by Kat Chow
I didn’t understand then where the name originated. Suspended in the ocean, I do now. In a flash, I picture the country taking him like it took his father, those waves sweeping him out to the depths of the sea, swallowing him whole, his parents and my mother watching from high above in the sky.
I grab on to one of his ankles to keep him from bobbing further from shore.
Then I let go, and I allow the waves to cradle me.
5.
My father and I are in a hospital in New York, in the same neighborhood where my mother died fourteen years earlier, waiting for Steph to give birth.
Steph texts updates to me and Caroline, who is in California. The surgery is delayed because Steph has sent nurses scouring the floor for another cesarean drape; she wants the curtain that will separate her from the doctors to be translucent plastic so that she can watch her baby’s birth.
Caroline and I text Steph back in our group chat: Wow. Hardcore.
And then, to one another, Caroline and I message: OMG.
* * *
Days before Steph gives birth, I dream I’m on a road trip with her, our father, and Caroline.
We wind through a mountain road toward a place that feels like home.
I gotta pee, my dream-self calls from the back seat. Real-life me must have drunk too much water before bed.
Can we stop soon?
We pull into a gravel lot where a dozen other cars are already parked. Signs for restrooms point to a narrow path in the woods, which dips into gullies on each side. One by one, we make our way carefully down the trail. Steph brings up the rear. She takes wide, deliberate steps and holds her enormous belly.
Just a few more days, I think in the dream while I rush along and leap over tree roots.
In the next flash of dream: I wait with my father and Caroline by the van for Steph to return from the restrooms. Families emerge from the trees to their cars. Suddenly, someone shouts.
Bear! A man yells. Bear!
A guttural roar—perfectly engineered in a studio for some feature film—sounds in the woods.
And then a voice: Run!
Steph is in the middle of a group of tourists. She looks around, bewildered.
Hurry, a teenager tells her.
I’m hurrying.
But this isn’t a dream—no, a nightmare—unless the obvious, terrible thing happens. As Steph runs to us, she trips and tumbles down the ravine. The bear bounds after her.
* * *
In my earliest memory of my mother, she has recently returned from the hospital and reclines on the couch. I’m around four years old. I climb onto the cushions and throw myself at her in want of an embrace. She winces, but does not say anything.
Careful, Chinchilla, Steph and Caroline say as they pull me back. Be careful with her stomach. It has all those stitches.
They gesture to our mother’s belly, though they mean her uterus. In retrospect, this must have been when my mother had her hysterectomy. As a child, I assumed that she was still recovering from when she had given birth to me, all those years earlier. I was not quite wrong.
Steph had mentioned many times when she was trying to get pregnant that she wished she could ask our mother questions about her own births, how her body had changed, how it might have resisted.
I want to fill your silence in this early memory with what I know now. I want to ask you if all of your deliveries felt like reclamation—both of your body and of your mother’s. She was afraid to have you; she was told that your birth might coincide with her death. You must have feared having your children, but you weren’t scared to mother. It strikes me now that you wanted to inhabit your own negative spaces with a fierce, unfiltered attention and affection. In defense of your history; in reaction to your history; in honor of your history.
And your history is part of mine.
She always say, you are her heartstrings, Yi Ma tells me in a recent conversation. You girls are her heartstrings. I imagine your heart as still able to be plucked and played, that the three of us daughters have inhabited it and are helping it pitter-patter into a beat, the same as you have for ours.
* * *
From her hospital room, Steph’s husband, whom I will refer to as Stephen King in honor of my mother, sends the family group chat photos of their baby. Their son is swaddled on Steph’s chest, the two new parents smiling.
He also includes a photo of Steph seeing her baby for the first time. The doctor or nurse’s gloved hand, still bloody, gently holds her son against the surgery drape, close to Steph’s face. The baby is red and screaming and healthy. Steph sobs in relief, her chin wrinkled and eyes pressed closed.
6.
I trace the lines on my palms with my pointer fingers.
When I was little, my father told me that I had hands like his and my mother’s.
So unusual, he said at the time, showing me the lines on my hand as though he could read my future. You’re part Daddy and you’re part Mommy, he said as though this was something he and my mother had worked very hard to make happen.
One of my palms has two lines that meet in a hooked flag between my thumb and pointer finger. The other has three lines that do not run into one another.
I can’t recall which is like my father’s, and which is like my mother’s. My sieve brain leaks all of the important details. I have to check and double-check facts I should easily remember, and still, I am afraid of getting it all wrong.
I tilt each hand to the right, then to the left, trying to discern more of what these creases might symbolize. The gold from the ring that C.J. and I had made glints. Do my sisters have palm lines like this? What about Jonathan’s little hands?
I take a photo of my right palm, the one with a flag that stretches toward the crease between my thumb and pointer finger. I tap out a text to my father.
ME: I always forget—I have two different lines in my palms. One hand is like yours, the other like Mommy’s
ME: What do your palms look like? Do they make a flag?
