Paper Sons: A Memoir

by Dickson Lam

  The first time she tried to get my homeboys to call her Manny Lee, I told her, “The name’s dumb. Manny Lee is a Dominican shortstop for the Blue Jays.”

  “Me, I don’t care,” she said.

  邦強 strong as a nation

  My father renamed himself when he married my mother. The second name wouldn’t stick, something he tried out, then abandoned.

  Chinese folks accumulated names over a lifetime. At birth you were given a nickname, a “milk name.” A month or so later you received your given name. When you started school, your teacher gave you a name to be used just in school, a “book name.” If you’re counting, that’s three names by age six. Upon marriage, you took on an “adult name.” Later in life, you’d also have a formal nickname. If you were an artist, you’d have an “art name,” a pseudonym. And if you were part of the aristocracy, you’d be given another name after death. The posthumous name would reflect your reputation, either a way of praising you or a reminder to all that your life didn’t amount to shit.

  My father’s given name was On Wah. Wah had a generic meaning: “relating to China,” but On meant “peaceful,” “safe,” “a harbor.” Combined, his name could be interpreted as Peaceful China or Peaceful Chinese.

  Though the Lam family poem was gone, my Tai Mah remembered bits of it, at least enough to tell my father that the character for his generation was Bong, nation. Bah Ba decided to combine this with Keuhng, strong, for his “adult name”: Bong Keuhng. Literally, it means “strong nation.” Applied to a person, the name could be read as “Strong as a Nation.” Sounded more kickass than Peaceful Chinese.

  Though Keuhng means “strong,” under its entry in the dictionary, the character that my father had chosen for himself, also has several additional meanings when combined with other characters, including: “bandit,” “kidnap,” “unyielding,” “rape.”

  palimpsests

  The use of palimpsests was common during the Middle Ages. Parchment, the standard writing material of the time, would be recycled by using milk, oat bran, and pumice to rub and wash away its text. For Christians, this was also an excuse to efface pagan manuscripts, though faint traces of the original writing remained, hidden underneath scriptures.

  Centuries later, modern scholars would use ultraviolet light to uncover the lost text, words that had refused to be destroyed.

  graff

  I never left the house without a marker tucked in the waistband of my jeans. It might’ve been a marker with an aluminum barrel or one that looked like a super-sized crayon or one that was shaped like a deodorant stick, its tip as wide as a fist.

  We’d hop on the city bus and tear off the advertisements that ran above the windows. Blank panels were revealed. We’d tag there, monikers we chose ourselves: LAKE, STEAM, SKY, FUSE, DRUM. Our graffiti names carried a dignity that our birth names, names chosen for us, lacked.

  south bronx

  KRS-One—his emcee name originally his graffiti name—launched his rap career with the song “South Bronx,” an attack on MC Shan for his song “The Bridge.” Many viewed Shan’s song as a claim that his own Queensbridge projects were the birthplace of hip-hop, not the South Bronx, which had been universally credited.

  “South Bronx” in many ways resembles Shan’s song. The chorus on Shan’s song is his neighborhood repeated several times. KRS borrows this idea for his refrain. Shan’s second verse describes a park jam from back in the day, naming some of the hip-hop OGs around his way. KRS adopts the same template for his second verse. If you had listened to Shan’s song several times before hearing “South Bronx,” you’d hear an echo of Shan in KRS’s raps. Heard this way, KRS’s raps on “South Bronx” are even more vicious, evoking MC Shan only to crush him.

  writing crews

  The first tagging crew I joined was PE, Public Enemy, named after the rap group. I’d imagined kids donned in berets and paramilitary uniforms, my generation’s Black Panthers, but the leader of PE turned out to be a short white boy. Only a month after I joined, the crew died. Most crews never made it past a year. Not due to infighting or a power struggle. Motherfuckers just got tired of their crew name, bored of having to write the same letters next to their tag.

