Of Chopsticks and Bigotry...

It’s funny how sometimes things can lead you from odd into the obvious into the obscure.  I was sitting in the diner the other day, just vegging out of an afternoon when I wandered into one of those, been thinking on the event for a couple of days now.  One of the lasses on the crew was sitting across from me and eating the lunch she’d brought in.  Now that wouldn’t be anything of note under most circumstances, as a matter of fact I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary for a couple of minutes.   It was Chinese type food, and what was unusual for the setting was she was eating with chopsticks.  Perfect posture, perfect etiquette,  plate on the table, but using chopsticks.  No problem at all, except of course for the train and chain of thought the event initiated.

I make no bones about it, I really don’t like the oriental cultures.  They always feel like slavery to me, a tyranny so deep the enslaved have no concept of just how deep their slavery goes.  They feel more than brainwashed, they feel soul bleached.  I really can’t remember a time I didn’t feel that way.  The funny thing is I’ve never really searched this lifetime to try and understand why.

It’s not a xenophobia kind of thing, I don’t feel it dealing with someone from say Russia, or Africa.  They are different, their thoughts form in different manners than mine, they think in a different symbol set, but they feel like complete people to me.  But those from China, Japan, south-east Asia?  They don’t feel complete to me and I’m very uneasy in their company lest whatever robbed them is hunting more victims.  I'm not likely to change my mind on that point, but I do feel I should understand how I came to feel that way.

My father served in WW2, a navy man in the Pacific.  The Japanese were his enemy, and he saw front line combat.  He was aboard a mine sweeper, one of the little ships on the edge of the fleet.  His ship was part of the picket line as it was called that gave warning to the main fleet of incoming kamikaze attacks.  His primary duty station was sonar, listening for submarines, his ship was credited with two kills.  But when he wasn’t in the bottom of the ship listening his battle station was on deck using farm boy muscle to hump ammunition to the anti-aircraft guns. It was heavy labor, frantic labor, the first wave of a kamikaze attack always targeted the picket line trying to open a hole in the defenses to allow others to reach the main fleet undetected.  According to Dad more than once the gunners would fire so continuously the barrels were glowing red, so hot they’d gone soft and would bend under their own weight.  Often there wasn’t enough time to change them, the gunners would have to fire a round every few seconds just to keep them straight while they cooled.  There were seven aircraft kills on the scoreboard, the little ship had teeth.  These were short range kills, the equivalent of infantry combat, the combatants could see each other.  One of the seven was even closer than that, it was almost literally hand to hand combat. 

I heard of it one night when Dad was a bit nostalgic, a bit distant, a night when the war came back to haunt him.  I saw tears in his eyes, saw that twenty year stare.  He told of one attack when they were rigged out to sweep for mines, they couldn’t maneuver, it was a gun fight.  One of the attackers came so low the ships were taking casualties to friendly fire, it was unavoidable. 

My Dad’s ship took him, finally.  He almost got the ship, and he did get my father’s heart.  He was so low he broke off one wing against the mast, the other against the funnel, Dad swore the only reason he was that high was the continuous impact of lead.  But that wasn’t what got my father, what got my father was seeing the pilot’s face,  younger than his own, and seeing the paddle lock on the canopy.  That face haunted him for the remainder of his life, and as I think on the subject I’m coming to believe that paddle lock was the initiating event of my bigotry as well.

Like I said, I’ve always felt the Orientals were an enslaved people, a people so dominated by their culture as to have been reduced to almost sub-human, and there’s a good chance that boy locked into that cockpit (where if he tried to ditch he’d drown) was the beginning of that attitude.  Willing to die for your country is one thing, but a country willing to lock you in?  That... is something else entirely. 

I felt, deeply felt, the hurt that war left on my father, the distance it demanded he keep between his heart and his world.  And in full retrospect that distance is most likely the power source behind the bigotry, the almost instant instinct to stand to arms when I feel the oriental influence in any form or fashion.  I value the freedom of my mind even above the freedom of my body, and the orient always, always feels like a threat to both. Oh well, I suppose everyone has one.

And all of this popped to the surface because of a pair of chopsticks where chopsticks really are a harmless non sequitur to the prevailing culture.  Sometimes it’s the damndest of things that mark the fork in the road, you know?