Paper Sons: A Memoir

by Dickson Lam

  Mao directed students at universities and high schools to “bombard the headquarters” of the Party. Students had been waiting for this their whole lives, an opportunity to be revolutionaries, too young to have participated in the communist revolution. Now it was their turn to save the nation. Teenagers dressed in green paramilitary outfits with a wide leather belt. The faded uniforms had belonged to their parents. They’d dusted them off and added a red armband inscribed with the characters: Red Guard.

  It’s easy to see these kids simply as victims of Mao. Dictator brainwashes youth. They carried around Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, a small red book you could fit in a breast pocket. Parroting his words, they’d try to out-Mao each other. They wore badges displaying his image pinned right above their heart. Posters depicted Mao as the Red Sun. The cult of personality was in full effect, no doubt, but this tempting narrative masks the complexity of the Red Guards. These teenagers weren’t mindless pawns. The resulting violence was largely spontaneous, unpredictable, and layered.

  The Red Guards may have all quoted Mao’s words like scriptures, but competing factions arose from the outset with fundamentally different interpretations, all claiming to be the true disciples of Mao. The most radical of the Red Guards were, ironically, the children of former landlords. They were stigmatized and discriminated against by the class backgrounds of their parents. A couplet that was often recited: “If the father is a hero, the son is a brave man; if the father is a reactionary, the son is a rotten egg.” These radical Red Guards responded to the Cultural Revolution by calling for an attack on the Party. The political system had to be reconstituted to pave the way for yet another new China, where you wouldn’t be judged by the deeds of your parents.

  On the other end of the spectrum were the conservative Red Guards, children of Party cadres. They went to elite schools, ones that the children of landlords were banned from. These privileged kids weren’t about to attack a system that benefitted them. Instead, their spin on Mao Zedong Thought was that the traitors to the revolution weren’t Party cadres like their parents but members of the former ruling class—landlords, intellectuals, the bourgeoisie—plotting to recapture power. The conservative Red Guards attacked remnants of bourgeoisie culture, burning books and smashing art. They ransacked homes searching for Confucian texts and recordings of Beethoven. They’d chase anyone down with long hair. They’d pinned them to the ground, serve them with an ass kicking and a haircut at the same time.

  The two factions of Red Guards, known later as the Lost Generation, duked it out in city streets. The question that divided them: Were we destined to repeat the mistakes of our parents, or was it possible to transcend the failings of our forebears?

  reach!

  My first week at Cal, I was reeled into a student organization, REACH! Our organization’s primary activities were of the typical do-gooder variety, visits to high schools to encourage youth to apply to college. We’d present info on higher education in the form of a jeopardy game, tossing lychee candy at kids when they answered correctly. They’d leave with Cal folders and pencils. The university claimed us as their ambassadors, but we were also activists. We marched, rallied, and camped out on Sproul Plaza. We participated in civil disobedience, disrupting a speech by the Chancellor, a sit-in outside the office of the mayor of Oakland.

  We were the Asian Pacific Islander Recruitment and Retention Center, known simply as REACH! The name was an acronym, standing for something convoluted, really just an excuse to capitalize all of our letters, a “backronym.” As if all caps weren’t enough, we insisted on an exclamation mark at the end of our name. We feared being ignored. Asians were already the largest racial group at Cal, but those weren’t the kind of Asians we’d recruit, the ones from affluent suburbs with mommies and daddies with professional backgrounds. We targeted underrepresented Asians, basically, Asians in the ghetto, mostly Southeast Asians: Cambodians, Vietnamese, Hmong, Mien, and Lao, their families arriving in the country as refugees. We’d ask counselors to send us kids from these backgrounds who weren’t even on track to graduate high school, the fuckups, like me.

