Honor and Duty (29 page)

“How many Chinese in your class?” he asked.

“One other. Three Japanese-Americans. Fifteen are black and Hispanic, a couple from foreign countries.”

“You box, play basketball?” he asked.

Surprised, I put down my chopsticks. We had no history of discussing my sports. “I was a good athlete in high school and the Y. At the Academy, I’m average. Except for boxing.” I looked at my hands. “I’ll never be a great fighter. I can only go so far with my eyes. My vision really stinks.”

He frowned. “But you so big, strong, tall. Hard for Chinese, Japanese?”

“It’s hard on everyone.” I didn’t say that it felt harder because I was different. He knew that, better than I: he still had to fight his accent whenever he spoke; we attracted negative attention. Our accomplishments, and our failings, were magnified by our difference. Some people simply didn’t like our looks, and never would. Some upperclassmen had stared at me as if I were an animal during open season. We would always be aliens, constantly in a state of unspecified jeopardy from bigots.

“The school is very white, but it’s not racist,” I said.

“See, I’m right, about U.S. Army,” he said. “Best!”

“Yes, Dad, absolutely,” I said. I remembered how difficult it was for him and Edna, members of a unique mixed marriage. My father would get up from the table in restaurants and I knew that the management had decided not to serve us. Kids threw rocks and chanted the snake charmer’s tune, “Na na na na na, na na nana nana na.” Even with Frenchy O’Ware, West Point was better.

“Dad, shouldn’t you eat?”

“I watch you,” he said.

I felt the God-given courage of Achilles. “Are you happy?”

“Pretty happy,” he said, smiling, watching me.

“Dad, thanks for talking to me,” I said.

“Ah ha,” he said, “eat.”

“Megan? This is Kai. Your brother.”

“Kai! How wonderful to hear your voice. Is something wrong?”

“No,” I said. “I just wanted to call you and see how you are.”

“Oh, I’m fine!” she said in her English accent, the indelible mark of having learned from British and Indian teachers. “Tell me, please,” she said, “that you’ve quit West Point.” She checked herself. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Dad’s so proud.”

“What do you have against West Point?”

“Kai, we don’t know each other. We’re sixteen years apart. As the second daughter, I’ve never been important, and I’d rather have Dad’s indifference than his demands. I don’t count to him.

“Ever since the war in China, I’ve been a pacifist, and I’m brokenhearted that you’ve chosen to be a soldier—a killer.” She took a breath. “I’m
very
disturbed by the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and I
despise
the American army’s war on Vietnamese peasants.”

“Megan, the Reds are assassinating village leaders. We’re only protecting them. And Dad cares about you.” I didn’t understand her words about not being important, about his indifference.

“Kai, Kai—I’m sorry. No arguments. This is the first time we’ve ever spoken, just the two of us. Let me ask you a favor. Please respect my view of my relationship to my father. Our father.

“Now. How are you? Are you back for summer vacation?”

“Just for a few days.”

“Can you visit, or can we get together?”

“Probably not this time,” I said, afraid to argue with her, to hear about her
gahng
with Dad. “Nice talking to you,” I said.

“Oh, sure! All I did was criticize and depress you. I hear it in your voice. Please, come over and I’ll cook some great
baodze
and long bean
dofu
for you. I’d
really
love to see my
didi
, my baby brother.”

I shuffled through the narrow aisles of the San Bo Company. It smelled of rosewood, teak, and stale shipping confetti. I picked two Guan Yus, one to pack and one for an elder. Each of them was a dollar sixty-five. “Can I have them in two boxes?” I asked.

“You speak Chinese?” the man asked.

I shook my head. Three years of Chinese school and no retention of
sam yep.
A childhood of speaking Shanghai and
Mandarin, and nothing remembered except food. Now I spoke English, like Edna, and was estranged from the people whose faces I shared, whose culture had produced me and my clan.

“So sad, you lose Chinese. You look like Guan Yu!” He slapped my arm, startling me with the contact, and boxed each figurine. “Hey, young master, you pray Guan Ti, Lord Guan, then you speak Chinese again.”

