by Gus Lee
“Go to West Point. Must.” It was his refrain.
“Sit up straight, like a West Point cadet, like the cadet you’ll never be,” hissed my mother, providing the coda.
I had always wanted to leave. Years before, Toussaint and I sat on the tin-roofed sheds of the Empire Metal Works in the South Mission yards, studying the freights, watching 4–6–2s pulling long strings and little 0–8–0s humping cars in the yard, light gray smoke merging with the dun mist. We were from the Panhandle, a Negro neighborhood similar to South Mission on the other side of San Francisco, but the draw of locomotives on youth knew no boundaries. I was the only Chinese at the yards, but Mission boys customarily put up with me if I didn’t pretend to own the view.
“What’s a China boy doin’ here?” asked a kid one day. He was built like a big, rectangular caboose with rhino-sized limbs.
Toussaint had taught me to leave my new glasses be when trouble called. I made my hands quiet, fingers itching as the glasses slid down the modest bridge of my nose.
“Aw. he’s cool. Boy thinks he’s colored,” said another.
“He don’ look colored,” said Caboose. “He look white.”
“Ain’t white,” I said in my high voice. “See, I’m colored.”
“Bool-shit!” spat Caboose, frowning.
“He’s colored,” said Toos quietly. He had heart and knuckles. It looked like a lot of work to take on those fists, having that strong, high-cheekboned face bent on putting the hurt on you.
Caboose poked the insides of his mouth with his tongue, inventorying teeth and thinking, while Toos ran his cool icebox gaze around the challenger’s profile, getting ready for fate.
I hated those pulsing eternities before a fight, when breathing stopped and sparks and silence filled the air as the heart pounded in the anticipation of losing blood. I hated this more than I hated the tussles. Fear would put cotton in my brain and pump all my circulation into my ventricles and atria.
I remembered Toos’s advice. “Don’t jump to fist or to scat. Give words a chance. And don’t scream China stuff at ’em.” That was easy for him to say. When he spoke, talking came out and people nodded. “China, look ’em inna eyes and talk it real slow.”
Later, Coach Barraza trained me. The first round, when anxiety ruled, was my worst; in the third, when I was working too hard on saving my life to worry, I fought in accord with ho, sweet harmony, which drew left hooks and countering rights from me like long noodles from a good-fortune dish.
Please, I said to all the listening gods, let’s not fight Caboose and his brothers. He’s as big as a house, and it’ll be five to two on this here tin roof, and heights make me like to faint and I’m gonna fall for sure, way down there, where some train’ll flatten me and my glasses. I looked down, the bottom of my stomach dropping from me in anticipation, my gorge rising.
“Yeah, right,” sighed Caboose, peering through thin fog toward the downtown skyscrapers. “What I said—he’s jus’ light.”
I took a deep breath.
“But he surely do look like a damn China boy to me,” he added, to no one in particular.
The yards were Jump City for flight out. But Toos only joked about running, and I was never serious about my chances on distant tracks without him. In my running fever, I did not know that leaving Egypt would be hard. Exodus meant making farewells, and this was not one of my skills. I wanted to belong, never to be separated, to be made to stand alone, isolated, hopelessly different, and required to act or to suffer—ever again.
I was fourteen when we moved out of the Negro Panhandle, where I had been born and the family had lived since fleeing China. I felt like I was already ten feet under quicksand, and said nothing to Toos, Alvin Sharpes, Titus McGovern, or Earline Ribbons, or to anyone. I denied the split. I’ll be back—soon, I said to myself.
“What’s happenin’?” asked Toos. He frowned at the truck while my father and friend Hector Pueblo moved our furniture out.
I shook my head, no words in my mouth. We spit in our hands and shook. I was weak, unable to take the comfort of his strength. I was losing my best friend. There would never be another like him. This was where yeh played its bitter hand. If I had been more deserving, I wouldn’t have had to leave him and my young heart.
Now, three long years later, at seventeen, I wanted to leave with the fervor of a Hebrew held in Egypt. I wanted to flee San Francisco, a city I loved, so I could escape my mother, whom I secretly disliked. My mother was Edna McGurk Ting, and to me she was Pharaoh, skilled in abuse and quick with the whip. I was seven when she had come into our family with a reign of cultural terror that ended the Chinese nature of our family. She was from Philadelphia society, and I was her hopeless social project.
“I hope you do well at the Point,” Edna said to me when I came home the day I was accepted. Her cool eyes were sharply observant. “Your chances are poor. Jim Latre, a very bright, handsome, ex-beau of mine, got shingles and failed that first summer, drawing our sympathy.” She smiled, remembering. Then the frown.
“Lift your drooping shoulder. West Point is the most difficult school in the world. What possessed us to send you? They will throw you out on your ear. You are so woeful in math, so lacking in ambition, your mind so pitifully mediocre, you cannot miss a single thing. There, you cannot succeed by laughing or going crazy.
“But it is that pitiful Negroid neighborhood background that will always hold you back. You may not be sufficiently American. I have given you your best chance. But your affection for failure, your penchant for associating with those with no future, will haunt you all your days.” She was talking about Toos and Tony Barraza.
She ran a green dust rag from a pocket in her peach-toned sweater across the bindings of my beloved books. Ben Hur, Beau Geste, Captains Courageous, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Pride and Prejudice. She had taught me English, and I had quickly grasped paradox and irony.
She sighed. “I had to cleanse you of singing ‘Jesus Loves Me’ in Chinese. Then you employed that horrid Negro speech. Now your English is quite correct, thank you, but you still hesitate, your mouth filled with marbles and confusion. He who hesitates is lost. You hesitate.” She sighed, burdened by my shortcomings. “Your father and I have savings, enough for one of us to attend your graduation from West Point.”
In Philadelphia, silent table manners justified continued life. My family was from Shanghai, where the roar of omnivorous consumption shook seaports around the world. I was from San Francisco, rocked by sharp earthquakes, soothed by mournful foghorns, surrounded by Dungeness crabs, blessed with modest weather, and populated by citizens of the world. I was packing to leave the City, which to me had become the Pyramids.
I did not know what to say to her, and was experiencing the normal reactions of a boy whose brain was being flogged. It was a cool and foggy day, but I perspired, back aching. I wondered if I had polio from the polio god who had taken my friend Connie Dureaux. I must have done something very bad in my earlier life to have deserved these talks with my mother.
I was a teenager, tormented by profound doubt. I wore an unwanted Chinese face in Negro streets and white avenues. I was cursed by a tongue that misspoke to elders and was handicapped by an endless host of cultural stupidities. I secretly answered to every god known. To my credit, I had friends, got good grades, could box, and play basketball, but because I was not a genius, and I was not handsome, I knew I was on a karmic roller coaster that was headed, with all deliberate speed, down, and south.
“Pack your school clothes,” she said.
In the Sunset, boys wore Keds, tight, peg-legged jeans, and plaid shirts. I wore black baggy wool slacks, black shoes, and a white shirt. School clothes, Edna said. To me, they were for funerals—Chinese wore white, and Negroes wore black.
Jack Peeve, my friend in this new neighborhood, gave me his cast-offs. At his house, on the way to school, I’d change into an outfit that wouldn’t suggest suicide.
&nb
sp; Jack, like Toos, had all the freedoms and skills I envied. He could talk without making his mother scream, use the telephone, be cool in front of a girl he liked, swat curveballs out of the park, recover instantly from gruesome, mind-weakening injuries, and lick nearly any comer in arm wrestling. Jack could beat most men, except for Uncle Yorchich Votan and his dad.
Jack’s dad was short, thin haired, and broad shouldered. He smiled a lot, and he and Jack used to clap each other on the back every few minutes, making the same kind of sound that a house must make when it falls on a car. I did that once to Mr. Peeve, and it was like hitting the lumber in the basement.
Uncle Yorch lived in the Peeves’ dark garage. He displayed shark jaws, deer antlers, ram horns, assorted truck parts, and bullet-punctured German Wehrmacht helmets on the walls. He liked to play catch with a car tire with the wheel still in it. His head was as big as a medicine ball, and he used to punch Jack with a massive fist to keep him alert. “Hurtcha?” he’d ask.
