Playwright, journalist, art historian, Steve Hauk is creating with his art historian wife, Nancy, a Steinbeck show at their gallery, Hauk Fine Arts, which runs September 5 through October 18.

The show is in conjunction with the publication of Steve’s remarkable piece, “Steinbeck Armed: (A Colt Revolver) With the Truth,” in the Steinbeck Review as part of Blackwell-Wiley's American Author Series (Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Melville among many others). “Steinbeck Armed,” I am proud to say, first appeared in Redroom.com.

Steve Hauk says “Steinbeck Armed” explains the author’s courage and “why he did not cozy up to strangers who approached him out of the blue (they could have been there to do him injury), and how tough it is to write the truth about a situation that is going to cost people money (growers, employers).”

I’ve been invited to contribute a noir painting to the exhibit, so I chose to depict chapter 4 from “Cannery Row,” a book that was given me at age 11 by our landlady when my family first moved to the Monterey Peninsula. As a child, I spent a lot of time sketching and painting on location before Cannery Row was “beautified” and turned into an arcade.

The Chinese settled in the Monterey Bay before the Italians and Portuguese and founded the fishing industry. When they were muscled out by the other ethnic groups, they fished at night for squid.  Several Chinatowns existed near the present day Monterey Aquarium. When I reread Steinbeck as an adult, I realize the deep empathy Steinbeck expressed for The Other:

Beginning in the middle of Chapter 4 of the masterpiece, “Cannery Row”:

Only the brave and beautiful boy of ten named Andy from Salinas ever crossed the old Chinaman. Andy was visiting in Monterey and he saw the old man and knew he must shout at him if only to keep his self-respect, but even Andy, brave as he was, felt the little cloud of fear. Andy watched him go by evening after evening while his duty and his terror wrestled. And then one evening Andy braced himself and marched behind the old man singing in a shrill falsetto, “Ching-Chong Chinaman sitting on a rail---‘Long came a white man an’ chopped off his tail.”

The old man stopped and turned. Andy stopped. The deep—brown eyes looked at Andy and the thin, corded lips moved. What happen then Andy was never able either to explain or to forget. For the eyes spread out until there was no Chinaman. And then it was one eye—one huge brown eye as big as a church door. Andy looked through the tiny transparent brown door and through it saw a lonely countryside, flat for miles but ending against a row of fantastic mountains, shaped like cows’ and dogs’ head and tents and mushrooms. There was low coarse grass on the plain and here and there a little mound. And a small animal like a woodchuck sat on each mound. And the loneliness—the desolate cold aloneness of the landscape made Andy whimper because there wasn’t anybody at all in the world and he was left. Andy shut his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see it any more and when he opened them, he was in Cannery Row and the old Chinaman was just flap-flapping between western Biological and the Hediondo Cannery. Andy was the only boy who ever did that and he never did it again.

To see Belle Yang's videos and paintings, please visit her media page.