 Thank you all very much for coming out tonight. See if that's better. OK. Thank you all for coming out tonight to this, I guess, of the concluding event for One City, One Book. I wanted to start off, as I hinted or told Gus earlier, by talking about the beginning of the book, essentially the origins of the book. I think from there we'll go on to other things tonight, but particularly that because if not correct me if I'm wrong, but I asked you earlier when you had started the book, and you said it around 42 when you started writing it, I guess. And I found that very interesting because it's essentially an autobiographical novel, and most autobiographical novels that you read are usually written by people in their 20s near that time, especially if you're writing about their youth. You're usually not that big of a lapse of time. So I wanted to start off by asking you, why at 42 did you feel the need to revisit your childhood? Do you see that picture behind us? That's a very, very slow kid. He may look OK, but in fact, he's legally blind. He doesn't understand English. He can't fight, and he's in a fighting neighborhood. So I was really slow, Oscar. That took 20 odd years. But if you really follow the popcorn trail, it has two remarkable pieces to it, I think. One is early library reading and great English teachers. And the other was our seven-year-old daughter, who was the same age that I was when my American odyssey began. And when she asked us, we had just received photos of our long-lost, disconnected family members in China, in Shanghai, in Beijing, in Xi'an. And we were hanging these pictures up. And these were cousins. These are the children of my father's older brother. And we believed they had perished during the Cultural Revolution, in fact, if not earlier. And here they were, alive, writing to us in America and sending pictures. And Jenna said, I have three grandparents, and I'm missing a granny. Where is she? And I said, oh, she died a long time ago. And Jenna asked a very strange question for her, who she's never known, a mean mother. And she said, was that your mommy, and was she nice? And I said, yeah, that was my mommy. And I have a hard truth to tell you. And that is, she was never very proud of me, and we never got along very well. And Diane, my bride, said, Gus, Jenna's asking about your real mother, not your stepmother. And I said, oh, my real mother. I said, oh, I don't remember anything about her. I was five when she passed away. And Jenna's eyes grew really huge, because she thought, this is my daddy. He can reach the tall shelves. He can do second grade arithmetic. He knows every word in the vocabulary test. And he knows colors. So this is a very, very, he's a genius. How would he not know his own mommy? And it was that question which drove me to interview my three older sisters, who had escaped with our mother from China during the war, largely on foot, four females alone, to interview them and write down a journal. And that journal became China Boy. How long did that take to interview them? And did you interview other people besides your sisters? No, only them. We really had been disconnected from other members of the family and from our mother's friends. And that's because of the evil stepmother, who had really sealed off her life. It was like, my mommy died twice, once caporially in the second, spiritually in memory. And that was a murder, the second one was a murder. But it was just my three older sisters. I knew my father would not talk about his first wife. He would not talk about China or the past. So it was just the three of them. That took really a weekend. We sat down, the four of us, and I interviewed, I used to be a DA. I interviewed them as if I were preparing for a homicide trial. See what a DA has to do in those cases is you have to bring the deceased to life because the defendant is gonna sit there in a suit, not looking at all like the night in which he killed. And the deceased will come into the courtroom as autopsy photos from CSI. So we have to humanize the victim so she's present. So construct a narrative. Exactly. What time did she get up in the morning? What sort of friends did she have? What kind of books did she read? And so forth, what were her values? So that's what I asked my three older sisters and the result was after a long weekend enough material to write the first fourth of China Boy. Now had you taken any sort of writing classes? Anything on those lines when you started this? Nothing, nothing. When the thing got written and the thing got written this journal in three months. So it was clearly not, I was not acting on my own because I'm not that smart. So I got help, but in any event, we then had to find a literary agent. How many of you know literary agents? We didn't know any and we had to find a literary agent and the literary agent had to find a publisher. Right, and not go to the phone. So the literary agent ended up with Jane Distal, one of the best in the business. And she has a voice like Vito Corleone. So she says, Gus. Yes. This is Jane Distal. I have some questions for you if I may. Of course. What writing program did you come out of? I said, I didn't, I was never been in no writing program. Well, you majored in creative writing in English. No, I went to an engineering school. Well, you've gone to writers conferences and you're in a writing group. I said, no, and I'm thinking, this is all a big mistake. I'm