Honor and Duty

by Gus Lee

  “See here,” I said to him. “He is the only son we have in the total of both our families, however miserable and stupid he might be. He has disappointed me so many times, yet he is all we have.”

  He said to me, “I have no son.”

  Your failure to become the man he wished himself to be has cut your father to his inner heart, down in its bottom, where his most vivid and personal feelings are kept. His hope bleeds out of him, as it would from any Chinese father whose son has failed. Salt is in his wound because you failed at what he also regards as the American version of the Hanlin.

  I confess I am not so sad, for I know, despite your vigorous arguments, that your military school is not the Hanlin. Perhaps, in some ways, it is Chinese, full of k’e ji fu li, demanding honor, suppressing individuality, requiring vigorous scholarship and ritual, committed to social good. Yet, it also teaches the violent ways of Chingis Khan. It asks you to be a killer, and to lead other killers.

  Your mother birthed you in the year of loyalty, the Dog Year, and all this time I have tried to form from you a moral Confucian gentleman, loyal to Ancient Times. My chances of success, in my waning years, increase when you are not in the uniform of the ping, following Ping-fa, The Art of War, instead of the Lun-yu, the Analects.

  If you become a student of China and its ways, and rejoin us, all my work with you, however contrary to the wishes of your very honorable father, will not have been wasted.

  I suggest patience with him. A true Chinese father would never forget an injury from a son, and would wear the wound well past death. However, he is now American, and may recognize you again as his blood. I do not think he regards you as the emperor regarded Cheng Han-cheng and his wife, the disobedient couple who were skinned and burned as a warning to all others. You are not quite that bad.

  As to solving the problem between him and your sister Janie, please wait. You have no influence with him if you do not exist in his mind, and you can only push Janie into a worse situation, interfering with her own path to her father. So, I hope you are in as good spirits as possible, given the injuries you have imparted to him, and to me. Shim

  The lobby of the Beverly Plaza Hotel was quiet. I saw the old wooden enclosed telephone booth from which Uncle Shim had called me when I was a cadet. I was early. I was early for everything, for I had nothing else to do. The euphoria of seeing the Academy, of seeing my class graduate, of visiting with Major Schwarzhedd, had diminished in the wake of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and the violent animosities surrounding the war. As enduring solitude had returned, and I was trying to embrace it as my necessary yeh and yuing chi. I reminded myself that I had earned them.

  I had driven up from Fort Ord to ask Uncle Shim for help with my father. Perhaps, I thought, he could suggest a way to create a peace—not acceptance—but a relief from my continuous guilt, from the sense of being miserably undeserving. When not with my troops, I felt empty inside. I had become nothing. I was k’ung hsu, ignored as if unborn, cast out from the living.

  The desk clerk approached. “You are nephew to Mr. Shim?” he asked, and I nodded.

  “He say meet at Far East Cafe. He there long time now.”

  “Uhm goy,” I said.

  The Far East was between Commercial Street, where you can look at the financial district’s skyscrapers, the Bay, the Oakland Bay Bridge, and Old St. Mary’s Church—a small, dark brown sanctuary for Christians seeking redemption and heathens fleeing cold sea winds as they swirled from the depression below Nob Hill.

  Families filled the cafe and I weaved through the tightly packed tables. In the hallway’s last private cubicle next to the kitchen, the honored spot, I found the slender Uncle Shim, leaning slightly to his left. Next to him was my father. Both were in their customary suits, Uncle in a polka-dot bow tie. My father looked strong, but pale, and withdrawn; he stiffened as I knocked and entered through the curtain. I was the wound for which there was no poultice.

  The gallant Colonel Ting, the pilot and paratrooper, the man with two lives and two wives, one in China and one here, who had lost them both in America. The man who at one time had possessed an only son, who had failed him before the watching world, and now was a man without a wife, with no son, and a ghostlike nondaughter.

  “Hello, Dad,” I said to my American father.

  “Dababa,” I said, lowering my head to my Chinese uncle.

  The table was filled with dishes, enough for six, but I saw the food as if it were a photograph, without aroma, a cardboard thing without pleasure or reality. My father studied his plate.

  “Just us,” said Uncle Shim. “Please, Haushusheng, be seated.”

