Feast of Burden

Jaymee,

I am writing this firstly in email form which I will then put into the Seinfeld blog under the guise that the penultimate episode, "The Puerto Rican Day Parade," is Feast of Lanterns through a convex lens, and that this episode, the only one excluded from syndication, is as of yet mentioned in the study. It was not syndicated due to controversy (Kramer stamps out a burning Puerto Rican flag, and the parade is not respected but actually resented for its inconveniences) and therefore I do not know it nearly as well as the rest of the ouvre, placing it more in my imagination, its significance further into my own experience. So, in honor of white people stepping in front of the celebration of other people's heritages and my aloof comprehension of these phenomena, I think our story fits somewhere in the vein of the Seinfeld criticism.

Anyhow, here goes the typing!

(This story has since taken on its own tumblr )

I.

First of Lanterns

I had always known about the Feast of Lanterns celebration the way someone who knows nothing about hockey knows who the local hockey team is. I grew up 15 miles east of Pacific Grove and it was never an event my parents felt inspired to take me to as a child or my peers encouraged me to attend as an adolescent. After I returned to the Monterey area upon graduating from college I found myself suddenly actively thinking about the Feast of Lanterns for the first time when it was brought up by a colleague of my father's at a dinner party at my parents' house. The dinner was in honor of half a dozen Fulbright students from all corners of the world; and in this context of cross-cultural excitement and understanding, the premise, described by a man married to a Chinese woman, struck me as absurdly distasteful, irresponsible, and insensitive. Unfortunately, I would have to wait a year to see for myself, for it was asked "Did anyone go?" and no one had.

So when July came around this year, I was ready to investigate and decide if this small-town community event was centered around and named for a ceremony that was simply a little naive and insensitive, or something that was more severely racially ignorant. My friend Jaymee dove right in with me when I told her what I was doing that weekend. When I saw Jaymee the last Saturday of July she was fresh off a bout of internet research, and we excitedly discussed in downtown Monterey before riding our bikes over. "Andrew! The Chinese were invited to the first Feast of Lanterns and they came! The year before the village burned and they were run out of town!" We stopped at the mural on the bike path that describes the history of P.G. In describing the Chinese fishing village's destruction it concludes that the population "disappeared from the area." Jaymee explained to me the concept of "yellowface," which I understood in concept from Breakfast at Tiffany's and the Charlie Chan movies, and that it outlasted blackface in film by decades. Feast of Lanterns queens and princesses stopped mimicking asian features with make-up in the 1980s.

We arrived at Lover's Point to find a mass of people on the beach and around the park enjoying picnics and taking in a rock and roll cover band on the concrete stage above the water. Jaymee had to go home and I was to meet my family to see the last Harry Potter movie before returning for the main events—the crowning ceremony, Legend of the Blue Willow, and the fireworks—so I limited myself to one interview.

I talked to a man who wrote an occult detective novel that took place in Pacific Grove. He explained to me the occult nature of the town. "There's a lot of strange things in Pacific Grove," he began, explaining that his novel thus functioned as historical fiction, and he cited an obelisk by the rocks of Lover's Point and a gargoyle built by Clark Ashton Smith, a friend of H.P. Lovecraft, that points to it, and a wall beneath it with a matching obelisk. "Now if the world has chakras—and it does in metaphysical societies—Pacific Grove is the healing chakra. And the exact point, the center, of this fibonacci spinning of energy is emanating from that particular point out there at that obelisk. A lot of people wind up in Pacific Grove never thinking they're going to stay. Everything opens up—they get the job, they get the apartment, it's perfect: they're here. And over 89% are going to say they're in some kind of healing—healing a relationship, physical healing: something. It's very, very strange."

