My father would visit us once a year from Minnesota. Not for the holidays but for a mandatory meeting. It was a stipulation of our lease, an “annual reexamination.” Adults in the household had to sit down with the manager of the housing projects to verify income and who lived in the unit. My parents had to pretend they were a couple that had slept in the same bed for the past year. The lies sheltered us.
For years, I told myself that Bah Ba was forced to leave the restaurant he worked at in Chinatown because it was closing. But my dates were off. Hong Kong Tea House closed its doors five years after Bah Ba moved. If he’d continued to live with us until Tea House shut down, he would’ve watched my brother and sister grow into adulthood. Technically, through his annual visits, my father saw all of us grow into adulthood. Each visit gave him a snapshot of us, and if compiled together, he had a flipbook of memories. But these memories lacked substance.
Bah Ba would spend the bulk of his visits sitting at a mahjong table—it was like old times. During one trip, Bah Ba came home to the smell of vinegar. In my mother’s hand was an old sock stuffed with tobacco leaves that had just been boiled in vinegar. She pressed the sock against my fingertips, a little-known home remedy for ringworm. I squirmed as the scalding vinegar from the leaves soaked into my skin. Bah Ba glanced over at us but didn’t say a word. Didn’t ask what the odor was about, the sock, or what was wrong with my fingers. He walked straight past.
My dad didn’t always turn his back from fathering. He used to kick my brother’s ass. I’d wished he had done the same to me. Any type of intimacy with my dad would’ve pleased me as a kid.
After I’d reconnected with him as an adult, he explained in an email, “I was so rough with your brother when he was little. I felt powerless with my own temper. Finally I retreated to staying away from dealing with the day to day raising the kids part so to control my outburst.”
He didn’t mention his cruelty to my mother. One night when she refused his advances, he threw her onto the kitchen floor and tried to drag her to their bedroom. To teach her a lesson, he pissed all over the bathroom floor and laughed when she got on her knees and scrubbed.
Perhaps living with us reminded him too much of himself. Minnesota offered a fresh start. Its snowy winters gave everything a layer of white softness, the sidewalk, the bark of a tree, even the sharp tips of a fence.
kiss me
I was over at my mom’s house. I was still getting used to calling it that. I used to call it Willie’s house or my mom’s boyfriend’s house, but now they were married. Her name was on the deed.
I was in the kitchen, telling my mother and sister about Javon. Ga Jeh had been staying at their house temporarily since she broke up with her boyfriend. The guy didn’t tell her, until after they had gotten serious, that he had kids and that he was still married, at least on paper, the divorce not yet finalized.
“Javon was only fifteen,” I said.
“So sad,” my mother said, but she didn’t skip a beat as she washed dishes, her back to us. “What do you two want for dinner?”
I sat hunched over the kitchen table. You’d never know it was designed in the mold of a Chinese antique, a dragon pattern hand carved on the sides of the rosewood table. My mother had the table draped with three layers of tablecloth, her reason having something to do with making it easier to clean. The design of the top tablecloth was rows of circles, each row a different color. It was a strain on the eyes when combined with the objects on the table: Hello Kitty place mats, crystal necklaces, gold purses, and a red sequin clutch. Also on the table was a boom box, the same one that had rested on my father’s nightstand in our old apartment, the same one he had carried onto the airplane when we immigrated to the States. My mother would use the radio to listen to the Chinese station. Sitting on top of the stereo was a small pillow in the shape of a pair of lips. “Kiss Me,” it read. I covered my face with my hands.
“You can’t control these things,” Ga Jeh said. “It’s not your fault.”
I pulled my hands away. My lips were salty. My sister grabbed my hand. She had a tattoo on her forearm, a tiger emerging from a lush jungle. I took the tissue she handed me.
how should we view mao?
The week after Javon was struck down I had to grade a stack of papers evaluating the life of Mao Zedong. Ruling China for nearly thirty years, Mao was more than a father figure; he was the “Sun in the Sky.”
We’d been studying him for the last month, and the students had written essays responding to the essential question of our unit: How Should We View Mao? The question was mine, but it wasn’t original. I’d stolen it from my mentor teacher at a school in New York. His versions: How Should We View Lincoln? How Should We View Columbus? The question could be recycled and used for any controversial figure.
I’d proposed
