Free I Love a Broad Margin to My Life by Maxine Hong Kingston

from long, long
    ago. Our first male ancestor,
    Bao Xin Gong, made the xun
    of earth, made it earth-shaped, and gave
    forth this sound that is the sound of time, from
    far off to now to far after, the sound
    of the animate winds, the yin wind and the yang
    wind, the sound of the first man and this man
    breathing song. Hear it, and it belongs
    to you, and you belong to all of it.
    The music ends on a long long
    outbreath. The musician coughs and coughs,
    spits a lunger onto the dirt floor,
    rubs it in with his foot. Lights up
    a cigarette. Urges the guest, Go on, go,
    try it, blow. Wittman holds the earth xun
    in spread hands, fingertips over some
    holes, brings it up to his mouth. Pásame
    la botella. The sound he gives out
    is low, definite, smooth, clear, loud.
    “Koo.” “Koo.” “Tell me about xun.”
    The artists—they are masters of many arts
    in this commune of makers—speak with numbers.
    7,000. Xun was unearthed? invented?
    7,000 years ago? In the year
    7,000? 40. The xun in your hand
    is 40-something—generations? years?
    Cough cough. Pat-patting the lungs,
    the heart, me, myself. 40. The musician
    who takes up the xun will die in his 40s.
    All artists die young. We sacrifice.
    The painters, the model too, have coughs. The smoke,
    inhale, cough, exhale, cough, cough.
    The elder artist can’t help lecturing
    the younguns about their health. “No wonder
    you Chinese chronically cough and spit.
    You, with every breath, you’re drawing microbes,
    germs, disease from that old, used instrument,
    into your respiratory system. Those xun
    players died young because they caught an illness
    from this infected instrument, which they passed on to you.
    You guys shouldn’t be living in your studio.”
    Points at the beds, the stove, the tables loaded
    with cans, bottles, tubes of chemicals, food.
    “You’re handling poisons all day,
    and breathing fumes all night. I know.
    My wife’s an artist. We’ve been poor,
    but she keeps her workplace, her art lab,
    away from where we eat and sleep. She wears
    a face mask, a respirator. Just like
    Chinese do in traffic. And, come on,
    don’t smoke. Don’t smoke. If you
    knew your history, you wouldn’t smoke.
    Only 3 grandmothers ago,
    BAT, British American Tobacco,
    forced our people to buy opium, and tobacco-
    opium mix. We had two wars
    Chinese versus Anglos,
    Opium War I and Opium War II.
    We lost both times. We fought back
    poison against poison, and guns, sold
    bread with arsenic at the bakeries for Westerners.
    When I learned my history, I stopped smoking
    cigarettes, pot, any kind of shit.”
    The young artists don’t understand
    a thing he says, else they’d laugh over
    the bakerman, bakerwoman guerrillas.
    They do know, they give their lives for xun,
    for art. They take his waving and pointing to mean
    admiration for them and their work. They open
    albums full of photos of paintings with prices.
    Their brushwork takes your breath away.
    The lines and angles of Picasso. The impasto
    of Van Gogh. The colors of Rothko.
    The icing of Thiebaud. They can do anything.
    But where is the new, the never-before-seen
    that we’re counting on the post-Liberation
    post–Cultural Revolution generation
    to give us? Art schools in the U.S.
    are folding their painting classes, teaching computer
    and industrial design. The young artists show
    the old artist (buyer? patron?) their portfolios.
    Chinese kids selling their art
    on the streets of Sydney, Florence, San Francisco.
    On these walls, their latest work: dark
    pictures. Heavy black crosses. Black
    cross in foregrounds crossing out whatever else.
    Black cross in backgrounds or upper
    corners, a coming menace. The New China
    still hung up on Christianity.
    Let it go already. But look,
    we’re painting exactly what we see
    before our very eyes. There, above
    your head—the stovepipes, one up through
    the roof, and 2 arms out the walls.
    Like the number 10.We are painting
    hearth and home. The world will see