  The leader of PE started another crew, TFB, Taking Frisco Back. It was rebranding. Most of the members in PE wound up in TFB. The ones who didn’t had quit writing. It was a revolving-door community. New writers were always being birthed.

  Ten months later, TFB faded away, and the core members started KSF, Kings of San Francisco. I was one of the five founding members, though I could only trace our roots back two tagging generations. We were writers who didn’t record our past.

  paper sons

  One in three Chinese Americans are using a falsified last name, though they may not even know it. Their ancestors, during the first half of the twentieth century, came here “illegally,” but that term’s misleading, suggesting an immoral ethos, when it was the law itself that was immoral. The Chinese Exclusion Act—the name says it all, the first and only time the United States explicitly banned a group based on their race. This law also blocked “legal” emigrants from China from becoming naturalized citizens, yet “illegal” emigrants from Europe were offered a pathway to citizenship. For these white undocumented immigrants, we were willing to grant amnesty, their past transgressions forgotten. Citizenship could be extended or withheld, but this choice had nothing to do with notions of legal or illegal; it had everything to do with affirming whiteness.

  Like undocumented immigrants today who can only live and work in the United States by acquiring fake papers, many of the Chinese immigrants who arrived in the first half of the twentieth century also had fraudulent papers. When the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed city records in San Francisco, Chinese living here capitalized. Many of them lied, claiming they were citizens who had lost their birth certificates in the flames. It couldn’t be disproved. Now that they were citizens, they could bring over their children—an exception to the Chinese Exclusion Act—but why stop there? For a large sum, they’d pretend to be the father of someone unrelated to them in China, signing affidavits testifying to this. Paper sons, or in rarer cases, paper daughters, would ditch their family name and adopt the surname of the sponsoring “father.” The lie of the paper children would be handed down to their offspring.

  The deception, however, didn’t guarantee entry into the country for paper children, only arrival at Angel Island, not far from Alcatraz. Known as the “Ellis Island of the West,” Angel Island in reality was more of a prison: armed guards, a tall fence with barbwire. Chinese would be detained for days, months, sometimes a couple of years. Their somber stories are told through the poems they carved into the wooden walls of their barracks, rooms crammed with triple-decker bunk beds for a hundred men. One poem reads:

  蛟龍失水螻蟻欺 The dragon out of water is humiliated by ants;

  猛虎遭囚小兒戲 The fierce tiger who is caged is baited by a child.

  被困安敢與爭雄 As long as I am imprisoned, how can I dare strive for supremacy?

  得勢復仇定有期 An advantageous position for revenge will surely come one day.

  To determine if detainees were indeed the children of the supposed father, immigration officials would interrogate them. They’d ask questions about their village, their family, the physical layout of their home, how many steps from their home to the orchard, tricky questions meant to trip up the detainee. Based on their answers, they’d either be allowed to immigrate or they’d be deported. Officials would compare the answers of the detainees with the answers they’d receive from the supposed father—a high stakes father-son version of The Newlywed Game. But the game was rigged. The imposter children had secretly been given hundreds of pages describing their supposed family, a book-length cheat sheet.

  A small number of detainees were actually the real children of fathers in America, but would their ans
wers to questions about their homeland be the same as their fathers’? Their dads hadn’t been back in years, sometimes decades. Things had changed, especially in a country engulfed in war. During the years of Angel Island’s operation as an immigration station, the Communists and Nationalists were waging a civil war, and in the middle of that, the Japanese invaded. Poh Poh, my grandmother, had her village thrown into chaos. When she heard the gunshots, she grabbed her younger brother and ducked into the fields. As they hid, she had to keep her hand over her brother’s mouth, fearful that the Japanese soldiers could hear the muffled screams.

