Paper Sons: A Memoir

by Dickson Lam

  “You know your sister is not that smart,” my mother said.

  “I heard that,” Ga Jeh shouted from her room.

  “You know what I mean. You never had honor classes.”

  My sister marched into the kitchen holding a glass with a Hello Kitty straw. Her hair was permed, and it stretched high above her forehead, curling at the ends like a tidal wave ripping over her head. She had that constipated look of hers. That look she’d only have when talking to us. Get her on the phone with a friend, and she’d sound like a cheery customer service rep. “Move,” she said to me.

  I stepped aside. “Tell her, Ga Jeh. You don’t need Lowell to go to college.”

  My sister opened the fridge and grabbed a jug of OJ. Goh Goh and I were protesting this juice. It was Willie’s. My brother always asked our mom when she’d return from Costco, “Did you buy this or did he pay for it?” Anything Willie bought, Goh Goh refused, and I would say the same but would eventually relent. Ga Jeh on the other hand favored my mother’s boyfriend, seemingly without reservation. She rode on the back of his motorcycle once, and the next chance I got, I did the same. “Traitors,” our brother had called us.

  Ga Jeh poured the OJ into her glass. “Mom’s only pushing Lowell because you’re a boy.” My mother didn’t have the same aspirations for my sister, never encouraging her to be a doctor or lawyer as she would with me and Goh Goh.

  “I don’t think like that,” my mother said as though the notion were ridiculous.

  “Stop lying,” Ga Jeh said.

  “I’m Mommy. Why would I need to lie?” She waved her hand dismissively.

  “I don’t care where Dickson goes, as long as it’s not my school,” Ga Jeh said and left the kitchen, sipping on her juice.

  I sat on the cushioned folding chair and set the form on the kitchen table, which was draped with a fruit tablecloth. I took the cap off my pen and slipped a Chinese language magazine under the form for writing support. “It’s McAteer or Galileo,” I said to my mother. Galileo was my zoned high school.

  “Now you want to go to Galileo.” She plopped down on the chair next to me. “I ride the bus with those kids. Bad kids. Swearing in Chinese.”

  “That’s why I need you to sign, so I won’t go there.”

  She held the form, inspecting it. “But how come not Lowell?”

  “Are you listening? Deadline. Has. Passed. Sign the form, damn.”

  “Gong meh yeh? You love to swear now, huh? Shit. Fuck. Damn. Gong a. Gong a.”

  “Damn’s not a cuss word.”

  She raised her hand like she was about to slap me, her lips tightening together.

  I flinched though she’d never actually slapped me before. She’d only spanked me once, with the lid of a large tin box. My brother had had a friend over while she wasn’t home, and apparently we were all responsible.

  My mother, though, wasn’t against the idea of whuppings. She was raised on them by her grandmother, and when she’d see public service announcements on television about child abuse, she’d scoff at the screen,“Yueh gwo ngoh da leih, ngoh seung leih da dihn wa bei ging chaat. Keuih deih leih, ngoh do da leih. Bei keuih deih laih ngoh. Ngoh do mh gaan a.” A literal translation fails to capture her attitude. Let me try: I wish you would call the cops on me. Let them show up. I’d beat your ass in front of them. I wouldn’t give a fuck.

  “You don’t want to listen to me,” my mom said. “You want to do whatever you want, go live with your dad.”

  The phone was within arm’s reach. I hit the “talk” button repeatedly, a steady rhythm of beeps. A red dot sped across the display on the phone, searching for the best channel. Minnesota Dickson would not have to endure lectures. His father would be too tired from work for that. Minnesota Dickson would have his own room. Minnesota Dickson would live in a house. He and his father would watch football together. Minnesota Dickson would become a Vikings fan. Maybe a Twins fan. Minnesota Dickson would make money busing tables at the Chinese restaurant where his father worked. Minnesota Dickson would attend a suburban school, an all-white school. They would know nothing about him except that he was the Asian kid from California. He would make snowmen. Carry snowballs in his pocket. He would ski to school.

  “Stop playing with the phone. I sign at the bottom?”