  I sat opposite my father at the round table, six seats away.

  Father had not acknowledged me or given me permission to approach him. After I became a cadet, he used to stand and shake my hand. My presence reminded him, I thought, of death, of defeat and failure, of a loss of status. My failure had made him more Chinese, more vulnerable, in a land of businesslike Caucasian Americans.

  “Father,” I said, “I’m sorry for flunking out of West Point. I know that I have deeply disappointed you.” I had said those same words to him by telephone, a year ago, enduring his silence. “I’ve lost your gun,” I had added, back then. There will be no ring.

  Uncle Shim studied his jade cuff links. Time stopped; breathing was labored. A large rock pressed on my lungs.

  My father faced his cold food. He cleared his throat and began to eat slowly, the large Infantry ring bright on his hand.

  Uncle Shim nodded and I served. The rich, high sounds of the many Chinese families outside the cubicle created a symphony of continuity. For a moment I was transported to China and was part of her. She was older than West Point, more patrilineal than the Army, where the unworthy son lowers his head to the disapproving father and the community waits to see his skin peeled back and his bones burned. There was a justice to this, a constancy rising from the waters of tradition. I could be a sacrifice, an example to warn a hundred others, as long as I was a part of something.

  “I apologize to you, Dababa. You trained me to be a better student. I have disgraced the very name you gave me.”

  “Pour us drinks, Able Student.”

  I opened the Taipei beer and walked around the table to pour into my father’s and uncle’s glasses. My father’s pain caused him to incline his head slightly. Stiff, unbending, unyielding sternness radiated from him like rigor from the dead.

  I poured tea first to myself, then to Uncle, and last to Father, giving him the richest, strongest-steeped tea from the bottom.

  “Let us drink to the strength of the clan,” said Uncle Shim, his voice vibrating with feeling. “To the continuation of your line and the memory of old ways. Let us subdue ourselves within the great embrace of the men who have preceded us, the Tings and the Shims. We toast the women of the clan who have been our strength, and drink to the two Ting taitais, and to Shim taitai, all of whom await us in the next world. Think of them, and not our own cares. The future of both lines now rests with the three of us here.”

  This was a toast to me, technically, the most likely candidate to procreate. “Gambei,” said my uncle.

  My father did not drink alcohol, and he and I lifted teacups.

  The food was delicious and the meal was terrible. There was no ren yuan, social pleasure, at the table, giving the dinner the restrained social subjugation of a Western formal diplomatic supper between nations preparing to declare war.

  My father was honoring his friendship to Uncle; Uncle Shim was honoring his lun to my father by arranging this uneasy gathering of desultory digestion, with two spoken comments.

  “More crab, Father?” I had asked. No answer.

  “Haushusheng, finish the soup,” said Uncle Shim. I nodded.

  Our thoughts were unanchored to positive guidance, as disparate as our relationships, and it was these feelings that spiced the meal, more than the rich oyster, black bean, hoisin, or sweetly soured sauces on the ten p
latters before us. Into this silence that consumed our feelings, I could project every worst fear of my father’s judgment of me.

  Our cubicle was silent. Later, one of the waiters burst in, expecting an empty table to clear of plates. He jerked, his eyes flying open when he saw the three apparitions silently seated.

  “Ohh!” he cried, bowing and backing out.

  I felt an old and ancient tug to down the beer as if it were air, but I was tired of defeats.

  An hour passed. No one was eating.

  “Please allow me to pay for the meal,” I said. “I am so much in debt to you. The gesture means nothing, but the weight of obligation is real.” I was stilted by being with men I had known all my life, the English words fighting against my mouth. I sounded neither Chinese nor foreign. Speech was now difficult. My brain swirled, confused.

  “Unthinkable,” said Uncle Shim. “Tonight is my treat.”

  My father put his hand on Uncle’s arm, shaking his head. He would pay, and there would be no argument. With the check came three fortune cookies, left untouched. These American things, words wrapped in pastry, were for pleasure and levity. Not now.

  “Hausheng, walk me back to my hotel. Your father will drive home. I thank you both for sharing this meal with me, and for your valuable time.” He stood stiffly, his thin legs helped by the ebony cane. I noticed that it was scarred, as if it had been dropped.