  The heart and soul of REACH! was a pair of charismatic and dynamic sisters, Jidan and Danfeng. Although American-born, they’d only been given Chinese names, names couched in Maoist revolutionary ideals. The three of us would talk politics nonstop. I thought people like them only existed in history books. Jidan and Danfeng were both brilliant leaders but each in their own way. Jidan was process-orientated. Had the vibe of a counselor, warm and nurturing. Danfeng was the executive director, the one who made sure we got shit done, the general. Neither let me get away with any male bullshit.

  When we were brainstorming how to get members out to a rally for affirmative action, I said, with all sincerity, “We gotta tell ’em, if y’all don’t come, y’all some straight bitches.”

  Jidan pulled me aside. “Think of the b-word like the n-word.”

  Jidan and Danfeng’s parents had also gone to UC Berkeley, student activists in the ’60s. Inspired by the Black Power movement, the shift from “Negro” to “Black,” their parents and their friends rejected “Oriental” and its exotic connotations. Fuck being a foreigner in your own country. They proclaimed they were Asian American. In fact, the term can be traced back to the Berkeley student group that Jidan and Danfeng’s parents were members of, along with Richard Aoki, the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), the first organization to ever call itself “Asian American.”

  They united with the Afro-American Student Union, the Mexican-American Student Confederation, and the Native American Student Union to form the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition that demanded a radical multicultural education, and to that end, organized one of the longest student strikes in US history. The administration at Cal called in the police, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputies, and the California Highway Patrol. Mace and tear gas were shot at students. More than a hundred and fifty were arrested. Ronald Reagan, the governor then, ordered the National Guard to squash the protests, but the heavy-handed approach backfired. The faculty union joined the strike, and two days later, the university conceded. The Ethnic Studies department was established. Thirty years later, I majored in Ethnic Studies.

  Jidan and Danfeng’s parents had raised them to fight for social justice. As kids, they didn’t play Cowboys and Indians; they played Oppressors and Freedom Fighters. While I was watching Saturday morning cartoons, they were fighting apartheid, marching down Telegraph Avenue, trying to pressure the UC Regents to divest from South Africa.

  These two sisters envisioned REACH! as our generation’s AAPA. Claiming REACH! made me an heir to the struggle.

  I had Bah Ba to thank for having time to volunteer with REACH! He was able to send checks again. I didn’t have to work. I’d received enough in grants to cover tuition and spending money, and now Goh Goh was paying for the groceries at home. He’d finally come out of his funk and started working again, picking up a job as a delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant. I’d try to talk to Goh Goh about going back to school, but he’d just grunt in response, as though what I was saying was taboo, his little bro giving him life advice.

  I’d volunteer with other student groups, including one that visited a group home, the youth referred there by their probation officers. We didn’t try to mentor or teach the kids, at least in any traditional sense. More than anything we just listened, why they were there, what they regretted, what they didn’t, the kind of men they wanted to be. The youth, Black and brown, looked more like the guys I’d hung with as a teenager than the kids REACH! served, but REACH! was the group I’d drop everything for.

  It was a new feeling working with kids who saw themselves in me, who’d say, “Dang, you look like my cousin.” It was a moment of recognition I couldn’t turn away from.

  bandaged figures

  I saw my father through the peephole. It had been four years since I last saw him. I knew he wa
s coming, but none of us understood why. His name had been dropped from the lease. The trip wasn’t required.

  “Hey,” I said, opening the door.

  “Hi,” Bah Ba said, almost inaudible. He looked smaller, or maybe it was that I’d grown. My father’s hair, though still thick, had grayed, and his face had begun to sag unkindly. He grunted as he lugged his suitcase across the kitchen. It was the same suitcase he’d always had, hard-shell with clasps and a handle, an oversized briefcase. I could’ve given him a hand, but I didn’t want to send mixed messages. Neither did my mom or brother. They barely acknowledged him as he walked by. It wasn’t like in the past when we’d roll out the red carpet, but my brother and I would at least offer a half-assed hug. Now, even that gesture seemed juvenile, like leaving milk and cookies out for Santa.

