The Homing Mandarin: Or, After The First

Death There Are Others

By Jaime An Lim

Mending the Body’s Fences

When he was nearly sixty years old, our father took out the battered leather valise from under his
bed, packed it full with his clothes along with a couple of souvenirs from the Philippines, and
went back to his first wife and family in Nanp’ing, China.

This was in 1964, shortly after his last consumptive attack which wracked his body with harsh
blood-speckled coughing and left him bedridden for months. The doctor was frankly not too
optimistic and his mah-jong buddies who dropped by to visit spoke in grave undertones outside
his room. It was understood that he did not have much longer to live. Perhaps six months. At
most a year, if he was lucky.

But Lisa, my elder sister, following doggedly the doctor’s prescriptions, coaxed him back to shape
with lots of rest, fresh air, fresh fruits and vegetables, juice, chicken broth. That meant nearly all
of my sister’s monthly pay as a cashier in a textile store owned by Huan An, one of father’s friends
from way back.

As a young man, our father looked surprisingly aristocratic with his high thin nose, trim
mustache, sharp profile, and thick, wavy hair. This was from an old photograph taken in the
forties at Campo Doce, Bukidnon, where he wore a black woollen turtleneck and the afternoon
light cast soft, flattering shadows on one side of his face. His brooding gaze was directed toward
the rows of pineapple plants stretching dreamily for kilometers in the unfocused distance.
Nothing of his patrician good looks survived the years. In fact, it was largely gone before I even
knew they were there. I had always thought of him as simply old. Thinning gray hair, permanent
dents on the side bridge of his nose from his glasses, sunken cheeks, fingers so nicotine-stained
they looked like antique ivory. After his recovery, he looked better, but not much better. An
alertness came back to his walk, his breathing became easy and clear again, his thin arms filled,
and the hip bones which used to be sharply prominent softened a little against the regenerated
flesh.

Father’s mah-jong buddies cautiously congratulated him on his improved health, but they were
not fooled. It was just a matter of time, they thought, before another attack struck, and this time
it would be fatal. So among themselves, they talked and calculated and arranged and calculated
again. In the end, they collected more than enough money for father’s trip back to China.

It was to be a long and expensive journey: by boat to Manila, by plane to Hong Kong, by train to
Foochow, in mainland China, and then by bus to his old hometown in Nanp’ing. Before Lisa and I
were even aware of anything, they had already decided it was time for father to go back home.
You can always trust the Chinese to take care of their own: a business associate slowly sliding into
bankruptcy, a friend’s marriageable daughter looking for a suitable husband, a mah-jong buddy
going home to die.
 Family Photos

My first suspicion that something was afoot came in a roundabout way. Father wanted a picture
taken of the family. Mother and our younger brother had been dead for some time by then, so
there were just Father, Lisa, and I.

“What for?” I asked.

“We never have one of all of us together,” Father said, without blinking an eye.

True. “But we’ve managed without one before. Why now?”

“Mickey, what harm can it do?” Lisa reasoned. “A picture of us would be nice.”

So the following afternoon, the three of us, dressed in our Sunday best, walked to Ever Photo
Studio on Borja Street and suffered ourselves to be powdered and straightened up and arranged.
“Move closer. Closer. Tilt your head this way, just a little. Perfect. Chin up and say cheese…
Hooold it,” the photographer said under the black hood and, with a sharp click, captured our
likeness against a painted backdrop of a stationary boat at sea, coconut trees and a nipa hut at the
side, and a paper moon overhead, its shimmering reflection in the water. Father ordered one
8x10 and a half dozen 5x7 in black and white.

In the picture, our father looked like a benign patriarch, seated with knees crossed on a peacock
chair in the center. Standing to his left was Lisa, newly scrubbed, slender and tallish, one hand
resting possessively on the back of the chair, a dazzling smile on her mouth. But no amount of
clever side lighting and retouching could take out the sullen look from the boy’s face, mine: eyes
glaring, chin almost touching chest, hands thrust deeply in pockets, feet planted wide apart as if
ready to take on the world.

