Honor and Duty (8 page)

Once, the god appeared at a banquet at Johnny Kan’s restaurant in Chinatown. Beautiful Chinese ladies in soft, padded peach, azure, and saffron silk cheongsams encircled me and said “
Bougwai!
Precious!” and touched my cheeks, bathing me in glittering smiles. I loved their touch, and the god arrived, making me giggle, falling into the mad grip of insane laughter. Each laugh forced a beautiful lady to back away, the insanity god separating me from her affection, her smile turning from shock to hurt and fear, until there were none left, and I was alone, laughing with tears.

By this time in my life, I had achieved threshold acceptance as a struggling Negro youth, and no longer wore the tattoos of lost fights on my body. This incident, of hurting Chinese ladies, became my most painful memory, which I could not expunge because I was reminded of them and their pain in my dreams. A woman with soft, kind brown eyes, a small red rosebud mouth, and jet-black hair, dressed in a peach cheongsam, smiled at me, and wept when I began to laugh. When I awoke, she was gone. Later, I would dream of a murdered
man who blamed me for his death, and he would chase the Chinese woman from my sleep for all time.

The secrecy of my father’s life convinced me that he harbored within himself a wealth of deep confidences and mysteries. I imagined his life to be the best book in the world, and one I would never be sufficiently smart or qualified to read.

I had within me murky half-memories, superstitious shadows of belief and event, fractured impressions of connection, cratered concepts of separation and pain, abandonment and death.

I could not distinguish memory from dream, boundary from custom, fact from fear, East from West. It was a long and dark tunnel, with no landmarks in the offing or light at its end.

I watched my father in the parlor, reading about West Point and the Panama Canal, Cheops and the Pyramids, Queen Anne’s War, the discovery of the helix, and the banking secrets of Geneva, his pipe clamped tightly, the pages turning with a steady rhythm. He was more disciplined every day than I was in my wildest dreams.

I knew that my father, the proud warrior who loved to jump from American airplanes and tramp Chinese river roads in pursuit of the enemy, was finding refuge in books, as surely as my friend Sippy Suds, our most famous drunk, found solace in the bottle.

As a pledge to America, Father read only in English and never in Chinese. He was immobile while he read, as if he, the inanimate book, the table lamp, and his cushioned living room chair were an ensemble as secure as Napoleon, his great maps, his courageous marshals, and his old green coat. I read books about war, but they weighed little against Father’s encyclopedic grasp of the world.

I used to ask him about China, his childhood, his war years, his family. I asked him about his father.

Puffing on his pipe, he never answered. If pressed, he would lift his eyes and look off into the great beyond, giving the Gaze. It took him from the present world to places unknown. If I had the discourtesy to persist, he would maintain the Gaze, or say, “This is America,” and my briefing on the history of our family, the character of its members, the moral lessons they learned from life, and the nature of Chinese civilization was concluded.

His strong grasp of the things that pressed inside me, things that beat bright brass Chinese gongs in the pocket of the brain where questions are formed, was closed to me, as inaccessible as Red China, as mysterious as romance or the dark side of the
moon. China was his secret. He guarded it with care, using it to court Edna with selected stories of family history, of the estates and servants of his
gung-gung
, grandfather. He told her of the dawn conferences in the Forbidden City under imperial roofs lined with the figures of bad Prince Min and the parade of marching animals, of the predawn work regimens of scholars in the Hanlin Academy, of the cycles of agriculture in the valleys of the Yellow River. Edna shared morsels of these stories with me, sufficient to inspire taste, never enough to digest, proof of his distrust of my mind. When my father spoke to Edna about China, he was wistful. The two of them had a close but private relationship, full of passion, conversation, and privacy. When Father looked at me, he was sad and silent, as if I reminded him of ancient pains and lost hopes.

I wanted to know his history, certain in the belief that this knowledge was part of my preparation for later events. I believed, primordially, that his telling me his past would lend me some of his great power, and that somehow the telling could even lighten the rock that he himself bore through the length of his weighty American days. I was the child at the fire, looking up at my father with curiosity and faith, waiting for the stories that represented the chain of life.

