Days of Distraction

by Alexandra Chang

  “She’s American?” the little girl asks, pointing at me. “She speaks English?”

  “That’s right,” he says in a steady, sweet tone. “Study English”—I miss a string of his words—“you can go to America. Do you hear?”

  All of the little girls nod vigorously and chirp like baby birds being fed. They look so hopeful. Do they know what they’re hoping for? Is there really a future for them away from these market stalls? Is that future any better than the life they have here among the cheap clothes and good food? Surely, it must be, most think. But what will they lose? Will they be as bold in a place they can’t call home?

  They wave goodbye as they ride slowly away.

  “Did you understand what I said to them?” my dad asks.

  “Yeah. Study English and you can go to America,” I say.

  He laughs. “Not quite. I told them if they work very hard, then they can go study in America, where they can learn English and be as good as you. I reminded them to ride slowly in the market. Also, I told them to spend more time doing schoolwork instead of having fun all day.”

  “I was close!”

  “Yeah, close enough.” He pats my shoulder, then he adds, “See, they’ll remember today forever. They’ll remember to be better kids.”

  Now on the TV is a multihour special on Charlie Soong, a businessman who had close ties to Sun Yat-sen.

  “There were lots of Charlies back then; whenever an American saw a Chinese face, they called them Charlie.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, there was a lot of frustration toward the Chinese. They were hardworking and took jobs from—”

  “No, I mean, why were there so many Charlies?”

  “Oh. I guess it was a name that was easy for Chinese people to remember.”

  Which brings me back to the question: What was it like to be with a white woman in the ’70s?

  “People used to be so upset if they saw an Asian man with a white woman. But by the time Sharon and I were together it wasn’t a problem.”

  “Really? Not at all?”

  “One time we were driving through Georgia, and we went to a Laundromat to wash our clothes. When we got back, all of our clothes were folded so neatly. We get there and the owner says, politely, ‘Here are your clothes.’”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “He was a bit of a hippie guy, an older hippie man.”

  “So why do you think he folded your clothes?”

  “Well, he was a nice guy. He saw I had a BMW, too. Maybe that’s why. And I gave him a generous tip.”

  “But what does that have to do with you being Chinese? Do you think he wanted to be nice because he knew other people around there didn’t like that you were with a white woman? Was he compensating for something else?”

  “Well, that’s possible. I don’t know. Another time, we had to get the car fixed, and we pull up to a mechanic’s place, and a young guy came out, and he goes, ‘Hey, boy,’ when he saw me.”

  “What did you say back?”

  “I just said the same thing back to him. ‘Hey, boy,’ and so he was a little surprised and started taking me seriously. Next thing he says, ‘What can I do for you?’ And so I told him exactly what we needed, but this was before I was a mechanic, so I didn’t understand as much as I do now.”

  “Okay . . . So? What does it mean?”

  “What do you mean, what does it mean?”

  “What did Sharon think?”

  “Oh, Sharon would get mad.”

  “About what?”

  “My white friends, they would introduce me as ‘my Chinese friend’ or ‘my Asian friend’ to people. She would get so mad when they said that. She was very sensitive about that. I said, So what? I’m Chinese, I’m Asian.”

  “But people don’t introduce their white friends as ‘my white friend so-and-so.’”

  “Yes, that’s true, but it never bothered me. But oh, Sharon would be so mad.”

  “So she fought for you?”

  “Oh, yes. She fought for me, hard.”

  The one time I thought I saw his ex-wife, we were walking up a long flight of stairs that connected our old San Francisco cul-de-sac to the street above. We were going to the doughnut shop and Burger King in the nearby shopping plaza, and planned to bring the feast back to my brother, sister, and mom. Then he said, “That was Sharon.” I spun around and saw a woman’s back, her long, frizzy brown hair, and the butts of two giant dogs, Great Danes, walking ahead of her. The image could be made up, could be conjured from other images he’d shown me in years since, but the incident was not.