But why hedge? I disliked his dishonesty, his unwillingness to acknowledge his imminent
departure, and allow us at least to prepare ourselves. Why a family photo? Obviously, so that he
could point out the son and daughter he would leave behind in the Philippines, just as he had
once pointed out, in another family picture, the wife and children he had once left in China. His
was a much larger family then — three boys and two girls: chubby, rosy-cheeked, fair-skinned,
almond-eyed, full-lidded.

This is Kim Tong. This is Suat Do. That is Puan Shiek. And that is Du Dan. He would move his
stained forefinger from head to head in that solemn formal company of our half-brothers and
half-sisters standing at attention in a semi-circle round their equally solemn mother and father.
Did they know he was leaving them soon after? Most likely. Thus, the forlorn seriousness in their
expressions.

Lisa, in her innocence and ignorance, could afford to smile away like an idiot in seventh heaven. I
pointed out to her the fact that our father might soon be leaving us. Deserting us.

“Don’t you see? He’s preparing to go,” I said, sounding like a hysterical hotel manager afraid a
lodger might skip town might skip town without paying the bill.
“Mickey, why are you always so distrustful of people?”

I was flabbergasted. I could not believe my ears. “Talk of distrustful! What will happen to us if he
leaves? How about me? My schooling? I’m not through with college.”

“Is that what you’re worried about? Your schooling?” Lisa could be blunt sometimes.

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“Well, don’t. You forget I’m already working. I can help. And I won’t marry until you finish.”

That last point about letting me finish before marrying never failed to hit home. Every time I
heard it, my knees would turn watery with undying gratitude.

“Be happy he can go on a little visit. He’ll go and rest, then he’ll come back. You’ll see. And don’t
worry about your schooling,” she said again, gently this time, patting my hand.

True enough, Lisa was my lifeline, graciously taking on the responsibility that rightly should have
been Father’s. She made sure that my tuition fees were paid on time and my textbooks bought,
the shirt on my back clean and mended, and my shoes not falling apart. She was keeping any
plans of marriage in the back burner, specifically marriage to slim peasant-looking Chinese
mestizo named Paquito Dy who worked as a travelling salesman for a pharmaceutical company.
Lisa was already twenty, an age well past the magic peak of desirable youth for most women of
her generation, and her taking on the added responsibility for my education was a real sacrifice.

I went to night school at Xavier U, as an over-aged freshman of seventeen. Lisa shouldered most
of the expenses, while Father gave me a monthly allowance. That was the extent of his personal
interest in my education. Sometimes, he would inquire about my class schedule, or grades, or
major. B.S.E., I would say, I was going to be a teacher. Teaching, hmmm. Somehow to him, there
was something vaguely disreputable about a man doing what he felt was a woman’s job. He
seemed sorry he asked. And a smirk, a slight one, would creep involuntarily to the corners of his
mouth. Medicine, engineering, business — now there’s a worthwhile dream for a fine young man
to dream on! Sure, on a thirty-peso-a-month allowance, I thought fiercely. Dream on. Bastard.

Farewell to Youth

Three weeks later, he left. In addition to the valise, father handcarried various packages sent by
friends to be delivered to their own families and relatives in Nan-p’ing. He wore a new navy blue
waterproof jacket (courtesy of his mah-jong buddies) because it could get treacherously windy on
the ship. The Gothong interisland vessels had stately names like MV Doña Conchita and MV
Doña Juana, which plied the Cagayan-Cebu-Manila route alternately on Tuesdays and
Saturdays. Father was taking the MV Doña Juana and was traveling first-class (courtesy of the
ship captain who was a relative of another friend of his). The cots were the same as those in the
second and third class, but the first-class cots were on the upper deck and the first-class
passengers took their meals in the “dining saloon,” where waiters in white uniform served their
chicken asparagus soup and escabeche in matching white bowls and plates. Father seemed in
high spirits, like some Boy Scout going on a camping trip. Lisa and I tried to match his mood with
passable aplomb.
Earlier, my sister warned me against burdening our father with unnecessary worries and
problems. During this trip, he should only remember the good things. He must not be sad. (Fat
chance. The way he carried on and on, bright excitement in his eyes, it was clear he was not
leaving his broken heart in Cagayan de Oro.) So we smiled and smiled while straightening his
sheet and fluffing his pillow and helping him slide his things under the cot. We even took some
creme biscuits from a tin can (courtesy of Lisa) that he insisted we try. They were really good.
Then it was time to pull the gangplank away (“Fuera visita, fuera visita…”) and we stood up to
say our final goodbyes. “Take care, Pa, and don’t forget to write,” Lisa said as she kissed both
clean-shaven cheeks and gave him a tight hug. I did not want to kiss him in front of the milling
crowd, so I just shook his hand and muttered something inane and cheerful. Ba-bye, tah-tah,
enjoy!

