Darned Detours

So what happened? I swear that I'm going to speed this up and instead I stop for almost two months. First, I decided to work on a long short story that turned out to be emotionally exhausting. I couldn't work on the draft at the same time for some reason. The second reason is in the realm of the strange. My mother is 78 years old. For whatever reason (I can make sense of them, I just can't talk about them in a public forum), shes decided to tell me something that's pretty significant about my life that I knew nothing about. Her own memory of the events is very hazy and yeah there are bits of this story that draw on real life, though far less than most people assume or think. In any case, there's probably a psychological reason that I've been so slow with this novel - at some level there was an important part of the story missing.

Way back when, I kept running into what I thought was a huge handicap in taking on this subject matter: I simply didn't know a lot about the incidents. In particular, a lot of the people only spoke Chinese or in some cases Tagalog or Spanish. I had no idea what they were talking about and thus thought I couldn't possibly understand what they thought or felt. A haze of languages I couldn't understand or speak surrounded the core of my story. Over time, I've come to see the haze as the most interesting aspect of the story itself. Memory is never clean or perfect. Feelings are often complicated and difficult even impossible to understand. At the same time, that doesn't make them any less valuable.

The weird thing is that for the last couple weeks I've been faced with the fact that the things I thought I knew and that we're in a language I understood weren't quite as clear as I'd assumed. My Grandfather's generation was always the mystery generation for me, but the older I get and the more I find out it strikes me that my parents' generation is much more complicated than I could have imagined. No doubt, I'll learn the same thing about my own or at least my daughter might come to realize that.

My writer's group often reminds me that the “town” around which the novel revolves, Paperson, California, is based on what for most readers is an inside joke. They ask “Are you going to explain that somewhere in the book?” I haven't yet. Due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese coming into the US had to show that they were the son of a merchant, scholar, etc. After the San Francisco earthquake destroyed most of the immigration records, a sizeable business grew up in forging identities for young men who wanted to come to America. These folk were called “Papersons”. Almost all of the Chinese coming through the town were “Papersons” and they often came to the countryside to avoid immigration officials.

I've always had two models in mind for the town in the novel. One was Macondo from One Hundred Years of Solitude. The other was Sutpen's Hundred from Abaslom Absalom. Over the last week, I've been listening to Absalom via book on mp3. It's been interesting to see how much I'd misapprehended the book and how much I'd forgotten, but it's helped to go back there.

I think the hardest thing in this process has been knowing when to “push forward” and when to “sit back and consider”. So, I spent a bit longer doing the latter once again, something that I've spent far too much time doing in this process. Hopefully, it gets me closer to not further from my goal.

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Inside the Box Chapter 6

Item #1
For fifteen year's Sam Share's black and white photo of Paperson's 1950 fourth of July picnic hung on the walls of most Chinese American households. The picture, which appeared on Life magazine's Miscellany page, should have merited a thousand words, at least according to that tradition of Chinese proverbs that only Americans seem to quote. Instead, it got a two sentence caption.
"The town of Paperson celebrates the 4th of July and both the American revolution and the Chinese revolution of 1911. This year's picnic in America's last self-contained Chinatown raised over ten thousand dollars for the cause of democracy in China."
This is what was in the picture. A statue of Dr. Sun Yat Sen holds the center. A Chinese boy in a baseball uniform and a girl twirling a baton sit on his lap and turn Dr. Sun into a cross between a Chinese George Washington and Santa Claus. Behind Dr. Sun a group of Chinese men dressed in sportshirts and women in bermuda shorts and sundresses wave a mixture of American and Nationalist flags. In one corner a woman hands out slices of watermelon next to a table filled with bottles of soda and cups of tea. A man in an apron grills hamburgers and hot dogs while those in line carry paper plates filled with a mixture of chow mein, rice, and cole slaw. In another corner, an impromptu baseball game is being played. If you look closely, the bases are twenty pound sacks of rice. There are almost as many women as men. Young families outnumber the handful of elderly men. It must be noon because there are no shadows.

