Red Wheelbarrow 2003

Can you tell us something about your childhood and teenage years, including your life as a farm worker? How were you able to go on to higher education?

I was able to go on to higher education simply because I was forced to do so. I have always admired Jewish families for their assumption that their children would go on to higher professions. That assumption does not exist in most families of color in America. With them, as with most low classes, the child is expected to learn something in school, the family environment being irrelevant. My clients, and I mean each and every one of them (I am a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco), come from homes without clocks, without books, without magazines, and, most importantly, without expectations. My childhood was never that way. When I was five I received an encyclopedia for my birthday. My grandmother taught me to read using those twelve volumes. I read them over and over again until my twelfth birthday when some farmworkers presented me with my second set. All of the migrant workers insisted that I use my mind and not my arms and back. By the time I was forced into school at the age of thirteen I had read every book listed by the University of California English 1A through 2B schedule. I am convinced that if I had been born and raised in suburbia I would have been a dolt.

How did your experiences in the Vietnam War affect you?

The Vietnam War wiped out every assumption that I held about my own life and the lives of others. At 17 I was no fool. I worked my way through high school and was going to college without borrowing a dime from anyone, but I was being seduced by America and didn't know it. I was being seduced into the American adventure of automobile worship, youth worship, and the value of forms over substances. I wanted a Porsche so that I could hear the music as I participated in the last mode of expression left to the American male: the car you drive and how you drive it. I wanted a pretty wife and a decent job and I wanted to care about which team won the NBA championship. Then I found myself in Vietnam. Only one in every eleven soldiers in the US military is a combat soldier. The rest are "Pogues." They are food servers and typists and navy guys one ships with five movie theaters. They are Air Force types who gas up the jets then go get a pizza. The "Grunt" or ground unit is something else again. He gets the privilege of seeing William Wallace disemboweled; of looking into the ovens at Auschwitz; of smelling the Jews burning on Ile de St. Louis. He gets to watch a rib-spreader in action. He has to do a tracheotomy in the dark...for a dying friend. He gets to go to the last day of his life and realize that there is no wide-screen TV or Camaro or narcissistic movie starlet that he wouldn't trade in an instant for just one more day of life.

Why did you decide to become an attorney? Why a criminal defense attorney? Do you find this work rewarding?

I was doing a death penalty trial in some little backwater town in the Central Valley...a little town that was doing its best imitation of Selma, Alabama, in the fifties. I had never before experienced such an openly racist judge and prosecutor. I had been hired by the county to aid a defense lawyer who had never done a defense case. He had been a prosecutor for 30 years...and he was a raging alcoholic. The "defense" lawyers told me how much he hated Mexicans (our mutual client was a Mexican) and how much he hated me. A clearly defensible case became a shambles. (The "informant" was in custody in another jurisdiction on the day that he "heard" my client confess to the killing. The "informant" was a serial child molester.) The client was convicted in less than two hours and sentenced the same day. (The case has since been reversed and the judge and the other defense counsel disbarred.) I left the courtroom after telling the judge that he was an honorless cretin, had three martinis at a local dive, went to my hotel room and began to write my first novel.

What other writers have influenced your style and approach as a writer?

I love Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez, Umberto Eco, García Lorca, Dylan Thomas, Carson McCullers, John Steinbeck, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, Herman Melville, James Baldwin, Howard Zinn, Zora Neale Hurston.

Your writing combines realism and fantasy. In The Silver Cloud Café, for example, a character survives a firing squad. In Gods Go Begging, harrowing, realistic battle scenes, episodes of criminal violence, and graphic depictions of mangled bodies coexist with miraculous survivals and flights of imagination. Some people have labeled this mix of realism and fantasy magical realism. Do you think that label fits your writing? Were you influenced by García Márquez or other Latin American magic realists? Do you think there is any danger that the fantasy elements may undermine the realism, that (for example) the miraculous survivals may detract from the truth of the violence and death you depict so strongly?

