by Gus Lee
I found a sign that said “4th New Cadet Company” hammered to a long stone barracks stoop atop a single flight of steps. I kept my chin in, my chest out, trying to breathe and hold my eyes and head locked to the front while double-timing. It was like juggling pachyderms while dogs chewed at your ankles, your mother screamed at you, and a gasoline fire began to spread in your pants.
“YOU MOVE LIKE A CHICKEN! CLUCK YOUR WAY UP THOSE STAIRS!”
I stopped, goggle-eyed. I did not know what “cluck” meant.
“CLUCK! MAKE LIKE A CHICKEN!” cried an upperclassman.
“Cluck, sir?” I said. I was not a t’u, a rabbit. I was not a sausage, not a lopchong. I was a chicken, hsiaochi.
“POP OFF, MISTER! I CANT HEAR YOU! GIVE ME TWO CLUCKS! NOW CLUCK YOUR MISERABLE DUMBJOHN BODY UP THOSE STAIRS!”
“YES, SIR! CLUCK-CLUCK, SIR! CLUCK-CLUCK, SIR!”
The sky fell and I fluttered into a building resounding with the cries of final distress. I wanted to flee, but I surrendered to my yeh, my fate as a Chinese Chicken Little, marching to the sounds of carnivorous consumption, entering the room as would an undevout soul with foul karma. I was da ru saba chun di yuh, beaten into the eighteenth level of Buddhist hell for eighteen previous bad lives. Here, the cacophonous, volcanic bellowing in the sweltering room defeated any message that may have lain within it. A lava of fury and terror crawled over us like a live, serpentine evil. Everyone screamed in an accelerating tempo punctuated by the crash of bodies against walls and fists against metal. When was someone going to offer a hand and say, “Just kidding. Welcome to West Point. Sure is hot, isn’t it? Have a lemonade”? Please, God. Then I remembered that I made wishes only to Chinese deities. They had the power.
Outside, upperclassmen wore white hats and yelled precisely. As one ventured deeper into the cauldron, conditions worsened. Hats came off, bodies fell, apostrophes appeared, dangling modifiers would follow, and soon all hope would be lost. Flames would lick higher, flesh and bone would congeal; sausages, rabbits, and chickens would be flambéed as smoking sacrifices to military gods.
“WHAT’RE YOU DOING, CROTHEAD?! FUNCTION, MISTER, DON’T SPAZ ON ME!” screamed a dark, unhatted cadet seated behind a desk, the veins in his exceptionally thick neck competing with flexing tendons and muscles for space. He was very agitated. Agitated at me.
I saluted and screamed, “SIR, NEW CADET TING REPORTS TO THE FIRST SERGEANT OF FOURTH NEW CADET COMPANY!” I had no idea what words would pop from my mouth.
“MISTER, YOU LEFT OUT ‘AS ORDERED’! TRY AGAIN, CROT!” The first sergeant stood and leaned into me, his face so close that my eyeballs bulged from the gravitational pull of his corneas. He was like the others: angry, clean-cut, and white, his features the products of sharp chiseling. Compared to his cropped hair, my crew cut looked like malicious error. Now he was so close he had to know I was Chinese. So now it begins. Remember, you’re American, ch’uan hsin ch’uan i—with whole heart and mind. No going back.
“SIR, NEW CADET TING REPORTS TO THE FIRST SERGEANT OF FOURTH NEW CADET COMPANY, AS ORDERED, SIR!”
“ONLY ONE ‘SIR’ IN A STATEMENT!” he screamed. “CRAM THAT NECK IN! GIMME MORE WRINKLES, YOU SORRY STINKING GROSSED-OUT KNOB!”
I pressed my chin through my jaw, my throat, my neck, trying to merge it with my spine. Maybe, if I braced hard enough, I might pass into another room; perhaps, into another dimension. My eyes began to roll around in my head like lost and unrelated marbles.
The first sergeant looked at a roster. “You’re in Third Squad, First Platoon,” he snarled. “Room ten-forty-one. Squad leader’s Mr. Alsop.” He suddenly lunged at me and screamed, “WHAT SQUAD, BEANHEAD?!” I recoiled and instinctively formed fists.
“YOU FLINCHED, YOU SORRY GROSS CROT! WHAT SQUAD’RE YOU IN?!”
“SIR, I AM IN FIRST SQUAD!” I shouted, trying to control my compressed throat, which was pulsating without my wishing it to.
