Contents
Praise for Paper Sons
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PART ONE
King
PART TWO
An Unreliable Narrator
Apartment 171
What’s in a Name?
Left Behind
PART THREE
Hope You Solve
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Notes
Acknowledgments
Questions for Discussion
About the Author
Praise for Paper Sons
Dickson Lam’s Paper Sons combines memoir and cultural history, the quest for an absent father and the struggle for social justice, and namingtraditions in graffiti and in Chinese culture. Violence marks the story at every turn—from Mao to Malcolm X, from the projects in San Francisco to the lynching of Asians during the California Gold Rush. After one of his former students at the June Jordan School of Equity is gunned down on a street corner, Lam is compelled to tell a mosaic of stories. What does it take, in this social context, to become a person who respects himself and holds hope for those coming up through a culture of exclusion and violence? Lam writes with a depth of hard-won understandings both political and psychological. This is an important book, beautifully crafted, rich in poetic images and juxtapositions, that offers insight and compassion for a nation struggling to make sense of its immigrant nature. I congratulate Dickson Lam on this fine work.
—alison hawthorne deming, contest judge for Autumn House’s 2017 Nonfiction Prize
From China to Hong Kong to San Francisco’s North Beach projects, Dickson Lam’s Paper Sons (and daughters) navigates the mysteries and betrayals of deleted and recovered memory, of tagging crews and migrant parents, of generational secrets. Dickson Lam’s unforgettable characters blaze like falling stars and illumine a world. Paper Sons, written in short pieces like a document torn and reassembled, is also the story of a determined younger brother who reclaims the truth, and the fierce, protective sister who shows him the way.
—jayne anne phillips, National Book Award Finalist
Raw, monstrous, white-knuckled recollections of love-hate, hate-love, abuse, regression, repression, and all the darkness and light any foolish-brave memoirist could possibly summon forth. It rings true to anyone who has gulped deeply from that well of pain. Highly recommended!
—andrew x. pham, author of Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam
This moving memoir about coming-of-age in the hardscrabble streets of San Francisco while coming to terms with a dysfunctional family sheds fresh light on the Asian American immigrant experience. Dickson Lam presents an unflinching and poignant portrayal of his troubled father and the emotional toll of being a father figure to inner-city youth. Charting a heart-wrenching journey of strength and forgiveness, Paper Sons is an exhilarating debut.
—rigoberto gonzález, author of Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa
Dickson Lam’s Paper Sons is a groundbreaking memoir about growing up Chinese American, about working-class kids of color in the Bay Area, about the sorrows and survival of his troubled family. Through his roles as a son, a student, a teacher, and a writer, Lam creates three-dimensional portraits of people who have too often been silenced in our culture, and he rings immense sympathy even to those who have hurt or disappointed him, particularly his father. This is a moving and necessary work, and I thoroughly agree with one of his students, “You’re a deep man, Mr. Lam.”
—david mura, author of Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei
With Paper Sons, Dickson Lam dissects his own life as a vehicle for understanding what it is to be a good man in this world. Paper Sons isn’t just a memoir, it’s a triumph. Dickson Lam yanks you into his heart and sews up his chest behind you. The only thing breaking out is this debut.
—mat johnson, author of Pym and Loving Day
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Copyright © 2018 by Dickson Lam
All rights reserved. No part of this book can be reproduced in any form whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews or essays. For information about permission to reprint contact Autumn House Press, 5530 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15206.
“Autumn House Press” and “Autumn House” are registered trademarks owned by Autumn House Press, a nonprofit corporation whose mission is the publication and promotion of poetry and other fine literature.
Autumn House Press receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
Cover Art: Cafe Racer/Shutterstock.com
Book and cover design: TG Design
Digital production: Joel W. Coggins
ISBN: 978-1-938769-31-3
For my sister
and
my students
My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me…I alone devote pages of paper to her….I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her….
—maxine hong kingston
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You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2 + 2 = 5, and the path out is only wide enough for one.
—mikhail tal
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chapter 1
King
advisor
Two months after my student Javon King was killed, I boarded a plane to see my father. The last time I visited my dad in Minnesota I was fourteen, the same age Javon was when he first entered my classroom, a small kid who wore his hat backwards, afro leaking out the sides. While standing on a crowded corner, he was gunned down, the fatal shots fired from a bus. I blamed myself for why he was there that day and not at school.
Javon was part of our inaugural class of a hundred freshmen. I’d joined with a handful of gung ho teachers to start a school in San Francisco, my hometown. We were a diverse school, half Latino, a quarter Black, a quarter Asian and white, the white students mostly from Russian immigrant families. The name of our school contained our mission: June Jordan School for Equity. How we got that name probably tells you more. We left it up to the students. We gave them three candidates they could name the school after, unsung activists we admired, civil rights leader Ella Baker, labor organizer Philip Vera Cruz, and poet June Jordan. Once the students heard a spoken word recitation of Jordan’s “Owed to Eminem,” it was a wrap. The first lines