I include the photo. My father responds the next day, after I’ve forgotten I’ve sent the message.
DADDY: The other one. All my three lines are not connected. Your left hand is like mine
Your left hand is like mine. The one with the lines that do not touch. Did he know that from the image? Or did he always remember?
I take a screenshot of the exchange. When I can’t remember again—in just a few weeks, and then again in a few months, and then in a year—which hand is like my mother’s, and which is like his, I pull up the screenshot and stare at my palms.
7.
On an early April afternoon, my father sends the family group chat a text from Havana. He’s been there for a few days, and it is the first we’ve heard from him since his arrival. So much has happened in the two years since Caroline and I last visited Cuba with him. C.J. and I have gotten married and we have moved from New York and back to D.C. Caroline has taken to planning elaborate family trips for us. Steph has had her baby.
DADDY: We find the bone box. Will carry back the ash with me
He includes a photo of a lone box that the cemetery’s attendants helped him haul from a crypt. His father’s name is painted on it. 周開傑.
He follows this message with a photo of his nephew Denny and a man from Barrio Chino they’d befriended, both of them standing by the vault’s mouth, their hands clasped behind their backs in patient wait.
ME: This is really great Daddy. How do you feel?
DADDY: Good.
Silence until he returns to the U.S.
* * *
Here is what happened, as he tells me a few weeks later—complete with some of his best digressions—when I am passing through Connecticut for work.
When he arrives in Cuba, my father is held up at the José Martí airport because security wants to scan his camera. It takes so long that he misses the Ching Ming festival at the cemetery.
The next day, with his nephew Denny—his brother’s eldest son—he re
sumes the familiar process of walking all over Barrio Chino from association to association. The pair sits for hours at various restaurants or Casino Chung Wah or Min Chih Tang, chatting with strangers. They meet up with Mitzi, whom my father has been corresponding sporadically with over the past couple of years.
(An interlude about a restaurant: They said the seafood is good, so we order fish and curry chicken. And rice, wow, the rice is so bad. Probably two or three days old. It’s very hard. And the curry, probably they don’t have the spices, so it’s not spicy at all, it’s just so-so, the fish is so-so, not really that fresh, although they claim it’s fresh…)
Early in the week, my father and Denny are at Min Chih Tang sifting through donation records. Denny had recalled seeing one with his grandfather’s name many years ago when he was in Havana on vacation, but he couldn’t remember where he’d seen it. My father keeps returning to this fact. Mitzi helps them flip through booklets until they discover a war bond indicating that my grandfather had sent $20 to China to help fight the Japanese. It did not list what association he belonged to, though, and for this reason, my father only allows marginal excitement.
We still didn’t know what tong he belongs to, which we need to know what crypt to go to.
Still, the record has the address of a dormitory listed, which my father and Denny walk to in order to see where my grandfather once lived. The building is not far from Barrio Chino and, if I have the correct address, appears from my research to be a hostel.
(On the topic of a restaurant in Barrio Chino that my father went to on his first night in Havana, as part of a Ching Ming celebration with some members of the various Chinese associations: We find out this pizza in Viejo Amigo is very good, the price is very good. They have cheese pizza, a combo pizza, and ham pizza or whatever pizza, it’s really good. And the price is not too bad. I think cheese pizza is only $7, $6.50. Chicken pizza is only $5. And the soup—chicken soup! It’s only $2.50 and very big chunks of chicken.)
The next day, Denny and my father meet with the president of Chi Tack Tong, who my father says is a very powerful person in Barrio Chino. María Elena Hung has agreed to meet with them at the association’s building and accompany them to the cemetery, where she’ll unlock the tong’s crypt. Denny and my father flip through an album and discover a leaflet that shows Hoy Kit donated $300 to help construct Chi Tack Tong’s building, which cost $24,574.39. Ecstatic, my father poses afterward for a photo. He sits in the association’s president’s chair—a throne—looking thrilled and wearing his nephew’s hat.
(An interruption to discuss feelings: Wait, when you were looking through the book, were you anxious that you’d find it?
Yeah, when I found it, I say, ‘Oh, geez! It’s here.’
Were you excited?
Some people donate $500. See? Two Chows donate $500. And also, Ng and Choi donate $500. And my father also donate $300.
When you saw this for the first time, what did you feel?
Oh, I find him. He actually exists in Cuba. And then he donate $300.
Were you happy?
Well, at that time, I’m happy that I find him, that he exists in Havana. In Cuba. Because that time before that I cannot find his name.
Did you think he didn’t live in Cuba?
I know he live in Cuba, but I thought maybe he used a different name or that the Communists take over and they destroyed the record. But I know that the record exists because Denny said he saw it.)
With this new information—a confirmation, really—the next day, they visit the Chinese cemetery with María Elena.
