by Gus Lee
“No. Thanks very much,” I said. “So we’re starting over.”
“We both missed you, more than you can believe,” she said.
I started to argue. I was confused, my resistance to her in jeopardy. I didn’t know what to do with her kindness. I looked again at the bed, where Silly Dilly had slept, and was comforted by my old loathing of her, for what had happened to the cat. “Thanks for the sandwiches.”
I brushed my teeth and donned my dark blue Rogers Peet blazer with blue button-down shirt, narrow red-striped tie, and gray trousers. The phone rang and Edna said it was for me.
“Kai, Duke Troth.” Hollow echoes of long-distance calling.
I paused. “My mother liked the flowers.”
“Congrats on math. Hey, I was a shit.” He laughed. “Probably shouldn’t swear on leave. Plebe year, you know. Sorry.”
“No problem,” I said. A silence. He wanted something.
“Want some help with contacts?” I asked.
“Aw, hey, I don’t do that anymore. I’m apologizing to everyone. We’re upperclassmen now. No reason to shit on anyone. I owe you a cherry Coke at Doris Barth Hall at Camp Buckner. Hey, you’re all right. Let’s not crap on each other. What do you say?”
“Cool,” I said. “I don’t like having enemies.”
“Well, look, that’s great. See you at Buckner.”
I looked at my watch. I could make it. “Going to call Dad for lunch,” I said to Edna. It would’ve been better if I could’ve seen Tony first. Pinoy had said, “Little boys need Tony and Barney.” I was eighteen, a grown-up. I had to give up my things of childhood.
“That’d be wonderful, Kai,” she said.
17
TALK
San Francisco, June 12, 1965
He was working on a Saturday. I waited in the lobby.
He appeared, smiling, nodding, unchanged. He wore English regimental ties with neatly pressed suits and brilliantly shined shoes. He had shined them ever since Edna announced that a gentleman could be gauged by his shoes. My hand compressed in his powerful grip, and he glowed as he introduced me to his co-workers. “My West Point cadet!” he exclaimed. I endured it manfully, but my discomfort from being his possession was a palpable, living thing that consumed my inconstant, shaky identity.
Dad’s job with Soboleski was new. I had never seen his office before. I realized that the disaster area composed of successive layers of sedimentary buildup, of squirreling, and a relentless refusal to discard anything, was his. I expected it to be neater. It looked like my desk after poker, or Tony Barraza’s desk before he swept it clean, or New York on a good day. It looked like my brain before a math writ.
Talk it slow. “How’s the job?” I asked. The words came out smoothly, as if I were a familiar friend. His office had a clear view of the City. I watched tiny cars twinkling in the late-morning sun as they crossed the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge.
“Good,” he said, lighting his pipe.
I had asked something, and he had responded to me.
“I like your desk,” I said. “Looks like mine.”
“You going to graduate?”
“I hope so,” I said.
“Must,” he said.
I nodded.
“Cannot tell you how much, must.” He twisted his blue, aquamarine Infantry School ring. The gold eagle and crossed rifles had been worn smooth in the twenty-three years since it was attached to his finger in Fort Benning. It had been the best weeks of his military career, going through the Infantry Officer Basic Course with American lieutenants. He had been a major in the Chinese infantry, and was the beau ideal of the class: he had been in combat and they hadn’t. The American officers had bought him drinks and meals and toasted the success of his army against Japan.
I stared at the old ring that made him more American than his citizenship papers. He had been a brother, honored by the Army he had loved so much. Nothing could compare to it. I broke my gaze.
“Many fail, right?” he asked.
“Yes, too many.” I thought of Stew Mersey, Joey Rensler, and Ravine Mankoff, of Alduss, Conoyer, Dirkette, and the others.
“They not so smart, not work so hard.”
“They worked hard. Some were a lot smarter, better, than me.”
There were clouds in the East Bay, where Christine went to college. I frowned with the view. With a start, I realized my middle sister, Megan, was over there. She was a schoolteacher in Berkeley. I wondered how she was. Suddenly, I wanted to see her. My heart began pounding; Edna forbade contact with her. How could I do that? But I’m an adult now. I can talk to my father. I could call her. Like I called Christine—in the open. I looked through the mass of debris on my father’s desk and saw his telephone.