“No way!” Jack would shout, rising at the opposite end of the garage, the debris from his collision with the memorabilia from his uncle’s campaigns against all animals and Nazis still jangling onto the oil-stained concrete of his living room floor. Being with them was like watching an unchoreographed John Ford western bar brawl. I knew how to box, but hated to fight.
“Ouch,” I would say in sympathy.
“Arm-wrestle?” Uncle Yorch asked me, eyes bright with hope.
I shook my head. Not with my hand.
I think Jack awakened one morning at the age of twelve with whiskers and the musculature of an adult. I thought this was because Mr. Peeve was a chef, with lots of food at home. Jack said it was because he was Bulgarian. With the Germans so close, they couldn’t mess around with growing up, so they did it overnight.
I had been walking to Lincoln when he had said, “Nice clothes.”
I sized him up and knew, with a sinking heart, that even with all my years in the ring, this guy could pound me. He had a toughness that did not come from effort, but from the gods.
“I’m Jack. Want some a my old clothes?”
“Yeah,” I said. Then I smiled, although Toos was the only one who could tell when I did. He said something happened in my eyes.
“Burt Lancaster would wear clothes like this,” I said. He was my number-one cinema hero. I liked his smile. Jack looked like him.
I hoped the clothes would make me look white. They didn’t—any more than I had turned Negro from hanging with Toos. But the clothes helped; I didn’t look like the sad, lame, emasculated Chinese in American movies, bound for Chinese and Negro funerals, dressed by a mother who saw life as more than a challenge.
After school I took the L car downtown to my YMCA job in the Tenderloin, then returned the clothes to the Peeves’ on the way home, racing through the clothing change. “Fast, huh?” I said.
“Yeah,” said Jack. “Get moolah for changing clothes fast.”
“You do?” I asked, excited about my skills.
Jack shook his head, grinning. “Nope. Just kidding,” he said, clapping me thunderously on the back.
“Wish Jack would dress up like that,” said Mrs. Peeve, appraising me in the formality of Edna’s school clothes.
“No thanks, Ma,” said Jack. “I’d rather go to school naked.”
“I’m done with school clothes,” I said now as I packed, my heart in my throat, feeling like Oliver asking for more porridge. I finally had gotten up the nerve to bring Jack’s cast-offs home. I did it the way our cat, Silly Dilly, used to bring in birds, worried about the reaction of the home folk.
“What do you know about anything?” Edna asked through closed teeth. “Where did you get these?”
“Jack Peeve’s give-aways.” I felt anticipatory fear. Now would come woe and the return of the garments to Jack under scrutiny of press, cops, and neighbors. I awaited the conventional destruction of my spirit or of my model planes that hung from the ceiling. She would claw them out of the sky with her antiaircraft broom and then jump on them with a vehemence that arrested breath. Four planes had survived her blitz. Silence. I prepared for sadness.
“Predictably, Christine has not thanked you,” she said. “She should send flowers to us, for our appointment to West Point.”
I slammed the suitcase lid on my fingers. Our appointment. My heart slugged, vision blurred, stomach soured, back ached, polio bloomed. I could not argue or raise my voice to her.
I had asked Dear Abby if it was correct for me to send flowers to a girl I loved who did not love me. Edna was aware of the flowers and knew that I had received no answer from Christine. An old and familiar anger surged through me. “You can’t read my mail! It’s against the law!” I had yelled when I discovered she had been reading my letters for years. I had made the claim hysterically, without thought, as if I were worthy of having an opinion.
“I AM YOUR MOTHER!” she screamed. “There are bad influences in this world—much of it in the mail! DON’T YOU DARE RAISE YOUR VOICE TO ME! How dare you toss the law at me as if you were a lawyer? DO YOU WANT YOUR FATHER TO FIND ME WITH A STROKE?!”
I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been. Of course, she had read my Dear Abby correspondence. She was my mother.
I had not always kowtowed to her. I was almost nine when I had held my fists up to her, left foot and left profile leading in accord with the Marquis of Queensberry and the teachings of Tony the Tiger Barraza. I didn’t want her to hit me anymore. She took to her bed in a dignified retreat that probably made the funeral procession for Queen Victoria look like the drunken 49er riots at Kezar after another bitter loss to Detroit.
