Where the Past Begins

by Amy Tan

  At times my father was my secret compatriot. We were the mutual victims of my mother’s anger. I recall a day when we brought home a watermelon. This took place in our home in Hayward, the first home my parents owned. I was seven or eight. The watermelon slipped onto the kitchen floor and cracked open. I can’t remember how it happened, but I must have been to blame because my mother was furious with me. Only the rind had touched the floor, but my mother said it was too dirty to eat. She told me take the whole watermelon to the garbage can and throw it away. Because of what I had done, none of us would have watermelon. My father said he would carry one half and I should take the other. I followed him out the kitchen door to the garbage can by the garage. I was upset, of course, and I might have also been crying. My father set the broken watermelon on top of the can and signaled that I should remain quiet, and then he gestured for me to scoop out watermelon with my hands and to eat as fast as I could. So then I knew he did not blame me. We were like thieves, greedily stuffing ourselves with purloined goods. By doing what was forbidden, we had made a pact.

  He was also my compatriot on my ninth birthday. It was Sunday, and for some reason, my mother did not go to church with us. But when we returned home, we saw that she had turned the living room furniture upside down—big heavy chairs and the coffee table lay on their sides. Objects had been thrown onto the floor, including my birthday cake. I thought she had done this simply because it was my birthday. I began to cry and my father led me outside, put me in the car, and took me to lunch. I cried but tried hard to stop, because I knew he wanted to make me feel happy. He took me to the ice-skating rink, and I wobbled around a few laps. I knew I should be glad to have my father to myself, but when I asked him why my mother wrecked everything, he was evasive, which made me think I was the reason. At the end of our afternoon, he took me to the top of a grassy hill. We walked to the summit and saw the valley below. He posed me leaning against a fence. He did not need to tell me to look off into the distance. I had turned my face away because I was still crying and my eyes were swollen. I have no memory of what happened when we returned home, whether my mother had calmed down enough to make dinner and another cake. She never would have apologized for what she had done, but if she had made me a cake, I would have known that she was sorry.

  I have memories of my father and me reading aloud the Word Power multiple-choice quiz in Reader’s Digest. It was the monthly time we spent together, just the two of us in the living room, learning words as equals. He loved words and so did I. He wrote down new multisyllabic ones he liked and so did I.

  There was a terrible memory, the day he found me crying in the laundry room. I was holding my cat Fufu who had returned home mewing softly after being hit by a car or mauled by a dog. I was trying to put her intestines back into her torn body. My father came back with a towel and wrapped her up and placed her in my lap when we got in the car. She purred the whole way to the vet and I sobbed. My father was with me when the vet said it was hopeless and that I had to say good-bye to my cat right there. Only my father and I had seen both my cat’s and my agony. Only he knew what it meant when I told people that my cat had died.

  I do not recall my father spending much time with me after that. He was always working. He had his full-time job as an electrical engineer. He still did volunteer work for the church and delivered sermons as a guest minister at First Baptist churches up and down Northern California. He continued to think of the ministry as his calling and engineering as his occupation. He was working toward a master’s degree in engineering at Santa Clara University. And like many engineers in the future Silicon Valley, he started a business. His niche was a small doughnut-shaped transformer the size of a Life Saver candy. They were the smallest transformers for the high-voltage needs of electrical systems, such as those on satellites. He believed that this product would be the breakthrough that would make us rich. My mother, older brother, and I were recruited as unpaid employees. We took turns using a noisy, clunking machine, holding the transformer in place with our fingers and turning it as the threading machine moved up and down, winding copper wire around the transformer. It was like sewing a giant buttonhole. I was always nervous that I was winding the transformers the wrong way or with too many or too few loops of wire, which would then damage a satellite and make it fall to Earth. Fifty years later, I think the real damage may have been our daily and direct contact making and testing transformers that emitted strong electromagnetic wave frequencies. That may have been the reason why my brother and father developed malignant brain tumors in the same year and my mother a benign one, also around the same time. It makes more sense that this was the reason over random bad luck, and it also makes me think a similar fate awaits me.

  None of us saw my father much anymore, except at dinnertime. As soon as he was done eating, he left to study. One day I went looking for him for some reason I no longer recall. I found him working on his engineering homework, which was spread out over a small bathroom vanity that served as his desk. He handed me a sheet of yellow graph paper covered with precisely written Greek symbols and numbers. “What do you think?” he said. I don’t remember what I answered, but I was happy that he had asked for my opinion.

  His constant work also left no time to take vacations. When visitors came, my father took them on a tour of Santa Clara University. To my mind, our lives were boring and monotonous. I occupied myself by reading and drawing in my room with the door closed. I signed up for many church activities—youth choir, BYF, a trip to the mountains, outdoor games in a park. I spent as much time as I could at the homes of my friends.

  In 1966, my father wrote the usual mimeographed Christmas letter.

