to bear a tattoo on his face, a marker of his poor background, an attempt to keep him in his place. In spite of this, Dik rose up the ranks to become a general and was later promoted to the imperial court as the minister of military. If the story ended here, my Chinese name would serve as a reminder of my father’s wish that I become a man of bravery and nobility.

But when Dik Ching served on the Song Court, he discovered that other officials were distrustful of him, fearing the powerful general might one day abuse his military power. They fabricated rumors about the Tattooed Face General, even blaming him for natural disasters. Eventually, they forced him out of office. Demoted, he was sent from the capital to another city. A year later, he died of illness at the age of forty-nine. Perhaps his two sons and wife were at his side. Maybe they had moved with him to his new appointment, but I can’t find a record of this. It’s possible he spent the last year of his life isolated.

The first half of the Dik story represented the hopes that my father had for me, the second half foretold his own fate: a father scorned.

out

Rob gave me my first graffiti tag: out. I thought it was a random name, but it probably referred to how often I’d strike out in baseball. I wasn’t much better in my first few months as a tagger. I was a toy, incapable of holding a chisel-tip marker correctly, at a forty-five degree angle so the width of each stroke remained consistent. Style was secondary to me. Getting up—that’s why I began writing my name for all to see.

Though Rob had introduced me to tagging, trying to pressure me into it, I didn’t pick up a marker immediately. It was important that I decide for myself when to begin. I was a child of the “Just Say No” campaign. I’d vowed at a young age never to succumb to peer pressure. That was for weaklings. I’d partake in drugs on my own!

The first day I brought a marker to school, I hid it in the sleeve of my jacket, the barrel of the marker zebra-striped. I grabbed the block of wood that served as the hall pass for Ms. Porto’s class and headed to the first floor where there was a stretch of bare white wall, usually reserved for signs made of butcher paper announcing spirit week, bake sales, or some class president candidate. That day the wall was empty. I waited for the hallway to clear, then wrote my name billboard-size, reaching as high as my hand could climb and as low as my knees could bend. My T resembled a sai, the ends of the roof dipping down like prongs. But the width of the marker wasn’t suited for colossal scale. The proportions were off, my letters appearing as stick figures, sickly.

the lam poem

Dozens of generations ago, my ancestors chose a name for me, embedded in a family poem. Each character in the poem was to be assigned to a specific future generation. Given names contained two characters, one chosen by your parents, the other predeter- mined by your family poem, by your ancestors. Fathers, knowing the position of their name in the poem, would give their sons names containing the next character. Sons would share this character with their brothers and paternal cousins. Daughters, however, were usually excluded from this practice.

After the end of the poem was reached, when all its characters had been exhausted, what remained was an abridged family tree set to verse. Clan elders could recycle the poem for future generations, or they could compose an entirely new one.

The Lam poem had been passed down through generations, spanning hundreds of years, but in my father’s generation, the poem vanished. My mother’s family poem was also lost. Though my mother recalls her grandmother showing her their family’s poem inked in a notebook, my mom’s parents now have no idea where this notebook might be. For all they know, they might have left it in Hong Kong.

It’s no accident that generation poems have lost their importance. When Mao came to power, he pushed to rid the country of its Confucian tradition. The sacred bonds of emperor-subject, husband-wife, father-son—all bullshit. These doctrines had produced a submissive nation, a kowtowing species that groveled to foreign empires.

Mao declared a change: “The Chinese people have stood up!” He banned foot-binding. Out went ancestor worship. Women could seek divorce. Genealogy books and generation poems were patriarchal relics. This was to be a new China, though the attack on Confucianism wasn’t new.

Thirty years before, on May 4, 1919, thousands of students in Beijing protested the Treaty of Versailles. China, once again, had gotten screwed through a treaty, forced to hand over their land to another imperial nation. The protests sparked unrest across the country. Many were rejecting Confucianism and turning toward Western ideas of science and democracy, but also anarchy and Marxism. They sought solutions for a country in turmoil. China had thrown off the yoke of dynastic rule only to see provincial warlords seize power.

At the time of the student protests, Mao was in his mid-twenties, part of the May Fourth Generation. Inspired by his peers in Beijing, Mao founded the Xiang River Review, a local weekly journal. “Oppressors are people,” he pens in one essay, “human beings like ourselves.” Their tyrannical actions are due to “an infection or hereditary disease passed on to them from the old society and old thought.”

Three years later Mao had his first son. Mao’s generation name was Ze, the fourteenth character in his clan’s generation poem. Twenty characters in the poem, twenty generations.

立顯榮朝士   Stand tall with honor before noblemen,

文方運際祥   and utilize education to expand fortune.

祖恩貽澤遠   Ancestral favors are handed down through time,

世代永承昌   descendants forever indebted for their prosperity.

When Mao named his son, he ignored his family’s poem, turning his back on his forefathers. He refused to pass on to his

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