Honor and Duty (67 page)

I stepped outside. The redcaps and the cabdrivers, most of them black, were weeping with greater force than the passengers in the terminal.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Oh, man,” said one. “He won the primary and they shot him dead. They shot Bobby Kennedy in L.A.” He looked at my uniform. “He died for you, man.”

On the plane to Travis I realized that I had left the phone dangling, the number undialed. Bobby Kennedy had been shot on the day my class had graduated from West Point.

Kennedy was a man beloved by the many-hued colored people of America. But I knew little else about him. So I couldn’t understand why I felt like I had been shot, or that his death had been personal to me, my momentarily promising future ended abruptly, once again.

40

San Francisco, June 14, 1968

I reread the letter Uncle Shim had written nearly a year ago.

The lobby of the Beverly Plaza Hotel was quiet. I saw the old wooden enclosed telephone booth from which Uncle Shim had called me when I was a cadet. I was early. I was early for everything, for I had nothing else to do. The euphoria of seeing the Academy, of seeing my class graduate, of visiting with Major Schwarzhedd, had diminished in the wake of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and the violent animosities surrounding the war. As enduring solitude had returned, and I was trying to embrace it as my necessary
yeh
and
yuing chi.
I reminded myself that I had earned them.

I had driven up from Fort Ord to ask Uncle Shim for help with my father. Perhaps, I thought, he could suggest a way to create a peace—not acceptance—but a relief from my continuous guilt, from the sense of being miserably undeserving. When not with my troops, I felt empty inside. I had become
nothing. I was
k’ung hsu
, ignored as if unborn, cast out from the living.

The desk clerk approached. “You are nephew to Mr. Shim?” he asked, and I nodded.

“He say meet at Far East Cafe. He there long time now.”

“Uhm goy,”
I said.

The Far East was between Commercial Street, where you can look at the financial district’s skyscrapers, the Bay, the Oakland Bay Bridge, and Old St. Mary’s Church—a small, dark brown sanctuary for Christians seeking redemption and heathens fleeing cold sea winds as they swirled from the depression below Nob Hill.

Families filled the cafe and I weaved through the tightly packed tables. In the hallway’s last private cubicle next to the kitchen, the honored spot, I found the slender Uncle Shim, leaning slightly to his left. Next to him was my father. Both were in their customary suits, Uncle in a polka-dot bow tie. My father looked strong, but pale, and withdrawn; he stiffened as I knocked and entered through the curtain. I was the wound for which there was no poultice.

The gallant Colonel Ting, the pilot and paratrooper, the man with two lives and two wives, one in China and one here, who had lost them both in America. The man who at one time had possessed an only son, who had failed him before the watching world, and now was a man without a wife, with no son, and a ghostlike nondaughter.

“Hello, Dad,” I said to my American father.

“Dababa,”
I said, lowering my head to my Chinese uncle.

The table was filled with dishes, enough for six, but I saw the food as if it were a photograph, without aroma, a cardboard thing without pleasure or reality. My father studied his plate.

“Just us,” said Uncle Shim. “Please,
Haushusheng
, be seated.”

I sat opposite my father at the round table, six seats away.

Father had not acknowledged me or given me permission to approach him. After I became a cadet, he used to stand and shake my hand. My presence reminded him, I thought, of death, of defeat and failure, of a loss of status. My failure had made him more Chinese, more vulnerable, in a land of businesslike Caucasian Americans.

“Father,” I said, “I’m sorry for flunking out of West Point. I know that I have deeply disappointed you.” I had said those same words to him by telephone, a year ago, enduring his silence.
“I’ve lost your gun,” I had added, back then. There will be no ring.

Uncle Shim studied his jade cuff links. Time stopped; breathing was labored. A large rock pressed on my lungs.

My father faced his cold food. He cleared his throat and began to eat slowly, the large Infantry ring bright on his hand.

Uncle Shim nodded and I served. The rich, high sounds of the many Chinese families outside the cubicle created a symphony of continuity. For a moment I was transported to China and was part of her. She was older than West Point, more patrilineal than the Army, where the unworthy son lowers his head to the disapproving father and the community waits to see his skin peeled back and his bones burned. There was a justice to this, a constancy rising from the waters of tradition. I could be a sacrifice, an example to warn a hundred others, as long as I was a part of something.

“I apologize to you,
Dababa.
You trained me to be a better student. I have disgraced the very name you gave me.”

“Pour us drinks, Able Student.”