“Come,” he said. “I take you to lunch, Blue Fox.”
I took a breath. “Dad—could we go to Kuo Wah? And I’ll pay.”
He frowned. “Kuo Wah. Pay—ridiculous! Don’t take pleasure!”
Andy Young, Kuo Wah’s proprietor, was a tall and dashing man who could have run for governor on the strength of his smile and the beauty of his wife and daughters.
“Hey,” he said, “how’s our general? Richard! Your best patron is here! How are you, Mr. Ting?” he said, bowing to my father.
Richard Loo, the refined waiter, had always served our family. Seeing him was like Noah seeing the dove and dry land.
“Mr. Ting, how are you, sir? Ah, young master,” he said to me. “You look wiser and very hungry! Come. Favorite table and dishes!”
“Doggone it, Richard,” I said, “I sure missed you.”
He smiled with all his teeth, laughing a little, looking down. “Yes, yes, young master. We miss you too.” He seated us in our usual booth near the kitchen, closest to the hottest dishes.
The luncheon was constantly interrupted as a variety of people I could not remember, or perhaps had never met, came to the table to greet the West Point cadet.
“Where your uniform?” asked a stockbroker from Hooker and Fay.
“I don’t have to wear it on leave, sir,” I said.
“Should wear it,” he grunted. “Show off uniform, for all of us. You only Chinese cadet from City!”
“Thank you, sir,” I said flatly, trying not to think of the duty he described. I had enough expectations.
As usual, I had foolishly presumed that when people are near food, the only business at hand is eating. My father, like all table commandants, had a different agenda.
“What they say about Southern Lands, Viet-Nam, at West Point?”
I was enjoying the use of kwaidz, chopsticks, and the savoring of food. I liked eating at my own pace, without any semblance of Western manners and without the Fourth Class mess hall light being illuminated for my departure from an unmeal. Then it hit me: my father had asked me a real question. I swallowed.
“We get briefings, but we don’t know that much yet. I know basic infantry skills. This summer, we’ll learn advanced skills for Vietnam. Lots of patrolling, night patrols.”
“You know, China fight Viet-Nam. Never win. Nam is Cantonese for nan, ‘south.’ ” I nodded. “ ‘An-nan’ mean ‘pacify south.’ Whole people, name for warlike natures. They always trouble! Han, T’ang, Sung, Yuan, and even Ming—all Chinese armies try rule An-nan, Champa, Viet-Nam. Viet kill all. Chinese, Mongol, Manchu, shock army, Golden Horde, Bannermen—Viet kill Chinese soldiers for thousand year! More hero than China. Dinh Bo Linh! Le Loi! Vo Nguyen Giap.”
I remembered hearing about the Chinese army’s thousand-year war in Champa, which they renamed An-nan. I didn’t want to think about it. Deep down, I was unhappy we had gone in. We were clearly going to win, but my father’s talk worried me. “There’s not going to be trouble over there, is there?” I asked.
“Already have trouble. To beat them, we must fight a thousand years. You stop eat. Don’t. Eat more.”
He was talking to me but wasn’t eating, watching me devour platefuls of food. Chinese food was the best.
Besides tasting better than the best steak and having more complex tastes and sensory memories than the most sophisticated French sauce, it was spiritual sustenance, and wonderfully communal. What I ate was superior in taste, but it did not come from the extraordinary sacrifice of a French chef who had dedicated his life to perfecting a special dish. What I loved about Chinese food was its wondrous merging of the extraordinary with the common, the hard and the soft, the sour and the sweet, the pleasures of one with the pleasures of all. As I ate this food, I was joined in spirit with the great Black Haired people, who recognized in meals the celebration of life, and family, and community, a father talking to his son, hearing his questions. I served him, selecting the cheek and eye of the fish, the most succulent black mushrooms, the darkest, most compact pieces of meat. Some of the delicacies, like sea slugs, were easy for me to surrender.
“How many Chinese in your class?” he asked.
“One other. Three Japanese-Americans. Fifteen are black and Hispanic, a couple from foreign countries.”
