Willie described to my mother the last stop on his route, the Palace of Fine Arts. “There’s a lagoon. Swans. Ducks.” He kept the descriptions simple, nothing about the rotunda or the Greek columns. Didn’t want to confuse my mother, a recent immigrant. During the ride, Willie played the role of interviewer, and my mom did most of the talking.
My mother refers to that day as their first date. She tells me she wasn’t used to having a conversation like this with a man. By man, she means my father.
When my mom first considered divorce, she was pregnant with me. That night, she felt nauseated, had thrown up. My two-year-old sister had a high fever while my three-year-old brother ran circles around our small apartment. My mother pleaded with Bah Ba to stay home this time, to help watch the kids, but he took off to gamble.
Even if my mother wanted to divorce my father then, the laws in Hong Kong made it difficult for women. In 1970, a year before my parents married, the divorce rate was fifty times less there than in the States. Before a woman could petition for divorce, she had to live two years apart from her husband. That’s if the divorce was mutual. If it wasn’t, she had to live five years apart. She’d have to make it on her own. The lives of her kids would be in limbo. No child support. Not until the divorce was finalized, however long that took.
A quicker solution occurred to my mother: take her kids and immigrate to America. Leave her husband behind. It was her father who was sponsoring them, not his. Gung Gung had caught a break and landed a head chef job in America. My mother told her father the plan, but he advised her, “Maybe when he comes here, he won’t play mahjong as much. San Francisco isn’t like Hong Kong. No one stays out as late. Give him a chance.”
The biggest change my father made in America might’ve been the drinking. It got worse.
Willie’s first job in the States was picking grapes in Delano. A year after he quit, Filipino farmworkers in that town went on strike, protesting poor pay and working conditions. Eight days after the Filipinos began the Delano Grape Strike, Mexican farmworkers, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, joined in, recognizing their common struggle; hence, when the two merged forces, they named themselves United Farm Workers.
When Willie met my mother, he was also married. He had a child, a daughter. He told my mom about his rocky marriage to his white wife who was also an alcoholic. Now he was looking to get out. My mother had been thinking the same about her marriage.
After Bah Ba moved to Minnesota, my mother came clean to us. Willie was her boyfriend, and she planned to divorce my father, but only after Willie divorced his wife. Then they’d marry. I was skeptical. It sounded like an episode from a daytime talk show: Men Who String Along Their Mistresses.
But true to his word, Willie did divorce his wife. It was my mother who was unwilling to pull the trigger. She was raised to believe divorce meant disgrace, at least for women. A divorced woman became an “old shoe,” spurned by even her own family.
My mother’s parents knew about Willie. If it came down to a divorce, they were clear: they’d take my father’s side. My mom, however, cites economic reasons, not cultural ones, for her reluctance to divorce my father.
“Your father made $800 a month. Then all take home give me. If divorce, child support maybe only half give me. Not enough for everything, and then how I can take care of three kids?”
My mother didn’t consider the obvious option—get a job. She’d say she already had one, taking care of three kids and keeping the house spotless.
Whatever her reasons, she had no intentions of divorcing my father, and perhaps never did. She wanted to live life on her terms. She would not be an old shoe, yet she would not be miserable, either. To pull this off, she needed our help. When she was vacationing with Willie, Bah Ba would call, and we had to follow the script. Mom was on a trip with her friends from her ESL class, we’d say. Lying became second nature, the lies I told my father, the lies I told myself: My mother was not cheating on my father. They were separated, some unspoken arrangement. I was not an accomplice.
asleep
Here’s what I ignored when I booked a ticket to visit my father: Back when we were kids, when Bah Ba was still living with us, on the nights my mom was on vacation with Willie, perhaps frolicking down Main Street in Disneyland, while my brother and I were asleep in our room across the hallway, my dad would sneak into my sister’s room. Drunk. His fingers slithering across her body. The first time, Ga Jeh was eleven.
Knowing this hadn’t deterred me from reconnecting with Bah Ba, and it also hadn’t stopped my sister from doing the same.
cross the line
I’d confessed what my dad had done to my sister, though not the details, to a room full of students and staff. I was teaching at Dewey Academy in Oakland, the job I had before June Jordan, two years before my trip to Minnesota.
That afternoon we were crammed together in the cafeteria, teachers and a hundred high school students, all standing on one side of the room, waiting for John, the facilitator, to read a statement. If it applied to us, we had to cross an imaginary line. It seemed silly. Our students had enrolled in Dewey, a second-chance school, to make up credits, and instead of completing assignments, they were asked to participate in an activity with imaginary lines, as if they were elementary kids. We’d been told that the school district had contracted with an outside organization, Challenge Day, to provide a program
