by Gus Lee
“Now dis officer, he’s OCS an’ he ain’t educated an’ he says, ‘Crap, given dis choice, I’ll take Thayer, whoever de hell it is.’
“Tribesmen, dey pull de guy’s pants down, spreadeagle ’im on de ground, an’ the whole tribe takes turns, sodomizin’ ’im.”
Groans rose from the upperclassmen. All of us Plebes for tables around crammed our chins deeper into our necks, fearing something more than losing our lunches from this joke.
“So de chief,” continued Joey, “he turns to de second guy. Second guy, he’s a West Pointer. ’Thayer or death?’ demands de chief. West Pointer, he puffs out his manly chest, an’ pops off inna military manner, ‘SCREW ALL A YA. GIMME DEATH!’
“De warriahs, dey beat dere spears ona ground goin’ ‘Ooohh!’ in deep respec’, admirin’ the West Pointer’s big guts.
“ ‘All right!’ de chief says, pattin’ de guy on de shoulder. ‘Death! Good! Hey—yur brave! But first, Thayer!’ ”
Silence.
“Rensler,” said Mr. Kirchhoff. “You may have a Fall-out with Big Bites. If you never tell that joke again.”
Now, I was gunner, as correctly in my place as Judas at the Last Supper. I had no joke that could alter the course of the meal. One of our upperclassmen was in the hospital, and I had cut the Martha Washington sheet cake into nine stunningly equal, proudly Euclidean, rectilinear pieces. I opened my mouth to announce it.
“Gentlemen, remain seated. Mr. K., may I join you for lunch?” It was Major Robert “Yoiks” Yerks, our company tactical officer. He was spare, unassuming, caring, and hungry, and he sat in the empty chair. In three years, he would win twenty-two combat decorations in Vietnam. He would retire as a four-star general who still remembered the first names of his cadets from the 1960s.
I heard Mr. Kirchhoff say, “Mr. Ting, cut ten pieces.”
Sweat appeared on my forehead. Without a twitch, my brain went through a floor exercise that was the internal equivalent of rubbing my scalp, contemplating the skull of Yorick, screaming for a cab in a Manhattan downpour, and dropping my trousers in Times Square while doing a hat dance around my freshly dug grave. I quickly smoothed over the cuts, pushing the icing around in hard sworls to cover the marks, hoping against all of Newton’s laws that stitching the surface would reunify the divided cake beneath.
Joey Rensler uttered semiaudible squeaks of sympathy in a miniaturized version of a Three Stooges whine. It was all I had going for me. I announced the cake and passed it up.
“Let me serve you some cake, sir,” said Mr. K. “What the … TING! THIS IS AN ATROCITY! WHAT’D YOU DO—CUT IT WITH A HAMMER?”
“NO, SIR!” I cried. Joey Rensler said, “Meep, meep.”
“LOOK UP HERE!” Mr. Kirchhoff was looking at me with the heaviest, blackest eyebrows in the Corps and one of those classic expressions cherished by Bela Lugosi fans everywhere. He filled me with the deep willies. That darkly underworld gaze, his large, menacing, suspended eyeballs floating in the bright white sclera under a dark roof of hairy brow, induced wienie-shortening fear.
“REPORT HERE AND BRING YOUR HAT! Take this to Washington’s statue and ask the Father of Your Country for forgiveness for having butchered his wife’s cake! NOW POST!”
In those days, Washington was northeast of the Plain, where he had a panoramic view of the wide, sparkling Hudson as it took a hard left around the dark green forests on Constitution Island. Today, he’s in front of the Mess Hall, making it far easier for Plebes impaired in the cutlery arts to report their failures.
Chinese want burial where the geomantic forces of wind and water, fengshui, are kind, permitting a view of the neighboring real estate. General Washington had good fengshui. This was the general who had willed that America would have a military academy to defend against foreign invasion, who had head-quartered here to keep the British from dividing the Colonies. He had led frozen, chilblained farmers and boys in rags to face Europe’s best army. He was the father of the entire nation. It was an overpowering mixture of icons, and I trembled superstitiously.
