by Dickson Lam
“Oh my God, Mr. Lam, what are you breaking in my house?” Lakida asked.
“’Kida stop playing. Check on your cake,” Tanya said. She leaned in towards me and said, “She’s making carrot cake for you.”
“Either she’s real sweet,” I said, “or she knows she’s in trouble.”
“Don’t play me like that, Lam,” ’Kida said.
“Go ahead and sit down Mr. Lam. ’Kida will bring your plate over.”
The living rooms of these new units were smaller, the ceiling also lower. The kitchen was a kitchenette, no room for a table. I pictured my father eating with my brother’s family. They’d sit around the couch, the same one Bah Ba had shipped from Minnesota
years ago.
I took a gulp of the margarita. Lakida brought over my plate: barbeque chicken, corn, and potato salad on the side. They sat down with theirs.
The conference would go as expected. I showed them Lakida’s grades. I recycled comments from previous conferences, “Do these grades reflect your best?” “What’s stopping you from achieving the way you know that you can?” We ended with an action plan, what each of us would do differently to help Lakida succeed. I took notes and promised copies.
This was a breeze compared to two other parent-teacher conferences I’d had that week. One was another house visit with Eric, a Chinese kid with a single mom. It was always the missing Chinese fathers that made my own father loom over the parent-teacher meetings, never the Chinese dads who showed up to the conferences. That wasn’t the kind of dad I had.
Eric had crummy grades. He’d come late to school all the time. His mother didn’t know what to do. She had to leave for work early in the mornings, so she couldn’t get him out of bed herself. She suggested that if her son arrived tardy, I should go old school on him, reach for a ruler or just slap him upside the head. I explained why I couldn’t do that, but I couldn’t think of the Chinese word for “illegal.” I just kept saying “I can’t do that.” She thought I was a softie.
The other parent conference was held in my classroom. I thought it was going to be a normal meeting. Student wasn’t doing great—action plan. Boom, go home. But we almost didn’t get to her grades. The father had come back from El Salvador, and his wife and his daughter Jenna, my advisee, had discovered that he had been cheating with a woman in El Salvador. No wonder Jenna’s grades had taken a dive. The parent-teacher conference would be the first time they’d have a real conversation since the news of the father’s affair. At home, there’d been a thick silence. I’d learned all this just minutes before the meeting began when Jenna confided in me in the hallway.
We didn’t get far in the parent-teacher conference before the father said something about Jenna needing to be honest. He meant about her skipping classes, but she interrupted him before he could finish. “You’re full of shit,” she said to him. “You talk about me being honest. Look at you.” She had dark eye shadow and lipstick. I was secretly cheering her on—Tell him! Tell him!—proud she was calling out her old man.
“Don’t talk to you father that way,” the mother said.
“No,” the father said, eyes tearing up, “I deserve it.”
The conflict resolution strategies I knew, I-statements or paraphrasing, seemed absurd for this. Couldn’t imagine saying to the father: “Can you please paraphrase what your daughter just said about you?”
Jenna left and skedaddled down the hallway. The mother went after her, so it was just me and the dad. He was slightly shorter than me, but his meaty hands and broad shoulders gave him a rugged look. I liked him, liked his parenting style, firm but compassionate, but this didn’t make it any easier for me to sit with him, a father who betrayed his family.
The walls of my classroom were mostly bare. A lifeless teal dominated. Decorating was at the bottom of my to-do list. The most ornamental thing in the room was two table runners hanging vertically, orange and red-striped. On the chalk tray rested Mao’s “Little Red Book,” thank-you letters from students, and a laminated picture of Javon that was made for his memorial at the school.
“I don’t know what to do, Mr. Lam,” Jenna’s father said. “She won’t talk to me.”
I had to get him Kleenex from my desk. I probably needed a tissue myself, but I was trying to hold it together. “Give her time,” I said.
“I don’t see her changing.”
“I know you’re a good father,” I said. It was like I was talking to my own father. I didn’t want to continue, but I forced out some lines. “Don’t give up on her,” I said, “even though she’s got nothing but mean things to say. You’ll have to take it for a while. Prove to her you’re truly sorry.”
