Paper Sons: A Memoir

by Dickson Lam

  Ga Jeh drove the Crazy Guy home. So for a little while, it was just me and Mom. I knelt next to her bed and examined her head for any bumps. My brother had struck her on the collarbone, she said. As she was knocked down, she’d hit her head on the edge of the doorway.

  “Goh Goh’s not coming home tonight,” I said.

  She patted my hand and began to nod off. I fixed her bedcover so that it spread neatly over the sides of the bed and tucked the covers in so she was snug.

  ga jeh’s room/my room

  I try and picture her room. I knew it well. I’d snoop around when Ga Jeh wasn’t home. I dug through her books and cassette tapes. I’d spend hours in that room bobbing my head to Janet Jackson, Latin Freestyle, and I confess, Debbie Gibson. For all the time I spent in her room, I can’t fully picture it.

  Some things I can see. Her desk with a cherry finish. An alarm clock sat near its edge. My parents had received the clock as a gift for opening a bank account. Hanging on the wall near the doorway was a caricature portrait of my sister done by a street artist. Her head is gigantic, her neck sprouting from a tiny cable car rolling downhill. The artwork was a birthday present from my father. I don’t know if it was Before or After: a gift used to seduce or a gift used to apologize.

  What I can see with clarity is the outside of the door. It was decorated with stickers, Scratch-n-Sniff, Snoopy, My Little Pony, but in the middle of the door, Ga Jeh had taped an old birthday card that I’d made for her. It had a peek-a-boo hole that revealed a lopsided cake that I’d drawn. The card remained on her door until she left when she was twenty-one.

  She took off as soon as she finished her associate degree at City. She said our place was too noisy, kids always playing in The Back. My sister had the most sensitive hearing of anybody I knew. I’d be in the living room watching TV, not even loud, and she’d pound on her side of the wall, telling me to turn down the volume. She would’ve made one hell of a librarian.

  Ga Jeh’s move made her the first of us to be independent. She was done relying on Bah Ba’s money. Wouldn’t have to see him or answer his calls. When he’d come back for his annual visits, she’d keep her distance from him, staying in her room. Still, she hadn’t been a fan of lying to our father for our mother. Tell your own lies, woman, she’d thought.

  When my mom discovered Ga Jeh planned to move, she took it as a betrayal. You weren’t supposed to leave your parents until you got married.

  “We’re not in China,” Ga Jeh said to my mother.

  “We’re not from China.” My mom slapped her chest. “We’re British. We’re from Hong Kong.”

  Ga Jeh moved to a suburb south of San Francisco near her job working at the front desk of the Embassy Suites by the airport. My sister was pretty straight-laced, a square, so I was surprised when she got her first tattoo, a small one on her ankle, the Chinese character for “tiger,” her sign. The other tattoos would come later, images of tigers, one on her forearm, the other a large one on her back shoulder, reminders that she was not prey.

  Ga Jeh’s room became my room. I rearranged the two dressers she left behind and moved in my stuff. The first time I slept in that room, I was jolted awake. A loud motor roared. A leaf blower outside, groundskeepers off to an early start. The noise was right outside the window next to my bed. I’d positioned my bed the same way Ga Jeh had, and I thought I understood why my sister had said that she “had to get the fuck out of there.”

  Ga Jeh tells me now that it wasn’t the noise that drove her out. It was the silence, the things she could not say.

  chapter 4

  What’s in a Name?

  林 lam

  The last name that I share with Bah Ba means forest. In Chinese, it’s written as two trees side by side. The origins of the name begin three thousand years ago with the murder of a would-be father.

  He was both the uncle of the emperor and his advisor, which would’ve been fine if the uncle was a yes-man, but he called it like he saw it: the emperor was a fucked-up ruler. Never concerned himself with his subjects. It was more fun to plan orgies. He needed an appropriate setting, something worthy of a true despot.