“Sir, Mr. Ting reports to the President as ordered.” I offered the cake. “Sir, I apologize for butchering Mrs. Washington’s sheet cake.” It had taken seventeen cuts, the last nine the unkindest.
He looked the same as the face on the dollar bill—quiet, reliable, steady, and green. I didn’t compare him to any actor because he looked like George Washington. Silence. Wind brushing through the trees at the edge of the Plain, the water deep and still in its blueness, the air fresh from the river. In his face I saw my father’s Gaze, as he would look into the distance at China. This was similar to my conversations with him, experiencing a monolithic silence while anticipating a burst of anger.
How often had the Father of Our Country seen Plebes offering ruptured cakes? If I hadn’t taken the Confucian position to his side, it would look as if he were reaching for the cake. I wondered if Washington had ever seen an Oriental in the span of his rich life. I wondered how he felt about a Chinese West Point cadet. Would true acceptance here mean that I would look at Washington and think only American thoughts, and not think of old Chinese ways?
The late-summer day embraced me. The emerging oranges and yellows of the valley soothed the memory of the abusive din of the mess hall. The wind whipped the flags and flag cords. The pleasure of being alone and so near the river overcame the awkwardness of conversing with a cold and unresponsive mass of melted metals forged into the shape of an unreachable father.
Through tremendous good fortune, Clint Bestier and I had not only been assigned to Company H-I, but also had ended up in the same room. Our two new roomies were Joey Rensler, a sharp-featured, sun-sensitive, Danny Kaye look-alike from the Bronx, and Bob Lorbus, a big, cheerful, country music-loving, broad-shouldered Kansan who began every sentence with the words, “Hiya, buddy!” I missed Pee Wee, Sonny, and Mike, but they were great friends to have while facing Plebe year.
Something buzzed in my ear and I started punching my pillow. I found an alarm clock and switched it off. It was quarter to five, I had laundry duty, and I hadn’t awakened my roommates.
H-I occupied three divisions, or vertical floors, in Old South Barracks. Davey “Curve Wrecker” Glick, Matt McBall “Meatball” Rodgers, and I began collecting the dirty laundry bags with their inventories and running them down to the stoops. One bag was torn. When we were done, I exchanged it in the sinks for a new one. A BP—a barracks policeman, a civilian janitor—was rummaging through the spilled contents of a consolidated garbage can. “Oh, sorry, young man,” he said, scooping up the garbage from the floor to put it back in the can. “Looking for a Texas football program.”
He was scarred and I recognized him as the silver-haired janitor at the gym on R-Day who had wished me good luck. I saw his name tag: Scoggin. “Mr. Scoggin, I’m Kai Ting. I was the first guy to report in. You were standing by the door of the Post Gym on one July.” We used military date timing: the number before the month.
He smiled, and we shook hands. “Elmer,” he said.
Like other BPs, Elmer emptied our waste cans, which we placed outside our doors in the morning before class. He mopped rooms and hallways once a week; we cleaned our floors the other six. Upperclassmen handled classified military assignments. Thus, BPs could not scrounge our garbage.
“I’ll give you mine,” I said.
“Oh, son, that’d be beautiful.” Texas was number one in the country. Rollie Stichweh, our quarterback, had almost beaten them.
“Can I pay you?” he asked after I gave him my program.
I shook my head. “Want me to get you programs for the games?”
“No, sir. Only if they play Texas again.… Hey, Mr. Ting. Thank you most kindly, and bless you. You’re a real gentleman.”
I returned to my room feeling quite pleased with myself.
Our door was open. Clint Bestier, Joey Rensler, and Bob Lorbus were bracing stiffly in our darkened room, facing me and the open door. Oh, God, I thought: it’s Mr. O�
�Ware with a message from hell and now I’m going to pay for having felt good about something. I stood in the door, bracing hard.
It was Mr. Fideli. He smiled. I moved the corners of my mouth.
He said, “Please meet my brother, Mario.”
Another Mr. Fideli stepped from behind the door. I blinked. My eyes popped. I braced harder. There were two identical Mr. Fidelis. In the dim light in our room, they appeared more duplicate than duplicates. That’s how they had changed clothes so quickly during Beast; there had been two of them. My roommates and the Fideli twins looked at my comically compressed, eyeball-swelling, shocked face and burst into laughter, joined by the Fidelis, and I nearly ruptured myself hee-hawing while bracing, shoulders rising and falling like pistons.