And he explained the Feast of Lanterns to me. "Think of it as an open, private party. The town had its own little holiday. It used to be that there were all these crafts people, and artists, dancers, writers—filled up P.G. It was super cheap; the sardines went away; the town's worth nothing. You could rent an apartment for sixty bucks, so great for artists: low overhead. So the festival had all these crafts booths and people and the talent show, etc. etc. So at the end of the festival when the fireworks went off you'd go up to maybe fifty or sixty open parties. It was a community, everybody knew everybody. 1982: the chamber said 'Why don't we advertise it; could be good for business.' 40,000 people showed up. Insanity. And nobody realized because the parties were still open. So a friend Michele looked up and she had 200 people in a 600 square-foot house, and she said she was lucky she had a mattress to sleep on when it was over, all these strangers." As a band covered Michelle Branch's duet with Carlos Santana, "The Game of Love," he put the festival in context, compared with "what they say it is."

"After the sardines went away and the town was nothing, before they could sell it as a tourist joint or valuable coastal lands, it was just, sort of, a ghost town. And this little kept going on and turned into a wonderful private holiday which anyone could attend." I also first heard of Elmarie H. Dyke, the woman who revived the festival fifty years after it had initially began. The lifelong mission of "Mrs. Pacific Grove" was to keep Pacific Grove a dry town until 1969, which, of course, it no longer is, though the town still cannot boast a bar; and after she died the Feast almost went with her. "They were thinking, 'it's an old festival thing, nobody likes it, it's a pain, why do it?' But it wasn't let go. People had badges saying 'We want fireworks.' They said we'll do it but there won't be any fireworks. Well, it was put out that there would be bottlerockets on a rubber raft out there," gesturing past the point, "so the coast guard was cruising looking for the famed rubber boat. Unbeknownst to them that was to keep them busy because, actually, all of the bottlerockets were down on the beach with hundreds of people. And at the end of the play when everyone stood up, all the rockets went off. You just couldn't identify who did it." I thanked him for the information, gathered that the myth would occur at eight, and the fireworks at nine, I walked up the hill as the band played a flawless cover of "the Sultans of Swing."

Then I went to the movie theater and met my parents and my brother who was visiting from Seattle and we saw Harry Potter and had dinner at Mando's. They were not interested in staying for the show, so I walked down to the water by myself.

Many houses around downtown P.G. are adorned with colorful Chinese paper lanterns in July and many businesses stock and display them in their windows. As I walked down toward the bay and the music got louder it seemed like more houses displayed a greater number of lanterns. The music sounded like Gloria Estefan and when I turned the corner I saw a group of girls doing a Caribbean-style dance on the platform across the water. As I circulated among the crowd considering interview options the genre and the dance changed from Mexican to hip-hop to Florence and the Machine's ubiquitous 2011 hit.

I talked to volunteer security guards, parents of princesses selling Feast of Lanterns cookbooks and pageant histories, representatives of the Paper Wing Theater Company from whom I bought a coffee, a police officer to whom I used to sell coffee, and finally Jaymee arrived and we considered from where we should take in the Legend of the Blue Willow.

We took some pictures, she ran into a friend, who we asked for a quick thought--"I'm glad theater is valued in some way,--and as we settled across the water from the stage the coronation began. After the coronation was a dance to a Chinese pop song. The girls were wearing Japanese kimonos and waved fans. The next dance was arabic, still with kimonos and fans. I recognized my neighbors and we compared impressions of first respective Feasts. "It's a really unique example of small-town community," she said. "It was much more stylized than I expected," he said. Jaymee and I came clean about our amateur sociological study and they revealed they were both, in fact, anthropologists. He, a professor at NPS, explained that he came down the hill partly because a student introduced it to him as, what he thought was a reconciliation or some kind of acknowledgment of the Japanese internment during World War Two. It seemed the event was multi-cultural only in that it was misunderstood to be representative of many different cultures. The vagueness of the weekend's significations made it potentially about everything. This is California, after all. We owe our heritage to dozens of sources, and our '90s Republican governor Pete Wilson acknowledged Monterey's diversity and internationalism by declaring it the Language Capital of the World. It would only make sense that a group of teenage dancers take us through the cultures of the world through its music and movements, that a bellydancer instructor and her students bring us from Egypt to India, and that high school girls wear Chinese dresses and are accompanied by Queen Topaz’s father in a cap that dangles a dark braid from its back, and that this group parade down the stairs and onto the stage to re-enact an English legend first propagated to sell British-made porcelain with the Blue Willow pattern in the late 18th century. Of the the pattern one critic wrote, "It is at best an imitation or distillation, at worst a distortion of Chinese culture," ( http://www.nyu.edu/projects/mediamosaic/madeinchina/pdf/Portanova.pdf). Or as our announcer, a combination of Ed McMahon and the narrator of a nature documentary, tells us, "no one knows who first told the story of the Blue Willow plate." And, though very unlikely, "possibly it was some Chinese storyteller who began spinning the story of Chang and his love for the beautiful Koong-se."

