Paper Sons: A Memoir

by Dickson Lam

  Children of migrant parents were also surveyed. Living in rural villages, a third said they talk to their parents on the phone once a month, and of this number, half of them said their conversations last for less than three minutes. One girl, caught by her grandparents slashing her wrists, wrote in a letter, “if I hurt my hands, my mother will come home.” Others have the opposite reaction. An eight-year-old boy claims, “I used to miss my parents, but not anymore.” This same village boy also believes he’s going to marry his lamb. Another girl writes in her diary: “What’s the big deal of having no mother anyway? I can grow up without a mom.” These kids suffer from what has been dubbed “left-behind children syndrome,” higher rates of psychological issues and criminal behavior.

  thief

  Before I was a graffiti writer, I was a thief. Jim was my mentor. He relied on guile, stereotypes, and insincerity. He’d get to know the workers at stores, their work schedule, what they were studying in college, if they were in a relationship, if they had kids. Jim had these large round eyes that made his bullshit believable. He’d ask them to bring down a jersey that hung on a rack high above, or maybe he’d have them search for a different size in the back room, and then we’d make our move. We’d stuff the hats in our jackets at the same time, on Jim’s word.

  Sometimes it would be me, Jim, and another couple of guys from our neighborhood, but when Jim wanted to hit a new store, where we didn’t know the salesclerks, he’d push for us to ditch the others, for us to be a duo. Store clerks saw me and him, the Asian dudes, as innocent, harmless, and these same clerks would’ve been on red alert if we had brought our Black homies. It seemed wrong to deceive our friends—we’d make up excuses of where we were going—but I couldn’t argue with Jim’s logic or the results. I’d wind up stealing over two hundred hats. Kids would place orders with me, what team, what color, the style. It was more efficient than the other way around, stealing them randomly, then acting like a salesman. I went to sleep with a wad of bills in a shoebox underneath my bed. Never had to ask my mom for money anymore.

  The day Jim and I got caught at Marshalls, or rather, the day I got caught, the T-shirts we’d stolen weren’t for us but ’Dullah’s uncle. He hadn’t offered us much, ten bucks for three, but he’d taken us to see Boyz n the Hood, so we gave him a discount.

  We rode the escalator up and left Marshalls with the shirts in our possession, mine tucked in my waistband. I started thinking about the drumsticks at Woolworths across the street. We met the downtown crowd and followed the flow of pedestrians. Jim took out a plastic bag and dumped the two shirts he’d stolen into it. He passed the bag to me. I started to pull out the shirt in my waistband,

  but someone grabbed my arm. A man with slick black hair. He snatched the bag and examined the tags. “Got one, fellas,” he said to a huddle of men.

  Jim was gone.

  They brought me back to Marshalls and escorted me towards the security room in the back. All these men wore leather jackets and chewed gum. As I passed the workers on the floor, Latino women, they glowered at me, which only made me think they were chumps. You don’t own this store, I wanted to say. One of the men tugged me by the arm into the security room.

  “Sit down,” the man with slick hair said.

  I sat and faced a console of small black and white monitors.

  “We see everything,” he said.

  “You can’t hide shit from us,” a deep voice said from behind me. The owner of the voice was tall and lean. “Show him, Earl.”

  Earl played with the buttons and joysticks, making the cameras zoom in and out and rotate in every direction. I wasn’t impressed. These gadgets hadn’t caught me. It was dumb luck. I happened to pull out the shirt in front of them.

  I must’ve made some smart-ass face because Earl took a loud step toward me and said, “All right tough guy, we’ll see what your parents think.”

  He called my mother, getting the number from me by threatening to file charges if I didn’t cooperate. I heard my mother on the phone yelling. “I’m glad I’m not you,” Earl said.

  The guys launched into a lecture, clichéd and rehearsed: See kid, in life you have to be smart. Don’t let people manipulate you. It probably wasn’t your idea, right? But you’re the one paying for it.

  I got the sense this was their favorite part of their job. They were talking over each other, fighting over who would get to make which point. Half an hour of this was hard to endure, tuning them out while maintaining a face of thoughtful reflection. There was no guarantee they wouldn’t press charges.