I looked at the figurines going into the boxes. Guan Yu’s great, expansive chest seemed less imposing, his ferocity compromised by being laid horizontal.

He looked like Tony Barraza. When the clerk closed the box, I closed my eyes.

18

San Francisco, June 15, 1965

Uncle Shim was working half-time in the China Lights Bank on Jackson Street. He had told me that he would be at Sigmund Stern Grove, a small park not far from the Pacific Ocean, where free concerts were held on summer Sundays amidst an impressive stand of stately eucalyptus trees. Here, for years, he had studiously tutored me in the ways of China, while the sun glinted through the trees, the birds chirped, and the eyeballs rolled in my head.

I knew that by going to West Point I had been unfaithful to his creed. “The purpose of learning is to help others,” he had said. “The purpose of soldiering is to kill. Yes, yes, I know you say it is to ‘protect.’ But the way soldiers protect is to kill.”

Stern Grove usually had more fog than sun. Today the sun was bright, and more brittle than warm. Shim
baba
now had a small, delicate, ebony cane, upon which he rested both hands as he watched bushy-tailed squirrels take peanuts from his feet.
He smiled and his head moved stiffly with each of their lightning moves. Uncle had shrunk, his frame gaunt inside the soft gray flannel suit of which he was so fond. The collar and cuffs of his white shirt encircled his thin neck and wrists like carelessly loose shackles on an old, forgotten prisoner. For the first time in memory, I noticed that his collar and cuffs were worn. He had always been flawless in his dress. The gay brightness of his familiar jade bow tie emphasized the pallor of his skin.

It was painful seeing him. Had he aged so much in only one year? Or had the year in the company of oversized, physically vigorous, athletic Western men altered my perception?

His brightly cleaned, metal-rimmed spectacles caught the sunlight in blinding beacons as he looked toward me. He put out a hand and waved it, palm down, in the conventional Eastern way of invitation, of beckoning. Friends in the ’hood were always confused by the gesture, which looked like waving goodbye instead of “Come here.” The squirrels saw me and fled.

“I bow to you,
Dababa
,” I said, bowing, smiling as the pleasure of his company overcame the pain of studying his frailty.

“
Hausheng.
What a pleasant surprise. I find you looking very round, very full, very lucky, and a strong credit to your family. Actually, have you lost weight? Ah! Is that food?” he asked, sniffing the
kuotieh
, pork-filled pot-sticker dumplings, and the flat rice-noodle shrimp
chowfun
that I had brought in a take-out bag from Kuo Wah. I reached into the bag and pulled out my gifts for him. “ ‘The weight of this is light, but the feeling in my heart is like a mountain,’ ” I said. In it was a Guan Yu figurine.

Uncle Shim smiled, blinking rapidly. “Ah ha, thank you,
Hausheng.
Very nice gift. Very clever of you, to give me a household god, but not Wench’ang, for scholarship. Instead, Guan Yu, the warrior.” He nodded. “Put him on the ground.”

I did. The squirrels rushed over to the great red-faced spearman, sniffing, grasping him. Guan Yu stood tall, his widely spread feet resisting, his spear held firm. I was proud of him.

“Guan Yu was the great Asian soldier,
Dababa
, not Chingis Khan.” I removed the containers and began to divide the servings onto plates. “Millions of Chinese people honor him and his sense of duty, and honor. That is what West Point is helping me become.”

“Yes, no doubt,” he said gruffly. “You may do what he accomplished. Which is, to kill and to die by the sword.”

“
Dweila
—right,” I said automatically. I passed him a plate of steaming noodles and pot-stickers.

“Yes,
syesye.
First. Please remember, through all your foreign thinking and your foreign ways, that you are not in this world alone, one young man on the flatland dirt of the world beneath the Heavens. Oh, no! You are connected by blood and tissue”—he said “tiss-you”—“to every person in your family by the
San-gahng
and
Wu-lun
, the Three Bonds of trust and Five Personal Relationships. You all represent one collective creature. To be without them—well, it is to be like me. Cut out from the world.”

He deftly scraped the wooden chopsticks against each other, smoothing them, then nimbly secured one of the steaming, slippery pot-stickers and took a bite, chewing, full of gusto and enthusiasm.

