Authors: Gus Lee
Honor and Duty (68 page)
I got my car out of Portsmouth Square and drove up Broadway through the new Barbary Coast, past Carol Doda’s Condor Club while Richard Harris sang “MacArthur Park.” I turned down Van Ness with the Hungry Hippo and its oversized parking lot on my right. At Geary I turned west for the Pacific Ocean as the Band played “The Weight,” about a tired man pulling into Nazareth. I switched stations, slowly turning the tuning knob to KABL.
It was a little after nine-thirty, and Sunset Beach was quiet and deserted on a moonlit, fogless night. The lights in the Cliff House were ablaze. Its roof shined in the glare of the round and full moon. The illumination lifted the gloom left in the scarred excavation of Sutro’s Baths and Museum, the empty space next to the Cliff House. I drove down Point Lobos past the Cliff House, opposite the space that once held Playland, a beach amusement park. Diagonal parking spaces lined the Great Highway along the tide break, and I parked. When Bill Moen on KABL stopped talking, I turned off the radio.
I heard the suave and cool ocean wind. Here, Laughin’ Sal,
a monstrous, calico-dressed mechanical dummy with a garish, broken-toothed mouth, used to laugh like a foreign devil from a glass perch at the entrance to the Fun House. I walked across the sandy sidewalk to lean against the seawall, and looked at the plastic envelope.
It contained two paper envelopes; the smaller bore the characters
hau, shu, sheng.
I opened it. Inside was a small diamond ring with a note.
Kai,
This is yours. You can give it to your wife someday. Lisa (I used to be Janie)
I remembered Janie pulling on it, in Quebec.
“Right,” I said, buttoning it into my right breast pocket.
The second envelope was very old. Written in an elegant, woman’s script were the Chinese characters for “Only Son” and
han
and
lin.
I removed a thin parchment letter of several pages, written in a faded blue ink. I turned my body to allow the moon to shine on the top page. It was very old and it crinkled gently in the soft sea breeze.
April 4. 1952.
My Darling Only Son.
You know some humans are bitter? And others are blessed? Some so bitter about bad luck fortune that they wish to spit at their enemies from death, hating with ever so much great power from their graves. I used to dance like American movie actress, my hair floating in the air, but I am not bitter for losses. From my grave, I give you a long and strong and full hugging so to smell your sweet skin and to feel your small heart beat with life all the way reaching back to China and to our home and our house gods.
I wish you happiness on day of graduating from high school and beginning of American college. You are now 17, bound for
Hanlin Kuan.
Are you going to Harvard or Juilliard? I wish I could stand in your shadow now! You must be most tall and most handsome! Perfect in your looks! This is what drew me to your father! I pinned pictures of Tyrone Power and Robert Taylor on the walls, thinking thoughts of their faces at the correct moments, for you.
Today is Friday, 4/4, fourth day, fourth month, double-double-bad-bad luck, one meaning death, the other meaning
dying. Double the number, 8/8, double-double good, day you were born. Now I feel other world, the weakness of my life. When I am not of this place, my Lord will help me cross Great Eastern Sea to rejoin our family in China, where once again I be an honoring daughter to my father and mother.
I think from there maybe my thoughts come to you now, ten years later, in 1964. Uncle will give you this letter when you begin college. You compose for piano, yes? You play wind instruments, yes? Teachers compare you to Mozart and weep for joy when they hear your music, yes? Tell me
everything
at the April festivals, and do not visit me only once a year! I have asked your father to bury me in an American cemetery. Not Chinese cemetery, because too many not Christian. Most Americans Christian, there where Jesu can find my immortal soul with Gwan Yin’s sisterly help.
If you speak at the grave, I may hear you, maybe not. If you speak at Eastern Sea, I will hear. This is because of Christianity’s reach to China, where Jesu found me when I was a girl, and found my father when he was a young man. My Only Son, visit me at beach, where God joins Heaven and Earth.
You are last male in family and only person who can carry the clan; Reds and Japanese kill everyone else. I accept now. I said to your father—stop worry, Reds will lose. So sad, how wrong I was. He always so much better in politics than me.