  This year, we decided not to take a journey-worn vacation, but to spend the money for relaxation at home. We bought a RCA 120-watt stereo system with 15’’ woofers to bring the house down. It is absolutely sensational to vicariously sit in the middle of a hundred-piece Philharmonic orchestra that sets your heartbeat in resonance with the bass drum. Even the Beatle [sic] music sounds wonderful.

  He added he would not do the usual bragging about his kids being a chip off the old block. The tone was joking. But then he did mention that we had become extroverts and were now class officers. His next few sentences wounded me.

  When it comes to domestic responsibility, their IQs drop to a negative value. Clothing and hairdos become a perennial fuss. It was a relief to see Amy push away the dark clouds in front so we could see the stars, but when the long, long silky black hair dipped in the thick dinner soup, Alas!

  How could he make fun of us to others? He always ended his letters with dialogue between my mother and him, which he might have modeled after a George Burns and Gracie Allen routine—George always gave the straight line and the naive but wise Gracie delivered the inadvertently wise or hilarious punch line. In my father’s version, he had the punch line.

  Across the candlelit table, John was admiring the “salt and pepper” on her head—“Daisy, you are always young and fair to me.” She looked at the “soy sauce” on his head—“How come nothing seems to worry you too much?” John pointed his finger up, “I listen to the Boss, upstairs.”

  Two months later, he wrote a different kind of letter to friends and members of the church with the following prologue:

  Peter is now arguing with the other Peter about crashing the Pearly Gate without a validated ticket.

  The rest of the letter is written in the style of Biblical verse, paraphrasing Mark: 9:14–29.

  And Jesus said, “According to your faith be it done to your boy.” Then he said to the dying boy, “By the power of God, I make you well.” And the boy cried with a loud voice and was convulsing terribly, foaming in the mouth, then was lying there like a corpse: so that most of the famous neural [sic] surgeons invited for consultation said, “He is dead.” But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose picking up his admission to the University of California in Santa Cruz and went surfing for the Lord.

 
This is our faith in God, our hope in His mercy, and our love for Peter. Pray for Peter and pray for us.

  “That’s the way!” Daisy’s famous last word.

  “That’s the only way!” John adds.

  Santa Clara, California, 1967: Mementos of my brother’s death at age sixteen.

  Everyone thought it was a wonderfully written letter. And now, upon reading it fifty years later, I remember why I did not believe what he had written. It was disingenuous. He had written, in effect, a sermon in the voice of a minister. His modified Bible passages had reduced our chaotic, murky, and fearful life into Christian testimony, which he spread via hundreds of mimeographed pages to churches. My father was acting out the story of Abraham. God asked him to prove his faith by killing his son. The Lord was testing us and we were going to pass the test and Peter would come out of his coma and ask my mother for potstickers. My mother had already promised to make them. People who visited us at the hospital to console us went away inspired by my father’s faith. They made a prayer circle and I was the silent weak link. I knew my brother was going to die. I watched my mother and father exhorting him to open his eyes. They interpreted every muscle to be a message of love. I wanted to shout for them to stop. My little brother and I became shadows in the house. They yelled at me for not being more helpful. All the days at the hospital passed by with little variation. For a while, my brother’s head was swathed in white bandages. Then he was bareheaded with crooked train-track stitches over his scalp.

  I kept a diary that year, but what I wrote was so trivial it is clearly pathologic. There are no entries about my brother. Instead I methodically recorded the names of the top one hundred songs on the radio. I noted what certain boys had said to me. It was 1967, the Summer of Love. I wanted love. I wanted to be an ordinary teenager. I wanted psychedelic adventures. I did not want to hope I would not die.

  And now I remember something else from that time. A few weeks before Peter died, some high school friends and I decided to see the newly released film Doctor Zhivago. My father had noted the name of the film in his diary. I was excited because I had a crush on one of the boys who would be there. To him, I was just a nice kid. But if he even looked my way or said hello that would have counted as a success. When we arrived at the theater complex, I was horrified to see my parents and little brother standing near the entrance. They were smiling and came toward me, thinking I would be surprised and delighted. I am guessing now that I accused them of spying on me, or that they had come to deliberately embarrass me, words to that effect. Whatever I said festered in my father all night. When I returned home, he was standing by the front door. He yelled at me and accused me of having no love and concern. We should all want to be together as a family as much as possible. His tone of voice suggested that he hated me. Something was ending. All that we had been to each other had never been true. We had never been compatriots. I must have shown an implacable face because my mother and father shouted that I had no feelings. My expression must not have changed, which so enraged him, he lifted his arm to strike me, but instead of landing a blow, his arm involuntarily flopped heavily onto my shoulder and slid off. My mother cried out. My father tried to lift his arm again. He could not. They both thought he had suffered a stroke and I thought I had caused this to happen and was immediately sickened with guilt. They left me by the door, forgotten, as my mother rushed to get her purse and the car keys to take my father to the emergency room.

