by Gus Lee
“Harder than you can imagine to win, Kai. We’re not supposed to really win. We triumph as part of a team, part of a community, bending sail under good winds for high causes. We try to stop ourselves just short of a great personal win, because the high-profile winners are often selfish people. And we know that, and don’t want to be that. We taste blood, master the violence of battle, and like it. Then what?
“Good to worry about winning and gloating. Good to be concerned about enjoying victory—knowing your win is ashes in the mouth to the loser, his home burned, crops destroyed, family exposed to death and economic rapine, children left to wander across a burned earth. All this unspeakable misery, to stop war and to delay the next. God’s greatest paradox. Here we train you to kill and educate you to love peace. To love your men, and then send them up a hill to die.
“Look at Trophy Point. Beautiful and barbaric. Battle Monument, for the dead. Made up of melted-down enemy cannon. Trophy Point’s salted with cannon, grounded in the earth, muzzles down. Imagine if those were your guns, taking from your dead Redlegs. Wellington was right. The only thing worse than defeat is victory. What would Confucian scholars think of what you did?” he asked.
“K’e ji fu li,” I said.
“Ah, yes,” he said, as we entered the coolness of the BOQ and unloaded the ice. “Subdue self, honor the rites. Well, Mr. Ting, you honored them well. You deserve a reward. Want a soda?”
35
REQUIEM
Thayer Hall April 1967
Major Sewell asked us to compare Napoleon’s “morale to guns” to the Communist “anti-imperialism to foreign weapons” ratios. I argued that the Chinese Civil War and the Philippine Hukbalahaps proved that nationalism could defeat superior arms. Armed with popular support, the People’s Liberation Army defeated my father’s better-equipped army. Without popular support, the Huks lost to Magsaysay. Most of the class disagreed, believing that nationalism was but one of many ingredients in the counterinsurgency soup. But I had read Lacoutre, Fall, Truong, and Buttinger. I was right.
The major, an Oxford-educated Rhodes scholar, was moving the discussion to the French war in Indochina. I couldn’t wait.
Mrs. Malloy, a department secretary, entered, giving him a note. I felt she was trying to look at me in a consoling fashion.
“Mr. Ting, return to your company for a telephone message.”
I entered 4-West wing of the University of California Hospital, carrying my overnight bag and a flower bouquet. I had been classified Military Airlift Priority 1B, medical emergency leave/family, and had been booked on a night-flight C-141 from McGuire AFB in New Jersey to Travis AFB. Now, in San Francisco, I was surrounded by a surly hostility. Few said anything, but many looked at me with dislike. I had gone to West Point to become American, and now in the city of my birth, riding public transportation on the way to the med center, I was the enemy.
“You don’t get it, do you?” I asked a guy my age with long hair who was trying to drown me in his glower. “If someone attacked us, you’d expect me to die for you.”
He turned his head away from me, laughing, making my words sound silly. He made faces to fellow passengers, who agreed with his sentiment. Once again I was the skinny Chinese kid, drawing ugly laughter. Did they think I invented Hitler, Tojo, Chingis Khan, and Stalin? I got off at Parnassus with my face red with anger. I looked like Guan Yu.
I already missed West Point. Mike was coaching Mr. Spanner in English and math. Mr. Zerl had suffered a knee injury and was despondent about his gridiron future, but had managed to teach Mr. Spanner how to shine shoes. Mr. Parthes had seen a picture of Pearl and had joined the Spanish Club. They all might make it.
“Kai,” said my father in the corridor, the use of my name evidence of his distress. He looked tired, deep lines of sleepless worry creasing his cheeks and forehead, deepening the sockets of his eyes. My father looked old. We shook hands, but he could not look at me. She had to be very sick. I put down my bag and the flowers. After twelve hours of transportation, I was where I was supposed to be, but I didn’t want to go in.
Megan Wai-la, my sister, stepped out from the room, crying softly. “Oh, Little brother!” She threw her arms around me.
It felt great to hold her, and I could’ve stayed there a long time, enjoying the closeness, but she broke our grip first.
