Chung-Yung's Smile
For those of you lucky to have met her, it must have gained your notice that Chung-Yung has a stunning smile, and it may in fact be her most winning physical feature. It is marvelously free of improvement. She brushes assiduously . Her bathroom is filled with toothbrushes with bristles worn down like stubble on a soldier's skull, In fact, when I visit her bathroom and use one of hers myself, I sometimes wonder if I am perhaps using one she employs for cleaning the toilet? How can I tell? So I pick one and shut my eyes. So she brushes assiduously, and I introduced her to flossing - but she has never had a cavity. Never. When I told my former dentist, a fine high-priced Bronxville practitioner, too high-priced to retain my services recently, that she had perfect teeth, his first question was, "Where is she from?" He said that geography as well as heridity affected the perfection of teeth. I didn't tell him that her dad has false choppers, but I did mull over how that fact played into her heriditary perfect teeth.
But forward.
When she smiles upon a human the result is almost always a melting. I remember when in France we asked some gendarmes outside the Surete, submachine gun toting boys, "Ou est St. Chappelle?" they didn't unbend to me a bit. And then she smiled, and they melted. They began smiling at each other and making their small, gentle French sounds, and I considered asking Chung-Yung to have a try at taking their guns away from them, just to gauge how powerful her smile was. In fact, I have concluded over the years that a human has to be a singularly uptight asshole not to melt when Chung-Yung smiles upon him. For example, when I wanted her to take my photo outside the American consulate in Seoul in the spring of 2000, the submachine gun toting Korean guards didn't unbend a bit and in fact motioned with their weapons that they objected. And then she stood beside them and opened up her smile. And they still objected. I got pretty hot considering it was my embassy and therefore American soil, but she prevailed upon me to give it up, and I left calling them assholes. Over my shoulder of course.
So this is preface to last Wednesday night when we attended the free concert at the Central Park bandshell. Along with free Vivaldi they were giving away free t-shirts. When we came to ask for ours, we were told by the attendant, a matronly black woman, that there were no more size mediums. There were no smiles from this woman. I had the distinct impression that she thought we were trying to get over somehow by asking her for two of the t-shirts she was supposed to give away free. Sort of like the reaction you might get if you asked your grocer to give you two quarts of milk free.
"Will they shrink if we wash them?" I asked.
"No they WON'T." she replied.
Cotton shrinks when it's washed, so this was a palpable lie.
Then a woman beside the matron said, "They'll make great nightshirts!" The matron handed two over with vast disapproval. That, as I point out to you, is one big asshole.
You'll note I mentioned she was black. We shouldn't hold anything against black people in general. We'd be wrong. I've found any number of black people to be as fine people as people come, which isn't as nice as it sounds, but it still indicates that black people are as good as any. And here in America we owe a debt to black people, a debt we won't erase in our lifetimes. If any of you are thinking "white liberal guilt", well fuck you. Very few black people asked to come here. They were brought here.
Now I'm not talking about reparations. I wouldn't go for that. Why? Well, if a black person asked me if I favored reparations, then I would ask him, "I'm from Virginia, from a slave-owning family in fact. So I would pay, right? But what if they tested my DNA, and they found I had some black in me. So I would qualify for reparations, right? Or I would pay myself, right? I mean, if I've got any black in me, then I qualify. Or are you going to work on percentages? If I'm one 32nd black, then I qualify, right? Or are you going to set the bar at one 16th black?" So to my mind reparations would raise all kinds of questions and all sorts of bad feelings. I mean, what if some Georgia linthead with no teeth discovers that his great great great grand dad owned slaves, and he's got to ante up despite the fact that he's makes minimum wage at the 7-11. That's hard feelings. What might happen to some of you? Jon's mother is from New England, but how's he know his great great great grandad didn't own a share in a slave ship? Kokis is straight from Greece. But we know how close genetically the Greeks are to the Turks - see the width of your fingernail? - cut that by nine-tenths - and we all know what part the Arabs played in the slave trade.
No, no reparations for me.
But yet I know a clown who leaves messages on my phone about Barack Obama and fried chicken, and he is legion, so black people still suffer prejudice in this country. I once asked myself what has happened to our present generation of black people with their welfare mothers, crack heads and gang members, not to mention the street flies of Manhattan. How could Johnson's Great Society have failed? And then I realized it didn't. It succeeded. Not only have black people multiplied in the middle class and positions of prominence in every area of business, academia, arts and government, but they are more accepted there. But it happened only as a result of every measure fought against in the last 40 plus years.
As President Kennedy said about the American South, "They keep saying we'll take care of it on their own, but a hundred years have gone by, and it's still the same." Indeed. Sometimes I try to imagine what the American South would be like today if Lincoln had said, "Okey by me." As Chip aays, we'd have a third world nation between us and Mexico.
Affirmative action? Fine. I'm confident I've lost a job or two as a result of affirmative action. Well, I'm big enough to accept that. Race based college scholarships? Hey, I've accepted the fact that I find my scholarships in the form of those $10 bills I find in the street or in the Gristede's aisle. I found one there in early June. This is what we pay for a more just society.
So therefore we have to examine ourselves when we encounter unpleasant black people. We have to tell ourselves that they are just unpleasant people.
For example, as you know I carry a knife in my pocket. It's for opening things. Twice in 2006 I had to pull it to discourage men who were treating Chung-Yung badly. I'll explain further in a forth-coming e-mail to be titled "Brass Balls". And in the both cases the men behaving badly were black. When I told Chip of these escapades, he said I would make the news and analysts would say that it was known that I had a problem with black men. I replied, "Totally correct, but you left out one item. I have a problem with black men what I catch in the act of committing crimes against my girlfriend."
No, we have to accept that unpleasant black people are just unpleasant people and that their particular unplesantness may include the factor that they are black, which may add some element of unpleasantness or attitude.
If there are people out there who make jokes about Barack Obama and fried chicken, then I understand why some black people feel slighted by innocuous incidents. For example, once in a chinese bakery in Flushing, a black man took umbrage because no maid picked his pastries for him, holding the tongs and tray, as they usually do. Neither he nor I could get service. He looked at me and said, "Guess we both got to serve ourselves." He was hot. But I believe he was overreacting. The were merely busy.
But as for the t-shirt woman, no, she was an asshole. She was probably burned up about how she had to give something free to this white man and this chinese girl while she, a black woman, was giving rather than getting something. She was an asshole. And Chung-Yung was smiling at her too.
24 Fifth Ave., 30 Jul 2007