  My mother finally arrived with Willie. He was dressed in his driver uniform. My mom walked past me, said nothing, and introduced herself to the plainclothes security guards. She wore black boots and a rabbit fur jacket. I hated that thing. I was no animal rights activist; I just knew Willie bought it.

  She used a soft-spoken tone with Earl like she was at a funeral reception, then she came back over to me and knocked me upside the head. “Mouh yuhng a! ” she said, waving her finger at me as if she were casting a spell.

  “You’ve really embarrassed your mother, Dickson,” Willie said. I wanted to tell him to mind his own fucking business. He was an extra in the scene. It was unfair that I couldn’t hate him more. He made my mother happy, and I was glad someone had that job.

  “Mrs. Lam—” Earl said.

  “Ms. Lee,” my mom said.

  “Ms. Lee, you’re free to take him home.”

  “You want to keep him here longer? Yeah. I don’t care.”

  We drove home in Willie’s sports car hatchback. I had to squish into the passenger seat with my mother, my face almost pressed against the window. He played some Johnny Mathis and sang to my mom. He reached for her hand, but she pulled back and turned to me.

  “Why you steal?”

  “I needed money.” This wasn’t the entire truth. Sometimes I stole just to steal. Anything could be mine. The world became less cruel.

  “If you want, just ask.”

  The next week she made me go to Macy’s with her. Had me pick out a new pair of jeans. Said now I’d have no excuse to steal. I grabbed a pair of overalls. I knew my mom felt guilty, blaming our lack of money for my behavior, and I played along. Sometimes I saw my mother as just another adult to manipulate and deceive.

  I wore the overalls on the first day back to school with both straps unbuckled. The front flap hung. I let the pants sag. I had no belt, and they were a size or two larger than necessary. There didn’t seem to be any other way to wear them.

  squeeze

  Around the corner from my house lived a guy named Levi. He was a dap-giving fanatic. He couldn’t get through a sentence without exchanging pounds. For a few months we were road dogs, in-fuckin-separable. A couple of years later, he’d be out there hustling on the corner, but back then he hadn’t started down that path. He was a tagger, a rookie, and I was showing him the ropes. I played the big brother, at least when it came to writing. I vouched for him to join TFB. Plus, he and I also formed our own crew, FMW, the name self-aggrandizing like all crew names: Frisco’s Most Wanted. Claiming multiple crews simultaneously, juggling competing loyalties, was a part of the game.

  I hooked Levi up with a legit marker, the tip as wide as a baseball card, not that puny toy shit from Walgreens. I taught him how to hold a marker at the correct angle. His tag name was FBS, Full Blooded Samoan, but his mom was Filipino. I never saw his father.

  Once, me and Levi were on a bus, making our way to the rear door, and he said, “Watch this.” We were standing over three girls sitting side by side chatting in Chinese. Their hair wasn’t styled in any memorable way. No gel or hairspray. I thought Levi might hit his name up before we got off, so I kept my eyes on the driver, but Levi tapped me on the arm. “I said, watch, blood.”

  He reached down, rammed his hand between the thighs of the middle girl, and squeezed the crotch of her
acid-washed jeans. His fingers were a clamp. He jiggled her while she tried to jerk away.

  The beep from the rear door signaled our stop. The green light above the exit lit up. Levi bulled past me. “C’mon,” he said. I was still staring at the girl’s crotch. She had meaty thighs. Her mom probably called her fat. Feih Mui. She wore raggedy sneakers.

  “Motherfucker, you coming?” Levi was holding the door open for me.

  I leapt off the bus, and the rear door swung closed.