This is what isn't in the picture. Three quarters of the population of Paperson was male and over the age of fifty five. The gambling house, the heart of the town's economy, can't be seen. Several of the women in the photo were prostitutes recruited to pose for the picture for five dollars each. Most of the children came from Sacramento and Stockton. The photographer chalked an “O” on the grass where each child was to pose just to keep the spacing right. Henry Luce was angry at Madame Chiang for raising millions in the United States for Chinese relief and then finding that almost none of the money made it to China. It devastated Luce that the country he had been born in as the son of American protestant missionaries was now communist. My grandfather hired a publicist to encourage Chinese families to settle in Paperson. For three thousand dollars, the publicist got a hold of Sam Share, the man who had photographed the explosion of the Hindenburg. The editors at Life saw a way to make Luce happy about promoting democracy in China without invoking Mr. and Mrs. Chiang Kai Shek. The watermelon slices were painted wood, because they held their shape better in the heat. The photo was done night for day with bright spotlights to make for sharper outlines than natural light could provide. In actuality, it is all shadows.

This is what I learned from Sam Share's photo. This is not a picture of Paperson at all. Despite the many times he sat for pictures with various members of the family, this is the most revealing portrait ever taken of my grandfather even if he isn't actually in the photo. My grandmother refused to have anything to do with the photograph. She was angry at my grandfather for having given the ten thousand dollars to a charity that would never use the money to fight communists or help refugees. None of the old men in the photo ever returned to China. A few of the children grew up and visited after ping pong and Richard Nixon made it possible to return. One of them was astonished to find a faded copy of the photo in his cousin's old photo album. "Why did you keep this picture? When we'd never even met?" he asked. "How could you have saved this from the Red Guard? Why didn't you throw it out? You could have been killed."

"It was my dream of America. When they forced us to move to the village for reeducation, I told myself that I would survive and someday move to Paperson."

Two cardboard boxes sit on the top of the Danish modern desk-bureau set that fills the long wall of what used to be my room. A year ago, my mother gathered up the artifacts of my childhood, gave me a call, and announced, “Lucky, it’s time for you to take these, you have your own home now.”

Over time, I’ve gotten most of the items- old toys, baby blanket, Halloween costumes, school certificates, a wax-papered bag containing six pomegranate seeds, a model of a Flying Tiger airplane, a Chinese beanie and a pair of white duck pants from a Chinese Marching band, a baseball glove, and a set of elementary Latin books. For various reasons, I’ve left these last two boxes despite multiple intervening visits to Sacramento and my mother’s house.
A few weeks ago my mother caught on to my excuses and just said, “I’m going to throw them away if you don’t want them. They’re not mine. They’re yours. I don’t need them.”

She means that she doesn’t need them in her second life. Although my mother still lives in the house she bought with my father, she remarried two years after he died. It surprised me that she met someone and married so quickly because my parents were so close and so devoted to one another. It might not have been healthy, but she even used to refer to my father as “Dad”. Her own father, my grandfather, died when she was ten. I never met my other grandfather, but my mother worshipped him as the one truly kind male on her side of the family who always defended the “girls” when my grandmother wanted to give everything to their sons. A few years ago I asked my mother why my grandmother didn’t share the same high opinion of my grandfather and I was shocked to hear that my grandmother never forgave my grandfather for cheating on her back when they lived in China.

My mother was also in her late forties when my Dad had his heart attack. Don seemed like a nice enough fellow and I never imagined her growing old alone. When Don moved in, they agreed not to keep any mementoes of either my Dad or Don’s late wife around the house. It was part of their fresh start. My boxes weren’t physically in the way, but they did stand in the path of my mom putting behind the past and her difficulties with my dad’s family. It was clear to me that even the good memories for her were still painful. It was even clearer that when it came to Paperson, my grandparents’ house, and our time there, there were no good memories.

