by Gus Lee
Edna—nothing.
I had hated this woman, and now she was dying. I had caused it. I caused people to die, to bleed, and I felt nothing.
Megan sobbed when she saw the photo of our mother, who had been unaccountably cruel to her. Megan’s sadness opened like the gates of heaven, and she wept louder for so many hurts, so long endured. I heard my father crying, a sound utterly new to me.
I clung to my emotional immobility, again noting that even within my own family, I was a minority who could never fit in. When others were stern, I laughed like a madman. When others wept, I felt nothing. My father and Edna would have preferred a different child than me. I realized that I was supposed to have been a nonasthmatic, perfectly visioned, physically beautiful, mathematically endowed Caucasian girl, and not who I was.
My father wept.
“I’ll miss you, darling,” she said to my father.
36
BELONGING
West Point, May 1967
West Point’s Class of 1835 began the American tradition of graduation rings. Ours displayed the high and sharply spread wings of an American eagle, fiercely crouching on the centerpiece “68.” Under the numerals appeared a bold “USMA” and the hilts of Academy cavalry sabers. On the opposite side was the Academy crest with a scrolling bilateral streamer reading, “Duty, Honor, Country, West Point, 1802, USMA.” Graduates wear the Academy crest inward, emblematic of the school’s closeness to the heart.
The L. G. Balfour Company held the Class Ring Expo in the Post Gym. We made our selections of gold, stone, and inscriptions. Most of us picked gold rings. Pearl suggested I choose white gold. “See,” she said, “it goes better with your skin.”
“My father loved his American Infantry ring more than anything else. Look how big it is! A ‘crass mass of brass and glass.’ ”
The ring symbolized our camaraderie, the bonds and the brotherhood of West Point, forged by common effort against uncommon challenges. It was more symbolic of the effort, and the comradeship, than any building or monument on post, or any speech, tactics formula, or epithet created or remembered in its halls. “It’s like the whole thing’s inside the stone. All the lifelong friendships are smelted into the gold. A stamp of approval from the Academy, from your classmates. From all West Pointers.”
“You think this ring will make you American,” said Pearl.
I nodded. I filled out the form. I entered the letters “D.L.” for Dai-li, Mah-mee’s initials, for the inside. The eagle of my country, the gold of Honor, the weight of duty, were in its patent features. But there was more—it emulated my father’s ring. The black onyx saluted the other part of my heritage, and the gold was chosen by Pearl. The ring would be the unified icon of my life.
“What do you think?” asked Bill Ericson, who headed up the Ring and Crest Committee. He was a ramrod-straight Airborne poop schooler with chiseled features. We were looking at the mock-up.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Pardon me?” he asked.
“Congratulations, and thanks. You guys did a beautiful job.” Pearl beamed at me. She always liked me when I was emotional.
Deke wanted to play tennis on the river courts, Arch was putting together a touch football game on the practice field, and Bob was looking to play basketball. I wanted to do it all. It was a spectacularly sunny spring Saturday afternoon with no duties; a fine cool breeze blew in through the windows while the radio played. Sonny was leaning on me to study Juice.
Harper’s Bizarre was singing “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)”: “Slow down / You move too fast / You got to let the morning last.…”
“Kai—you gonna play or not?” asked Arch.
“He’s not,” said Sonny. “Don’t ever ask ’im again. He doesn’t play any games—no hearts, no hoops, no hallway touch, nothin’—until he gets past the Juice whufer.”
“Good point,” said Bob. “You and good times, Kai, just got a divorce.” There was a low, indecipherable mumble of common assent.
“Great,” I said.
“That sounded insincere,” said Mike.
Sonny hung large sections of butcher paper on the walls of my room. They were filled with multicolored Juice problems. “Remember the OMI lesson—that we retain seventy percent more from visuals than through our ears. Here’s your visuals.”
Mike kept looking at me while I looked at the equations. Black for the problem, red for the derivation, and blue for the solution. I studied the derivations flowing from the problems.