I opened the Taipei beer and walked around the table to pour into my father’s and uncle’s glasses. My father’s pain caused him to incline his head slightly. Stiff, unbending, unyielding sternness radiated from him like rigor from the dead.

I poured tea first to myself, then to Uncle, and last to Father, giving him the richest, strongest-steeped tea from the bottom.

“Let us drink to the strength of the clan,” said Uncle Shim, his voice vibrating with feeling. “To the continuation of your line and the memory of old ways. Let us subdue ourselves within the great embrace of the men who have preceded us, the Tings and the Shims. We toast the women of the clan who have been our strength, and drink to the two Ting
taitais
, and to Shim
taitai
, all of whom await us in the next world. Think of them, and not our own cares. The future of both lines now rests with the three of us here.”

This was a toast to me, technically, the most likely candidate to procreate.
“Gambei,”
said my uncle.

My father did not drink alcohol, and he and I lifted teacups.

The food was delicious and the meal was terrible. There was no
ren yuan
, social pleasure, at the table, giving the dinner the restrained social subjugation of a Western formal diplomatic supper between nations preparing to declare war.

My father was honoring his friendship to Uncle; Uncle Shim
was honoring his
lun
to my father by arranging this uneasy gathering of desultory digestion, with two spoken comments.

“More crab, Father?” I had asked. No answer.

“
Haushusheng
, finish the soup,” said Uncle Shim. I nodded.

Our thoughts were unanchored to positive guidance, as disparate as our relationships, and it was these feelings that spiced the meal, more than the rich oyster, black bean, hoisin, or sweetly soured sauces on the ten platters before us. Into this silence that consumed our feelings, I could project every worst fear of my father’s judgment of me.

Our cubicle was silent. Later, one of the waiters burst in, expecting an empty table to clear of plates. He jerked, his eyes flying open when he saw the three apparitions silently seated.

“Ohh!” he cried, bowing and backing out.

I felt an old and ancient tug to down the beer as if it were air, but I was tired of defeats.

An hour passed. No one was eating.

“Please allow me to pay for the meal,” I said. “I am so much in debt to you. The gesture means nothing, but the weight of obligation is real.” I was stilted by being with men I had known all my life, the English words fighting against my mouth. I sounded neither Chinese nor foreign. Speech was now difficult. My brain swirled, confused.

“Unthinkable,” said Uncle Shim. “Tonight is my treat.”

My father put his hand on Uncle’s arm, shaking his head. He would pay, and there would be no argument. With the check came three fortune cookies, left untouched. These American things, words wrapped in pastry, were for pleasure and levity. Not now.

“
Hausheng
, walk me back to my hotel. Your father will drive home. I thank you both for sharing this meal with me, and for your valuable time.” He stood stiffly, his thin legs helped by the ebony cane. I noticed that it was scarred, as if it had been dropped.

“Able Student, I find you looking very round, very full, and very lucky. Someday, you will be a strong credit to your family.” He smiled broadly, as if we had just finished a ripsnorting collegial roast closed with four choruses of “That’s Amore.”

I stood away from the door. Dad studied my chest, looking at the Airborne wings, the drill sergeant badge, my three little ribbons, the qualification badges. I wondered if he wanted me to go to Vietnam. I wondered if he wanted me to, if I would go for him.

“Good night, Dad,” I said.

He nodded, put on his gray Tyrolean hat, and walked out of the restaurant with his Prussian posture, stiff with the aches of defeat, slowed by the weight of the unworthy.

“
Hausheng
, matters are progressing famously!” We walked slowly through the press of the evening crowds on Grant.

“I must’ve missed something,” I said.

“You missed nothing. Your father will someday forget the wounds you gave him. You must be ready when he is ready.”

“Uncle, thank you for your help. I really appreciate it.” I took his frail arm as we crossed heavy traffic on Sacramento. “I know it was hard for you to do.”

“Ai-yaa!” he cried. “You are so dense. This is my job—helping support the linkages between friend and friend’s only son! It did not bother me to do my duty as a Chinese elder.”

He breathed heavily until we reached the Beverly Plaza. At the door, he stopped, reached into his coat, and gave me a letter inside an old and stiff plastic envelope. “Read this,” he said, “at the Sunset Beach. Indulge me by using strict obedience. Do not read it anywhere else. Go now.”

“I will, Uncle,” I said. “Thank you.”

He nodded, passed the hated elevator as if it were a rude drunk, and methodically climbed the stairs.