“You box, play basketball?” he asked.
Surprised, I put down my chopsticks. We had no history of discussing my sports. “I was a good athlete in high school and the Y. At the Academy, I’m average. Except for boxing.” I looked at my hands. “I’ll never be a great fighter. I can only go so far with my eyes. My vision really stinks.”
He frowned. “But you so big, strong, tall. Hard for Chinese, Japanese?”
“It’s hard on everyone.” I didn’t say that it felt harder because I was different. He knew that, better than I: he still had to fight his accent whenever he spoke; we attracted negative attention. Our accomplishments, and our failings, were magnified by our difference. Some people simply didn’t like our looks, and never would. Some upperclassmen had stared at me as if I were an animal during open season. We would always be aliens, constantly in a state of unspecified jeopardy from bigots.
“The school is very white, but it’s not racist,” I said.
“See, I’m right, about U.S. Army,” he said. “Best!”
“Yes, Dad, absolutely,” I said. I remembered how difficult it was for him and Edna, members of a unique mixed marriage. My father would get up from the table in restaurants and I knew that the management had decided not to serve us. Kids threw rocks and chanted the snake charmer’s tune, “Na na na na na, na na nana nana na.” Even with Frenchy O’Ware, West Point was better.
“Dad, shouldn’t you eat?”
“I watch you,” he said.
I felt the God-given courage of Achilles. “Are you happy?”
“Pretty happy,” he said, smiling, watching me.
“Dad, thanks for talking to me,” I said.
“Ah ha,” he said, “eat.”
“Megan? This is Kai. Your brother.”
“Kai! How wonderful to hear your voice. Is something wrong?”
“No,” I said. “I just wanted to call you and see how you are.”
“Oh, I’m fine!” she said in her English accent, the indelible mark of having learned from British and Indian teachers. “Tell me, please,” she said, “that you’ve quit West Point.” She checked herself. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Dad’s so proud.”
“What do you have against West Point?”
“Kai, we don’t know each other. We’re sixteen years apart. As the second daughter, I’ve never been important, and I’d rather have Dad’s indifference than his demands. I don’t count to him.
“Ever since the war in China, I’ve been a pacifist, and I’m brokenhearted that you’ve chosen to be a soldier—a killer.” She took a breath. “I’m very disturbed by the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and I despise the American army’s war on Vietnamese peasants.”
“Megan, the Reds are assassinating village leaders. We’re only protecting them. And Dad cares about you.” I didn’t understand her words about not being important, about his indifference.
“Kai, Kai—I’m sorry. No arguments. This is the first time we’ve ever spoken, just the two of us. Let me ask you a favor. Please respect my view of my relationship to my father. Our father.
“Now. How are you? Are you back for summer vacation?”
“Just for a few days.”
“Can you visit, or can we get together?”
“Probably not this time,” I said, afraid to argue with her, to hear about her gahng with Dad. “Nice talking to you,” I said.
“Oh, sure! All I did was criticize and depress you. I hear it in your voice. Please, come over and I’ll cook some great baodze and long bean dofu for you. I’d really love to see my didi, my baby brother.”
I shuffled through the narrow aisles of the San Bo Company. It smelled of rosewood, teak, and stale shipping confetti. I picked two Guan Yus, one to pack and one for an elder. Each of them was a dollar sixty-five. “Can I have them in two boxes?” I asked.
“You speak Chinese?” the man asked.
I shook my head. Three years of Chinese school and no retention of sam yep. A childhood of speaking Shanghai and Mandarin, and nothing remembered except food. Now I spoke English, like Edna, and was estranged from the people whose faces I shared, whose culture had produced me and my clan.
“So sad, you lose Chinese. You look like Guan Yu!” He slapped my arm, startling me with the contact, and boxed each figurine. “Hey, young master, you pray Guan Ti, Lord Guan, then you speak Chinese again.”
I looked at the figurines going into the boxes. Guan Yu’s great, expansive chest seemed less imposing, his ferocity compromised by being laid horizontal.
He looked like Tony Barraza. When the clerk closed the box, I closed my eyes.
18
PURPOSE
San Francisco, June 15, 1965
Uncle Shim was working half-time in the China Lights Bank on Jackson Street. He had told me that he would be at Sigmund Stern Grove, a small park not far from the Pacific Ocean, where free concerts were held on summer Sundays amidst an impressive stand of stately eucalyptus trees. Here, for years, he had studiously tutored me in the ways of China, while the sun glinted through the trees, the birds chirped, and the eyeballs rolled in my head.
I knew that by going to West Point I had been unfaithful to his creed. “The purpose of learning is to help others,” he had said. “The purpose of soldiering is to kill. Yes, yes, I know you say it is to ‘protect.’ But the way soldiers protect is to kill.”
Stern Grove usually had more fog than sun. Today the sun was bright, and more brittle than warm. Shim baba now had a small, delicate, ebony cane, upon which he rested both hands as he watched bushy-tailed squirrels take peanuts from his feet. He smiled and his head moved stiffly with each of their lightning moves. Uncle had shrunk, his frame gaunt inside the soft gray flannel suit of which he was so fond. The collar and cuffs of his white shirt encircled his thin neck and wrists like carelessly loose shackles on an old, forgotten prisoner. For the first time in memory, I noticed that his collar and cuffs were worn. He had always been flawless in his dress. The gay brightness of his familiar jade bow tie emphasized the pallor of his skin.
It was painful seeing him. Had he aged so much in only one year? Or had the year in the company of oversized, physically vigorous, athletic Western men altered my perception?
His brightly cleaned, metal-rimmed spectacles caught the sunlight in blinding beacons as he looked toward me. He put out a hand and waved it, palm down, in the conventional Eastern way of invitation, of beckoning. Friends in the ’hood were always confused by the gesture, which looked like waving goodbye instead of “Come here.” The squirrels saw me and fled.
“I bow to you, Dababa,” I said, bowing, smiling as the pleasure of his company overcame the pain of studying his frailty.
“Hausheng. What a pleasant surprise. I find you looking very round, very full, very lucky, and a strong credit to your family. Actually, have you lost weight? Ah! Is that food?” he asked, sniffing the kuotieh, pork-filled pot-sticker dumplings, and the flat rice-noodle shrimp chowfun that
I had brought in a take-out bag from Kuo Wah. I reached into the bag and pulled out my gifts for him. “ ‘The weight of this is light, but the feeling in my heart is like a mountain,’ ” I said. In it was a Guan Yu figurine.
Uncle Shim smiled, blinking rapidly. “Ah ha, thank you, Hausheng. Very nice gift. Very clever of you, to give me a household god, but not Wench’ang, for scholarship. Instead, Guan Yu, the warrior.” He nodded. “Put him on the ground.”
I did. The squirrels rushed over to the great red-faced spearman, sniffing, grasping him. Guan Yu stood tall, his widely spread feet resisting, his spear held firm. I was proud of him.
“Guan Yu was the great Asian soldier, Dababa, not Chingis Khan.” I removed the containers and began to divide the servings onto plates. “Millions of Chinese people honor him and his sense of duty, and honor. That is what West Point is helping me become.”
“Yes, no doubt,” he said gruffly. “You may do what he accomplished. Which is, to kill and to die by the sword.”
“Dweila—right,” I said automatically. I passed him a plate of steaming noodles and pot-stickers.
“Yes, syesye. First. Please remember, through all your foreign thinking and your foreign ways, that you are not in this world alone, one young man on the flatland dirt of the world beneath the Heavens. Oh, no! You are connected by blood and tissue”—he said “tiss-you”—“to every person in your family by the San-gahng and Wu-lun, the Three Bonds of trust and Five Personal Relationships. You all represent one collective creature. To be without them—well, it is to be like me. Cut out from the world.”
He deftly scraped the wooden chopsticks against each other, smoothing them, then nimbly secured one of the steaming, slippery pot-stickers and took a bite, chewing, full of gusto and enthusiasm.
I felt his hurt, but was happy that he was still a man of China. Even when depressed, he ate like a horse. Food, after all, was a celebration in itself. I smiled as if I had cooked it.