really sorry I bothered you, forget it, it was a bad idea. Anyway, no background. You must have read. Except for the library. Coming to the main library as a kid, later Parkside Branch as a teenager, reading voraciously. And again, as I said, I had a phenomenal senior composition teacher, Mrs. Marshall. And my first freshman English instructor, Prof at West Point, Captain Polonic. They were gifted teachers. And they really brought whatever small writing interest I had to life. Although I still didn't see myself as being capable of writing a book. While you're writing it, or let me back up. After you finished the book, did you notice any influences of anyone you read in the book? Were you picking up unconsciously on any sort of writers? I mean, in terms of style and in terms of the way you were writing. The reason I bring it up is because of the way you use dialect. You have about five or six different dialects going at once. And I wanted to find out like, how did you go about trying to get those sounds on the page the way you did? It's not unlike Mark Twain, with Huckleberry Finn and that sort of thing. Well, it's funny you mentioned Twain because as I was recounting conversations between Toussaint and Toussaint's a real person, Kim got to see Toussaint at Lidquake a couple of weeks ago. Toussaint, the razor sharp street fighter who scraped me off the sidewalk on McAllister Street and tried to teach me how to be a successful black male youth. Here's this dialogue between Toussaint and me. And I have not thought about what Toussaint and I had to say for decades when I'm writing this. And I'm very emotional because I'm realizing that he and his mother and the boxing faculty at the YMCA had really saved my life. And it's all coming back to me for my daughter. And I have this flash of Huck and Big Jim. Except in that conversation, Huck is the one who knows just a little bit more about French than Big Jim does. And in every conversation with Toussaint, I know nothing and Toussaint knows everything. But I did think of Twain. And then I put it into a very Chinese conscience, which is, let me get this straight. You're an idiot in the English language and you're now writing this dialogue from childhood and you're thinking of Mark Twain, right? So I got rid of that thought very quickly. It seemed inappropriate. Oh, it's all right. You're very kind. Well, it's all right. Well, and so given that Toussaint's a real person, Coach Tony is a real person. True, your sisters, they're real people. You're Kai, I'm assuming, yes. So why write is a novel and not is a memoir? Have you, do the words confuzer, Confucius mean anything to you? So there's this notion that if you're in a Confucian family and you write about your parents, you're dead. Not only that, you've done something horrible to all the before-borns. And going way back, I mean, eons, millennia. And you're the one, you're the American, Chinese American idiot who broke this chain of respect. So I thought, just because my father was very smart, that if I changed the names, he wouldn't get it. I mean, here I am at the time I wrote this, I was the trainer for California's prosecutors. And I was not naive about life. I mean, really, I'd grown up in the underbelly and I'd prosecuted some very, very difficult people. And there were no mysteries left in life, but I thought if I wrote the book under Augustus Lee, my formal name, dad would never figure it out. Not smart, but anyway, I changed the names. I took my father out of the story. He was really not a good father and not a good husband. Excuse me. And thinking that that would offend him far less than if I revealed him in reality. Even if I, if I only represented half of what he was, he would be humiliated in Chinatown, in San Francisco at work, and Confucian or not. There's no story worth that. Plus, it wasn't gonna get published, but I didn't want our children to know how genuinely scary their kong kong, their grandfather was. I mean, he was pretty scary to them already, but if they knew that he was worse than that, that wasn't information they needed at their tender ages. So I had lots of reasons, besides fear, to change the name and just write it as a novel. Would you, if you had it to write over again, would you change that? Would you go about it differently? You still would do it that way? No, there is, my father and I at that time did not have a good relationship. But there was nothing that he had done in his life that merited his son attacking him in public. And you were conscientious, you felt it, but I mean, you would have never have tended to have been attacked though, right? I mean, in terms of what you're writing it, or you would have just been, this is what happens. But revealing it would have had the effect. You know, it's sort of like, I remember, I was, I really was blind. I had 20 over 800 and was 20 over 900 vision. So you take, and I didn't get classes till I was nine, so I didn't know, I wasn't stupid. I just thought the world was a very confusing place and didn't understand until nine that there's a world out there. But in the boxing ring, there's no room for classes. So I went back to being blind even after I had them. And I remember I was boxing this kid named Connie and we were just shadow boxing. We weren't supposed to make contact. But I misjudged the distance and I really clocked them. And, you know, really dumb. So I was shadow boxing, I felt contact and then