Paper Sons: A Memoir

by Dickson Lam

  “Oh shit,” he said. “Sorry, Dickson.”

  I laughed and thought it was the coolest shit I’d ever seen. I held onto my cheek and told some of the fellas outside. Randy demonstrated his double kick again. I’d felt embarrassed not knowing martial arts—I was the Asian one.

  The friends I’d hung with in high school were the main reason I became a teacher. Many of them never attended college. I’d wanted to reverse the trend of failing schools, failing students.

  A student buried her head in the shoulder of a friend. I tried not to cry by using the old make-like-you-got-something-in-your-eye trick. I thought I had it down because of the way I’d rub my fingertips as though I’d found an eyelash.

  “Cross the line,” John said, “if you have been touched inappropriately as a child. Or know someone who has been.”

  No one moved. It was silent long enough I wasn’t sure if anyone would, but some began to trickle over to the other side.

  I was surprised I hadn’t immediately thought of Ga Jeh. It was just a year ago that she’d confided in me about what Bah Ba had done. I was lying in bed watching a basketball game when I picked up her call. She didn’t tell me what exactly happened, just that it did, several times when our dad was living with us. Her tone was calming, like she was at work, at the concierge desk addressing a customer.

  “I’m going to talk to him about it,” she said. “I just thought you should know, but don’t say anything to Mom. She’ll go crazy. No need to freak out about this, OK?” She was still trying to take care of her little brother.

  She’d given me her old car, a red Honda Civic, lowered with tinted windows, red racing rims, a silver joystick for a gearshift, the exhaust loud enough to set off car alarms—a real rice rocket, souped-up by some guy she’d been dating years ago. I’d thought she cared for it more than anything. Before she handed me the keys, she gave me a long to-do list for the car. Use disinfectant wipes immediately to wipe away bird poop. Use this cleaner for the racing air filter. Use premium gas. Take the car up to Mom’s house to hand-wash it. Bring your own oil for an oil change. Always put up the sunshade.

  The first week I drove it, I got into an accident and scraped the fender. I thought Ga Jeh would have a fit, but the only thing she wanted to know was if I was all right.

  Before Ga Jeh had called me that night about Bah Ba, she’d also phoned our brother, revealing her secret to him as well, but she wasn’t dissuading us from connecting with our pops. In fact, she was still insisting that we chip in for our dad’s dentures because he had no health insurance. When our dad invited us to Toronto a few months later, Ga Jeh was the first to accept. I assumed she’d forgiven him or, if not forgiven, was at least willing to accept him into her life. Who was I to persuade her otherwise?

  “We all have a balloon,” John said, “that we fill up with our hurt. If we don’t deal with that hurt, one day the balloon pops, and everything in it spills onto others.”

  We sat in small groups to debrief the day. I bit my lip, and it helped to focus my mind away from my sister.

  “For the last activity,” John told us, “we want to hear from you on the mic.”

  I was never drawn to public speaking. I stuttered at times and wasn’t confident in my pronunciation, but sometimes in college, I’d be asked to speak at a rally. There weren’t many Asian guys involved in leftist campus politics, and back then I was a sucker for the argument: “If you don’t do it, no one will.” I had tended to ramble, forgetting my point. That’s when I’d throw in a “fuck,” and the crowd would cheer.

  “You can say anything about how you feel,” John said, “or about what you’ve learned today.”

  I thought about that damn balloon, and I raised my hand. We’d heard how hurt could translate into anger, how hurt explained why kids lashed out, but no one had said anything about how to deal with the hurt, only to be aware of it.

  I walked to the microphone, past clusters of small groups. I heard some students cheering my name, but I kept my eyes on the floor, so I wouldn’t trip over anything.

  John put his hand on my shoulder. “What’s on your mind, bro?”

  I grabbed the microphone, but I wished I had thought more about what I was going to say. Couldn’t throw in a “fuck” with these students. I could hear my breath on the microphone over the speakers.

