Golden Mountain - July 24, 2005

Golden Mountain

After rejections from publishers far and wide, an Ashland woman’s memoir wins four national awards

By BILL VARBLE
Mail Tribune

The cars on the Golden Gate Bridge looked like toys high above the deck of the ship. Irene Kai and her mother had sailed from Hong Kong. It was 1965.

Today Kai, 55, sits in the dining room of the Ashland home she shares with her partner, David Wick, a mane of black hair framing her face as she sifts through old photos and remembers the Golden Gate.

"I thought it was my chance to live," she says. "Not just be an obedient wife and daughter-in-law."

If freedom was her first thought, abundance was the second, all those cars.

"But I thought having a car someday would be too much to ever think of."

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She would have her freedom, and have a car, and her odyssey would twist and turn and deepen into a spiritual journey. Kai’s 2004 book, "Golden Mountain: Beyond the American Dream," is the story of the journey.

The book was self-published after many rejections, including one from Ashland’s White Cloud Press, but it’s what happened next that veers away from the usual script. At the recent BookExpo America awards for independent publishers at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City, "Golden Mountain" (a Chinese term for America) won four national awards.

It was named the 2005 best book of the year in the autobiography/memoir category by ForeWord Magazine. It won the Independent Publisher Award for multicultural, adult nonfiction, and it was a finalist for best book of the year in ForeWord Magazine’s mind/body/spirit category.

It also won an award for best cover design for designer Nita Ybarra’s dreamscape of Kai’s childhood impression of the Golden Gate.

"Maybe we were wrong about it," White Cloud’s Steve Scholl says.

In one faded photo Kai is a baby, in another a 5-year-old girl with her mother and sisters in Hong Kong. Here she’s a smart, Twiggy-era teen in mid-60s New York City. A few years later in go-go boots and mini-skirt, she could be a Motown singer. In another photo a dark-haired woman’s eyes cut through the years.

"My mother was a beautiful woman," she says.

She was also a woman trapped in traditional Chinese culture, submitting to an arranged marriage with a wild, drug-abusing husband, and lashing out at her children in fury.

"They hated each other," Kai says of her parents.

In New York City’s Chinatown, Irene would rebel against her abusive mother only to wind up in other abusive relationships. She would graduate from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and the Royal College of Art in London.

She would model for sculptor George Segal (photos of his studies of her can be found on the Web), teach graphic design at Penn Stage University, marry badly, make a fortune in business in Los Angeles and walk away from it.

She would move to Ashland in 1997 and meet Wick, at the time an executive trainer for Sun Microsystems, in the early days of online dating.

"All the good men are taken, and I don’t do bars," she told her daughter.

"Go online," her daughter said.

She was taken with Wick’s e-mail, which said, "Bravo for finding balance in your life," and a relationship blossomed.

When she turned 50 Kai bought a silver Mercedes convertible. She and Wick took a drive. The night was clear. They put the top down. As he drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, she rode in the passenger seat with the cold ocean wind in her long hair under a full moon. She had completed a circle.

"It was amazing," she says.

As she struggled for her identity, Kai had to come to terms with her family. "Golden Mountain" traces clashing cultures and changing times through generations.

One of Kai’s great-grandfathers immigrated to America and owned a laundry. Various ancestors moved back and forth between China and the Golden Mountain. Always, marriages were arranged and women submitted to husbands and their families.

Kai’s great-grandmother Wong Oi married a peasant who went to the Golden Mountain and returned with the money to build a fine house and take a concubine. Her grandmother, Choi Kum, was married off by her wealthy parents to Wong Oi’s son, Hong Kai, and a life of grueling work, 10 children and isolation in the Golden Mountain.

Irene’s mother, Margaret, was raised in Pennsylvania, returned to Hong Kong at 14, submitted to an arranged marriage, became cruel to her children. Kai was beaten, neglected, whipped with a rattan stick. Her grandfather was a sexual abuser, her father a heroin addict.

In New York she rebelled against her mother’s physical and psychological abuse, discovered art, sexuality and ultimately herself. She hated the sexual harassment at Penn State in the mid- ’70s, returned to New York City and decided to move to Los Angeles.

"It’s where people go when they have nothing better to do," she told her mother.

She met a man who lived in Malibu and imported African art and lived an exotic life, and he swept her off her feet.

"Conventional is not in my blood," she says.

At 40, Kai found herself living in Los Angeles in a $2 million house with gardeners and a housekeeper and her kids in private schools. She was miserable.

Increasingly she turned to meditation, which she had discovered as a child out of hurt and loneliness, not knowing what it was.

"One day everything melted away and I felt light and was at peace," she says.

Money meant nothing.

"I knew that to live, I had to wrench myself from the bonds of the life I had created and accepted," she says.

She walked out of her home and her marriage. One of her daughters had seen a play at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and told her about Ashland. She moved there in 1997.

Kai wrote daily for three years. She says she found the book in meditation, as if it were given to her.

"I don’t even know grammar," she says.

Wick’s support was the catalyst, she says. He often found her crying as she released years of rage, grief and denial.

She says she never thought about writing her story as fiction, even though it was scary to write the truth.

"Truth-telling is part of the book," she says. "Self-censorship is so automatic. I had to make the choice of being true to my intentions. If I didn’t, the book would mean nothing."

A sister told her she’d never speak to her again. Her mother died in 1994.

She finished the book in July of 2003 and sent it out to everybody from the biggest New York agents right down to small publishers. Everybody turned it down.

"We didn’t have a real strong feeling for it," White Cloud’s Scholl says. "It was hard to keep track of the characters. But basically we just had too much on our plate at the time."

"We learned more and more about the publishing business," Wick says. "About how much control you give up. So we decided to keep it whole, keep the integrity."

Kai and Wick founded Silver Light, an independent publisher specializing in books promoting positive change in seeking truth and compassion. Wick says the philosophy is, "Allow grace, then use our intelligence."

Silver Light’s next book, its second, is "The Lost Girls," literary fiction by Portland writer Lin Hendler.

"Golden Mountain" has been adopted for Asian Studies, Women’s Studies and other classes at City College of San Francisco, Portland State University, Wellesley College. It’s available as an audiobook with music by Grammy Award-winning composer Gary Malkin (visit blackstoneaudio.com and click the biography section).

Silver Light inked a deal with Publishers Group World Wide for distribution to Australia, Asia, the United Kingdom, and reviews have appeared in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, elsewhere.

When Kai spoke recently to students at City College of San Francisco she was greeted with thunderous applause by students, most of whom are from Asian backgrounds.

The book is "a lot of pain but it touches deeply on human’s mind," one of the students wrote. "Life is not easy, but we can change it."

From the book

One afternoon, I sat in the living room doing homework on the round carved rosewood table. We called it the table with the stone of clouds because of the huge piece of marble set in its center. I made up many stories from the stone’s patterns. They were stories of wishing. One of the swirling gray and white patterns looked like a woman climbing a mountain with a child on her back. I imagined she was going into the mountains to look for her husband. They were separated by tragedy and I was sure, one day, he would return. After all, they loved each other.

I wished one day to find someone who loved me and was kind to me.

I was startled from my work by my mother screaming for my first elder sister. My sister ran past me. I saw her frightened face. I didn’t know what she had done, but judging from my mother’s tone, I was glad it wasn’t me.

— From "Golden Mountain: Beyond the American Dream"

Reach reporter Bill Varbleat 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com.