China Beach

While living in an artist's garret overlooking Spruce Street in Philadelphia's Center City, I was lucky to meet a lot of very cool people from all over the world. It was good timing and an excellent situation: Temple University paid my full freight in exchange for graduate school teaching and summer jobs and better yet, I was a free man in Paris, having separated from my first wife back in North Carolina. There were a number of charmers around, intelligent, educated and comely women from Vietnam, China, India, Germany, Russia, Canada, England, France, Spain, Italy, Thailand and other exotic faraway places. It was great! In my first semester in 1992, I enthusiastically took five high level classes and worked like a crazy man and made a ton of friends. Nga Mai, a beautiful and smart-as-a-whip entrepreneur/restauranteur, hired me occassionally to cover her Diva Cafe, right across the street from my apartment, and sometimes we'd play chess and talk about Hannah Arendt or diss Camille Paglia, who was teaching nearby at the boho University of the Arts. Nga and her two sisters had come to the States with their Catholic mother, starting in Omaha, Nebraska; their father remained in Vietnam after the Americans evacuated. In any case, Nga is terrific and now owns and operates multiple Asian eateries, still in Philly.

A cute Chinese woman in her thirties, Lu Ping, was always smiling at me in one of my five classes. This one in particular, taught by Herb Erskowitz, was as dry as bone, so eventually Lu Ping and I would meet before and after class, and soon thereafter started dating. This was fun for a while, but she became "a little needy" and started to harass me to flatter her and say poetic things. An English teacher in China, she'd memorized hundreds of Romantic poems in English and wanted to see them brought to life. (Sometimes I felt like retorting with Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe"). She advised me to apply for a teaching post at some Chinese compound where, she assured me, I could find additional girlfriends and receive a tax-free stipend from the government. Furthermore, her aging father, who survived with Chairman Mao on the Long March, could find me a permanent situation if I wanted one. It was all very interesting, but also a little much with her way too authentic Chinese cooking and dramatic declarations of feeling, especially when I learned that her husband and daughter would be moving from China to Pennsylvania at the end of the summer.

Moral: never assume someone isn't married just because they act like they're single.

Second moral: I don't like bossy women and I don't like submissive women. I prefer women who are right in the middle: confident, sweet, and equal.

A lot of guys seem to go for Asian women. I understand the aesthetic attraction, but beyond that, people are people. It's interesting that Iggy Pop married a Japanese fan and wrote the raw but touching "China Girl," which David Bowie also covers. From the 1976 album The Idiot, it's got memorable lines like these:

I stumble into town / . . . like a sacred cow / visions of swastikas in my head / and plans for everyone . . . And when I get excited /My little China Girl says /"Oh Jimmy, just shut your mouth." / She says, "Shhhh..."

Iggy Pop (James Osterberg), originally from Ypsilanti -- about forty-five minutes to an hour from where I live -- has a hard-edged and mordant Detroit sensibility. He and the Stooges rock out with primal energy. More on this influential son of an English teacher soon.

Meanwhile, all aboard for funtime. . . . .