Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Shimada,

We have evaluated your child, Joan, for English language competency. This evaluation was performed by Mrs. E. Darer and Mr. J. Shemalian. For the purposes of this evaluation, the student has been tested in English both orally and in writing.

The scope of this standard test has been devised so as to determine a student’s abilities in reading, writing, and comprehension, as well as in necessary auxiliary skills. Specifically, the test requires a student to:

• Recognize, state, read, and write statements and questions.

• Listen to short conversations and answer questions orally.

• Read and comprehend silently and aloud and answer questions.

• Determine the main idea in a simple paragraph.

• Demonstrate sequential ordering of events.

• Use a dictionary and other essential reference books.

• Demonstrate a basic knowledge of punctuation.

• Write legibly upper- and lowercase letters and properly use capitalization.

Our finding is that the student is unable at this time to meet the minimum standard of competency that would enable placement in Grade 8, the level at which a child of this age ordinarily is placed. The student will be required to demonstrate increased proficiency in all areas prior to placement at this level. In the interim, the student has been placed in Grade 2, which will provide a better opportunity to learn at a more unhurried pace.

Should you have any questions concerning this matter, please do not hesitate to contact my office.

My very best wishes,

Louis F. Longcrier

Principal

Just the briefest portrayal of those Fresno Years, which began so inauspiciously. When Joan finally did get to high school at seventeen, the big deal of the thing evaded her. The Choklit Shoppe ethos reigned supreme, fifties swan song ringing out from the angular Seeburg jukes all the stiffs swayed to. Who’dja rather be, Betty or Veronica? Bro-ther! Joan rolled her eyes. The Little Jap in Black hung out with the strange ones, all the oddballs, misfits, loners, eccentrics, screwballs, nonconformists, and cranks. She smoked pot in someone’s dad’s pickup truck in a field outside Porterville. The smell of manure all around. For a minute she believed that what she was smoking actually was cow shit. She read a copy of The Subterraneans someone had lent her. Filled her head up with ideas; it seemed easier than she might have expected to wholly identify with, to imagine herself as, a Negro woman. What it filled her up with was the idea of leaving.

Throughout all this she’d kept winning prizes for her artwork. People were very reassured by this Japanese girl and her delicate touch. A dedication to the old traditional values of the Orient, all the gentle ceremony that seemed to be getting pushed out of the way in this startling new era of entrenched, highly motivated East Asian enemies. She enrolled at Fresno State—

“Well, I’ll say one thing for the Japs,” a grocer said one morning, as Joan entered his store. “I’ll say one thing for them.”

“What’s that?” asked the man he was waiting on.

“At least they ain’t Communists. They understand this system good. They make it work for them. They got it fixed so they got quotas there in all the state colleges. They steal all our inventions to send on back home and then the Japs there send them right back to us, in cheaper versions. They ain’t Communists.”

— She enrolled at Fresno State but soon knew that it was time to be moving on. For one thing, the fine arts department was desolate, an orphaned entity on a third-rate campus. But she didn’t need excuses. She just needed to get out of there. It can be said with some degree of certainty that her parents understood and supported her decision. She applied to CCAC up in Oakland, got in, and left. Exit Fresno.

It was possible, even in the late 1960s, for a person in the Bay Area, in Berkeley, to sustain an apolitical outlook. This was in itself a sort of political posture — albeit a crouch — particularly for someone like Joan, a person for whom politics had never had any point, who had always seen clearly that the divisiveness of political discourse ultimately and inevitably split people into those who were free and those who were “relocated.” That at least was a kind of brutal commitment. True, the camps had preempted discourse, but there in the depraved fact of them lay the resolution of whatever dialectic may have ensued, then or now. In the paper she read of the army’s “strategic hamlets” in South Vietnam, accompanied by a photograph of the peasants, baffled and defiant, behind the barbed wire that was to preserve them from the wrong ideas. There was a Nazi propaganda film she’d seen at the Art Institute; it announced, “Hitler has built a city for the Jews!” She remembered Manzanar, the mountains cut clean against the horizon, the white of the peaks against the white of the sky, from which they could be distinguished only by the glare at their summits. For a few years she went about her business, ignoring the political poseurs and the hippies alike, especially the hippies, who all seemed about two weeks removed from their crew cuts and prom tuxes.

It was three credits that brought Joan into alignment with her political kismet in 1969. She was lacking three humanities credits that she needed to get her diploma and move on to whatever the next thing was going to be for her, and she enrolled in a night philosophy course at Merritt, a JuCo in Oakland. There she met a man, Ralph, who very gradually introduced her to politics. That her newfound engagement was at the beginning inextricably linked to the powerful, explosive orgasms — her very first — that Ralph provided her seemed both just and honorable. By the time the course ended the affair was about over, but the aspirant beatnik from the Central Valley via Hiroshima via Manzanar had already developed a certain taste, for which the peculiar circumstances of her life had prepared her, for the exhausting encounters, the minuteman keenness, the leery reexamination of the old pieties, required of the political radical.

Joan met Willie Clay at one of the People’s Park demonstrations in May 1969. By now, a week or two after the first riot, the National Guard, the police, and the demonstrators appeared to have worked out the blocking of the scene. It was the first time that Joan had actually been to the park site, and she hung back on Telegraph, keeping an extra half block between her and the center of things down Haste Street. Something about the whole setting that day, under the unseasonable lowering sky, gave her the creeps. It was the sort of weather that piss offed the bees, made the dogs bark and run across their yard at you. She was really just trying this People’s Park business on for size anyway. It was all anybody was talking about, there were all those National Guard guys all over the place freaking everybody out (though Joan herself was familiar with the sight of uniformed, armed men), so why not? Now she was kind of sorry that she’d come, and it occurred to her all at once, as she was caught up in the crowd, the small, churning eddy of people below the steady current flowing through the Sather Gate and down Telegraph, that the affirming solidarity others found in the midst of a swarming, loud assembly was nothing that she needed, at all.

She was a stealthy, secret person, with a delicate touch.

What she had to offer was more than the pinprick presence of her body smack dabbed in the middle of a jam. It was something more, an individual voice that inspired, an individual vision that revealed.

OK, so this bared some lingering fucked-up values, some egotype issues she still had to deal with. But right now she had to like get out of there. She’d reached the corner and could see that the demo had begun to disintegrate, that a sequence of discrete clashes had built into a rush toward the park itself, vacant in its ruin behind a defensive line of helmeted guardsmen who stood in impassive anticipation of the encounter. The hollowed voice, its pulsing monotone, coming through the police bullhorn, seemed to counterpoint the surging crowd and its own steady noise, like an ostinato playing against the surf: