Honor and Duty

by Gus Lee

  “Able Student,” Uncle Shim said, smiling, “you have asked a very excellent question. Maintaining positive gahng and lun, bonds and relationships, is the essence of the moral and superior man. You have no existence outside the network of your gahng, the constellation of your duties. I am very happy with your question.” He showed me his teeth. I smiled back, chewing industriously.

  He cleared his thin throat, adjusting a perfectly knotted jade bow tie. He looked about through his thick-lensed apothecary spectacles that brightly reflected light like Archimedes’ mirror. The cafe was awash in the bubbling talk of the high-tea lunch crowd as patrons argued, yelled, chewed, sucked soup and tea, and filled the air with lush, fourteen-toned Cantonese dialects. No one cared what we said, or could hear us if they tried.

  Uncle Shim hid his teeth, frowned, pain in his eyes, distaste in his mouth. He looked down and said, in his soft, spare voice, “You know, I am in bad relationships.”

  This was like Mrs. Marshall saying she loathed Shakespeare’s effete writing, or President Johnson saying he disliked Texas.

  “Yes!” he cried against my disbelief. “I tell you the truth!” He sucked in breath. “Young Ting, I failed in my relationship to my parents, to my son, to my wife, and to my daughters, to the entire clan. I could not stop their deaths. Is this not the most awful thing that an elder can tell a youth? Someday I will tell you the story of my failure.” He brought his face up. “All my learning, and my parents’ efforts, to no avail. Wo ts’o liao! I am to blame!”

  “Uncle—”

  “So,” he sighed. “Please believe me. Our learning in this mystery of gahng and lun is never done. This is why we must be students of the Master, for all our days. And as regrettable a man as I am, I have not ceased in my effort to be a good student.”

  He adjusted the alignment of his unused kwaidz, chopsticks. His thick, graying eyebrows were skewed, his thin cheeks hollowing, his eyes large and liquid, burning brightly with oils of pain and remorse. Now he spoke to himself, again the uncle of my early childhood, the reciter of Ming poetry, the cantor of sad rhymes from another age, speaking to graves.

  “My heart is a cold stove, my life the cup filled with dust.”

  “I don’t remember that one, Dababa,” I said. My uncle avoided saying new things. He liked to review the fundamentals.

  “Words just came; I made them up. Now they are gone.” He sipped his tea and looked at me. “Why do you ask this essential question about gahng and lun?” he asked softly.

  “Dababa—the war wasn’t your fault. If China had an army—”

  “Why do you ask this essential question about gahng and lun?”

  I wanted to say: if China had had a West Point, it could’ve resisted the foreign powers, saved the slain from death, and kept my uncle from savoring his failures. The foreign destruction of China’s spirit could have been avoided. One must fight evil.

  “It’s my mother,” I said, closing my eyes in primitive fear. “I have a bad relationship with her.” I sucked in breath. I was violating ji hui, speaking inauspiciously and disturbing the geomancy, causing bad words to come to life. It was unfair that negatives waited in muscular ambush to pounce on our stupid words, while the good was hidden in the secret, hidden folds of life.

  “I’m supposed to love her. I don’t even know how. I want to yell at her.” I omitted the part about beating up the house.

  He sucked his breath. “Shouting is for men without brains. This is indeed a failing, to raise your voice against your mother.” He shook his gray head and I could no longer enjoy the wafting cafe aromas. “Think of Cheng Han-cheng’s disrespectful wife.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “Do you not remember her? She struck her mother-in-law and was stripped of her skin, sliced and burned? Truly, to have a mind with no gripping at all—a brain made of hard rocks.”

  I grimaced for Mrs. Cheng and smiled at his description of me.

  “And now you smile! Ayyy—yes, thank you,” he said to our red-jacketed waiter, who delivered hot tea, nodding blandly at the ritual of elders chastising the young, trying to pour their life lessons into the empty and nonabsorbent vessels of youth.

  “See here, young Ting. The love of parents is not a Sung canticle of romance, for the lute or mandolin, for poets who yearn for the moon and shed tears for the mystery of the tides. It has nothing to do with gan ch’ing—human emotion.

  “Hausheng, Able Student, it is duty. Do not worry about feelings. Think of your obligations. It is such a mistake to call this relationship a matter of love. This is Western silliness and foreign nonsense, which do not cover the truth of duty.

  “There is no dreamy softness inside the heavy burden of shiao, of piety to parents. It is a huge rock. You can try all your life and never encircle this rock with your arms or with your life.

  “It is the mountain of obligation you can never carry and never drop, for you are bound by duty to your father and all fathers before. This is what it means to honor your birthright.

  “You must create in your father a sense of harmony, of ho, in his heart! This is the unending duty of sons! To place his thoughts before yours, his needs before all others.” He sighed deeply, attempting to calm the exclamations my statement about Edna had excited from him. The vein in his temple darkened to a deep blue. He sipped tea loudly, trying to drown the bitter air at the table. I did not give my parents a sense of harmony. I had raised my fists to Edna. I wanted to yell at her. It did not matter what she did to me; I had to honor her. Yet, deep down, I knew truly that I hated her, breaching shiao and failing in duty. I was without honor or value. I lowered my face in hot, red shame and put down my kwaidz, unworthy of human respect, undeserving of good or plentiful food.

  “Bonds and relationships,” he said softly, “gahng and lun, tie you to others and give you the purpose of life. Duty, dzeren, filial piety, shiao, bind you to those you must honor. In serving gahng and lun, you honor the life your parents gave you. Without this, you are dishonored. It cannot be simpler. Do you see?”

  “Yes, Dababa,” I said, looking at my old shoes.

  “So whose fault is this lack of ho, this absence of harmony with your living mother?” he asked. I looked up.

  “Mine, Dababa,” I said. The dark blue vein in his head pulsed.

  “And how can you rectify this failing?” he asked.

  “I will leave,” I said firmly.

  He smiled wanly. “The worst, perhaps, of all thoughtful choices.” It was a mild day, but Uncle Shim held the teacup in both hands, taking its warmth. He looked at me as if seeing me from afar.

  “Are there not others whom you will miss,” he said slowly, “when you leave for the moon, for the outer stars?” He could not bear to say the name of my actual destination, that “military school”—two words that produced an immediate contradiction. This place in distant New York that could not be an academy of thought and scholarship if it also had guns and taught killing. “Good emperors with armies are more evil,” he had said, “than bad scholars with poor brushes.”

  “I’ll miss Christine Carlson,” I said.

  “Who is this?” he said, for perhaps the tenth time.

  “Christine.” I flourished her photo, as always.

  “She does not remind one of Hsi Shih, the famous beauty who sat watching the quiet river in ancient times, does she,” he said, not even expending a shihma, a question mark. “She is not Chinese,” he said, and I stiffened. He sucked the tea loudly, offering the most powerful punctuation available. “You have romantic fondness for her? Affection which she does not return to you?” he asked.

  “Yes, Uncle. No, Uncle,” I said.

  “Ah ha,” he said. “You are quite smart in these matters. You have given all your affection to a white-haired girl without family, who detests you.” He looked at his impeccable nails and found dust on a cuticle. He looked up. “She does not know the San-gahng, the Three Bonds, the Wu-ch’ang, Five Constant Virtues, the Three Followings, and the F
our Female Virtues?”

  “Americans don’t know that,” I said. Edna was independent with my father. She was not a Chinese wife with small feet and small voice and five steps back. My father was American.

  “All the more important, then, young Ting, to select a woman who does know them. Is she willing to learn?”

  Christine submitting herself to her dad, then to her husband, and then, in widowhood, to her son. Cultivating obedience, appropriateness, seemliness, and the home? I didn’t think so.

  “Ha!” cried my uncle, startling me. “Is she of a free spirit—an unconventional thinker? Different than most girls you know?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s her.”

  He nodded. “Your Mah-mee was the same.” He beamed until he realized he was smiling. He furrowed his brows.

  I poured him tea. I placed the empty pot with its lid canted near the edge of the table and waved to the waiter.

  “Hausheng. Honoring your duties, it will take years to build. You cannot recover your relational skills in that … place.”

  He cleared his face of the bitterness of these truths. “You know. There are no Chinese there. No Chinese food. No customs or rituals. No dababa, Chinese uncles. No one to speak to about matters of the mind, of duty, of honor.” He looked sadly into my face, studying me through his frameless spectacles. It meant I had provided another incorrect answer.

  “I just want to go,” I said.

  Silence. My fault. Say something. “Uncle,” I said, “I think West Point is like the Hanlin Kuan, the Hanlin Academy, of the Wen-lin, the forest of culture.” What he called the Forest of Pens.

  The fabled green-and-orange-tiled Hanlin Academy had stood for centuries before T’ien An Men Gate in the Forbidden City. Six years before my father’s birth, British troops burned and looted its storied courtyards and gazebos, its antiquities, and its irreplaceable national library archives, turning the northern sky black with the ruin of China’s ancient scholastic heritage.

  He looked at me as if I had thrown reeking ox dung onto his white hotel-living-room rug. He shuddered, then gathered himself, much as I would after taking a wicked right cross in the chops.

  “So,” he said, imposing sentence with one syllable. “This is the result of Chinese youth in a foreign land trying to think.” He hissed. “Ssss! Hausheng—foreign ping burned the Hanlin Academy! Foreign soldiers fabricated stories of Chinese Boxers killing foreigners—and used those lies to pillage and burn the Summer Palace and the Hanlin Kuan. The stink of it still shames all Chinese men.” He lowered his head, grieving for losses never to be salved. “That you would join their army!” He closed his eyes.

  “What was Master K’ung Fu-tzu’s central message?” I welcomed his change of subject: what he called wong ku tso yu ehr yen t’a—talking to the left and right.

  “ ‘Moderation in all things,’ ” I recited.

  “Hausheng. Can a soldier”—he curled his lip, bristling his mustache—“be moderate? Can a soldier moderately attack his enemy and use moderation in cutting off the head of the enemy general, then moderately stake the bleeding skull onto a tall spear?”

  “No, Dababa,” I said, recoiling from his words. “But you want me to exert with the Chinese stuff—without moderation.”

  “Yes, use all muscles in your brain. This is duty—resulting in excellent thinking, which benefits society. But soldiers kill innocents and burn books. They stole China’s eleven-thousand-volume national encyclopedia after burning all the copies.”

  “West Point would not teach its officers to do such a thing.”

  “Hausheng, the American ping who attacked the Forbidden City were led by General Chaffee. He killed Indians and Filipinos before he killed Chinese. Your father knows.”

  “Then he was wrong,” I said. “Not the school.”

  He cleared his throat and repeated what had become a favorite aphorism of his—“Good iron is not used for nails”—followed quickly by “Hau nan bu dang bin.” That he had said “Good boys do not become soldiers” in Chinese seemed to emphasize its truth.

  “Tsong yong shi dao,” he said evenly, drowning me in Chinese, punishing me with Confucian heavy artillery. Walk the middle path. In it there are no ping, no soldiers.

  I was unhappy with this lecture and brought my shoulders up.

  “Who was China’s greatest thinker and scholar? Clearly, the Master K’ung. Who was the greatest soldier in Chinese history?”

  “Guan Yu,” I said, naming my barrel-chested, red-faced hero.

  He shook his head, no.

  “Tso Tsung-tang—who had fought the Taipings and the Muslims?” I tried. “Li Hung-chang?… Tseng Kuo-fan?”

  “It was Chingis Khan,” he said, “who conquered Asia and Europe, from Turkey to Poland and Hungary, filled Russia with almond-eyed people, drank tea on the Mediterranean, in Moscow and Baghdad. All feared him. He was never defeated. He died in 1227 and his able grandson Kublai conquered China, where he settled. Do you know how the Mongol soldier defined pleasure?”

  I shook my head.

  “Listen to these erudite words: ‘Pleasure is crushing your enemies, taking their property, making their families weep bitter tears, riding their horses, and ravishing their women.’ You wish to train to be a ping? Be a Mongol—tied to a horse at three, given bow, lance, and sword at five! Join the army at fourteen and look forward to death in a short life of battle!”

  He sensed that this did not sound as bad as he wished it to. “Hausheng, for a young person as yourself, with muscles coming out of your body as if you wanted to be a horse instead of a man, what I say about myself also applies to you. You are a Chinese youth, Able Student. You sound so foreign, and think so foreign, but you are Chinese. The only way of remaining intact and not going crazy without the clan to sustain us in this foreign land is to honor the teachings of your past with even greater fervor. Do you see?”