There, inside Chi Tack Tong’s crypt, my father walks along the rows, taking in the names and the bones. Denny notices boxes that are wedged in the back, and he can see that one of them, partly obscured, has characters that resemble his grandfather’s name painted on its side: 開傑. Could this be his grandfather’s box?
He shouts to my father. Hastily, they kick into action.
The cemetery crew methodically shuffles the boxes so they can extract the one that Denny has spotted. My grandfather’s full name in Chinese: 周開傑.
That’s it, my father says. He and Denny yowl euphorically. My father bursts up the crypt stairs and into the afternoon light.
Inside were the bones of my grandfather, Chow Hoy Kit, ivory and browned at the edges, accompanied by a faded photo. The photograph was possibly there for posterity; something practical, another form of identification. It makes me think of Neva Dorsa and the photo she left of her dead husband next to his decaying remains.
My grandfather’s photo is torn slightly at the bottom, though remarkably preserved considering its age and that it was stored among human remains. He is dressed in a light-colored suit, maybe linen, with a striped tie. His pants are baggy, though pressed sharply down the middle of each leg. He stands next to a pillar and his hand rests on it, his expression soft. My father had never seen this photo before, and this full-length image of my grandfather is a remarkable discovery on its own.
(On the unfortunate reality of a broken bone box: When [the cemetery worker] was moving those boxes, one flimsy one, a more recent one—I think it’s metal—and that metal thing fell apart. And all the bones fall on the floor and after they start moving the boxes, some guy bring another metal box to put all those bones back in again. But I think after they put it in, I don’t think they put any names on it. So whoever comes for that thing, they won’t know who that is.)
My father arranges for the bones to be cremated. He picks up the ashes from Chi Tack Tong, along with an urn.
You should fill out some paperwork to transport the remains back with you, someone tells him.
But that would take time that my father lacks. He decides it is less risky to bring the ashes home on the plane without letting anyone know.
You should take the remains, his nephew tells him. He is concerned about transporting them without the right records.
How did you get them on the plane? I ask. On a recent family trip, I watched my father froth with indignation, arguing with airport security as they scanned his camera bag while my sisters and I tried to calm him. He kept getting pulled aside for additional screenings and he worried he would miss his flight, his agitation growing.
I carried them, he says of his father’s ashes. See, they’re right there.
We are in the family room, and he gestures in the direction of a dusty rattan couch that’s covered with piles of discarded mail, magazines, and empty cardboard boxes. At its base sits a backpack and a pair of blue jeans that’s been rolled into a ball.
Where? I say, standing to scan the room.
He picks up the jeans and unfurls them to reveal a mass of toilet paper. He unravels the toilet paper to show me a trash bag.
Here, see? He points at the bag, which I understand to be makeshift nesting dolls containing my grandfather. Denny had an extra bag for garbage, so I put ash in it.
He laughs, and tells me that he used all the toilet paper from the inn to wrap around the trash bag of his father’s ashes. When he went through customs at the airport, the officer made him unroll the wad.
Did they care about the ashes?
No, they care more about the urn, he says. They thought it was a vase! They want to scan the urn but not the ash. Ha-ha, boo-ooy. It was really something.
My father, always so scrappy and thinking he’s pragmatic. I don’t want to assign sentiment that isn’t there, but I wonder if my father did not want to risk being parted, again, from his father before he had the chance to reunite his parents. A twinge of pride surfaces; this is a better reaction than recoiling.
Do you want to put them in the urn? I ask. It is about a foot and a half tall with a pointed lid, coated with a thick, black glaze with a gentle yellow-brown splatter across its top curves. I could already picture us standing in the kitchen by the sink, trying to use a funnel to pour his father into the urn.
No, he says. Why should I? We’re going to bury it soon, and it’s easier to transp
ort like this. He gestures again to the bag.
Eventually, he says, he’ll bring his father’s remains to Toronto to bury with his mother. His nephew Denny has already called the cemetery in order to figure out potential dates. At the mention of these plans, I glance at the metal container filled with Jonathan’s remains. My father has moved it to rest on his fireplace mantel. The tin box sits between a portrait of my mother and the photographs of my father’s parents. I can’t look away.
* * *
When I return to D.C., I walk circles in my apartment with frazzled, distracted energy. I keep finding myself in the bedroom or kitchen, certain I am there to retrieve something, only to forget what I needed. Compulsively, as if this is what I’ve meant to do all morning, I pull three joss sticks from a drawer. I’d bought them a few months earlier for Lunar New Year, when C.J. and I cooked a spread for friends, lighting incense and joss paper before the meal.
I do not have a permanent altar set up for my mother or our other relatives, but then, neither did my parents, all of us making do. While the incense smolders, I sink to the floor and remain seated on my heels. I had always thought that my family did not pray. For much of my childhood, I considered the burning and bowing a gesture rather than an act of communication. But I see now, watching the smoke spill out the screened door, that this is an invocation of the dead’s spirits, of my mother, my father’s parents, and Jonathan.