  “My father moved out when I was ten, and I grew up feeling like he didn’t care about me. I started to hate him, and that filled my balloon. But I’m telling y’all, you don’t want to live with that hate. Let it go. It’ll turn you crazy. You’ll do things you’ll regret, drop out, get locked up. I forgave my dad, and just like that, all the air left my balloon. I woke up a new person. I forgave my dad for not being there. I forgave him for being a jerk to my mom. I forgave him for what he did to my sister—”

  I couldn’t continue. I leaned forward, my hands on my knees. The microphone dropped, and I heard the thud over the speakers. I began bawling.

  I saw my sister as a child in her bed and Bah Ba next to her. The image of my sister and father moved forward like a video as though someone had hit the play button. Bah Ba tugged at Ga Jeh’s pajama pants, and I felt the sensation as though it was me under his hand. I could smell his breath, nicotine and Hennessy. My legs got weak. A gentle push would’ve tipped me over. I closed my eyes and felt myself being drawn into a dark place I didn’t have the strength to resist.

  A hand rubbed my back, then an arm lifted me up, but I was limp.

  “It’s your favorite student,” Antonio said.

  Another arm helped me up. “No,” Carmelina said, “I’m his favorite student. Tell him, Lam.”

  Other students surrounded me, ready to help. I picked up the microphone. I don’t even know if I made any sense at that point, but I remembered why I’d gotten up to speak in the first place.

  I spoke through tears to finish what I had planned to say, “If you don’t want to forgive for the sake of the other person, do it for yourself.”

  I heard the crowd clap as I walked back to my seat. I grabbed the Kleenex box to blow my nose and sat down. I looked up and saw JB.

  He shook my hand and pulled me up for a hug. “You’re a deep man, Mr. Lam.”

  It wasn’t until I was back in my classroom packing up at the end of the day that I realized I had lied to my students. How could I have forgiven Bah Ba if I hadn’t dealt with what he’d done? That’s why the image felt fresh. I was seeing it for the first time.

  Maybe Ga Jeh hadn’t forgiven our father. Perhaps like me, she’d hidden the images from herself. We hadn’t talked about any of this since she’d revealed it to me. I wasn’t sure the exact nature of the abuse, and I wasn’t trying to find out.

  I told myself I’d call Ga Jeh as soon as I finished grading the set of papers I was taking home, but I didn’t. Admitting to myself what Bah Ba had done was one thing, broaching the topic with my sister was another. Should I initiate a conversation, force her to confront the past, or keep quiet, let the past stay buried? I didn’t know the best way to help my sister with her balloon, how to keep it from popping—I was still a rookie.

  In the two years leading up to my trip to Minnesota, I slipped back into forgetting. I covered up what I didn’t want to see as easily as one might toss a throw over a stain on the couch.

  good ol’ pops

  After I returned from my visit to Bah Ba, I told my sister that I’d encouraged our father to retire in San Francisco, to be closer to us. She wrote me this in response:

  We need to talk, you and me. I don’t know how I’m feeling about our good ol’ pops. I know how he’s “trying” to be a father and a grandfather, but I still feel a lot of anger towards him. I sent him an email asking him why he did what he did, and he never responded! I know I need to see a psychiatrist, but I don’t think it’s going to help. You forgive him or you don’t. And I’m not stable enough to forgive hi
m. I still have to interact with him. I don’t like talking to him or seeing him. I try to put those feelings aside, but it’s very hard.

  * * * * * *

  I met Ga Jeh at her apartment. She’d just moved in. The place was sparse. Sitting on one of the shelves of her skinny bookshelf was a small brush painting of a panda. I’d bought it for her on a trip to China. In the corner of the room was a papasan chair, a holdover from the apartment she’d shared with her most recent ex. Their dogs would sleep in the chair, or rather, his dogs, a greyhound and a bulldog. They were the reason why it had taken her so long to leave the crummy boyfriend. She was ready to say bye forever, but saying that to the dogs, that proved more difficult. Now the chair was all she had of them.

