[APPLAUSE]
I have a request from Mari, [CHUCKLES]
one of my Asian-American sisters out there,
to read a Chinese-American revenge tale.
And this one's collected in an anthology
called Charlie Chan is Dead.
It's a wild anthology.
Pick it up if you can.
[CHUCKLES] Well, I call this--
I guess one of my friends say--
what she said about this poem is this.
It's a cross between a traditional classical Chinese
ghost story, revenge story, and in a fractured fairy
tale from Rocky and Bullwinkle.
If you can imagine that--
[CHUCKLES] --that hybrid.
It's called "Moon."
"Moon was a little fat Chinese girl.
She had a big yellow face befitting her name.
She was sad and lonely as were all little
fat Chinese girls in 1991.
And she had a strange insatiable desire
for a pair of trashy blonde twins name Smith.
No accounting for taste of course.
Every night she would wander on the beach in search of them,
hoping to espy them taking a joyride around Pacific
Beach in their rebuilt sky blue convertible Impala.
Their long blonde hair swept backward like horses' manes.
Their faces, obscenely sunburned,
resembling right halves of peaches.
One chilly September evening the boys
stopped to make a campfire on the beach.
And Moon, feeling quite full and confident that day,
descended upon them, waddling--
so fat, so round, and shiny with sea spray.
She offered them chocolate macadamia nut clusters
and began to sing, strumming a tiny lute like instrument
her grandmother sent her from China.
She began singing in an ancient falsetto
a baleful song about exiled geese winging
across the horizon, about the waxing
and waning of stormy seas.
About children lost to the unknown depths
of the New Kingdom.
The boys were born and raised in the Valley
and were very unsophisticated.
They were also functional illiterates and were held
back twice in the fifth grade.
[LAUGHTER]
And there was no way that they could have understood
the complexities of her song.
They huddled in that sporting male way
and whispered surreptitiously, speaking
in very short sentences between grunts
or long run on sentences with ambiguous antecedents.
[LAUGHTER]
So that Moon was not quite sure whether she was the subject
of their discussion.
Finally, the boys offered to give fat Moon
a ride in their stainless steel canoe they got for Christmas.
We know, of course, that they were up to trouble.
You don't think that their hospitality was sincere, do you?
Moon graciously accepted their invitation.
Actually she was elated given the bad state
of her social life.
She hadn't had a date for centuries.
So the two boys paddled, one fore, one aft with fat Moon
in the middle.
Moon was so happy that she started strumming her lute
and singing the song of Hiawatha.
[LAUGHTER]
Don't ask me why this was what she felt like singing.
Suddenly the boys started rocking the boat
forcefully forward and backward, making wild horsey sounds
until the boat flipped over, fat Moon, lute, and all.
The boys laughed and taunted Moon to reappear
from the rough water.
When she didn't surface after a few minutes
it suddenly occurred to them that she was drowning.
They watched in bemusement while the last of her yellow forehead
bled into the waves.
Finally, they dove in and dragged her heavy body back
into the boat which was quite a feat for she was twice as heavy
wet than dry.
And she was now tangled in sea flora.
When they finally docked, Moon discovered
the boys saved her only to humiliate her.
It appeared that they wanted a reward
for saving her life, a blood debt if you will.
In this material world, goods are bartered for goods,
and actions, however heroic or well-intentioned in appearances,
are never clearly separated from services rendered.
And in the American ledger all services
must be paid for in the end.
And all contracts must be signed at closing
bearing each participant's legal signature.
Thus the boys ripped off moon's dress and took
turns pissing all over her round face and belly saying,
"So it's true, it's true that your cunts are really slanted.
Slant eyed cunt.
Did you really think that we had any interest in you."
After the boys finished their vile act
they left Moon on the wharf without a stitch
on, glowing with yellow piss.
And she cried, wailed all the way home on her bicycle.
Imagine a little fat Chinese girl, naked, peddling, wailing.
When Moon got home her mother called her a slut.
Her father went on and on about the Sino-Japanese war
and about the starving girl children in Guangdong.
And look, what are you doing with your youth
and new prosperity, wailing, carrying on.
Just because some trashy white boys rejected you.
Have you no shame.
Your cousin, the son matriculated Harvard.
Your brothers, the stars, all became engineers.
Where are the IM Peis and Yo Yo Mas of your generation?
They sent her to bed without supper that night
as a reminder that self-sacrifice
is the most profound virtue of the Chinese people.
Up in her room Moon brooded, and swore on a stack of bibles
that she would seek revenge for this terrible incident.
And that if she were to die today
she would come back to Earth as an angry ghost
to haunt those motherfuckers.
With this in mind Moon swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills
only to cough them up 10 minutes later.
Obviously, they didn't kill her.
However, those 10 minutes of retching
must have prevented oxygen from entering her brain
and left her deranged for at least
a month after this episode.
Hey, I'm no doctor, just a storyteller.
Take my diagnosis with caution, please.
Overnight she became a homicidal maniac.
A foul plague would shroud all of Southern California, which
curiously infected only blond men.
[LAUGHTER]
Both natural and peroxided types.
[LAUGHTER]
Those slightly hennaed would be spared.
[LAUGHTER]
For 30 days and 30 nights, Moon scoured
the seaside, howling, windswept, in search of blond victims.
They would drown on their surfboards or collapse
while polishing their cars.
They would suffocate in their sleep
next to their wives and lovers.
Some died leaving a long trail of excrement
because whatever pursued them was
so terrible that it literally scared the shit out of them.
And since-- and not since Herod had
we seen such a devastating assault on male children.
On the 31st night the horror subsided.
Moon finally found the Smith boys
cruising in their sky blue convertible Impala.
They were driving South on the scenic route
between San Clemente and Del Mar when she plunged down on them.
Her light was so powerful and bright that the boys
were momentarily blinded and swerved into a canyon.
Their car turned over 12 times.
They were decapitated, the coroner said.
So cleanly as if a surgeon had done the job with a laser.
Moon grew up, lost weight and became a famous singer.
Which proves that there is no justice in the universe
or that indeed there is justice.
Your interpretation of this denouement
mostly depends on your race, creed, hair color, social,
and economic class, and political proclivities,
and whether or not you are a feminist revisionist
and have a habit of cheering for the underdog.
What is the moral of the story?
Well, it's a tale of revenge obviously,
written from a Chinese-American girl's perspective.
My intentions are to veer you away
from teasing and humiliating little chubby Chinese girls
like myself.
And that one wanton act of humiliation you perpetrated
on the fore or aft of that boat of my arrival
maybe one humiliating act too many.
For although we are friendly neighbors
you don't really know me.
You don't know the depth of my humiliation,
and you don't know where, you don't know what I can do.
You don't know what is beneath my doing."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
[CHUCKLES]
OK.