liked the lingerie models in the Sears catalog. I had been crazy once, when the insanity god had lived inside me when I was ten. The god made me laugh when nothing was funny.
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 murderedman 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 themoon. 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
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 murderedman 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 themoon. 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
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