  “You really would let me live in Minnesota?”

  “If you want to go, go. I don’t care.”

  I handed her the phone. “Can you ask him?”

  She looked at the Garfield clock. His striped tail hung and swayed in one direction while his droopy eyes darted in the opposite direction. The clock was my mother’s idea, but perhaps Willie had bought it for her. “It’s late there,” she said. “I’ll call tomorrow.” She returned the phone to its base.

  “Promise?”

  “He won’t want to take care of you. He has to work.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re a big boy now, right? What are you going to do when you get sick?”

  “Tylenol?”

  “You don’t even know how to take pills.”

  That was true. I had a phobia of swallowing them. My mother would wrap pills for me inside a napkin and hammer them down to powder, then she’d mix the powder with water in a spoon, using a toothpick to stir.

  “I’m sure Bah Ba has a hammer.”

  “Who’s going to take you to the doctor?” she said. Our main doctor was an old guy with a cane whose office was a small room in the back of a store. He’d have me rest my hand on a purple pillow, and he’d check my pulse. In three seconds he’d have a diagnosis. To be sure he’d ask me to spit phlegm on a paper towel. He’d examine the color and write an herbal prescription. At home my mother would cook the herbs in a clay pot. The process took over an hour and stunk up the kitchen. You’d think she was boiling a filthy boot. When I drank the bowl of the dark brown concoction, the foul odor would hit me, and I’d have to pinch my nose just to drink it. It tasted so bitter and nasty, I knew it had to work.

  “Are you going to ask him or not?”

  “OK, OK. Tomorrow.” She signed the form. “Happy? No more talking. I have to finish washing dishes. I have to sweep, mop.”

  My mother would continue to give me the run around for months. “He hung up so fast,” she’d say. “Next time. Next time.”

  I could’ve asked Bah Ba myself, but I was too chickenshit. I worried he’d brush me off and tell me to put my mother on the phone. Worse, I was afraid he’d be honest. Tell me he didn’t want me around. My hope lay in his duty as a father. We counted on that each month. He was the breadwinner, never failing to mail home the check that paid our bills. Perhaps he could be convinced that it was his fatherly obligation to allow me to move in with him.

  One night, the phone rang in the living room and I picked up. It was Bah Ba.

  “Jackson?” he said.

  “Dickson,” I said.

  “Get your mom.” Bah Ba and I had fallen into a groove. It was understood, no chitchat. Just hand the phone to my mother.

  “She’s in the bathroom.” I lied. My mother was in the kitchen.

  “Have her call me when she comes out.”

  “Hold on. I heard the toilet flush. She’ll be out in a sec.”

  “OK.”

  “Does Minnesota get hot in the summer?”

  “Gaan haih a,” he said as though it was a dumb question, or maybe I was being sensitive, and his tone only reflected the natural harshness of Cantonese.

  “It’s not sunny here at all.”

  “That’s better. Never gets too hot or too cold.”

  “Do you like living alone?”

  “Leih gong mut yeh?”

  “Living in a house by yourself. Isn’t that boring?”

  “You think I just lay around the house all day?”

  “No, that
’s not what I meant.”

  “I wake up early. Work. Come home. Sleep. No time to think.”

  “I’m starting high school.”

  “So fast?”

  “I am turning fourteen in a few months.”

  “Who’s on the phone?” my mother asked.

  “Bah Ba.” I passed her the receiver of the plastic French-style phone.

  She held the receiver on her shoulder with her back to me.

  I tugged her shirt and pointed at the phone, then myself.

  She raised a finger to her lips to shush me.

  “Remember to ask,” I said.

  “Dickson,” she said into the phone, “he wants me to ask you something. What? Hold on, I’ll find it.” She grabbed the base of the phone and carried it to the kitchen. The rotary dial contained a picture of my mom crowned with a lei, and the photo would rotate with the dial of a number.

  I couldn’t follow their conversation, only hearing my mother sorting through envelopes and shuffling about in her flip-flops.

  “Houh la,” she said and hung up the phone.

  I rushed to the kitchen. “Well, what did he say?”