It was nonsense. Satanic scribblings from the ancient Chia dynasty of China. Bone scrawls, cave etchings, blue-dyed tattoos of dead deities left in memory of extinct civilizations, offering explanations to the smiles of sphinxes and the rising of phoenixes.
Sonny looked at me and scratched his healed leg, scrunched his face. “Kai,” he said. “Am I a bad tutor?”
“God, no, Sonny. You’re the best. I just got sawdust for brains. I’m the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. There’s only so far you can take me before all the stuffing falls out.”
He got up, looking at me and Mike, seated at the desks, the room empty now except for the three of us. A gaggle of guys wrestled in the hallway; distant chatter from the Great American Public on Thayer Road crept through the window; and, with the approach of June, some of my Plebes were singing the lyrics to Broadway show tunes at the tops of their lungs for the pleasure of the upper classes. It was mostly quiet.
“Over here,” said Sonny, pointing to his right, “is heaven, a month away, as a Firstie with the Good Deal First Class Trip around the U.S., no more hard engineering. Ya get two electives an’ the best military art, strategy, and tactics courses in the Academy. Stuff ya came here for. You’ll get ta write the script for One Hundredth Night an’ you’ll be a platoon leader, at least. We get rings in two stinkin’ months. Turn in our lousy rifles an’ pom-poms an’ get sabers an’ plumes. Unlimited weekends in New York with Pearl—no more stinkin’ movies in the gym. The Corvette or T-Bird or whatever ya want. We cheer as the best Army team since Dawkins rolls over the competition. Kai,” he said, taking a big breath, “you’ll be with your classmates.”
“Sounds good,” said Mike. “Too bad it’s not a real college.”
“Over here,” said Sonny in a low voice, pointing to his left, “is the nadir in bullshit humiliation and personal defeat.”
“Uh, I pick the other side,” I said.
“This,” he said, “is sayin’ hi ta your old man cuz ya got found. He doesn’t care that ya flunked only one course, or that you’re good in other subjects. He just knows ya let him down. Same for your civilian friends—the ones who aren’t Communists. In California, that’s probably about two people.
“Anyway,” he said, cocking his head to the door. “That’s Vietnam as an NCO, no control over what kinda platoon leader ya get. That’s goin’ over without us, which may not be a Good Deal. And if ya get killed over there, you can’t even get buried in the cemetery with Custer and Fideli. Bad Deal. Nothingburger. No degree, ring. No class reunions so ya can tell the new Corps they’ve gone to hell. No chance for ya to come back as faculty and use your lawyer talk to get ’em to make Juice an elective. This,” he said, “is giving up the three hardest years in your life, without the payoff, the fun, the easy year. Ya get this? This makin’ sense?”
“I get it. I’m a jerk. You’ve given me a lot of your time.”
“Good,” he said. “Better’n feelin’ stupid, and a lot better’n feelin’ kicked out.”
“Yes, Sonny,” said Mike. “If you weren’t helping Kai, you could sleep sixteen hours during the day and still get eight hours of rack at night.” It was a joke; Sonny tutored everyone.
“You wanta take a break? Come back to this later?”
I nodded. “I need to run,” I said.
Running in tennis shoes and shorts was a basic Academy tradition. I was surprised to learn during my summer leaves that this was not true at Cal, or Stanford, or Yale. Pearl
thought I was crazy, running voluntarily while no one was chasing me. West Point was a beautiful place to run, and I took the course around the chapels and the cemetery so I could end up at Trophy Point. The view was a reward.
Random thoughts cruised through my consciousness while I ran. I thought of Pearl, how she had established through our dates at the Academy a regular routine of kissing, knowing that much more was at stake; she was still seeking a husband.
Battle Monument was remarkably empty of sightseers. I stretched, then sat on the pedestal of the huge granite column and huffed.
This was my school. I belonged here. I had friends almost beyond count: hundreds and hundreds—battalions—of talented and idealistic young men who would smile at the sight of my Chinese features. I loved to run all over the Academy, visiting and talking with friends about anything but math. In a hundred conversations I had learned about the fifty states and explored authors and films. In thousands of talks we had fought and designed and won the war in Vietnam, imagined terrible death and hoped for enduring survival.
