Homebase. Shawn Wong
carriers, destroyers, submarines, bombers, sunken ships, and palm-lined white sandy beaches. At night the humid animals of the day, the lizards, insects, and rodents, made a zoo of noises in my sleep.
On this island, the tropical night still hisses its hot breath against my ears. The day must cool into evening, Father. When you and I sat on the front porch, there was no movement to cool the day. I followed my father into the jungle behind our house, the boondocks, the name itself was myth and legend. The enemies of all our life were hiding in the grasses, behind the rubble, a jungle of blood. I knew Jap soldiers were hidden away in the tunnels against the hill, still fighting the war. The terror of my childhood was a crashed and charred fighter-jet lying mangled amid the roots of the trees. Some nights I woke thinking I heard that jet crash into the trees with a noise so great that I knew it was a dream noise—it makes me deaf, but the dream still goes on. In the faint light of that humid night the fighter glowed, lifted itself in my eyes like silver smoke, and brought the taste of metal to my tongue. And I could not stop myself from peering down inside the cockpit, feeling the metal still warm from the burn, reaching down through the broken glass into that old air to brush away the smoke, and finding the broken body of a ghost.
When my father was a young man he tried to climb Mount Shasta in California’s north gold country, but was defeated by the wind rushing down the mountain face. My father said the wind was always the conqueror, not the cold, or the snow, or the heat, but the wind that makes you deaf, numbs your touch, and pushes blood into your eyes.
My father was sleeping in a stone cabin at the foot of Mount Shasta and was awakened by the sickening smell of rotting wood and the muted voices of Chinamen. His bed became soiled with the breath of poor men. He was getting sick in the pre-dawn night when a voice spoke to him, “Do you know me?” a woman asked, touching his ears with her hands.
“Yes,” he lied, seeing the dim outline of her naked body. His eyes filled with smoke. He tried to breathe. The wood of the room smelled like burning dust as he reached for her.
“Are you afraid of dying with me?” she asked, drawing his hand to her stomach, putting her moist mouth in his ear, making him deaf, his throat ached for the moist moss of trees.
“Yes,” he answered, knowing she was the nightmare that made China the bitterness of his grandfather’s and father’s life. He heard her heart beating in his stomach. He left tears on her breast.
In all the days I visited my father in the hospital when he was dying, I don’t remember a single day in detail. I do not remember what I was doing when he died. I do not remember what day he went into the hospital, how many days he stayed there. What time he died. I never asked. I just knew one day in spring, 1957, it was all over. All I had left was a pile of pictures and some clothes my mother put away for me to wear when I got big enough.
My father is twenty-eight years old in the photo I carry of him. I remember him like that. He is seated in a wooden chair on a lawn somewhere, his legs are crossed, he is looking to his right. It is a settled look and if I try there’s an ambitious feeling to the photograph. Perhaps that’s because I’m his son. He is wearing a white shirt, dark V-neck sweater, heavy wool pants, checkered socks, and black shoes. The table at his right is also made of wood. It looks like a wooden box standing on one of its sides. There are heart-shaped holes cut in the two ends of the box table. A folded newspaper separates two empty coffee cups on the tabletop. A stone wall behind him divides the photo in half. Longleaf bushes spill over the top of the stone wall behind him. He is not yet a father. He will not be a father for four more years.
My father will always stay the same in that picture. April, 1945. And when I am twenty-eight we will be the same age. It is dangerous to honor your father. It is hard to really love your father. It is easy to respect him. When you are the same age, or even when you grow older than your father, like growing taller than him, your love changes to honor because you yourself would like to be honored. I must simply love him. When a son takes a risk of love, he naturally loves his father. He commits himself to his father. It is a dangerous risk.
In three more years we will be the same age and I will have been to all the places my father had been.
I remember you, Father, now with urgency. It is night and I am more like you than I have ever been. I hear the same sounds of a tropical night, the clicking of insects, the scrape of a lizard’s claws on the screen door. Tonight I remember a humid night on Guam when I held your forehead in my small hands as I rode on your shoulders. My hands felt your ears, the shape of your chin, and the shape of your nose until you became annoyed and placed my hands back on your forehead and shifted my weight on your shoulders. It is April.
When I was a boy, my father whispered to me from his hospital bed, “Rainsford, I love you more and more.” He cried and I thought he was singing. He was a father to me even when he was dying. He said, “Fathers should confess their youth to their sons. Confess the lovers of their youth.”
My mother kept my father’s love letters to her. I found the letters in an old box. I saw my mother and father in their youth. I see them as I see myself now. They are the celebration of strength for me.
I was left a father to myself after my father’s death. When a son or daughter dies, the parents have another or adopt another child to raise and love. When a family loses a beloved dog, they go out and buy another quickly before the self-pity replaces that life. When a father dies, there is only violence. I am violent. I commit myself to love, saying it is there, but never going further to grasp loving. My real life eludes action. It leaves me a father to myself.
My mother died eight years after my father and it was then that I realized I was my great-grandfather’s son and I knew why the label of orphan meant nothing to me. My great-grandfather had begun a tradition of orphaned men in this country and now I realized I was the direct descendant of that original fatherless and motherless immigrant. Now there was a direct line from the first generation to the fourth generation. I was not hampered by the knowledge of China as home. The closest I had come to China was my own mother, who was the daughter of a Chinese dentist, schooled by private tutors in Tientsin in English and Chinese literature, French, piano, ballet, and painting. She married my father in 1947 when she was a student in painting and he was a graduate student in engineering in Berkeley. His life had been the opposite of hers, and the realm of his history and tradition did not resemble hers in any way. But in America they were expected to notice each other and, in fact, to know each other. He was working as a dishwasher at the Blue and Gold Cafeteria when he did notice her, and he dismissed her with his own form of racial arrogance. His traditions and history were deeply rooted like scars, and he remembered only the bitterness of his father and grandfather, and he cultivated his sensibility from the lives of those lonely men. And he noticed her that day simply because she was the same color as he and she was good-looking. They did not meet again until she took a course in drafting, and he was the teaching assistant in the class. When they first met, she spoke to him in Chinese and he told her he didn’t understand Chinese.
“You do not understand Chinese?”
“Nope.”
The way he said “nope” was all she needed to prod him. She seemed to know what annoyed him. Young Chinese girls from China annoyed him. She was talking to the side of his face. When a man says “nope” it was time to move on, and my father was looking off into the distance, ready to move. She was slowly moving her head, then her shoulders, trying to make him look at her when she spoke.
“You were born here?”
“Yes,” he said, looking at her, then looking away at a point in the distance.
“What generation are you?” she asked. Then she added, looking away from him at the same point in the distance, “I have an uncle who came from China to go to school in Pennsylvania and became a dentist in 1917.” She paused, feeling him looking at her. “And another uncle who was a Methodist minister in California in 1850.” It was a look of impatience.
“I’m third-generation Chinese,” he said quickly.
“You are not Chinese.” She caught him saying the word “Chinese” a little too forced, like a lie, just to dismiss her questions. And when they