Paper Sons: A Memoir

by Dickson Lam

  We came up with a plan for Javon in my classroom. I stuck him in the corner. With fewer distractions, he got his work done. His last major assignment for me was a research paper on the Black Panthers. I’d lent him a stack of my Panther books: Seize the Time, A Taste of Power, Revolutionary Suicide. It wasn’t a stellar paper, but it was solid, and he was proud of it. I showed it to his mother, evidence that he (I) had turned things around.

  In the last month of the school year, regular classes ended and we began Intersession, a three-week-long experiential program. Students had several PE-related courses to choose from, and Javon signed up for “Go Wild,” an outdoors course with Shane. They went on a backpacking trip, hiking through redwoods to a cascading waterfall. On another excursion, Javon stepped up to be a leader, guiding his group through an orienteering activity. His indefatigable energy was bottled in the classroom, but in the outdoors, that same energy was prized. When I saw him after his overnight trip, he said, “Next year, you guys gotta make Intersession year-round, Lam.” This is how I want to end Javon’s story, with him thinking of his future.

  bus driver

  In high school, I wasn’t a troublemaker in class like Javon, but I also needed a kick in the ass. I was a graffiti writer, and I’d cut school to hop the city bus all around San Francisco. I’d sit in the window seat of the last row, unloosen the cap of my marker, and slide the window open, so the smell of ink wouldn’t reach the driver. I’d hit up my name, RANK, on the white panel that ran vertically alongside the window, the letters to my name written top to bottom, a totem pole of letters. I knew all the bus routes, which ones went to which bus yard, how you could shut down the engine of a diesel city bus by flipping a secret switch located on the backside of the vehicle. I’d return to school to nap while my tags stamped on buses zigzagged around the city.

  Bus drivers were our adversaries. We tagged when they weren’t looking in the rearview mirror, when they’d lean into a turn, spinning the steering wheel, their eyes fixed on the road. Sometimes we’d get lucky, and a driver would have their mirror aimed away from us. When a driver caught us in the act, usually they’d just shout until we got off. But once, a driver called me up to the front like he was inviting me to sit down in his living room. We were the only ones left on the bus. He gave me a you-could-be-doing-more-with-your-life talk, which somehow didn’t come across as corny.

  Another driver stopped the bus and charged at me and my homeboy sitting in the back. The two of us each squeezed through a window and jumped. But the driver wasn’t deterred. He gave chase, on some superhero shit. He abandoned his bus, along with his passengers, in the middle of a one-lane street, cars honking, traffic stalled. I turned back after a couple of blocks. The driver was gaining. I didn’t think I had the stamina to elude him. As soon as I turned the next corner, I stopped while my friend continued. I leaned against the wall, creeping to the edge of the corner, listening for the footsteps of the approaching driver. When he drew close, when I could hear him panting, I slipped past him, speeding off in the opposite direction.

  The man my mother had an affair with was also a bus driver. Their relationship started back when I was in elementary school. Willie, a Filipino guy, would come over during his lunch breaks while my father was working in the kitchen of a restaurant in Chinatown. Willie would have on sunglasses, dressed in a brown uniform. My mom would put on makeup before he arrived, heavy blush and blue eye shadow.

  They’d go in her room and lock the door. Just looking at photo albums, my mom would say. She had a stack of albums in her closet. There were two types, ones that contained pictures of our family, and ones that contained pictures of her vacations with Willie. He was careful never to be photographed, always the photographer. They’d take trips to Disneyland, Hawaii, and, once, Paris. My mom carried a small wallet, and on the front cover was a picture of her in a bikini, kneeling on the beach, a yellow flower in her hair.

  She’d somehow convinced my father that she was going on these trips with friends from her ESL class. In the beginning, I also believed her. As I got older, I began to see through the lies, but I played along like my brother and sister and kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t difficult. Bah Ba never probed or protested, as though his wife taking off was his vacation. While my mother was gone, which couldn’t have added up to more than a week or two a year, we were left alone with our father. One morning, my sister confided to me that she had cried herself to sleep.