  It has been a week now since the election, a week since I went into the garage and found more boxes of my father’s papers and documents: the essays and thesis he wrote for his theology degree, his typed and handwritten sermons, his Bibles, more little black diaries, address books, and mimeographed Christmas letters, his last letter scrawled to a friend, photos of him with a shaved head and radiation-tanned face, photos of him in a casket, and several lengthy typed eulogies, remembrances in church bulletins, and notes of sympathy. I took them to my office and have been searching through these piles, searching to understand my father.

  As a class assignment when he started at Berkeley Baptist Divinity School, my father wrote a sermonette:

  I was born in a well-to-do modern Christian family in China. I received a good education, got a good job right after graduation from college, worked my way to the title of radio engineer in five years. In 1944, I was successful in passing a competitive government examination for a scholarship to come to the United States to study radio engineering. I was to go to study at MIT, then I transferred all my records to Harvard, intending to study business administration, but finally I found myself studying at BBS, preparing for the great task in life.

  Obviously he had not yet found his charismatic voice as a minister. He had provided facts that contained little about his feelings of either his past life or his new one as a devoted Christian. He offered no explanation why he switched his plan to study from engineering at MIT to business at Harvard to theology at divinity school. He did not tell the story, as he would in later years, that he had been like Saul the Pharisee. On the way to Damascus, Saul was startled by a flash and fell off his horse. He and his men heard Jesus’s voice asking Saul why he had persecuted him to death. He told him to go to the city and receive instructions. Saul stood up and realized he was blind. His men led him to Damascus. After three days, he heard a voice saying Jesus was before him, and instantly his eyesight was restored, and he could see Christ. Saul was immediately transformed into the Apostle Paul and penned a letter to the Corinthians about the nature of love. My father often used the metaphor of being blind to the presence of Christ in our lives. But he did not mention what persuaded him to make the ministry his life’s work. He had been blinded by love.

  Long after he died, my mother told me about the terrible guilt he felt for having fallen in love with her. He bore responsibility for breaking up her family and for causing his own parents and sibling turmoil. When he came to the United States in 1947, he must have said nothing about my mother, the married woman he loved. Two years later, when the minister of the church he attended announced that my father’s bride was coming from China, a few girls cried out in shock and one fled the church hall in tears. One family friend recalled that everyone pictured his bride would be a tall woman who looked like a movie star. She was not even five feet and weighed only eighty pounds. I think the young women who gasped were his photo subjects and those who sat next to him at picnics. He took many photos of one young woman dressed in a wide-sleeved embroidered Chinese jacket and pants, who he posed next to columns and reflecting pools. In some photos, she stared with a dreamy expression at some unknown horizon.

  No one knew that my father’s bride was still married and had other children. When he wrote that sermonette assignment, it was only a few months before my mother would arrive. I wonder if he had ever been tempted to tell her that he had changed his mind. I do not doubt that he loved her and that she had been his “first true love,” as he described her in one letter. But his love for her had broken one of the Ten Commandments: “They shall not commit adultery.” By marrying her, he would be reminded daily of that sin. He must have been tormented by the fact that she left behind her three daughters to be with him. Keeping her past a secret was the same as telling a lie, the sin of omission. To counter his sins, he wanted his faith to be unshakeable. I think that was why he adhered to the other commandments so strictly. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.

  I don’t recall him issuing hell and brimstone warnings at home, but he was strict on certain matters that most Christian families might not have been. For example, we could not say “gee,” “gosh,” “golly,” or “darn,” because those were blasphemous derivatives of “Jesus,” “God,” and “damn,” a violation of the commandment: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain. For some reason, “doggone-it” was exempt. He considered drinking alcohol to be a sin, although that was not the belief of most Christians we knew. They drank wine at Christmas celebrations. But we had no alcohol in our house, ever
. On one occasion, he came home from the store and saw he had accidentally bought a six-pack of ale, not ginger ale. Instead of returning to the store to exchange the ale, he called us over to the kitchen and had us watch as he opened each can and poured the contents down the drain. I thought it was a terrible waste of two dollars, especially on a hot afternoon. Meanwhile, my mother simply went along with whatever my father wanted to model as good behavior. No alcohol. Fine.

  Throughout my childhood, we prayed before every meal—without fail. Most of the time, my father would say the prayer, but sometimes he nodded to one of us to say it. Our prayer was not like the inspired, oratorical prayers he gave in public. It was a faithful recitation of the same words, delivered in one breath: Blessohlord­this­foodweareaboutto­receiveandmake­usevermindful­oftheneedso­fothersinJesusChristamen.

  When my father was hospitalized, our mother stopped praying at home. The first few times we sat down to a prayerless dinner, my little brother and I would look at each other. And then we would shrug and start eating. Something had changed, and it felt dangerous.