Connie wasn't there anymore. It's like, where'd Connie go? And that's what it would have been like to tell the truth in China Boy in 1991 when the book was published about my father. Maybe I wouldn't have intended to clock them but I would hit them right or in his face. Sure. Were you reading the novel when I was surprised by more anything else? I'm not surprised so much is just frankly delighted was the way you portrayed 50 San Francisco in two aspects. And if you want to comment on this, that'd be great. One is, you know, the 50s generally have been thought of as being some sort of golden age. You know, where everybody got along, kids were safe, you could put them on the street. It was beautiful. You know, gardenias all over the inner city. It was a great place. And yeah, it's little better than Deadwood the way you write about it. There's a lot of hurt and there's a lot of discontent. There's a lot of poverty going on. That's number one. Number two, what was also very surprising was to see actually how multicultural San Francisco already is at that point. This is, you know, it's already a place at least, you know, in your neighborhood where you have people of different ethnicities who connect with each other and do so in frankly in a very open way. So if you, when you were writing the novel, did it surprise you to remember that, that that's actually the way things were? You know, I mean, had you ever at any point yourself like distorted and thought, you know, like just for example, so when you're writing about, you know, Big Willie beating the tar out of Kai and going, oh my God. So we were living basically in a hellhole, you know? First on the 50s, it went a great question. I hate questions that require me to think and this one definitely doesn't. But 50s were both. It wasn't a dillock time because I remember very clearly from the men in the neighborhood who began to drift away as the 50s deepened. And these are African-American men who were all World War II veterans and what it meant to them to not be in war anymore. I remember African-American families talking about not being in the Jim Crow South anymore, not living under really immoral punishing, degrading segregation, I mean, lethal segregation. So San Francisco was haven from Jim Crow South. It was haven from being in the ETO and the Pacific Theater of Operations where half a million Americans died. So that was real. It was a time when politeness and civility had greater sway in popular culture than now. People had the same dislikes and the same prejudices and the same bigotry. I think that is invested in much of human nature. But there were only very limited circumstances in which that could be voiced. I'm not saying that was better, but it was different. On the other hand, poverty of spirit and poverty of purse are human conditions. And we only think that they don't exist because we're not looking at it. It's there now, it's in the city now. In many ways it's more pronounced than it was when I was a kid growing up in the 50s. And it's certainly in the world. So I think that's a continuous reality. I was in a school today where I saw two young men who could have been, except for the dramatic age difference, buddies of mine, running buddies from the panhandle, both kids of color and was so much hurt and disregard and fear about their lives inside them that they had to punch each other out. And they spread fear to others so that adults who were watching this did not intervene. The violence was paralyzing. And that could have been Roosevelt Junior High. That could have been Anza Elementary. Fremont Elementary in the panhandle where I went to school. That plays out in the novel. You can see that with the bullies that it's a cycle of violence or a cycle of abuse, where the father beats on him, he goes out and he beats on the weaker guy and so forth and so on. We live as we learn. And did you at any point realize when you were writing this novel, you were writing a great sports book, by the way? Because it has some of the best descriptions about boxing. I'm a boxing fan. And I was really delighted to see so much attention brought to the detail of what goes in to create a boxer. Could you comment more on that? I mean, do you still box? Do you still follow sport, anything like that? Only remotely. I really did that sport when I left San Francisco at the age of 17 to go to West Point. I went down to the Central Y on 220 Golden Gate in Leavenworth and I said goodbye to Tony. Tony was really my father. And well, I'll never forget is that he apologized when I was saying goodbye. What I wanted to say is, you know what kid? You came in here, you were a wreck, you know? You looked like a toothpick and a tutu. You looked like a shrimp on a hook. You turned sideways and you disappeared. You know, you look like you could be a man now someday and the YMCA is real proud of you. Now you go to West Point, you do a good job and you think of me every now and again and you find something like St. Boniface light a candle for me. That's what I expected him to say. Instead he says, you know, I'm really sorry that you ended up boxing 10 years from me because I know the only reason you did it was me, that you don't have the heart of a fighter. You got the heart of a peacemaker and he sort of said it like it was a curse, but you know, for Pete's sake and that's really true. If Tony had taught painting, who knows, you know? But boxing was actually