At the wooded campfires at Camp Tolowa in the Santa Cruz Mountains, my boxing coaches, Barney Lewis and Tony Barraza, spoke under a canopy of stars to boys who were not their sons. Tony had last seen his child when the boy was four. Tony Jr. and I had been born in the same year. I imagined my father and me sharing singed marshmallows, throwing moss kindling into a crackling fire, watching sparks fly into the nighttime sky. Here, under the cloak of dark, under Wench’ang, the celestial god of scholarship, whose presence was known in the West as the Big Dipper.

When I was nine, I got glasses, and Uncle Shim pointed out what he called the Literacy Arc. “See,
Hausheng
, Wen-ch’ang, god of the literati, in the form of the Bear. Below him, the four stars of his chariot with Wen-ch’ang’s principal assistant, K’uei-hsing, the ugly fellow who gives the grades. Inside the chariot, unseen, is Chu-i, who gives good luck to lackluster, ill-prepared students.

“
Hausheng
, never trust Chu-i, god of the inept. Honor Wench’ang as I honored you with your name, Able Student. As an advocate of the
Wen-lin
, I urge upon you scholarship and literacy.”

In my daydreams, Father would tell me the stories of his life—his childhood, his victories, his enjoyments—tutoring me under the kind and ancient Arc of Literacy and its three gods. Here, his urge for mathematical genius and Uncle Shim’s Old World beliefs, Tony’s training about rules, my Negro heart and Chinese blood, and the wishes and hopes of fathers and sons could commune and be safe with one another, fortified against any harm or any change.

On the night before I left, we stood in the dank and poorly lit garage. Here he found quiet refuge. When the pressures of his life became too weighty for reading, he would clang his pipe against an old, large glass ashtray and walk down the narrow hallway to the door that led to the garage.

Using hand tools, he made inlaid stools, ornate end tables, and cabinets of a quality that was beyond his training. He had a gift, which appeared in many things that he did. It was in this respect—demonstration of competence—that I was not his son. He was a capable man; I was always slow, myopic, hard of hearing, stupid, awkward, poorly tongued, hesitant in speech and uttering inarticulate Chinese when I should have been silent, putting up fists when I should have been doing kowtow, raging with horrible anger against my own parents, blurring my Chinese, Negro, and American boundaries, unable to laugh except when mad.

I came down twice every morning to do pull-ups, six sets of twenty, thirty seconds apart, on an old metal pipe, driven by the need to escape. My arms were my wings. I practiced with the
liang-jiang
, the two octagonally beveled rods of pine that resembled dynamite sticks connected by a thong. Chinese fighting sticks. I practiced the double-hand whipping, attacking, blocking, and hand switches taught me by Pinoy Punsalong at the Y. When I could not cope with life, I came here to punch the beams.

“Come,” he said, standing, and I followed him downstairs.

On a high shelf, surrounded by small cardboard boxes of wood screws and hinges, was his Colt super .38 automatic, two shelves above my
liang-jiang.
His old Army sweater strained as he reached. It was moth-eaten, stretched thin around his shoulders, the fragile fabric requiring him to don it as if it were made from the webs of spiders. His baldness had quickened, but he was trimly athletic, his posture exemplary; his handsome face had softened as the war years grew distant. I thought of asking him about West Point.

“Clean,” he said, handing the gun to me, watching as I disassembled and cleaned it with an old undershirt and an oiled gun cloth. I held the barrel to the light, checking for lint in the bore. I glanced at him quickly. He was lost in his thoughts. I knew that my
gahng
, my bond to him, had been a test for both of us. The purpose of the test and how I might pass it were never clear. Now this duty of son to father—the first of the
San-gahng
, the high Three Bonds identified by K’ung Fu-tzu—was changing, seemingly before the test had been administered. I was relieved in a way; I did not want the grade that K’uei-hsing—or Chu-i—would give me.

I cleaned the slide. I was leaving in the morning—to go to the one place on earth that seemed to embody all that he believed, all that he had hoped for in both of our lives. Now that I had obtained what he had always wanted, he seemed more withdrawn and secretive. Something was angering him. It had to be me.

He inspected the pieces. He nodded, and I began reassembly. What does the gun mean to him? Had he killed with it? When I was seven, and learning the basics of street fighting, I wanted to believe that he had killed. Now I was less sure.

My mouth fought itself. “Uh … so, uh, when you wore it—uh, you know, the gun—did you put a round … in the chamber with, you know, a full clip, or did you just, uh, load it with, you know, the magazine? Alone? So it had, you know, extra—an extra round?”

