Here’s the vona event and the excerpts i read:
San Tong lives in Los Angeles. She works at an advertising agency, while pursuing various writing projects. She was the Visual Director for Theater Group called Mango Tribe, an APIA women’s theatre production group founded on the belief that collective creation is often the most powerful form of art. She was also a literary manager for the 5th Night Screenplay and Short Film Series at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
1.18.07 (VONA fundraiser)
Distillation Poem:
History kept getting confused.
She was put on this earth to excavate the truths that transcended
territorial borders,
bayonets,
and good foreign policy.
She transcended the bond between
mother
and
child
and for that her sacrifice was great
Neurosis and madness can birth greatness,
but not everyone makes it thru to the other side.
And what she bore changed how a generation regarded the word
“rape” and the phrase
“occupation.”
“I do the work I do so that my grandfather’s death in the hands of the
soldiers was not in vain,
I ask for an apology.
I ask for reparations.
I have not forgotten and neither have a generation still scarred by
Nanking atrocities.”
Some called her a liar, a rabble-rouser.
But she believed that there is fairness in love and war.
She sought truth, but madness drove her to make the ultimate sacrifice.
Excerpt from Longer Fiction Piece:
From then on, she always believed the moon to be heaven. The river was a mirror to show off her beauty and grace. Heaven was a place that teased earth with her beauty and calm. And mortals like her had only to look up at it to see its splendor. So every night, she said a little prayer that soon she’d be there to hug the moon when it was full and to cradle and spoon it when it was a crescent. It was a place where there was no pain. It was now her third full moon cycle at the house of comfort. Marukumoto, the soldier who had taken ownership of her had either been killed or transferred to another part of China. She didn’t know what happened to him. She did not love him, but understood that in war she would be a fool not to take any special treatment she could get. But now, things were miserable.
When Marukumoto was still around, she thought that he was slowly falling in love with her. She’d never felt anything like it before, but she couldn’t release herself to love him completely simply because he was the one she lost her virginity to. He was her first and it was not by choice. It was him and 2 other soldiers that had forced their way into her family’s home. Her mother was in the kitchen washing rice. The loud sound of the rice clinking against the metal bowl they used each night must have drowned out the sound of the soldier’s footsteps against the dirt road leading up to their hut. They must have stabbed her in the back from behind. She barely heard her scream, but heard the bowl crash to the ground, the round metal circling on the ground a few times before settling on the floor frozen in time. The rice was thrown into the air like confetti before landing. By the time Yishun was forced to discover her mother, she was a curled up ball, hunched over on the floor, in a pool of blood, rice scattered on the ground beside her. This was the first snapshot of Yishun’s hell on earth. Reincarnation might have graced her with an easier fate.
San
The gift of Grapefruit, Sulu, Peas, and Apples
