Railroad Standard Time

• “Words I’d never heard before set me at play in familiar scenes new to me, and ancient.” (pg 1) I thought this was a very powerful way to describe the experience of listening to his mother’s Chinese. Even though I’ve never had this kind of experience, the language used helps me understand what it might feel like to be confronted with something that you know is a large part of your family’s history and culture and be unable to understand it the way they do.
• “So this dance and groggy mumbling about the watch being no good, in strange English, like an Indian medicine man in a movie.” (pg 2) Why did she start acting funny when he asked her what her father’s name was? And what did that have to do with the watch being “no good”? She said something about her father’s name being “one of those Chinese names…” (pg 2), so was she thinking that the watch didn’t have value because her father was Chinese or something like that?

• “I wore it braking on the Southern Pacific, though it was two jewels short of new railroad standard and an outlaw watch that could get me fired.” (pg 2) What is an “outlaw watch”? I’m assuming based on the titles of the book and chapter that he is working for railroads in some capacity and “braking” is referring to that, but there is a lot of stuff here that seems like it requires background knowledge to understand that I simply don’t have.
• “When we were sitting down and into our dinner after Grandma’s funeral, and ate in front of the table set with white food for the dead, Ma said she wanted no white food and money burning after her funeral.” (pg 5) I’m not familiar with this custom, so I’d like to know more about the significance of doing these things. However, was “white food” referring to the race that eats the food or the color of the food itself? Because that would have very different connotations depending on intended meaning.

The Eat and Run Midnight People

• “I was still, as she lay next to me, still again as she put a smelly damp sandy hand under my shirt, on my chest, and still again as she moved her hand back and forth, flat, round and round my breast, sanding off a nipple.” (pg 10) I have no idea what’s supposed to be happening here; he mentioned being at the beach and this person is supposed to be a nun, but I don’t understand this at all. Is this supposed to be a metaphor for something, or is there literally a nun molesting him on the beach in the middle of the night? What does this mean?
• “Then I told him that I would live forever too. For I have insinuated myself in the crowd scenes of movies that star stars whose movies will be seen on TV forever.” (pg 10) This imagery really stuck out to me, and it’s a little easier for me to parse than the previous sections of this story. It kind of sounds like he’s making a statement about representation in movies, and how being in a movie is kind of like living forever because those stories will live on and keep being shown and retold?
• “I moved back and then I moved in, in cold blood, in and out, fascinated with the motion, pistoning grit, digging an escape tunnel out of camp, banging down the right of way, going home, Grandfather.” (pg 13) Is he… comparing having sex with an ex-nun on the beach to digging the tunnels for the railroads?? Or am I misunderstanding? Either way, it’s very uncomfortable to read and I’m wondering why he would choose to write about having sex on the beach in such a poetic manner. I’m assuming the juxtaposition is meant to represent something or make a point about something, but I’m not really getting it.
• The poetic descriptions of inappropriate things and the disjointed nature of the writing, combined with his brief mention that his kids were “gone” (pg 22), makes me think that this whole story is him dissociating due to grief and possibly trying to distract himself through sex. I think this would also make the story about the guy getting crushed by the train and dying feel less like a non sequitur, especially if his kids had died in a railroad accident and that’s why he moved to Hawaii “On an island without real trains, or great highways” (pg 23).

The Chinatown Kid

• I had to look up diaphanous, which apparently means “light, delicate, and translucent” which makes the chameleon thing make a bit more sense, as if his skin is see-through then it’s sort of like being camouflaged, which chameleons are known for. His comment about skin being “nature’s insulation” (pg 24) creates and reinforces the idea that he’s trying to hide or is attempting to conceal something.
• “He wanted to see Maria happy, to ease the grip of boredom and death on him.” (pg 27) So even before his wife died in childbirth and before he married her, he was dealing with grief of some sort? Or is it more of a metaphorical death, like depression which could be construed as a sort of death of the self because it eats away at you and leaves you feeling like a shadow?
• “Dressing the girl had been an act of revenge; he was a master baker ornamenting a poisoned wedding cake, something white and preciously beautiful that would mindlessly be eaten alive. He didn’t know how to tell her.” (pg 32) What was he going to tell her? Is it something to do with how she described herself as American in the previous passage, or something to do with the death of her mother?
• “Another glimpse of his sister, sad and enduring woman at the head of the table surrounded by her children and grandchildren and her walls cluttered with pictures of herself and her children taken at various ages at various times of day.” (pg 35) Wait, if his sister is old enough to have grandchildren, then is Hyacinth his granddaughter and not his daughter? I think I’m confused about the timeline and relations between characters.

The Only Real Day

• “This was the life after a week of privacy with the only real Chinese speaker being paralyzed speechless in a wheelchair. No wonder the boy doesn’t speak Chinese, he thought, not making sense. The boy should come here sometime. He might like the fish.” (pg 42) Since it was previously established that he “hates cripples”, has a son who still lives in China, and that there was something that he didn’t want to talk about, I’m guessing the person in the wheelchair and the boy he mentions here might be his son? If he hates disabled people that much then the person in the wheelchair must at least be someone important to him, for him to stay with them for a week despite his hatred.
• On page 43 and 44, the men display a lot of racism towards Jewish people, but they also mention that people think of them as basically the Asian version of Jewish people “because nobody likes the Jews”. I thought this was interesting, seeing the implied tensions between the two minorities and how they affect their relationships towards white people.
• “He could hear the fat birds cooing over the sound of the streets, and the grass snap when their droppings dropped fresh. Some splattered on the bronze plaque marking the location of the birth of the first white child in San Francisco, a few feet away.” (pg 52) Why would there be a plaque celebrating that? Is there some historical context for this that I’m unfamiliar with?
• “The Yuen went to the bank and withdrew all his money in a money order and borrowed a sheet of paper and an envelope, and in Chinese wrote his song: “This is all the money I have. You will not get anymore. I’m dead. Your father,” and signed it.” (pg 70) Why did he describe it as his “song”, first of all. Second of all, because of the previous discussions about the other guy’s brother shooting himself in the head, Yuen keeping a revolver under his pillow, and Jimmy telling him to die of old age, this seems like it might be foreshadowing that he’s going to commit suicide?