  Too much was at stake. I suspect the real children of fathers were also given a study book to prepare for their interrogation. Answering the official honestly wasn’t the goal; answering the same as their father was. Even sons and daughters by blood played a game

  of pretend, trying to outtrick the trickster. Every Chinese making it through Angel Island was escaping war in their homeland, but for the actual children of fathers in America, entry into the US meant not just escape, but a reunion, an end to the years living without their fathers who they might’ve been meeting for the first time as

  adults. They’d uncover what kind of men their fathers actually were.

  roots

  The Angel Island poem was translated by Genny Lim and Him Mark Lai. Him Mark was known as the father of Chinese American history, a self-taught scholar who the FBI kept tabs on during the McCarthy era. His father was a paper son, among the first shipload of immigrants detained at Angel Island, Lai a paper name, but Him Mark’s father also managed to hide the family’s true name as the middle name of his children; Maak became Mark.

  I met Him Mark through my participation in a summer pro- gram he co-founded, In Search of Roots. The program took ten Chinese Americans back to their family’s ancestral village. As part of our preparation for the trip, we met as a group on Saturday mornings, and one Saturday Him Mark stopped by and gave each of us a packet containing background info on our villages, research he’d compiled and translated.

  When we arrived in the villages, folks would ask what we were doing there. Many of us spoke poor Chinese, so all we could offer was the name tags hanging around our necks. It displayed our Chinese names and our purpose: 尋根, In Search of Roots.

  I journeyed to my mother’s village in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong Province, Bah Ba’s village too far for the program. I met my grandfather’s older sister, my Goo Poh. I was filming her on a camcorder, but she didn’t realize what the device was doing until I flipped the screen so she could see herself. She lived alone in a small house made of bricks. She had one daughter but hadn’t seen her in years. The daughter knew she was adopted and no longer felt an obligation to Goo Poh. “Tell my brother to come see me,” Goo Poh said. “I’m an old woman.”

  I paid respects to my mother’s grandfather, my Tai Gung. He was kept in a mausoleum. Originally, he’d been buried behind the village, where family members could go and pay respect by burning sheets of paper, ghost money. Tai Gung’s body, however, had been excavated to make room for the landscaped garden of a new housing development. The economy, I was told, was booming. On top of where Tai Gung’s body had been buried was now a manicured bush.

  ghost yard

  We were the only ones in the Ghost Yard that night. No security guards. Just us and a fleet of dilapidated city buses. I stepped inside one, marker in hand. The scene was apocalyptic: holes in the floor, windows smashed, a seat uprooted lying sideways as if the Hulk had thrown it in a tantrum.

  We found lead pipes and swung them at windshields, cracking them. We climbed onto the roofs of buses, hollering at the moon: “Errrrrayyyyyy!”

  With only the moonlight, we could barely see what we’d tag, though I could feel the tip of my marker against the surface of the bus, wiping away layers of dirt and dust. All around my tag were faded names, names we didn’t bother to read in the dark—our graffiti forebears.

  One day, we too would be unread.

  erased

  We introduced ourselves to another writer by asking, “What do you write?” Though we understood our writing had no future, we knew nothing as sweet as mobbing deep, going to work on a bus with the urgency of a pit stop crew, filling the inside of the bus with our tags, as if it were an autograph page of a yearbook—rocking it. The only thing better was seeing the same bus again, our names floating by, more points on the scoreboard. If the bus was stopped at a light, we’d marvel at our work from the sidewalk, sometimes running across the street just to get a peek. A moment had been captured, marking a particular occasion, an opening for a story: Oh, that was when—

  How long a bus would run in its current graffitied state was unpredictable. Some tags lasted months. Others half a day. The more we crushed a bus with our tags, the more likely the cleanup crew at the bus yards would take notice and buff away our tags sooner rather than later. Though none of us wanted to see our names erased, we relied on buses to get buffed. Without the removal of prior graffiti, we’d have no space to tag. To write was to accept your own erasure.

  lamskino

  I retired from graffiti the summer before my senior year of high school. I sensed the ride was nearing the end and began to keep a journal. The first entry: Aug. 8—Wood got sprayed w/ mace by clown.