“You’re so big!” she whispered. She wanted to smile but was unable to hide her dismay at the sight of my uniform.
“There’s nothing wrong with wearing this uniform,” I said.
My father was proud of my comment. But I had compounded old wounds in the family, pulling scabs from my sister’s psyche, to no one’s benefit. It delayed me from seeing Edna. Again, I was seven years old, afraid to enter my stepmother’s room.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Megan. “You look good.”
“Oh, it’s okay, you monster,” she said, in her fine English accent. “I have no right to judge you; you’re my brother. Hurry. She’s waiting.”
Edna lay in a room with two beds, one empty. She had the window view. A plastic white curtain was partially drawn, and she lay so still I feared she was dead. A television faced her, and muted, meaningless sounds came from a small gray portable speaker by her pillow. He hair was white, her pale skin blanched, her body thin and seemingly without muscle. A tube ran from her nose, and she had an IV in her arm with a bag of clear fluid suspended on a rack above her.
Dad had not been able to tell me what had felled her. All he could do was choke out the words “Edna in the hospital, bad.”
I knew it was a stroke—a real one.
“You’re not serious,” Janie had said.
“This could be a chance to patch things up,” I said.
“It’s not my job,” she said. “It’s up to her.”
“Look. I don’t want to go, but I have to.”
“I do not have to,” she said. “Nor do you.”
“Don’t you feel anything? A duty? She’s chimu, whether we hate her or not. You’d be going to respect her, her status, not her record as a parent.”
“Gahng and lun?” she asked.
“Yes—gahng and lun.”
“I have no gahng. I’m the ghost. I feel nothing for her.”
“But—you suggested we get rid of her. Now God’s doing it for you. I just think it’s a good idea to make peace.”
She sighed, long and deep. “I’ll never have peace because of that woman, dead or alive. What she did was so wrong, so hateful.”
She was asleep. I stepped closer. I hadn’t washed. I placed the bouquet on the bed, went to the bathroom sink.
“Hello, Kai,” she said quietly.
“Hi, Edna. How are you doing?” I said, drying my hands.
Outside, below on the street, a siren wailed, a car honked its horn, and some young man began shouting his anger.
“Fine,” she said.
“You look rested,” I said.
The Honor Code forbade even social lying. West Point had always striven to be as strict as she, and usually failed. I had been proud of the Honor Code. Lately, it had been making me sad.
“You look wonderful,” she said. “Handsome. So presentable.”
She had always thought me ugly, but she loved uniforms.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Senile diabetes. It’s affected my eating and functions of other parts of my body. Can’t eat. Now, my heart.”
She tried to wave her hand. She breathed slowly, once, twice. “The truly terrible, terrible thing—things—are the needles. I hate them,” she said, frowning, her voice weaker with every word, sighing softly from the exertion. It was like watching water shut off from a tap.
“How soon before you get out of here?” I asked.
She raised her eyelids to see me. I moved a chair to her bedside so she could look at me more easily.
“What uniform is that?” she asked.
“Khakis,” I said.
“I’m not leaving here.” A sigh
. “I’m dying.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true—you’re exaggerating.”
“I am not,” she said, with weakened vehemence. “I really do think you gave me a stroke,” she said.
I was ready. I sucked in air. “I’m very sorry. Very sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she said, reaching for me, and I held her hand in mine. I looked at it, the way I would look at the paw of an unknown beast. I didn’t enjoy the touch, and I felt guilty.
“Strong hand. Just like your father’s,” she said. “You were always a good boy,” she said.
Jesus, don’t say that. After all these years of my being the worst thing in your life, you’re going to say that? Strength waned in her frail fingers. I had been a bad boy, the worst. I had hated my life. I had hated her. It was my secret identity.
“I should get Dad,” I said, taking my hand back.
“No.” She moved her lips soundlessly, licking them, resting, getting ready to speak. “Purse,” she said.