He came out of his thoughts. He rubbed his square jaw, and made a gesture with his hand: Finish your work.

When I finished, he inspected it, closing the action with a loud metallic snap. He slapped the empty magazine into the handle well. “You know how safety work,” he said.

“Yes, Dad.”

“Leave chamber empty. Child find, she can die,” he said.

“Yes, Dad.”

“During war, I keep extra round in chamber, under hammer. Extra clip, all places—in boots. Canteen carrier. Pockets, rucksack. Sergeant Kress, Infantry School, say, ‘Never no such thing, too much ammo.’ Now, no war. Leave empty.”

“Yes, Dad.” He carried extra clips for the gun, in the war, the way Teddy Roosevelt carried nineteen pairs of extra glasses up San Juan Hill. TR also had suffered from asthma. My mouth moved, looking for words, wanting to be the portal for
a hundred questions while my mind clattered against itself. Maybe he would say more.

“Kai, this yours.” He pushed the heavy gun into my hand.

He cleared his throat. “Na-men give to me. I put letter for you, mail to her when you get there. In holster. Na-men will smile when she see West Point postmark on stamp. She will like letter from her old friend from China days, mailed by her only son.” Many Chinese confused the feminine third-person pronoun with the masculine; in Chinese there is no distinction. This difference had caused comic mayhem with Dad’s instructions when my sisters were part of the family. With Edna in the house, their visits were now infrequent.

“Na-men” was H. Norman Schwarzhedd, who had fought alongside my father during the Second World War. Na-men now wore the two stars of a major general, and commanded the Second U.S. Infantry along the DMZ in Korea. Na-men was a Chinese-speaking West Pointer.

Na-men had judged men by what my father called “Western way”—by action. My father’s upbringing had taught him to judge men by their classical education, social status, and birth order. During the war in China, when my father became an expert judge of the character of men in the Western way, he looked carefully at Major Na-men Schwarzhedd and decided that if he, Major Ting Kuo-fan, ever had a son, the son should be a West Pointer as well.

“Dad, this is your gun,” I said, feeling its weight, returning it. His hands came up suddenly, pushing the gun into my chest.

“No, no more. Is her army make it. Now,
your
army.” He patted it, as if, in a way, he were patting me.

“You know, I
love
U.S. Army!
Yess! All
American soldier
gallant gentlemen!
Eat last, sleep last, up hill first, die first!” His eyes moistened. “Best men! Good you go to Army. No money for college.” He laughed in a way that was not sad, but close to a thing of pleasure, surprising me.

“West Point!”
he said. “This the way! Army college, pay
you!
” His eyes beamed. “American Army West Pointer! Ahhh!

“My dream,” he said.

“I’ll send money home, Dad.”

He frowned. “No! No! You need. Books. Ammunition, uniform. Don’t need your money. No worry. Work, pay raise. Buy less food, you gone! You do good. No fail. Edna and I come for graduation. Edna, very proud of you.”

So many words for him, to me. Fortified, I blurted, “Dad, what would your father think of my going to West Point?”

It was too dark for the Gaze. He walked to the bench and rummaged for his old pipe, filled it with Edgeworth, and lit it. This was a powerful message: Do not ask. He hated this old pipe but he hated my question more. Long, uneasy moments passed. I had to break the spell I had caused. “I should send a little money.”

He looked at me. “Edna very proud,” he said. “
Very
proud.”

“Okay,” I said, frowning. He loved her. I couldn’t.

“I am your father!”
he shouted, enunciating each word as if it were Shanghainese and not English. “Chinese or American—I am
father!
YOU NOT STUDY!” he cried, waving his hand at me in a fury of expression. “Draw airplane picture! Read book about war! Get grades by brains and luck without work! You work at Y not at math! Do boxing, play sport all time! You sit and hold your knees! You talk zoo elephants out loud! Bad at math! How can climb American ladder without math!”

I backed up, blinking.

“No fail,” he hissed angrily. He stood in front of me, and I saw him in his tan field uniform with the Sam Browne belt, soaked in sweat, standing in front of his men, the automatic in his holster, somewhere in Asia, where war was the business at hand and talk was not Jane Austen; it had been Edgar Rice Burroughs.