Could fantasy element undermine the realism? Only if your cultural walls begin and end with Germanic or Anglo-Saxon religions, the Puritans, or other manifestations of ultra-linear, confirmation-biased thinking. As a matter of reality, my childhood as a Yaqui and Mexican child was even more fantastical than almost anything I have ever written. I was exposed to the peyote ceremony by the age of 7 and learned to deconstruct long before I ever read Derrida. I am not a magical realist. My first three novels represent the first three parts of my life: childhood in a squatter camp, the migrant farm circuit, and Vietnam. All were looked at through the eyes of the Yaqui-Mexican, albeit through an overarching narrator. One of the main points of Silver Cloud Café was the ancient lineage of peripatetics, subjects of diaspora and the mythologies ever attendant. Why stop in the modern era? I refuse. I extended the grand mythologies into modern times to say something specific about wanderers.

You place a lot of emphasis on the ethnic background of your characters, including (but not at all limited to) African Americans, Vietnamese, Jews, Filipinos, and Chicanos. Why? Since you sometimes treat these ethnic categories humorously, do you ever feel you might be crossing the line into caricature or stereotype?

I always cross the line into stereotype. Then I go back. Race is one of the most important subjects of all, to me. It is important that I not be limited by anything other than my own conscience and good sense (which I presume to have) when I wish to comment on the issue of race. I cannot be limited by political correctness or fashionable terms...fashion, if you haven't paused to think about it, is the opposite of art. Political correctness has its place...it is a sort of summation of an enormous mass of ideas...condensed into a polite rule...it is for lesser minds than yours and mine just as dogma is for the great believing throng while the bishops and popes get to have concubines and collect art.  Any movement, any improvement in the conceptualization of race will happen when brazen dark ones step up and speak. Take McWhorter over at U.C. Berkeley. I don't always agree with the man, but I love his courage.

One of your recurring character types is a Graham Greene-type priest or pseudo-priest beset by doubt. Why is this character so important to you? What does he signify to you?

The pseudo-priest is me, of course. It is the voice in Wallace Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning." My grandmother baptized me between 30 and 40 times (the characterization in La Maravilla is accurate) while my grandfather taught me the Yaqui way in his own taciturn method. I am very religious, but not institutionally religious. (The padre in Gods Go Begging was a real person, but a lot like me, though he was from Iowa.) I realize the fallacy of having forty or fifty separate religious schools of thought from which one might choose. What if I want to choose school number 53? What if any monolithic school is repugnant to me? Monolithism is always repugnant to freethought and art. The question made e e cummings crazy. It spurs on ideas of magical realism. It makes people into Salvador Dalis and Picassos. It starts with a person who is torn.

You pay a lot of attention to gender and sexuality. In The Silver Cloud Café, the friendship of two men-one physically "malformed," the other gay-is presented with sensitivity and respect. In Gods Go Begging, the conflict between male combatants in the Vietnam War is counterpointed by the friendship of two women (one Vietnamese American, one African American, wives of two of the combatants) years later in San Francisco. Would you be willing to comment on what you are trying to show or say in your treatment of gender roles?

I am not saying anything about gender roles in Gods Go Begging. I am saying that sexual license and sexual prowess are the "gifts" our culture promises to young boys who are willing to go off and fight. Of course, it is a lie. Of course war is always sold as love. Love is the curb appeal of war. The reality is quite different. As for the gay man in Silver Cloud, he was a real person whose agony was clear to me even as a boy. The midget was also real. I hope, every day, that one of them will see the book and call me up. The difference between the men and the women in Gods is that the women know the true face of love. It is not the face of war.

Do you have any advice for young writers?

Advice for young writers? READ! Study what you read and ask yourself why this set of words, arranged this way, has moved you. Learn to be critical. Siskel and Ebert criticism is for convalescent home internees. Two thumbs up for "The Waterboy" and for the "Battleship Potemkin" are not the same two thumbs. There is a hierarchy of art...I don't care how many rap "artists" call themselves artists, they will never be Mozart or Duke Ellington. Learn to love art. But, most of all, don't listen to anyone's advice. The writing industry (that's what it is) is poised to tell you who your audience is, and what they want to read. They are pagans. Ignore them as much as you can.

Can you tell us what you're working on now? Will you share with us some of your plans for the future, in your writing or the rest of your life?

Right now I am writing the most difficult book that I have ever attempted. It's killing me. I love it.

Alfredo Vea

Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine - De Anza College - Cupertino, CA 2003

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