  “What I told you he’d say, ‘No time.’ See?”

  “Call him back. Say I’ve got no good choices for high school. Say Minnesota’s my only shot for college.”

  “What kind of father do you think you have? How many times has he asked anything about you? About any of you? He doesn’t care about his kids.”

  Maybe a father can see something in his son no one else can, and what my father saw in me repulsed him. Perhaps it was my likeness to him.

  My mother handed me the phone to return to the living room. I placed it back on the end table. Hanging above the table was a studio photograph of our family taken in Hong Kong shortly before we immigrated to the States. The five of us sit on the floor of a room, huddled together, as though we want others to believe this is our living room. I’m in the center, a year-and-a-half-old, my body round like a lump of clay, laughing because I do not know any better. My brother and sister sit next to me, one on each side, their legs extended straight out and their backs slouched. My parents lean into each other. My mother’s her usual photogenic self, with the same smile she has in all photos. Posed but not fake. She’s happiest when being photographed. My dad’s rocking bell-bottoms and a burgundy sweater. He looks relaxed, eager for more of whatever this is, as though when the photo is done, he will roll around the carpet with me and raise me high up in the air. But this was all staged. This was not our living room, and the father rendered in this picture was a stranger.

  My father was one only on paper, on a form for free lunch, on public housing records, on a family tree assignment. He was a check in the mail. I understood now this was no accident, and it wasn’t a shortcoming. It was the way he preferred it, the way he wanted it to remain.

  “Don’t be so sad,” my mother said. “How about I make beef lettuce wraps tonight? Or we can get McDonald’s.” She went to rub my shoulder, but I brushed past her. I went to my room and grabbed a comic book from the shelf, an issue of the X-Men. I brought the comic to the bathroom, a place where I could steal some privacy. I sat on the lid of the toilet and found myself in the Australian outback.

  The X-Men were laying low, building a new headquarters while the world assumed they had died. They were still missing their leader, Professor X. He was probably stuck light years away on a spaceship or some mysterious planet. He’d been MIA since I began following the series a couple of years ago. Perhaps this is what drew me to the X-Men, a band of rejects, each with a particular mutated gene—steel skin, wings, the ability to heal any wound, the ability to turn air into ice—all of them waiting for one man to return. Maybe he never would. Maybe he wasn’t stuck. Maybe he was happier in outer space and had no intention of returning to Earth to guide his former pupils. Maybe we’d been suckers for hoping.

  On the trip to Minnesota the summer after Javon’s death, my father confirmed for me what I had, over the years, come to suspect, that my mother had never relayed my desire to live with him.

  “It wouldn’t have made a difference,” she said when I confronted her. “He still would’ve said no.”

  I wish she was wrong, but it’s hard to imagine the Bah Ba of my childhood jumping at the chance to raise me. There’s little doubt my father would’ve said no to my proposition, yet my mom still felt the need to fabricate his response. She was a queen of deception, juggling two men, one for romance, one for money—she had three kids to feed and clothe—but more to the point, she reigned as the Queen of Apartment 171, and she wasn’t taking chances—her youngest would not flee her queendom.

  bathroom

  My mother was slicing up beef in the kitchen when I came home. Her hair was tied up, and she was wearing Capri corduroys. “Faan Ke Ngauh Yuhk Faahn,” she said, “your favorite.” Beef with tomato over rice.

  “I’m going to shower first,” I said. “I was playing basketball.” Judging from my face, you wouldn’t have known I’d just gotten my ass whupped, jumped for my Starter parka by a bunch of FOBs. They’d surrounded me. Someone kicked me in the back. The one rocking a pompadour struck my cheek. I’d punch one of them only to get blasted by blows I couldn’t even see coming. It was like fighting a ghost. I fell and rolled around trying to dodge their kicks. It was a cold day, so my jacket was zipped up, and the entire time on the ground, while one hand was shielding my face, the other hand maintained a grip over the slider of the jacket zipper. No way I was giving up my Starter parka. It had cost my mom (dad?) over a hundred bucks. Luckily, a lady from her upstairs window scared away my assailants by saying she’d called the cops. More good luck: I’d only suffer bruises, nothing broken, no wounds. Much easier to take kicks from loafers than say, steel-toe boots. The best news to me: I’d managed to keep my jacket.

