by Julie Wu
“When it was time to board, your mother called for him to come over, and I thought, How sweet, she wants to give him a hug.” She glanced at me. “But then she grabbed the toy gun and yanked it out of his hands. She said he wouldn’t need it in America and she was going to give it to her nephew.”
Yoshiko turned to me, her face dark. “Kai-ming started screaming. I took his hand and turned my back to Kachan. I wished I had a thousand backs to turn to her, a thousand chances to refuse to say good-bye. Kai-ming was crying so hard he couldn’t walk, so I had to carry him. Him, my X-rays, my carry-on, and everything. I walked all the way up the stairs and onto the plane, all the way to our seats, which overlooked the tarmac, and not once did I look back at your mother.”
She sat on the bed and blew her nose. “Why don’t they love you, anyway?”
My head swirled.
“They used to tell Kai-ming you were dead, you know. They thought it was funny when he cried.” She looked at me and grabbed another tissue. “I will never go back there,” she said. “Not ever.”
38
I WOKE IN THE morning to hear her singing in the kitchen, the song of the fisherman’s wife. Her side of the bed was still warm.
Looking at the net, my eyes redden—such a hole!
I want to repair it but have not a thing . . .
Alone and miserable, my lover has gone hiding.
I sew but have trouble controlling the needle and thread.
My long needle connects West and East.
My thread is a bridge to the Milky Way . . .
I had watched her sleep in the moonlight. So many years had passed without her it seemed a waste of time to sleep when she was here, living, breathing, her eyelids fluttering. In the middle of the night, when it would have been noon in Taiwan, her eyes had suddenly opened and she had laughed to find me watching her. And I had reached for her, made love to her.
I walked into the kitchen, and she stood at the sink, smiling at me. Sunlight, reflected by the snow, poured in through the window, illuminating her face, catching the gold flecks in her eyes. I touched her waist, feeling its curve through her yellow flowered dress, and I kept my hand there, relishing the desire between us, the years of longing come to fruition, the future laid out before us like a sure path through the forest.
She turned, her waist tensing under my hand, and handed me a cup of steaming tea.
“From my father,” she said. “The best.”
I took a sip of the fragrant tea. It transported me to our courtship, to waiting in the living room with her mother. Waiting for Yoshiko to come home from work, waiting for the proper time for our engagement. Waiting for this.
“My father is doing very well now,” Yoshiko said. “He has a nice new house and he’s even been able to buy some land from his brother.”
“So you were right about selling the house,” I said.
“I was!” She smiled. “Even my sister-in-law is satisfied. My father said, ‘Next time you come back, maybe I will have two houses’—”
A sudden sob cut off her words. The dream was over. She turned her head to the side and put her cup of tea on the counter.
Ah! What she had given up for me! In escaping from my parents, she had left her own. I looked down, crushed under the weight of what I had done to her.
Kai-ming came running in. “Ma! Why are you crying?”
He ran to her and wrapped his arms around her legs. He glared at me. He was fully dressed, even wearing his hat and parka.
Yoshiko laughed, sniffling. “Kai-ming, where are you going?”
“I’m going outside to play in the snow. Why are you crying?”
“Ah, don’t worry. Your father and I were just talking about how much better life will be for us in America, you silly thing. You can’t go out by yourself like that. Four years old and our first day in the United States!”
“It’s not our first day in the United States. We were in Seattle yesterday.”
She laughed, hugging him cheek to cheek, and beamed up at me. “You see? Kai-ming is amazing. He is my big, big boy. He protects me.”
“Where is my gun?” he said, looking up at me. “Then I can do better.”
“I’ll get you a gun, Kai-ming.” I smiled, but their closeness both touched and saddened me. It was a bond of love and hardship, the kind of desperate bond that grows when it is attacked, when a child is told for sport that his father is dead—a bond so steadfast, so unassailable, that I wondered how it could ever include me.
39
WE SPENT OUR FIRST months together preparing for my father’s arrival. We bought sheets for his bed, a new TV. We bought these items with no small amount of resentment, which Yoshiko expressed with little disguise.
