Paper Sons: A Memoir

by Dickson Lam

  four guns

  I’ve had a gun pointed at me four times, all as a teenager. All after I’d transferred high schools. Three of the four stemmed from adventures on the city bus.

  The first time, I was with a tagging crew, a racially diverse bunch, vandals of all stripes. We were on a bus that had made a stop, and some of us were talking shit through the window to a group of Latino dudes hanging near the bus shelter, maybe late teenagers, dressed in khakis. As the bus was pulling from the curb, one of the Latino guys reached in his waistband, pulled out a gun, and waved it at us. We dropped to the gum-stained ribbed floor as the bus rode away.

  The second time was at my doorstep.

  My apartment was on the ground floor of our housing project,and it opened up to the courtyard. I was kicking it with Rob. We were inseparable. He lived two floors up, and he’d stop by my house, sometimes for dinner but mostly just to shoot the shit.

  I’d transferred into his high school, and I’d met most of my friends through him. Rob was the kind of kid everyone noticed. Had the height and talent of a basketball star, though he could never cut the grades to play for the school. Other kids buddied up to him. Some cowered. Adults treated him like a top prospect. The spotlight clung to him, and if I stood close enough, I could feel the light’s warmth, if not its gaze.

  That night I was standing in front of my door, which was slightly ajar behind me. Through the opening, my mother could be seen washing dishes at the sink.

  Rob had just got paid, a wad of twenties. He opened the bills up into a fan, practically shoving them in my face. The money had been given to him by his father. His pops worked at a car dealership and lived in the East Bay with a new wife and a newborn daughter, who Rob refused to acknowledge as a sister. From time to time, Rob would swing by his dad’s job, a two-hour bus ride from our house, and guilt his father into giving him some dough.

  None of my family drama was new to Rob. When I told him that my dad lived in Minnesota but paid our bills, he said, “Shit, that ain’t nothing but child support.” When I explained my parents were still married and that Willie was my mother’s secret boyfriend, a guy who’d take her on vacations, Rob praised my mom as a pimpstress.

  He stuck the wad of bills into his jean pocket, took out a comb, and began to pick out his afro. He had gray strands sprinkled throughout, though you’d only noticed up close. I’d asked him about the gray hairs once, but all he would say was, “That’s what happens when you fuck as much as I do. Grown man shit.”

  Two men were passing by the courtyard. I didn’t recognize them, but I didn’t think much about it. Relatives or friends of neighbors would often visit. The men approached us like they wanted to know the time. One took out a gun. The other patted us down. They grabbed Rob’s cash. I had nothing in my sweatpants.

  Quietly, the one with the pistol told Rob to walk away, and he told me to get back in the house. I went inside and closed the door. My mom didn’t hear a thing. She was on the phone with Willie.

  The third time someone aimed a gun at me I had a bat in my hand.

  An hour before, a friend of mine, a short Latino kid who was growing out his frizzy hair into a ’fro, bumped into another kid as they both rushed to board the bus. My friend could’ve just apologized, but he acted bold. “Watch where the fuck you’re going,” he said. I suspected he was only doing the tough-guy routine because the other kid was Chinese, and he thought he could get away with it. So when fifteen of that guy’s friends also got on the bus, I thought, I’m not getting my ass kicked for this shit. And the other guy we were with, Jesse, felt the same. “Dumb move,” he said.

  The Chinese kids wore leather jackets and cheap loafers. Hair with bleached tips. FOBs. We didn’t call them Fresh off the Boat to clown them for being an immigrant. We used the term as a lazy label for a Chinese gang. They didn’t even have to be a gang per se. They just had to mob deep and speak Chinese. They were not unlike my brother and his friends. They’d cuss in Chinese and call each other “nigga.”

  At some point during the ride I realized that the Asian kid my friend had bumped into was someone I used to know. He was actually Vietnamese and had hung out at my house once, back in sixth grade, along with a group of other Asian kids. It took me a minute to recall his name. We made eye contact, but he didn’t acknowledge me, so I left it alone. When our stop came, Jesse and I made sure we were first to the rear door. I leapt off the bus, and our friend got yanked back by his backpack, the door closing on him.