  It was a literal clown, makeup and all. He was sitting near the front of the bus. Hollywood had just tagged his name on the window that day, and before I had the chance to do the same, the clown said, “I saw that!” He stomped toward us with a painted grin. Hollywood stood up to confront him, and the guy pulled out a small device, which at first I assumed was some kind of clown gadget, like a squirting flower, until he sprayed Wood in the face with a mist of mace. He pointed the can at me. “You want some, you punk?” Some of the initial shot had somehow reached me. My eyes began to burn. I grabbed Wood, got us off the bus, and we staggered into a sporting goods store. Fortunately, the manager, a Black guy, let us use their employees-only bathroom. We told him the story, and he gave us his card. Said he could get us jobs, but neither of us wound up calling.

  The entries in the journal only last for nine days, taking up just a page and a half of a small notebook. I included a crew meeting, a fight at a park, a truce struck on the bus, two all-nighters I pulled, one tagging up a bus yard. My final entry in the journal had nothing to do with writing. It was about school, senior pictures, me in a rented tuxedo. The rest of the book is blank.

  Retirement came early for taggers. Seventeen seemed to be the cutoff, a year after you were eligible for a driver’s license, a year before you’d be tried as an adult. I knew hundreds of writers, bus-hopping fanatics, but only one over seventeen who was still active.

  The next time I’d carry around a marker, they were for dry-erase boards. I was a first-year teacher at a school designed for kids on probation. My new monikers were: Lamborghini, Lambambino, Laminator. My favorite: Lamskino. The student who gave me this name explained from the back row, “Lam is your slave name, Lamskino is your hip-hop name.”

  a reversal

  I’m still a writer, but I labor over words now, not letters, sentences, not tags. Maybe I became a literary writer, a memoirist, for the same reason I became a graffiti writer: to be remembered. A graffiti writer, through their tag, screams to the public, “I will not be forgotten!” A literary writer, though not as pushy about it, says the same through their stories.

  As a memoirist, I seek ways to reassemble the past. I composed my own generation poem, combining characters from the names of my relatives. Mine is a reverse generation poem, not constructed to name but from names. It contains blood from both sides of my family, women and men. No hierarchy exists, the characters and generations jumbled. Twenty characters in all, following the form of the Mao family poem, a quatrain comprised of two couplets, each line five characters. I allow myself to cheat once. I don’t use the character 甥, Saang, from my name, too h
ard to fit “nephew” into the poem. I break that character in half, only using the radical 生, “to be born.” Since it’s also pronounced Saang, a homonym, read aloud, my character can still be heard in the last syllable of the verse.

  玉鳳英能曼 A jade phoenix has superior grace.

  燕子瑞安靜 A swallow carries luck and peace.

  雪約易培誠 Wipe the contract clean, replace, and foster truth.

  明天茵麗生 Tomorrow, radiant flowers will bloom.

  * * * * * *

  chapter 5

  Left Behind

  the goalie

  After my father moved to Minnesota, he still thought of himself as part of the family, the head of our household in fact. My mom thought of herself as a single parent, left to raise three kids on her own. If you were to ask my father, he’d scoff at the notion that my mom had been a single parent. “I was the one working six days a week,” he might say. “Where do you think the money came from?” According to the forms they’d fill out each year for the San Francisco Housing Authority, Bah Ba was right, my mother was not a single parent, by her own admission. But this was on paper. Day-to-day, she was a single parent, thrown into a game where sitting out the next play wasn’t an option. Didn’t have the luxury of a sub. And forget about double-teaming. She was a lone goalie on a vast field, the last line of defense.

  left-behind syndrome

  One in five children in China has a migrant parent. In a survey of these parents, eighty percent said they sought jobs in the city to improve life for themselves and their children, yet forty percent understood their migration would also negatively impact their children who they’d left in the countryside.