“Will he like this? Can we afford it?”
“Of course,” I said. “There’s still more on our credit card.”
“I hope so. Or we’ll have nothing to eat. Or maybe that will make him feel at home.”
“Yoshiko! He got the money for us to come here, remember?”
“Believe me, I’ve heard that enough times to remember. Now he’s coming for his payback.”
I HAD LONGED for my family for so many years. Here they were, finally, and we argued.
“Saburo!”
Yoshiko appeared in the doorway wearing a frilly green apron, her face scrunched up. “Why are you making Kai-ming sit at the breakfast table for so long? It’s time for me to make lunch now.”
I stood to face her. “I told him to stay there until he finishes his egg. It’s a sin to waste it. He’s like a stick.”
“He doesn’t like it! I cooked it too long,” Yoshiko said angrily. “Leave him alone!”
I loved my son, yet when I saw Yoshiko fold him into her arms and kiss him, I felt that such gestures were her domain. Wasn’t that the difference between men and women?
The next day, I gave him a BB gun.
“Not a real gun! He’s four! What’s the matter with you?” Yoshiko cried. “You don’t know how to behave with children at all!”
It was true. I once fought with her to convince her it was okay to leave Kai-ming by himself while we went to a dinner party. I had roamed the streets and paddies with Aki at that age. Why shouldn’t my capable son be safe in his own house?
“He’s almost five!” I said angrily. “People would laugh at us if we got a babysitter.”
Knowing better, Yoshiko had fretted the instant we left the house and insisted we turn around. We entered the living room to find the boy sinking a fourth parallel slice into the black vinyl of our armchair with a razor blade.
“Li kwa, Saburo! You see!”
I did see, and I began to wonder whether my own upbringing had permanently snuffed out my ability to be a good father.
Overall, we were happy to be together, but the fights wearied me. I wondered at my wife’s moods, which went from laughing and sweet to furious and back again with hardly a pause in between.
We fought, in particular, about my future. I was having second thoughts about taking a sabbatical year to get my PhD.
“It’s too much of a risk. There’s no way I can pass the qualifying exam and write my thesis in one year. All those people from Taiwan University have been there for years. What if I don’t pass the exam? I’ll have taken a sabbatical for nothing.”
She frowned, scooping rice from her frying pan into blue plastic bowls. “Don’t listen to those people. They’re just trying to make you feel bad.”
“Hai!” I clucked my tongue. “They’re just telling the truth. They’re still there, and they had a better college education than me.”
The pan clattered as she dropped it on the stove. She shook a pink spatula at me. “They had a better education than you, and now you have a master’s degree and you’re a professor at an American university. That means you’re smarter than them!”
I watched her in surprise. “Have you been talking to Professor Beck?”
“You’re the one who told me what he said. Ma
ybe you should listen to yourself.”
MAY WAS COMING. We washed the windows. We took an extra trip to the Chicago Chinatown to replace the gamy-tasting pheasants in the freezer—the ones I had shot with Beck—with Chinese staples for my father.
Yoshiko lay on the couch, a damp towel on her forehead. She wore a lovely white dress with red roses on it, even though she had been cleaning, and the skirt draped over the edge of the couch onto the floor. “I don’t know why I’m so tired,” she said.
We found out two weeks later that she was pregnant.
“An American baby.” She took my hand as we walked out of the doctor’s office. “It will have a happy life.” She smiled up at me, her face as bright as it had been in her childhood, before she had been left behind by her father, by me. I felt another pang of guilt at having made Kai-ming fatherless for his first years.
Everything would be different now. This child would set all my wrongs to right.
40
IN THE LAST DAYS before my father’s arrival, I could not sleep and instead sat in the black vinyl armchair in the dark, running my fingers along the slices Kai-ming had made in the armrest. This seemed to me the reward for all my trials: that I should have Yoshiko and Kai-ming in America with me, that we should welcome another child into our new home, and that my father would come to recognize, in however small and reserved a way, the worth of my life.
