by Gus Lee
This your duty to me. God is our Heavenly Father. I very tired now. I kiss your sweet face.
Your
Mah-mee
When I finished reading I could remember nothing, staring at the delicately flapping pages as if they were gossamer wings of an exotic bird. I looked at the waves. Over the horizon lay China and my mother’s heart.
I reread the letter three times and I understood, nodding, having a sense of everything in the universe. I returned to the car, carefully returned the letter to its envelopes and put it into the least used storage pocket in my B-4 bag.
The deep, profound silence had been replaced by the roar of the surf. I walked along the seawall until I reached the stairs, and descended onto the beach. I began running across the thick sand to the surf, as my mother, her feet unbound from tradition, her soul yearning for her past, had once run, trying to commune with her distant father, across the Pacific, the Great Sea.
She had placed her feet in the freezing water, hoping her father, on the other side of the world, had been doing the same.
I sat in the sand and unlaced my jump boots, put my socks inside them, rolled up my khaki trousers, and walked across the cool, smooth, wet sand into the cold water. I listened for her, turning my ear toward China, trying to remember her voice, her tones. I remembered she sounded like Janie and Harper Lee. I was four years and sixteen seasons late, standing in the Great Eastern Sea. Do the dead wait?
I looked at the horizon, where the heavens separated from the earth. The ocean roared, driven by the moon, whipped by cosmic tides that felt to me like the hand of God.
I closed my eyes to the crash of the waves, the concussion of its encroaching march upon the earth. In its deep, reverberating roar I heard the voice of divinity, the rhythmic chant of celestial harmony. I heard the baying of patriarchs, the clarion bugle calls of the Academy, the heart-stirring crescendo of the West Point march, a distant call to war and to duty beyond family. It was the crashing of the sea, and Providence, and faith.
I heard my father, his strong voice in the thunder of the surf, his artillerylike defiance to the awesome weight of Chinese tradition, rising above the power of our family, rebellious to an unchallengeable past. He was a blindly zealous champion of a different future, a Black Haired man of the Western world.
He too had been given a rock at birth—the rock of filial duty, of shiao. One he could neither lift nor drop. Then had come civil war and an awful invader. To apply his will and hold his fist to the face of evil, he had dropped the rock, had worked with a foreign army, come to a foreign land, and become a foreigner himself. My father had faced his own Fork of Pain, so many times.
The waves crashed all around me. I was alone on the beach.
I looked up at the moon. Uncle Shim had not given me my mother’s letter in 1964 because, to him, West Point had not counted. Going to the University of California at Davis—this counted.
When I last spoke to her, it was in Shanghainese, and I had been a small child.
“Mah-mee…,” I now said tentatively. “I was at the American Hanlin.” I licked my salty lips. “It was all k’e ji fu li. It loved honor and cared nothing for money. I dream of this school, every night. We were like the brothers in the Peach Orchard.
“Mah-mee, I’m a ping. Going to be an officer. I’m going to UC Davis, seventy miles from here, like from Shanghai to Soochow. Don’t be angry.” I looked at the moon and I thought a cloud crossed it. “I apologize for not speaking to you, for being a bad son. I’ll honor you at ch’ing ming and visit the beach and speak to you. I’ll try to open my mind to Christian thought.” Although, I thought privately, you ask too much. Ji hui, I thought.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have no secrets from you. I shouldn’t lie to you. The Christian stuff is asking a lot, but I will do all I can to honor you.” I breathed in the wet sea air. “Mah-mee, I have done so many wrong things. I wasn’t good to my chimu. Couldn’t love her. Couldn’t save Janie from her trouble. Kept Janie from keeping her promise to you. I caused a man and his son to die because I didn’t call the police. I caused terrible pain to some classmates, by honoring Honor more than them. Mah-mee, I’m a bad student. I flunked out of the American Hanlin, causing my father unbelievable pain. I’m awful at music. I wish I could tell you I’m Chinese and Christian. I wish I could tell my father that I’m American and not Christian. Uncle knows. In your mind, and in the mind of my father, I am all of that, and none of it.”