This was the most remarkable institution in the world, and I was in the heart of it. I was even admired by some, and could count among my acquaintances some of the outstanding members of my class and of West Point’s faculty. I had been in the company of some of the best teachers in the world.
This was the Hanlin, with its bright yellow pennons, imposing stone walls, and ancient traditions, all so steady and strong for the good of all. And I was one of its members.
“I might be a surgeon, but I’m thinking about psychiatry.” Michael Warren Benjamin, number-six man in the class, was next to me in his running gear. He smiled his Clark Gable grin, ending my rather stunning analysis of the world at hand.
“My best friend wanted to be a doctor,” I said. Toos, where are you? “Psychiatry?” I asked.
“Frontier of the mind,” he said. “Motivation, pleasure, anger, hope.” He laughed, fully, slapping his knee. “It’s great! Nothing more exciting. Surgery’s macho.” We had done macho.
“I like psychology,” I said. “Say ‘conditioned response’ and I say ‘Pavlov.’ Actually, I can’t wait for you to have me lie on a couch and tell me about my injured childhood.” Pearl had said, “Chinese people in America need a lot of help.”
“You gave me that copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. He says that figuring out yourself and what the other guy is going to do is the essence of the military art. And that,” Mike said triumphantly, “is psychology. Right now, I’m trying to figure out why you can’t study. Why you’re blocked in Juice.”
I looked down. “I’m just not that smart,” I said.
“You always hate math?” he asked.
I nodded. Then, a jolt. “No, wait,” I said, with the unique urgency of the Honor-bound cadet. “I think I liked it until I was, I don’t know—ten? Eleven? Young. Long time ago.”
“What happened then?” he asked.
I saw the Cadet Chapel, its geometry. “My dad tutored me.” “That didn’t help?”
“He got real pissed when I didn’t do it right.”
Mike smiled, nodding. “Yeah, I know that one.”
“It was real important that I get it right. Your dad do that to you?”
“Until I got smart,” he said.
“Well, I never got smart.”
“But you liked math until he tutored you?”
I gazed at the river. “Never told anyone this before.” I looked down at my hands, rubbing against each other. No sparks came out; no answers were writ in the sky. “I sort of went crazy. I was hard to teach. Stupid. It drove my dad sort of nuts. The funny thing is, I went crazy.”
“What do you mean, ‘crazy’?” he asked.
“Crazy. Abnormal, insane, nuts, crazy. Psychotic, or something. Worse than neurotic. I had laughing fits. I couldn’t stop laughing.” My words floated over the river, toward watching gods.
I had always known the insanity god had more to do with mathematics than was commonly understood.
My father presented bewildering geometry and trig problems. He looked at me the way cynics study palm readers, suspecting the absence of competence. I would look at these carefully drawn figures, knowing that they were one part graphite and two parts blood from his brain. These were very important sheets, very important diagrams. To me, they were gobbling gibberish, what Toos called rank jive.
My father would describe the problems with his unique English, and I would reply in my personal mutation of the language, neither of us understanding the other, neither willing to express truth. The truth was he feared that I was endemically stupid, while my truth was I could do little but fear him.
I was blind with it. I was the classic citizen of China, listening to the emperor, who echoed, “Lin tsun, tremblingly obey.” I had mastered the trembling part.
My math never met his expectations. The hurt, frustration, and even fear that flowed from my math errors stoked angers in him that could melt coke and iron in the forges of hell. They made me weep at the sight of his face.
The worse I was with his problem sets, the angrier he became.
“Study math now,” he said in his deep voice, and my heart would sink into the nether regions of my body, never sure when it was safe to return. We walked down the dark hall to the kitchen. I would not have been surprised to find a guillotine installed atop the old table. Here, my brain and my soul had been examined, again and again, and been found wanting.
“You are born with your character,” said Edna. “Boys cannot change. Girls can, and do.”
