Honor and Duty (18 page)

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

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!

I miss her. If she were here today, I would ask how someone who has acted as poorly as I could be forgiven by any god. It is only in her absence that I realize what she meant to me and my days. She was a woman. She was my closest friend.

How unlucky of me to have one friend left in the world, a rebel to all which I have ever held dear, married to a foreign woman, who appreciates China no more than a Mongol soldier.

This great rebel, however, has a son. I hope that the son can be my courier, taking this writing to my family graves. But he is like his father, chasing after soldiers. Where is the honor in this? I am losing the effort to save his Chinese essence. He is seventeen and already a
ping
, in a palace of soldiers. His becoming a soldier worries me; I fear he cannot recover, for with every sunrise he grows farther from the reach of the Master’s ways. Looking at him, I see a youth of neither the foreign land
nor our old ways in China. He is neither of this world nor of the next, part Chinese, part foreign. Half of him here, half of him waiting to arrive later. He has the body of a common worker, the scholastic diligence of an infant, and the mind of a rock.