If this all did relate to the cultural tapestry of the town, and its history and people were celebrated, then it very well could be explained on some level. However, there is no explanation. The only reference to the past, the only acknowledgment and celebration of history and culture, is to the play and the Feast of Lanterns itself, the history of celebrating some undefined obscure history, and that the lovers flee the evil Mandarin and turn into monarchs, of course, because it is Pacific Grove, California—Butterfly Town, U.S.A. The monarchs and tourists are historically the area's only celebrated migrants.

Jaymee and I walked around as the fireworks went off to record the ambience and take one last look before heading back to her apartment to meet my brother. As we walked up the hill away from the water we saw hip-looking young men park and walk in the other direction with musical equipment. We were later invited to what turned out to be a concert in the living room of the bellydance instructor’s house. An impromptu all-welcome rock show in a living room in P.G. There really was something special about Feast Night. To continue the trip back to the Bohemian '70s in Pacific Grove we took advantage of Rolling Rock throwback return to cans and bought a 12-pack. Someone else had the same idea, it was the cheapest, and many of the other young, hip white people were also throwing back the throwbacks.

II.

Feast of Returns

California, here I come
Right back where I started from
Where bowers of flowers
Bloom in the spring
Each morning, at dawning
Birdies sing and everything
A sun-kissed miss said, "Don't be late"
That's why I can hardly wait
Open up that Golden Gate
California, here I come

I began a new job at a seafood restaurant, in Pacific Grove interestingly enough, right as I was processing the experience. As I was researching how the Pacific Improvement Company evicted the fisherman families of China Point 1905 partly in reaction to the odor of their squid-drying methods, I learned that Monterey squid is not really local—it is shipped to China for processing and then shipped back, less sustainable than simply purchasing squid caught in Asia. I saw the green lights of the squid boats at night in a new context when I read that the Chinese were pressured out of the daytime fishing industry, and instead of forcing the issue they simply adorned lanterns to their boats and fished for squid at nighttime. And, as worded by a history of Cannery Row in Monterey, just down the coast from China Point, “Pacific Grove’s ‘Feast of Lanterns’ is an ironic tribute to the torches and pitchwood fires used from the Chinese sampans to attract the curious squid to their waiting seines.” And I learned that the Chinese attended the first Feast of Lanterns in 1905, the last summer they were to spend in P.G., and, with the exception of ceremonies in 1935 and 1938, the event didn’t take place annually until 1958.

Even the free local periodical—the Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin—acknowledged there was something off about the relationship between ethnic tensions that came to a head in 1905-1906 and “lantern week,” referring to an exhibit in the Pacific Grove Natural History Museum—”To its credit, the museum also debuted without irony a scale model of the 70-home Pacific Grove Chinese village razed by fire in 1905 [sic], the feast’s inaugural year.” The celebration of a racist mockery of a people in the moment they were being run out of town as a cultural tribute is ironic. But to display the account of this is unironic? What “to its credit” means is as strange as declaring that the exhibit was “debuted without irony.” It’s as though the museum spoke enough truth that the face-painting didn’t seem frivolous and insensitive, but not enough truth to create a contradiction between the levity of the family-friendly afternoon and the weight of the unjust history.