It was not until the ship had dwindled to a flickering dot on the horizon that Lisa and I started
back to the city. It was late, past eleven already, and only a few haggard passengers were sitting in
the midst of their strewn luggage in the waiting shed. We walked without speaking, watching our
steps on the darkened road that felt wavy, unsteady, like the sea. I knew the tears had finally
caught up with Liza because she was navigating round the muddy potholes clumsily. The
rhythmic crashing of the waves against the wooden palings at the edge of the pier faded behind
us, but the air still tasted of the dank saltiness of the sea. We walked side by side. At one point,
she called out my name but I could not answer. I was shaken by the sudden realization that we
needed to grow up fast because there were only my sister and I in a world gone dark and cold.

A Stanger’s Homecoming

Our father came to the Philippines in the thirties during the earlier waves of Chinese migration
into the country, propelled by the growing political rift between the Kuomintang of Sun Yat-sen
and the Communist Party of Mao Tse-tung, as much as by the attraction of economic
adventurism. The immigrants were mostly young men, some of them were single but most were
married and left behind their wives and children. Our father and his brother -in-law, Uncle Kee
Chuan, Papa Kai Sin, and Hua An came at the same time.

Everybody else did reasonably well. Uncle Kee Chuan, of course, had his dried fish business. Papa
Kai Sin also had a big store in Campo Doce, Bukidnon, that sold everything from sugar to
plywood. Hua An managed the textile store where Lisa worked.

In their group, only Father failed in all the business enterprises he ventured into. This had been
one sore point that strained the relationship between Father and Uncle Kee Chuan who felt our
father did not try hard enough. How could he fail except through wilful indifference, playing
mah-jong and drinking too much? As everybody knows, businessman is a synonym for Chinese.
Trade practically runs in their blood. So he was understandably confused and later displeased
when Father, after an enthusiastic start, would let his latest venture go down the drain. But Uncle
Kee Chuan helped him, who was his sister’s husband after all, and other friends helped too,
lending out precious capital that predictably enough evaporated into thin air. His venture into the
cassava flour manufacture was a sorry and expensive fiasco, lasting less than a couple of
disheartening years.

It was typical of Father that we did not hear from him for many months after his departure. Not a
short note to say he arrived safe and well. It was only the following year that we finally received
some news.
“Uncle Kee Chuan was here this afternoon,” Lisa told me, when I came home from school. “Oh?”

“He received a letter form China.”

Henceforth, letters would be our only means of contact with our father. But it was ironic that
Father could not even write directly to us because we could not read Chinese. Somebody else had
to translate everything for us. The envelopes they usually came in were flimsy, like onion-skin,
and the stamps small and drab-looking. The address would be written twice: in Chinese
characters and then in the usual Roman script.

“From Father?”

“No. From his niece, a neighbour of theirs. She said Pa’s wife ran away and hid in the kitchen
when he arrived. She would not speak to him for a week.”