  “If Bah Ba moves back,” my sister said, “I’m moving out of the Bay. I still feel like he’s a threat.”

  Her last three encounters with our father had been during funerals. They barely had to talk. And during our visit to Toronto, our interactions with Bah Ba had been buffered by uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents. Living in the same city as Bah Ba, Ga Jeh would be expected to regularly share meals with him, to yahm cha together on weekends, to invite her abuser over to her house.

  “If I’d known how you really felt about Bah Ba,” I said, “I would never have gone.”

  “Sometimes I feel bad,” she said, “sometimes I don’t give a shit.” She blew her nose. “Sometimes I want to kill myself.”

  I hugged her, and a river of tears followed. I’d spent years listening to teenagers, hearing their family dramas, listening for the quiet signs of abuse. I’d been trained to do this. I’d even had to call CPS once on behalf of a student, yet when it came to my own sister, I’d found it easy to look the other way, to bury any questions about how she might truly feel.

  I’d sold out my sister, so I could play out a father-son fantasy.

  “I never want to see him again,” Ga Jeh said.

  “I don’t either.”

  tape

  Two years later, Bah Ba had retired in San Francisco, and I was refusing any contact with him. Ga Jeh had skipped town, like she’d vowed, moving down to San Diego. I was living in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, in an in-law apartment with my girlfriend at the time, L.

  Dressed for a jog that morning in shorts and a soccer jersey, she was rummaging through the TV cabinet in our bedroom for her iPod. “What’s this?” She held a videotape for me to inspect.

  My cheeks warmed. The last time she discovered an old videocassette, it was Luke’s Freak Show, basically a guy with a camcorder trailing behind any large ass he could find, on the streets, in a hotel lobby, at a Mickey D’s. L’s gripe wasn’t on feminist grounds—objectification, exploitation, nothing like that. She was pissed I might still have a thing for Black women, not that she had anything against Black women. L was a community organizer who was all about intersectionality and coalition building. She just didn’t want to be stuck in a relationship with a guy who not only secretly preferred someone who didn’t look like her, a Filipina, but who also secretly preferred someone who didn’t look like himself. “This is some self-hate shit right here,” L had said when she found that Luke tape.

  “That’s not even my tape,” I’d said. “I love Asian women.” She didn’t say another word. Just picked up her overnight bag and strolled out of the apartment in her wedge heels, the bag hung on the crook of her elbow, a cigarette held between her fingers.

  The spine on the home video L now held in her hand read: “L.A. 1988.” The handwriting was mine. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and I leaned back on my arms. “I forgot all about that,” I said. “My dad took us to Disneyland. I must’ve been in middle school.”

  “I thought your dad was never around.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  She held the tape as though weighing it. “Your pops—at least the way you’ve described him—doesn’t sound like a family vacation kind of guy.”

  “It was a one-time thing,” I said.

  She sat on my lap and placed the video next to us on the bed. Rocking side to side, she sang a song in Spanish while redoing her ponytail. Half the songs on her iPod were songs in Spanish. She’d spent a year studying in Mexico, and relished any chance to speak Spanish, whether it was translating for a client at her nonprofit job or just somebody at a taqueria. To her, she struck just the right balance between her Pinay pride and her appreciation for Mexican culture, while the way I juggled being Chinese with an appreciation for Blackness was unhealthy. Not enough self-love in my recipe, according to her. This was one of many things we’d argue about. Though we loved each other deeply, deeper than each of us had ever loved, we were always on the verge of breaking up. We’d started couples therapy to try and save the relationship.

  I knew L was waiting for a real explanation of the tape, but if there was one thing I didn’t want to talk about, it was my dad. L knew my reasons, but she didn’t understand how raw my feelings were, how I couldn’t stop daydreaming about strangling my father. To say this desire aloud was to admit weakness.

  I pulled L’s body close, her back against my chest.

  She wiggled free. “Tell me about this trip with your dad.”

  I rubbed the inside of her thigh. It didn’t seem a terrible strategy to try and fuck my way out of the conversation.