We managed to reconvene and actually talk about Jenna’s grades. I’d convinced her to come back in, give her dad a second chance. I was a hypocrite, I know, but Jenna wasn’t me, and she wasn’t in my situation. She was mad, but I could tell she didn’t want to write her dad off forever. I ain’t gonna lie though, I was tempted to advise her, “Once a cheater, always a cheater.” I wanted Jenna to join my club: Children Who Had Disowned Their Fathers. I had to remember, this wasn’t about me and my issues; it was about my advisee. That’s when I knew I couldn’t keep doing that job.
Ga Jeh was visiting from San Diego. She wanted to spend the day with Jordan and Alana. The movies then the park. And of course the ice cream truck by the sandlot, even though she knew Goh Goh didn’t want his kids eating sweets. The thing was, she had to drop them off in North Beach, and only Bah Ba would be home. Goh Goh was out of town, and his wife was working. My sister hesitated when Goh Goh told her this, but he assured her that it’d be fine. The plan was simple. Jordan and Alana would ring their apartment, and Bah Ba would buzz them in. Ga Jeh wouldn’t have to see or talk to our father.
It had been months since she saw the kids. Jordan was seven, his cheeks less chubby. Alana was three, and Ga Jeh worried that it might take them a bit before they’d warm to her. She was Yi Goo Jeh, Second Aunt. I was Saam Sook, Third Uncle. It doesn’t translate well. There weren’t two aunts or three uncles. The numbers signaled our birth order. My sister loved being an aunt, loved to hear them say, Yi Goo Jeh, so I started calling her that too, and she’d call me Saam Sook.
She’d phone my mom on weekends because our nephew and niece would spend the night. She’d ask our nephew, “What does Yi Goo Jeh like?”
“Good boy,” he’d reply. Even though this was an old routine that they had, Ga Jeh would celebrate his answer like he was a prodigy.
It was an overcast day, and my sister thought how odd it was that she’d already forgotten how summer in San Francisco wasn’t summer at all. She parked her SUV near the entrance at the gate, a few parking spots away rather than the parking spot directly in front, a precaution. Didn’t want to be in plain sight if Bah Ba came out.
She kept the engine running as she looked over her shoulder, waiting for Jordan and Alana to be buzzed in at the gate. Goh Goh had told Bah Ba that a friend would drop off the kids. Ga Jeh hadn’t seen our father in a few years, and she wanted to keep the streak alive. She kept busy with a new job, a promotion, more responsibilities, people to supervise, a new relationship with a guy who wasn’t a jerk—a first. After work, she’d walk across the beach. The way her toes sunk into the sand put her at ease. She’d close her eyes and hear the waves, a cleansing.
Once, when Bah Ba was out of town, I hung out at Goh Goh’s apartment. I saw a Father’s Day card pinned on Bah Ba’s room. On the front of the card, a large balloon contained the words “World’s Best Grandpa.” Jordan flipped the card to the next page, and he pointed at his own name on the bottom, the letters unaligned.
I could’ve opened Bah Ba’s bedroom door, saw his new life, what it smelled like, the pictures he might’ve had up, but I didn’t touch the door. The less you know, the easier it is to forget.
The card on the door was Goh Goh’s idea. It was weird
seeing our brother in this role, a father teaching his son to be thoughtful, sweet. For Christmas, my brother stayed up until five in the morning wrapping gifts for his kids. He tried to do Santa’s work. He assembled a Big Wheel and a kitchen play set, which took forever because of the stickers. He couldn’t figure out where they went. Harder than it sounds, he’d told me.
This is the way I’d like to think I’d be as a dad. My brother was the one who spent time with the kids. My sister-in-law, Dai So, worked a graveyard shift, supervising at a mahjong parlor, though it wasn’t always clear when she was working and when she was playing herself. She wasn’t home often. Anything to do with school, anything recreational with the kids, taking them to the park or a movie, getting them into extracurricular activities, martial arts, ballet, or just sitting at home with them, that was all on Goh Goh. Dai So was like our father in that way—unavailable. But at least she’d handle dinner. It was as though, to her, this was her sole duty as a mother, anything else optional. As soon as dinner was over, she’d be out the door with the quickness.
