“A singular portrait of a community ... engagingly written and illustrated” —Puget Sound Metropolitan Living, July 2000

“Lau’s eye is trained by painting, his hearing by poetry, and his other senses by a lifetime spent attending to vegetables and fruit.” —Washington Free Press, Jan/Feb 2001

“Twenty years ago, Alan Chong Lau was laid off by Boeing and began working for a greengrocer in Seattle’s International District. This is where he started writing poetry. But his book is no portrait of the artist as a young grocery drudge. [Lau] speaks above all as a person and a poet, large-hearted and tireless, filling his pages with fresh wonder at the everchanging same old workaday world just south of downtown.... Lau throws himself joyously into his work and sends his radiant attention outward to find health and laughter nearly everywhere. In short lyrics, prose poems and some ebullient, twitchy drawings, he records the sights and sounds around him—and smells, whether from ‘an alleyway / of crushed flowers / soaking in yesterday’s piss’ or a whiff of restaurant barbecue.” —Seattle Times, 27 August 2000

“In this sensuous, often witty book, one is struck from the first page onward with how completely this poet lives a ‘life considered.’ No one I know writes with more sensitivity about the nature of life and work than Alan Lau, and few poets explore so honestly the nature of living in a community with others who have had to live complex and difficult lives.” —Gail Tremblay

“Reading the poems of Alan Lau has been for me like coming unexpectedly upon a living green oasis when crossing a desert. Lau’s poems speak for and embrace an entire people, a tragic century, and from his eloquence and modesty and compassion the identity of this fine poet comes to enduring life.” —Kay Boyle

“Filled with startling images, subtle insights, and true-to-life profundities, this long-awaited volume by this widely known and highly regarded, multifaceted artist will undoubtedly prove to be an event. It will speak to people interested in poetry, Asia, Asian America, the visual arts, multiculturalism, food, produce, sociological issues, commerce, spirituality, and just plain life in general.” —Lawson Fusao Inada

Alan Chong Lau’s poetic memoir of his days as a produce worker in Seattle’s Chinatown reveals a microcosm of grassroots, working-class Asian America—a world where customers, workers, and fruits and vegetables intersect in exchanges that crackle with energy and brim over with humor.

With the simple profundity of a Zen koan, the poems bear witness to people’s humanity. Lau portrays in words and pictures a community in constant flux as it moves to the push and pull of immigration. Blues and Greens has a lot to say about Asian Americans. What emerges is an acutely observed, nuanced critique of where Asian Americans—native-born, refugee, and migrant—are today.

Alan Chong Lau was born in 1948 in Paradise, California. He is co-author with Garrett Hongo and Lawson Inada of Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 (1976) and author of Songs for Jadina (1980). His writing has appeared in many publications and anthologies, and his paintings have been exhibited in the U.S., England, and Japan.

I’ve got
the dirt of China
underneath my nails

Tonight the musk of water chestnuts
buried in water
sinks deep
into my dreams

Slivers of light
skimming off this bowl of morning
discarded moans of ancestors
and torn cries of antelope
fade off into the distance

Footprints that earth cannot hold
sounds the wind will not carry

—from “Coming Home”