When we were brainstorming how to get members out to a rally for affirmative action, I said, with all sincerity, “We gotta tell ’em, if y’all don’t come, y’all some straight bitches.”
Jidan pulled me aside. “Think of the b-word like the n-word.”
Jidan and Danfeng’s parents had also gone to UC Berkeley, student activists in the ’60s. Inspired by the Black Power movement, the shift from “Negro” to “Black,” their parents and their friends rejected “Oriental” and its exotic connotations. Fuck being a foreigner in your own country. They proclaimed they were Asian American. In fact, the term can be traced back to the Berkeley student group that Jidan and Danfeng’s parents were members of, along with Richard Aoki, the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), the first organization to ever call itself “Asian American.”
They united with the Afro-American Student Union, the Mexican-American Student Confederation, and the Native American Student Union to form the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition that demanded a radical multicultural education, and to that end, organized one of the longest student strikes in US history. The administration at Cal called in the police, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputies, and the California Highway Patrol. Mace and tear gas were shot at students. More than a hundred and fifty were arrested. Ronald Reagan, the governor then, ordered the National Guard to squash the protests, but the heavy-handed approach backfired. The faculty union joined the strike, and two days later, the university conceded. The Ethnic Studies department was established. Thirty years later, I majored in Ethnic Studies.
Jidan and Danfeng’s parents had raised them to fight for social justice. As kids, they didn’t play Cowboys and Indians; they played Oppressors and Freedom Fighters. While I was watching Saturday morning cartoons, they were fighting apartheid, marching down Telegraph Avenue, trying to pressure the UC Regents to divest from South Africa.
These two sisters envisioned REACH! as our generation’s AAPA. Claiming REACH! made me an heir to the struggle.
I had Bah Ba to thank for having time to volunteer with REACH! He was able to send checks again. I didn’t have to work. I’d received enough in grants to cover tuition and spending money, and now Goh Goh was paying for the groceries at home. He’d finally come out of his funk and started working again, picking up a job as a delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant. I’d try to talk to Goh Goh about going back to school, but he’d just grunt in response, as though what I was saying was taboo, his little bro giving him life advice.
I’d volunteer with other student groups, including one that visited a group home, the youth referred there by their probation officers. We didn’t try to mentor or teach the kids, at least in any traditional sense. More than anything we just listened, why they were there, what they regretted, what they didn’t, the kind of men they wanted to be. The youth, Black and brown, looked more like the guys I’d hung with as a teenager than the kids REACH! served, but REACH! was the group I’d drop everything for.
It was a new feeling working with kids who saw themselves in me, who’d say, “Dang, you look like my cousin.” It was a moment of recognition I couldn’t turn away from.
bandaged figures
I saw my father through the peephole. It had been four years since I last saw him. I knew he was coming, but none of us understood why. His name had been dropped from the lease. The trip wasn’t required.
“Hey,” I said, opening the door.
“Hi,” Bah Ba said, almost inaudible. He looked smaller, or maybe it was that I’d grown. My father’s hair, though still thick, had grayed, and his face had begun to sag unkindly. He grunted as he lugged his suitcase across the kitchen. It was the same suitcase he’d always had, hard-shell with clasps and a handle, an oversized briefcase. I could’ve given him a hand, but I didn’t want to send mixed messages. Neither did my mom or brother. They barely acknowledged him as he walked by. It wasn’t like in the past when we’d roll out the red carpet, but my brother and I would at least offer a half-assed hug. Now, even that gesture seemed juvenile, like leaving milk and cookies out for Santa.
Bah Ba came home as I was watching television in the kitchen, highlights from preseason football games. He grabbed a Budweiser from the fridge and sat down.
“49ers, haih meih gum yaht waan?” he asked.
“Yeah, they already showed them,” I said. “Vikings are coming up though.”
Bah Ba went into the living room—where there was a perfectly fine television, a larger one at that—but he left his beer can on the kitchen table. He’d been relegated to the pullout sofa. My mom kept her door locked, so there wouldn’t be any funny business.
He returned with a nail clipper and a waste basket. His shoulders were slumped forward, body deflated. It was the first time I realized I could kick my dad’s ass. Not that I had the urge to. His life had already done that for me. The restaurant he opened had flopped, and now he was back doing what he’d done damn near my whole life, sitting on a stool for hours, hunched over a table making dim sum, shrimp dumplings perhaps, using his fingers to join together edges of dough. The literal meaning of “dim sum”: “touch the heart.”
“That’s my favorite quarterback,” I said. Randall Cunningham was competing for a starting job with the Minnesota Vikings. In his twenties, he had thrilled Eagles fans with his scrambling ability, nicknamed Gumby for the way he’d contort his body to elude opponents. He’d take off near the end zone, leaping over defenders, soaring for a