Her purse lay on the bedside table. It was new and had replaced the old navy blue one she had carried for many years. “It’s not a very handsome purse,” she had said. “But it has exactly the right number of compartments, exactly the right amount of space, and the correct feel to hang on my arm as I go downtown, and it matches most of my clothes.” She used to talk to me like that when she was cheery. I think my father was always enchanted by her free use of emphasis, her explosion of exclamation points. They both spoke with an innate sense of drama, of pressured thought.
I stood and took the purse.
“Open,” she said.
Inside was a large envelope that was labeled “Kai Ting.” I remembered Janie Ming-li’s envelope, as she sat at our dinner table, a lifetime ago, in the twilight of our Chinese family. Did this hold my fate? What would Edna give me?
“Open,” she said faintly. “Rest,” she murmured, her arm falling off the bed. I put it back on the bedsheets, her fingers flat and unresponsive. I looked at her, so weak and helpless, her chest barely rising and falling as she laboriously drew breath.
She had been the living, sleeping, hounding terror of my life. Her voice kept me in childhood, ever vulnerable, always fearful, always wrong, and stupid, unworthy, hateful, and ugly. She had cuffed me for breathing, cursed me for not ending my asthma, evicted my sister, killed our cat, taken everything from me I valued, made me regret being a male, a Chinese, a person who had a friend. She had never apologized for anything.
In the envelope was a photograph that had been folded in half, with a note.
Dear Kai,
This picture is of your first mother. You could not successfully become an American while this common, uneducated peasant woman held you back with her oodles of superstitions, her gods in the doorbell, trees, and kitchen and the ghosts of ancestors floating down the hall. She wanted to train you to honor dead people in China and to put actual food at altars to dead people, and to never use your body. To be like a museum piece—just a brain! Honestly! She had a cockeyed view of Christianity. How could a foreign woman be expected to grasp the fine rules and strict laws of an unworkable faith. She thought you could do anything and then be forgiven by God! I hardly think so! There in truth is no God, but there is a Hell, and Judgment Day, as certainly as there is evil in the world and cruel people in it.
I truly hated this woman for what she had done to you, keeping you inside the apartment and away from life! Americans cannot live like this! Americans are robust and out-doorsy! I tried to burn this picture, but it would not burn, and for some unknown reason I never threw it away. You are 20 years old now, and mature enough, in my judgement, to have this picture, to do with as you wish.
I don’t know why my discipline of you angered you so. Boys have terrible, physical impulses, and it takes a strong will to redirect them. Your sullenness truly broke my heart. I tried to reach you, but your heart is made of stone. Now, I realize, you will probably never marry or be happy. It is not my fault. You are not handsome, and you would have needed all my assistance to compensate for your shortcomings.
I think I will give this to you as a birthday present. When you speak wonderful textbook English, or look at your big shoulders, every time you date a beautiful American girl or read fine literature, whether it’s Ben-Hur or Great Expectations, and whenever you write English, you should think of me, and thank me, and harbor no ill thoughts.
I love you, Kai.
Your mother, Edna
I pulled out the photo and unfolded it. One corner had been charred. It was the picture my sister Megan had given me in Angie’s cafe at the Y, on the eve of my fight with Big Willie Mack. After sleeping with the framed photo under my pillow, I had surrendered it when I was eight, on my handshake deal with Edna that had made her my real mother, and had given me a life without her physical punishment, opening the door for psychic abuse. I had given the picture to Janie. Edna had taken it from her.
My Chinese mother looked at me from the old black-and-white photograph. Her large, observing, serene eyes seemed bright. A rosebud mouth was composed so it could, in an instant, smile or laugh. Jet-black hair, parted in the middle, brushed to sweep along the contour of her head. A sculpted face with gentle cheekbones, dark eyebrows, and a round, pretty chin. She wore a light, high-collared Mandarin dress and a large flower in her hair just above her neck. She was beautiful. This was my mother. My Mah-mee. I found in her lovely face no similarity to me. I used to dream of her.
The photograph had been folded horizontally, and the crease caused tiny fissures in the photo’s dried emulsion.