  “Able Student, I find you looking very round, very full, and very lucky. Someday, you will be a strong credit to your family.” He smiled broadly, as if we had just finished a ripsnorting collegial roast closed with four choruses of “That’s Amore.”

  I stood away from the door. Dad studied my chest, looking at the Airborne wings, the drill sergeant badge, my three little ribbons, the qualification badges. I wondered if he wanted me to go to Vietnam. I wondered if he wanted me to, if I would go for him.

  “Good night, Dad,” I said.

  He nodded, put on his gray Tyrolean hat, and walked out of the restaurant with his Prussian posture, stiff with the aches of defeat, slowed by the weight of the unworthy.

  “Hausheng, matters are progressing famously!” We walked slowly through the press of the evening crowds on Grant.

  “I must’ve missed something,” I said.

  “You missed nothing. Your father will someday forget the wounds you gave him. You must be ready when he is ready.”

  “Uncle, thank you for your help. I really appreciate it.” I took his frail arm as we crossed heavy traffic on Sacramento. “I know it was hard for you to do.”

  “Ai-yaa!” he cried. “You are so dense. This is my job—helping support the linkages between friend and friend’s only son! It did not bother me to do my duty as a Chinese elder.”

  He breathed heavily until we reached the Beverly Plaza. At the door, he stopped, reached into his coat, and gave me a letter inside an old and stiff plastic envelope. “Read this,” he said, “at the Sunset Beach. Indulge me by using strict obedience. Do not read it anywhere else. Go now.”

  “I will, Uncle,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He nodded, passed the hated elevator as if it were a rude drunk, and methodically climbed the stairs.

  I got my car out of Portsmouth Square and drove up Broadway through the new Barbary Coast, past Carol Doda’s Condor Club while Richard Harris sang “MacArthur Park.” I turned down Van Ness with the Hungry Hippo and its oversized parking lot on my right. At Geary I turned west for the Pacific Ocean as the Band played “The Weight,” about a tired man pulling into Nazareth. I switched stations, slowly turning the tuning knob to KABL.

  It was a little after nine-thirty, and Sunset Beach was quiet and deserted on a moonlit, fogless night. The lights in the Cliff House were ablaze. Its roof shined in the glare of the round and full moon. The illumination lifted the gloom left in the scarred excavation of Sutro’s Baths and Museum, the empty space next to the Cliff House. I drove down Point Lobos past the Cliff House, opposite the space that once held Playland, a beach amusement park. Diagonal parking spaces lined the Great Highway along the tide break, and I parked. When Bill Moen on KABL stopped talking, I turned off the radio.

  I heard the suave and cool ocean wind. Here, Laughin’ Sal, a monstrous, calico-dressed mechanical dummy with a garish, broken-toothed mouth, used to laugh like a foreign devil from a glass perch at the entrance to the Fun House. I walked across the sandy sidewalk to lean against the seawall, and looked at the plastic envelope.

  It contained two paper envelopes; the smaller bore the characters hau, shu, sheng. I opened it. Inside was a small diamond ring with a note.

  Kai,

  This is yours. You can give it to your wife someday. Lisa (I used to be Janie)

  I remembered Janie pulling on it, in Quebec.

  “Right,” I said, buttoning it into my right breast pocket.

  The second envelope was very old. Written in an elegant, woman’s script were the Chinese characters for “Only Son” and han and lin. I removed a thin parchment letter of several pages, written in a faded blue ink. I turned my body to allow the moon to shine on the top page. It was very old and it crinkled gently in the soft sea breeze.

  April 4. 1952.

  My Darling Only Son.

  You know some humans are bitter? And others are blessed? Some so bitter about bad luck fortune that they wish to spit at their enemies from death, hating with ever so much great power from their graves. I used to dance like American movie actress, my hair floating in the air, but I am not bitter for losses. From my grave, I give you a long and strong and full hugging so to smell your sweet skin and to feel your small heart beat with life all the way reaching back to China and to our home and our house gods.