I imagined our father’s wife, her face nicely wrinkled like a dried plum, hiding and weeping in the
kitchen, huddled between the dripping sink and the unpainted cupboard where they kept their
bowls and chopsticks and jars of black beans and pickled radish. The buried hurt coming out at
last in deep heaving sobs. Thirty years gone and what did he have to show for it? Nothing. Just
this bent graying man with a stumbling walk — no longer dashing and youthful, nor capable of
loving her in bed. Thirty years they had to fend for themselves, she and the children, while he
journeyed to distant lands. She felt terribly deceived. Thirty long and lonely years gone. And
finally this moneyless stranger, seeking her out with a choked voice, calling An-An, please come
here. An-An, please. I’m home.

The recriminations! His hundred-and-one sins of omission!

I gloated with pleasure, imagining what must have been a deadly reunion and a deadlier
confrontation.

“Serves him right,” I said, with a malice that surprised even me.

White Lies and Blue Mondays

No sooner had our father gone when Lisa started wondering when he was coming back.

“Mickey, when do you think Pa’s coming home?” she would ask.

Over the years, this became my sister’s one recurring question, a leitmotif that would surface
especially when she was feeling down — over work, or money, or Paquito — as though it would
only take Father’s shuffling presence to make everything right again somehow. (Paquito, at this
time, was impatient to settle down, and, unhappily, Lisa kept saying: wait a little longer, in
another year, a couple more years.)

The variations were many. And she would drop them without preface, while snapping string
beans, or trimming her cuticles, or much later, smoothing out the crow feet from around her eyes
with cleansing cream. “Mickey, do you think something’s wrong?” “Mickey, why is Pa taking so
long?”

Somehow, to Lisa, the questions remained real, long after it had become to me merely rhetorical.
In our own letters translated into Chinese, we of course asked; but on this point Father was
always evasive. Because his letters were terse, we became experts in reading between the lines.
Perhaps, they still censored their mail going outside China? (This was on the eve of Martial Law,
at the height of student activism and a Communist threat in the Philippines.) “The winter is
terribly cold this year,” he wrote. “If you can, please send some thick jackets or coats or blankets
you don’t need.” Inwardly, we rejoiced because it meant he still preferred the tropical climate of
the Philippines. So when he wrote later about building a small woodshed behind their house in
Nan-p’ing where they were planning raise Chinese mushrooms, Lisa was dismayed. Obviously,
Father was planning to stay for the harvest.

“Do you think Father’s coming back?”

“Beats me. Ask the man on the moon.”

Later, I tried to sound less bitter, partly because I finally did finish college and found work
teaching high school math and could afford to be magnanimous, but mainly because I couldn’t
bear the sound of rejection in my sister’s voice. So I would lie: “Of course, coming back. Takes
time. Slow boat. China faraway.” Which was an inept attempt to humor her. But her face would
light up every time, and with renewed energy, she was off to the supermarket to pick up a half
kilo of beef rump, bean sprouts, and some dried tangerine rind to cook “five-fingered beef with
bean sprouts” sautéed in peanut oil, Father’s favorite dish. It was as if, any time, now, he would
enter the room and take his place at the head of the dinner table.

We always ended up eating bean sprouts for days in a row. Or at least, I did because by then Lisa
was too dispirited again to lift a spoon and still too blind to realize that Father, after his years of
exile and wanderlust, had finally gone home.

Home is Where Your Heart Is

Father never felt at home in the Philippines. In a country of brown, large-eyed people, his yellow
skin and almond eyes marked him as different. Over thirty years in the country and he could not
quite speak Cebuano fluently, that strange coarse language of those strange coarse people. And
his own speech, to them, was an object of curiosity and ridicule.

When we walked down the street, the naughty kids in the neighbourhood has a song for
him. “Intsik wakang, buto niwang, higda lantay, patay.”

To which Father returned a cold look of venomous content and hurled an obscenity that summed
up his feelings for the people who could not quite claim him for their own. “Sai din lao bu!” Fuck
your mothers!

