by Gus Lee
We strained to hear him above the roar in the hall, and he had a huge voice. My neck ached from the contortion of bracing. I spied a huge, colorful mural of war covering an entire wall, state flags, ancient, cathedral-like windows, and many old portraits of exceptionally stern-looking white men.
“Gunner prepares dessert.” Mr. Armentrot smiled. Inside, we smiled. He had reason to; we did not. “Gunner announces dessert and inquires who wishes dessert. You want, present right fist, forearm at a right angle to the vertical upper arm. Gunner counts and divides it into exactly equal, Strac portions. Should he fail to cut equal portions, all manner of misfortune will befall him unto the third generation of little dumbjohn crothead gunners. You share in the success and failures of your classmates, so you all get it in the neck if he ties up. You will work together, and cooperate. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?!” he bellowed, and we cried “YES, SIR!” as our twisted bodies lurched with effort and fear, wondering what a “Strac” portion was. Was that bigger or smaller than equal?
Lunch was my best meal since it was the one I consistently ate away from my mother’s criticism. I was relieved to be in the middle of the table, without a job. I was not boss of beverages or desserts. It was a good omen. Waiters brought platters.
“SIR!” cried the gunner, in an Hispanic accent. “THE VEGIE-TABLE DISH FOR LUNCH TOday … is …” We all died a little as his voice trailed off, swallowed by uncertainty. Name the veggie! I urged silently. You were so close!
“IRP, MISTER!” “POP OFF!” “FUNCTION, CROTSPAZ!!” cried our upperclassmen as they pounded their big fists on the table, so eager to assist the gunner that they screamed advice at the same time, causing my internal organs to shuffle positions as the flatware and condiments jumped.
“SIR,” cried the new cadet, “THE VEGIE-TABLE DISH FOR LUNCH TODAY IS … IS … LEETLE CABBAGES! LEETLE CABBAGES TO THE HEAD OF THE TABLE, FOR INSPECTION, PLEASE, SIR!”
“THAT’S WRONG!” screamed Mr. O’Ware. “WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU COME FROM—NEW GUINEA? HOW THE HELL DID YOU—”
“Frenchy,” advised Mr. Stoner quietly. “MISTER, THAT WAS GROSS! TRY IT AGAIN!”
“SIR,” the new cadet cried confidently. “THE VEGIE-TABLE FOR LUNCH TODAY IS LEETLE GROSSES! LEETLE GROSSES TO THE HEAD OF THE TABLE FOR INSPECTION, PLEASE, SIR!”
Ice water sprayed over the table as Messrs. Armentrot and Stoner roared, screamed, coughed, and guffawed.
“What’s your name and where you from, Mister?” asked Mr. Armentrot, wiping his eyes and wetly clearing his throat.
“SIR, MY NAME IS MR. VARGA. SIR, I AM A FOREIGN CADET FROM THE NATION OF ARGENTINA!”
“Varga,” said Mr. Stoner. “These shitty little things are not ‘leetle cabbages.’ They’re ‘brussels sprouts.’ This is the big, badassed sprout patch of the Western world. You’re the sprouts. Welcome to America and cram in your stupid little crot neck.”
The cold beverage corporal distributed milk and water; the upperclassmen fisted for the hot beverage corporal’s announcement of coffee. The food went up to the top of the table and came around for us. We passed and received correctly. It was a team drill, and we operated under a collective will of seven crots sweating to make it, to help each other, to do it right. One screwup would endanger us all. It was Chinese pao-chia, collective responsibility—all of us profit, or all of us lose.
I received cold cuts, brussels sprouts, and melon. Task by task, I built a modest sandwich, my plate crest free of food for my faithful gaze. Small bites, chew six times. I could do that.
Neck muscles ached. A glass of milk stood tall above the point of my knife, the empty carton by its side. We had said grace; we had passed correctly; we had not broken crockery or taken the Lord’s name in vain; we had survived the attack of the killer brussels sprouts. Edna would have approved. Well, maybe not Edna.
“When the worker crots are done,” said Mr. Armentrot, “gunner says, ‘Sir, may I ask a question?’ With permission, he says, ‘Sir, the new cadets at this table have completed their tasks. Sir, may the new cadets at this table have permission to eat?’
Now I had four answers: I could also say, ‘Sir, may I ask a question?’ At this rate, I could orate by Christmas.