  I told her I’d done the same. I figured we both really missed our mom. We weren’t used to spending so many hours with our father. Usually he’d be out playing mahjong—he was a gambler—and our home was simply his pit stop. He’d change clothes after work, drink a beer or some Hennessy, make his presence felt through burps and unapologetic farts, and then take off before dinner. We wouldn’t even bother to keep a chair at the dinner table for him. He was an old-school kind of father: bringing home the bacon was his sole obligation.

  Back then, I didn’t harbor a grudge against Bah Ba. I’d sit in the chair closest to the front door, waiting for him to come home from work. When he appeared, I’d hurl myself at him. I’d inhale his scent: flour and grease mixed with nicotine. My hugs weren’t entirely selfless. I was trying to set myself apart from the rest of my family. Goh Goh was too cool for such displays. Ga Jeh used to sit on Bah Ba’s lap, but with middle school on the horizon, maybe she thought she was too old for that. My mom kept our father at arm’s length, though she’d suffocate us with hugs. I became the only one to hug my dad, the last to give up hope, the last to understand that he was already on his way out.

  To be fair, it wasn’t always mahjong that kept my father out at night. Once, he enrolled in a culinary course at a local community college’s satellite campus. He’d come home with American cookbooks, and I’d look over his shoulder as he perused the recipes. Perhaps he had aspirations of a better-paying job.

  My father may have also spent his nights frequenting strip clubs. On his desk, tucked away underneath old envelopes, I discovered several coins stamped with naked women and the name of a strip club in North Beach. “Your father’s not a pervert,” my mom said. “Some guys from work probably dragged him there.”

  When Willie and my mother would return from her room—really, my parents’ room—Willie’s shades would hang from his collar. He had beady eyes, and the pockmarks on his cheeks made me uncomfortable. Looking at his face was like staring at a scar.

  He wouldn’t leave immediately. They’d sip coffee in the kitchen. My mom would speak to Willie in “broken” English, inflected with the giddiness of a teenager. Sometimes, he’d have her sit on his lap. He’d call my mother by her Chinese name, Laih Fong, but he’d mispronounce it, unable to use the correct tones. From his lips, my mother’s name sounded like some sort of Ching-Chong Chinese.

  I was set up for a variation of the Oedipus complex: Willie, the father I had to kill. It wasn’t lost on me as a graffiti writer that Willie drove the buses that I treasured. I’d cut class to mark them, some of which I knew he would later drive. I’d tag RANK on the windows, on the ceiling, and on the back wall. The final stroke of my name, the front leg of my K a slash.

  two transfers

  After my sophomore year in high school, I decided to transfer schools, from McAteer to Galileo. Gal was just a few blocks from my house. More of my friends went there, but that’s not why my mom signed the paperwork. She’d been shocked by my low grades, finally seeing my report card in the mail. Up to then, I’d been beating her to the mailbox and tossing my report cards in the dumpster. She had no clue I’d been fucking up, and nobody from McAteer gave a shit. No phone call home or notice in the mail about my absences. In Geometry class, I amassed sixty-four absences, though miraculously, I passed.

  The teacher was a white dude with a gray afro, an ex-hippie who showed us slides of his tie-dyed shirt days. On the day of the final, right before the bell rang for class to begin, the guy sitting next to
me told me the final was the same as the study sheet,

  multiple-choice questions, but I didn’t have the sheet. I’d skipped the review day. The guy handed me his study sheet so I could scribble the answers on my desk. It turned out there were two versions of the final. One, exactly the same as the study sheet; the other, same questions but in a different order. The other guy received the jumbled version, and I received the replica. I filled out the answers in seconds, but I tried to play it smooth. Waited half an hour to turn it in. Half an hour of watching the guy next to me struggle through the questions, drawing triangles, hexagons, parallelograms, shapes that bewildered him.

