“Are you going to ask him or not?”
“OK, OK. Tomorrow.” She signed the form. “Happy? No more talking. I have to finish washing dishes. I have to sweep, mop.”
My mother would continue to give me the run around for months. “He hung up so fast,” she’d say. “Next time. Next time.”
I could’ve asked Bah Ba myself, but I was too chickenshit. I worried he’d brush me off and tell me to put my mother on the phone. Worse, I was afraid he’d be honest. Tell me he didn’t want me around. My hope lay in his duty as a father. We counted on that each month. He was the breadwinner, never failing to mail home the check that paid our bills. Perhaps he could be convinced that it was his fatherly obligation to allow me to move in with him.
One night, the phone rang in the living room and I picked up. It was Bah Ba.
“Jackson?” he said.
“Dickson,” I said.
“Get your mom.” Bah Ba and I had fallen into a groove. It was understood, no chitchat. Just hand the phone to my mother.
“She’s in the bathroom.” I lied. My mother was in the kitchen.
“Have her call me when she comes out.”
“Hold on. I heard the toilet flush. She’ll be out in a sec.”
“OK.”
“Does Minnesota get hot in the summer?”
“Gaan haih a,” he said as though it was a dumb question, or maybe I was being sensitive, and his tone only reflected the natural harshness of Cantonese.
“It’s not sunny here at all.”
“That’s better. Never gets too hot or too cold.”
“Do you like living alone?”
“Leih gong mut yeh?”
“Living in a house by yourself. Isn’t that boring?”
“You think I just lay around the house all day?”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
“I wake up early. Work. Come home. Sleep. No time to think.”
“I’m starting high school.”
“So fast?”
“I am turning fourteen in a few months.”
“Who’s on the phone?” my mother asked.
“Bah Ba.” I passed her the receiver of the plastic French-style phone.
She held the receiver on her shoulder with her back to me.
I tugged her shirt and pointed at the phone, then myself.
She raised a finger to her lips to shush me.
“Remember to ask,” I said.
“Dickson,” she said into the phone, “he wants me to ask you something. What? Hold on, I’ll find it.” She grabbed the base of the phone and carried it to the kitchen. The rotary dial contained a picture of my mom crowned with a lei, and the photo would rotate with the dial of a number.
I couldn’t follow their conversation, only hearing my mother sorting through envelopes and shuffling about in her flip-flops.
“Houh la,” she said and hung up the phone.
I rushed to the kitchen. “Well, what did he say?”
“What I told you he’d say, ‘No time.’ See?”
“Call him back. Say I’ve got no good choices for high school. Say Minnesota’s my only shot for college.”
“What kind of father do you think you have? How many times has he asked anything about you? About any of you? He doesn’t care about his kids.”
Maybe a father can see something in his son no one else can, and what my father saw in me repulsed him. Perhaps it was my likeness to him.
My mother handed me the phone to return to the living room. I placed it back on the end table. Hanging above the table was a studio photograph of our family taken in Hong Kong shortly before we immigrated to the States. The five of us sit on the floor of a room, huddled together, as though we want others to believe this is our living room. I’m in the center, a year-and-a-half-old, my body round like a lump of clay, laughing because I do not know any better. My brother and sister sit next to me, one on each side, their legs extended straight out and their backs slouched. My parents lean into each other. My mother’s her usual photogenic self, with the same smile she has in all photos. Posed but not fake. She’s happiest when being photographed. My dad’s rocking bell-bottoms and a burgundy sweater. He looks relaxed, eager for more of whatever this is, as though when the photo is done, he will roll around the carpet with me and raise me high up in the air. But this was all staged. This was not our living room, and the father rendered in this picture was a stranger.
My father was one only on paper, on a form for free lunch, on public housing records, on a family tree assignment. He was a check in the mail. I understood now this was no accident, and it wasn’t a shortcoming. It was the way he preferred it, the way he wanted it to remain.
“Don’t be so sad,” my mother said. “How about I make beef lettuce wraps tonight? Or we can get McDonald’s.” She went to rub my shoulder, but I brushed past her. I went to my room and grabbed a comic book from the shelf, an issue of the X-Men. I brought the comic to the bathroom, a place where I could steal some privacy. I sat on the lid of the toilet and found myself in the Australian outback.
The X-Men were laying low, building a new headquarters while the world assumed they had died. They were still missing their leader, Professor X. He was probably stuck light years away
