Read Online Second Generation by Howard Fast - Free Book Online

and not very physical, in spite of his large, heavily muscled frame. The coach, loath to relinquish what he considered a prime physical specimen, went into a lecture on the natural football abilities of the American Indian. It was an understandable error. With his black, slightly Oriental eyes, his straight black hair, and his brown skin, Joe might well have been taken for an Indian; and Lavette, a French-Italian name, might well have been something out of the Northwest.
"I'm not an Indian," he said. "I'm Chinese. It doesn't work the same way. We make rotten football players. Anyway, I just haven't got the time."
"With a name like Lavette?" the coach snorted.
"My father is Italian. My mother is Chinese."
The time he hoarded so preciously was spent with books and with his grandfather, Feng Wo. He was a voracious reader, and he consumed everything he could get his hands on, almost without discrimination. As for his grandfather, two years before this, Feng Wo had decided that although he himself would live out his life on this land of the barbarian, it by no means meant that his grandson must of necessity grow up as a barbarian. Whereupon he raised the subject quite formally and very politely at the family dinner table, stating that if Mr. Lavette agreed, he would like to teach his grandson, Joseph, to read, write, and to speak that most ancient and commendable of all languages, called Mandarin. Being Chinese, Feng Wo did not ask for the opinion or consent of either May Ling, Joseph's mother, or Joseph himself.
"Chinese! Are you kidding?" Dan said. "In the twenty-five years since you first came to work for me, I never learned more than ten words of Chinese,,and that includes being married to May Ling. Nobody can learn Chinese."
"Except five or six hundred million Chinese," May Ling said sweetly. "And that includes myself. Father taught me Mandarin, and I picked up enough Cantonese and Shanghainese to get along in that as well. So sa qua trey bun."
"What the devil does that mean?"
"Best left unsaid," Feng Wo told him. "My daughter has many bad habits."
"Why don't we ask Joe how he feels about it?" Dan said.
"I like the idea," Joe said.
"Oh, not so quickly," May Ling put in. "You really don't know what you're getting into, Joe. If father's going to teach you to read and write, it means learning about five thousand ideographs—pictures, symbols. It's picture writing, you know. Not like our alphabet at all."
"Then that does it," Dan said. He had never completed high school himself. Most of what education he possessed had come from May Ling, out of books she had persuaded him to read and out of the gentle flow of her knowledge that he had absorbed almost without knowing it. Nevertheless, he was fanatically eager for his son to be educated, well educated. The drive to do what you do better than anyone else was still present in him. "Where's his schoolwork? Where is anything else? And who is he
going to talk Chinese to?"
"To me," May Ling said gently. "To my mother and father—and who knows who else? Why don't we let him decide?"
"I could try it," Joe muttered uncertainly.
A year later, he was able to write a two-page letter to Barbara at Sarah Lawrence, which she exhibited proudly to her friends and which was translated for her, not by any member of the faculty, but by a Chinese laundryman in Yonkers.
Now, early in June of 1934, Joseph Lavette came home and informed his mother and father that he had been chosen to give the valedictory address at the commencement exercises of his high school. Dan, who was still in his work clothes, who had picked up May Ling at the library only a few minutes before, listened to his son in silence, nodded, and then went up the stairs to his room. Joseph stared at his mother.
"Is he angry at me? Isn't he pleased?"
"Of course he's pleased." She threw her arms around Joseph and kissed him. "He's as pleased and proud as I am. It's a wonderful thing."
"Then why—?"
"Give it a little time, Joe. He's a