  He had a large pool constructed at his palace, large enough for several canoes, and he filled the entire pool with wine. Perfect for lazy afternoons. He’d lounge in a canoe with his concubines and dip his hands in the pool to get drunk. He had a small island built in the middle of the pool, and hanging from the branches of the trees on the island were skewers of roasted meat. One-stop shop: alcohol, food, sex—all while drifting in a canoe in front of his palace. Top that, future dictators of the world!

  To fund his lavish lifestyle, the emperor taxed his people heavily, and the uncle, Mr. Party Pooper, chided him for abusing his power. The uncle knew he was getting on the emperor’s last nerve, but he persisted, urging him to repent as though he believed that the emperor, his nephew, his blood, could be redeemed.

  The uncle would go down in history as courageous, but I bet his pregnant wife wanted him to keep his mouth shut. His honesty was a death wish.

  The emperor sent the royal guards to capture the uncle. They arrested him and, following the orders of the emperor, they ripped open the uncle’s chest and cut out his heart. The pregnant wife escaped and hid in a forest. There, alone, she held tight onto two trees as she gave birth to a son.

  Years later, a new emperor came to power and restored the mother and son back into the royal family. He granted the son the surname Lam in honor of the forest that had protected them. All Lams descend from this son, but I wonder who the two trees in our name represent.

  I could argue that it represents us and a future child, an explicit expectation to continue the royal lineage, to grow the forest. That sounds nice, aligning myself with royalty, but what makes more sense is that the pair of trees represent not What Will Be but What Is, us and our father. Stronger than a desire to multiply was the desire to solidify the father-son bond, for the son to swear his allegiance to his father. The Lam story did not begin with the son. It began with a soon-to-be father.

  For the first Lam, the son, his name became a lifelong tribute to his father. He’d tell the Lam story to others to honor his Bah Ba’s bravery. For me, Lam has become a lifelong burden. Bah Ba and I do not simply share the same name—he exists inside mine.

  狄甥 dik saang

  The Chinese name Bah Ba chose for me is not an authentic Chinese name. It’s a transliteration of Dickson: Dik Saang. The first character of my name refers to an ancient general, and the second character means “nephew.” To a native speaker, these two characters combined results in an awkward phrase. My name sounds like a mistake. Perhaps my father saw no point in giving me a true Chinese name. By the time I was born, my parents had already filed the paperwork to immigrate to the States—I would be a child of America.

  There were several choices my father had for the Dik character. Other words that make that same sound include the characters for “foe,” “oppose,” “wash,” “cleanse,” “enlighten,” “guide.” Instead my father used the surname of the Song dynasty warrior Dik Ching. Early in Dik’s military career, like many common soldiers, he was forced to bear a tattoo on his face, a marker of his poor background, an attempt to keep him in his place. In spite of this, Dik rose up the ranks to become a general and was later promoted to the imperial court as the minister of military. If the story ended here, my Chinese name would serve as a reminder of my father’s wish that I become a man of bravery and nobility.

  But when Dik Ching served on the Song Court, he discovered that other officials were distrustful of him, fearing the powerful general might one day abuse his military power. They fabricated rumors about the Tattooed Face General, even blaming him for natural disasters. Eventually, they forced him out of office. Demoted, he was sent from the capital to another city. A year later, he died of illness at the age of forty-nine. Perhaps his two sons and wife were at his side.
Maybe they had moved with him to his new appointment, but I can’t find a record of this. It’s possible he spent the last year of his life isolated.

  The first half of the Dik story represented the hopes that my father had for me, the second half foretold his own fate: a father scorned.

  out

  Rob gave me my first graffiti tag: out. I thought it was a random name, but it probably referred to how often I’d strike out in baseball. I wasn’t much better in my first few months as a tagger. I was a toy, incapable of holding a chisel-tip marker correctly, at a forty-five degree angle so the width of each stroke remained consistent. Style was secondary to me. Getting up—that’s why I began writing my name for all to see.