  I wish you happiness on day of graduating from high school and beginning of American college. You are now 17, bound for Hanlin Kuan. Are you going to Harvard or Juilliard? I wish I could stand in your shadow now! You must be most tall and most handsome! Perfect in your looks! This is what drew me to your father! I pinned pictures of Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor on the walls, thinking thoughts of their faces at the correct moments, for you.

  Today is Friday, 4/4, fourth day, fourth month, double-double-bad-bad luck, one meaning death, the other meaning dying. Double the number, 8/8, double-double good, day you were born. Now I feel other world, the weakness of my life. When I am not of this place, my Lord will help me cross Great Eastern Sea to rejoin our family in China, where once again I be an honoring daughter to my father and mother.

  I think from there maybe my thoughts come to you now, ten years later, in 1964. Uncle will give you this letter when you begin college. You compose for piano, yes? You play wind instruments, yes? Teachers compare you to Mozart and weep for joy when they hear your music, yes? Tell me everything at the April festivals, and do not visit me only once a year! I have asked your father to bury me in an American cemetery. Not Chinese cemetery, because too many not Christian. Most Americans Christian, there where Jesu can find my immortal soul with Gwan Yin’s sisterly help.

  If you speak at the grave, I may hear you, maybe not. If you speak at Eastern Sea, I will hear. This is because of Christianity’s reach to China, where Jesu found me when I was a girl, and found my father when he was a young man. My Only Son, visit me at beach, where God joins Heaven and Earth.

  You are last male in family and only person who can carry the clan; Reds and Japanese kill everyone else. I accept now. I said to your father—stop worry, Reds will lose. So sad, how wrong I was. He always so much better in politics than me.

  So education of My Only Son will be American. It does not matter; you have my character, helped by Uncle Shim to honor the Old Ways and Ancient Times. You will always be perfect Chinese inside yourself, living with foreigners.

  I have you for almost seven years—first year in my womb—and you will be six years old in August. I did not let you run, or perspire. All of your precious shigong, internal energy, has been preserved for music and for learning! You will be a genius
! And better in mathematics than your father! How much misery he get because of Western ways.

  Janie Ming-li has helped you grow to 12 years old with Christianity teaching, music lessons, good food and warm clothes, and has kept away physical exertion, human sweat, peanuts and ruffians. No rough k’u-li work or awful peasant fighting for my son! You are not a fierce man, but a gentle loving boy with so many brains. I pat your head and you lean against me and this is better than all other things. I gave Janie my diamond ring to repay her for her years being your mother. Little Tail will honor her duty to me and to our Lord.

  Someday your father will become your teacher. But too late to make you a soldier. How he wants you to be a Western man in Western uniform, Guan Yu again. I cannot express all my joy that this horrible thing is not to be. Praise be to the Christianity God. Character is formed at birth, finished at 12! He can do many magic things, my husband. But not in this regard. You will be K’an Tse, a scholar with good grades and music, not a soldier, jumping out of Western airplanes with a knife in your mouth and chewing American gum!

  Uncle has taught you in my place, balancing your father. Your father does not wish you to be Chinese. Uncle joins me in not wishing you to be American. He has kept your tongue smooth and fluid in gwo-yu and Shanghainese. Uncle is Hanlin-trained, and is the best. He loves you as his own son. Care for him in old age, and pray he remarries, although I think he will not. Women should pay cash for man like him! He is kind and attentive and enjoys conversation with women.

  You now stand at beach I love. I have so very much comfort knowing that C. K. Shim is my friend and will help you when I am dead. Please always remember how we ran on the sand, how I sang to you. How I put my feet in freezing cold water of the sea and spoke to my father in Tsingtao. This closest to China possible.

  Now I cry. Cannot tell if cry for my father, or for Jesu, or for leaving you, the tears are the same.

  This is last letter. Cannot write again. I send all good blessings and love and Christian forgiveness to your beautiful wife and to your sons and daughters. Honor me with sons like your Na-gung, my father. Daughters who remind you of me. Be a man with a kind heart for your daughters and wife. Try to treat them equal of sons. Teach my grandchildren what Jesu teach: Go into world in peace, be of good courage, hold fast to goodness, render no one evil for evil, support weak and help afflicted, honor all persons, love and serve the Lord, being so happy in power of His Spirit.