This was the August 17th edition and shared a recap written by someone who, like me, was sharing his “First Timer Impressions.” I also managed to visit the Natural History Museum, but for a different reason. Jaymee told me that she remembered a “Walk for Remembrance” in May, to commemorate the destruction of the village on May 16, 1906. She said it was led by a descendant of the village and had begun at the museum. So we decided to begin there as well during my Saturday break between answering the phone and returning messages in the afternoon and returning to the restaurant for the dinner shift. The woman there recalled, vaguely, the event, but told us they would have a better idea at the Heritage Museum which happened to be open from one to four only on Saturdays. And not only that there was the aforementioned installation up about the village and its demise. Not since Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall have clues lined up so readily for a curious couple.

The exhibit was very well done with a scaled construction of the village by Michael E. Croft. And the text that accompanied the visual went further than most we’d seen to address the ambiguity of agency that comes with a fire. It is never people who destroyed the village, it is the avatar of their hate: a fire. Like most accounts it didn’t make a judgment about the origin of the fire—"In May 1906, a fire broke out in the village and despite firefighter’s efforts, the village burned to the ground”—though it did give historical context to allow us to doubt the innocence of the break out of the fire:

At this time, “Chinatowns” in cities across the state burned down in fires, often started by arson. The Chinese could not take legal action in most cases, because the state congress even passed laws preventing citizenship rights to people of Chinese descent, even if they were born here.

Why can’t we have such a candid understanding of the Feast of Lanterns? If we had that perhaps we could have a candid discussion of how these two narratives relate. Instead we act like because the whole population moved half a mile away into Monterey the story ends in Pacific Grove, it “disappeared” as the mural informs us.

So we probed further for answers, walked up the hill to the old gray barn that is the Heritage Museum and were welcomed by the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” emitting from a player piano. A woman sat there pumping her feet up and down, rocking back and forth happily with the music. When the scroll reached its end she got up and greeted and invited us to take in all of the historical knick-knacks the place had to offer. She offered for us to have a look around and to try the player piano; Jaymee wandered around the old maps and books and artifacts, and I chose the "California, Here I Come" scroll and pedalled out the tune.

Afterwards we explained what we were looking for and the woman knew exactly the event we described. She shuffled through old copies of the Heritage Society of Pacific Grove Newsletter (Dedicated to Maintaining the Beauty and Individuality of Pacific Grove) and found the May 2011 edition whose cover showed Gerry Low-Sabado and the Monterey Bay Lion Dance Team on the recreation trail with Hopkins Marine Station behind them, the old site of the village. Inside was an article describing the event: an address by Mayor Carmelita Garcia, Gerry Low-Sabado, the direct descendent who helped organize the event, a reception, and a walk to Hopkins led by the Monterey Bay Lion Dance Team and their two spectacular lions. The city, its natural history museum, Heritage Society, the dance team, the National Coalition Building Institute, and even the ACLU collaborated to make this happen.

