Paper Sons: A Memoir

by Dickson Lam

  Perhaps the seeds for my political awakening were planted a few years earlier by my older brother. I shared a room with Goh Goh, and he’d blast Boogie Down Productions, Public Enemy, Paris, and Poor Righteous Teachers, all of whom sampled Malcolm X speeches and rapped about Black unity. My brother took the moniker China MC. Even made a rap video for a class assignment. It begins with him sporting a Starter parka and a bandana tied around his head. He carries a briefcase, which he clutches as though the contents are top secret. He kicks his first verse, and we learn through a flashback that he’d stolen the briefcase from a government safe. The files inside contain the hidden Asian American history that, if revealed, would free us from oppression and being mired in self-hatred. For the rest of the video, shot at his high school, a government goon squad chases Goh Goh through hallways, stairwells, the courtyard, the gym, with, of course, timely pauses for his raps. In those days, my brother would say, “I’m just a product of my environment, baby,” a reference to how we lived in the projects, though he never actually hung out in our neighborhood.

  The Red Bean Soup story in high school ceased being a public story to poke fun at my dad and became a story I’d tell myself, the last defense against completely writing off my father. Bah Ba had made the soup and managed to come to my party, though he never did the same for my brother or sister. It was the only day I could remember he’d taken off work. No small sacrifice. Bah Ba worked an under-the-table job without personal or vacation days.

  red bean soup redux

  I gave my students at June Jordan a writing prompt about a childhood experience. They asked for an example, and I told them the first story that came to mind that wouldn’t be a downer, the Red Bean Soup story.

  “If he skipped work for your party,” one student said, “why didn’t he do the same for your brother or sister?”

  I sought my mother’s opinion. “Yauh mouh gaau choh?” she said. How can you have it so wrong? “Your Bah Ba made the soup, but he never came to your school. If he was there, why did I carry that pot on the bus? That thing was heavy. I had to walk up three flights with it to get to your classroom.”

  Her version sounded more credible than mine. Even when Bah Ba was sick, he’d muster the energy for Tea House. No work, no check.

  My version was most likely false, but I continued to tell it.

  two drivers and not an old shoe

  My mother’s first memory of my father was at a nightclub in a fancy hotel. Bah Ba saw my mother sitting by herself, and he asked her for a dance. They spent the night dancing to Elvis, Tom Jones, and the Beach Boys. She thought my dad was “handsome” and had a “sense of humor.” A few years later when they had my sister, they named her after this club, The Scene, which they pronounced “De Seen.” They switched the order of the two syllables: “Cindy.”

  When they became a couple, Bah Ba began to ask my mother to cover his shift at his father’s gift shop. “In the morning,” she says, “I work at the store. Only by myself.” Bah Ba would leave to play mahjong, and my mother would never mention the gambling to my father’s parents.

  She wasn’t happy about their relationship, but she accepted it. My mother married my father when she was twenty-one. She only had an elementary education. Anything more required money. As a teenager, she had worked in a factory, assembling Christmas light bulbs.

  My mom had bigger dreams of being a singer/movie star. When she was eleven, she read commercials on the radio. At fifteen, behind her grandmother’s back, my mother managed to land a gig on television singing classical Chinese songs. The first song she sang was about a woman waiting on her husband to come home, wishing his love was like the trunk of a palm tree, his love never branching off. My great-grandmother saw my mom singing on television and made her quit. Showbiz was for sluts.

  For my mother, marrying into my father’s family was marrying up. When she’d walk around with Bah Ba, friends of his father would see him and call him wohng ji. Prince. Bah Ba’s family owned several tourist shops, their most notable one being the store where my mother covered for my father. It was located on the ground floor of the then newly-built Hyatt Regency, the first overseas Hyatt.

  I’ve seen a black-and-white photo of Bah Ba in that store. He’s wearing a three-piece suit and tie, posing for the camera in front of shelves of folded clothes. His hair parted neatly to the side, he stands regal over a checkered floor, a fist against his hip, his hand resting on the edge of the glass counter.

