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Sketch: "Eye Contact" in Shawn Wong's American Knees

Shawn Hsu Wong is a second-generation Chinese American, born in Oakland, California in 1949. He obtained his undergraduate degree in English at the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at the San Francisco State University in 1974. After teaching in several colleges and universities, he is presently a Professor specializing in Creative Writing and Asian American Studies, at the University of Washington, where he is also the director of the University Honors Program. His multi-awarded works include Homebase , first published in 1979, as well as edited and coedited works Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) and The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese America and Japanese America in Literature (1991), among four other anthologies. Wong has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Italy, and has won several awards including first pr
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Tricks, Love, and Magicks

To be able to perform magic trickery very well, you have to master the force, misdirection, cunning wordcraftery, and sleights. It is in these four essential principles that magic is most diametrically opposite to love, if we understand and reduce love to terms of the question, reassurance, honesty, and transparency - for, as one definition goes, magic is the art of deception, implying a cleaving from the other; and love is the closest we get to being one with an other. First binary: Force and question The force in magic is already a predetermined "choice" the magician presents, along with others, to his audience. Without going into mentalism and the magician's choice, the force is the principle of rigged order in what appears to be chaotically random concatenations of things or options. It is in this forced/rigged action of the magician forcing your hand, unbeknownst to to you, that the trick comes to fruition. When asking a question of a lover, you do not ask merely to
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Training Max: Chapter 13

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  Unlike Max, she quit working out, and unlike Max yet again (who consistently does this,) she can write a rare inspired piece. The only reason for this gaping difference between them is because, as she explained to Max when they had moved to a different messenger in what seemed like ages ago, “Boredom is at the once the greatest invention of the human mind and the most painful insult of humanity to the majestic fuckery of the universe. So no, I may not get bored. I may write, yes, but I respect what things are. Unlike you, I have to draw the line of my ego somewhere. Even if it takes me a thousand-mile radius to do it. You are at the limit of that thousand miles. I can, however, draw that line . I am afraid you can’t; you do not know – and, as a writer, should not know - when you as a writer stops. I, on the other hand, have to stop somewhere: otherwise I would write you a love sonnet every day and not even like you. It goes against what poverty-stricken moral compass I have.” It wa
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