I wasn’t completely naive. I didn’t expect him to smile and say, “I love you,” as Americans did. I had never seen him smile and I would never expect him to embrace me; he never had. But perhaps there was some way—some subtle, casual way—that he could acknowledge my worth. That I was Kazuo’s equal—even his own. I wanted to talk to him as father and son, yes, but also as a grown father to a respected son, man to man. I had not taken the path he wanted, but how much more glory I was bringing to the family by pursuing my own path! If I did everything right—passed my qualifying exam, wrote my thesis in a year—I would be the first person from Taoyuan with an American doctorate.
Yoshiko made sure his room was spotless. I moved his bed this way and that, back aching, to find the best placement in the room. When the day arrived, I awoke so early with anticipation that I watched the sun rise over the valley of neat little Rapid City homes.
It was a brilliant day, and I went by myself to pick him up from the airport, anticipating that moment when we would be alone together, the two of us. We had never been alone for all my childhood except when I faced him in his armchair. Someone else had always been in the way—my siblings, my cousins, his colleagues, Nationalist agents, soldiers.
I waited on the tarmac for his plane, and finally it came, touching its delicate, spinning toes to the Rapid City runway. All the passengers spilled out the plane’s doors, and then he emerged, dwarfed by all the tall white people around him, his face as grim and self-important as an army general heading into battle. He strode toward me on the tarmac, his pear-shaped body clad in a gray three-piece suit. He was perfectly erect, his eyes, in this strange, new land, directed straight ahead. At his approach I felt a coldness in my belly. I tried to shake the feeling off, because I knew things would be different now.
He drew near and held out his leather satchel. “Put this in the bank for me,” he said. “I need it in Japan.”
“What is it?”
“It’s cash, stupid.”
I TOOK HIM to meet Beck. Mrs. Larsson smiled brightly on introduction but then, receiving my father’s mirthless nod, glanced at me and went back to filing papers into her desk drawer.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Tong,” Beck said. “Please come in.”
The three of us stood awkwardly in Beck’s office. It was late Friday afternoon. Beck wore his fishing hat and I saw his reel leaning against the wall behind his desk.
“We’re lucky to have your son with us,” Beck said. He spoke slowly, clearly. I had told him my father’s English was limited, and I was grateful that he remembered.
“Hm,” my father grunted. His face was smooth and inscrutably somber as a temple statue’s, his ever-present bow tie perfectly symmetrical.
“He’s not afraid to take risks. Been teaching a different course every semester to prepare for his PhD qualifier. Most people just want to stick to the same course. Laziness, I guess.” Beck tilted his head slightly, watching my father. He started speaking less deliberately. “He’s doing cutting-edge work at Michigan, too, on the upper atmosphere. Exciting stuff.”
“Hm,” my father said again.
Beck looked at me uncertainly.
I took my father out into the hall and waited for him while he lit his cigarette.
He let out a puff of smoke. “Why was he wearing such a stupid hat?” he said. “I expected someone important, not a small-town hick.”
“HE DIDN’T EVEN go to college,” Yoshiko whispered to me at night. “He has to cut you down to size.”
Even in my own home, bought with my own money, my father was king. He sat in my black vinyl chair, turned the TV to shows he liked, and ordered food from my wife. At times I couldn’t bear to see it, and I took him out. This seemed to be what he wanted as well. I thought he would be impressed by the beautiful countryside of South Dakota, so we took him for long drives. He was especially fascinated by American cows; in Taiwan, the cows were black from head to toe.
“Wait, wait!” he exclaimed as we drove by a farm, and I had to stop the car so he could take a picture of a Guernsey calf staring back at us through a segment of wire fence.
Kai-ming stifled a giggle, and Yoshiko shushed him harshly. “You must not laugh at your akong,” she said.
My father was equally impressed by the mountain goats chewing grass by the side of the road at Custer State Park. At the Badlands, he noted the similarity to the undulating rock formations at Yehliu, on the northern coast of Taiwan.