It didn’t surprise me that the Life Magazine photo of Paperson disappeared from the hallway wall soon after my dad died. It was more of a surprise that my mother had kept it at all in its black wood frame. The photo is a year older than I am and I suspect it’s held its age somewhat better. Within fifteen years, Paperson was all but a ghost town. My Grandfather’s gambling house was the town’s one real source of revenue. After they completed I80 to Reno even the farmworkers figured it made more sense to spend a couple extra hours in the car and gamble legally rather than drive the levee road to a darkened venue that always smelled of mildew from the river.
Had Jan Grady and Luke Howard known about the Life Magazine photo? It seemed likely enough. Did they know anything of the story behind the picture? It was possible, yet it still hardly seemed like a Luke Howard project even if he did grown up in Ralston just an hour east of Paperson.
I sat back on the bright red platform that used to be my bed. My parents had bought the bedroom set when I was six years old for their first home of their own in the suburbs. At the time all the white formica with the metal and dark wood accents looked a bit futuristic. I realize now that it was something of a pointed message about what they wanted for their child. Even then, they didn’t want to look back at where we came from only to wherever our family was going.

My mother has separated the contents of the two remaining boxes according to a simple organizational principle. One is filled with old baseball cards, (unfortunately she gave away all the ones that would be worth anything to some kid who came to play at the house when I was away at school some thirty years ago), ticket stubs and programs for sporting events and car shows, prizes and announcements from my regular school, and various childhood art projects that only a mother would save. The other box has the Chinese stuff, the remnants of our life in Paperson. I have no choice. I’ll have to pack them in my car. It’s just that I have no idea where to put them now or what to do with them.
I hear my mother’s voice from the kitchen, “Time to eat.”

My mother obsesses over food. If you walk through her front door, she makes it a fetish not to let you leave until you consume some bizarre variety of food at unhealthy levels. I ignore her call.

“Lucky, it’s time to eat….Don and I aren’t going to wait. He’s hungry.”
I ignore her then make my way out to the front entry way where my mother waits for me in a red apron that says “Bitch, Bitch, Bitch” in white letters.

“You know your Uncle Leon’s up to something,” she tells me, “You better watch out.”
I shrug. According to my mother, my Uncle Leon is always up to something. For my entire life my parents warned me not to trust any members of my father’s family.
I find myself standing parallel to the five foot tall statue of a sitting Buddha which once watched over the bar at my father’s downtown restaurant for twenty years. I sometimes wonder what the Buddha has seen and heard in that time. He must have witnessed any number of conversations my father had with friends, customers, his various workers. I miss my father. It seems perfectly logical to me the Buddha made the pilgrimage into our living room after the sale of the restaurant. I’m sure that like me Mom figures that one day the Buddha will just start talking and share the memories of my father neither of us had the opportunity to witness. In the meantime, Marie has reminded me that our house has no room for items as large as life-sized Buddhas regardless of sentimential value. We’ve never discussed space for talking Buddhas though.

On my right side, I am dwarfed by


a larger than lifesized painting of a seated blue-robed Mandarin who overlooks the entryway.

The Mandarin came from the period when my mother turned to Gump’s, the high society San Francisco department store, to take over the task of decorating my parents’ first house after we moved back to the suburbs from Paperson. Gump’s specialty was to sell furniture and other household decoratives to American homeowners who sought an oriental flare. My mother never picked up on the irony of hiring Caucasians to add oriental flare to her home. She mostly liked the idea that Gump’s was San Francisco old money taste instead of the sectional sofa, chrome lamp, nouveau look that was becoming increasingly common in suburban Chinese homes in the late seventies.

In most things, my mother never had the confidence to trust her own taste, so she hired Gumps to supply it. If you understand the WASP culture she was trying to emulate, this might have been the height of bad taste. I only happen to know that because I went to a boarding school in New England for my high school years to give me the kind of breeding and opportunities my father and mother also felt they couldn’t provide. Had they only known that New England boarding schools in the seventies mostly imparted the drug and music culture of the late sixties rather than the country club and debutante ball niceties that supposedly once got you to the board room and partnerships. Fortunately for my parents and unfortunately for my popularity, I stayed away from all those plastic bags filled with green buds that got consumed in the woods around the campus and even the basements of the dormitories.

