I could’ve replied to Bah Ba’s email. Said something supportive but measured. That would’ve been my predictable response, but at the rate Bah Ba and I were going, our relationship would remain stagnant forever. I’d bury him as a stranger. I didn’t want to chicken out from another challenge.
“On Wah, haih mh haih goh dou?” I asked the guy at the restaurant for my father. It might have been the first time I spoke his Chinese name.
Bah Ba came to the phone. “Wei?”
“It’s Dickson.”
“Meh yeh sih?”
“I was thinking about visiting.”
“You have time?”
“I got the whole summer.”
“Houh a.” And then as though I didn’t understand, he added, “Good.”
* * * * * *
chapter 2
An Unreliable Narrator
alley
My first memory of my father: he slammed the front door on me, leaving my three-year-old ass out in the dark alleyway. I had nothing on but tighty-whities. My mom had just put them on me when Bah Ba burst into the bathroom. He’d grabbed me by my wrist and pushed me into the alley, then shut the door. Maybe he was pissed because he’d stepped on one of my toys, who knows.
I could hear my mother pleading with my father while I stood silent in front of our apartment on the edge of Chinatown, our first home in the States. We lived at the dead end of the alley, near the dumpster, far from the streetlamp.
At some point, my mother opened the door and swept me into her arms. She brushed off my feet and gave them a warm squeeze. She turned around, but my father was nowhere to be seen.
toilet
Or maybe my first memory of Bah Ba was when he dropped me into a toilet. We were in the bathroom of Tea House. Bah Ba was on one knee and held me over the toilet by my armpits.
His face began to twitch, his grip softened. He sneezed. You wouldn’t expect my father to instinctively cover his mouth. He wasn’t big on etiquette. My father liked to hock a loogie the way some men like to grab their balls, habitually and unabashedly. But on this occasion, he had manners. What befuddles me is not that he covered his mouth but that he had to use both hands.
My butt splashed into the murky pool, my arms and legs flailing about. Bah Ba pulled me up and wiped me off with toilet paper. Before we left the bathroom, he said, “Mouh wah bei leih Ma tang.” Don’t tell your mother.
drunk
Bah Ba was sitting on the linoleum floor in the hallway, jubilant, singing Cantonese songs, and laughing to himself. I sat next to him. His head swayed from side to side, his beard stubble brushing against my cheek. I put his head on my bony shoulder. We looked at the mirror and laughed. He staggered toward my mother in the kitchen, but she scowled and pushed him away. She left him laid out on the kitchen floor, singing himself to sleep.
The next morning, he told me he didn’t remember a thing.
ear picker
My most cherished father-son moments were when my father cleaned out my earwax. It was Bah Ba’s only duty at home. I’d tell him when it was time, tugging my ear. He’d rinse the metal ear pick, and I’d pull a napkin from the tin dispenser, a freebie from his restaurant. I’d unfold the napkin on the kitchen table, then lay my head next to the napkin, ear to the table, listening to the wood. Bah Ba would place his hand firmly on my head as he used the cold pick to scrape and dig. He never rushed. Whatever he scooped out, he placed on the napkin. The higher the mound of wax, the better—a marker of time spent with my father. But to get a large pile, I had to wait for the buildup. As a result, these sessions were few and far between.
Once, I waited too long. A ball of earwax had formed, and Bah Ba was unable to dig it out. My mom had to take me to the doctor. What the doc pulled out was the size of a marble.
red bean soup
I was turning six, and for my school birthday party, Bah Ba told me he planned something special: red bean soup. I never liked that concoction. Who wants soup served cold? I didn’t protest, however. I had never had his red bean soup. I assumed my father had a natural gift for the culinary arts. Perhaps he’d developed his craft at a young age, a prodigy.
I’d discover later that when Bah Ba arrived in the States from Hong Kong at the age of thirty-one, four years before the party, he had no kitchen experience, but he lied about this to the owner of Tea House. It was my grandfather’s idea. He told his son-in-law not to worry, he would train him. Gung Gung was the head chef at the popular dim sum restaurant in San Francisco. His wife, my Poh Poh, also worked alongside him in the kitchen. All the workers, the cooks, the women pushing metal carts with stacks of bamboo steamers, the hosts and hostesses dressed in suits, they all addressed my grandfather as Sifu.
A couple of months after my aforementioned birthday party, Gung Gung appeared in the New York Times. In the Travel section, there was a food guide of San Francisco’s Chinatown, and Tea House was described as “arguably the best dim sum restaurant in the country.” The article credits my grandfather by name, since he was the head chef. Not surprisingly, no mention of Bah Ba. Eventually, my father would leave
