Why I Write

449,166.

The mid 400s?

Not bad for a small condo in the Richmond district.

But who’s talking real estate? I’m talking book rankings.

When I last looked at Amazon.com, my book Amok: Essays from an Asian American Perspective, with a foreward by Ishmael Reed, (published by AsianWeek Books) was listed as 449,166th.

That’s enough to make anyone go amok.

Oh, to be No. 1? Heck, I’ll settle to be part of Moby Dick! (Melville’s Bantam Classics version, ranked 6,962).

But my book’s still one better than the poor soul at 449, 167, whoever that is, who lies in the wake of my literary shadow.

I take even more solace in the fact that I’m up from 800,000 in little over a year’s time: a 100 percent gain from when the book was first published. Am I doing a sales spin? The book’s still way higher than the absolute bottom of the literary river — No. 2,196,969.

That would be the number assigned to Mastering Management: Your Single-Source Guide to Becoming a Master of Management, a compilation of business essays by various authors that first appeared in London’s Financial Times. Not a real book, you say?

Hey, my book is a compilation of essays, too! But the comparison ends there.

I wrote all of my essays.

And I’m in the top 25 percent of all of Amazon’s rankings.

But who are we kidding? Sales rankings mean something to the Top 40 stars, the Brittany Spears and the Back Street Boys. Not to the stars of the Top 400,000!

Ultimately, being No. 449,167 with no bullet is meaningless to a writer like me. Not even for survival. One’s ego better be healthier than that. The truth is, one doesn’t really write for sales, or the ignominious glory of seeing a book take a millimeter’s rise in the rankings.

Samuel Johnson, the biographer may have said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” But the fact is, these days, you’re a blockhead if you do it just for money. Writing for the ethnic media taught me that.

No, there’s got to be something else. Something that eats at you from inside. (Stewed prunes come to mind. But for metaphor’s sake, I prefer peppers to prunes. Let’s go with jalapeños). It’s something that physically forces you to go to the computer, to make you start cursing the slow boot-up of Windows.

You can’t wait. You’re on fire (can’t get that from prunes). You must get on with it (damned peppers!) Your amokness must be engaged.

So how can writing be about sales or awards? (Did I mention mine won an American Book Award in 2000?) Something needs to get out (well, prunes could help here). Something must get told. Something has made you a writer.

Something you ate? No, no, no. Unless it was you who ate Shakespeare. Or was it Bacon?

Realistically, it’s that you see yourself in someone literary. You see, or hear yourself in their work.

Who would that be exactly for me, a young writer, an Asian Pacific Islander American male, circa 1970s? Pearl Buck after a sex change? Buck Pearl? Jose Rizal? Carlos Bulosan?

None of that stuff spoke to me then. I was American, barely ethnic. And then, as a young page working at San Francisco’s Presidio branch library, I found myself thumbing Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself.

It was all about him. But it spoke to me.

Mailer was already a writer of some repute. The Naked and the DeadÁ his World War II novel, had put him on the map, and now he was emerging as the American literary persona. He was one teapot of testosterone and intellect and he was ethnic. Jewish American.

Thus began my period of being Jewish. My Lowell High English teacher Flossie Lewis, herself a bang-up writer from Brooklyn, encouraged me. I was Mailer. I was Roth. I was Bellow. No mere omniscient, in the exaggerated parlance of Mailer — I was Aquarius!

But I wasn’t. And thanks to the writer Ishmael Reed, I discovered I was me, an API American. Of Filipino descent. Only when I discovered that, did I realize that was enough. We had our stories to tell, our way. Made up. Observed. It was all real.

I went into journalism because that was the marketplace for daily writing, or at least writing that showed up sometime in the near future. It wasn’t a novel five or ten years in the making. There was an urgency, there was stuff no one was writing about or commenting on. It was writing from the front. It was public thinking.

Which leads us back to the ethnic media that spawned my book Amok.

Recently, I wrote a column about racism in the Wen Ho Lee case.

Another week, another column? Sure. But it’s no one-way street. A writer presumes a reader. And when the readers become writers, well, then the real communication takes place.

Here’s an example of some of the e-mail I got on the Wen Ho Lee column.

“Give it a rest already,” said one reader/writer. “Did they single him out? Of course. My wife is Japanese and no doubt fifty years ago, she would have been (suspicious) to the U.S. government. Is this nice behavior? No. Would it be racism? No. Just the reality of the situation. Give it a rest already.”

But then there’s always one e-mail that makes you want to go beyond “the reality of the situation.”

“I have not read your book,” said another reader/writer. “But a friend sent me an article of yours touching on the subject of racism.

“I really thank you for being sensitive and observant on this matter,” he continued. “I am a 64-year-old college-educated American of Chinese ancestry who, among other things also served as an officer in the U.S. Army.

“Being raised in the Central Valley of California, I blinded myself to the discrimination going on around me, and focused on doing the right thing and going forward in spite of any adversity. I think many of our generation were raised in that manner and taught not to make waves, as the surrounding Caucasian community had the power to take away our toys. There is no way I press the idea that Asians are any nobler than others, but only that for their general accomplishments in this country, they deserve a hell of a lot better than what they have gotten.”

When I get responses like that, the importance of the presence of an APIA voice — an APIA public voice — becomes crystal clear.

And that’s why I write my column, my book(s) — any and all of it.

It’s about me. It’s about you. It’s about us.

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Emil hosts NCM-TV on Friday nights on KCSM-TV (SF Bay Area) and KLCS (Los Angeles). E-mail:emil@amok.com.