A Feather on the Breath of God Read online

  Now and then he brought home food from Chinatown: fiery red sausage with specks of fat like embedded teeth, dried fish, buns filled with bean paste that he cracked us up by calling Chinese pee-nus butter. My mother would not touch any of it. (“God knows what it really is.”) We kids clamored for a taste and when we didn’t like it my father got angry. (“You know how he was with that chip on his shoulder. He took it personally. He was insulted.”) Whenever we ate at one of the restaurants where he worked, he was always careful to order for us the same Americanized dishes served to most of the white customers.

  An early memory: I am four, five, six years old, in a silly mood, mugging in my mother’s bureau mirror. My father is in the room with me but I forget he is there. I place my forefingers at the corners of my eyes and pull the lids taut. Then I catch him watching me. His is a look of pure hate.

  “He thought you were making fun.”

  A later memory: “Panama is an isthmus.” Grade-school geography. My father looks up from his paper, alert, suspicious. “Merry Isthmus!” “Isthmus be the place!” My sisters and I shriek with laughter. My father shakes his head. “Not nice, making fun of place where people born!”

  “Ach, he had no sense of humor—he never did. He never got the point of a joke.”

  It is true I hardly ever heard him laugh. (Unlike my mother, who, despite her chronic unhappiness, seemed always to be laughing—at him, at us, at the neighbors. A great tease she was, sly, malicious, often witty.)

  Chinese inscrutability. Chinese sufferance. Chinese reserve. Yes, I recognize my father in the clichés. But what about his Panamanian side? What are Latins said to be? Hot-blooded, mercurial, soulful, macho, convivial, romantic, rash. No, he was none of these.

  “He always wanted to go back. He always missed China.”

  But he was only ten years old when he left.

  “Yes, but that’s what counts—where you spent those first years, and your first language. That’s who you are.”

  I had a children’s book about Sun Yat Sen, the Man Who Changed China. There were drawings of Sun as a boy. I tried to picture my father like that, a Chinese boy who wore pajamas outdoors and a coolie hat and a pigtail down his back. (Though of course in those days after Sun’s revolution he isn’t likely to have worn a pigtail.) I pictured my father against those landscapes of peaks and pagodas, with a dog like Old Yeller at his heels. What was it like, this boyhood in Shanghai? How did the Chinese wife treat the second wife’s son? (My father and Alfonso would not have had the same status as the official wife’s sons, I don’t think.) How did the Chinese brothers treat him? When he went to school—did he go to school?—was he accepted by the other children as one of them? Is there a Chinese word for half-breed, and was he called that name as we would be? Surely many times in his life he must have wished that he were all Chinese. My mother wished that her children were all German. I wanted to be an all-American girl with a name like Sue Brown.

  He always wanted to go back.

  He never forgot that dog howling on the dock.

  In our house there were not many books. My mother’s romances and historical novels, books about Germany (mostly about the Nazi era), a volume of Shakespeare, tales from Andersen and Grimm, the Nibelungenlied, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, works of Goethe and Heine, Struwwelpeter, the drawings of Wilhelm Busch. It was my mother who gave me that book about Sun Yat Sen and, when I was a little older, one of her own favorites, The Good Earth, a children’s story for adults. Pearl Buck was a missionary who lived in China for many years. (Missionaries supposedly converted the Changs to Christianity. From what? Buddhism? Taoism? My father’s mother was almost certainly Roman Catholic. He himself belonged to no church.) Pearl Buck wrote eighty-four books, founded a shelter for Asian-American children, and won the Nobel Prize.

  The Good Earth. China a land of famine and plagues—endless childbirth among them. The births of daughters seen as evil omens. “It is only a slave this time—not worth mentioning.” Little girls sold as a matter of course. Growing up to be concubines with names like Lotus and Cuckoo and Pear Blossom. Women with feet like little deer hooves. Abject wives, shuffling six paces behind their men. All this filled me with anxiety. In our house the husband was the meek and browbeaten one.

  I never saw my father read, except for the newspaper. He did not read the Reader’s Digests that he saved. He would not have been able to read The Good Earth. I am sure he could not write with fluency in any tongue. The older I grew the more I thought of him as illiterate. Hard for me to accept the fact that he did not read books. Say I grew up to be a writer. He would not read what I wrote.

  He had his own separate closet, in the front hall. Every night when he came home from work he undressed as soon as he walked in, out there in the hall. He took off his suit and put on his bathrobe. He always wore a suit to work, but at the hospital he changed into whites and at the restaurant into dark pants, white jacket, and black bow tie. In the few photographs of him that exist he is often wearing a uniform—his soldier’s or hospital-worker’s or waiter’s.

  Though not at all vain, he was particular about his appearance. He bought his suits in a men’s fine clothing store on Fifth Avenue, and he took meticulous care of them. He had a horror of cheap cloth and imitation leather, and an equal horror of slovenliness. His closet was the picture of order. On the top shelf, where he kept his hats, was a large assortment—a lifetime’s supply, it seemed to me—of chewing gum, cough drops, and mints. On that shelf he kept also his cigarettes and cigars. The closet smelled much as he did—of tobacco and spearmint and the rosewater-glycerin cream he used on his dry skin. A not unpleasant smell.

  He was small. At fourteen I was already as tall as he, and eventually I would outweigh him. A trim sprig of a man, dainty but not puny, fastidious but not effeminate. I used to marvel at the cleanliness of his nails, and at his good teeth, which never needed any fillings. By the time I was born he had lost most of his top hair, which made his domed forehead look even larger, his moon face rounder. It may have been the copper-red cast of his skin that led some people to take him for an American Indian—people who’d never seen one, probably.

  He could be cruel. I once saw him blow pepper in the cat’s face. He loathed that cat, a surly, untrainable tom found in the street. But he was very fond of another creature we took in, an orphaned nestling sparrow. Against expectations, the bird survived and learned to fly. But, afraid that it would not know how to fend for itself outdoors, we decided to keep it. My father sometimes sat by its cage, watching the bird and cooing to it in Chinese. My mother was amused. “You see: He has more to say to that bird than to us!” The emperor and his nightingale, she called them. “The Chinese have always loved their birds.” (What none of us knew: At that very moment in China keeping pet birds had been prohibited as a bourgeois affectation, and sparrows were being exterminated as pests.)

  It was true that my father had less and less to say to us. He was drifting further and further out of our lives. These were my teenage years. I did not see clearly what was happening then, and for long afterward, whenever I tried to look back, a panic would come over me, so that I couldn’t see at all.

  At sixteen, I had stopped thinking about becoming a writer. I wanted to dance. Every day after school I went into the city for class. I would be home by eight-thirty, about the same time as my father, and so for this period he and I would eat dinner together. And much later, looking back, I realized that was when I had—and lost—my chance. Alone with my father every night, I could have gotten to know him. I could have asked him all those questions that I now have to live without answers to. Of course he would have resisted talking about himself. But with patience I might have drawn him out.

  Or maybe not. As I recall, the person sitting across the kitchen table from me was like a figure in a glass case. That was not the face of someone thinking, feeling, or even daydreaming. It was the clay face, still waiting to receive the breath of life.

  If it ever occurred
to me that my father was getting old, that he was exhausted, that his health was failing, I don’t remember it.

  He was still working seven days a week. Sometimes he missed having dinner with me because the dishwasher broke and he had to stay late at the hospital. For a time, on Saturdays, he worked double shifts and did not come home till we were all asleep.

  After dinner, he stayed at the kitchen table, smoking and finishing his beer. He never joined the rest of us in the living room in front of the television. He sat alone at the table, staring at the wall. He hardly noticed if someone came into the kitchen for something. His inobservance was the family’s biggest joke. My mother would give herself or one of us a new hairdo and say, “Now watch: Your father won’t even notice,” and she was right.

  My sisters and I bemoaned his stubborn avoidance of the living room. Once a year he yielded and joined us around the Christmas tree, but only very reluctantly; we had to beg him.

  I knew vaguely that he continued to have some sort of social life outside the house, a life centered in Chinatown.

  He still played the horses.

  By this time family outings had ceased. We never did anything together as a family.

  But every Sunday my father came home with ice cream for everyone.

  He and my mother fought less and less—seldom now in the old vicious way—but this did not mean there was peace. Never any word or gesture of affection between them, not even, “for the sake of the children,” pretense of affection.

  (Television: the prime-time family shows. During the inevitable scenes when family love and loyalty were affirmed, the discomfort in the living room was palpable. I think we were all ashamed of how far below the ideal our family fell.)

  Working and saving to send his children to college, he took no interest in their school life. He did, however, reward good report cards with cash. He did not attend school events to which parents were invited; he always had to work.

  He never saw me dance.

  He intrigued my friends, who angered me by regarding him as if he were a figure in a glass case. Doesn’t he ever come out of the kitchen? Doesn’t he ever talk? I was angry at him too, for what he seemed to be doing: willing himself into stereotype—inscrutable, self-effacing, funny little Chinaman.

  And why couldn’t he learn to speak English?

  He developed the tight wheezing cough that would never leave him. The doctor blamed cigarettes, so my father tried sticking to cigars. The cough was particularly bad at night. It kept my mother up, and she started sleeping on the living-room couch.

  I was the only one who went to college, and I got a scholarship. My father gave the money he had saved to my mother, who bought a brand-new Mercedes, the family’s first car.

  He was not like everybody else. In fact, he was not like anyone I had ever met. But I thought of my father when I first encountered the “little man” of Russian literature. I thought of him a lot when I read the stories of Chekhov and Gogol. Reading “Grief,” I remembered my father and the sparrow, and a new possibility presented itself: my father not as one who would not speak but as one to whom no one would listen.

  And he was like a character in a story also in the sense that he needed to be invented.

  The silver dollars saved in a cigar box. The Reader’s Digests going back to before I was born. The uniforms. The tobacco-mint-rosewater smell. I cannot invent a father out of these.

  I waited too long. By the time I started gathering material for his story, whatever there had been in the way of private documents or papers (and there must have been some) had disappeared. (It was never clear whether my father himself destroyed them or whether my mother later lost or got rid of them, between moves, or in one of her zealous spring cleaning.)

  The Sunday-night ice cream. The Budweiser bottle sweating on the kitchen table. The five-, ten-, or twenty-dollar bill he pulled from his wallet after squinting at your report card. “Who? Who?”

  We must have seemed as alien to him as he seemed to us. To him we must always have been “others.” Females. Demons. No different from other demons, who could not tell one Asian from another, who thought Chinese food meant chop suey and Chinese customs were matter for joking. I would have to live a lot longer and he would have to die before the full horror of this would sink in. And then it would sink in deeply, agonizingly, like an arrow that has found its mark.

  Dusk in the city. Dozens of Chinese men bicycle through the streets, bearing cartons of fried dumplings, Ten Ingredients Lo Mein, and sweet-and-sour pork. I am on my way to the drugstore when one of them hails me. “Miss! Wait, miss!” Not a man, I see, but a boy, eighteen at most, with a lovely, oval, fresh-skinned face. “You—you Chinese!” It is not the first time in my life this has happened. In as few words as possible, I explain. The boy turns out to have arrived just weeks ago, from Hong Kong. His English is incomprehensible. He is flustered when he finds I cannot speak Chinese. He says, “Can I. Your father. Now.” It takes me a moment to figure this out. Alas, he is asking to meet my father. Unable to bring myself to tell him my father is dead, I say that he does not live in the city. The boy persists. “But sometime come see. And then I now?” His imploring manner puzzles me. Is it that he wants to meet Chinese people? Doesn’t he work in a Chinese restaurant? Doesn’t he know about Chinatown? I feel a surge of anxiety. He is so earnest and intent. I am missing something. In another minute I have promised that when my father comes to town he will go to the restaurant where the boy works and seek him out. The boy rides off looking pleased, and I continue on to the store. I am picking out toothpaste when he appears at my side. He hands me a folded piece of paper. Two telephone numbers and a message in Chinese characters. “For father.”

  He was sixty when he retired from the hospital, but his working days were not done. He took a part-time job as a messenger for a bank. That Christmas when I came home from school I found him in bad shape. His smoker’s cough was much worse, and he had pains in his legs and in his back, recently diagnosed as arthritis.

  But it was not smoker’s cough, and it was not arthritis.

  A month later, he left work early one day because he was in such pain. He made it to the station, but when he tried to board the train he could not get up the steps. Two conductors had to carry him on. At home he went straight to bed and in the middle of the night he woke up coughing as usual, and this time there was blood.

  His decline was so swift that by the time I arrived at the hospital he barely knew me. Over the next week we were able to chart the backward journey on which he was embarked by his occasional murmurings. (“I got to get back to the base—they’ll think I’m AWOL!”) Though I was not there to hear it, I am told that he cursed my mother and accused her of never having cared. By the end of the week, when he spoke it was only in Chinese.

  One morning a priest arrived. No one had sent for him. He had doubtless assumed from the name that this patient was Hispanic and Catholic, and had taken it upon himself to administer Extreme Unction. None of us had the will to stop him, and so we were witness to a final mystery: my father, who as far as we knew had no religion, feebly crossing himself

  The fragments of Chinese stopped. There was only panting then, broken by sharp gasps such as a person makes when reminded of some important thing he has forgotten. To the end his hands were restless. He kept repeating the same gesture: cupping his hands together and drawing them to his chest, as though gathering something to him.

  Now let others speak.

  “After the war was a terrible time. We were all scared to death, we didn’t know what was going to happen to us. Some of those soldiers were really enjoying it, they wanted nothing better than to see us grovel. The victors! Oh, they were scum, a lot of them. But your father felt sorry for us. He tried to help. And not just our family but the neighbors too. He gave us money. His wallet was always out. And he was always bringing stuff from the base, like coffee and chocolate—things you could never get. And even after he went back to the States he sent packages.
Not just to us but to all the people he got to know here. Frau Meyer. The Schweitzers. They still talk about that.” (My grandmother.)

  “We know the cancer started in the right lung but by the time we saw him it had spread. It was in both lungs, it was in his liver and in his bones. He was a very sick man, and he’d been sick for a long time. I’d say that tumor in the right lung had been growing for at least five years.” (The doctor.)

  “He drank a lot in those days, and your mother didn’t like that. But he was funny. He loved that singer—the cowboy—what was his name? I forget. Anyway, he put on the music and he sang along. Your mother would cover her ears.” (My grandmother.)