  I wasn’t innocent. I used to grab women’s asses and run. I learned from Jim. On crowded buses, he’d brush his hand over a girl’s behind, then cup it, right before he ran off the bus. Once, we followed a woman wearing a business skirt up a staircase near a plaza. It was my turn. I squeezed her ass and took off down the stairwell before she could turn around. I felt comfortable enough doing this sort of thing that I once did it on a family trip to Lake Tahoe. At the buffet line of a restaurant, when I saw a woman in a wool dress lean over the buffet table to scoop pasta from a serving tray, I grabbed her butt, and I didn’t run. I don’t know what I expected to happen, but what she did in response, I hadn’t even considered, though it was the obvious reaction: she slapped me. Not my face but my shoulder. Her mouth was agape. Before she could form any words, I fled back to my table carrying an empty plate. I had a cousin get my food, and I spent the rest of the dinner with one hand shielding my face.

  Levi watched the girl through the window as the bus pulled off. “You seen her face?” He leaned on my shoulder and laughed. He slapped palms with me, but I didn’t slide my fingers to interlock mine with his. They were the same fingers that had clamped the girl.

  “You know you wrong for that,” I said, but my words weren’t firm, chuckles mixed in between. I gave Levi a light shove off the curb, and he continued across the street to our projects, screaming “FMW.” It was a two-man crew, just me and him, and we had no intentions of expanding.

  garbage

  When my mother was out by herself, men constantly approached her. They’d say corny stuff like: “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” I’m sure there were also vulgar comments, but she never repeated them to me. Sometimes a white guy would hand her a business card: “Modeling Agent.” Some would follow her around in their cars. Once, my sister had to check a guy that was staring at our mom a little too intently. “You got a fucking staring problem?” she said.

  Our mom, decked in red, walked the streets with Guinness-World-Record long hair, which everybody stared at, not just men, but women, kids, old folks. Some women would pay her compliments, ask her how long she’d been growing it out. Others would frown in disapproval, as though my mom was nothing but an attention whore. Either way, people scanning her hair up and down made me feel like these strangers were gawking at my mother naked.

  When she’d throw out the garbage at night, after dinner and cleaning up the house, she’d have a homier look. Hair tied up in a bun. No makeup and heels, instead, an oversized T-shirt and flip-flops. Still, the trio of men (fathers?) who’d hang around the bench by the dumpster would catcall her. One night, I heard her getting into it with them, though I couldn’t make out the words. If I had had more guts I would’ve stepped to one of them, made a scene, like knocking the brown paper bag from his hand, but I was fifteen and felt small. That’s when I began to throw out the garbage myself.

  creep

  Ga Jeh was no fan of our mother’s fashion sense, the leopard-skin leggings, the gold platform shoes. “With those boots,” my sister once said, “Mom looks like a hooker.” My sister wasn’t into jewelry, didn’t wear boots or the color red (the red Honda Civic—yep, my mom’s choice), and if my sister wore any makeup, it was hardly noticeable. But you didn’t need anything flashy to attract the gaze of a man. One time we were at a restaurant, and a Chinese guy at the table next to us kept staring at my sister’s breasts like they were the grand prize. The guy was with his whole family. I leaned over to his table and told his son, who was around my age, in his twenties, “Hey, your dad’s staring at my sister’s breasts. Tell him to stop. It’s creepy.” I could’ve told his wife, but forcing his son to shame him promised a special kind of dishonor.

  prayers

  Girls left behind in China are often targets of sexual violence. In Guangdong Province, home of my mother’s ancestral village, ninety percent of sexual assault victims in some regions are girls who have been left behind. “Many of these tragedies might have been prevented had they been living with their parents,” an NGO report claims.

  For my sister, it was the opposite. Her father was her tragedy. Bah Ba’s decision to leave might’ve been received by Ga Jeh as an answer to her prayers. She was the only one of us still attending church.

  You lie in bed dreading that turn of the knob. You know he will enter but not when. When he does, you don’t know what he will do, when he will stop, if he will go further this time. You pretend to be asleep, like you always do. You don’t want to see him this way. You don’t want to see yourself this way. For you to open your eyes, to face what is happening, would deny you your ability to deny.

  Your mother returns the next day bearing a gift: a Disneyland T-shirt. She shows you a photo taken at night of her and her pal Mickey Mouse. You go in your room, shut the door, get on your knees, recite the Lord’s Prayer, and beg your Father for an end. One day, He delivers. Bah Ba must move. Faith is restored.