  Bah Ba came home as I was watching television in the kitchen, highlights from preseason football games. He grabbed a Budweiser from the fridge and sat down.

  “49ers, haih meih gum yaht waan?” he asked.

  “Yeah, they already showed them,” I said. “Vikings are coming up though.”

  Bah Ba went into the living room—where there was a perfectly fine television, a larger one at that—but he left his beer can on the kitchen table. He’d been relegated to the pullout sofa. My mom kept her door locked, so there wouldn’t be any funny business.

  He returned with a nail clipper and a waste basket. His shoulders were slumped forward, body deflated. It was the first time I realized I could kick my dad’s ass. Not that I had the urge to. His life had already done that for me. The restaurant he opened had flopped, and now he was back doing what he’d done damn near my whole life, sitting on a stool for hours, hunched over a table making dim sum, shrimp dumplings perhaps, using his fingers to join together edges of dough. The literal meaning of “dim sum”: “touch the heart.”

  “That’s my favorite quarterback,” I said. Randall Cunningham was competing for a starting job with the Minnesota Vikings. In his twenties, he had thrilled Eagles fans with his scrambling ability, nicknamed Gumby for the way he’d contort his body to elude opponents. He’d take off near the end zone, leaping over defenders, soaring for a score. The acrobatic feats ended after he tore his ACL. Now Cunningham had come out of retirement and was attempting to reinvent himself as a pocket passer. That was the story told by the anchor delivering the highlights, but if you had asked Cunningham himself, he would’ve said his biggest transformation was off the field. During his time away from football, he’d been baptized.

  “I hope they start him,” Bah Ba said in Cantonese. He let out a belch and began to clip his toenails, eyes stuck on the TV. Next to him on the edge of the kitchen table was a large sculpture. Carved from soapstone, it was an abstract family of four, faceless figures connected to one another through their limbs. I’d traded my Jordan XII’s for it. I’d spent the summer in Zimbabwe through a study abroad program, and I’d see folks everywhere hawking sculptures of families, but I wanted one that represented my family, a family of four that included just one parent. I was ready to give up my search when I finally found one. I threw in an extra thirty bucks to the sculptor to sweeten the deal. But I was dumb enough to pack it in my luggage instead of as a carry-on. It broke apart en route. I duct-taped it back together though, thinking the black tape would blend in with the dark stone color, but I wasn’t fooling anyone. It was an eyesore, bandaged figures.

  I thought about how awkward the conversation would be if Bah Ba were to ask what the story was behind the sculpture, how I’d have to explain that I’d been in Africa through a summer program at school, that I was a student now at UC Berkeley, entering my senior year. He might act stunned, maybe he’d say something complimentary. Worse, I’d feel obligated to ask about his life.

  I sat with him until the end of the football highlights. As I got up to leave, I slid him the plastic-wrapped remote.

  The last night my father was in town, I waited up for him in the living room. It was a little past midnight. His flight was at dawn, and I thought someone should at least say bye. For all we knew, this could be his final visit. We’d acted like we wanted it to be, leaving the room when he’d enter.

  Jerry Springer was on. A woman was in a soundproof room, waiting to reveal a secret to her boyfriend who was on stage. The guy was professing his love for his longtime girlfriend to the audience, cheesing so much you knew this was going to end badly.

  I was lying on the sofa when Bah Ba came home. It was the same sofa he’d owned in Minnesota, a twill sectional. He’d shipped it to us when he sold his house.

  “Dickson,” Bah Ba said, “meih fun gaau?” He seemed overly concerned, as though I had a bedtime. It reminded me of his last visit. I was pouring boiling water into a bowl of Cup Noodles, and he said, “Siu sum.” Be careful? I was eighteen. Maybe he had difficulty grasping that my childhood was gone.

  “I’m going to stay up for this show,” I said.

  The girlfriend had come onto the stage and was sitting next to her boyfriend, holding his hand.