  After they married, my father attempted a new venture. He picked up a job as a chauffeur, shuttling around Japanese businessmen. Then it occurred to him, why not go into business for himself? He’d be a self-made man, not a son chained to his father. He pawned the gold jewelry my mother received as wedding gifts—necklaces, bracelets, rings—and with the money, he purchased a taxicab. The cab would sit idle, my mother says, parked in front of where he played mahjong.

  On another occasion my mom contradicts herself. She says he did have passengers. Many were prostitutes. They’d hop in his cab, and he’d take them from one john to the next. They felt relaxed enough around my father to share tales from work. Bah Ba might’ve been the only man in their lives they told these stories to. My father, the affable driver.

  Willie drove the 30 Stockton. That’s how he and my mother met. Simple hellos led to longer chats. One day, Willie convinced her to stay on past her stop. “Sightseeing,” he said to my mother, who was sitting in the passenger seat behind him. There’s no rush for her to go home. We were at school—I was in the first grade at the time—and my father was at work.

  Willie described to my mother the last stop on his route, the Palace of Fine Arts. “There’s a lagoon. Swans. Ducks.” He kept the descriptions simple, nothing about the rotunda or the Greek columns. Didn’t want to confuse my mother, a recent immigrant. During the ride, Willie played the role of interviewer, and my mom did most of the talking.

  My mother refers to that day as their first date. She tells me she wasn’t used to having a conversation like this with a man. By man, she means my father.

  When my mom first considered divorce, she was pregnant with me. That night, she felt nauseated, had thrown up. My two-year-old sister had a high fever while my three-year-old brother ran circles around our small apartment. My mother pleaded with Bah Ba to stay home this time, to help watch the kids, but he took off to gamble.

  Even if my mother wanted to divorce my father then, the laws in Hong Kong made it difficult for women. In 1970, a year before my parents married, the divorce rate was fifty times less there than in the States. Before a woman could petition for divorce, she had to live two years apart from her husband. That’s if the divorce was mutual. If it wasn’t, she had to live five years apart. She’d have to make it on her own. The lives of her kids would be in limbo. No child support. Not until the divorce was finalized, however long that took.

  A quicker solution occurred to my mother: take her kids and immigrate to America. Leave her husband behind. It was her father who was sponsoring them, not his. Gung Gung had caught a break and landed a head chef job in America. My mother told her father the plan, but he advised her, “Maybe when he comes here, he won’t play mahjong as much. San Francisco isn’t like Hong Kong. No one stays out as late. Give him a chance.”

  The biggest change my father made in America might’ve been the drinking. It got worse.

  Willie’s first job in the States was picking grapes in Delano. A year after he quit, Filipino farmworkers in that town went on strike, protesting poor pay and working conditions. Eight days after the Filipinos began the Delano Grape Strike, Mexican farmworkers, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, joined in, recognizing their common struggle; hence, when the two merged forces, they named themselves United Farm Workers.

  When Willie met my mother, he was also married. He had a child, a daughter. He told my mom about his rocky marriage to his white wife who was also an alcoholic.
Now he was looking to get out. My mother had been thinking the same about her marriage.

  After Bah Ba moved to Minnesota, my mother came clean to us. Willie was her boyfriend, and she planned to divorce my father, but only after Willie divorced his wife. Then they’d marry. I was skeptical. It sounded like an episode from a daytime talk show: Men Who String Along Their Mistresses.

  But true to his word, Willie did divorce his wife. It was my mother who was unwilling to pull the trigger. She was raised to believe divorce meant disgrace, at least for women. A divorced woman became an “old shoe,” spurned by even her own family.

  My mother’s parents knew about Willie. If it came down to a divorce, they were clear: they’d take my father’s side. My mom, however, cites economic reasons, not cultural ones, for her reluctance to divorce my father.

