by Gus Lee
I miss her. If she were here today, I would ask how someone who has acted as poorly as I could be forgiven by any god. It is only in her absence that I realize what she meant to me and my days. She was a woman. She was my closest friend.
How unlucky of me to have one friend left in the world, a rebel to all which I have ever held dear, married to a foreign woman, who appreciates China no more than a Mongol soldier.
This great rebel, however, has a son. I hope that the son can be my courier, taking this writing to my family graves. But he is like his father, chasing after soldiers. Where is the honor in this? I am losing the effort to save his Chinese essence. He is seventeen and already a ping, in a palace of soldiers. His becoming a soldier worries me; I fear he cannot recover, for with every sunrise he grows farther from the reach of the Master’s ways. Looking at him, I see a youth of neither the foreign land nor our old ways in China. He is neither of this world nor of the next, part Chinese, part foreign. Half of him here, half of him waiting to arrive later. He has the body of a common worker, the scholastic diligence of an infant, and the mind of a rock.
The boy remembers nothing of his mother. My dzeren, duty, and lun, connection, to his father prohibit me from telling her story to him. He has forgotten his sister, Janie Ming-li. As a child, she served as his mother after their Mah-mee died. Tragically, Janie ran away. I have purchased detective agencies to find her, but she is lost. It is in this respect that Ding Kai, what he would be called in China, shows so little promise: he has no memory. I cannot pour China back into his hard, foreign bones.
I have told him many of the important stories of China, of Lu Ban the builder, scholars Chang Tsai, Chu Hsi, and Wang Fu-chih, novelists Li Ju-chen and Lo Kuan-chung, fortune seeker Su Ch’in, selfish Yang Tsu, Golden Age rulers Yao and Shun, the all-loving Mo-Tzu, stark painter Ni Tsan, who never painted petty humans against great mountains, and the stories of piety and the sacrifice of sons. He should remember the forty-three thousand poems of the Emperor Ch’ien-lung, wandering to southeast China, pretending to be a humble poet. But I do not know if any of these moral points have touched the boy’s already hardened foreign heart.
It is hard to teach him. Boys in this foreign country are wild, without deep culture. They lack the large extended family to pool the adult labor necessary to raise them. Foreign elders and parents abandon their children, and children think they own their own lives, which are of course, the property of parents.
Teaching young Ting, whom I named Able Student at birth, and who has been consumed by foreign ways, has been the challenge of my late years.
Yet, I have hope for him. He is lazy with Chinese, but reads aggressively in English. He is forgetful, but he looks at me with genuine affection, and respects his friends, if not his family. He is striving to please his father.
Yet, this does not matter. His mother has commanded me to remain loyal to him, to not regard scholarship as the basis for relationship. This is hard for me, but I loved my friend dearly.
12
VALLS
Old South Barracks, West Point, October 18, 1964
I looked at my watch: three minutes to go.
“Kai,” said Clint Bestier, “he’ll ask about your health and about Plebe sports. He’ll try to get you to box for the company. He’ll talk about your grades. Then he’ll ask you ‘spirit’ questions—whether you like the Infantry, jumping out of airplanes, slitting people’s throats, drinking blood, you know, things like that.”
“Drinking blood?” I asked.
“Like ‘Would you drink enemy blood?’ or ‘Are you a killer?’ ”
“Sir, Mr. Ting reports to his squad leader as ordered!”
“ENTER!” he bellowed. Mr. McWalters, an Arkansan, was probing Macbeth’s deeper meaning by poking his tongue from the corner of his mouth. His roommates cranked formula for electrical engineering while cursing the heritage, progeny, and anatomy of Juice in a blue fog of creative, scatalogical profanity. How could I whip a course that hard? Why struggle now, merely to face that course later? McWalters scribbled a margin note on Harrison’s Shakespeare and removed his Squad Book.
“Weight?” McWalters was one of a large continent of beefy cadets who could pass as bouncers in any bar south of Market. He was a goat, nonacademically inclined. But he was a thorough squad leader. He resembled George C. Scott, the actor from The Hustler. He had a very big nose through which he sniffed frequently.
“Sir, I weigh one hundred and fifty pounds.”
“Up five pounds—still fifteen down. How’s your body?”
“Sir, I am good.” I had taken the dull ache of hunger the way moose heads accept wall mounts. Eating had been my skill, and it was my yeh to know hunger in a society with ample food.
He sniffed. “Constipated? Shoulders?” The conventional questions. Flushed with maturity, we no longer reported bowel movements and teeth brushing. But matters had not improved. When everything went to hell in a biblical chain of disciplinary, academic, and athletic disasters, Joey Rensler would say in Bronx, “It’s been a Thayer sort a day.”
“A fifty-thousand-dollar education,” added Pee Wee slowly.
“Crammed up our asses, a nickel at a time,” recited Bestier.
The pressure of being “fourth estate” subserfs in a feudal society, overburdened with torment and too much work, and deprived of food, sleep, and comfort, would incite revolution in other societies. At West Point, it caused constipation.
Away from our bottoms and closer to our compressed, dumbjohn doo-willie skulls, bracing sometimes induced “brace palsy,” where the shoulder muscles, stressed from months of isometric tension, collapsed. A palsied Plebe looked like Pinocchio after the strings had been cut, and was “profiled”—excused medically—from bracing. This seemed, initially, to be a Good Deal. But the brace profiles were pursued by gangs of upperclassmen who sought to compensate for the Plebe’s loss of a full Academy experience. I had somehow evaded these plagues of our modern age.
“You validated boxing,” McWalters said happily. Plebe athletics had a full menu of masculine pastimes: boxing, wrestling, survival swimming, and gymnastics, which we called bleeding, groping, drowning, and spasmatics. If you could pass an early skills test in any one of these courses, you were “validated”—granted early course completion—and rewarded with a class in the more refined pursuits of scuba, golf, squash, or tennis.
“Gonna box for us in the winter?” he asked, blood almost dripping from his mouth in hearty anticipation.
“Sir, I do not know.” I had boxed for ten years, but technique wasn’t the stuff of victory at West Point. Once, I had no choice in fighting. Now I did. I knew McWalters wanted me to box. I wasn’t sure what to do. Tony had wanted me to quit. He had been telling me to leave boxing for something else.
I had entered the South Boxing Room as if I were visiting a shrine. The lights, smells, ring, and apparatus inspired a strange reverence, connecting me to Tony. It was something I knew. When I was seven, I feared the very sight of the Y ring.
Now, its counterpart at the Academy was a comfort, brimming with the habitual and the prosaic. I had paid the mortgage on boxing floors and knew them the way helmsmen know tides.
We had spent the first weeks on the basics: stance, hand positions, movements, punches, jabs, and parries, taught en masse in long lines, like ballroom dancing in Cullum Hall, but infinitely easier. West Point had more heavy body bags than any gym I’d seen.
Coach F. N. Fabrizi was a former middleweight with a flat nose. I felt like saying that I had been trained by Antonio Cemore “Tony the Tiger” Barraza, also known as “Dr. Hook,” but I knew this would be very un-Chinese, very unplebeian, and very stupid. (“Oh, Willie Mays taught you to bat? No kidding? Okay, Ace, let’s see your stuff.…”)
Coach Fabrizi used me as an example. “Lookit body position. The chin. See him smooth left toe up? Liftin’ and glidin’ heel back, no herky-jerky. Lift, glide, lift, glide trailin’ foot, circle left, circle right. Lookit
the high left hand, springin’ jabs. See it return, same place, after? Lookit the hook. Whap! Head up, opposite hand up, chin down—use the hip! Do it like that!”
This was the first thing, besides being hungry and Chinese, in which I had excelled here. My classmates were great athletic specimens, and some had dabbled with the Sweet Science, but no others in my group had boxed in a Y program. They clodhopped, dropped guards, and telegraphed punches, unsure where to place heads, arms, gloves, and feet, sapped by malnutrition and a lack of sleep. Helping classmates with the techniques was a job I knew.
Coach spoke to me in my corner after my first round.
“Ting. Ya bin inna ring. This ain’t the ring, it’s West Point. You’re backin’ up from your man. In my book, you’re losin’.”
I pulled out my mouthpiece. “Coach—he’s dead meat. Split his lip and I’m wearing his blood. You can throw in the towel, Coach. He’s not standing for the third.”
“You’re backin’ up. Ya back up at the Point, ya lose.”
