Local poet expresses ‘My Father’s Martial Art’

Thursday, April 6, 2000 | 9:28 a.m.

Stephen S. N. Liu is a small man who casts a large shadow, one that spans continents, cultures and time.

The English professor may be 5 feet tall, if he stands on his tiptoes. He might weigh 100 pounds, if he fills his pockets with rocks to keep from being blown away by a strong desert wind.

But his stature as a poet is tall. The weight of his insightful poems provide ballast for readers who may feel adrift in life as they search for meaning.

The 70-year-old bard will appear at the Enigma Garden Cafe at 7 p.m. Friday to sign his most recent collection of poems, "My Father's Martial Art," a title derived from one of the poems in the book published by University of Nevada Press ($11).

This particular restaurant seems appropriate for Liu, whose life is somewhat of an enigma, one filled with contradictions that, on the surface at least, are perplexing.

Liu, who has taught English at the Community College of Southern Nevada since 1973, was born in China in 1930. He is a scion of wealthy scholars and landlords in the remote, mountainous regions of the Southwest. That's where he acquired a lifelong love of the natural world as he grew up alongside peasant farmers, but in a social class that Mao Tse-tung, late chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, would eradicate when he took power in 1949.

"My family inherited a lot of money from my great-grandfather," Liu said. "My grandfather was a scholar, a poet. My father was a painter who painted water lilies exclusively, and a landlord. We had a 40-room mansion on the top of a mountain in the country."

Communists would end private ownership of land and condemn many wealthy people to death or prison.

Although he hated Mao, many of Liu's friends were communists and he supported them in their desire to end the corrupt regime of President Chiang Kai-shek, whom Liu also detests.

"Mao was evil," Liu said, "one of the worst human beings in history ... totally evil. I hate him with all my heart."

But Chiang was no better. He became chairman of the national government after the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1928. Sun, called the father of the Republic of China, was head of a self-proclaimed government that was taking power away from the ancient system of warlords.

"I was supportive of the (Communist) revolution because I was against the government of Chiang Kai-shek, not because I was philosophically in favor of communism. He was so corrupt," Liu said.

Barely 16 -- and already a poet published in many periodicals -- Liu joined the Chinese army in the closing days of the war in mid-1945 to fight the Japanese in Burma.

His military days were brief. A year later he was out of the army and studying at Nanking University, working on a degree in Chinese. Meanwhile, Mao's revolution against Chiang was spreading across the vast continent.

Liu received his degree in 1948 and decided to travel outside of China. "Since I was a child I had dreamed of traveling," he said. In 1949 Mao succeeded in taking over the nation. He drove Chiang and his followers out of China to Taipei (now Taiwan).

Because of Liu's upper-class background, he could not return to his homeland and ended up teaching Chinese in a Taipei high school for three years, before receiving a scholarship to study at Wayland Baptist University in Texas.

"I tried many times to get back into China, but I was the son of a landlord and they considered me their enemy. I would not have survived," Liu said.

His fate could have been that of his parents -- his father starved to death in prison, his mother died from illness. Seven brothers and sisters still live in China.

So, the man who was brought up under the teachings of Confucius was indoctrinated into American culture at a Baptist college.

"There is not a great difference between Confucianism and Christianity," Liu noted. "I had no difficulty adapting to America."

His education began in the Orient and ended (if education ever ends) when he received his doctorate in English from North Dakota University in 1973 and he came to Las Vegas to teach. The year he received his doctorate there was a glut of English graduates.

"I was the only one in my class who got a full-time teaching job that year," he said.

Over the years Liu made many attempts to revisit China. He was finally successful after President Richard Nixon, who became famous for fighting communism, paved the way with a diplomatic mission that reopened America's relations with the world's largest communist nation.

In 1982 Liu went home on a teaching sabbatical and has been back twice since then. He has no urge to return permanently to the country where he was born. "The government is still evil. It will never change," he said.

During his first sabbatical to China Liu published a book of poetry in Beijing, the nation's capital. "The book was in a different form. It was bilingual, with poems in English with Chinese translations," Liu said.

Poems in English generally are meant to be read aloud. But the written language of Chinese does not consist of words created by letters of an alphabet, but of characters that create descriptions. The Chinese characters enhance the pleasure of the language's poetry, he said.

Liu's poems reflect the striking juxtapositions that have occurred in his life. They are about his early years growing up in a rural world filled with peace and tranquility; and they are about the strange world of Las Vegas.

Among the poems in his latest book are "At the King's Funeral," about the death of Elvis, and "Adultery at a Las Vegas Bookstore." These are in the same volume that contains such poems as "The Frog and I" and "Little Moon."

He writes of quiet streams, cicadas and opium dens and about such places as Disneyland. A sample:

The Frog and I

He sat on a lotus leaf;

And I on a moss-bearded stone;

The sun warmed him, warmed me.

Leaving Disneyland

On the Columbus ship we are to discover America;

through swamps and river gorges;

where crocodiles, cougars and wolves will not ambush us ...

"Poetry is my passion. It helps me capture my memories of China," he said. "It is a world that is gone, gone with the revolution that took everything away.

"(Through poetry) I remember my experiences as a kid. I try to arrest the ghosts, or they would have been lost a long, long time ago. That's the main purpose of my poetry."

And, he said, it helps him express deeply felt emotions about his American experiences.

Unfortunately, poetry may be becoming a lost art. Liu finds that most of today's students, both in the United States and China, avoid poetry because, among other reasons, it may be difficult to understand.

Many poets are too arcane -- readers must be scholars to fully comprehend and appreciate the poetry of such writers as T.S. Eliot ("Wasteland"), said Liu, who keeps his own poetry simple but meaningful.

"In China, a poet will read his poem to a child. If the child doesn't understand it, he rewrites it," Liu said.

Poetry is a way of adding depth to one's life, to better understand and appreciate the experiences a person has.

And for Liu (who prefers the solitude of the countryside), it also is a means of escaping the pressures of urban living and the constant clanging of quarters striking metal.

This city of lights and 24-hour action is not Liu's favorite place.

"(Poetry) keeps me sane," he said. "This is a wild world here."

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