“THAT’S WRONG, CRAPHEAD!” he screamed in that unique, Negro-like, military meter, rocketing the first word, banging his fist onto the hollow metal desk and making the roster—and half the world and most of the chambers of my heart—jump. “YOU’RE IN THIRD SQUAD, FIRST PLATOON!” He lifted his chin, making an announcement to the world: “THE BEASTS IN THIS, THE FINEST FRIGGING COMPANY IN FIRST DETAIL, AREN’T GONNA EAT, SLEEP, OR BE VERY DAMNED MERRY THIS FINE SUMMER, YOU GOT THAT, CROTHEAD?!”
“YES, SIR!” I cried, as someone new began to roar at me. He had Henry Fonda’s flat midwestern twang, with the volume turned up.
“THAT’S THE GROSSEST PIECE OF DOGCRAP SPECK EVER DISPLAYED IN BEAST! YOU PROBABLY CAN’T REMEMBER YOUR OWN NAME! YOU’RE GOING TO BE LUCKY TO SEE FOOD THIS SUMMER, YOU GOT THAT, CROTBEAN!!?”
“YES, SIR!” I screamed.
“I CAN’T HEAR YOU! POP OFF, MISTER!” cried the first sergeant.
I screamed again in an escalating fury, using all my lung air to speak. It was as if everyone were yelling to each other from distant mountaintops, trying to explain that their hair was aflame. All these white guys screaming at me. And had he really said no food this summer?
I lived for food and cared little for perspiration. Tony Barraza, my boxing coach, had marveled at my ability to work hard and to sweat little. Now I was bracing at West Point, sweat pouring from me like rats from a holed freighter. The human body was 80 percent water, and my brain was shrinking. At this rate I could be in very big trouble, very quickly.
Kai Ting, you funny-lookin’ China-boy crapforbrains, you are in major-league, very big trouble. No food for the summer. Mr. Alsop. Room ten-something. Third Squad, First Platoon. Glasses are not welcome here. My name is Ting. My name used to be Ting.
The first sergeant was pasting angry shouts all over the next victim in the Fourth New Cadet Company lineup, teaching him how to throw his rigid body against a wall to allow an upperclassman to pass. “HIT THAT WALL, MISTER! KISS IT WITH YOUR BACKSIDE, YOU SORRY CROT! WHEN I WALK, I WANNA HEAR YOUR BODY SLAM THAT WALL! I DON’T WANT YOUR SORRY DISREPUTABLE UNMILITARY BEANHEAD CORPSE NEAR ME!”
Henry Fonda’s voice said to me, “Report to your room. Deposit your luggage. FALL OUT INTO THE COMPANY STREET IN CENTRAL AREA AND REPORT TO THE MAN IN THE RED SASH! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!”
“YES, SIR!” I cried, responding with the automatic compliance of the abused. The Sash man directed me to barbers who buzzed my hair to the skull. I donned T-shirt, gym shorts, black shoes, and knee-high socks—the first outfit which exceeded the imposed poor taste of my mother’s school clothes. I accented the ensemble with a quivering West Point brace that began in Central Area and reached my ancestral home in Shanghai. A paper laundry tag marked “TING” dangled from a safety pin on my shorts. Tiny spikes of cut hair pricked my sweating skin. I looked like a fugitive from a hotel fire and felt like a sofa that had been thrown, burning, from the top floor, over which an engine company of booted, axe-toting firefighters had trod on their way to something important. My stomach grumbled angrily and emptily.
A multitude of Men in Red Sashes met our needs with the bonhomie of surly Parisian waiters encountering Bermuda-shorted, tobacco-spitting, gum-chewing American tourists. We learned facing movements and close-order drill. The Sash men marked off each Herculean task on our laundry tags. We were the wash, caught in a perpetual spin cycle, high wet heat, no rinse, all original colors merging into plebeian new cadet sludge, the true American melting crucible fueled by a broiling sun and a consuming white male anger. “POST INTO THAT SALLY PORT, MISTER!” shouted a Sash man.
Who was Sally Port? What was a girl doing here?
“IT IS A FORTIFIED PASSAGE FOR TROOPS, LIKE A TUNNEL. POST!”
I basked in the coolness. Screams were thinned by the tunnel’s depth, and I took a cool breath of air for the first time in hours.
Three men waited for me, backlit by the bright sun. I thought of rumbles in the dune tunnels on the Great Highway by the Pacific Ocean, where punks fought hoods without the honor of single combat.
White boys had yelled “Skinny yellow ching-chong Chinaman chink” at me and “Wooly-headed skinny nigger boy” at Toussaint LaRue, my best friend. I had raised my fists, trying to parry their words from hurting us deep, the way punches never could. I learned to fight ugly, bloody words with skinny, hard-knuckled, weeping fists.
Now, three men: one tall, one big, and one huge. I had never fought with my neck stuck in. My poor eyes adjusted to the dark.
