waga
We held a memorial service for Javon in the auditorium. Around our necks, hung on a lanyard, was a laminated picture of Javon, him in a jersey with a backward hat. Friends shared stories, what they remembered most about Waga, how they first met, silly things he did. A trio consisting of two students and a teacher performed a rap song directed at Javon, looking down at us from heaven.
On the way to the auditorium, a student, sobbing, had shouted at me and a group of teachers, “You guys did this. If you never kicked him out, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“That ain’t true,” her friend, holding her, said. “Don’t mind her. She don’t mean that.”
The sobbing student’s accusation hit me as more honest than the speech I’d prepared for the memorial. What I said had little specifically to do with Javon. You could’ve lifted the bulk of the speech and recycled it for another untimely student death. I steered clear of emotions. Students were wailing outside the auditorium, and I didn’t want to feel what they felt. I avoided eye contact with Javon’s mother and sister sitting in the front row. Facing them, at the foot of the stage, was a cluster of wreaths.
I told the audience Javon wouldn’t have the chance to pursue his dream of becoming a mechanical engineer, but we were still here to pursue ours. Use this tragedy as fuel. That was the way to honor Javon. Give his death meaning. “What are you going to do different now with your life?” I asked.
As I went down the aisle to sit down, Shane grabbed my hand. “I’m glad someone said that,” she said.
She and I had been responsible for looking after Javon together, but unbeknownst to her, or anyone else, I’d abandoned Waga, unwilling to deal with the child that I’d been given.
migrant
When I was ten, my father moved out. Ostensibly, it was for our benefit. He left for Minnesota, two thousand miles away. Took a job that paid double what he’d been making, same line of work, a dim sum chef. His salary at his job in San Francisco—which I recall from school free lunch applications—was $200 a week. The annual difference between the two jobs: $10,400—the number it took for Bah Ba to leave us.
I try and contextualize my father’s decision. I adjust for inflation. All the numbers double, but nothing changes.
Feeding a family of five with only a couple of hundred bucks a week couldn’t have been easy. He was our sole source of income. My mom was a housewife, which she made sure I wrote down on school forms under “Mother’s Occupation.” My mom had two sources of pride, and they both had to do with appearances: the way she looked, and the way her house looked.
Behind the closet door in the hallway hung her shoe rack, a wall of red heels. Sometimes we’d leave the house, and before we could make it to the bus stop, my mother would scrutinize her heels and realize that this red pair didn’t go well with her outfit at all. We’d turn back home for her to switch shoes, another set of red heels, the distinction too subtle for my eyes. And these trips, mind you, were only to pick up groceries in Chinatown.
When I got older, my mother would send me off with money to buy cosmetic products for her at Neiman Marcus. They were handing out gift samples with purchases, a bag of makeup goodies. She’d already gone the day before and didn’t want to be seen again. Someone there might get the wrong idea.
At home, my mother was a cleaning fanatic. Swept and mopped the floor every night. Dirt was her adversary. A folded tablecloth hung over the washing machine. A lace doily draped over the top of our couch. Hand towels rested on the top of the floor speakers. Leftover vinyl flooring had been cut to fit the top of our wood-paneled television in the living room. We had to keep the remote in its original packaging, a cardboard case with a cellophane window over the buttons. My mother had fashioned a home resistant to aging.
As a child growing up in Hong Kong, my mother hadn’t lived with her father, either; he’d been a migrant worker of sorts, his job far enough that he had to live apart from his family but close enough that he could still visit on his day off.
I want to believe that in Chinese culture, a father living away from his family is nothing new, a noble sacrifice born out of economic necessity. Hadn’t the first Chinese arrived in America as migrant workers? They’d been living in an impoverished country, unable to feed their family, so who could blame them for leaving? They were promised riches. California was Gold Mountain. Working as miners, farmers, railroad workers, they maintained ties to their family through remittances. Their hairstyle was also a claim to their homeland—queues, proof of their allegiance to the Son of Heaven, a wish for a return home.
Many, however, would never see their families again. Stuck in Gold Mountain, they’d become scapegoats for white unemployment. Massacres across the West. Two out of every three lynched in California in those days were Asian. Chinese immigrant fathers, living in an openly hostile country, still continued to support their family overseas, though they hadn’t seen them in years. It was understood: The bond of father-child and husband-wife couldn’t be destroyed by distance. An ocean couldn’t separate a family.
Even today, migrant work is common among Chinese. In China, millions flock from the countryside to factories in coastal cities. That’s where the jobs are, hundreds of miles away. Sweatshop conditions prevail, maybe a buck an hour sewing jeans that’ll be exported to the States. Sometimes it’s the father who leaves the family, sometimes the mother.