  Bah Ba sank into the bean bag. He wore a polo shirt tucked in, a pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket. The shirt fit loosely on his skinny frame.

  “You ever watch this?” I asked.

  “I have to wake up early for work,” he said.

  “Right.”

  The girlfriend confessed she had been born a man. The boyfriend shoved her away, almost knocking her off the chair. Then he stood up like he was going to sock her. The audience started cheering as the security guard leapt up to the stage, “Steve! Steve! Steve!”

  “So stupid.” Bah Ba pointed with his chin at the boyfriend duped by his lover. “How could he not know?” My father laughed.

  I cringed at the irony. On top of one of the stereo floor speakers was a glass bottle in the shape of the Eiffel Tower. It was filled with slanted layers of sugar, each layer a different color, a souvenir from my mom’s trip to Paris with Willie.

  I didn’t want to have to tell Bah Ba the truth. That was my mother’s responsibility. The fact that my father still didn’t know about Willie made him more pathetic, an aging man continuing to be deceived. I’d thought he deserved it, but the man on the bean bag was not the same man I knew. He was harmless.

  I was a college student yapping about change. I’d tell kids how I’d gone from Ds in high school to UC Berkeley, how anything was possible for them—I was living proof—but when it came to my father, I could only conceive of him as a fucked-up dad.

  “It’s not too late,” I said.

  Bah Ba turned to me, and he somehow knew what I was trying to say. There was an openness in his expression, almost like that of a child.

  “You haven’t always been there,” I said, “but you can still be our Bah Ba.”

  He placed his hand on my shoulder, his touch gentle. He nodded. “Yes, OK.” His eyes glistened.

  “I forgive you,” I said and hugged him. We pulled away without looking at one another.

  “Fun gaau,” he said. “It’s late.”

  “Houh la,” I said. OK.

  At the time, I thought this was my Hollywood ending. That’s not to say my relationship with Bah Ba didn’t change at all. He called when he returned to Minnesota. Asked specifically for me. My mother wondered what the hell was going on. The day I graduated Berkeley, I phoned Bah Ba, wanted to share that moment with my father, and a week later, I received a card from him saying congratulations. He also included a check for a hundred bucks. But that was more or less the extent of our relationship for the next three years, until the birth of my brother’s son. I knew how to complain about a relationship, but I didn’t have a clue how to build one.

  stand-in parents

  “Sharing the Blue Sky” was a national campaign in China launched to support left-behind children in four sectors:

  1) daily care

  2) education

 
3) safety

  4) psychological and personal development

  Volunteers, known as “stand-in parents,” were recruited to aid in the campaign. Many of the stand-in parents were teachers who came from the same villages as the left-behind children.

  wards

  My first teaching job was back in San Francisco, at a school in Hunter’s Point, on Third and Newcomb. It was a neighborhood on the other side of the city from where I’d grown up, but I wasn’t unfamiliar with it. As a teenager, right up the street from that school, once, I was at my boy’s girlfriend’s house along with several others. We were playing cards and dominoes listening to Tony! Toni! Toné! but then the girl’s mom came home. She wasn’t supposed to have guys over. We ran upstairs to her bedroom as her mom was opening the door. The girl went to stall her mom, but before she left the room, she told us, “My mom don’t play, y’all need to jump.” We peeked out the bedroom window. We were on the second floor, and below us, there was nothing but concrete. I was going to hide in the closet, but one of us squeezed through the window and dangled from the ledge. He let go and landed awkwardly, stumbling onto the ground, but he was still in one piece, so when we heard the mom coming up the staircase, the rest of us jumped too. Besides having to crawl around my house, unable to walk for the next day, I was fine.

  The grandfather of the two elementary kids that I’d tutored managed an apartment building also in the Point, deep in the Point, at the end of a road, and during one summer, I’d catch the bus out there to tutor. The grandfather worried about my safety, but I didn’t have the heart yet to say bye to those two kids, a sister and a brother.