  I asked him again if it had happened, and he said yes. Sharon had asked to see me. Why? She hadn’t even said anything. Why had she just walked by if she wanted to meet me? He said Sharon didn’t want to meet me, only to see me, to know that he was happy, that he had a family, something they could not have had together.

  It was difficult to believe that this woman, whom I had thought of, strangely, as a would-be mother (what if I had been born a different child) could appear and disappear so quickly. I had so many questions for this white specter from his past, and it was only much later that I’d realize they might never be answered.

  “Her parents weren’t happy at first,” he says. “But then they met me and they accepted me into their family. They were old-school, East Coast Jews. Sharon was their JAP. They were very protective. They liked me, though. Her dad especially.”

  “Why did you separate again?”

  “It’s complicated,” he says. “For one, I told you she couldn’t have children.”

  “Was that it, though? You just said she was the love of your life.”

  “Yes, she was. Not my first love, and not my last—that’s your mother. But of my life.”

  “So?”

  “Later, later. Why so many questions all of a sudden?”

  “Just curious,” I say.

  Cobbled streets. Ruins of St. Paul’s. Bright yellow and pink Portuguese-style buildings. Bible shops run by old Chinese women in religious habits. Gold shimmering casinos. The Vegas of the East. Egg tarts—pasteis de nata—with brown caramelized tops and layered, flaky crusts. Colonialism looking and tasting better than it should. And should I be enjoying it as much as I am?

  There are many beautiful, stylish men and women here. I stare at them, make eye contact with anyone who will look back. I envision what could have been had I been somebody else, or even if I had been a different version of myself, a self who had “returned” to China or Hong Kong, if I’d ever had the interest to do a year abroad in college, if I’d never begun a relationship with J, fallen in love, if I hadn’t been so intent on distancing myself from this place in my adolescent years (I look too Asian . . . I don’t want to be so Chinese . . . I’m not one of those Asians . . .), if I had been a self who had known more than I knew then, or know now, then what could have been? Would I have been happier? Would this have been a better fit?

  When we first started dating I had a dream where we were on a bus, in the back, where the seats face one another. Across the aisle from us sat a few teenage girls, all white, not unlike my friends from high school. They began taunting us, at first in even voices, then in loud screams. Why would you date a girl like that? She looks like a dog! He’s gonna leave you, he’d never stay with a girl like you. I woke up deeply upset. I told J, and he laughed it off, said that he would never leave me and that I looked nothing like a dog.

  Recently, after getting the dog and the cat, I had a dream where I was the one screaming. I was the one leaving. The dog and cat are coming with me. They’re mine!

  I told J. He looked hurt, and said, Why are you having dreams like that?

  What changes got me from one to the other, and how much change, and in what direction, is still possible?

  After reading that on February 3, 1905, the jury in Lee Toy and Hippolytus Eca da Silva’s trial decided in a mere fifteen minutes on a verdict of not guilty, I stop caring about his fate in life.
Of course she left him.

  No surprise that Yamei once told a reporter that she had been unhappily married to a man and that she had finally moved on from that former life after her husband had died, though he hadn’t. But it hardly mattered—he was dead to her. If they ever loved one another, it was definitively lost to history. All that was recorded and left was a shadow of their end.

  Now we’re sitting at the Grand Lisboa’s bar. My dad orders a Guinness. I request water. One of us needs to stay sober in this glittering landscape of money and desperation and false luck. Since it is eleven in the morning, the bar is slow, and my dad chats up the bartender, who has tattoos on his forearms and some peeking up beyond the collar of his shirt. He winks, quick and subtle, when he brings the glasses. My dad tells the bartender the story of his grandfather’s death on the casino’s floor. In this telling, my dad switches between Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, and I wonder if there are certain parts, certain emotions and images that are easier for him in one language over another.

  “He needs to practice English, too,” my dad explains. “If you want to move up, bartend in America, you’ll need to speak English. My daughter’s a writer. If you have any questions, any at all, about the English language, she has the answers.”

