The Art of War
The sectioned titled “The Art of War” is all about revolutionaries. It is filled quotes from Sun Tzu, of course, but also other Asian writers offering commentary on war, such as Ho Chi Minh and Mao. A character hoping to follow the path of the revolutionaries is painted metaphorical tones as failing short:
Ben pondered the constant warfare within his mind, the hidden mines that seemed to explode at every venture made through that dark labyrinth. Had not his heroes, Lenin and Marx, already cleared a path to light? Why was it, then, that his vision could only navigate through the clarity of a white opiate
Or Acronym Salad
The thing about radical revolutionaries in the 1960’s was that they all had their own organizational names which came with their own acronyms. The Black Panther and the Yippies figured it out, man: make it name to remember. Who could keep track of those similar sounding acronyms anyway? Especially when they began fighting each other:
An alphabet soup of punching youth, kicking and pushing, beating out the long years, months, and days of our frustrations, strangling the deep disappointment of our failure, finally spilling the blood we could not in nonviolent civil disobedience.
Charlie Chan
Throughout the book are peppered quotes from the famous, infamous and doubly so. Some are philosophers, other are politicians, others are celebrities. And some are even fictional. This being a story set in Chinatown before the arrival of political correctness, one of the simmering questions must be: will a certain fictional Chinese detective show up? The answer is yes:
Mind, like parachute, only function when open.
The Unification Theory of Food
One character proposes a not entirely unsound metaphorical premise for the underlying ideological pursuit of colonial territories. It’s not just about land, but what is done with that land. And when you think about it, how many wars have been found over Antarctica?
“You think about it. Food is the basis for everything…How come Magellan comes to bother folks in us faraway islands? It’s to make their food taste better.”
Darkness
Darkness, strangely enough, is not omnipresent in this more than 600-page long novel. Darkness is the unofficial metaphor of post-19th century writing, after all, found somewhere in the work of every fiction writer published since the turn of the last century. The bigger the novel, the more often it is usually engaged. But that does not hold true for this big book. Still, it does inevitably show up:
Incense rises, and the steam spits. And the heat envelopes you until you bleed your dirty waters, grab the earth, sink your cheeks into its cool dark soil. The hot darkness squeezes you like a wet sponge, and your waters get replaced for visions.
