by Kat Chow
So I might have a brother or sister, my father says, his eyes wide in excitement when he gets to this part of his speech. He shares all this in a mix of Taishanese and English, and he drops in a couple of Spanish words for effect.
Excelente, excelente, he repeats, whenever somebody agrees to help. Gracias, gracias.
Many people provide my father with the same fact—that Cuba had only an estimated two hundred Chinese people remaining, this number shrinking each day. When Fidel Castro came into power, he restricted immigration from China, and many already there married Cubans.8 We spent the morning sitting in air-conditioned offices of association leaders hearing details like this, fans sucking the perspiration off our arms and thighs.
* * *
Casino Chung Wah is one of the largest tongs. From the street, it is nondescript; inside, it has an expansive ballroom with a stage flanked by teal doors. The lights are off, and we introduce ourselves to Guillermo Chu, who is in his eighties and works at the association. We pore over registry books nearly a century old in search of my grandfather’s name: 周開傑. Guillermo tells us that at the start of the revolution, he hid these records from the Communists. They destroyed any property they could find, he says in Taishanese, my father translating for me and Caroline. Inside the book, there are pasted photos of young men in their twenties and thirties, and inscribed next to the pictures are their names in Chinese and Spanish, their village in China, and the date they enrolled in the association.
Caroline and I bend over these pages and compare these faces to our grandfather’s. We examine the cheekbones, the side parts, and the grim smiles. We study their names.
Maybe your father used a different name here, Guillermo says to my father. Maybe he was a paper son.
Maybe, our father agrees. Maybe he had a different name. He looks at the spread with a renewed energy.
He asks Guillermo to retrieve more books. Guillermo is frail, and shuffles slowly down the hall to the small closet where they’re stored.
Excelente, excelente, my father says as he tries to follow him, but is politely waved away.
We discover a name that is partially like my grandfather’s, with my grandmother’s surname: Kwan Hoy Kit. My father leans closer, volume increasing, gestures widening. He keeps repeating what Guillermo has just told us, about my grandfather potentially being a paper son, how this could mean my grandfather could have become anybody. He is hopeful, whereas I find this information overwhelming and devastating in its inconclusiveness. A woman emerges from another room and observes us for a few minutes.
He has to go, she says eventually. He has a meeting. She escorts Guillermo by the elbow from the room.
OK, my father says. He sees Caroline and me, our eyebrows raised. What? He’s busy.
No, I say.
No, Caroline says. You were yelling, Daddy.
Yeah, I say, unhelpfully. You kept asking him to walk back and forth to that room to get more of those books. That lady probably thought you were going to give Guillermo a heart attack.
Bo-o-ooy, my father says. No, that’s not what happened.
Yes it is, I say.
Ai, you girls are just exaggerating.
No, I say, my own voice rising. You were yelling. You’re always yelling.
* * *
For my own recollection, I document some of this week with an audio recorder, and in one of the sound files, we are at a restaurant. My father is chatty and animated by the possibilities this trip might bring. He mentions Steph and how she wished she could have joined us.
Is Steph your favorite daughter? I tease.
No, I don’t have favorites, he says. All of you have different personalities.
Am I your third favorite daughter?
He pauses, and then falls into a cavernous laughter.
Bo-o-ooy. ‘Am I your third favorite daughter.’
* * *
The myth I told myself was that we were in Cuba because of the easing of sanctions and Caroline and I finally had money to pay for our father’s travel. Never mind that we could have cut up to Canada and circumvented those rules years before if we’d really tried, or that our father could have scraped together money himself. In truth, we were there because he was old. He wanted to see the place where his father lived and passed before he died.
These tongs also took care of the funeral services of their members, who were buried in a cemetery about five kilometers from Barrio Chino in tombs special to their association. After a few years, the association would clean the bones and send them to the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals in Hong Kong, which coordinated the return of the remains to the deceased’s home village.
But because of the Japanese occupation of China and the country’s civil war, as well as Cuba’s own Communist uprising, bone repatriation became difficult. My grandfather, despite his intentions, remained in Cuba indefinitely.
When I call Evelyn Hu-DeHart, a scholar of the Chinese Cuban diaspora and a professor at Brown University, in search of more context about my grandfather’s life, she invokes this proverb: 落地生根落葉歸根. Or, lok dei sang gun, lok yip gwai gun. It translates to, she says, “Put down roots when landed, return home when leaves fall.”
* * *
A few of the cemetery’s caretakers lug a wooden plank to the first crypt. Havana’s Chinese cemetery contains a mix of aboveground tombs and underground vaults. Following the funeral, the deceased’s body remains in one of the tombs above ground for two years, after which their bones are transferred to a box and stored in one of the vaults.
Pok Chi has helped us arrange with a few of the association leaders to unlock their burial vaults. The cemetery itself is a sliver of the Vedado, modest compared to the nearby Necrópolis de Cristóbal Colón. Still, I feel overwhelmed as we prepare to enter the crypts, which some of the tong leaders have allowed us to search.