  After I turned in my test, I was given the second part. I’d have to show my work. There were no answers to select from. Our final grade in the course would be the average of these two tests. Never mind everything else that had been done or not done in the semester. I figured I already had an A on the first part, so I didn’t get flustered with the second test, though I knew I couldn’t solve any of the problems. I rested my head on the desk and knocked out until the bell rang. I passed the second test forward, blank except my name. That’s how I managed a C in Geometry.

  When my mom discovered my grades, which included a couple of Fs, along with all my absences, she threw a couple of plates at the wall, finger jabbed my temple, less of a stab than a push, but eventually she acquiesced to my transfer of schools. It offered her hope.

  In the second year of June Jordan, we left the college campus and moved into a building in the Excelsior, a neighborhood closer to where most of our students lived. We also needed more room. We were doubling in size. At SF State, we had classrooms on three different floors, some on this end, some down that wing, the main office, somewhere in between. The lack of contiguous space resulted in a dismembered school.

  Before we began the second year, we had to set up schedules for our students. In our new main office, a former woodshop, we crowded around a group of tables pushed together. On the tables were piles of index cards, each with the name of a student and their gender, ethnicity, and skill-level noted in the corner of the card. We were to manually program our students’ class schedules to ensure balanced groupings. Losing Javon to another teacher was not a total accident.

  At a typical high school, students get a new set of teachers every year, but at our school, we wanted students to remain with the same teacher for two years, for continuity’s sake. Our classes were also intended to be mixed-age, half sophomores, half freshmen, a balance of old and new. Because we only had freshmen in the first year of the school, my returning students couldn’t all return with me. I had to make room for the next freshmen class. Half of my returning sophomores were to be handed over to a new teacher, Ms. Luna.

  Our new class list contained blank slots for freshmen, which we were to fill using the index cards, but the sophomores had already been assigned. Javon was on Luna’s list.

  “If you see any red flags,” another teacher said, “we can still make some switches.”

  “Any advice about my group?” Ms. Luna asked me.

  When I saw her list, I knew I should’ve fought to keep some of my students, particularly Javon, who I’d invested so much time in, but I chickened out. If I had a repeat of the year before, I would’ve quit teaching, a failure. I had a better shot at being a new man with new kids. I exchanged my old students for new ones like I was trading in a bad poker hand.

  “You’ll be fine,” I told Ms. Luna.

  She must have detected something in my voice, because she laughed. “You sure about that?”

  Luna was a strict teacher, but my students turned out to be a handful, even for her. She’d kick Javon out often. He’d head to my classroom, which was the standard procedure—kids going to their advisor. Javon, as a sophomore, had gotten rid of the Powerpuff Girls backpack. Now he rocked buttoned shirts and wore a gold earring.

  I’d be in the middle of class and wouldn’t have time to check in with him. I’d sit him in the corner and tell him to write an explanation of what happened, but I’d rarely discuss it with him afterwards. I’d just send him off to his next class. I had new students to worry about.

  As the fall semester wore on, Javon’s grades plummeted. Shane asked how it happened that Javon was no longer my student. “All that progress you made with him last year,” she said.

  “The foreign languages messed up the scheduling,” I said. “I couldn’t figure a way around it.”

  Our last resort with Javon was to switch him into another family, hoping a new advisor and new set of teachers might work some magic. It didn’t. He continued to blow off assignments. That by itself we could work with, but Javon was also getting sent out of class regularly, within the first minutes of class. It seemed intentional on his part.

  At a staff meeting, we voted for Javon to leave the school. “If we keep him,” I said at the meeting, “what message are we sending to the rest of the students?”

  I volunteered to meet with Javon and his mother. It was a delicate matter. We didn’t have the power to kick out a kid. If a student hadn’t committed a serious offense, a transfer had to be voluntary. We laid out the reasons why Javon would be better served at a different school, and Javon was all in.

  “Teachers here be on you 24/7,” he said. “They be doing too much.”

