My sister reached behind the passenger seat, past the Snoopy tissue box that hung over the seat and pushed the rear door open. “Get in, Jordan.” Ga Jeh came around the car and picked up Alana, brought her to the other side and stuck her in the car seat, fastening the buckle.
“But it’s Yeh Yeh,” Jordan said. My father was at the gate.
“I said now, Jordan,” Ga Jeh screamed. “Get in!”
My nephew climbed in and closed the door.
“Jordan!” Bah Ba waved his hand like he was flagging a taxi.Ga Jeh screeched off. My father didn’t know my sister drove an SUV.
The kids were silent in the car, scared of how angry my sister had gotten. Ga Jeh neared downtown and saw Alana’s face in the rearview mirror. She looked as if she was bracing herself to be hit. My sister pulled over.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” my sister said.
“How come you don’t like Yeh Yeh?” Jordan asked.
Ga Jeh leaned toward the backseat. “He’s a very bad man,” she said to both of them, her voice cracking. “Don’t forget that.”
My father lived with my brother for several years before Goh Goh finally kicked him out. I was surprised that it took that long. Bah Ba was drinking again, and this, obviously, did not pair well with babysitting duties. The first strike was when my brother came home from work and Jordan was missing. My father was in his room, doing who knows what. “Jordan’s here somewhere,” Bah Ba told my brother. “I picked him up from school.” They searched the house, walked around the courtyard, but no luck. Then my brother received a call from Jordan’s school. He was still at the after-school program, waiting to get picked up.
The second strike involved my niece. Goh Goh came home from work, and once again, one of his children was missing, this time, his daughter. Bah Ba was outside the complex, smoking a cig. “She should be upstairs,” my father said. “That’s where I left her.”
“You shouldn’t be leaving her at all,” my brother said. “She’s three.”
They, or it’s possible just my brother, found her in the play area in the courtyard around the corner from the apartment. She’d wandered outside by herself. There would be no third strike.
three against one
The hardest checkmate to deliver is when you’re up three pieces to one: a king, knight, and bishop versus a lone king. Even grandmasters struggle with this endgame, some settling for a draw. The tricky part is coordinating the three pieces, to get this motley crew to work in tandem. If they’re to win, they must control adjacent squares, forming a wall the enemy king cannot pass. The wall closes in on the king until he’s forced to a corner of the board where checkmate is finally delivered. Easier said than done. I’d offer my students a hundred bucks if they could execute this checkmate, but they never could. Just when they thought their plan was working, that they were pushing the king to the edge of the board, the enemy king would once again find a gap in their shoddy wall and slip through to safety.
single room occupancy
Bah Ba now lives in an SRO on the outskirts of Chinatown, one room, comparable to a large walk-in closet. He shares a kitchen and bathroom with all the tenants on his floor. I imagine cockroaches, leaking ceilings, cigarette butts crammed into window tracks. Early retirement hasn’t panned out for my father. He has to work again. My brother points out the place as we drive past, a dry cleaner on a quiet street.
He doesn’t live alone. He has a new wife, a homeland chick, not that much older than me. I’ll say this about my father—the guy is resourceful. When he was living with my brother, he stumbled upon a letter from a childhood friend of my sister-in-law. The friend wanted to marry an American, become an American. My dad figured he fit the bill.
The friend had the same last name as Dai So, which was typical, villagers sharing the same family name. They weren’t all relatives, but it also wasn’t out of the question for villagers to be secretly related. Their families had lived side by side for generations. It was taboo to marry within the village, a risk of inbreeding.
Goh Goh and his wife made plans to visit Macau. My brother had never met her folks. “I’d like to come along,” Bah Ba said. “I’m family, too.”
That’s how my father met his second wife, perhaps a distant cousin of his daughter-in-law.
presents
We met at my sister’s house for Christmas. She moved back to the Bay and lived now with her husband in an apartment minutes from the coast. She was the one who organized our holiday get-togethers. She’d delegate who’d bring what. I brought lasagna, no meat. My sister didn’t eat beef, and like me, no pork.
Ga Jeh was all about the holidays. So was her husband. They’d driven an hour north to a tree farm. It was a tradition in his family, cutting down the tree, and my sister had embraced his family’s traditions as though they were hers. They’d decorated their tree with ornaments from both of their childhoods.
I was on break from graduate school, my second MFA. I’d jumped immediately into another creative writing program after already completing one, first in New Jersey, now in Houston. I was buying time, another couple of years that I could live a couple thousand miles from my father. Before I’d left June Jordan I’d given a speech at a fundraiser for the school. In front of the audience that included students, parents, and colleagues, I’d announced it’d be my last year at June Jordan. I was leaving to write a memoir, a writer once again.