He pretended not to care, but I knew he was hurt — just as I felt hurt when the same kids would
chant MIC-key, BI-hon, PAN-cit, MIC-key, BI-hon, PAN-cit! over and over in a singsong trochaic
beat.
It made me ashamed to be part Chinese. So early on, I decided to discard that detested part of my
ancestry. I refused to continue schooling at Chung Hua Chinese School where I started my
kindergarten (Chinese in the morning, English in the afternoon). I refused to speak Chinese.
When he brought me along to visit his friends, Father would greet them with “How’s business?”
Then they would spy me silently tagging behind and they would ask, “Can he speak Chinese?” By
which, I supposed, they meant either Fukienese or Mandarin, both of which Father spoke. And
Father would say, rather disappointingly, “Bu-oy hao kong, i-haw tiah.” Cannot speak, can
understand. True enough. All I retained were the cuss and dirty words (lanchiao for cock) and
my Chinese name, an uncommon literary name (so they said), that meant “rock of the bridge” or
“leader among men.” Father’s wishful thinking.

By the time I transferred to the public school, the stigma attached to my being a Chinese mestizo
had mostly disappeared. Even my skin had darkened to a passable brown. Only in my family
name and in my eyes, if you look closely enough, would you be able to tell the Chinese blood still
flowing in my veins. In my skin and heart, I had finally become my mother’s son.

In Black or White

Except for a few incidents my memories of Mother were rather hazy. She was an indulgent and
gentle woman, with long black hair and rich brown skin. A true morena. I remember she like to
sew, making pretty little baby clothes, when she was not manning our store, waiting on the
customers, or arranging the cans of sardines and corned beef on the shelves.

A couple of months after giving birth to Bobby, our younger brother, she got sick and had to be
brought down to the Provincial Hospital in Cagayan de Oro in the truck used to haul sacks of
copra and corn, or bales of abaca. (We were living Tangkolan then, now called Manolo Fortich).
That time, however, the back of the truck was empty save for the cot in one corner where my
mother lay dying, a blanket tucked around her. A heavy green tarpaulin had been pulled over the
back to shade her from the sun. Her face shone in the semi-darkness like a mask left awkwardly
on the pillow.

Lucing, our yaya, was by her side arranging a thermos and some food in a rattan basket for the
long bumpy trip. Lucing’s eyes were red and swollen. She did not scold me even though my hands
were sticky and dirty from playing marbles all morning. She just gently motioned me towards
Mother.

As I drew closer, I could smell a curious scent: mediciney, herbal, fruity. Then she saw me. I gave
her a quick kiss and whispered something in her ear. She was too weak to speak, but she nodded
and smiled feebly. Then I was gone. (I had asked her for some of the oranges in her bedroom.)
That was the last time I saw our mother alive.

When I saw her next, she was lying on a strange bed. Dressed in a white flowery gown, she looked
like a young girl ready for a dance or some festive occasion: her hair jauntily gathered on top, her
face powdered and heavily rouged, her mouth glossy with lipstick. But her eyes were stiffly closed
and the hands folded on her tummy were waxy and bluish.

Father was sitting on a chair by her bedside, hunched over, elbows resting on his knees, his
downcast eyes staring at his empty hands.
The day was terribly warm when we buried our mother in the Igpit cemetery for the Filipinista,
right beside the graves of her own parents. All her eight silent brothers and four sisters were
there, along with a large assortment of other relatives who kept smoothing my head and
murmuring consoling words. Nobody spoke to Father. Perhaps, they blamed him for our
mother’s early death (this was in 1956 and she was only twenty-seven or twenty-eight then),
perhaps they felt he did not take care of our mother well enough. Most of us wore black, which
made the heat even worse. The burning candles did not look lighted because the white heat
bleached out their tiny orange flame. Even the paper flower wreaths looked wilted in the
afternoon sun. (In the shade, Bobby, who was to follow Mother a year later, napped in Lucing’s
arms throughout the burial.) Those who were not in the mourning black had black armbands or
black pieces of cloth pinned to their chests, except for Father who was completely in white —
dazzling white shirt, white pants, white shoes — which was the Chinese color for mourning.

In that dark-clad company, he stood out like a sore thumb.