  The bartender—his name tag says BOBBY and three Chinese characters beneath it—nods and says, “Ah, yes.”

  “No, no, I don’t. Does he even want to bartend in America? This seems like a really good place to bartend.”

  “I want travel to Europe,” Bobby says, slowly, carefully, in a deep tone. “Berlin. London. Paris.”

  “You’ll need to know English in those places, too,” my dad says.

  They speak Cantonese for a while.

  “I asked him what he thinks of my Cantonese. He says that it sounds like his Cantonese. That’s because I’m natural at languages. You know, some people have that talent. My mom said I started speaking in full sentences when I was one. People like that can hear and repeat. I didn’t learn Cantonese until I was in my twenties, but nobody, not even these native speakers, can tell. Not a trace of an accent. It’s the same for my English, right?”

  “Yeah, you only have a tiny accent, and it’s really unique to you.”

  “That’s a New York accent!”

  “Your father speaks very good,” says Bobby. And he brings another glass of beer.

  “Last one, okay? Last one, right, Daddy?”

  “She’s always worrying about me. Always telling me not to drink too much.”

  Bobby smiles. “Good daughter.”

  I fall in love for a moment, but then it is time to go.

  Yamei Kin’s legacy was larger than lost love.

  She mentored dozens of Chinese women who went on to study medicine at American universities. She designed, built, and established the first medical college in China for women. She traveled the world lecturing on topics from international relations to fashion to tofu. During World War I, she worked at the USDA, the first Chinese woman to hold such a position. “My boy is at the front doing his bit,” she said. “I want to do mine, too.” She lived an intensely full life, the kind you read about and wonder, How can one person do this much? After her son, Alexander, died fighting in France at twenty-three (“What did he die for? What did we have to do with that sickening war?” she cried), she continued to work and lecture. Eventually she retired, to a quieter—though certainly not quiet by most standards—intellectual and social life in Beijing. She invited actors and singers and writers into her home. She held parties where guests discussed art and politics. She employed a woman to read Chinese novels aloud to her, and spent her last years translating those books into English. She never remarried. She was a new woman until the end.

  “This restaurant is called Fat, Ugly Auntie’s House,” says my dad. “Named after that woman over there.”

  “That can’t be right. She’s not either.”

  “It’s not about what she is or isn’t,” he says. “It’s her nickname.”

  I try again to ask him about Sharon. I think it will shed light on my relationship. These are the lessons I want, but he keeps avoiding. He repeats what he’s said before, and nothing new.

  “Remember when I got upset in Hong Kong?”

  “When? When you were always grumpy and hungry? When you complained about walking? When you didn’t want to go out and stayed in the hotel and I had to go walk to the noodle shop by myself, even though I’m an old man and you’re young?”

  “No.” I clench the spoon in my hand. “When I said that I didn’t know if I wanted to be in Ithaca anymore.”

  “Oh, that, yes.”

  I ask if he thinks I should have dated more people, if I should have met more people, to which he replies that he used to think so. Is that a reason why he left Sharon for Mommy? Was it because Sharon didn’t understand some things that Mommy did, since they were both from the same place? Were there emotional disconnects, and things Sharon and he couldn’t talk about?

  “No, not at all,” he says. “I didn’t leave Sharon for your mother. That was later.”

  “Okay, well, was there a cultural gap?”

  “I do think most Asian people are big eaters. Like your mother is one. I didn’t know because I hadn’t been with a Chinese girl in a while. Everything she cooked in the morning would be gone by the end of the day, and this was before you were born, so you know she was the only one eating. I didn’t mind, though. I just had my coffee and toast. Americans, I think, are more weight conscious. This trip, I watch you and remember, you’re a big eater like your mom.” He laughs.

  I laugh, too, for the first time in a while. “Okay, that’s not exactly what I meant by cultural gap.”

  “What? That’s what I think! I did get Sharon into Asian foods, though. She learned to make sashimi and seafood dishes. She liked it because she doesn’t gain weight eating them. Jellyfish. It’s impossible to gain weight from jellyfish. Mapo tofu. You go to the bathroom four hours later and it’s all flushed out.”