The article even foreshadowed an "Historical Context Statement" that the city was scheduled to release to acknowledge and honor the contributions of the Chinese population. The synopsis of their exit from the town was actually one of the most sympathetic yet: "Sadly, at a time when a state-wide anti-Chinese immigration movement was underway, the village was forced out of existence by a fire and eviction, and the villagers dispersed." Pairing "eviction," whose causation stems from human action, with "fire" implies most reasonably that people started the fire that drove them from town. And I was reading this in the Heritage Society newsletter? The woman was so thorough in answering our questions she even found a roll of film developed from May and gave me two prints of the traditional Chinese dance outside the museum with the two lions that preceded the walk. I was dumbfounded and charmed. How can this be so out in the open, existing so thoroughly on the surface alongside an annual tradition that tranforms the predominantly white town into a faux Chinese village?
Jaymee and I left contented and went to a coffee shop to discuss before I went to work. There was a contact telephone number at the end of the article that I called, assuming it was some kind of historical organization that on a Saturday would give me a recording or a quick account of the event or a website. After three rings a woman answered the phone, "Hello?" I explained where I found the phone number and what I was interested in and she said she was Gerry Low, and this was her phone number. They had just included her personal phone number at the base of the article for those who wanted "more information."
With a few interruptions we talked for more than and an hour and I frantically scribbled notes all over my training check list, and in the margins of both copies of the newsletter we were given. When she asked my impressions of the Feast of Lanterns she seemed genuinely curious, and she was deeply moved that I had taken such an interest in her family history. She said it was interesting that I found it not undifferent from a beauty pagaent, as that was exactly how it began. Her biggest complaint was not in the mess of stereotypes that compose the event, the unwieldy, ambiguous myth that arises; it was much more simple: the crowd is encouraged to boo a Chinese person. The man who represents what is Chinese (literally named "the Mandarin"), who insists on the traditional arranged marriage, is shouted down by hundreds of white spectators. The problem is not just that he wears a fake ponytail and dresses up in Chinese clothes, it is that his character acts as a kind of catharsis for racism. Gerry explained that her great-grandfather was born from a match that was made in 1881, that it was a tradition that remained acceptable through the time that the Chinese occupied the village. "When you bring the community together," she said, children, tourists, the whole town, "you are teaching them to villanize chinese people." This was also part of my complaint: an incredible opportunity to share knowledge and cultural understanding with a large group of people, and to instill these values in children, is wasted. The exact opposite is accomplished: misunderstanding cultural difference, mocking the heritages of others, and instilling this value in children.

Eventually the conversation turned to her family and the village her great-great-grandparents inhabited. When she told me her great grandmother was Quock Mui it blew my mind. The famed polyglot symbol of Cannery Row's multiculturalism, "Spanish Mary," her great granddaughter had just answered my phone call, and she was excited to talk to me. I pass by her house every day where a sign with her picture alerts the passerby to the richness of her history, the contribution of her life to Monterey. Of course she would have descendents, but I thought if I ever met them it would be the way I would see Thomas Steinbeck signing books at the Steinbeck Festival or something, not simply having a conversation about the history of the Peninsula.

Eventually we came to the fire. What conclusions did she hold; where did someone whose family was directly devastated turn the ambiguities into judgments? She shared that it was documented that the village's hoses were cut; the newspapers carried editorials in the days after that condemned the white christians for cheering the events and looting the salvaged belongings from the sidewalks when residents went back for another armful of possessions. Even knowing this Gerry insisted that it did not matter what happened then, how the fire started, but how we behaved now, what we value now, what we model for children now. And what we are doing now is putting on negative Chinese stereotypes and, as a community, booing them.

I told her I looked forward to meeting her if I didn't have to work the evening of the Historic Context Statement, and if I did my friend Jaymee would attend.

III.

The Historic Context Statement

found here:

http://www.ci.pg.ca.us/HCS_Public_Draft_Part_2_6-29-11.pdf

I was once told a story at Bottles in Bins, the liquor store at the bottom of David Avenue, on the Monterey side of the border with P.G. The old owners and their mob connections effected a change in the city boundary so that their store would be in Monterey and they would be allowed to sell alcohol. It didn't seem crazy, but it did seem like a story that would naturally develop over decades in any store that bordered a town that was dry into the second half of the 20th century and to this day did not have a bar. However, when Jaymee and I looked at the map of Pacific Grove, in the years of its construction (1903-1926), the border was indeed Irving, one block further into Monterey; at some point Monterey annexed an entire block of PG; and further, this meant that I lived in what was historically Pacific Grove; the old border puts me squarely in a different town. And this, of course, also included my neighbors. The community that the Feast of Lanterns was for was our community. In 1903 Theodore Roosevelt visited our humble town.