  Though Rob had introduced me to tagging, trying to pressure me into it, I didn’t pick up a marker immediately. It was important that I decide for myself when to begin. I was a child of the “Just Say No” campaign. I’d vowed at a young age never to succumb to peer pressure. That was for weaklings. I’d partake in drugs on my own!

  The first day I brought a marker to school, I hid it in the sleeve of my jacket, the barrel of the marker zebra-striped. I grabbed the block of wood that served as the hall pass for Ms. Porto’s class and headed to the first floor where there was a stretch of bare white wall, usually reserved for signs made of butcher paper announcing spirit week, bake sales, or some class president candidate. That day the wall was empty. I waited for the hallway to clear, then wrote my name billboard-size, reaching as high as my hand could climb and as low as my knees could bend. My T resembled a sai, the ends of the roof dipping down like prongs. But the width of the marker wasn’t suited for colossal scale. The proportions were off, my letters appearing as stick figures, sickly.

  the lam poem

  Dozens of generations ago, my ancestors chose a name for me, embedded in a family poem. Each character in the poem was to be assigned to a specific future generation. Given names contained two characters, one chosen by your parents, the other predeter- mined by your family poem, by your ancestors. Fathers, knowing the position of their name in the poem, would give their sons names containing the next character. Sons would share this character with their brothers and paternal cousins. Daughters, however, were usually excluded from this practice.

  After the end of the poem was reached, when all its characters had been exhausted, what remained was an abridged family tree set to verse. Clan elders could recycle the poem for future generations, or they could compose an entirely new one.

  The Lam poem had been passed down through generations, spanning hundreds of years, but in my father’s generation, the poem vanished. My mother’s family poem was also lost. Though my mother recalls her grandmother showing her their family’s poem inked in a notebook, my mom’s parents now have no idea where this notebook might be. For all they know, they might have left it in Hong Kong.

  It’s no accident that generation poems have lost their importance. When Mao came to power, he pushed to rid the country of its Confucian tradition. The sacred bonds of emperor-subject, husband-wife, father-son—all bullshit. These doctrines had produced a submissive nation, a kowtowing species that groveled to foreign empires.

  Mao declared a change: “The Chinese people have stood up!” He banned foot-binding. Out went ancestor worship. Women could seek divorce. Genealogy books and generation poems were patriarchal relics. This was to be a new China, though the attack on Confucianism wasn’t new.

  Thirty years before, on May 4, 1919, thousands of students in Beijing protested the Treaty of Versailles. China, once again, had gotten screwed through a treaty, forced to hand over their land to another imperial nation. The protests sparked unrest across the country. Many were rejecting Confucianism and turning toward Western ideas of science and democracy, but also anarchy and Marxism. They sought solutions for a country in turmoil. China had thrown off the yoke of dynastic rule only to see provincial warlords seize power.

  At the time of the student protests, Mao was in his mid-twenties, part of the May Fourth Generation. Inspired by his peers in Beijing, Mao founded the Xiang River Review, a local weekly journal. “Oppressors are people,” he pens in one essay, “human beings like ourselves.” Their tyrannical actions are due to “an infection or hereditary disease passed on to them from the old society and old thought.”

  Three years later Mao had his first son. Mao’s generation name was Ze, the fourteenth character in his clan’s generation poem. Twenty characters in the poem, twenty generations.

  立顯榮朝士 Stand tall with honor before noblemen,

  文方運際祥 and utilize education to expand fortune.

  祖恩貽澤遠 Ancestral favors are handed down through time,

  世代永承昌 descendants forever indebted for their prosperity.

  When Mao named his son, he ignored his family’s poem, turning his back on his forefathers. He refused to pass on to his newborn the poem’s message: Bow Down to Your Ancestors. It was the very Confucian ideas he had railed against.