the time. You get green oil colors if you get any thrashed later. But I needed boxing, Oscar I really did because I was a physical coward and I lived on hard streets. So I needed that in order to grow and I needed to learn. And if there's a lesson to boxing and to China Boy for youth, I think it's this, that we all have opportunities to face our fears and we all have, we live in a culture of fear, but if we can face that fear, whatever it is that has hounded us or hounds us, then we have a real opportunity to be our best selves. We make lots of reasons to run away from it but they're not good reasons. And that's what Tony taught me. So I admire boxing. I do watch it. We have a body bag, hangs in our backyard. You don't flick a K-bar at it or anything? No. He didn't pick that up. That you didn't pick up, the flying kinks and everything. Well, you don't want to show that to your kids. A K-bar is a Marine Corps bayonet knife, which Pinoy learned to throw as a weapon. But I still hit the bag just for exercise. And our son, Eric, who's now 20, is an amazing martial artist. And he makes the bag sing the way Tony and Bobby and Pinoy used to make that. What's interesting, part of the point, though, of learning boxing or anything like that, at least what I took away from him is that when you're in control, when you know what you're doing, you're thinking. And when you're thinking, it's funny, it's like the better prepared you are, the less chance you're probably gonna get in a fight. It's a sort of paradoxical, which I thought, which is one of the things that like, for example, Coach Lewis and the novel sort of embodies this whole keen man who could thrash anybody, but that's not what he's about. In fact, he's a very, seems to be a very calm, very peaceful, thoughtful person. Exactly. And he turns into like a thinking man's game, frankly, that it's not just swinging your fist, it's not just beating someone up. It's even the idea of respecting the opponent, this sort of thing, as telling them thank you, thank you for the fight, that sort of thing. Preparing, I guess, for struggle, which is life, what's life is gonna be? And it's really, I mean, what I loved about the why and I continue to love about the why is that it taught principles. And yeah, life is a struggle and life's gonna be a challenge and there'll be real hard days, maybe even hard years. If you're unlucky, hard decades, but it all won't be hard. And that if you prepare yourself, and they were really training us to be men. I mean, up front, in your face, we are training you to be men, not males, but to be men. And that's sort of, it took me back because you realize your class were a bunch of like seven-year-olds, six-year-olds, eight-year-olds. Usually, this is the sort of thing you address to people when they're 15, 14, saying, now it's time to be a man and these guys are starting right off the bat. Boxing, man, boxing in San Francisco in the 1950s was a culture. There were, in this city alone, and it's a much smaller city back then, there are easily 50,000 guys that had a box because that's what you learned in the YMCA's. That's what you learned in the police athletic leagues. That's what you did in the Army and everyone went in the Army. I mean, all men did who were qualified. So it was part of the culture. It was as common to know, in my opinion, for men in the 1950s to know how to box. I mean, not to master it, but to know how to box as there are men today who know how to operate a cell phone. That's as common as it was. It was a given. Yeah. Now, let me ask you something that's scary. Okay. Did you really get beat down like that like at the end of the novel? Was that, I mean, were you just seriously ripped apart? Oh, yeah. Oh, my. Well, in fact, worse. So here are some things that are not true in the book. Okay. Number one, the chapter would where Kai Ting meets with the Gumsang, the chess club in China. That never happened. I walked in on them and was chased out. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. They go, I wanna get out. So you mean they didn't like getting little kids drunk? Yeah. That wasn't, they never happened, all right. And there was, S.Y. Shen, my uncle, whose uncle's Shim in the book, did play chess and did say good things about the chess association to me, but I never, that whole evening never occurred. That was the suggestion of Gary Luke, tremendous editor at Penguin. Number two, Kai Ting takes about two and a half years, is my guess in the book. Why am I guessing I wrote it? But that's my sense, about two and a half years from first lesson with Tony until he can beat Big Willie Mack. It was four years. But there were so many years of more beatings that Diane said, gosh, this is too much. Too much of a good thing, take them out. So I compressed the time. And a Washington Post book editor who is African-American caught that in a heartbeat. He said, the only, it was a fine book, da, da, da. But the only problem I have is how does a nine year old kid, because I think he's about nine or 10 of this, how does he fight that well? Well, the fact is he doesn't. The fact is he's 11 going on 12 when it really happens. And how old was Big Willie by this point? 