  He met us later at Jesse’s house. The beatdown lasted only until the next stop, when the driver kicked all of them off. Our friend with the ’fro had the collar of his shirt ripped, and he kept asking us to feel his head for bumps. The story would’ve ended there if not for Martín, Jesse’s cousin, who happened to be over that day. He paced around with a bat preaching payback. We sunk low on the couch. Above us was a painting of two Native Americans sitting on horses in front of a stream. They appeared dignified, even the horses.

  The four of us were all the remaining members of NSK, Notorious Sick Kings, a tagging crew we were trying to revitalize, and Martín appealed to this in his Knute Rockne speech. Something about these moments defining us. How did we want our crew to be known? As punk cowards?

  As a general rule of thumb, I had avoided fighting. I’d punked out every time I was challenged except once when a guy dared me to meet him by the track at lunch, and I’d only called his bluff because I knew he was more of a punk than me and wouldn’t show. The times I had fought were when the other dude threw the first punch. I’d swing out of reflex. Give me the opportunity to make the first move and I’d wilt.

  But I’d decided—enough. I wanted to become someone I could respect, someone courageous. Not Rob’s sidekick. I put myself on a point system. I’d gotten the idea from a self-help book my sister was reading. One point for taking a risk, doing something out of the ordinary: not running off the bus when the driver stood up and screamed at me to stop tagging, asking a girl on the street for her number. One point deducted if I wimped out.

  I picked up the other aluminum bat and felt the grip.

  “I don’t know,” the kid with the ’fro said. “My head kinda hurts.”

  “Fuck that,” I said and we rushed out.

  Two stragglers were at the bus stop. One was the Vietnamese kid. They saw us coming and broke with the quickness. They had a block head start, but I almost caught them. I got close enough that I could see the black label sticking up from the Vietnamese kid’s leather jacket. They ducked into a corner store, and I waited for my friends before entering. I was winded and unsure what to do next. We bum-rushed the store, each down a different aisle, but our foes had somehow vanished, as though they’d snuck through a secret portal. I swung my bat at a shelf, packages of ramen noodles, cans of vegetables. The cashier screamed something about the police. On the way out, I swung at the wooden door. I should’ve peeked outside first.

  A cop behind his opened car door had his gun drawn on me.

  The last time, it was Rob pointing a pistol at me, horsing around.

  It was a tiny weapon, a deuce-five. He’d borrowed it for protection. Some Samoans were coming by the rec center looking for him. The origins of the beef were comical.

  Rob and I had been riding in a van driven by another friend when Rob, sitting in the front seat, decided it would be funny to toss his Slurpee into the bus in the next lane. When we were younger, we’d throw water balloons at tourists, and though we’d given that up as too juvenile for sixteen-year-olds, Rob occasionally, for old times’ sake, would still do his specialty—hurling a large cup of ketchup at tourists. He’d fill the cup to the rim, ripping through dozens of packets at Wendy’s.

  Rob flung the Slurpee through the bus window, and the slushy contents splattered on the passengers, the bus packed with students from another school. The plan was to hit the gas and take off, but we got stuck at the light,
the bus and its riders next to us. All we could do was laugh. I found out later that the passenger who had taken the brunt of the Slurpee was a guy who was apparently known as Not-the-Kind-of-Motherfucker-You-Should-Fuck-With. Also on the bus was a group of taggers, one of whom identified Rob as the culprit.

  Rob carried the deuce-five around but kept a low profile until things blew over. When he first got his hands on the pistol, he showed it to me in the closed-in stairwell that led to his apartment.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “it ain’t loaded.”

