"I have been sitting in Sam Wo’s drinking cold aromatic liquor.

"What did Borodin do in Canton in 1927” —

The argument lasted five hours.

My friend Soo sympathizes with the Left Opposition;

He told me I had murdered forty thousand bodies on Yellow Flower Hill.

“Those bodies are on your shoulders,” he said.

He ordered stewed tripe and wept eating it,

Clicking his chopsticks like castanets.

Whatever Borodin did it was probably wrong;

History would be so much simpler if you could just write it

Without ever having to let it happen.

The armies of the Kuo Min Tang have taken the birthplace of Tu Fu;

The Red Army has retreated in perfect order.

I wonder if the wooden image erected by his family

Still stands in the shrine at Cheng Tu ..."

from Another Early Morning Exercise, included on the Bureau of Public Secrets website,  http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/poems/1930s.htm.

In the early 1930s Kenneth Rexroth, a major American poet and one of the founders of the so-called Beat Generation, moved to San Francisco from Chicago, where he had been part of that city's radical Bohemian scene and a friend of a number of local Chinese including the poet Wen Yiduo.  Compared with Chicagoans he found that San Franciscans harbored a great deal of anti-Chinese racial prejudice.

The poem was written in 1934, when Soviet agent (and former Chicagoan) Mikhail Borodin was still a well-known figure among both Chinese and Westerners.  Interestingly, at this time Rexroth seems to have been concerned about the struggle between the Kuomintang (= Nationalist Party or in Pinyin, Guomindang) and the Gongchandang (= Communist Party or Red Chinese) than about China's fight against Japanese aggression.

Anti-Chinese Feeling among Artists: 

Chicago vs. San Francisco in the 1930s

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"There was another side of the coin. When I came to San Francisco I expected to meet all sorts of people with whom I could discuss the great poets, philosophers and painters of China. But classical Chinese culture was a closed book to all but a few old men who could not communicate with a Caucasian, and a Chinese woman doctor and her brother. When C.H. Kwock arrived from Hong Kong and Honolulu to work on the Chinese World, with an enthusiastic knowledge and love of the classical culture, he was the first person of his kind in the community.

"Concomitantly, the hidden, deep-rooted prejudice against the Chinese, which prevailed in all circles of the white community, dumbfounded me. I had been friends during his stay in America with the great Chinese poet Wen I-to, later assassinated by the Kuo Min Tang, and had many other Chinese friends. I discovered that even among radical bohemians here, if I said “At the University of Chicago where I went, an Oriental student is a preferred date,” it was as though I had made a mess on the floor."

source: http://www.bopsecrets-org.pem.data393.net/rexroth/sf/1973-74.htm

Rexroth was an ardent fan and co-translator of the poetry of Tu Fu (in Pinyin, Du Fu), of whom he said "Tu Fu is in my opinion, and in the opinion of a majority of those qualified to speak, the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet who has survived in any language."  He seems to have had intellectual friends in San Francisco's Chinese-American community in spite of its supposed uninterest in classical Chinese culture: