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Lion Dancers

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Colorful Lion Dancers from UCLA’s Jade Lotus Lion Dance Troupe

Martine and sat on a ledge in the Maguire Gardens by the west entrance to the Los Angeles Central Library. At 11 am two pairs of lion dancers entered and performed a vigorous dance to open this year’s AAPI Joy: Voices, Then & Now. This is a celebration by various local Asian and Pacific Islander groups of their cultural heritage and the experience of living in Southern California.

After the dancers left, I notices the inscription in Latin above the west entrance: ET QUASI CURSORES VITAI LAMPADA TRADUNT. After doing a little digging, I found the quote comes from Book 2 of the De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) by Lucretius and, translated, means “and like runners, they pass on the torch of life.” Very appropriate.

We had attended the AAPI Joy event last year and were happy to find there were even more events scattered across the library premises this year. We attended four of them:

  • The lion dancers
  • Book awards to Filipino-American authors receiving the Carlos Bulosan Book Club awards
  • A Filipino dance troupe called Kayamanan Ng Lahi performing dances from Mindanao
  • The Koto and Nihon Buyo group playing popular Japanese koto music accompanied by dancers

I like the special events put on by the Central Library. Over the last eight years, the library has become a major factor in my life—thanks largely to the opening of the Exposition Line (the E train) on L.A.’s Metro Rail. It has been an unfailing source of great books, an ever-present help to my psyche thanks to the Thursday Mindful Meditation sessions, and a provider of entertainment at their luxurious Mark Taper Auditorium.

My trips to the library downtown are now one of the highlights of my life.

My Safe Spaces

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Day of the Dead Celebration in the San Fernando Valley

Ever since my first visit to Mexico in 1975, I no longer felt myself superior to Mexican-Americans. It didn’t take long before I felt that way about African-Americans and Asian-Americans. My safe space was becoming larger with each year. Now when I encounter prejudiced white people, I don’t even regard myself as being white. In fact, I’ve always felt particularly safe thinking of myself as a Hungarian.

That is a bit of a joke, really, as I am only 25% Hungarian. I am also 25% Slovak, 25% Czech, and 25% Bavarian German. The only difference is that Hungarian was my first language, and I can still think in Hungarian.

At the Los Angeles Times Book Festival this past weekend, I enjoyed the work of three black poets (Roger Reeves, Courtney Faye Taylor, and D. Manuel II) and one Hispanic poet (Brenda Cárdenas). Oh, and don’t forget Eloise Klein Healy, a white poet from El Paso, Texas, whose courage impressed me so much (see yesterday’s post).

I was presented with multiple templates of Los Angeles, all of which I accepted—if not exactly as my own, still as plausible worlds understandable to me. Probably the scariest Los Angeles was that of Eloise Klein Healy, because she fought successfully against the horrors of encephalitis and aphasia and recovered her verbal skills as a poet.

My reaction to the paranoia of white supremacists like Tucker Carlson is to regard them as broken people who are unable to join in the incredible richness of other ethnicities.