“Caruso, don’t just stand there,” the Fidelis said simultaneously.
“Sir,” I said, “a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down our pants.”
11
SHIM
His Journal, San Francisco, October 3, 1964
I, Shim, am a man alone, the last leaf on a dying tree, bending in a foreign wind. I cannot honor the graves of the before-borns. There is no sweet music of grandchildren. The household women do not fuss over me when I appear for meals; nor am I the center of attention with all screaming to Heaven when a grandson piddles on my knee. I customarily eat alone.
Of all the things and sounds of China, I miss most the laughter of my son. This is a surprise; I thought that the loss of my scholastic discernment, or my library, would have hurt most. All Chinese should know the future by knowing the past. But I, a man of learning and moral habit, did not know all I should have known.
I miss the expressions and the faces of my family, so full of life, ringing of laughter, finding all the signs of strong foo chi, good fortune, at the dinner table, where food pleased so many mouths, and all ate to celebrate the continuation of the line!
“My son, the fish cheek,” I used to say. “Take it, and its luck.” He would laugh as only ten-year-olds can. The symphony of twenty people of your blood and lun, eating and celebrating the fruits of the earth. That is China. That is what I miss.
I miss the delicate hand of my wife on my arm as we walked along the Whangpu River, listening to the water warble to us, as she told me her thoughts. I am the picture of loneliness! All men of Han have memories. We are reminded of the failure to be with the others, or to have saved them, or to have died with them. If I shed a thousand tears, ch’eng ch’ien ch’eng wan, it would not be enough.
The consequences of never using my mouth and eyes for laughter are now etched in my face. I am a learned man, I am far from China, and I must pay the price. I do not know how much longer I can live in this foreign country, this America.
The Chess Club has disbanded, its writing tradition ended. Today, I write for myself, and I am an unappreciative reader. Or perhaps I am writing for an unknown reader, whom I do not know and therefore cannot trust. This last idea is particularly displeasing.
We played shiang-chi, chess, trying to create ch’a lu t’ung k’u, the Fork of Pain, where however your opponent moves, he moves into defeat. I was good at this tactic—the stratagems of five layers at three depths, the moves behind moves, one move now to make six later. Now we cough and are slowly dying without family.
I never believed in Buddhist yeh, karma, but I feel it closing in on me now. My life has been played on a chessboard, and I have faced the Fork of Pain. I was in China, with so many of us dying from war and murder. I was not with my family in Shanghai in their moment of danger. I was at the boundary of the game, in Nanjing.
I had two choices. I could attempt escape and earn money to bring them to safety. Or I could stay in Nanjing, wait for the Japanese, and die. There was defeat in either move. Ch’a lu t’ung ku. I ran, and earned money. But they were all dead before I could help. Better, I think, to have stayed in China, for I would be with them now. I would know the experience of death and the underground life of the dead. I would not be alone. I have cash, but am poorer than a landless peasant in drought with one relative.
I have striven to be a man of moral rectitude. My life has been like my learning, toward the single path of correct conduct. But this was to occur within my society, not here. My learning means nothing in this culture. I must ask: Is the lesson of my life a deterrence to others? Am I being punished with solitary life to warn a hundred others to never leave the Middle Kingdom? Is there a Buddha who will compel me to return in regenerated life as a woman or a lower animal for my failures as a man? Or is there a Christian god who will forgive me for having run when I should have remained, for having lived emptily when I should have died with those to whom I owed loyalty and duty?
K’e ji fu li. As a Confucian, all I need remember is to subdue self and honor rituals. Yet I feel fear for whatever follows life, as if, despite all my schooling, all my effort, I have failed.
I am sitting at my desk in my room, on the third floor of the Beverly Plaza Hotel in Chinatown at the base of Dupont gai, which the foreigners have renamed Grant Avenue. Outside I hear the jangle of streets which remind me so powerfully of Avenue Joffre in the French Concession of Shanghai.