Uncle Shim agreed. “She is most wise for a foreign person. It is true. You are born with your gifts. You cannot order more talents from Heaven.” My lack of talents caused madness.
The passing of my mind was witnesssed by the isosceles triangle and cosine function questions that marched across my father’s fragile graph papers. Until this night, I had not known of the existence of the insanity god. He arrived at our kitchen table at my moment of greatest need. I did not understand the trig problem and was in the midst of the solution, making sucking noises with my mouth while wildly guessing at a host of unlikely answers. I was ten and had been angering my father for three years, coinciding roughly with my resistance to his second wife. I feared I would not see eleven.
In the midst of abject fear, something made me look up, into the light fixture that hung from the ceiling. It was very bright, and from it came a small and playful spirit that moved inside my stomach and forced from me a silly laugh.
A son, laughing at his father. During a test. Me, dumbest Chinese kid in the world, laughing at my father. The sound of it stopped my father’s hand. Again, the spirit forced out a laugh, heartier, fuller, more spirited than the first. It was neither mocking nor triumphant, but ludicrous, jumping with primitive hilarity, possessed of cosmic power and acting without fear. I laughed with the force of guffawing village clowns braying in tearful exuberance. I laughed from stomach, mouth, brain, and heart, from pancreas and thorax. I was a herd of hee-hawing elephants, crying until sheets of tears ran down my face and stained my shirt and my pants, leaving big salty drops on the delicate graph paper with their foreign symbols.
I saw my father staring at me in surprise, horror, and fear.
“Stop!” he cried. “STOP NOW!”
I couldn’t. Father no longer owned me; the insanity god had taken possession of my simple mind. Uncle Shim would say I could no more stop the laughter than a man could embrace smoke.
This did not stop the tutoring, but my father sat one chair farther away from me at the table, and no longer lost his temper physically in the face of my continuing mathematical stupidities.
There was no joy in escaping the bad temper I caused in my father. But I was powerless to beckon or dismiss this immature little spirit that knew nothing of my great rock, the heavy duty, the shiao, I bore to my father and all that he was. When I laughed without joy, the rock rolled away from me, and I watched my fate darken with a heart that struggled t
o beat.
I tried once to say it was okay that he had tried to form from me the intellectually heroic structure of a math prodigy, but I lacked the courage, and could not find words—only the riff of stumbling speech. When I turned thirteen and began to grow, the tutoring stopped. I had mixed feelings. Hard as tutoring was, it was what we did together.
Through his furies and losses and sadness, he was not venting his life’s disappointments on me. I was, however, one of them.
“Mike, my dad discovered I was really an idiot. When I found out, I think I went nuts, by laughing.” I blew out air. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“Cold Max,” said Mike. Leigh “Cold Max” McSon.
“What about him?”
“I could’ve beaten him. He went on to win Brigade, but I pinned him in Yearling year.” Mike’s knee was pumping.
“I remember that.” I was glad Mike was talking to the left and to the right, and not on that other topic. Cold Max and I had been roommates as Yearlings. “Mike, Cold Max was so angry, he spat. He talked like Donald Duck for weeks. You know—‘Holy smokes, how’d that turkey beat me?’ ” I said in my best Donald Duck imitation.
Mike laughed. “Kai, I had him in the last match.”
I remembered. Mike was up, 10-1. He could only lose by being pinned, which hadn’t happened once at the Academy—and Cold Max pinned Mike with fifteen seconds left. Mike was out of the Brigade finals. I had cheered for both of them, wanting both to win and neither to lose.
“Bad luck,” I said.
Mike shook his head. “Don’t believe in bad luck anymore.
We have inner motivations—hidden op orders—that unconsciously dictate what we do. Omens are road signs that give us clues about the motivations. Like, when you sit down with your Juice assignments,” said Mike, “do you see your father in front of you?”
Back to that. “Do you?” he said.
I shook my head and looked down at my tennis shoes.
“I can’t believe you’re not aware of him. This whole place is filled with sons of ambitious fathers. We’re all platforms for their hopes, their ambitions. West Point is a father’s totem.”