“SIR, MAY I ASK A QUESTION?” yelled Mr. Varga.
“Absolutely,” said Mr. Stoner.
“SIR, THE NEW CADETS AT THEES TABLE HAVE COMPLETED THEIR TASKS. SIR, MAY THE NEW CADETS AT THEES TABLE HAVE PERMISSION TO EAT?” We cheered silently. Way to go—word for word!
“Well done, gunner. EAT!” cried Mr. Stoner, and seven hungry hands dove with lightning speed for forks, glasses, or sandwiches.
“TOO SLOW!! SIT UP!!” screamed Mr. Armentrot.
Shocked, we returned our hands to our laps.
“YOU BEANHEADS BLEW IT! I figured you smacks to be hungry enough to sniff buffalo chips! Your Care Factor’s down! You’re indifferent to the fine meal the Quartermaster Corps prepared!”
I care! my stomach screamed.
“CUT UP YOUR MEAL! PLACE IT IN SMALL BITESIZED MORSELS IN YOUR EMPTY MILK CARTONS! IF IT WON’T FIT, WE’LL KNOW YOU DICKED THE FOOD FOR YOURSELF! THAT YOU SCREWED YOUR CLASSMATES! YOU WILL NEVER SCREW A CLASSMATE OR LET HIM DOWN! DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”
“YES, SIR!” we cried.
I recalled the best meal of my life—three servings of beef stroganoff, green beans amandine, dinner salad, tapioca, brownies, and no brussels sprouts, twenty thousand feet up. The stewardesses had fed me all the way across America. That had been yesterday.
The aging Trans World Airways Super Constellation had taken me east, toward the school that my father and his friend Na-men so revered, toward what I hoped would be the Promised Land.
I was feeling physical distance from my past and mistook it for the psychic freedom that it resembled. The plane was faster than the Santa Fe freights in the Mission yards, but I bounced in my seat to help the airliner take me out of California. The Super Constellation was an old but sleek, silver, four-engined aircraft with a triple-ruddered tail and an elegant swoop to its fuselage.
I wore a sport coat from the Ting Family Association in Chinatown, tailored to my scoliosis-induced low right shoulder and bodybuilding torso. I carried my Academy appointment letter.
“You are to be congratulated on this opportunity for admission to the Military Academy, for it comes only to a select few of America’s youth. It represents a challenge that will demand your best effort. Therefore, it is suggested that you give serious thought to your desire for a military career as, without proper motivation, you may find it difficult to conform to what may be a new way of life.” Signed, J. C. Lambert, The Adjutant General of the United States Army. I kept touching the letter and the photo while I reread my 1908 Harper & Brothers half-leather copy of Ben-Hur.
The TWA stewardesses were pretty, and I expanded my chest and flexed my biceps whenever they passed. They provided food on request, and I liked to think this was in reaction to the influence of my muscles. As I finished my fourth bag of salted cashews and third Coke, and anticipated lunch, I thought: This is too good to be true. Ji hui. Maybe it wasn’t true. Nick Kleiner would change his mind. I would have to return my appointment to him.
After months of arduous testing, Nick had won one of our two congressional West Point slots. Applicants had to be U.S. citizens, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two at the time of admission, and possessing leadership skills, competitive grades, and top Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. Leadership skills meant student body or class president, varsity captain, or Eagle Scout. Competitive grades meant an “A” average. SAT scores had to be in the top 95th percentile. The process began when our congressmen reviewed the field of applicants, eliminated the unqualified, and sent the list of survivors to the Army.
The Army invited the hundreds of qualifying applicants from all the neighboring congressional districts to the Presidio of San Francisco to test our medical and physical qualifications.
It would take three days, and began with a brie
fing about West Point A handsome, athletic captain named Bue, wearing silver Airborne wings on his chest with a bright yellow Ranger shoulder tab, spoke to us in Harmon Hall, near Crissy Army Air Field.
“The Academy is famous for its graduates—Thayer, Lee, Grant, Scott, Sheridan, Sherman, Longstreet, Stuart, Jefferson Davis, Jackson, Pershing, Goethals, MacArthur, Darby, Stilwell, Bradley, Patton, Arnold, Groves, Eisenhower, Van Fleet, Ridgway, Taylor, Gavin, Dawkins, Carpenter. No school has more renowned graduates. Imagine that West Point is a school in the mountains and the clouds. There, at the River and the Rock, young men are bound to each other not by hopes of fame but by pledges to honor. A West Pointer is a brave and honest man. He always strives to do the right thing.”