  “Your father made $800 a month. Then all take home give me. If divorce, child support maybe only half give me. Not enough for everything, and then how I can take care of three kids?”

  My mother didn’t consider the obvious option—get a job. She’d say she already had one, taking care of three kids and keeping the house spotless.

  Whatever her reasons, she had no intentions of divorcing my father, and perhaps never did. She wanted to live life on her terms. She would not be an old shoe, yet she would not be miserable, either. To pull this off, she needed our help. When she was vacationing with Willie, Bah Ba would call, and we had to follow the script. Mom was on a trip with her friends from her ESL class, we’d say. Lying became second nature, the lies I told my father, the lies I told myself: My mother was not cheating on my father. They were separated, some unspoken arrangement. I was not an accomplice.

  asleep

  Here’s what I ignored when I booked a ticket to visit my father: Back when we were kids, when Bah Ba was still living with us, on the nights my mom was on vacation with Willie, perhaps frolicking down Main Street in Disneyland, while my brother and I were asleep in our room across the hallway, my dad would sneak into my sister’s room. Drunk. His fingers slithering across her body. The first time, Ga Jeh was eleven.

  Knowing this hadn’t deterred me from reconnecting with Bah Ba, and it also hadn’t stopped my sister from doing the same.

  cross the line

  I’d confessed what my dad had done to my sister, though not the details, to a room full of students and staff. I was teaching at Dewey Academy in Oakland, the job I had before June Jordan, two years before my trip to Minnesota.

  That afternoon we were crammed together in the cafeteria, teachers and a hundred high school students, all standing on one side of the room, waiting for John, the facilitator, to read a statement. If it applied to us, we had to cross an imaginary line. It seemed silly. Our students had enrolled in Dewey, a second-chance school, to make up credits, and instead of completing assignments, they were asked to participate in an activity with imaginary lines, as if they were elementary kids. We’d been told that the school district had contracted with an outside organization, Challenge Day, to provide a program that would be a “celebration of diversity.” The veteran teachers had smelled bullshit and opted out. Standing in the cafeteria, trying to locate an imaginary line, I saw now why those veteran teachers had been so cynical.

  John had a tribal tattoo wrapped around his arm. The guy had a deep tan like he was from an island, and he wore a red T-shirt that read, “Be the Change.” He’d begun the day by gathering the staff in a huddle. The more we shared about ourselves, he’d said, the more the students will open up. “When I introduce a new activity,” John had said in a gruff voice, “I want you to jump and holler ‘Yeah!’”

  The first statements John had read were pointless. Statements about race, gender, and age. We didn’t need John to tell us our demographics. I figured these were warm-ups. He hadn’t asked about family, which didn’t bother me. I thought I’d come to terms with all the shit in my family. No more lies. My parents had divorced, and now we were forming an honest relationship with Bah Ba. He’d come back into our lives when my brother had a son. Being a grandfather—my dad’s second chance. He’d invited us to spend last Christmas in Toronto with his side of the family for the first time. They welcomed us, relatives whose names we had to learn, the aunts, Bah Ba’s younger sisters, fighting each other to show us around. Two aunts drove me and Ga Jeh to Niagara Falls. They treated us to dinner at a revolving restaurant atop a tower. Below us, the Falls was lit up with colors, like something out of Vegas or a theme park. Our father was like yours, the aunts said. Not a great dad or husband. Never around. He cheated on your grandmother. That’s why she left him. For many years, we were angry at your Yeh Yeh. But life is too short for grudges. We brought Yeh Yeh here from Hong Kong—we couldn’t let our dad die alone. The past is the past.

  I’m sure John read a long list of statements, but there’s only three that stick out.

  “Cross the line if you have ever been awakened by gunshots.”

  A flock of students crossed the checkered floor. Sunlight entered through the windows lined with wire mesh, and the light landed across the floor in the shape of small diamonds.