“SIR, MR. TING REPORTS TO THE SALLY PORT AS ORDERED!” The tunnel magnified my voice—like the showers at the Y, without the shampoo, the water, the laughter, or the goodwill.
Tall returned the salute. “Singing experience!” he said.
“SIR, I TOOK SEVENTH-GRADE VOCAL CLASS!”
“This is choir tryout!” said Huge. “State religion!”
I hesitated, fearful of saying “None.”
“Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish?” asked Tall in a deep voice that filled the tunnel. He had delicate features and translucent skin that seemed immune from the hot, beating New York summer sun. His name tag said “Fideli.” He hadn’t mentioned Taoism, and Confucianism wasn’t a faith. Tony Barraza’s rosary was in my pocket, for luck. I thought of the only church I had liked.
“SIR, I AM PROTESTANT!”
“Sing,” he said, “the following lines:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.”
His voice was rich and textured and seemed to fill gaps in an imperfect universe. Even today, his singing echoes in my mind. “Fall out. Let your neck out. Sing, Mr. Ting,” he said.
I let my neck relax and immediately felt something bad was going to happen. I sang. When I got to “lost” in the third line, Large said, “STOP! Mister, you normally sing like this?”
“YES, SIR! ‘Yes, sir; Yes, sir,’ ” echoed my voice.
The three looked at each other.
“Amusing voice,” said Huge.
“ ‘Amusing Grace,’ ” said Mr. Fideli. He smiled and I felt a wave of instant affection for him, followed by guilt. My mother knew that I was emotionally frail. Screw that crap. I frowned. Mr. Fideli studied my face. I heard the roar outside the sally port.
“Dismissed. Report to the Man in the Red Sash,” said Large.
Again, Mr. Fideli smiled. “And please take your voice with you.”
My next task was a mad shopping tour for bedding, uniforms, equipment, and books that, when lifted, inevitably reflected the atomic weight of lead. Now I was lost, betrayed by my terrible sense of direction, a lunatic in an open-doored asylum, running with my neck in, bearing heavy barracks bags. I joined a mob of other new cadets who moved purposefully. I was back in Central Area, breathing a sigh of amazed relief when I saw the “4th New Cadet Company” sign. I dumped the gear in my room and reported back to the orderly room, wherein lurked the awful first sergeant.
I ached with hunger. Food was first in my hierarchy of needs. Eating was second and having thirds was next. Because I feared hunger, I presumed that the ultimate test of American manhood would be starvation. Of course, I was wrong; the tests that awaited me in this school possessed roots even deeper than my appetite.
“Git outa mah road, damn Yankee scum.” His deep, growling intensity and sinister regionalism undercut the vortex of thumping bodies and mortal screams. It was familiar and strange, as if a white man were speaking the colored dialect of Negro streets. I saw him in my fearful mind—a pissed white bogeyman, running through the night with all the authority of a bad cop. We jumped like jammed holiday shoppers from a rabid dog, crashing our sorry knob bodies into inadequate wall spaces to flee teeth. Fear seized my guts. I knew, of all these boys in the room, he would pick me.
A lean, hard face filled my vision. The remnants of the hairs on my neck bristled. I regretted my childhood campaign to become a successful Negro youth. This man would hate my effort at blackness, my eclecticism, my pure Asiatic blood, my Chinese- and Spanish-speaking tongue, my love of Asian foods. This was no time to look like the United Nations rolled into a small, clucking rabbit.
The closeness of his face blurred my vision. Everyone seemed as myopic as I, pushing their eyeballs into my eye sockets to get a better look. He wore Aqua Velva. I shaved once a week whether I needed to or not. I knew details about razors and shaving colognes. Schick. Gillette. Old Spice, Mennen. Burley. Canoe. Blood.
He frowned, waves of forehead ridges bunching angrily, his eyeballs crawling over the features of my face. Time stopped.
“Whaat,” he drawled slowly at me, pulling the words like taffy on a cold day, “inna name a good GOD hail are yeew?”
I knew what he was asking. Verify your alien nature so we can hang your Chinaman body from a tall tree, fair and square. I wanted to say, “I AM AN AMERICAN—JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!”—but my purpose had wilted in this white, crystalline blast furnace. “SIR, I AM CHINESE-AMERICAN!” I shouted, ready, with teeth-gnashing determination, to endure the test, to take the words, face the rope, and show the skill. Where I came from, children yelled as a prelude to fists and men grew silent before taking blood. The roar dropped. I saw his name tag: Alsop. Yu chao. He was my squad leader.
“Jehezus. No beans? Pure Chi-nese?”
“YES, SIR!”