28. You mean chronologically or body size? Body size, 28. Chronologically. No one really knew how old he was, but my guess is he was 14. Yeah, and that's the other, getting back to that again about the cycle of abuse and the sort of stuff you touch upon is you really, you make him out to be such a tragic figure in the end. He doesn't seem to have anything. The poor guy really, in fact, and that was one of the things again that caught my attention in the novel was how all, even though when the coaches are getting ready for this big showdown, the emphasis is still being placed that, he's not evil. That's right, yeah. He's just basically confused and he's gonna keep hurting you until you defend yourself, but he's not evil. Now, do you believe that there's no such thing that people for the most part, people who hurt other people, who even sometimes kill other people are not evil so much as maybe are they just messed up? No, I believe in evil. I've seen evil. It's real. I didn't think Big Willie was evil. He was a kid, but you get to your late teens, get in your 20s, and after that, it's evil. I mean, to me, there's absolutely no doubt. It doesn't mean I don't think that we should change in response to facing evil. I think in each case, whether we're facing someone who's troubled and recoverable, or we're facing someone who's evil and will not change, we are still, this is YMCA training, this is also out of Zion AME Church. I was in two African American churches as a child and they really helped form me and is that sort of render to no one evil for evil. And in my worst fights, I really tried not to be evil. I really tried to be principled about what I was doing. The fact that it was desperate was not cause to change principles. Okay, let me ask you this. So what's become of all the people in the novel? For example, Toussaint, you said you met up with him again. So now what's going on with Toussaint? So what would you guess Toussaint is doing? This kid who was a savior of other children, beginning at the age of seven. What do you think he is now? Preacher, minister, teacher, social worker? You know, he's all of those things and he does it in the guise of being a family practice medical doctor for Kaiser Permanente Fresno. So there were two of us that I know of, two males who came out of the panhandle in that generation who were not drafted to go to Vietnam. Two of us. One, because I had enlisted. And second, Toussaint, who got a 2S student deferment to go to UCSF and then UCSF medical school. Think of how many African-American guys had that opportunity in the 60s. I know of one. And the irony is when we got together, when Toussaint, Diane, this is a beautiful story but there's no time to tell it. Diane found this time. Yeah, sure. So Diane comes down to the study while I'm writing the journal for our daughter, Jenna, and I'm crying. And she knows I don't cry very well. So this is pretty bad. And she's worried what's wrong. And I said, he choked up. I said, I just remembered that I was a very at risk kid and that I almost didn't make it as a kid, but that I was rescued. And the rescuer that I'm thinking of right now was my first friend and his mother. And he was my first best friend too. And there's so much that he put into me and I never thanked him. I just accepted it. And I remember when I tried to be black and I remembered after that I tried to be white. And when I tried to be white, it no longer served me to be a black would-be street fighter. That was really scary behavior. So I dropped it and I remember telling myself I was never poor, I was never hungry and I was never black. And in that self-telling in my cowardice, my moral cowardice, my desire to be accepted in the next neighborhood that I had forgotten Tucson. His name's Tucson Diane and he saved my life and I got to find him. I don't know where he is. And because I'd been in the military and I'd been in law enforcement, I was able to look him up in military records and FBI records. Every government record that exists and he didn't exist. He hadn't made it to the age of 18 because he came up with nothing. And Diane said, you know, I don't believe that. I used a scientific and empirical approach. I put in Tucson, Maseo Street, I put in his birth date, pinpoint he didn't exist. So he had died. A lot of kids in the neighborhood died. So he had died because I'd left there when still in junior high. Diane said, I'm gonna find him. And I remember being angry. It's like, how can I mourn two signs passing if you keep this silly idea alive that he's around? So she's teaching at Merritt Hospital in Oakland. And she says, it's very important for us, she's a nurse, very important for us to tell the stories of our patients. That's how we tell moral truths. It's through our patient's stories. My husband learned that because he just wrote a book about his childhood in which he remembered his relationships with his best friend, Toussaint. That was her search, her formal search. His good friend, Toussaint. And how important Toussaint was to him and that in fact, it was part of his survival. After the talk, people come up to talk to her. She's amazing, so big crowd. But anyway, afterwards, one woman remains and she's a nurse and her name is Rose Mew. And Rose says, did you say the name Toussaint? And Diane says, yes, I did. Do you know someone named Toussaint? She's like, I surely do, I work with him. Where do you work? Kaiser Permanente Fresno. So my gosh, well, what's your Toussaint's last name? She says, Street, which is my Toussaint's name. And Diane screams. There are people picking up plates on the back and they drop them. And she says, do you know if he's, would