He took pictures of Mount Rushmore and peered at dripping stalactites in the dark coolness of Jewel Cave National Monument. “There is a lot to see in this country,” he said. “I want to see more.”
But Yoshiko could not drive, so during the week, while I taught, my father stayed at the little house in Rapid City with Yoshiko and Kai-ming.
“All he does is watch TV,” Yoshiko whispered to me at night. “He can’t even understand what they’re saying. Doesn’t he have anything better to do? I’m working like a dog to take care of him and he just sits there like a king. I can’t stand on my feet all day when I’m pregnant.”
“We’ll go out to dinner. We owe him,” I said. “He helped both of us get over here.”
When summer came, we rented out our house in Rapid City and moved to a Northwood duplex on the University of Michigan campus. It was time to take the gamble of my life, to give up my professorship for a year in the hopes that at the end of the summer I might pass Michigan’s fabled qualifying exam and then use the year to write my thesis.
I needed to study even more. Hunching over my books in the library with the other Taiwanese was, however, out of the question. Since my little dinner with Wei-ta, they had stopped being friendly to me, and it seemed unlikely that studying the way they did would be effective in any case. Beck’s method of questioning had been the key to my quick mastery of the material in South Dakota. To replace him, I joined a study group of American students who took turns fielding questions. I still needed to work in Gleason’s lab, and I often returned home very late.
We invited Wen-chong over for dinner to meet my father. “Professor Hong is safe!” he said excitedly as I welcomed him into the house. “And his wife has been cleared to come to the US! I am so grateful to your father!”
“Ah!”
Wen-chong was in a good mood, and he conversed easily with my father, who was clearly impressed with Wen-chong’s tidy appearance and sophisticated Chinese.
Wen-chong sucked delicately on spare ribs in black bean sauce, wiped his mouth elegantly with his paper napkin, and told my father about our first trip to Fort Churchill. “Your son is a bold
young man and quite an excellent engineer. It is so wonderful that you could help with his family’s immigration, and of course I so much appreciate your part in clearing Professor Hong’s name in San Francisco—”
“Who? What? Professor who?” My father chewed and waved his hand, wrinkling his forehead in annoyance. He swallowed a mouthful of lotus blossom tea. “I didn’t do anything. No one listens to me anymore. It was that American senator who called the Taiwanese embassy. Scared the daylights out of the Nationalists. That pig-faced friend of Kazuo’s got into big trouble with the party. Making up accusations, wasting people’s time and resources. Because of Kazuo! Kazuo should have been the one in trouble, but he’s so sly he managed to get himself out of it.
“As for Saburo,” he added irritably, “I don’t know why he has to take this PhD thing so seriously.”
That night in our bedroom, Yoshiko sat fuming as my father’s footsteps lumbered overhead on the second floor of our duplex. She panted a little; her belly protruded so much now that it brushed against the bureau as she leaned toward her mirror. She untied her scarf and threw it down on the bureau. “He takes every opportunity to shoot you down! And see, he didn’t help you or me or Professor Hong, after all! Senator Dickey did everything.”
I folded my tie and tucked it into a drawer. “He’s frustrated,” I said. “I’m too busy to take him around. It’s a long time to wait until after summer session.”
“Then he should hire a tour guide. You can’t just drop everything because he’s here!”
But sometimes I would stop studying early and go sit with my father in our little living room to keep him company. Time was passing, passing. Our study group’s meetings had accelerated in frequency from once a week to twice a week to daily. The qualifying exam was fast approaching. And then, come what may, there would be one month, and my father would be gone. The time to forge our connection was now. Perhaps that was why he was upset. He wanted to talk.
“Look at this!” He struck his brother’s airmail letter with the back of his hand. “What a democracy! They simply take the opposition leader and blackmail him. Thomas Liao’s sister-in-law is in prison and they’ve sentenced his nephew to death. It’s all because of the elections. They’re afraid Chiang’s son will look bad. What does it matter, when all the elections are fixed, anyway? It’s simply needless brutality.”