IV.

By Light of Lanterns

On Saturday, October 22 the Monterey Public Library and Gerry Low-Sabado were hosting a screening of a film made by CSUMB students, By Light of Lanterns. Months before Gerry had mentioned that it was fortuitous that I was composing a piece on this subject because she was coordinating these events this weekend. It seemed especially appropriate that the site of much of my research and typing was the very spot of the weekend's first event. I pitched the story to the Weekly a few weeks before, but received no reply, so I made it downtown anyway, still filling out the story for myself, and walked through the lobby and its computers and the youth reading room past the bathroom into the community room.

Gerry was wearing a bright red ornate cheongsam and smiling and circulating among the dozen people who had already arrived. Two tables were set up at the back, one with Sandy Lymon's China Gold, which I have gathered is the quintessential scholarly work on the Chinese in Monterey; and the other had a representative from CSUMB selling copies of the DVD of the short student-made documentary.

I had failed to follow up with Gerry after that first phone call two months ago, and Jaymee was forced to watch her speech on TV in the hallway of city council chambers, and I wasn't ready to interrupt and introduce myself yet. So I sat in one of the cushion-topped grey folding chairs, five rows back, with a feeling of anticipation mixed with the vague dissatisfaction of being inside on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, especially after such a fogged-out, cold summer. I quickly realized that the forty-something librarian in charge of the event was the youngest person here. The women two rows in front of me were talking about the famous Jerry that was in town the weekend before. One had seen Seinfeld's 100-dollar-a-seat act and was recalling the charm by which he commented on "the simplest little things," like bathrooms. "Why don't the doors go all the way to the ground? What's up with that?" An older Chinese man came in with two girls who must have been his grandchildren. Now I was closest in age with an 11 year old.

The next day's event was a walking tour of Cannery Row led by Gerry. From what I had heard it was sold out, but I heard the librarian at the front of the room mention that people could just come. I intercepted her as she walked to the back room and asked if there was room on the tour. "You didn't hear it from me," she said, but it was a public place and they couldn't really prevent people from being outside with them. I sat back down happily. The day before I had called the library to reserve a spot, well two, but Jaymee couldn't make it, for the free film screening, as I was advised by the newspaper. The librarian on the other end had no idea what I was talking about and after a few explanations she reluctantly took down my name. There were no more spots for the more coveted free walking tour that began at the Intercontinental, where a luncheon with author Lisa See and book signing were to precede it. Problem solved.

Gerry and the librarian mingled for a few more minutes before introducing the library—California's first!—and the event to a warm round of applause. Gerry desired to share a few words and bring some context to the documentary, how she, in her fifties, became interested in and aware of her family's history with the help of these college students who went searching for what was left of the Chinese's legacy on the Monterey Peninsula. Then the film was to begin. The librarian struggled as the DVD loaded to find the full screen option on the laptop. The sound was very off and I quickly realized that the set-up was simply to have the sound come from the laptop's tiny speakers. I was horribly embarrassed as I watched several older volunteers pop up to lend a hand and the librarian ran out of the room to find speakers.

It seems that the cards are always stacked against substance. Jerry Seinfeld gets the stage in the lavish, velvet-curtained, sold-out Golden State Theater with the best sound a show could have, and talks about nothing. Geraldine Low-Sabado gets a glorified box with folding chairs and an old laptop plugged into a projector in the front of the room, and gets to the heart of the way racial hatred can destroy identity, the way entire generations have lost the very story of themselves.

Gerry handled the mini crisis with the sweet charm with which she addresses any situation. She consulted the tableful of items she brought and decided upon a plastic-sleeved typed letter that she revealed to be written by Thomas Steinbeck, the son of a famous local author. He apparently had written a historic novella on the very subject of this piece and the film and the walking tour called In the Shadow of the Cypress. How was it that I was learning this now?