I had gone into the second and third rounds advancing, and gotten chewed up. I had won, but my guts ached from a steady rain of blows from a rookie boxer who stood his ground and waited for me to come to him, poking through my no longer perfect guard. I beat him because I knew combination punching, and he didn’t.
Coach Fabrizi was right; this wasn’t the ring. It was pure aggression. No skill, just advancing. No Sweet Science; this was Bash City. That’s what I knew before I learned boxing.
Tony Barraza’s last good word still rang in my ears. He had said to me, “Ya ain’t a killer.” I was better at defense than offense. I was a counterpuncher. I didn’t like hitting friends.
“Coach,” I said, “what if I box for two rounds, beatin’ the crap outa him and losing points, and then advance in the third. Work for you?”
Coach pulled me aside after two weeks of fights. “Stand here. Gonna validate ya. Your trainer taught ya ta exploit your gifts.”
I smiled. “Yeah, Coach—bad eyes and no vision.”
“Don’t shortchange him. West Point ain’t a palooka gym with fifty-buck purses onna way ta Madison Square Garden. This is jus’ ta teach young gen’l’men ta be aggressive. That’s it. Your trainer was a pro, right? Colored, Latin, or paisan?”
“Paisan, Coach.”
“Good! He built ya a system. Speed, counterpunchin’ hooks an’ your left to getchur way inta the body. Rich stuff for this gym.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll miss ya as a demonstrator.”
I basked in his good words.
“I ever hear a your trainer?” he asked.
“Tony Barraza,” I said.
“The Tiger? No kiddin’! Saw him fight. When—’47? Just after Hank Casey. At Winterland. Piece a work. He still out on the Coast? What’s he doin’ trainin’ Chinese?”
“He’s at a black-and-white Y. I was the only Chinese.”
“Well, you had one a the best.” He pulled on his nose. “And he got ya a ticket outa here. Now they’ll teach ya some pansy crap like squash or tennis or scuba. Hell, that ain’t even English.” He looked at the class.
“Skills ain’t the ticket here. The Point just wants a guy who’ll wade in for blood.” He made a face. “Who’s ta say they’re wrong? They grew up some good fighters. The system, it ain’t gonna change. Be curious ta see if ya box here.” He pulled on an old, broken ear. “Havta live off your right ’steada your left. You can do it. Gimme your hand. Took my direction good. You run inta Barraza, tell ’im Fabrizi remembers from Winterland.”
I filled out a preference card, with scuba followed by tennis and squash. I didn’t even know what squash was. I got squash.
After squash, I would enter the ring and practice a straight, attacking style. For ten years I had circled left and right, feinted, advanced, backed up, each of these moves setting up counterpunching combinations as my opponent looked for the alleys. I could follow a glove I had parried because I could feel it. Going straight in with my eyesight was awkward. It was like running blindfolded. I couldn’t see the glove if I walked into it.
“Hey, Ting!” growled McWalters. “Don’t drift while I’m talkin’ to you! Crack your skull in! Ya gonna box or not? Be decisive, beanhead!”
“Sir, I will box if I do not make the gymnastics team.”
“Fair enough,” said McWalters. “You validated swimming. Where the hell’d you learn to swim so good?”
“Sir, I learned at the YMCA.” I had learned everything there.
We heard that Plebes drowned at West Point like lemmings in season. Our enemy was not the water, or climbing from the water on swaying steel chain ladders to jump from little postage-stamp platforms to retrieve rifles on the pool bottom, struggling down the swim lanes with our rifles while outfitted in full field gear—spongy fatigues, boots, and brick-filled field packs. Our enemy was the Teutonic presence of Mr. Flauck. Flauck made Frederick the Great look like Bob Hope and Chingis Khan look like a comedian.
He was lean, bald, clear-eyed, high-cheekboned, and Prussian. He taught survival swimming, Erich von Stroheim at West Point, parading the length of the pool in his black uniform, swagger stick, and silent black sneakers while we performed like steel girders in a high sea. I learned to swallow pool water and like it.
I was a good swimmer, but keeping the rifle dry while wearing a pack and boots gave me the flotation profile of a red brick. Whenever we faltered, and reached desperately for the edge of the pool to avoid drowning, Mr. Flauck struck our hands and wrists and arms with his hard, sharp, welting swagger stick. Whack! Whack! “ZERE ARE NO VALLS IN DER OCEAN!” he boomed. “VAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO VEN YOUR ASSAULT CRAFT SINKS? CLIMB OUT OF DER POOL?”