The Ming poets said: “Measure a man by his memories.” Mine is filled with lovely things, full of smiles, and good food shared with family fellowship, the sounds of the young joining in harmony with the creaking of the old, lubricating our ancient voices with the cries of childhood and the music of a good kitchen.
Family records should be for sons. My son is dead, as are my daughters, and their children. What can be sadder—all their deaths, the end of our clan, with its last member here, on a far shore, unable to practice the rites.
Did not the Master say: “Honor the past, honor your parents, honor your teachers.” To see the future, look over your shoulder and examine the path of your ancestors. He who breaks with the past is himself a brittle thing, easily washed away by wind and water.
Writing now, I am a boy waving a toy hammer at Lu Ban, the great architect. May my forebears respect my effort to preserve memory, and not criticize me for my lack of skill. Do they watch me now? My years in the Western world make me question this. But I feel their presence, and it is not my imagination or my loneliness doing this. Other Chinese men have felt it, too.
I have gone to the ta’i ping yang, Pacific Ocean, standing on the San Francisco beach, peering at China. My best friend used to go there to yell at her clan in Shanghai, thirty thousand li away. I used to deride her for yelling across the sea with the gulls.
How wrong I was. I should have stood shoulder to shoulder with her and howled into the western winds, my voice joining with hers to reach across the water to our beloved Shanghai, its western lights, and a million fish in the two rivers.
Her husband, K. F. Ting, Ting Kuo-fan, is now my only true remaining friend. But he has abandoned the old ways and is utterly foreign and even has a foreign wife. He and I went to St. John’s, a Western Christian college in Shanghai, after our tutors taught us the ways of Master K’ung. I came from scholars; he has soldiers in his heritage. I was a child magistrate when the Empire fell.
Ting used his classical education and his Western schooling to become a soldier, which is like using an emerald to buy a cup of old millet. Hau nan bu dang bin. Good youth do not become soldiers.
Ting walks faster than the foreigners, knows their history better than they. He watches their cinema, studies their habits, and embraces them with the vigor of a drowning man seizing floating wood. Yet he is alone in this world, with none like him in all of the Western world or in China. He is as lonely as a mythic dragon, a person of endurance and strange and almost magical uniqueness, wrestling with his mind and his past.
Ting comes from a line of old soldiers and magistrates who valued privacy above all. Ting’s own father came from a family of terrible loneliness. Solitude has been their mark.
Ting’s wife, Ting taitai, Mar Dai-li, was a sparkling connoisseur of literature, an amusing
storyteller, an enchanting person filled with great inner energy and utterly peasant in her superstitions. She was also Christian, so fond of her lord, the Jewish teacher Jesu. Ting taitai was possessed of powerful ren yuan, charisma, something that she passed to her daughters.
Ting taitai and I used to argue about poetry, innuendo, and Taoism and Christianity with fluidity. She argued for Mo-Tzu’s undifferentiated love of all people; I reminded her of the preeminence of li, ritual, in all human relationships. I saw only precision and earnestness in our debates. She knew the mind could bring pleasure as well as understanding. I did not.
“C.K., this is so much fun!” she used to say in the middle of hot debate. Now I hope this was all very true. I hear her words and remember her energy, and I smile, all by myself.
She came here during the war, to America, bringing her three daughters, with all the enemies of China on her heels. Unlike my dear wife, she had detested walking, yet she strode across China. She had loathed the idea of war, and she became a lady warrior in the protection of her daughters and their path to Free China and beyond. She loved China and Shanghai, and crossed the Pacific to live in San Francisco. She was raised to be a fabled princess of Chinese society, and left it forever.
The separation from parents and clan was too great. She could not survive on Gold Mountain, what my Kwangtung brothers call gum san. Her faith in the Christian god could not sustain her—proving, I think, its weakness. She took comfort in her producing at least one son, not knowing he would receive an American chimu, abandon Chinese ways, and not accept me as his tutor.
I used to think that the Christian missionaries who captivated her imagination in Shanghai had changed her. Now I do not think so. The Christians made her more romantic. A believer in poetry and good deeds, a believer in life’s mystery. A forgiver, which is a most foreign habit. Who with power forgives enemies? Nonsense!