The caretakers joke with me and Caroline.
Married? They wink. Caroline says yes. I tell them no because I’m not sure how to say in Spanish that I’d just gotten engaged.
They slide the plank beneath the rectangular stone that sits on the mouth of the vault. They heave and pry it upward. This reveals crumbling stairs that lead to a damp and dark underground space.
My father flips up his sunglasses, but still, I cannot read his expression. He’s waited seven decades for this. I hand him a flashlight and hold his backpack while he lowers himself into the crypt. Caroline and I follow, constricting our limbs so that we won’t scrape the walls and the stacks of concrete boxes that surround us. They are the size of milk crates, in varying conditions, some of them more than a century old. Painted on their sides are numbers or names in Chinese or Spanish—all part of a system we haven’t deciphered. That is, if they are labeled at all. They extend rows deep, and accessing the furthest ones would require a game of life-size, high-stakes Tetris in order to bring the hidden ones forward. I can’t tell how large this space is; I can’t see past the boxes to determine the boundaries. I can only squeeze myself into the narrow aisles between the rows, trying not to knock over the remains of the men who had been conscripted into indentured servitude, the laborers after, and their descendants. Some of the boxes gape open and greet us with exposed skulls and bones.
Before we boarded the plane to Havana, I tried to prime my father’s expectations. I thought that this was smart and dutiful. I had spent months reaching out to professors or anyone who might have contacts in Barrio Chino, and quickly understood we might be disappointed.
What are you expecting to find? I’d asked my father at the airport.
I don’t know, he’d said. We might not find anything. I just want to take a look. Resignation crept into his voice.
Someone at the cemetery tells us that some Cubans believed the remains of Chinese immigrants held magic—so they smashed the tombs and snatched these remains to procure their power. If this is true, I wonder if that desecration was worth it, and if they felt any such luck. Or if they were haunted by what they did
.
My father disappears into a chamber of another tong, this one, an aboveground mausoleum. Its floor is chaotically tiled with a mound of femurs, skulls, and tibias—all stained ivory shards—protruding from one another. I follow him, confused that I am not shrinking back from this, like I did from the sea bass, like I did from the image of you stuffed in my living room. Now I am inured, though my feet are heavy and my limbs press closer to my sides. How many humans are in this pile? How, and when, did these people die? My father strains to read the names on some boxes across the room. I see him hesitate before the heap of bones, but finally, he sidesteps over the heap. One of his sneakers knocks into them and creates a skeletal wind chime.
I don’t want to breathe next to those bones and their fragments and their dust. I’m afraid that if I inhale, I’ll suck in the particles of the dead. Their spirits, too. But I do exhale, then inhale: a gentle must, sweet hay. This is the scent of decay and bones. And maybe, somewhere, my grandfather.
We repeat our search through new vaults half a dozen more times, whatever ones we can get unlocked. The opening of the crypts, the descent into a permanent hell, the furtive browsing of bones.
Dazed, my legs carry me around the cemetery grounds. I can’t walk into any more tombs. I can’t step over any more cracked skulls. A stray dog I’ve been watching all morning trots along the perimeter and toward me. A splinter of bone hangs from its mouth.
Jesus Christ. I back from the dog and look for my sister.
At some point, we have to stop searching. We have been at this for hours; we are becoming dehydrated and hungry. But neither Caroline nor I want to tell our father to stop looking, so we wait by the cemetery’s front gate. Fifteen minutes later, he emerges. We watch him weave between the memorials.
I cannot tell what he is thinking. The way his head swivels, his lips pursed and his expression strained, he looks like a lost child. Appropriate, since he is looking for his father. It is humid and sticky, and he pants a little. There are too many unlabeled boxes; too many piles of loose, clattering remains.
This might have been easier if I’d planned our timing better. We had tried to schedule our travel to Cuba to coincide with Barrio Chino’s Ching Ming celebrations. I’d heard from Pok Chi that the Chinese cemetery would be open for the public to observe the grave-sweeping holiday, and that many of the tongs’ members would be around. This made it a convenient time for us to look into the tombs and ask any questions. But I had miscalculated my family’s flight schedule, and we missed the festivities—and in my father’s eyes, an opportunity to meet all of the associations’ leaders and members. My father cites this misstep whenever he becomes discouraged or agitated. You tell me that professor say to get here for Ching Ming, he had said earlier, will say a few more times. If we had gotten here earlier, we would have had an easier time getting people to open the tombs.
I want to take a picture, he says, and then we can go.
He digs into his backpack to retrieve his digital SLR and attaches an enormous lens. It is the only lens he ever uses, and it requires him to stand a dozen feet back to take close-up portraits, which feels fitting, a distance required for his version of intimacy. He hoists it to his face. The twist on his mouth deepens, and I wish I could take a photo of him right here, this way, in this dusty cemetery. His camera clicks, still audible when he walks to the street to take in the cemetery’s front gate and sign.
Afterward, we return to Barrio Chino.