  What I wanted were answers and all I’m getting is food commentary.

  I try again: But why did you and Sharon get divorced?

  “I told you it was very complicated.”

  “Complicated how, though? I feel like my relationship is complicated.”

  He pauses and takes a sip of his beer.

  “Your relationship isn’t complicated,” he says. “Actually, your bonehead is very simple. You know, he’s easygoing. And I know he’s an honest person, which you can’t say for most people.”

  “But what about you and Sharon?”

  “You want stories from your old man now, huh? I guess you’re old enough to hear it.”

  It was one thing on top of another. First, she wanted him to go to AA meetings. He went, but he didn’t like it. A lot of mumbo jumbo, jibber-jabber. Second, she was going through her own issues. Sharon said her father had abused her, but none of her family believed her, not even her sisters. What was there to do? He believed Sharon, he was on her side, he did everything he thought he should do at the time, even went to therapy with her and her family. Maybe he shouldn’t have drunk so much, and maybe he could have supported her more. They were both stressed. They fought a lot. One night, when things got heated, the cops came. And one of those cops making the call, well, he doesn’t know how exactly it happened, but Sharon had an affair with the cop. The cop probably comforted her, saw his opportunity with this woman who was weak, at a bad spot in her life. It wasn’t entirely her fault. The cop likely pursued her. But he couldn’t forgive her, he couldn’t get over that. And even the therapist, whom he went to on his own once, told him, I wouldn’t know what to do, either, it’s a really tough situation. So he left.

  “Oh,” I say. Though it does not surprise me, it is far from what I imagined, and its lessons hazy and inapplicable. A melodramatic and loud series of events—what else was I expecting from him?

  “You wanted to hear about my life, didn’t you?” He takes a few sips of
tea. “I wasn’t the best dad, I know that. But I was a pretty good dad, right? And after Sharon, I was very cautious. I never wanted you and Ling Ling to ever think I did something like that to you. I wouldn’t even wipe your butts after you turned three. I told your mother, ‘You do it.’ With Didi, it was fine.”

  “Okay, okay, I don’t need those details.”

  He laughs. “But I was a pretty good dad, right?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “You don’t have problems like that in your relationship, do you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “As for your question. Did I want you to date more people? I think it would have been good for you to be with a nice Jewish boy. Or go travel and have more experiences by yourself. But your bonehead, I like him. I like the Irish. They’re hardworking and genuine, not like most people. Definitely not like most of the Chinese.”

  “Sometimes I think it would be better to be alone.”

  “There’s a Chinese saying about this. What do you think is the most important quality to having a good connection with another person?”

  “That you get along with them?”

  “Well, of course. You have to have something in common. You can talk to them. You get along, that’s just a basic thing. An obvious thing. What is the next step? Even more important than that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have to be able to reflect each other’s hearts.”

  “Where did that saying come from?”

  “It’s my saying, a Chinese saying, ha ha! I heard something like it when I was a kid, but this is the way I put it. Heart to heart. That’s the most important. Without that, there isn’t a real, true relationship. Am I right?”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

  “Right, your dad knows a thing or two.”

  He drinks more beer and we sit silently for a while.

  “Did you ever think about going to AA again?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “That shit didn’t work for me. And look, I think I’m fine. I stay in control. I also believe I’m one of those human beings that doesn’t die easily.”

  I nod. I eat. I hope so.

  In high school, J said at a party, I could throw a rock from my house to yours. I said he couldn’t. The next day, he called me to come over. We stood on the pathway that led from the back of his house to the back of mine, but it curved to the right and was so overgrown with trees and bushes that we couldn’t see my house from where we stood. He threw rocks as far as he could, and they flew a great distance, much farther than I thought they would. He had a great throwing arm, and still does. They’re at your house, he said. No they aren’t, I said. But neither of us really knew the answer, because it was beyond our line of vision.