You do not honor your mother, or speak to her, Uncle Shim had said. You do not remember her or know her face.
Now I remembered her features. I had a clear, shining image of my mother, lying in her hospital bed, smiling at me with her large, luminescent eyes, communicating with me with her face, without words. She was trying to tell me something, something important, and I was little, I was six years old and I couldn’t get it. I smelled something horrible. Ether. It smelled like sze, death.
She was my mu-ch’in, my mother, Mah-mee, and she would never tire, never leave me. She was brave and resourceful and loyal. Everyone said so. Mah-mee kept smiling, nodding, encouraging, sending, communicating, radiating feelings, thoughts, assurances.
I love you, my only son, I always will, her eyes had said.
Hands pulled me away from her, down long corridors, and my eyes couldn’t hold her, and through a terrible, horrible maze of halls and doors and stairs, each step, each turn, each floor, and every door separating me from her, making me dizzy as I tried to memorize the patterns on the floor so I could go back to her, and someone was telling me “Vyoh puh,” don’t be afraid, that she would be all right, and I would be all right. “Kwahla, kwahla!” Hurry, hurry! But we were going the wrong way and by then I had no idea where Mah-mee was, or how I could find her again.
I started to cry, and I felt so counterfeit, so bogus, crying for my Mah-mee when I should be crying for Edna. This true, honest, clear image of my mother, my only image, shimmered like a desert mirage and folded into the photo in my hands. I lowered my forehead and touched it to the picture, bowing to her, and to the mother behind her, who lay in her deathbed.
I had passed on the picture to Janie through the deal with Edna, knowing that Janie would guard it as fiercely as I had. I did not know that Edna was about to erase Janie from our family tree, void the home of the memory, of the photographs, of the spoken name, of recollection of the existence of the two Chinese females who had been, in rapid succession, my mothers.
I sat there for a moment, looking at the photo of Mah-mee, and then at Edna, and back again, in a form of filial visual rebounding that did not become simpler through repetition. I could not fit them together. I thought of Dad, who had married both of them. Dad, who would tell me nothing, leaving everything to feeble guesswork, to edited, polemic retellings, to vast and dark ignorance.
Edna had hated my Chinese mo
ther and loathed her memory, fearing her more as a ghost than as a woman with a life now ended. My mother from China had died, and now, joining her, was my American mother. Edna had set aside her hatred. Momma LaRue would have said that Edna was trying to make peace with her maker.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“You … good … boy,” Edna murmured. “Don’ cry,” she said. She sounded like Momma LaRue. She was fading. I stood and found Dad and Megan at the end of the hall. They returned. Dad held Megan’s hand. I stood back, adjusting the details of my uniform, doing the familiar, again and again.
I imagined my father putting his arm around Megan when she was fourteen, when they had met for a moment near the end of the Run, the boh-la, from Shanghai to Chungking to America. Born in China, raised in China, fled from China. For all their vast differences and their accumulated disappointments, they were connected in ways I could never emulate. They were true Chinese, not jook sing like me, and had seen war without end. I was American, and had fought all my battles within my family, both here and at West Point.
Edna was speaking to Dad, and Dad to her, and Megan tried to separate herself, but Dad needed her, needed her arm, and she stayed, weeping. Megan’s tears accentuated their absence in me. My father and my American mother said farewell to each other. They had been married fourteen years and should have had many more.
“Sorry … for Silly Dilly,” Edna said.
“It’s okay,” I said, surprised by my words. I think she wanted me to say that she had been good for me. I don’t think she wanted me to cry for her, although I would never know. I felt a Buddhist nothingness that paradoxically had clear borders, as if part of me had been excoriated not by fire, but by a surgeon’s knife. I looked at my father and felt sadness, and loss, and frustration. I admired Megan’s spirit, even the part that opposed me. I had so many confused feelings about Janie. I grieved for the Honor crisis, for Tony Barraza searching for his lost boy, for Clint, for Pee Wee, for Pearl’s dilemma with her father. I felt sorry for Silly Dilly.