I felt his hurt, but was happy that he was still a man of China. Even when depressed, he ate like a horse. Food, after all, was a celebration in itself. I smiled as if I had cooked it.

“I’m sorry, Uncle,” I said. The squirrels returned, sniffing, standing up on hind legs, hopeful. As a child and as a crotheaded Plebe, I had known how they felt: hungry. I broke a fortune cookie and offered the fragments. The squirrels boldly snatched them and stepped away, eating with those little hypersonic movements.

If this fortune says “Love is in your future,” then Christine will kiss me before I go back to the Academy, I thought. It said “You are cordial and perceptive.” I wondered if she would ever kiss me. Uncle was talking and I was daydreaming again.

“
Hausheng
, do not be sorry. It is not your fault! You did not cause the Ch’ing to lose the
T’ien Ming
, the Mandate of Heaven, to lose the power to govern people. You did not choose to be born here. But you often choose to forget who you are.

“So. Second, I owe
you
an apology.” He looked down while I wondered what was happening. Chinese men do not apologize.

“When you called the bank and tried to say goodbye to me last spring, I was very hurt that you were choosing to follow in your father’s footsteps, eager to be a soldier. All this teaching of you, to come to that. I felt very sad, and most alone.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle,” I said, pained.

“Yes. This, to apologize to me for this, is acceptable, although
I am confessing my wrongs, not yours, and you of course did the correct thing. You honored your father.”

It was summer in San Francisco and the bench was cold. I was warmed by the food, hoping that he did not notice how ferociously the light ginger sauce in the
kuotieh
squirted when I bit into it.

“Against the wishes of your father, nothing can compete but the judgment of Heaven. So the wishes of an old, outside uncle, are nothing against the authority of the
fu-ch’in.

“But,” he said slowly, “your father has abandoned the way of the Master. It truly is a terrible problem. It is what the English call Hobson’s choice. What I have always called the
ch’a lu t’ung k’u.
Do you remember this expression?”

I shook my head, chewing. “Notrly,” I said with my mouth full, which was acceptable when eating Chinese food.

He put down his chopsticks. “It is the Fork of Pain, the Choice with No Choices. You see, for me to support and aid your father’s wishes to make you a soldier offends all that I have learned. But to
not
support your father’s wishes also offends all that I have taught you, and either outcome produced dishonor. I could not solve the puzzle. Where does the duty lie? This is, of course, a terrible reflection on me, and on my scholarship.”

His face was torn with intellectual pains. I shut my eyes, not wanting to see my uncle humbled.

“So I closed my door. I did not give you my elderly words. I did not give you a gift to remember the honor you paid me as a sometime, lackluster student. I asked Secretary Hannah to tell you I was out, when I was in. I did not act with skill, or wisdom. It was as if I were the youth, and you the elder.” He chewed, his mustache flaring, put down his
kwaidz
, and adjusted his cane.

“So,
Haushusheng
, I am very sorry. Please be more courteous to me than I was to you, and accept this.”

He reached into a pocket. He opened my palm and placed his gold Piaget Swiss watch in it, his cool, thin fingers bending around mine to enclose it. He had never touched me before.

“Here. Do not argue, for I will not bend. No polite refusals, three times, until I forbear upon you. I forbear now. I employ the same aphorism: ‘The weight of the gift is as a feather, but its meaning in my heart is like a huge rock.’ There. All said.

“I only wore a watch because Madame Cheng expected her staff to wear them, to be so American, even me. This was
frankly silly of her; there were clocks on all the walls, and ancient Chinese timepieces in the hallways—then she gave us little gold clocks for our desks. Ai-yaa!—so many reminders of death! It is such a modern thing, and I am now almost retired. It ticks too loudly; I hear it at night, calling to me, like the small voices of all the dead in my family. It now ticks with a rhythm of a bad heart. Very, very—uh—
eccentric.
If I silence it by not winding it, I feel a deep guilt to Madame Cheng. I do not wear a watch at all now. I am late for any number of things, and I enjoy the privileges of being old. No one at the bank can criticize me, for they all call me ‘Father.’ ”