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
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
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