I cleared my throat. I was filled with self-consciousness and awkwardness. It had begun as a rote exercise. Now she was listening to me and I was performing the Shining Bright Duty of ch’ingming, reporting to ancestors.
“I’m not married. I don’t have any children for you. I don’t think I’d be any good at it.… I’m sorry that this is what you want. I’d be the worst at it. I mean, besides math,” I added.
I felt the next question. It had been in me always. I shut my eyes tight to keep it away, but I was too weak and Honor pressed upon me to confess the inquiry of my life. But instead of saying it, I began to cry. Softly at first, and then with hooping wails that only a child’s lament inside a man’s lungs could produce.
“Mah-mee. Did I kill you? My chimu said I did. Did being pregnant with me cause your cancer? Oh, God, I’m sorry, so sorry, so sorry.” I fell on my knees, covering my face. I could not hear the surf, only my own sounds. I wept into a void of sound and time, no longer looking at my weakness. When I was too tired to cry, I stood.
“I want to honor you, my mother. I want to be a good son to my father.
“I’ve been confused because each of you wants me to be something the other doesn’t want. You both brought the old disputes in China here, and it’s continued, long after your death. I’ve been the living argument between your memory and Father’s will.”
The roar of the surf was louder. My father spoke to me from the ocean, while my mother listened, and tolerated, and accepted me from a bright and silent moon that blacked out the stars and whipped the waves, throwing fine, wet, salty spray into the air.
“I must do the same as you, Mah-mee, and seek my own path, as you did. I’ve done things to dishonor you. I love the Army and I don’t understand anything about music. Thank you for thinking of me, for writing this letter, sixteen years ago.”
I had separated from the Academy with silence. But the separation had been a ripping of my soul, a tortured scream at the roof of heaven, as if a mother I had loved had been taken from me.
I had left a place that was all yang, male force, and the separation had brought my mother back to life in the bottom of my heart, where the most vivid feelings settle under the weight of living. I began to suspect that many of the deficiencies in my personality had arisen from the death of a mother I had forgotten.
“Thank you,” I said, my voice drowned in the surf, “for loving me.” I looked at the lights at the Cliff House. My mother had loved me. At one time in my life, I had deserved love.
“Father,” I said. “If you had told me about my mother, I would have understood myself a little. My early physical fears, my reluctance to fistfight, my superstitions, my clinging to Chinese ways in a black ’hood. I would not have felt like a k’ung hsu ghost, an abandoned, free-floating spirit in this land of white men. I would not have forgotten my own duties, to my sister, to my mother. You can’t take a child’s past without an explanation, with only the curses and blows of an angry chimu, and expect him to be good in mathematics because you demand it. I may not be good, I may not be worthy; but I was a child, and not clay.”
I closed my eyes in the surf and faced my father. “You are the father, the fu-ch’in,” I said. “You have responsibilities. You can’t look stern and walk away when times turn hard. When Edna evicted Janie you did not help. All my fights as a kid I carried alone. When Edna hurt me, you were gone. I’m afraid of your roar but that can’t be helped.”
My Mah-mee was telling me how to face my father. To face his harnessed fury
with peace, to be of good courage where all I felt was fear, to hold tight to the good that lay somewhere in our relationship. I would not render to him the banishment he had permitted to befall Janie, or seek to return the pain that Edna had given me. I would support Janie, a low-status Chinese daughter who had been cursed in k’ung hsu by an American chimu. I would honor my father and my sister with Confucian duty and Western honor. I, a son with paterphobia, would have to apologize to him, and ask him to serve his daughter.
Seven green aircraft lights went on as we arrowed for the DZ. It was time to stand in the door, to take the wind in the face and to jump out, to see if my mother’s God felt like inflating a Chinese parachute sewn from ancient, silken gahng, stitched upon the bones of broken relationships and sealed with the blood of suspicious hearts, to test the possibility of Christian poetry.
I rang the doorbell and the buzzer sounded. I opened the iron gate, clanged it shut, and walked up the stairs. The light came on, the door opened, and my father appeared in his old Army sweater.
“Kai! What—what is it?”
“Can we talk?” I asked, nervous, trembling from the cold and the proximity to my father. Obey, and tremble. I smelled his pipe.
