Paper Sons: A Memoir

by Dickson Lam

  Contents

  Praise for Paper Sons

  * * * * * *

  PART ONE

  King

  PART TWO

  An Unreliable Narrator

  Apartment 171

  What’s in a Name?

  Left Behind

  PART THREE

  Hope You Solve

  * * * * * *

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Questions for Discussion

  About the Author

  Praise for Paper Sons

  Dickson Lam’s Paper Sons combines memoir and cultural history, the quest for an absent father and the struggle for social justice, and namingtraditions in graffiti and in Chinese culture. Violence marks the story at every turn—from Mao to Malcolm X, from the projects in San Francisco to the lynching of Asians during the California Gold Rush. After one of his former students at the June Jordan School of Equity is gunned down on a street corner, Lam is compelled to tell a mosaic of stories. What does it take, in this social context, to become a person who respects himself and holds hope for those coming up through a culture of exclusion and violence? Lam writes with a depth of hard-won understandings both political and psychological. This is an important book, beautifully crafted, rich in poetic images and juxtapositions, that offers insight and compassion for a nation struggling to make sense of its immigrant nature. I congratulate Dickson Lam on this fine work.

  —alison hawthorne deming, contest judge for Autumn House’s 2017 Nonfiction Prize

  From China to Hong Kong to San Francisco’s North Beach projects, Dickson Lam’s Paper Sons (and daughters) navigates the mysteries and betrayals of deleted and recovered memory, of tagging crews and migrant parents, of generational secrets. Dickson Lam’s unforgettable characters blaze like falling stars and illumine a world. Paper Sons, written in short pieces like a document torn and reassembled, is also the story of a determined younger brother who reclaims the truth, and the fierce, protective sister who shows him the way.

  —jayne anne phillips, National Book Award Finalist

  Raw, monstrous, white-knuckled recollections of love-hate, hate-love, abuse, regression, repression, and all the darkness and light any foolish-brave memoirist could possibly summon forth. It rings true to anyone who has gulped deeply from that well of pain. Highly recommended!

  —andrew x. pham, author of Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

  This moving memoir about coming-of-age in the hardscrabble streets of San Francisco while coming to terms with a dysfunctional family sheds fresh light on the Asian American immigrant experience. Dickson Lam presents an unflinching and poignant portrayal of his troubled father and the emotional toll of being a father figure to inner-city youth. Charting a heart-wrenching journey of strength and forgiveness, Paper Sons is an exhilarating debut.

  —rigoberto gonzález, author of Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa

  Dickson Lam’s Paper Sons is a groundbreaking memoir about growing up Chinese American, about working-class kids of color in the Bay Area, about the sorrows and survival of his troubled family. Through his roles as a son, a student, a teacher, and a writer, Lam creates three-dimensional portraits of people who have too often been silenced in our culture, and he rings immense sympathy even to those who have hurt or disappointed him, particularly his father. This is a moving and necessary work, and I thoroughly agree with one of his students, “You’re a deep man, Mr. Lam.”

  —david mura, author of Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei

  With Paper Sons, Dickson Lam dissects his own life as a vehicle for understanding what it is to be a good man in this world. Paper Sons isn’t just a memoir, it’s a triumph. Dickson Lam yanks you into his heart and sews up his chest behind you. The only thing breaking out is this debut.

  —mat johnson, author of Pym and Loving Day

  * * * * * *

  Copyright © 2018 by Dickson Lam

  All rights reserved. No part of this book can be reproduced in any form whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews or essays. For information about permission to reprint contact Autumn House Press, 5530 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15206.

  “Autumn House Press” and “Autumn House” are registered trademarks owned by Autumn House Press, a nonprofit corporation whose mission is the publication and promotion of poetry and other fine literature.

  Autumn House Press receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

  Cover Art: Cafe Racer/Shutterstock.com

  Book and cover design: TG Design

  Digital production: Joel W. Coggins

  ISBN: 978-1-938769-31-3

  For my sister

  and

  my students

  My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me…I alone devote pages of paper to her….I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her….

  —maxine hong kingston

  * * * * * *

  You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2 + 2 = 5, and the path out is only wide enough for one.

  —mikhail tal

  * * * * * *

  chapter 1

  King

  advisor

  Two months after my student Javon King was killed, I boarded a plane to see my father. The last time I visited my dad in Minnesota I was fourteen, the same age Javon was when he first entered my classroom, a small kid who wore his hat backwards, afro leaking out the sides. While standing on a crowded corner, he was gunned down, the fatal shots fired from a bus. I blamed myself for why he was there that day and not at school.