Yes, Young Daddy

• This is the third story that has a character named “Dirigible”. I don’t think they’re all meant to be the same character, so is there a cultural significance to naming your child that? Without context, from my perspective that seems almost like naming your child “Airplane” or “Moon Unit”.
• It’s interesting seeing the juxtaposition of Lena’s style of writing compared to Dirigible’s writing. He writes very formally with precise grammar, whereas her writing feels more like regular speech. This gives a very clear sense of what their characters are like for both of them.
• The sexual tension between Dirigible and Lena is making me uncomfortable. At least, I’m reading it as sexual tension, when she calls him “daddy” and is offering to feel his muscles and dressing up in makeup and high heels for him. (pg 84-86)
• So they secretly molested each other as children even though they’re cousins, and in the present day somehow getting caught with Lena by his aunt leads to him to think his poetry is terrible? What is this meant to represent? Self-loathing, because he let his cousin touch him that way? What was the point of this?

“Give the Enemy Sweet Sissies and Women to Infatuate Him, and Jades and Silks to Blind Him with Greed”

• “He did and didn’t tell her his father had been paralyzed from the neck down since he was nine and he read the news to the man for a half-hour every evening, for years, until he recovered and fulfilled his ambition of playing evil Jap generals and Chinese who die and seeing Tempest Storm strip live.” (pg 93) This Dirigible seems like he’s probably the same one as the Dirigible in The Only Real Day, since the backstory seems to match what was mentioned in that story, so I’m curious to see if they mention what happened with Yuen at all. Or maybe it’s just meant to be a similar character who happens to share the name?
• The stream-of-consciousness thoughts from Dirigible on pages 100-101 is both practically incomprehensible and difficult to read. Why would he write it like this and not break it up at all? He uses paragraphs before, so it must be a stylistic choice, but what is he trying to convey through it here?
• Why would they kick him out of the church because they were convinced he’s going to die young? (pg 103) This part doesn’t make much sense to me. Did they think he’s like a bad omen or something?
• What happened to Sharon? The way he describes her as saying goodbye to him at the end (pg 106-107) makes me think that she either killed herself or was sick and knew she wouldn’t see him again/wouldn’t make it? I’m guessing she was sick, since on page 107 he describes her as “dead and petrified”, which I think she would be less likely to be scared if she had killed herself, but maybe I’m missing something.

A Chinese Lady Dies

• On page 110, the chameleon imagery symbolizing something being hidden returns, along with another Dirigible who may or may not be the same Dirigible as in the other stories. I still can’t tell if these are all meant to be the same character at different points of his life or if they just all have the same name for some reason.
• “How old would he be, how much money in the bank, how much hair would he have, how many marriages, children, years in a jail when he got the news?” (pg 110) I thought it was interesting that his mother is dying, and he’s wondering not whether he’ll be in jail, but how long he’ll have been in jail for when she dies. This implies that the fact that he’ll go to jail at some point is a given, and I wonder whether that’s a commentary on racism or whether he’s done bad things that he thinks he’ll get caught for eventually.
• Dirigible and his mother are arguing for a long time about how he won’t be sad when she’s dead, but it feels very distant. It feels like they’re just going through the motions because they feel like they should be upset or something, and they’re not actually feeling any way about it. That’s the impression I get from this anyway.
• At this point, I would be very shocked if these characters were not the same characters as in the previous stories, since they all have the same names. This does however beg the question of how they all know each other. Are some of them related? Are they all friends?

The Sons of Chan

• “This Hawaii was Hillbilly Heaven, where every colored boy and girl danced to the whiteman’s crazy tune, sang his songs, talked his language, did his work, believed in his God, which not even the whiteman believed in that much.” (pg 132) I don’t understand what’s going on here. I know that Hawaii is one of the states and was a U.S. territory for a long time, but I don’t know how or why or any history about it, so I have no idea whether or not this was symbolic, or literal, or something else.
• “I’d become a father and a divorce, had a daughter by an elderly ex-nun and returned to California to play yellow bit parts.” (pg 133) So this is obviously that guy from The Eat and Run Midnight People, which is… awkward, to say the least. It was foreshadowed a little bit in the previous story because he talks about the movies a bit, but in this story it suddenly throws me for a loop when it talks about how he electrocutes himself to listen to the radio, so I hope that gets explained.
• “By 1923 the laws made America proof against Chinese women and Chinese reproduction. No Chinese woman could enter the country legally. No American-born Chinaman woman could marry a man from China without fear of losing her American citizenship and immediate deportation.” (pg 135-136) This is sickening, not only because of the actions themselves, which are heinous in their own right, but also because I’m guessing this really happened and I’ve never heard of that aspect of it. I’m assuming this was part of or related to the Chinese Exclusion Acts, but this sort of thing was never mentioned.
• “And I remembered they talked about the millions of starving children in China to make white kids eat their vegetables.” (pg 147) I can’t tell if this is a play on the “starving kids in Africa” thing that parents do or if American parents just changed the ethnicity to “update” the saying for modern times. Either way, it’s a really dehumanizing thing to say, implying that all Chinese and all African people are poor or homeless and their children are starving because of it. It also implies that there are no starving children in America, thus perpetuating the belief that America is the best place in the world to live, the land of opportunity, and that everything here is fine.