  “Dime,” she said, tapping my hand on her thigh.

  I grabbed the tape, turned it over a couple of times, and slid it out of its sleeve. Nothing written on the face label. I told L about the only scene I remembered on the video, the one I had recorded.

  I’d set up the camcorder on a table by the hotel pool. My mom wades in the shallow end with a swimming cap. My sister leans on a kickboard, drifting. I pretend she’s sinking. I grab a lifesaver. “I’ll save you,” I say, and I toss the ring at Ga Jeh, attempting to encircle her with it like a lasso. It knocks her across the head instead. She screams.

  My father’s not present in this scene. If he was poolside off-camera, I don’t recall it. I can’t picture Bah Ba in swimming trunks. I have no image of his naked torso, only the surgical scar across his belly button from an operation he had before I was born. The surgery to repair a hole in his intestine forced him to postpone his wedding with my mother until the following year. Bah Ba never actually appears anywhere in the entire videotape. For the rest of the video, my father was always behind the lens, the one charged with recording us. A year after this trip to Disneyland, my mother talked Willie into taking us again, as though to upstage my father.

  My mom disagrees with my version. She says I have the order wrong. Willie was the one to take me first, and instead of keeping it a secret, she bragged to my father on the phone about the fun we had, substituting friends from her ESL class in the story for Willie. Bah Ba felt slighted he wasn’t invited to our first family vacation and insisted we go with him. Maybe it was my father who wanted to upstage the earlier Disneyland trip. Either way, I remembered Disneyland with Willie, not my father.

  “You always say he didn’t care about you,” L said, “but your dad took you to fucking Disneyland.”

  “And that proves he was a great guy?”

  “No, it proves you keep hiding shit from me.” It was true. When we began dating, I gave her a spotty timeline of my parents failed marriage, misleading her into believing that my parents had already separated when my mom began seeing Willie. I was reluctant to declare my mother a cheater. I wanted one parent I could respect. When L discovered the truth, she labeled me a “mama’s boy” who was unable to see his mom for who she was, not a victim but a master manipulator who I had let off the hook for the dysfunctions in my family.

  I shifted my weight, as though suddenly L was heavy on my lap. “OK, what else do you want to know?”

  She pulled a piece of lint stuck to my buzz cut. “Any other vacations with your father?” she asked jokingly.

 
“There was one other time.” I recalled during the winter break of my freshman year of high school I, along with my mother and sister, had visited Bah Ba in Minnesota. My brother couldn’t get off work. He was a busboy at Bah Ba’s old restaurant, Tea House.

  My father at that time had a house in a Twin Cities suburb. It wasn’t huge, but it had felt roomy, at least for one person. I’d slept on the sofa, firm as a showroom sofa, as though Bah Ba had been waiting to break it in. The only other thing in the living room was a flimsy stereo system. If I pushed a button too hard, the whole unit would sway.

  I dug around in his basement one day while he was at work and found a stash of Playboy magazines. Actually, I didn’t really dig, and it wasn’t a stash. They were stacked on a table in plain view, but I wasn’t supposed to be down there.

  Most days we ate lunch at his restaurant, the kind rented out for banquets. My sister and I would stuff our plates with fried chicken wings at the buffet and grab a glass of soda at the bar. We used the bar gun like we owned the place. Bah Ba had only one day off, so he and I shared few moments: him standing in the doorway marveling at the graphics of the video game I was playing, him sitting down with me to watch Do the Right Thing, then getting up when he realized it was a serious flick and not a comedy. I shot hoops at a gym with his boss’s son. His neighbor took me sledding. I felt snow on my fingertips for the first time. The snot in my nose froze. All this had made me feel I had a place in my father’s world, but now that I had turned my back on him, I wanted to dispose of these memories. I felt guilty even having happy memories of that winter trip. Ga Jeh’s version of that visit may not have been as fond.

  L leapt off me. “If we’re going to make this work,” she said. “You gotta start being honest about your family.” She shook out her wrist, adjusting her turquoise bracelet.