  Javon was part of our inaugural class of a hundred freshmen. I’d joined with a handful of gung ho teachers to start a school in San Francisco, my hometown. We were a diverse school, half Latino, a quarter Black, a quarter Asian and white, the white students mostly from Russian immigrant families. The name of our school contained our mission: June Jordan School for Equity. How we got that name probably tells you more. We left it up to the students. We gave them three candidates they could name the school after, unsung activists we admired, civil rights leader Ella Baker, labor organizer Philip Vera Cruz, and poet June Jordan. Once the students heard a spoken word recitation of Jordan’s “Owed to Eminem,” it was a wrap. The first lines of the diss poem: “I’m the Slim Lady the real Slim Lady / the real Slim Lady just a little ole lady.”

  We were an alternative school. We didn’t have a principal; we had co-directors. We didn’t have counselors; we had advisors, and each of us had to take on that role, responsible for a caseload of fifteen students. I’d added the phone numbers of my advisees’ parents into my cell phone, and I’m sure they had mine added on theirs.

  Originally, Javon wasn’t my advisee. I wasn’t even his teacher, and boy, was I grateful. He was the school’s biggest headache. His nickname was Waga. Sounded like baby talk to me. He’d skipped a grade back in elementary school, his proof he was a genius.

  That first year of our school, San Francisco State University housed us, our classrooms on the same floor as college classes, but within a few months, we received enough complaints that we feared we’d get the boot. When we’d investigate a complaint, the trail inevitably led back to Javon.

  He dribbled a basketball in the hallway, disrupting a professor’s class. He took a groundskeeper’s golf cart for a joyride across campus. H
e stumbled upon a wheelchair in the gym and rode laps around the court, even though the owner of the chair, an SF State professor, shouted and hobbled after him on crutches.

  My advisees, in comparison, were angels. The biggest headache I had was one being too clingy. This student, wearing her usual gray hoodie, would slip me letters before school, during passing period, and after school. She mostly wrote about typical freshmen anxiety, not making friends, that type of thing. She was Chinese and signed the letters Mui Mui, Little Sister. One teacher suggested I set boundaries. I couldn’t, though. The student’s family resembled mine growing up—a family that relied on an absent (migrant?) father to make ends meet. Her dad would visit from Hong Kong once a year during Christmas, and that’s when the student wrote the longest letters. Nothing in her writing merited a call to CPS, but from the way she’d act—she’d clam up whenever she tried to talk about her dad—I’d expected a bombshell.

  Fine, I told her, you can call me Goh Goh, Older Brother.

  It was a reversal of roles. I was the youngest in my family, and my mother had raised us under a clear hierarchy. She was at the top, infallible. My father, Bah Ba, came second, and he wasn’t around enough to dispute this. Next in line was Goh Goh, then Ga Jeh, my older sister. I had a title too, Sai Lo, Littler Brother, but my siblings simply called me by my first name. I wasn’t allowed to address them by theirs. First name privileges were a one-way street: older to younger. Another privilege they had—kicking my ass. I was taught not to fight back. “Who told you to be the youngest?” my mother would say.

  My sister and I, as teenagers, rarely communicated. It seemed the only time we spoke was to fight over the phone. She’d storm into the room, yelling at me to get off, throwing around the word “urgent,” as if lives were at stake. Then she’d get on the phone, and all she’d do was sweet talk some boy or talk about whether or not she should sweet talk some boy.

  Later, as adults, Ga Jeh and I would commiserate over failed relationships. We’d end our conversations with “I love you.” No one said that in our family growing up, which I hadn’t had a problem with. In fact, it’d been a source of cultural pride: we’re not into that touchy-feely crap! But now my sister had gotten in the habit of telling us that she loved us. My brother and mother wouldn’t reciprocate her I love yous. I, on the other hand, went along. I couldn’t leave my sis hanging. We were closer than we’d ever been, though when it came to discussing our father, Ga Jeh and I still weren’t able to confront the past together.

  overlap

  I got sucked into Javon’s orbit when an advisee confided to me that Javon had stolen a teacher’s wallet. I reported this to the staff, and they nominated me to squeeze a confession out of Javon. When there was a pressing student issue and the co-directors weren’t around, I became the default dean.

  I had Javon sit by my desk in the main office. All the teacher desks were located in this room, abutting and facing each other, the close proximity meant to foster a family-like atmosphere. We even divided students and teachers into families, clusters of students who would share the same teachers, but one veteran teacher complained about all this rhetoric of family. “I got my own,” she said. “I don’t need another one.”

  Javon rose from his chair. “I gotta be somewhere,” he said as though he had a pressing appointment.

  “It can wait. Sit.”

  Javon fell back in his chair, still wearing his backpack, which featured a cartoon image of three girls with humongous eyes.

  “Who’s that on your bag?” I asked him.

  “Powerpuff Girls.”

  “Boys like that show too, huh?”

  “I know what you’re trying to say, Mr. Lam. That’s sexist.”

  “You like this school?”

  “Not really.”

  “I can help you transfer.”

  “To where?”

  “How about Balboa?”

  “Hell, nah. I’ll stay here.”