I sat on the edge of the bleachers, barely breathing. Here was where K’ung Fu-tzu and Guan Yu came together. Be honorable. Do your duty. Be correct. Have courage. Do not be selfish. Subdue the self.
The physical was akin to performing every event in the Olympics, followed by being asked to defeat Napoleon at Borodino and to reconstruct the Grand Canal of China. I had practiced at the Y. At the Presidio, I did fifty-one pull-ups, a hundred push-ups, ninety sit-ups in one minute, fifty parallel-bar dips, a four-second legless rope climb, a ten-second hundred, and a two-minute-ten half-mile. I was convinced with all the assurance of uninformed youth that competence with my arms, legs, and abdominals would compensate for a lack of other aptitudes.
My asthma raised eyebrows, as two doctors listened to my chest and heard wheezing. Going to the Y had lessened the symptoms.
“Asthma is psychosomatic,” Edna had said to me when I began wheezing after her arrival in our home. “You have chosen to have this to defy me. I am taking you from that loud, rowdy Negro church. Henceforth, you are a Christian Scientist. Doctors are too expensive. Read Mary Baker Eddy. You will end your asthma.”
Then, the eye exam. “Son,” said the doctor, “you’re twenty over eight hundred, legally blind. You’re 4-F, can’t be drafted, or enlisted. You show asthma symptoms. You’re big for an Oriental, but forget the Point It’s not a school for the handicapped.”
They studied the drooping right shoulder which made my right hand hang four inches lower than my left. “Scoliosis, another 4-F disqualifer.… And, son, you have flat feet.”
The Army was to be my ticket out of my family. While I knew that getting into West Point was practically impossible, I never thought I couldn’t be a common soldier. I had trouble sleeping.
The congressman wrote, “The Army has informed me of your medical tests and I have requested waivers from the surgeon general of the Army. I have never seen three granted before. Best wishes.”
I wrote back, thanking Congressman Mailliard for his assistance and restating my intent to attend the Academy.
The waivers were granted, and I was able to join fewer than a hundred who had passed the Presidio tests, to take an eight-hour Civil Service achievement exam at the Federal Building on Market. This was the final test. From this, the eight top cumulative scorers would be selected, from which the top two would go. Eight, ba, was a lucky number, round and full in sound and shape.
Some congressmen ignored scores and selected sons of patrons. Ours did not. This was lucky, since the Ting family influenced Congress the way I influenced the gravity of the sun. William S. Mailliard, Sixth U.S. Congressional District, posted his list of eight candidates in the early spring of 1964, which was printed in all local papers. The top two would be appointed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The other six were alternates, who could use that status as a basis for joining the Army and applying to the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School in Virginia. USMAPS grads could then compete for direct Army appointments to the Academy. I assumed that this would be my path; my congressman had already recommended that I not go to West Point at age seventeen.
I had placed third. Nick Kleiner and Hank Spence won the spots. Nick was Washington’s student body president and football captain and the all-city quarterback. He looked like William Holden. He and Hank, who attended academically elite Lowell High, were National Science Foundation scholars. I figured that last summer one had found the true source of the Nile and the other had helped Dr. Salk invent a new vaccine. But Nick declined his appointment in order to go to Princeton, moving me up. That’s when Edna received the telegram from West Point and, in a burst of goodwill, called Lincoln High with the news.
I called Nick that afternoon from the Y pay phone. “This is Kai Ting—from the West Point exams.… Yeah, the Chinese guy. Way to go on Princeton. And thanks—it moved me up.”
“Hey,” he said, “you got the waivers. You earned it—you made ’em drop dead during the tests. Ever think of football?”
I laughed. “Sure, if I were bigger, stronger, smarter, braver. With eyes. Gonna play for Princeton?”
“It’s not playing for Dietzel at Army, but I’ll start. Good luck.” Nick hesitated. “You oughta know … my older brother’s at the Academy—he’s a senior, a Firstie. He says it is no fun.”
Fun was flying to West Point through the clouds at three hundred miles an hour with an open kitchen. I was answering the Academy’s invitation to undertake the “irksome and difficult” task of becoming a member of the U.S. Corps of Cadets. There I would be a continent away from all that I disliked, and separated from all that I knew. I would not see any other Chinese people.