Goh Goh and Dai So used to argue about this, her always out, but now they fought less. They’d settled into the routine. “I’ve failed as a father,” Goh Goh once told me. He wanted more for his kids than he had, but he was struggling to pay the rent, having to borrow money occasionally from one of us. He was raising his family on the same block that he’d grown up on, a new version of his old housing complex that didn’t feel new enough, the dynamics in his own family too similar to the one that had raised him.
There was no answer at the gate of the complex. The kids turned back to my sister confused. She lowered her rear window and reversed so they could hop back in the car. Take them to their mom’s job, she thought.
“I think Yeh Yeh is asleep,” Jordan said. When Jordan calls Bah Ba, Yeh Yeh, my sister’s body shudders like mine. Our father has a new identity, untainted.
Ga Jeh unlocked the car door. Through the thick bars of the gate, she saw a figure approaching. “Yeh Yeh,” Alana hollered. They didn’t understand that we didn’t speak to our father, their grandfather. I wondered what we would tell them when they got older, how honest we’d be.
My sister reached behind the passenger seat, past the Snoopy tissue box that hung over the seat and pushed the rear door open. “Get in, Jordan.” Ga Jeh came around the car and picked up Alana, brought her to the other side and stuck her in the car seat, fastening the buckle.
“But it’s Yeh Yeh,” Jordan said. My father was at the gate.
“I said now, Jordan,” Ga Jeh screamed. “Get in!”
My nephew climbed in and closed the door.
“Jordan!” Bah Ba waved his hand like he was flagging a taxi.Ga Jeh screeched off. My father didn’t know my sister drove an SUV.
The kids were silent in the car, scared of how angry my sister had gotten. Ga Jeh neared downtown and saw Alana’s face in the rearview mirror. She looked as if she was bracing herself to be hit. My sister pulled over.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” my sister said.
“How come you don’t like Yeh Yeh?” Jordan asked.
Ga Jeh leaned toward the backseat. “He’s a very bad man,” she said to both of them, her voice cracking. “Don’t forget that.”
My father lived with my brother for several years before Goh Goh finally kicked him out. I was surprised that it took that long. Bah Ba was drinking again, and this, obviously, did not pair well with babysitting duties. The first strike was when my brother came home from work and Jordan was missing. My father was in his room, doing who knows what. “Jordan’s here somewhere,” Bah Ba told my brother. “I picked him up from school.” They searched the house, walked around the courtyard, but no luck. Then my brother received a call from Jordan’s school. He was still at the after-school program, waiting to get picked up.
The second strike involved my niece. Goh Goh came home from work, and once again, one of his children was missing, this time, his daughter. Bah Ba was outside the complex, smoking a cig. “She should be upstairs,” my father said. “That’s where I left her.”
“You shouldn’t be leaving her at all,” my brother said. “She’s three.”
They, or it’s possible just my brother, found her in the play area in the courtyard around the corner from the apartment. She’d wandered outside by herself. There would be no third strike.
three against one
The hardest checkmate to deliver is when you’re up three pieces to one: a king, knight, and bishop versus a lone king. Even grandmasters struggle with this endgame, some settling for a draw. The tricky part is coordinating the three pieces, to get this motley crew to work in tandem. If they’re to win, they must control adjacent squares, forming a wall the enemy king cannot pass. The wall closes in on the king until he’s forced to a corner of the board where checkmate is finally delivered. Easier said than done. I’d offer my students a hundred bucks if they could execute this checkmate, but they never could. Just when they thought their plan was working, that they were pushing the king to the edge of the board, the enemy king would once again find a gap in their shoddy wall and slip through to safety.
single room occupancy
Bah Ba now lives in an SRO on the outskirts of Chinatown, one room, comparable to a large walk-in closet. He shares a kitchen and bathroom with all the tenants on his floor. I imagine cockroaches, leaking ceilings, cigarette butts crammed into window tracks. Early retirement hasn’t panned out for my father. He has to work again. My brother points out the place as we drive past, a dry cleaner on a quiet street.