  “Three different students have told me—and they put this in writing—that they saw you steal Ms. Mana’s wallet.” I only had the one statement from my advisee, but three testimonies sounded indisputable. I understood deceit was an effective strategy for an interrogator. As a young teenager, my friends and I had stolen frequently from a baseball card shop until the owner offered us jobs. He handed us index cards and told us to jot down our contact info. We raced to finish the cards. “Print neatly,” he said. We shoved each other aside to hand him our index cards, to get picked for an interview. I was chosen first. The owner brought me to his office in the back. He closed the door and said an eyewitness claimed we were the kids responsible for the missing Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. If I didn’t confess, the owner said—he flapped the index card in front of me—he’d call my mother.

  “Man, some students are trying to set me up,” Javon said. “That’s why I hate this school.”

  “What do you think the other teachers are going to say when I show them the student statements?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “They’re going to kick you out.”

  “Oh well.”

  I placed a piece of lined paper on the desk with a pen. “If you won’t own up to it, take responsibility, you’ll be out of here. You think your mom’s gonna be happy about that?”

  He slouched into the seat.

  “Think it over.” I opened the door, and before I could close it behind me, Javon said, “What I got to write?”

  In addition to the confession, Javon wrote a letter of apology to Ms. Mana and served as her helper after school to make amends. To keep our eye on Javon, we gave him two new advisors, myself and one of the co-directors, a double-team approach. We met with him and his mother every Friday morning to continually check in about his progress. His mom would show up on her way to work, dressed in a hospital uniform. For a short period, Javon moved in with his father, and he’d be the one to attend the Friday meetings. The extra attention paid off. Javon raised his grades and quit his reckless behavior, but he remained the class clown, at least in my class.

  Though I’d agreed to transfer him into my Humanities class, a course combining English and history, I’d wanted to block the move, worried that Javon would drive me nuts. I was already struggling. I couldn’t get my students to focus. They’d chat like it was the lunchroom.

  I could’ve sought guidance from seasoned teachers, but I had too much pride for that. I wasn’t a rookie, so I didn’t have that excuse. Twenty-seven, fourth year of teaching, and I still hadn’t grown into an authority figure. I sure didn’t dress like one. I’d wear baggy corduroys and cargo pants, oversized plaid shirts designed by hip-hop clothing brands. I’d rock Tims to my classroom. This was my version of dressing up.

  At the first school I taught at, Urban Academy in New York City, my attire was even more casual: jeans and a T-shirt, the school even more alternative than June Jordan. Students chilled on couches in the hallway. I’d wear a baseball hat, not on my head—I’d take it off when I entered the building—but I’d snap the strap of the hat around a belt loop in my jeans, the hat hanging against my thigh, the same way it had back when I was a teenager, when teachers had forced me to take it off.

  I didn’t feel that removed from my June Jordan students. Not only because I was still in my twenties, or grew up in ’Frisco like them, but because our lives overlapped. I taught students related to old homies. Some of the connections I would learn about later, but some I knew then. One advisee’s family had lived in the same public housing project that I had grown up in. Her older brother had schooled me in a pickup game. And more recently, during a spring break from teaching, I’d hung with her brother in Miami, along with several other dudes from my old projects.

  Another student had a cousin, Keino, who’d been killed. He and I hadn’t been tight—he was still in middle school when I was in high school—but we’d kicked it a number of times,
at the basketball gym and in the mornings at the bus stop in front of his school. Though he was from a different turf, most of the dudes I was running with back then claimed that same set. Keino and his middle school crew were the younger version of us. We’d all refer to each other as “cousin.”

  The student, a thirteen-year-old girl, would come into my room to talk about Keino. She recounted the gory details of his death. He’d been in a van, shots to the face, an AK-47, close range—closed casket. I’d heard the story before, from someone who was in that van, but hearing it again from my student, someone I was entrusted to nurture, made me feel responsible for Keino’s death. Not his murder but for the weight of it, at least on my student.

  Whatever feelings I had didn’t change anything. My student dropped out of school, and I never heard from her again.

  laminator

  Javon would run around my room, gossiping, dancing, pulling pranks on other students, slapping a kid on the nape of his neck and darting off. I’d grab him by his Powerpuff Girls backpack and drag him back to his seat. Throwing Javon down into his chair, I felt fatherly.

  One of the co-directors, Shane, observed my class for an evaluation. Together, we’d partnered to advise Javon. She was one of the original founders of the school, a white woman with freckles in her early thirties. Shane was that rare blend, a visionary who had no ego about doing the dirty work. She’d roll up her sleeves right alongside us. It was her who gave me the nickname: “Laminator.”

  After Shane observed my class, we met in her office. “The students like you,” she said, “but they’re not respecting you.” Students had been talking over me, out of their seat, side conversations galore. I had to reinvent my teacher persona, become firmer, serious, a different kind of man. I wasn’t sure I knew how.