I did however learn from visits to classmates’ homes that even if one paid an interior decorator, upper class mothers pretended that they just threw things together themselves and didn’t really care about which table matched the wingback chair.
When it comes to my father’s side of the family though, my mother has never had any reticence about expressing her own judgment. It’s taken me more than twenty five years but I’ve learned that it’s better to be secure in your judgment about people than furniture and window coverings.
“Your father always said that your Uncle Leon is always looking for a way to take advantage of a situation. He even told me that he doesn’t care who he takes down in the process.”
Years ago, Uncle Leon married the wrong woman, the only Chinese girl within ten miles of Paperson who was built anything like Jane Russell. My Grandparents told him the thought it was a bad idea and wanted him to wait. He ran off with her anyway and swore that he’d make it as a mechanic. Three years later, the marriage failed and my father drove out to Denver to coax his younger brother back into the family. He came back, but he wasn’t the same guy.
“Mom, you’ve told me that a few hundred times before. We still have to sell Paperson and Uncle Leon’s still the executor of the estate.”
My mother shakes her head. I look away from her and at the blue corduroy couch in the living room. I’m reminded that the painting of the Mandarin was really chosen to match the couch. I have no idea if the interior decorator from Gumps had any idea that the Mandarins in a Cantonese living room were the rough historical equivalent of holocaust survivors hanging portraits of storm troopers in their house. When my Grandfather first saw the painting in our house, he got upset until my father convinced him that we’d bought it because the guy in the picture looked so much like him. Actually, it really did look like my grandfather. Apparently, that erased whatever historical significance it had and he did not command my father to get the painting out of our house.
I let my mother go on about Uncle Leon and my father’s five other brothers and sisters for a bit more. She hasn’t seen any of them in at least fifteen years, but she still warns me about trusting any of them in any way.

Once when my father was alive, I asked what was in retrospect a sensible question. “If everyone on Dad’s side of the family is so untrustworthy, why don’t we just move away from all of them. Why do we still have so much to do with them? All you guys ever do is argue over money.”

My father thought a moment then just said, “Because Chinese families don’t do that sort of thing.”

Apparently, American families frequently committed the sin of being so fractured that first cousins sometimes had never even met simply because their parents had had some disagreement. Chinese were expected to respect familial responsibilities regardless of anything they had said or done to one another. Interestingly, both Uncle Pershing and Uncle Leon had been married and divorced, but that was somehow different. One could divorce a spouse in my father’s family, you couldn’t however divorce your blood family.

I suspect others who knew Paperson might have seen it differently. They certainly whispered that my father’s hanging in there was less driven by Confucian filial piety than the fact that he needed my Grandfather’s money. Who knows? What’s clear to most anyone who knew my dad was that the stress of Tang family inner-politics played as much of a role in his heart attack as his love of cigars and rich food. After my Grandfather and father died in the same summer, the family stopped being Chinese. For several years, I’ve only seen my father’s family either for meetings about the estate and funerals.

My mother scowls at me as I try to explain the prospects of selling what remains of Paperson. Several minutes ago she yelled to Don that he should go ahead and start eating. We decide to call it a draw and head to the kitchen table, but not before I tell her, “Mom, this time is different. Luke Howard is involved.”
She looks at me blankly.
“Who?”
“You know those Outer Space movies. He’s got a lot of money.”
“I don’t go to the movies. Don doesn’t like sitting in dark theaters.”
It strikes me that my mother wants to be rid of the last of the boxes that contain her last remnants of Paperson and I just want to sell what’s left of the town. Life Magazine was replaced by People. Luke Howard is threatening to replace the mere movie with something involving virtual reality and Paperson. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a three dimensional experience in dolby surround worth?

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