  I grabbed the gun and chased him up the stairs, too scared to pull the trigger. He took the gun from me, and we swapped roles. I ran down the staircase and pretended to be shot in the back. Upon turning around and seeing that my assailant was none other than my partner in crime, I made an exaggerated face of disbelief. I took an invisible bullet to the chest, then another, and another. I fell to my knees, but he kept shooting.

  waga

  We held a memorial service for Javon in the auditorium. Around our necks, hung on a lanyard, was a laminated picture of Javon, him in a jersey with a backward hat. Friends shared stories, what they remembered most about Waga, how they first met, silly things he did. A trio consisting of two students and a teacher performed a rap song directed at Javon, looking down at us from heaven.

  On the way to the auditorium, a student, sobbing, had shouted at me and a group of teachers, “You guys did this. If you never kicked him out, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “That ain’t true,” her friend, holding her, said. “Don’t mind her. She don’t mean that.”

  The sobbing student’s accusation hit me as more honest than the speech I’d prepared for the memorial. What I said had little specifically to do with Javon. You could’ve lifted the bulk of the speech and recycled it for another untimely student death. I steered clear of emotions. Students were wailing outside the auditorium, and I didn’t want to feel what they felt. I avoided eye contact with Javon’s mother and sister sitting in the front row. Facing them, at the foot of the stage, was a cluster of wreaths.

  I told the audience Javon wouldn’t have the chance to pursue his dream of becoming a mechanical engineer, but we were still here to pursue ours. Use this tragedy as fuel. That was the way to honor Javon. Give his death meaning. “What are you going to do different now with your life?” I asked.

  As I went down the aisle to sit down, Shane grabbed my hand. “I’m glad someone said that,” she said.

  She and I had been responsible for looking after Javon together, but unbeknownst to her, or anyone else, I’d abandoned Waga, unwilling to deal with the child that I’d been given.

  migrant

  When I was ten, my father moved out. Ostensibly, it was for our benefit. He left for Minnesota, two thousand miles away. Took a job that paid double what he’d been making, same line of work, a dim sum chef. His salary at his job in San Francisco—which I recall from school free lunch applications—was $200 a week. The annual difference between the two jobs: $10,400—the number it took for Bah Ba to leave us.

  I try and contextualize my father’s decision. I adjust for inflation. All the numbers double, but nothing changes.

  Feeding a family of five with only a couple of hundred bucks a week couldn’t have been easy. He was our sole source of income. My mom was a housewife, which she made sure I wrote down on school forms under “Mother’s Occupation.” My mom had two sources of pride, and they both had to do with appearances: the way she looked, and the way her house looked.

  Behind the closet door in the hallway hung her shoe rack, a wall of red heels. Sometimes we’d leave the house, and before we could make it to the bus stop, my mother would scrutinize her heels and realize that this red pair didn’t go well with her outfit at all. We’d turn back home for her to switch shoes, another set of red heels, the distinction too subtle for my eyes. And these trips, mind you, were only to pick up groceries in Chinatown.

  When I got older, my mother would send me off with money to buy cosmetic products for her at Neiman Marcus. They were handing out gift samples with purchases, a bag of makeup goodies. She’d already gone the day before and didn’t want to be seen again. Someone there might get the wrong idea.

  At home, my mother was a cleaning fanatic. Swept and mopped the floor every night. Dirt was her adversary. A folded tablecloth hung over the washing machine. A lace doily draped over the top of our couch. Hand towels rested on the top of the floor speakers. Leftover vinyl flooring had been cut to fit the top of our wood-paneled television in the living room. We had to keep the remote in its original packaging, a cardboard case with a cellophane window over the buttons. My mother had fashioned a home resistant to aging.

  As a child growing up in Hong Kong, my mother hadn’t lived with her father, either; he’d been a migrant worker of sorts, his job far enough that he had to live apart from his family but close enough that he could still visit on his day off.

  I want to believe that in Chinese culture, a father living away from his family is nothing new, a noble sacrifice born out of economic necessity. Hadn’t the first Chinese arrived in America as migrant workers? They’d been living in an impoverished country, unable to feed their family, so who could blame them for leaving? They were promised riches. California was Gold Mountain. Working as miners, farmers, railroad workers, they maintained ties to their family through remittances. Their hairstyle was also a claim to their homeland—queues, proof of their allegiance to the Son of Heaven, a wish for a return home.

