Poetry In San Mateo Day
A Beginning of the Year Poetry Celebration
We've been working hard at straightening up our facility for this event. Moving all the cases of In Good Conscience was quite a chore. So please come and join us this Sat. January 14th at 1pm.

Authors Oscar Peņaranda, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, and Cynthia Chin-Lee will be on hand. Plus we've added Professor Maciko Conway, a poet and instructor of Japanese language and calligraphy, to our list. Professor Conway was a member of the Ginushisha poetry club in Hilo. This is the same poetry club that Kurenai Hongo, author of our poetry book Petals of the Vanda, belonged to.

Prof. Conway will be reciting Tanka in Hyaku Nin-Isshu (classic Japanese poem form). Also she will be singing Shigin (poetry singing) "Fujisan"(Mt Fuji).

Miscellaneous
On Dec. 29, 2005, activist and author Tsuyako "Sox" Kitashima passed away. AACP helped publish Ms. Kitashima's book Birth of an Activist. Thank you for your many years of service to the community.

Thank you Sophie and Nicole for your help moving books. Thanks to all the writers that contributed poems to this months newsletter. Unfortunately, we don't have a winner for our poetry contest. We didn't receive any non-professional entries from non-AACP affiliated individuals. Don't be bashful, I'm sure many of you can write better poetry than us at AACP. So next year we really want to see some of your works.

Leonard Chan
Executive Editor

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In researching our October 2005 newsletter article on McCarthyism and its effects on the Asian American community, I discovered an interesting story of how one Chinese American poet burned hundreds of copies of his poetry in fear that they could be discover by government agents. That poet was Tung Pok Chin.

When I found out that Tung Pok Chin had an autobiography, entitled "Paper Son," I thought I'd check it out to see if it was something that AACP should carry.

Paper Son reminded me of my parent's generation's lament that the younger generations of Asian Americans cannot comprehend the hardships that they had to endure. Having read a number of autobiographies and biographies of Asian American that came before me, Paper Son reaffirms the notion that we are lucky to have not gone through what they had experienced.

Paper Son reveals Tung Pok Chin's personal life and hardships. It starts with his impoverished life in China and continues on to his entry into the US as an illegal immigrant (paper son status). His marginal existence in the laundry business and broken first

marriage resulting from years of separation reveals a life experience that was probably common to many Chinese that lived in America in the first half of the twentieth century.

The lesser-known Chinese American experience, which is exposed by this book, is the communist witch-hunts of the 1950 and 60s. Chin tells of how his family and friends were questioned, watched, and searched for many years, even after the McCarthy era had ended. What brought on this governmental scrutiny were Chin's poetry pieces for a blacklisted Chinese newspaper.

Tung Pok Chin's life story is reminiscent of the life of Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan who chronicled his life in the classic autobiography "America is in the Heart." Both of these individuals immigrated to the United States during the depression era and both lived hard lives as laborers. The inspirational part of their stories was how they both persevered to have lives as poets and writers.

At this time when AACP is trying to promote new Asian Pacific American poets and their writings, it's good to be featuring a book on one of our community's pioneering poets.

The following is our annual AACP staffs' attempt at writing Haiku. This year we've included two attempts at writing Tanka poetry. Tanka poetry is an ancient Japanese poetry form written in 31 syllables-5,7,5,7,7.

Here's an excerpt from our poetry book Petals of the Vanda, which describes Tanka.

Tanka captures the fragile quality of beauty and emotion of a particular moment. The poems are true expressions of the heart and are written on the spur of the moment. Thus, Tanka are pure, simple, spontaneous creations, and yet they have a depth of subtle meaning. When too much thought goes into writing a Tanka, it is no longer an expression of the true self, and it is therefore not a true Tanka.

Convergence
If it's meant to be,
We will meet again sometime,
In the dream for sure.

Enjoying the Moment
Hear the cricket sing
Jump, shout, dance, whirl, twirl, and love
Watch, learn, and enjoy

A New Year
Rain falling, wet floor
An awful year ends again
Worries and troubles
Vision, money, work, love, loss
New Year brings fortune and luck(?)

New Year's With Family
Fading rainbows seen
No pot of gold on this day
Good food served instead

The Unknowable
Quiet chilly night
Unfathomable meaning
My head wants to burst
Danger, danger overloaded
Engineers cannot compute

Asian Pride
Love whispers in air
Cultural mist swirls in snow
Pride amongst us

Together
Kiss, smile, sunshine
White man, embrace me tightly
cultural mixture

Project Yellow-wash
Blossoms soar on land
Eyes, rice, tea, dim sum, chopsticks
We're everywhere.

Here to Stay
Ching, Chong, Chinaman
Not foreign, subordinate
here to stay for good

This Land is Our Land
My land, not my land
History repeats itself.
Chin, Thind, Ozawa