He doesn’t live alone. He has a new wife, a homeland chick, not that much older than me. I’ll say this about my father—the guy is resourceful. When he was living with my brother, he stumbled upon a letter from a childhood friend of my sister-in-law. The friend wanted to marry an American, become an American. My dad figured he fit the bill.
The friend had the same last name as Dai So, which was typical, villagers sharing the same family name. They weren’t all relatives, but it also wasn’t out of the question for villagers to be secretly related. Their families had lived side by side for generations. It was taboo to marry within the village, a risk of inbreeding.
Goh Goh and his wife made plans to visit Macau. My brother had never met her folks. “I’d like to come along,” Bah Ba said. “I’m family, too.”
That’s how my father met his second wife, perhaps a distant cousin of his daughter-in-law.
presents
We met at my sister’s house for Christmas. She moved back to the Bay and lived now with her husband in an apartment minutes from the coast. She was the one who organized our holiday get-togethers. She’d delegate who’d bring what. I brought lasagna, no meat. My sister didn’t eat beef, and like me, no pork.
Ga Jeh was all about the holidays. So was her husband. They’d driven an hour north to a tree farm. It was a tradition in his family, cutting down the tree, and my sister had embraced his family’s traditions as though they were hers. They’d decorated their tree with ornaments from both of their childhoods.
I was on break from graduate school, my second MFA. I’d jumped immediately into another creative writing program after already completing one, first in New Jersey, now in Houston. I was buying time, another couple of years that I could live a couple thousand miles from my father. Before I’d left June Jordan I’d given a speech at a fundraiser for the school. In front of the audience that included students, parents, and colleagues, I’d announced it’d be my last year at June Jordan. I was leaving to write a memoir, a writer once again. “I tell my students to follow their dreams,” I’d said, “so I need to follow mine.” Translation: Enough about the kids, what about me!
I’d told Ga Jeh what I’d planned to write, and she gave me the green light. “I don’t mind if you have to write about ‘that,’” she said. “I remember reading a memoir that had a similar situation and thought, �
�How can that happen to people?’ but in reality, it had already happened to me. I trust that your book will be an inspiration to others and if they’re going through something similar, they’ll know they’re not alone.”
I’d sent her a story of mine that had gotten published. In the story, I question if I should bring up the subject of abuse with my sister. I want to shelter her from more pain. After Ga Jeh read the story, we sat down over tea and discussed the abuse for the first time at length, perhaps the first time she’s ever been so willing with anyone. A few weeks later, she scheduled an appointment with a therapist.
When we finished the Christmas dinner, it was time for presents. My sister and her husband gave Jordan and Alana multiple gifts, including stocking stuffers, but Jordan was nine and was starting to be a brat. He’d open a present, take a quick peek inside the box, and, if it was clothes, he’d toss the box aside and move on to the next gift. If it wasn’t Legos, it was junk.
The next day, we were at my mother and Willie’s house. Jordan would call Willie “Grandpa,” and probably because of this, I started to see Willie as my, if not father, stepfather. When Jordan was younger, Willie introduced him to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Jordan would watch it on repeat the whole day. He’d make Willie and me join him for the “Me Ol’ Bamboo” song. He’d give us each a rolled-up sheet of paper, and we’d pretend it was a bamboo stick. The three of us would dance along to the choreographed routine, high-stepping around the living room, making the silliest faces we could while trying to stay in sync with each other. Watching the way Willie was with my brother’s kids—he’d take them out every chance he had—I had to admit we were lucky to have this grandpa in our family.
I called Jordan into the office. “Close the door behind you,” I said. “Grab that chair and bring it here.” I may not have been a parent, but I’d been a high school teacher for seven years, and if I wasn’t taking bullshit anymore from students, I’d be damned if I was gonna let my third-grade nephew get away with his ungrateful attitude.