One morning, after breakfast, she called me to their room. “You gave me a stroke,” she said calmly, her voice brimming with ancient pains. Her careful articulation was a weapon against my imprecise speech. Weak sunlight fell on the bed, leaving her face in shadow. I stood at near attention, facing the rope, the consequences of my prior bad lives, of standing up for myself.
“I am your mother. Not your stepmother. Give the picture of the Other Woman to your sister. Never, ever make a fist or raise your voice to me!” she cried. “Refer to me as ‘my mother,’ or ‘my real mother.’ Obey and I will not hit you. Stand straighter, you pitiful wretched, ugly, fat-lipped thing. Wipe that expression from your face this moment.” Megan, middle of my three tsiatsia, older sisters, had given me Mahmee’s photo only weeks earlier. Edna was offering a trade. If I gave it to Janie, the youngest of my sisters, she wouldn’t hit me anymore. I didn’t know that raising my guard to her had already accomplished what she now offered. All I knew was that she hated me, and it was my yeh to live with it.
“Deal,” I said, edging closer, offering my hand, without spit.
We shook, her pale eyes and pallid features eloquently accusing me; I was a hood who had tried to knuckle his own mom. I was the cause of her ills, her poor animation, her industry in correcting and guiding me through a ceaseless process of examination and criticism. I felt bad, and tried, and old. The strength of her handshake made me wonder. In time, overcome by the small events of life, I forgot the photo.
Edna’s postal concern was not related to Howdy Doody flexi-straws or Davy Crockett coonskin hats; it was worse than my frowning face, my trouble with the gymnastics of English, or my Chinese habit of eating noisily. I had looked at Sears bra ads.
“Girls distract boys and diminish your woeful native capacity for schoolwork. Girls are cruel, you are far from handsome, and they will hurt you terribly. Rely on us for affection. Animals are kinder than people. You are so frail and emotionally stunted … the slightest comment drives you into a frenzy. You can’t even speak without my help. Change that expression this instant! I can’t stand that ugly, despicable scowl. Don’t you dare defy me with your horrid face. You are sick and vile for looking at these—these pictures. Your interest is unnatural! Other boys do not look at women in their underwear! If only you could see yourself as others see you. You’re despicable! Just bec
ause you’re now larger in frame does not mean that you do not have to mind me.”
She was in rhythm now, chanting ills in synchronicity with ho, the greater harmony, flurrying verbal Sunday punches with no jabs and all right crosses, hooks, and uppercuts. All I felt was hurt, pinned to the ropes, without a ref, a bell, or a god to intervene. I leaked blood from my brain and regretted my life. Her voice knifed into my brain, where it vibrated and keened painfully, and I prayed for the emptiness that comes to those with patience.
“I should’ve called Juvenile Hall and had you arrested! You’re terrible, ungodly, disgusting, with fat lips and small, frowning, squinty eyes. No girl could like you! You’re going to West Point and don’t even see it is I who made this possible and now you’re going as if you earned it! You are so ungrateful and full of venomous, stupid, teenaged nonsense! Oh, yes, show me that bland, ugly, stupid, expressionless face. It will hurt you more than me.”
3
ROCK
Chinatown, May 20, 1964
“Dababa, Uncle, you ever have a bad relationship with anyone?” Uncle Shim was not my true blood uncle, but he was my Old World elder in all of life.
“Ding hao!”—highest best! He liked my question. We were in the On-On Cafe on Grant Avenue after my Saturday shift at the Y. He sipped long-steeped, thick, oily black tea while I ate the house specialty of hoy yaw ngauyuhk fan, succulent, aromatic oyster beef over steamed, fluffy white rice, along with do see dofu hom nyeuw, the sharply salted, tender fish with soft bean curd in thick black bean sauce that Chinese had used for centuries to build muscles, and gai chowfun, chicken with wide, flat, richly seasoned rice noodles. It was a meal for four or five and barely enough for me.
The waiter said, “Hey, fan toong.” Rice garbage can.
Chinese food was a tonic to my ills. When Edna called Christine names, I wanted to scream to the heavens and jump up and down; but I couldn’t, so I ran to the basement and punched wood in crossing combinations with bare knuckles until the pain went away.