“You went ocean, feet in water,” he said, stepping back.
I nodded as I entered. I was drenched in saltwater, my knees black with sand and grit.
He smiled as if the uptilting of his mouth might cause pain.
“Dad. Let me say two things. First, I’m sorry I wasn’t better in math, that I flunked out. I know you were trying to help me with math when I was younger—”
“Kai,” he said sadly, “no need.”
I was in the apartment where he and Edna had spent their last years together. He industriously had filled the lonely space with high stacks of books and magazines that covered the floor and in some cases reached four feet in height, creating, for me, an even greater impression of solitude. I remembered Major Schwarzhedd’s Q, and his icebox, and his great treasury of books with notes fluttering like small birds in the breeze of his rotating fan. I stood straight, trying to match Dad’s ramrod posture, standing at parade rest, formal, but subordinated. I took a very deep breath and heard the jump master’s call to “Go!”
“Dad, you need to do something about your family, your daughters. You have to fix things with Janie. Dad, you have to take command. You have to do the right thing. No matter how hard.”
He narrowed his eyes, moving his jaw back and forth. He turned away from me. There was a long silence.
“WHAT CAN I DO NOW?” he shouted. “TOO LATE! YEARS TOO LATE! Chance gone. Gone, forever.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said. “It’s never too late. All you have to do is say you’re sorry. Whether they, or she, listens or not. And she’ll probably not listen. Not at first.”
“She will scorn at me!” he yelled. “So I was wrong! Never can be forgived! NO! We forget! DROP!”
I gulped. I involuntarily flexed my arms. “Try, Dad.”
He paced, full of fury, knocking over stacks of books, like Godzilla flattening Tokyo, shouldering the furniture, a human temblor shaking his world. This was worse than a world of WFRs.
“DO I BEAT HER, MAKE THEM TO GIVE ME MONEY? TELL THEM WHAT TO DO? TELL THEM WHO TO MARRY! NO! They are American! No shiao, no filial duty! In America, people have freedoms!”
“In America, Dad, it’s your duty to her. The old way, goo dai, is only her duty to you.” I took a deep breath. “We don’t do that anymore. We’re Americans. Americans honor their daughters, bear duty to them, always. Here, the stronger care for the weak, the parent always stands up for the child.” I didn’t even know that I knew that.
“What do you know about anything!” he cried. “You know nothing! Nothing of duty! Only read baby book in Chinese! Never see China! Don’t know pressures.” He shook his head, retrieved his pipe, and clanged the pipe in the brown glass ashtray like a Muni cable car man ringing a bell.
“Sit.” He pointed at the old hassock. I sat on the arm of the sofa. The light from the lamp cast shadows under his eyes and reflected on the expanse of his broad forehead, brimming with ancient knowledge. “Not matter. Tonight, talk about school. Not Janie. Night for memory. I ready to talk. Then you come in, angry.” He grimaced. “Always, you do it wrong. When should be quiet, you talk. When should shout, you whisper. Say stupid thing in restaurant, laugh in face of society lady! Always drive Edna crazy with frowns! Not matter. I tell you, anyway. I have great memory.” He blew out his breath, pursing lips.
He nodded. “I remember too much.” He looked out the window for a long time. I glanced at Uncle Shim’s watch, reminding myself to be patient, to honor my gahng to him, to try to restore his ho, his harmony.
“You see, I not graduate. I flunk out of engineering. Never finish college at St. John’s. I did not finish with my classmates. I last—three years.”
My mouth fell open.
“Yes! True! Three years—just like you! When you fail at West Point—I think gods curse us!”
“God. You—don’t believe in gods,” I said.
“Maybe now,” he said, “you flunk out. End of third year,” he said. “My grades not so good.” He frowned, shaking his head, the pain in his face something I understood so intimately. His pain, my pain, double-double pain.
“My father say: ‘Be engineer!’ Americans say: ‘Improve self, climb ladder high, tomorrow new day—always better! Sky the limit.’ Chinese say—born under stars, no choice. All geomancy, all yuing chi and yeh, luck and karma. Born Horse, always Horse. Once stupid, always stupid! Once second son, always worthless! Then, world go crazy—Japan invade. Reds say kill all landowners. People like my father! Foreign power push each other. Kuomintang try improve China. College students all demonstrate—no studies.”
