.” All this erotic consumption has been relegated to only memories for Louie, who evokes feelingly the unspeakable pangs of being a mere onlooker, a perpetual outcast at a communal table.
Illness had deprived Louie of his identity as an eater and isolated him from the day-to-day eating majority. But outrageous fortune had not taken away Louie’s ingrained humanity and enduring talent, his singular gift with words. “Eat, Memory,” an excerpt from a memoir that had been in progress and has been selected for The Best American Essays 2018. Just as “pangs of love” echo Hamlet’s musings, so the prince’s ultimate plea to Horatio— “draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story”— best conveys this artist’s heroic resolve and lifelong commitment to a tale well told, one only Louie could tell. And whet our appetite for more.
Works Cited / Consulted
Cheung, King-Kok. Chinese American Literature without Borders: Gender, Genre, and Form. New York: Palgrave, 2016.
Chin, Frank, et al. eds., Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. New York: Mentor, 1983. First published in 1974 by Howard University Press (Washington DC).
Eng, David L. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
Hirose, Stacey Yukari. “David Wong Louie.” In Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Authors. Edited by King-Kok Cheung. 189-214. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000.
Ku, Robert Ji-Song. Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013.
Louie, David Wong. Pangs of Love. New York: Knopf, 1991.
—. “Cold-Hearted.” Los Angeles Times July 17 1994. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-07-17/magazine/tm-18422_1_cold-hearted
—. The Barbarians Are Coming. New York: Berkeley Books, 2000.
—. “Eat, Memory: A Life without Food.” Harpers August 2017.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “The Remasculinization of Chinese America: Race, Violence, and the Novel.” American Literary History 12.1 (2000): 130-157.
https://vietnguyen.info/2000/the-remasculinization-of-chinese-america-race-violence-and-the-novel
Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. “Chinese/Asian American Men in the 1990s: Displacement, Impersonation, Paternity, and Extinction in David Wong Louie’s Pangs of Love.” Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies. Edited by Gary Y. Okihiro, et al. 181-91. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995.
Xu, Wenying. Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007.