I had brought my icons: my photo of Christine, plastic cup, wooden liang-jiang, Chinese linked fighting sticks, and my father’s Colt super .38 automatic in its shoulder holster with his letter to his American Army patron, Na-men. Other things—ancient times, goo dai, and Chinese duty—accompanied me as well, and I felt their weight. In my pocket was Tony’s old rosary.
I had often wondered what my father thought of Tony. Whenever I spoke of him, or Pinoy, or Barney Lewis, my father was silent.
5
FATHER
San Francisco, 1964
Chinese fathers—for me, such a mystical, frightening term, full of ancient fogs, aeons of deeply ingrained custom and ritual. None of that American let’s-play-catch interaction which was always advertised in film and so absent in life. None of that teenaged talking-back, gimme-the-car-keys, rock-and-roll rebellion. Chinese fathers inspired deep obedience—deep obedience.
“What did the emperor Ch’in Shih Huang Ti tell his subjects?” asked Uncle Shim.
“Build me a great big wall,” I quipped.
Uncle Shim’s brows knitted and he pursed his lips in profound disapproval. I grimaced and rolled my shoulders.
“ ‘Lin tsun’—tremblingly obey,” he said. “This directive closed imperial edicts, requiring subjects to obey the emperor, as sons must revere fathers. This is reflected in your actions, your thoughts, and your speech. In all you do. In all you do not do. You regard him with awe; you speak to him with clarity.”
I was more likely to put hippos on roller skates than to speak with ease with my father. The thought of it invited panic. I tried to form questions and fell into chaos when I spoke. It was as if the gods had seized the cards in which I had organized my thoughts and shuffled them in a loud advertisement of my weaknesses.
My father was formal, detached, and remote. My speech, actions, and failures to act were all variations on a dirge. I was a Chinese candidate stuck at the first level of examinations, the page who could never be a knight, the boy who would always be made of wood. Our gahng arose not from sociology but paleontology, an archeological dig of unknown boundaries and unplumbed meanings, whose hold on the both of us was strengthened by silence.
I could play sports and no longer feared the sight of my own blood; Toos and Jack were my friends; I communed with animals in the zoo; I could earn money; I crazily loved food and Christine Carlson. I was jook sing and a fan toong, an American-born Chinese and a garbage can for rice. I was different, and always would be. That’s what I could read in the open pages of my small life story.
My father’s life was a secret,
so I harbored my own ciphers. I disliked my mother. I disliked being Chinese, preferring either Negro or white. I liked the lingerie models in the Sears catalog. I had been crazy once, when the insanity god had lived inside me when I was ten. The god made me laugh when nothing was funny.
Once, the god appeared at a banquet at Johnny Kan’s restaurant in Chinatown. Beautiful Chinese ladies in soft, padded peach, azure, and saffron silk cheongsams encircled me and said “Bougwai! Precious!” and touched my cheeks, bathing me in glittering smiles. I loved their touch, and the god arrived, making me giggle, falling into the mad grip of insane laughter. Each laugh forced a beautiful lady to back away, the insanity god separating me from her affection, her smile turning from shock to hurt and fear, until there were none left, and I was alone, laughing with tears.
By this time in my life, I had achieved threshold acceptance as a struggling Negro youth, and no longer wore the tattoos of lost fights on my body. This incident, of hurting Chinese ladies, became my most painful memory, which I could not expunge because I was reminded of them and their pain in my dreams. A woman with soft, kind brown eyes, a small red rosebud mouth, and jet-black hair, dressed in a peach cheongsam, smiled at me, and wept when I began to laugh. When I awoke, she was gone. Later, I would dream of a murdered man who blamed me for his death, and he would chase the Chinese woman from my sleep for all time.
The secrecy of my father’s life convinced me that he harbored within himself a wealth of deep confidences and mysteries. I imagined his life to be the best book in the world, and one I would never be sufficiently smart or qualified to read.
I had within me murky half-memories, superstitious shadows of belief and event, fractured impressions of connection, cratered concepts of separation and pain, abandonment and death.
I could not distinguish memory from dream, boundary from custom, fact from fear, East from West. It was a long and dark tunnel, with no landmarks in the offing or light at its end.
