Abe on Valentine’s

Saipan teams with lovers as the Spring Festival vacation in China extends for a week from the 8th. It is a preferred destination for newlyweds. Bedroom duties are not rushed; it comes casually like the weather. Patience in relationships comes easy.

More than a century ago, a great bearded emancipator, Abe Lincoln, was born in a Kentucky log cabin, raised in Indiana and became a politician in Illinois, universally known as the U.S. President who signed the emancipation proclamation freeing slaves, intensifying the Civil War with the South in 1863.

A highly agricultural area dependent on the manual labor of slaves, Confederacy elites demurred while the plantation dames and gentry aped their royal cousins in Europe by attending to their gowns and balls, in spite of the obvious trend that it’s waltzes were Gone With the Wind.  It was the heart’s desire to maintain the ways of European royalty in the grounds of plantations run by slaves.

At the Kentucky school I attended, white girls dating blacks was a “no-no,” even by a missionary daughter who salved her conscience by dating Oriental me in ‘66. How sporting of her though not so with the missionary who ran orphanages lunching near a hotel cafe in Burkina Faso, a victim of African resurgence vis-a-vis Aryan supremacy.

Interracial love was not in the air in Kentucky, and not in many U.S. places even today.  Many T-shirts sport the sign, I “heart” you, referring to a place like New York City or Tokyo, Shanghai, or San Francisco. I wore my SF jacket in China last month, almost brought it back to Saipan with the inner lining and the hood I might have used for a day.  I remember picking it up by the Bay one day when I discovered that even mellow San Francisco does not keep a wide elbowroom on Chinatown.

I want to focus on the “heart,” not about the name of the location emblazoned in many shirts, but that balancing part of the brain from which the impetus of the yin-yang originates.

Abe was all heart when his lanky 6’4” frame delivered his Gettysburg Address, roughly written in the train on the way in. I memorized his speech in college where he wrongly predicted that the “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” But Abe took a bullet to the head, compliments of John Wilkes Booth who felt he was doing the Confederacy a favor by pulling the shot heard around the world in the balcony of the Ford theatre in D.C.

Abe decided from the heart. Secessionist South made common sense, as the horse-and-buggy soil tillers did not sit well with the industrializing North. The notion of a Union was an abstraction. Abe felt his gut tremble confronted by the possibility that the U.S. might be rent in two.  The Supreme Court decided on the Dred Scott vs. Sandford case on March 1857 where the Chief Justice declared blacks were not citizens and had no rights from the Constitution. Lincoln opposed this decision that later cost him his breath.

The “heart” in the Orient is a balancing act, performed with sobriety and grace. To be sure, the wildness of the heart exhibited around the Mediterranean is more of the Valentino of our familiar, but we write from the Orient and the traits of Sinosphere are a huge ingredient in Saipan. Heart day favors roses and features flowers with ample supply of allergy pills, holding hands a common sight facing the beautiful sunset by our lagoon.

This was not my experience of America early on. I moved to a school in Texas from Kentucky and spent my first semester protesting the “for whites only” washetaria near the school. At a church summer camp offered to Latino inner city youth, the director often hollered to me: “Jaime, I need your color!”  I looked enough of a TexMex and my pidgin Hispanic creole recognizable that I passed easily for a local. While processing bankcard charges part time, I applied for a fulltime position that required English proficiency. I lost to a Caucasian girl who came to me for explanations on procedures printed in English.
I live during the summer in Dong Bei (northeast) of Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom (China). Being in the middle is a judgment of the heart, the symbolic metaphor for the balancing act of the brain.  Zhong is harmony in the middle. Merchants on the Silk Road were called “people of the Qin,” from where the word “China” evolved.  The “Chinese” call themselves Zhongguoren, people of the middle. That made a profound click at why the yin-yang symbol is so dominant in Sinosphere life. China avoids peripheries and edges, ensuring that everyone stays in harmony in the middle (Zhong).

Sinosphere tourists from countries that have strict rules on guns, patronize Bing, Beng, Bang on Saipan for their live cartridges but Valentino waltzes with clenched flower in his teeth and a ribbon-tied box of chocolate on hand, with intensity only in the crime of passion.

This Feb. 12 is Abe’s b-day. The world did note, and long remember. At 56, he was enshrined, became the world’s Valentine.