  “Yes, Uncle,” I said. But I did not believe him. I was American, like my father. I was going to West Point, a place that took only true Americans, a status to which my birth certificate attested. I spoke English almost like my Caucasian true mother, had read hundreds of books in the English language, and was in love with an American girl named Christine whose very brightness was an unmistakable message to my myopic eyes. Even if she rejected me, that pain was confirmation of my existence and made me similar to so many other American boys who also sought her heart. West Point represented American culture and artful escape. West Point—between a wide, sparkling azure river and hard-rocked, deep-green-forested mountains, with regiments of armed marching men in gray—appeared to be a sanctuary. It had food, sports, an all-male faculty, and uniforms that made everyone look alike. It was surrounded by fortified walls with cannons. It was three thousand miles from my mother, but it felt to me, somehow, that both she and my father had stowed away in the airplane and followed me there.

  4

  SPROUTS

  Beast Barracks, July 1, 1964

  “TA-AAKE SEATS!” cried a voice from above. The vast, high-ceilinged, stone-castled dining hall seemed to have held its breath during grace. In an instant it roared with two hundred cadre and a thousand agitated former civilians screaming at each other.

  We were at rectangular tables of ten. First Sergeant Stoner sat at the head, flanked by two squad leaders. Fourth New Cadet Company’s tables were under the high balcony whence the command to be seated had issued. Seven sweating, bracing, disoriented, thirsty and hungry new cadets occupied the other seats. We were in a sea of anxious, high-pitched, fear-fueled human static.

  “I’m Mr. Armentrot,” said the man to the left of Mr. Stoner. “Mr. Arvin, King of Beasts, gave grace and the order to sit. You are Beasts; he is Commander, First Detail, New Cadet Barracks.

  “Sit on the first six inches of the chair, one fist from the table, hands grounded on laps. Ground hands after each task. Pick up knife and fork, cut one small bite, ground silverware in parallel diagonals at rear of plate, ground hands. Pick up
fork, select small morsel, place in mouth by a right angle to the spine, elbow up. Retrack fork to table, then to back of plate. Ground hands. Chew, swallow, silently, mouth shut, ears open, eyes down.

  “Take small bites. Chew six times for adequate digestion by your dumbwillie GI tracts. Six times, six inches, one fist. Keep eyeballs on the Academy crest at twelve o’clock on your plate.

  “Three at the bottom are gunner, cold beverage, and hot beverage corporals.” He explained how to pass platters. “GOT IT?”

  “YES, SIR!” we screamed back. I longed for the cold beverage, but I would have guzzled mud and fought over milk of magnesia.

  “Knob in the middle is gunner.” Guns at the table? “Gunner announces food. Look up.” We left the crest on our plates to look, stiff-necked and bracing, like a clutch of overfed turkeys invited to dine with Pilgrims bearing knives. Mr. Armentrot was bald, with shoulders that could be used for cots, cool in his crisp white uniform shirt. Mr. Stoner was the thick-necked first sergeant, tall and dark, with jet-black hair and deep creases where humans kept dimples. He looked as cruel as a heartless buccaneer. He was the one I had vexed in the orderly room by forgetting the words “as ordered.” My fearful heart dropped into my empty stomach; the other squad leader was the halitoxic Mr. O’Ware who had called me “shitface-Marsman” and had promised that he would remember me. He had the face of a ferret with four tight shoes on its paws.

  Mr. Armentrot held his plate above his right epaulet with both hands. Next to him, the plate looked like a coffee cup saucer. “Say this is potatoes au gratin, delivered by the mess hall waiter. Gunner holds it away from mouth, head up, eyes on his plate crest, and announces in a manly voice: ‘SIR, THE VEGETABLE DISH FOR LUNCH TODAY IS POTATOES AU GRATIN. POTATOES AU GRATIN TO THE HEAD OF THE TABLE FOR INSPECTION, PLEASE, SIR!’ Gunner passes with his left hand to the hot beverage corporal, who receives it in his right. The rest of you sorry knobs will pass it up to Mr. Stoner, the table commandant, for his inspection. That’s the easy part.”