“Waall … whup man ever-lovin’, long-livin’, stand-up-straight unit! Ah ain’t never seen no Chi-nese built lank yeew afore. Damn! Y’ all’s a big sonofabitch! What’s it lank bein’ Chi-nese?”
“IT IS NOT VERY MERRY, SIR!” I shouted.
His face softened, the features sliding, changing, his face so old. “Good fer you,” he said with a smile. “CRACK YO’ HEAD IN, CROT!” he screamed. “DON’T YOU DARE BE BJ ON R-DAY! YOU AIN’T GONNA BE VERY MERRY—I’LL SHEW YOU NOT VERY MERRY! GONNA FELL YOU UP WITH FOURTH-CLASS KNOWLEDGE, YOU CHINESE YANKEE SCUMBAG CROTHEAD DOOWILLIE DUMBJOHN!!” His shouts filled my ears, my brain pan, the room, the Western Hemisphere, the Gulf of Po Hai. He stopped fuming. “WHY’D Y’ALL DECIDE TA BE A CHI-NESE?” he roared.
“NO EXCUSE, SIR!” I cried.
He smiled. “BJ means ‘Be-fore June,’ 1965—year frum now, if y’all fortunate—when y’all be reckanized by the upper classes. Y’all be Yearlin’s an’ we’ll shake your damn Yankee hands.” He made his imitation grin, and then it disappeared without memory. “THAT’S WHEN Y’ALL CAN FIX TA SPOUT BJ WO-ORDS LAHK ‘MERRY’!” he roared, his head jacking up and down as if he were going to take a bite out of my head. “TILL THEN, Y’ALL BRACE LIKE A DANG FOOT-DRAGGIN’, TAIL-BUSTED, LONG-TONGUED YELLER DAWG—YA’LL GOT THAT!?”
“YES, SIR!”
“Listen up, crothead. NEXT TIME, Y’ALL CHOOSE TA BE FRUM MISSISSIPPI, YOU HEAR ME?”
“YES, SIR!” I screamed, with total sincerity.
2
EXODUS
Sunset District, San Francisco, May 1964
I understood Buddhist yeh, karma. I had wondered who I was and who, in the prior rotation, I had been. I feared I was descending the slope of respent lives, following the progression from man to woman, of woman to lower animal, lower animal to insect. I expected an assistant Buddha to tell me someday that this was my last trip.
Two months before wandering into Central Area like Typhoid Mary—colliding with classmates, horrifying the public with my singing, and making enemies on sight—my stout English teacher, Mrs. Marshall, touched me. I recoiled; I didn’t like to be touched.
“Your mother called, Kai. You’ve been accepted at West Point.”
Shouts rang as friends beat on my back and shook my hand. “Way to go, Kai!” “Cool rules!” “Bitchin’, man!” “All right!” I was going to West Point! Me, in a place like that! I was round and full with American status. I tried to control my face, but had to smile as I shook hands with Randy Reed, John Estrella, Pat Hogan, and the others, expanding my chest as Cindy McCreedy, Katie Martin, Berta Lowry, Jane Accampo, and Molly Bokelund cried “
Congratulations!” I felt pleasure. I felt fear, disbelief, joy, and unworthiness, the distress of an unlucky person becoming noticed, a failure being subjected to the risks of recognition. But I had been given a golden ladder to scale success. I had wanted so badly to win the appointment, and I had been convinced that my very desire was a fatal impediment to its realization. What one wanted invited its opposite to appear. Gods frustrated human wishes, turning dreams into vapor. My mother had been proof of that. Whatever I openly liked, she uncannily took.
“Do not,” said Uncle Shim, “ever speak unpromisingly about family. This is ji hui, inauspicious words to be avoided, where speaking sourness invites it, and uttering desires chases them away. One receives rewards by not wanting. To ask for something directly is bad manners and exceptionally bad luck.”
In the Negro neighborhood where I had grown up, Reverend Stamina Jones had led prayers in the storefront church for Kingdom Come. But Chinese spirits were superior to the gods of Western faith; they had yuing chi, life fortune, sze, death, jing ji, taboo, ji hui, inauspicious thoughts, and k’ung hsu, living abandonment, while Baptists awaited Grace in a world that disliked black skin.
I had told four people—Coach Barraza, Toussaint LaRue, Jack Peeve, and Christine Carlson—my secret of wanting to go to West Point. With each admission, each more hazardous than the one preceding it, I had known that I accordingly could not go.
Jack Peeve had also wanted to go to West Point, but had been eliminated because of a history of scarlet fever. I had trouble telling him the good news, but he had no trouble hearing it.
My father, the former Colonel Ting Kuo-fan of the Chinese Nationalist Army, wanted me to go to the Academy. To him, West Point was escape from diaspora and attainment of America itself.