I had almost gone under at one point, but Mercury “Rocket Scientist” Ziegler, in the lane next to mine, hissed, “Do it!”
It was all I needed. “Thanks, Rocket,” I gasped to him after I finished the laps, spitting out the water I couldn’t swallow.
“Do the same for me,” he said.
I shook my head. “Not enough air to help you,” I said weakly.
“YOU VANT HELP, MISTER?! CHATTING IN MY POOL! GIVE ME ANOZER LAP MIT DER RIFLE! BOSE OF YOU!”
No one could help Pee Wee McCloud. A phobic fear of water meant that his aquatic background never graduated past shallow baths with a highly trusted rubber ducky. He joined the drowners, the Rock Squad, learned the rudiments of the Australian crawl through sheer willpower, and was prepared for testing. In the platform event, Pee Wee had frozen. Halfway up the ladder, the fear of drowning had met the fear of heights. He locked on to the ladder with limbs and teeth with such commitment that it was difficult to see where he ended and the ladder began.
“Whew!” hissed Peck “Ravine” Mankoff. “If he could wrap his dick around a rung, I think he’d do it.”
Pee Wee panted as the ladder swung high above the pool, the ladder jerking with every flex of his large, grunting form. The idea of climbing up so he could drown in twenty feet of cold, chlorinated water failed to inspire him to greater heights.
“YOU COME DOWN FROM ZERE RIGHT NOW, YOU KNUCKLEHEAD PLEBE!” cried Mr. Flauck, threatening with his stick. “CLIMB OR JUMP! YOU ARE BLOCKING MY LADDER!”
Pee Wee released the steel rung from his small mouth to scream, with great candor, “NO, SIR!”
A young lieutenant, four years out of the Academy, pulled off sweats, dove in, and climbed up. He spoke quietly to Pee Wee, who moaned, his eyes tightly shut, his teeth ready to pop from his gums under the pressure of his mandible on the rung. The lieutenant spoke more emphatically. The lieutenant yelled. He screamed. “May I touch you?” he roared. Plebes could be starved, sweated to walls, push-upped to death, tormented, and kept awake for months, but they could not be touched without consent. Pee Wee sort of nodded.
The officer would free one finger, then two, and the original finger would lock around the ladder. Nothing West Point could do—finger torts, psychic torture, starvation, recitation, mass abuse, punishment slugs, s
leep deprivation, loss of football privileges, court-martial, or firing squad—could compare to releasing the ladder. The survival-swimming program had encountered primordial fear and played it to a tie in double overtime.
“Who knows this man?” asked the lieutenant. My fist came out.
I was sent to retrieve Pee Wee. I didn’t mention to anyone my hysterical fear of heights, first discovered on the roof of the Empire Metal Works in the Mission rail yards, and barely conquered when I had done the platform event. Oh, man, I get to do it again. I dove in and climbed, trembling, heart frail, loins weak.
“Hey, Pee Wee.” I faced him from the other side of the ladder. Both of us were cold. It was difficult for me to hold on, because his body had merged into the ladder, leaving little to grasp.
He released the rung from his teeth, his eyes scrunched closed. “Kai?” he said, teeth clamping on to the rung again.
“Yo. Climb down with me. We’ll go one rung at a time.” I adjusted my grip, and the ladder swung. Pee Wee groaned “no.”
“Okay, I’ll jump first. I’ll be in the water with the lieutenant and a swim ring. Then you. We put the ring on you and pull you to the edge. Mr. Flauck’ll even let you climb out on his ‘valls.’ C’mon, man.” I looked down, my gorge rising. I closed my eyes. “Whatever you do, don’t look down.”
He looked down. “Oh, shit,” he said slowly. “Go ’way,” he whispered.
I couldn’t leave him. Time passed. “Pee Wee. This duck comes into the O Club and says, ‘A round for the whole house. Put it on my bill.’ ”
Pee Wee opened one eye. I made like Groucho Marx, holding on with one hand while fluttering eyebrows and dusting an imaginary cigar. I smiled brilliantly while teetering. He shut his eye.
“Duck goes to the commissary,” I said. “Duck says, ‘Give me a box of rubbers.’ The clerk says, ‘Shall I put that on your bill?’ The duck says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not that kind of duck.’ ”