  Many, however, would never see their families again. Stuck in Gold Mountain, they’d become scapegoats for white unemployment. Massacres across the West. Two out of every three lynched in California in those days were Asian. Chinese immigrant fathers, living in an openly hostile country, still continued to support their family overseas, though they hadn’t seen them in years. It was understood: The bond of father-child and husband-wife couldn’t be destroyed by distance. An ocean couldn’t separate a family.

  Even today, migrant work is common among Chinese. In China, millions flock from the countryside to factories in coastal cities. That’s where the jobs are, hundreds of miles away. Sweatshop conditions prevail, maybe a buck an hour sewing jeans that’ll be exported to the States. Sometimes it’s the father who leaves the family, sometimes the mother. Half the time it’s both. Factory workers live in dormitory housing and typically visit home once a year, during Lunar New Year, a reverse migration of millions. With luggage on their backs, they brave the stampede to railway stations. They squeeze into packed trains. The journey to see their children in the countryside may take several days by a combination of train, boat, and bus. It’s the largest human migration in the world, fathers and mothers returning home to their children.

  My father would visit us once a year from Minnesota. Not for the holidays but for a mandatory meeting. It was a stipulation of our lease, an “annual reexamination.” Adults in the household had to sit down with the manager of the housing projects to verify income and who lived in the unit. My parents had to pretend they were a couple that had slept in the same bed for the past year. The lies sheltered us.

  For years, I told myself that Bah Ba was forced to leave the restaurant he worked at in Chinatown because it was closing. But my dates were off. Hong Kong Tea House closed its doors five years after Bah Ba moved. If he’d continued to live with us until Tea House shut down, he would’ve watched my brother and sister grow into adulthood. Technically, through his annual visits, my father saw all of us grow into adulthood. Each visit gave him a snapshot of us, and if compiled together, he had a flipbook of memories. But these memories lacked substance.

  Bah Ba would spend the bulk of his visits sitting at a mahjong table—it was like old times. During one trip, Bah Ba came home to the smell of vinegar. In my mother’s hand was an old sock stuffed with tobacco leaves that had just been boiled in vinegar. She pressed the sock against my fing
ertips, a little-known home remedy for ringworm. I squirmed as the scalding vinegar from the leaves soaked into my skin. Bah Ba glanced over at us but didn’t say a word. Didn’t ask what the odor was about, the sock, or what was wrong with my fingers. He walked straight past.

  My dad didn’t always turn his back from fathering. He used to kick my brother’s ass. I’d wished he had done the same to me. Any type of intimacy with my dad would’ve pleased me as a kid.

  After I’d reconnected with him as an adult, he explained in an email, “I was so rough with your brother when he was little. I felt powerless with my own temper. Finally I retreated to staying away from dealing with the day to day raising the kids part so to control my outburst.”

  He didn’t mention his cruelty to my mother. One night when she refused his advances, he threw her onto the kitchen floor and tried to drag her to their bedroom. To teach her a lesson, he pissed all over the bathroom floor and laughed when she got on her knees and scrubbed.

  Perhaps living with us reminded him too much of himself. Minnesota offered a fresh start. Its snowy winters gave everything a layer of white softness, the sidewalk, the bark of a tree, even the sharp tips of a fence.

  kiss me

  I was over at my mom’s house. I was still getting used to calling it that. I used to call it Willie’s house or my mom’s boyfriend’s house, but now they were married. Her name was on the deed.

  I was in the kitchen, telling my mother and sister about Javon. Ga Jeh had been staying at their house temporarily since she broke up with her boyfriend. The guy didn’t tell her, until after they had gotten serious, that he had kids and that he was still married, at least on paper, the divorce not yet finalized.

  “Javon was only fifteen,” I said.