So education of My Only Son will be American. It does not matter; you have my character, helped by Uncle Shim to honor the Old Ways and Ancient Times. You will always be perfect Chinese inside yourself, living with foreigners.
I have you for almost seven years—first year in my womb—and you will be six years old in August. I did not let you run, or perspire. All of your precious
shigong
, internal energy, has been preserved for music and for learning! You will be a genius! And better in mathematics than your father! How much misery he get because of Western ways.
Janie Ming-li has helped you grow to 12 years old with Christianity teaching, music lessons, good food and warm clothes, and has kept away physical exertion, human sweat, peanuts and ruffians. No rough
k’u-li
work or awful peasant fighting for my son! You are not a fierce man, but a gentle loving boy with so many brains. I pat your head and you lean
against me and this is better than all other things. I gave Janie my diamond ring to repay her for her years being your mother. Little Tail will honor her duty to me and to our Lord.
Someday your father will become your teacher. But too late to make you a soldier. How he wants you to be a Western man in Western uniform, Guan Yu again. I cannot express all my joy that this horrible thing is not to be. Praise be to the Christianity God. Character is formed at birth, finished at 12! He can do many magic things, my husband. But not in this regard. You will be K’an Tse, a scholar with good grades and music, not a soldier, jumping out of Western airplanes with a knife in your mouth and chewing American gum!
Uncle has taught you in my place, balancing your father. Your father does not wish you to be Chinese. Uncle joins me in not wishing you to be American. He has kept your tongue smooth and fluid in
gwo-yu
and Shanghainese. Uncle is Hanlin-trained, and is the best. He loves you as his own son. Care for him in old age, and pray he remarries, although I think he will not. Women should pay cash for man like him! He is kind and attentive and enjoys conversation with women.
You now stand at beach I love. I have so very much comfort knowing that C. K. Shim is my friend and will help you when I am dead. Please always remember how we ran on the sand, how I sang to you. How I put my feet in freezing cold water of the sea and spoke to my father in Tsingtao. This closest to China possible.
Now I cry. Cannot tell if cry for my father, or for Jesu, or for leaving you, the tears are the same.
This is last letter. Cannot write again. I send all good blessings and love and Christian forgiveness to your beautiful wife and to your sons and daughters. Honor me with sons like your
Na-gung
, my father. Daughters who remind you of me. Be a man with a kind heart for your daughters and wife. Try to treat them equal of sons. Teach my grandchildren what Jesu teach: Go into world in peace, be of good courage, hold fast to goodness, render no one evil for evil, support weak and help afflicted, honor
all
persons, love and serve the Lord, being so happy in power of His Spirit.
This your duty to me. God is our Heavenly Father. I very tired now. I kiss your sweet face.
Your
Mah-mee
When I finished reading I could remember nothing, staring at the delicately flapping pages as if they were gossamer wings of an exotic bird. I looked at the waves. Over the horizon lay China and my mother’s heart.
I reread the letter three times and I understood, nodding, having a sense of everything in the universe. I returned to the car, carefully returned the letter to its envelopes and put it into the least used storage pocket in my B-4 bag.
The deep, profound silence had been replaced by the roar of the surf. I walked along the seawall until I reached the stairs, and descended onto the beach. I began running across the thick sand to the surf, as my mother, her feet unbound from tradition, her soul yearning for her past, had once run, trying to commune with her distant father, across the Pacific, the Great Sea.
She had placed her feet in the freezing water, hoping her father, on the other side of the world, had been doing the same.
I sat in the sand and unlaced my jump boots, put my socks inside them, rolled up my khaki trousers, and walked across the cool, smooth, wet sand into the cold water. I listened for her, turning my ear toward China, trying to remember her voice, her tones. I remembered she sounded like Janie and Harper Lee. I was four years and sixteen seasons late, standing in the Great Eastern Sea. Do the dead wait?
I looked at the horizon, where the heavens separated from the earth. The ocean roared, driven by the moon, whipped by cosmic tides that felt to me like the hand of God.
I closed my eyes to the crash of the waves, the concussion of its encroaching march upon the earth. In its deep, reverberating roar I heard the voice of divinity, the rhythmic chant of celestial harmony. I heard the baying of patriarchs, the clarion bugle calls of the Academy, the heart-stirring crescendo of the West Point march, a distant call to war and to duty beyond family. It was the crashing of the sea, and Providence, and faith.