he be like in his 40s? Oh yeah, I think that's about right. Do you know if he came from, anyway of talking to him? She says, sure, it's before cell phones. Wanderer pay phone, she says, this is Rose Mew. This is an emergency. I need Dr. Street. Dr. Street, this is Rose Mew. I'm up at Merritt and I want you to talk to this here, lady. All right, would you do that? Cause I think we're in the middle of a miracle. So she passes the phone over and she gives it to Diane. She says, this is not the first time this has happened to me. Diane says, is your name Toussaint Street? Yes. Did you grow up in San Francisco? Yes. Who is this? Did you grow up in the Panhandle? Yes. Do you remember a little Chinese boy named Gus Lee? It's a long pause. The voice says, of course I do. He was my best friend. Very good. When Toussaint and I got together that weekend. Yeah, Diane. And she says the rest of this conversation is, I cannot believe I am so delighted to meet you by phone. Toussaint, my name is Diane and I'm Gus's wife. And we have two precious children together. And he will be so happy to know that you're around. We thought you were not in the world. And he said, it's the strangest thing. But about two years ago, I started having these dreams about Gus. And there are a lot of Asian medical staff down here in Fresno. And they started wondering why this guy was coming up to him and saying, do you know Gus Lee? Have you ever heard of a Chinese guy named Gus Lee? And just the other day, finally had this Asian doctor turn to me and say, Toussaint, I look, you're the head of our department and I really, I admire you and everything. Why are you singling me out for all this attention, for lunch and everything? He said, well, you kind of remind me of a friend I had. And I just, this is, it started two years ago. And two years ago was when I started writing the journal and started crying about Toussaint and my study. So when we got together, I hugged him in the street, I hugged him in his car, I hugged him, you know, we could never hug in the 50s, but I was hugging him like, you know, it was going out of style and he gets out of the car, I hug him, I hug him on the stairs and everything. They're kids, kids and my kids are laughing and we're pretty entertaining to them. And we get inside the house, there's a Berlin game and I said, Toussaint, I looked him in the eyes and I said, I never got to thank you for saving my life. So, Touss, thank you, man, for giving me my life. And he looked at me and it was the weirdest thing, he just looked at me and he made this face like, and then he said, what you talking about? No, no, what you is like, that's not good. What are you talking about? Okay, but what you is like, what you talking about? And it was like, are there two, cause this looked like Toussaint. It was like this beautiful smile, this incredible smile. He had that smile and when we here we were as middle-aged men and balding and everything and we're saying hello to each other, but that look and that, what you talking about? I mean, if Toussaint didn't get it, that he saved my life and either I'm crazy or this is not Toussaint and I didn't think I was crazy. So, what you talking about? I said, what do you mean, what are you talking about? And I thought you taught me how to laugh, how to walk, how to smile, how they tried to teach me how to fight. You taught me how to play round ball. You taught me how to hit a baseball. You tried to teach me how to hit a curve. You really taught me how to talk back when I had to talk back and be silent when I had to be silent. You taught me how to be an American kid, a street kid. Like, none of this makes sense. And he kind of look at me, well, you know there's a little bit of that. I said, a little bit of that. He says, I never got to thank you. Okay, at this point I'm thinking, yeah, every time we crossed the hate, passed, went through the panhandle to the hate, we call it the, I thought it was H-A-T-E, the hate. There are some hard boys over there. But we go over to the hate and, you know, we're Tucson, people look at Tucson and say, yeah, I'm gonna tussle with him. I don't think so. But then they say, what's that China boy doing with that kid? Hey, blood, what are you doing with that China boy? And then Tucson would be in trouble that he'd never get without me. So it's like, thank you. Yes, Gus, thank you for all those fights I got into because of you. Those names I got called because of you, you know. Ripped up close, you know, it's like, yeah, you're welcome to, don't mention it, you know. But he said, no, do you remember that first day in Mrs. Halloran's class? Second grade, I said, no. I'm the one who wrote the book about this, no. And he said, well, there was a trash can fire. And he named a kid, I don't remember his name, but he was erasing the, and Mrs. Halloran had written very carefully her name and the class, you know, second grade, very beautiful penmanship, remember that? I'm sure it's still being done. But anyway, it was being erased because one kid had another kid in a headlock and was erasing the whole board with his head. Other kids were punching each other out. Someone had taken a trash can from another classroom and thrown it through the window, breaking it. So there was glass all over the place and our trash can was on fire. So I mean, it torched it. Second grade? Second grade. First day of second grade. And the teacher, he says to me, where