  When I returned to North Beach, I saw Richie Rich, who lived upstairs, hanging out by the bus shelter, and I told him what happened. Double R sported a Jheri curl and was sipping on a forty. He was in his twenties, just released after serving a stint for robbing some tourists. We saw two Chinese kids getting off the bus across the street. “Think that’s one of them?” he asked.

  “Probably.”

  We darted after them, and the Chinese dudes took off. I slowed to a strut, while Richie Rich raced after them in his Nike Cortez’s. He stopped to hurl his bottle at them, but it fell short, shattering on the pavement.

  My mother now pointed her knife at me. “Any homework?” she asked.

  “Already did it,” I said.

  “Stop lying,” Ga Jeh said from the living room. She and my brother joined with my mother to form a three-headed Ghidorah parent. She’d told our mother I was hanging with some shady kids. She’d spotted me once with some graffiti writers. We were easy to identify: ink on our clothes, ink underneath our fingernails, tags written on our backpacks. Goh Goh had snitched to our mom about the stack of hats I had in the closest. Probably stolen, he’d said.

  “Mom, don’t listen to her,” I said. “My school’s easy like that.”

  “Then you should be getting As,” my mother said. “How come I never see your report card?”

  “I bet he’s hiding them,” Ga Jeh said. She was wrong. I’d thrown them away. The last report card showed I was failing three courses.

  “They probably have the wrong address,” I said.

  “You’re retarded,” Ga Jeh said.

  “Check with your counselor,” my mother said, “or I’ll call myself.” She always gave me the benefit of the doubt. I’d gotten arrested for graffiti, along with Rob, on Super Bowl Sunday. I told my mother that the marker the cop found on me was for art class. I wasn’t even taking that class anymore, but she didn’t know that. The weird thing was neither Rob nor I had actually tagged on that bus—the driver was lying. We all had to appear in front of a judge, in his chamb
ers, and our moms mean-mugged the driver, a white woman with gray hair who didn’t take off her shades. Even Willie was giving the woman a dirty look. I’d hoped that seeing him in his bus uniform might force her to change her story. Maybe she wouldn’t fuck over a family from her own fraternity. But the lady stuck with the bullshit, and we were found guilty. A fine and thirty hours of community service. I appreciated Willie being there, but it changed nothing between us. He was still the secret I had to keep from my father.

  I took off my parka and hung it on a hook behind the hallway door. My brother was in our room, lying on his bed, talking on the phone. It had to be a girl on the other end. Goh Goh’s voice was gentler, and he was giggling. I didn’t understand how this sappy tone could work, but it did. Even back in his middle school days. Once I’d walked in on him and a girl who’d been voted Most Popular fooling around under the sheets.

  Every slight shift was now a new wave of pain, felt sharply in my chest and back.

  “Why are you moving like that?” Goh Goh said.

  I closed our bedroom door. “You gotta promise not to tell Mom.”

  “Whatever, yeah.”

  He got off the phone, and I told him what happened. He had said once that if anybody messed with me, he’d gather backup. Though he’d gone to a nerdy high school and had earned high marks, he was not an angel. He’d been arrested for stealing a car.

  “So you gonna help?” I asked.

  “I’ll figure something out.”

  I grabbed a change of clothes and went to the bathroom. I took off my shirt in front of the mirror. I had clusters of red marks on my chest, promises of blue and purple. I pressed gingerly on the marks. I turned on the shower and slipped out of my jeans.

  The door burst open. I was in my underwear. My mother held a wire hanger. She sucked in a breath and started swinging the hanger at my chest. I put my arms out to block her.

  “Gau daam?” she said. “Fong sau.” You dare? Drop your hands. “Think you’re so cool, huh? Look at you.” She pointed at the marks. “Let people beat you like that. Why do I have such a weak son?” She struck me on my thighs with the hanger.