蛟龍失水螻蟻欺 The dragon out of water is humiliated by ants;
猛虎遭囚小兒戲 The fierce tiger who is caged is baited by a child.
被困安敢與爭雄 As long as I am imprisoned, how can I dare strive for supremacy?
得勢復仇定有期 An advantageous position for revenge will surely come one day.
To determine if detainees were indeed the children of the supposed father, immigration officials would interrogate them. They’d ask questions about their village, their family, the physical layout of their home, how many steps from their home to the orchard, tricky questions meant to trip up the detainee. Based on their answers, they’d either be allowed to immigrate or they’d be deported. Officials would compare the answers of the detainees with the answers they’d receive from the supposed father—a high stakes father-son version of The Newlywed Game. But the game was rigged. The imposter children had secretly been given hundreds of pages describing their supposed family, a book-length cheat sheet.
A small number of detainees were actually the real children of fathers in America, but would their answers to questions about their homeland be the same as their fathers’? Their dads hadn’t been back in years, sometimes decades. Things had changed, especially in a country engulfed in war. During the years of Angel Island’s operation as an immigration station, the Communists and Nationalists were waging a civil war, and in the middle of that, the Japanese invaded. Poh Poh, my grandmother, had her village thrown into chaos. When she heard the gunshots, she grabbed her younger brother and ducked into the fields. As they hid, she had to keep her hand over her brother’s mouth, fearful that the Japanese soldiers could hear the muffled screams.
Too much was at stake. I suspect the real children of fathers were also given a study book to prepare for their interrogation. Answering the official honestly wasn’t the goal; answering the same as their father was. Even sons and daughters by blood played a game
of pretend, trying to outtrick the trickster. Every Chinese making it through Angel Island was escaping war in their homeland, but for the actual children of fathers in America, entry into the US meant not just escape, but a reunion, an end to the years living without their fathers who they might’ve been meeting for the first time as
adults. They’d uncover what kind of men their fathers actually were.
roots
The Angel Island poem was translated by Genny Lim and Him Mark Lai. Him Mark was known as the father of Chinese American history, a self-taught scholar who the FBI kept tabs on during the McCarthy era. His father was a paper son, among the first shipload of immigrants detained at Angel Island, Lai a paper name, but Him Mark’s father also managed to hide the family’s true name as the middle name of his children; Maak became Mark.
I met Him Mark through my participation in a summer pro- gram he co-founded, In Search of Roots. The program took ten Chinese Americans back to their family’s ancestral village. As part of our preparation for the trip, we met as a group on Saturday mornings, and one Saturday Him Mark stopped by and gave each of us a packet containing background info on our villages, research he’d compiled and translated.
When we arrived in the villages, folks would ask what we were doing there. Many of us spoke poor Chinese, so all we could offer was the name tags hanging around our necks. It displayed our Chinese names and our purpose: 尋根, In Search of Roots.
I journeyed to my mother’s village in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong Province, Bah Ba’s village too far for the program. I met my grandfather’s older sister, my Goo Poh. I was filming her on a camcorder, but she didn’t realize what the device was doing until I flipped the screen so she could see herself. She lived alone in a small house made of bricks. She had one daughter but hadn’t seen her in years. The daughter knew she was adopted and no longer felt an obligation to Goo Poh. “Tell my brother to come see me,” Goo Poh said. “I’m an old woman.”
I paid respects to my mother’s grandfather, my Tai Gung. He was kept in a mausoleum. Originally, he’d been buried behind the village, where family members could go and pay respect by burning sheets of paper, ghost money. Tai Gung’s body, however, had been excavated to make room for the landscaped garden of a new housing development. The economy, I was told, was booming. On top of where Tai Gung’s body had been buried was now a manicured bush.
ghost yard
We were the only ones in the Ghost Yard that night. No security guards. Just us and a fleet of dilapidated city buses. I stepped inside one, marker in hand. The scene was apocalyptic: holes in the floor, windows smashed, a seat uprooted lying sideways as if the Hulk had thrown it in a tantrum.
We found lead pipes and swung them at windshields, cracking them. We climbed onto the roofs of buses, hollering at the moon: “Errrrrayyyyyy!”
With only the moonlight, we could barely see what we’d tag, though I could feel the tip of my marker against the surface of the bus, wiping away layers of dirt and dust. All around my tag were faded names, names we didn’t bother to read in the dark—our graffiti forebears.
One day, we too would be unread.
erased
We introduced ourselves to another writer by asking, “What do you write?” Though we understood our writing had no future, we knew nothing as sweet as mobbing deep, going to work on a bus with the urgency of a pit stop crew, filling the inside of the bus with our tags, as if it were an autograph page of a yearbook—rocking it. The only thing better