I heard my father, his strong voice in the thunder of the surf, his artillerylike defiance to the awesome weight of Chinese tradition, rising above the power of our family, rebellious to an unchallengeable past. He was a blindly zealous champion of a different future, a Black Haired man of the Western world.
He too had been given a rock at birth—the rock of filial
duty, of
shiao.
One he could neither lift nor drop. Then had come civil war and an awful invader. To apply his will and hold his fist to the face of evil, he had dropped the rock, had worked with a foreign army, come to a foreign land, and become a foreigner himself. My father had faced his own Fork of Pain, so many times.
The waves crashed all around me. I was alone on the beach.
I looked up at the moon. Uncle Shim had not given me my mother’s letter in 1964 because, to him, West Point had not counted. Going to the University of California at Davis—this counted.
When I last spoke to her, it was in Shanghainese, and I had been a small child.
“Mah-mee…,” I now said tentatively. “I was at the American Hanlin.” I licked my salty lips. “It was all
k’e ji fu li.
It loved honor and cared nothing for money. I dream of this school, every night. We were like the brothers in the Peach Orchard.
“Mah-mee, I’m a
ping.
Going to be an officer. I’m going to UC Davis, seventy miles from here, like from Shanghai to Soochow. Don’t be angry.” I looked at the moon and I thought a cloud crossed it. “I apologize for not speaking to you, for being a bad son. I’ll honor you at
ch’ing ming
and visit the beach and speak to you. I’ll try to open my mind to Christian thought.” Although, I thought privately, you ask too much.
Ji hui
, I thought.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have no secrets from you. I shouldn’t lie to you. The Christian stuff is asking a lot, but I will do all I can to honor you.” I breathed in the wet sea air. “Mah-mee, I have done so many wrong things. I wasn’t good to my
chimu.
Couldn’t love her. Couldn’t save Janie from her trouble. Kept Janie from keeping her promise to you. I caused a man and his son to die because I didn’t call the police. I caused terrible pain to some classmates, by honoring Honor more than them. Mah-mee, I’m a bad student. I flunked out of the American Hanlin, causing my father unbelievable pain. I’m awful at music. I wish I could tell you I’m Chinese and Christian. I wish I could tell my father that I’m American and not Christian. Uncle knows. In your mind, and in the mind of my father, I am all of that, and none of it.”
I cleared my throat. I was filled with self-consciousness and awkwardness. It had begun as a rote exercise. Now she was
listening to me and I was performing the Shining Bright Duty of
ch’ingming
, reporting to ancestors.
“I’m not married. I don’t have any children for you. I don’t think I’d be any good at it.… I’m sorry that this is what you want. I’d be the worst at it. I mean, besides math,” I added.
I felt the next question. It had been in me always. I shut my eyes tight to keep it away, but I was too weak and Honor pressed upon me to confess the inquiry of my life. But instead of saying it, I began to cry. Softly at first, and then with hooping wails that only a child’s lament inside a man’s lungs could produce.
“Mah-mee. Did I kill you? My
chimu
said I did. Did being pregnant with me cause your cancer? Oh, God, I’m sorry, so sorry, so sorry.” I fell on my knees, covering my face. I could not hear the surf, only my own sounds. I wept into a void of sound and time, no longer looking at my weakness. When I was too tired to cry, I stood.
“I want to honor you, my mother. I want to be a good son to my father.
“I’ve been confused because each of you wants me to be something the other doesn’t want. You both brought the old disputes in China here, and it’s continued, long after your death. I’ve been the living argument between your memory and Father’s will.”
The roar of the surf was louder. My father spoke to me from the ocean, while my mother listened, and tolerated, and accepted me from a bright and silent moon that blacked out the stars and whipped the waves, throwing fine, wet, salty spray into the air.
“I must do the same as you, Mah-mee, and seek my own path, as you did. I’ve done things to dishonor you. I love the Army and I don’t understand anything about music. Thank you for thinking of me, for writing this letter, sixteen years ago.”