  The characters Mao chose for his first son, An Ying, challenged the Confucian ideals propagated by his family’s poem. Individually, the characters An and Ying respectively meant “the bank of the river” and “hero,” but interpreted through the lens of communism, the name became “The Hero Who Reaches the Shore of Socialism.” Mao scrapped the generation poem, but he didn’t toss out generation names altogether. He would later give three other sons names beginning with the character An, but Mao, a critic of patriarchal practices, would not give this generation name to any of his four daughters.

  Bah Ba also didn’t abandon generation names when he named me and my brother, but like Mao, Bah Ba didn’t give his daughter this name. To be fair, Bah Ba couldn’t. The character in my Chinese name that I share with Goh Goh is the male identifier, Saang. Atypical was Bah Ba’s choice to place our generation name as the second character of our given name and not our first. The character rests at the end of my name. Detached from verse. No claims to a clan. No grand instructions to descendants. Only a bond between brothers. The desire of a young father to keep his family whole.

  rank

  I leafed through the dictionary for a new graffiti tag, a name I’d choose myself. I began with aardvark and ended with zymurgy. I’d borrowed the idea from Malcolm X. To teach himself how to read and write, he copied the entire dictionary by hand in prison, back when he was still Malcolm Little.

  I skipped over any word with more than five letters. Long words were a luxury of time we didn’t have. Skipped the definitions too. We prided ourselves as writers, but it wasn’t words that we loved. It was letters, how they looked, the way an S meandered. The letters of my name, O-U-T, were stiff and uptight, wallflowers. I needed letters that danced and jabbed.

  Because of its sharp angles, its final letter punching and kicking, I renamed myself: RANK.

  mask

  Dik Ching commanded an army of thirty thousand men and thirty generals. He’d ride into battle wearing a bronze mask. Combined with his long hair, unkempt and billowing in the wind, the bronze mask sent enemy soldiers scurrying. They didn’t see a man charging at them, but a demon.

  Dik’s motivation behind wearing the mask, however, wasn’t solely to scare the enemy. It also hid the tattoo on his face, the reminder that he was less than. With the bronze mask, Dik discarded his past and became a deity.

  poor and blank

  “…the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are ‘poor and blank.’ This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for change, the desire for action and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.”

  —mao zedong

  malcolm

  Malcolm Little was his birth name, Little from his father. Detroit R
ed was his street name, red for the color of his hair, inherited from his maternal grandfather, a Scot. “Yes, that raping, red-headed devil was my grandfather! ” Malcolm said after he shed his street name. “If I could drain away his blood that pollutes my body, and pollutes my complexion, I’d do it! Because I hate every drop of the rapist’s blood that’s in me!”

  Malcolm X was his converted name, the X replacing the Little, the unknown erasing the scar. El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz was the name he created for himself, the el-Hajj for his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malik for Malcolm, el-Shabazz as in the Lost Tribe of Shabazz. His new surname expressed not just his love for his people, the lost children of Africa, but Shabazz was also a solution to the unknown, an answer for the variable, a name that could be passed on to his children and handed down successive generations, an invented name but a pure one.

  manny lee

  My mother, like me, was fifteen when she named herself. She chose Maggie for her English name. When she married my father, she married into the Lam family, but, as customary, kept her maiden name. She remained Maggie Lee, but she wasn’t thrilled with her name. Maggie, she learned, was all too common.

  My mom would later find a nickname, thanks to ’Dullah’s baby sister. She’d mispronounce my mom’s name as Manny. All the kids on our side of the projects also called my mother this. It was a requirement. She’d tempt them with candy like an evil witch. She’d leave our door open, and in plain sight on the kitchen table was a gumball dispenser.

  When a kid stopped at our door, my mom, with her makeup on—she never opened the door without it—would grab a gumball, show it to the kid then hide it behind her back. To get the candy, the kid would have to say my mom’s full name: Manny Lee. The kids would sit at our doorstep, and this would be the highlight of my mother’s day.