was the teacher? And I said, Tucson, I don't have glasses those days. I have no idea where she was. You know, when she was teaching, I didn't know where she was. And he said, dang, you don't remember anything. It was just like being back in the hood again. And he said, she was holding on to you. I said, you're kidding. No, she says you were the only kid in his seat and you had your knees together and your hands folded on top of your knees and you had your head down. And she was holding on to you with both hands. Everything else was in turmoil. And I remember what mama said to me, which is you get the teacher to be on your side. You treat, you respect that teacher like you respect me. And so I said, okay, that's cool. So I sat down behind you, put my knees together, folded my hands, put my head down. Before long, she was holding on to me too. She says, why do you think I went to Lowell, the academic high school? Why do you think I got into college from the panhandle and became a doctor because you showed what a student does? You know, I'm going. You know, stupidly was back at those days. I had no idea what was going on. They were speaking in English. So here is my great Tucson, thank you so much. And he would have none of it because he's Tucson. Instead, he made up this, he's a genius, okay? So he makes up this fabricated thing about how I put my hands together on top of my knees and it got him in medical school. Very nice, very nice. Well, I think at this point I might turn it over to, I guess, brief questions. I think we have a little bit of time for questions from the audience. So Rosie, maybe over there will be, but raise your hand if you want to ask us anything and she'll come by with the microphone. I grew up in San Francisco as well and wondered how you ended up in the hate when most people lived in Chinatown and was beached that area. Yeah, what were we thinking, right? It came about because my father's employer and they were kinsmen in Shanghai in China. So they came to the United States at the same time, owned an apartment building in the Panhandle. Because I had early TB, it was recommended that I not live in Chinatown. So that apartment, the upper flat of this apartment building, 2085 Golden Gate, was given free to my father and my mother and my sisters and I to live in. So that's how we ended up there. It was because of my health condition or lack of health. Oh, that was great for your health apparently. Yeah. Just the right move. Yeah, I learned how to breathe real deeply. Running for my life. It's gonna let blood out to cool down that feeling. That's right. Another question from the audience. I guess how have your kids reacted to the book? It's funny, I put it into three stages. Number one is at seven and five, they were too young to read it and I had put in the salty language of the streets. I didn't want them reading it. So I would tell them stories from it. Second stage is where friends asked them, what do you think of China Boy? And they'd say, oh, it was a great book because they, without having actually cracked the pages, well, they cracked the pages, but without actually having read it, they had heard enough of the stories where they thought they had read it. And then third was when people, when schools that they were in adopted the book and made it required reading for certain classes out of guilt, they then read it. But it was much later than I would have guessed. How did your relatives and particularly your stepmom feel about how they were cast in the book? I don't know my stepmother's reaction because she had passed away. I say this as a joke, I have said it as a joke. And I'm gonna say it aloud. I'm gonna test it right now to see if this is real. The line goes like this, if my stepmother were still alive, I'd still be in the army and a bachelor. I think it's true. I imagined having a wife. I imagined bringing that wife into reaching distance, punching distance of Edith's range. Her real name was Edith, not Edna. And then my whole body would just grow cold. So I don't think I really, I think I would have stayed in the army and it would have been a very meaningful career for me. I appreciated the military deeply. It was like a continuation of the YMCA, about principles and about taking chances for your buddies. And I honor that. But, so she never got to read it because by the time she had passed away, that allowed me to court Diane and get married and have children and bring the children to the world without the fear that Edith would do something to them. Looks like we have time for one more question. What became of your three sisters? Well, wonderful things really. Eleanor, let's see, can I remember my own book? Jennifer, her real name is Eleanor, Chinese name Awa. Our first born, she's an amazingly artistic, elegant person. She lives in New York, with a wonderful husband. Their whole story is summed up in this one. He courted her, he took her to Europe and they bought a basin dorfer and a Steinway matching grand piano so that they could play together. Ying, my middle sister, was in this very room earlier in the year for literary luminaries. Is it luminaries? Laureates. Laureates, I knew that was wrong. But it's a luminaries story. Laureates, sorry. And she and I are probably the closest in terms of relationship. And she lives in Berkeley. She was a very important politician in Berkeley for many years and worked for Ron Dellums in DC. And my youngest