  His mom, though, wasn’t budging. She countered, and rightly so, that our school provided more support. Why would she give that up?

  To convince her, I drew on my own high school experiences, not of being a student who’d gotten his act together after switching schools—that wasn’t my story—but of knowing how to appeal to a desperate mother. “You do the same things,” I said, “you get the same results. It’s clear to me, and I think to you too, if Javon stays here, he’ll just fail another semester of classes. He needs a fresh start, a wake-up call.” What I said wasn’t total bullshit. I really thought it was the best choice for Javon. Sometimes people need to be jolted into changing. But what was also true, and what I couldn’t admit to anyone else, was that I wanted him to leave. His presence reminded me of my cowardice.

  The next semester, Javon was placed at a vocational school. I didn’t know how things were going for him, but for me, things were looking up. I’d transformed as a teacher. Instead of yelling to get the class’s attention, I developed a stern gaze. I’d imagine myself as their parent. I’d make the disappointed face of a father and cross my arms, or the face of an angry mom about to open a can of whupass. Once, I got too into character. A boy made a subtle sexual remark about a girl in the class, and I popped him upside the head.

  During that spring semester, to boost teacher morale, Shane made appreciation posters for each of us. In the middle was our photo, surrounding by quotes from students. On my poster, one student remarked, “I don’t know what got into Mr. Lam this year, but he don’t play no more.”

  The next time I heard about Javon was near the end of that school year. I was on a panel in another teacher’s classroom, and we were discussing how a student had just done on her presentation. All sophomores had to develop a presentation and defend it to a panel, consisting of two teachers, a student, and a parent. Our job was to grill them with questions. If they passed, they’d move on to Senior Institute, what we called our mixed-age junior- and senior-level program. The oral defense was a grueling experience for a fifteen-year-old, but passing was cause for celebration. They’d run around the hallways hollering for joy. Some parents would get their kids flowers or balloons. If Javon had remained with us, he would’ve also presented his portfolio. Maybe I would’ve been scoring his oral defense at that moment. Maybe his mom would’ve brought him a lei.

  As we were about to announce that the student, dressed in a business suit, had passed her defense, a cell phone rang. It came from the panel. The student panelist stepped out to take the call.

  “What?” he shouted. He rushed back into the room. “They killed
Waga.” He grabbed his backpack and took off, still on his phone.

  The next to leave was the student who had presented, tears easing down her cheeks. Then her mother trailing after her. The other teacher collected the paperwork, numb like me. She left as though unsure what else she was supposed to do. I remained in the empty science room staring at a bent spout.

  I would read about Javon in the paper. Minutes before he was shot, he was hanging out on a corner in Hunter’s Point near his home with a group of other kids. A city bus approached. On it was a rival crew. The camera on the bus showed the kids passing a backpack between each other, arming themselves. The driver was clueless. Passengers who knew it was about to go down warned the driver not to stop, but he didn’t heed their pleas. He pulled over to the bus stop. Some kids near Javon, seeing enemies onboard, began firing at the bus.

  It’s unclear if these guys were Javon’s friends, acquaintances, or if he just happened to be in the same vicinity as these kids. “We know nothing,” the homicide inspector stated, but in the very next line, perhaps in an attempt to rationalize tragedy, the inspector added that Javon had once been arrested as an “associate of Westmob,” the same turf that the kids who had fired those first shots presumably claimed, though the inspector didn’t offer details of Javon’s earlier arrest. Had he been charged with directly participating

  in a crime, or had his arrest been a matter of guilt by association?

  Whatever the precise relationship between Javon and the boys nearby, the facts remained. The kids on the bus returned fire, and Javon, unarmed, was the only one killed. Though the article acknowledged that Javon was a student at John O’ Connell High School, the quoted district spokeswoman referred to Javon as a student at June Jordan: “He was a very easygoing guy who was excelling at math at June Jordan. He wanted to be an engineer.”