  When I was still living in the projects, one night, I heard bullets rattling off from a submachine gun. The sparks flashed through the blinds in my room. A neighbor was enjoying his new toy.

  I shuffled across the line. I could feel the eyes of other teachers on me. None of them had crossed.

  “Take a look,” John said, “at who’s standing next to you.”

  “Everybody’s on this side,” JB said, revealing his gold fronts. I’d thought JB was his nickname, or that it stood for something, but according to the school attendance sheet, his name really was just those two letters. His white do-rag contrasted with his dark skin. He held a baseball hat, which I had to remind him to take off every day in class. I thought we’d gotten closer when he showed me a picture of his four-month-old daughter, but our skirmishes in class continued.

  I had a tough time getting respect when I began working at Dewey. Most were juniors and seniors, and they initially thought I was a student. I had no facial hair. I’d cut off my moustache for my then-girlfriend. She didn’t like the way it’d prick her.

  The school year was nearing its end, and by now I’d won over most of the students, JB being the exception. Even Rodney had warmed to me. At the start of the year, I’d caught him drawing a picture of me as a monkey. His grandpa lectured him at the parent conference, saying the drawing was racist, that he’d grown up in the South hearing whites refer to Blacks as monkeys. He told me that Rodney subconsciously saw himself in me. “Your facial features are similar,” he said, “and we always thought Rodney had Asian eyes.”

  The conference changed nothing. Rodney continued to torment me, heckling “Rookie” long past when others had stopped. I had to keep kicking him out of class. Finally, I tried an unconventional tactic—basketball. I wasn’t confident I’d beat him. He was taller by a couple of inches, and my shot was erratic, my dribbling clumsy, but I prided myself on defense. I knew if I could block Rodney’s shot, he’d respect me.

  A small crowd formed on the basketball court outside. We’d barely begun, and I already blocked his shot three times. Students on the sidelines laughed and pointed at Rodney. I could tell he was humiliated, even though he smiled.

  We slapped hands at the end, but soon Rodney acted up in class again.

  A student named Antonio spoke up. “You better listen to Lam, before he takes you out to the court and swats your shit again.”

  Rodney sunk in his seat.

  The whole class laughed at him, and I knew I’d never have to kick him out of class again. He began doing his work and became the star debater. I taped a picture of us by my desk, to remind me that people can change.

  “Cross the line if you have lost a friend due to gun violence.”

  Students dragged their feet across the line, silent except for the
smacking of gum. They turned to face us. They reflected the diversity of the school: mostly Black and Latino, a scattering of Southeast Asians, and the lone white student at our school—Carmelina. She pulled a girl in for a hug and gave her a tissue. Some students accused Carmelina of “acting Black.” That’d set her off. She’d snap her head and launch into a spiel about her Italian heritage.

  The boys who crossed stood arm’s length from the nearest person. Some of them stared through the window at cars passing by. Some stared at the ceiling tiles. A couple of boys chuckled in the rear, and John glared at them, putting a finger to his lips.

  Antonio looked straight ahead. He had golden skin, a short ’fro, and thick eyebrows. Strange to see him so motionless, so quiet. He was a talkative kid, loved to argue about politics. So much that I’d brought him to a local radio station that wanted to hear what youth thought about the Iraq war.

  JB shook his watch, which was decorated with fake diamonds.

  “Man,” he mumbled, “ain’t it time to cross back already?”

  I thought of Randy and crossed. Earlier that week, I got a call from Rob that Randy had been murdered. He was from the same turf as Keino, about the same age, another lost cousin. We hadn’t hung out since high school, but I remembered the time we slap boxed in an empty basketball gym. He switched into a martial arts stance, and I knew I was in trouble. I’d forgotten he’d taken tae kwon do lessons for years. A roundhouse kick came at my rib cage. I blocked it with my palm, and I felt confident, dropping my hands, but this strike was a setup. He didn’t bring that leg back; instead he recoiled at the knee and snapped another kick at my head. It landed across my cheek, a loud smack.