The tiger’s lair
SINCE 1986, I’VE LIVED IN the flatlands east of Hollywood, on the border between Silver Lake and Los Feliz. As a writer and editor, I’ve been involved with publishing books and journals for the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, in the heart of the Westside. But I moved to this enclave when I found that living here gave me a pulse on the ethnic diversity of L.A. After all, Thai Town, Historic Filipinotown, Little Armenia, Koreatown, Little Tokyo, Chinatown, and Central Los Angeles with its Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan communities are all within a 15-minute drive. East of Hollywood also has its share of below-the-line film folks, gays and lesbians, and artists. It’s a mecca, but not always an easy melting pot, of social, sexual and class diversity.
So I’ve found -- or rather made -- my home in half of a tiny duplex hidden by a box hedge in the flats. The 700 square feet or so is painted in a nondescript gray and trimmed in a color called “mud.” It seems to recede from the stately neo-English style brick high school across the street, built in 1931.
My East Hollywood block is the “mixed block” -- about a baker’s dozen of small stucco houses or neatly painted duplexes from the 1920s with Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, African American and Anglo owners and renters. Being next to the high school probably stops some middle class folks from renting or buying here. The houses have seen better days. However, most residents don’t mind the noise of the high schoolers. Noise means life and family. Hawkish real estate agents could care less about this block, and know the home values are less than the other blocks. But for those of us who live here, oddly, less is more.
The neighborhood is used to indie film crews, shooting in front or inside or in back of the school. Sometimes the crew puts a few plants in front of the door, or changes the sign to become a nunnery, or a private school on the East Coast or Midwest. The street has three-storied maple and pine trees, rather than the usual L.A. palms; the locale doesn’t scream L.A. or Miami. We’re used to props and temporary facades. So people on this block fix up their houses as they see fit -- with cracked ceramic ducks or stones or bamboos or cement blocks or cacti in their frontyards.
Living inside this duplex is an affair of the heart and mind. Warm plaster walls and red tiles on the roof. Green tiles in the kitchen. Earth colors. I’m Chinese, but I’ve made my place a scavenger’s eclectic mix of neighborly influences from the streets around me. Things lost and found: stones, bamboo, paintings. Inside, I sit on my father’s office chair from the 1930s and write on an old wooden desk. The past surrounds me in the form of objects I can touch: a Taiwanese aboriginal statue from the 1940s, a book of 18th century blue paper from St. Petersburg, and books hand-bound by the Lithuanian artist down the street. But the present noses in via kitchen smells: soya, lemon grass, cilantro, jalapeno, star anise, sesame and Sichuan peppers.
A confession is in order: I’m a junkie of that Hong Kong filmmaker, Wong Kar-Wai. The interior of my rooms takes its cues from two of his films: “In the Mood for Love” and “Happy Together.” Shot with dark filters, these films depict relationships between a woman and a man set in 1960s Hong Kong, and between a man and a man set in 1970s Argentina. Montages filled with unexpected passions and the imperfection of messy lives. Visualize an Argentine boarding house room with its iron grilles, flea-eaten mattress and warm yellow light. Juxtapose that against the burgundy tones of something vaguely Asian but lost among a blur of green bamboo: These are the colors that make up his films -- and my lair.
THE DAYS ON THE block where I live are predictable.
In the morning, from 6:45 to 7:45, dark-haired boys and girls mill and chatter in Tagalog, Armenian, Russian, Spanish and English. Then they’re in to study.
In the afternoon, around 3, parents in pickups, vans, beat-up Toyotas and cars of indeterminate make pick up the students. After they leave, the automatic sprinklers go on, incubating the air with moisture.
In the evening, around 8, my Filipina neighbor, Irene, on the other side of the duplex, throws open her windows and plays her drums in the front room while her white Maltese, Ocha, barks at any passing dog on the street.
Sometimes, after midnight or early morning, if you open the front door, you can see coyotes that drift down from the hills lope across the wet grass that fronts the school.
Or you hear the furtive hiss of aerosol from a canister -- graffiti being sprayed again on the thick walls. A car drives off. All in a day and a night.
But it all makes sense because this is East of Hollywood, not West Hollywood, or even Hollywood, for that matter. No Oscar glitz, no handprints of movie stars fossilized in cement, no disco balls draining the night away. A few blocks away you smell the cigarettes of middle-aged Armenian men playing backgammon on their wooden front porches, and then, on nearby Hollywood Boulevard, the oil and pungent fish sauce from the Thai hole-in-the wall cafes crowd your nostrils.
ACCORDING TO THE Asian calendar, I was born in the Year of the Tiger. Tigers, it is said, have an affinity for bamboo forests. So when my neighbor cut down his giant bamboo, I cajoled a friend to help me carry the 20-foot rods, one at a time, around the corner to my house. On these bamboo I used a Japanese hacksaw and cut them to serve as curtain rods inside the house, and as fence posts outside. I’ve also planted live golden, black and Buddha’s Belly bamboo in the front, side and back of the house, in the ground and in troughs.
The bamboo shields the tiger (me) from the noise, pollution, people and cars in L.A. that can suddenly, without warning, assault your senses. You feel you’ve almost lost your body. So in this city, you need to find your real body again.
That’s where tai chi, the internal martial art form, kicks in for me.
Crane Spreads Wings. Lotus Kick. Dragon out of Water.
These movements, based on how animals move, were originally developed by Taoist monks.
Somewhere I’d read that Edgar Snow, the late China journalist, asked a worker: Why do you do tai chi? The man replied: To resolve my contradictions.
In the enclosed cement driveway of my yard I do my tai chi daily, rain or shine. Or I head over to Griffith Park to do the form. Around 6:30 a.m., middle-aged Latino guys in blue polyester sweats come up to me and ask me to teach them, or where they can learn tai chi or gung fu. I tell them I’m not a sifu (teacher) but a tofu! But I tell them that on weekends they can go to Elysian Park nearby and learn tai chi from Larry Antonio, my teacher, a former boxer in the Philippines who studied acupuncture and martial arts. He tells me: “Disappear like fog, resist like a mountain, fight back like a tiger.”
Through 74 calibrated animal movements of Chen-style tai chi, I teach myself everyday what it means to be alive. My pulse tells me that I’m on the verge of a tropical sweat.
But no matter where my mind and body travel -- even on the gray ribbons of freeways: the 5, the 10, the 60, the 405, the 2, or the 210 -- I return to this neighborhood east of Hollywood. As I unlock my front door, the smooth lilt of Luis Miguel’s “Suenos” floats through the iron bars of my open window.
Russell C. Leong, a winner of the American Book Award, is the editor of UCLA’s Amerasia Journal and an adjunct professor of English and Asian American Studies at UCLA.