  I’m not religious. I don’t believe in miracles. The way I see it, or the way I’d like to see it, is that my father accepted the job in Minnesota to stop himself from turning that knob, that something was operating inside Bah Ba, perhaps at a subconscious level, to remove himself from that apartment. He was a boogeyman who caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

  Bah Ba would return every year, but his visits into my sister’s room stopped.

  I can’t credit my father though. His trips to Cali never coincided with my mother’s vacations. She had to stick around for the meeting with the housing authority—Bah Ba was never left alone with us again. Whether my father was a changed man or a predator thwarted by circumstances, I’ll never know.

  A set of overdue questions: Why do I attempt to reclaim some small measure of humanity for my father? This was the man who abused everyone in my family. Why is it, any nugget of information, real or speculative, that I can uncover which complicates Bah Ba, humanizes him, why do these discoveries (imaginations) make me feel victorious? Why am I obsessed with reminding you that the Devil was a fallen angel?

  trust

  I was sixteen and on punishment. I’d gotten arrested for having a backpack full of spray cans on a bus, and just my luck, the next day, my history teacher called my mother and told her he hadn’t seen me in weeks. She showed up to the next class to check on me. I saw her through the little window of the class door. It was a new semester, and she didn’t want the same old crap, like the time I stayed out till three in the morning while she had no idea where I was. That was the night I was at the Ghost Yard. While I was running around in the abandoned lot, my mother had gone up to Rob’s apartment in search of me, pounding on their door, waking Rob and his mother up. Poor Rob had two moms badger him about my whereabouts, but he honestly had no idea where I was either. He’d retired from writing, was trying to clean up his act, wanted me to do the same, which only made it more difficult for me to put down my marker. I was tired of following in his footsteps.

  When I finally got home that night, I went straight to the bathroom. I had ink all over my fingers. My mom was trying to chide me through the door. I told her I’d fallen asleep at a friend’s house. I jumped in the shower. I used her shower brush to scrub off the ink from underneath my fingernails. When I turned off the shower, she was still yammering away.

  Now, I was supposed to come home straight after school, but on this day, I came home two hours late. She got in my face about it. “Why can’t you just trust me?” I sa
id. “I told you I’ll do better this semester.”

  “Trust you?” She made “trust” sound like the foulest word in English. She opened the front door. “Like to be outside so much, go out again. Don’t have to come back. Get your own place. No rules.”

  I didn’t look up from watching TV. If I said anything, my words would only fuel her anger.

  “Maybe you need furniture for your new place,” she said. “I’ll help.” She picked up a chair and hurled it into the courtyard. Rob happened to be walking by.

  “You OK, Maggie?” he asked.

  She shook her head like a pitcher shaking off the signs of their catcher. “Take my son,” she said, waving him inside our house. “Please Robert. Sure. Sure.”

  It wasn’t obvious to Rob that she was being sarcastic, or maybe it wasn’t obvious to me that she wasn’t. I pointed with my head for Rob to leave.

  “You don’t want to graduate,” she said to me. “Why wait, you can be a bum now.” My mom picked up another chair and heaved it outside, knocking against the chain-link fence of the garden.

  Rob took a step back. “I think I heard my mom call.” He turned and hurried upstairs.

  Granny from next door—who my mother called Ms. Johnson—came over. Probably heard the noise. The walls were thin. She lived with her two daughters who also had daughters. “There ain’t no need for all this,” she said to my mom.

  My mom said something to her, and Granny shot me a look. Next thing I knew my mother had her head on Granny’s shoulder, and Granny was stroking her back.

  the key to the combination

  In front of a boarded-up building on Haight and Fillmore, we were huddled in clusters, waiting for the two leaders of 3F to arrive. They were to decide whether or not SHIM would join the tagging crew. He was a goofy dude. He’d smile to himself and make animal noises, the sound perhaps of a dying hyena. It seemed 3F was lowering their standards, and that’s why Hollywood had brought me here. “If they letting SHIM join,” he’d said, “that loser, they gotta let you in.”