sister, Mary, Janie, let's see, Megan is Ying and Janie is Mary. Mary's a medical doctor. She was the, our mother squeezed her cheeks because she's, these are beautiful women, but when she was small and may make, you know, cute, our mother said, oh, may, don't worry about grades. The rest of us are being punished about grades, but don't worry about grades. You're so cute. Just marry a kind man and have lots of babies. So of course, Mary is the one with two master's degrees, a PhD and she's a medical doctor. All right, I think that's, we have one more? Okay, one more question. Thank you. Good evening. I'm from City College. My name is Alex Wu. My question is, after you graduated from West Point, why do you want to carry some job with the military and change to why this China boy book? Thank you. Sure. Great question, Alex. First of all, I didn't graduate from West Point. I flunked out in electrical engineering at the end of my third year. It turns out to be West Point's not a good place to go if you don't plan on studying, but when you're as immature as I was, you don't figure that out until you're out the door and you go, wait a moment, did you just kick me out? Cause I just, cause I don't study. So it was a humiliating event, very painful. And I became a drill sergeant and jumped out of airplanes for a while and then got my commission through ROTC at University of California at Davis and then went back in the Army. I only got out of the Army. I would have stayed in for a career. I'm sorry? No, I didn't go to Vietnam. I went to Korea twice. At the time I felt very cheated looking back, given the fact that I was such a lousy infantryman cause I was, I was blind. If all engagements had occurred in daylight and my glasses never fogged up, I would have done great. But the fact is I would have, in combat I would have put my troops at great risk just cause I was so visually challenged. So luckily I didn't go to Vietnam. Not so much for me, but for the men that would have been looking to me and I would have been leadership by the Braille method. So, but I got out because in my last year of active duty I was gone. They called temporary duty TDY. I was away from home and my wife and our newborn child 300 days. And she just said, this is not a marriage. So you have a choice. You can either get out of the Army or you can leave the service. So wow, I have a choice. So I got out. It was the right decision. How do you incorporate American culture and how do you incorporate American culture peacefully with your Chinese culture? Okay, I think wonderful questions. Thank you. Certainly my first five years with my Chinese mother, my mommy was most formative. After that, most Chinese, because my Chimu, my stepmother was German American, spoke no Chinese, cooked no Chinese dishes. In fact, cooked nothing really. But which is why I came to love Lola, the YMCA cafeteria so much. But most of my Chinese culture then came from going to school in Chinatown. So after public school, Chinese American kids then go to Chinese school in San Francisco. I went to St. Mary's. I was again very dumb because I spoke no Cantonese, only Shanghai and some Hanyu Mandarin, which were totally not understood in Chinatown. So I looked stupid in the panhandle and looked like an idiot in Chinatown. It's like, you look smart, but you are not smart. So I would say that's it. I know from friends at St. Mary's who had full Chinese families and still had Chinese culture, and I would visit with them. So that was it. Certainly the food. Go to a restaurant. 950 Grand Avenue, my other church. But as for melding Chinese and American culture, it is like having eight courses banquet. You get to pick what you like best. There are parts of Chinese culture that American culture can't touch. There are parts of American culture that Chinese culture can't touch. So has it been harmonious blending? No, lots of train wrecks, lots of collisions, lots of grinding discernment. But when the children, when I became a father, the choices became very clear about what parts of Chinese culture we would advance and model and what parts of American culture we would model. Thank you. Are we out of time? Maybe afterwards. That's his next book. The next book is, Gus Lee Gets Concrete. Well, thank you both so much for that rich conversation. I'd like to quickly just tell you a couple of things. I believe you know that Gus will be signing books in the back of the room. We've spent so much time and so enjoyably that it's going to have to be fairly quick because we're gonna be whisked out of here at eight o'clock. So I want to just make sure that folks respect that and kind of get their books in place and move quickly with that. We'd love to hear what people thought about the One City One Book program and about this evening's program and you can let us know through the One City One Book section at the library's website, sfpl.org. I want to again thank everyone that's been involved, especially I want to thank Marilyn and Diane. I want to thank the wonderful Marsha Schneider who makes these things possible at the library and Rosie who has done a wonderful job with this. I want to thank everyone that's participated. I want to thank Books Inc. for being such a gracious sponsor and host and serving great dim sum along with Gus's stories. And thank you all for joining in this great civic reading project. And again, Gus and Oscar, thank you so much. Thank you guys.