He smiled ruefully. “Easier, demonstrate, ask for justice, than do calculus. Easier, hold knees and tell school dean to go work for democracy than do studies. It was revolution. I was a leader. I had to lead.”
I nodded, dumbfounded, hearing and not believing.
“That why I push so hard when you were small child, try make you so good in mathematics. I think: give him pain now, no pain later! Try save you from my trouble, use all my willpower! Still have trouble with geometry, trig, calculus! Have to study hundreds hours make trig diagram, calculus equation for you at home.
“Still have trouble with geometry, trig, calculus,” he said. That was me. I couldn’t believe it was him.
He shook his head again, and his eyes were moist. I couldn’t watch this, and closed my own.
“I fear, inside your head, same bad brain like me, not as smart as Older Brother. Weakness for math. I try, fu bu fu, tsi bu tsi—father unlike father, son unlike son. I try save you. Instead,” he said slowly, “I put all my trouble in box and give to you. Sorry, so sorry,” he said, shaking his head bitterly.
“Oh, Dad.”
Silence, neither of us able to look at the other, swallowed by a dark world full of secret, inherited curses and broken hopes.
“I thought you were so good in math … you had a tutor.…”
He nodded, lips pursed, eyes narrowing in pain. “Ha!” he cried with old pains. “You have no idea. My tutor, so oppose to modern ways, so tied to past. He scorned at me! At my American thoughts, say that K’ung Fu-tzu very happy with my failure. Pleased that disrespectful Second Son got price of foreign thinking. He hardened his heart. He was so bitter, never forgive. Say all his years with me wasted.
“You know”—he sighed deeply—“I honor my tutor. But his old books not stop Japanese tanks.” His jaw hardened. “I try to be modern soldier, trained by Americans to protect my father, my mother, China. I think of my tutor, I hear his laughing.…
“So,” he said, firmly, his lips tightly pursed, his eyes hard.
“Never look back. I not man with backward glance. No tutor. No China. Only America.”
He walked into the bedroom, opened the window, and stepped onto t
he fire escape. I moved the curtain back and joined him, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder on the small steel lattice platform, both of us looking up at the brilliantly radiant moon.
“Except tonight.” He opened his hand to the moon, the impresario opening the long, dark, secret stage of memory.
“Tonight, have Liu Bei’s eyes, see past long ears! You like Guan Yu and his spear. Liu Bei was the brother in the orchard with brains.
“I remember. Moon so bright like artillery flare! I remember moon shining down St. John College central courtyard, June harvest moon, 1927. Same year when snow fall in summer on rebuilt Hanlin roof, when Shanghai sun have black circle run around it, when sweat come from orange figure of Prince Min on Forbidden City roofs, midwives say so many sick baby boys, born dead.
“All fortune-tellers say, bad crops, war, death, suffering, bad year. I not superstitious. But was bad year. Grades not good enough to stay. I stand alone in courtyard, knowing I go in morning.
“Midnight, last day of school. Everyone else asleep. Only I awake, all St. John’s. Like school belong to me, but not belong.
“It did not hurt to leave Shanghai. I had great adventure in front of me. No. It hurt to leave my teachers, my schoolmates. I was son of very important, very powerful man! My failure his failure. He lost face with fathers of my classmates, now, strangers to my face. Very much, so much hurt.
“Kai. Now we here, in America. Moon is round, just like China moon. But courtyard is unlimited, most peculiar, most special courtyard of all history. I come here, your mother angry with me from war, daughters grown up. No college degree, try get job.
“I so excited about come to America! With American Army, everyone has respect! You fight hard, you think good, you are honored. Here, no one want hire me. Call me ‘Chinaman’ and ‘chink.’ Me—grandson of emperor’s magistrate and friend of Joseph Stilwell! No honor! But I speak English not so good. My wife die from cancer. What do with you? Need mother. Janie just a girl. I could go back Army. Help, Korean War, do what I know.” He shook his head. “American father, must stay. I stay.”