I want to come back here, our father tells Caroline and me. She offers him water from her bottle and patiently waits as he downs most of it. His conviction has grown in the past half hour since we’ve left the cemetery: If he tries hard enough, if he works hard enough, if he pushes himself enough, he can find his father. He wants to sift through more records. He wants to convince more of the leaders to unlock their tong’s vaults. There are so many people whom we haven’t been able to meet in this short week. I can see the calculations flickering, as he tallies time and money and his own endurance.
OK, Caroline says.
OK, I say.
There is not much else to say.
Later, I sit with Caroline and my father in a plaza near our hostel. We purchase Wi-Fi cards to check our email or text people back home. I open a new rendering of the engagement ring that C.J. and I are designing using my mother’s diamond. We were engaged less than a month earlier, and though I’d worn my mother’s ring for a few days, it was too uncanny to feel the indent of her finger and to wear a symbol of my parents’ marriage. There was too much weight I could not carry; I worried that my mother’s ring would only remind me of what I feared our relationship would become—mortgaging each other’s well-beings, as well as our own, in service of an emotional debt we could not afford. So it seems healthier, wiser, gentler, for C.J. and me to instead create a symbol of hope. It strikes me also that we are here in Cuba because my father’s parents were only physically together for two years, eight months. My grandmother had wanted to join her husband in Havana, but he needed her to stay in China to care for his mother. The thought of this burns. All of that longing. What is a marriage, if it is not a partnership born out of affection, respect, and a closeness that makes life more navigable? Anything else feels lonely.
At dinner, we each order a mojito because, we figure, rum is made here and a cocktail is about the same price as a bottle of water. My father, who is not much of a drinker—who likes to tell the story of the single time he got drunk, on a rare business trip when he guzzled a complimentary bottle of wine in his motel room—downs his in a few minutes. His cheeks redden, and he shifts in his seat.
It’s so hot, he says. He swishes the ice from his glass and sips the last dregs. We should have gone somewhere with air-conditioning.
Drink some water. I push my bottle toward him.
No.
You need to drink water. You’re dehydrated.
No. He glares this time.
Here, put this against your wrist, I say. I slide his glass, dewy with condensation, toward him. It’ll help you cool down.
Stop telling me what to do, he says. He stands abruptly and pushes back his chair, its legs squeaking, his voice loud and ringing. You’re always trying to tell me what to do. The restaurant falls silent. Someone at another table says the word Chino and follows it with laughter.
You’re drunk, I say.
He rushes from the restaurant to pace outside.
You’re always so bossy, Caroline says. I’m amused and grinning because I am also dehydrated and a little drunk, and I want to provoke her and say, I’ve always been a bossy asshole, which is a Chow thing. But I shut my mouth. We finish our dinner, ignoring one another.
From our table inside, we watch our father stand under a street lamp. His arms cross his chest. He’s waiting for us because he cannot remember the way back to our hostel. I point this out to Caroline, and she rolls her eyes at me and pays our tab.
As we walk, our father remains a few steps in front of us, not making eye contact or acknowledging us. Every few blocks—our voices purposefully light so as not to sound pushy—Caroline or I say, The map says straight, or I think we have to turn right here.
Caroline, also flushed with rum, records a short video on her phone and occasionally breaks into a giggle. In the video, the two of us sheepishly follow our father in the dark, the edges of smiles cracking onto our faces, all the while trying to guide him down the street.
The next day we hire a cab for the thirty-minute trip to Playas del Este. It is a vintage car from the 1940s or 1950s, and we are briefly thrilled by the novelty. But every time we drive over a bump, we lurch toward the roof. We spend the entire ride tense and quiet as we brace ourselves against one another.
We arrive at the beach in the early evening just as other tourists fold their lounge chairs and return to Havana.
Wooow, my father says, still thinking about the drive. He whistles. That was really something. I thought we were going to die.
He draws ou
t the word die, and the three of us make the same laugh.
He walks along the edge of the water in his swimsuit, his two jade necklaces swinging against his chest—new ones, from another day spent in Chinatown with Steph—his arms folded. He watches the waves lick his feet with the same scowl he used in the crypts. Nearby, small children splash, and a couple embraces.
Look at Daddy frowning at the water, Caroline says. She takes a photo of him on her phone.
I’m wearing a dress I’ve borrowed from her, but I wade into the ocean. Warm as a bath, the sand doughy underneath my feet.
Do you like this? I ask my father. This is nice.
The water has good buoyancy, he says. He is suspended on his back and looking at the sky. He remains still while the waves prod him along. When I was little, he taught me to swim in a pond not far from our house. Facedown in the water, he helped me kick up my legs and blow bubbles, gamely ignoring the duck poop as it floated by our heads. He showed how if I let myself stay still, if I trusted that water could be forgiving, it would catch and hold me. Stretch your arms out wide. Your legs, too. Close your eyes and hold your breath so you don’t inhale the water. In that moment, it was like there was nothing he couldn’t do. It’s called dead man’s float, he’d said. You don’t need to do anything. You just float.