The Garden of Serenity

Uncle Kee Chuan, who also had very few nice things to say about our father, conceded that
Father’s calligraphy was very good. Tilting his head back and peering over his square-rimmed
eyeglasses, he would study the characters on the large scroll of rice paper in our living room.
Curious, I would also look closely to see what he saw. Nothing but strange doodles, or what
looked like visual shorthand of things. A foreshortened horizon. A rising sun. A house with a
peaked roof. A window with a child peeping out. A sleeping cat with five legs. A man with splayed
legs and outstretched arms, balancing oranges on his shoulders.

“A Chinese Garden of Serenity,” Uncle Kee Chuan said finally. “The larger the fortune horded, the
greater the loss. The higher the climb, the quicker the fall.”

“Oh.”

“Hung Tzu-ch’eng, a Zen Buddhist of the Mind Dynasty. Very nicely done, don’t you think?”

Frankly, I did not know, and I did not care. But Father’s calligraphy must have been okay because
whenever a friend or an acquaintance died, the family would ask our father to make some cloth
scrolls for the dead. At odd times, grave men would knock on our door and hand him a folded
piece of paper. Father would then take out the huge round horsehair brushes and the black stone
of viscous ink from a bottom drawer of his desk and, with a brush held expertly in one unraised
palm, he would quickly set down the huge Chinese characters on white cartolina. His writing
movement had some inner, almost musical rhythm that involved flicking a wrist here and
pressing the brush flat there, moving fast or slowing down, the movement carrying on from hand
to wrist, arm, elbow, and shoulder. He looked like a conductor of an orchestra.

The individual characters would later be cut out and pasted on three meters of cloth. What did
they say, those characters in black ink? Perhaps, a word of condolence, a prayer, or the dead
person’s name. I wasn’t really sure. Only that the cloth scrolls for the dead were later burned —
how wasteful, I thought — in one blazing heap in the center of the Chinese Cemetery located in
Lumbia at the far edge of town. They were burned along with the flower wreaths and the incense
sticks and the stacks of paper money for the dead to carry in his long journey to the other world.
Uncle Kee Chuan, who looked perfectly healthy and knew how to take good care of his body (he
did not smoke, drink, or gamble — vices he deplored in our “degenerate” father), died of cancer of
the prostate in 1980. Father would have gladly done the death scrolls for him in that beautiful
calligraphy he had admired so much. But by then Father was already in Nan-p’ing where he and
An-An were growing mushrooms on beds of moist hay. Tending a different garden of serenity, I
suppose. Uncle Kee Chuan was not buried in Lumbia though. His body was cremated and the
ashes sent in a small porcelain jar to his wife and daughter in Hong Kong.

Pieces of a Chinese Puzzle

After our uncle’s death, Papa Kai sin more or less took over the responsibility of looking in on us
from time to time to see how we were, or to bring word from China. He was Father’s best friend
and his exact opposite in many ways. Where Father looked frail, Papa Kai Sin was robust; and his
silver hair remained defiantly thick despite his age. Also, while Father was tight-lipped, he was
voluble almost to the point of excess. It was from him that we learned much about our father.

“Did you know that your father had a sister?” he asked once.

“I thought he was an only child,” I said, surprised.

“A younger sister, Jiang Ren. And I bet you don’t know your father’s family in China used to be
rich.”

This was too much, I had to smile. “Really? Don’t tell me he was a distant relation of the deposed
emperor.”

He was not amused. “No. But his family was wealthy. Owned tracts of riceland in our town. A big
sprawling house with half a dozen courtyards and gardens. A red-lacquered gate fifteen feet high.
He led a pampered life, your father. Nursemaids, gardeners, cooks, house boys. We know he was
not used to working with his hands. No business sense either. But we helped him. How could we
refuse? When we first came to this country, his family gave us pocket money, boat fare. During
the Communist takeover, your father’s family lost everything, of course. The land, the house, the
servants. The rich were considered the people’s enemies.”

He took a sip of his cooling tea. “Jiang Ren suffered terribly. She was a willowy girl but
headstrong, rebellious. In another time, another place, she might have turned into an
accomplished woman. But in the China of the forties and the fifties, she was considered
dangerous, a bourgeois through and through. Silk stockings and that sort of thing. Like your
father, she loved to read poetry and stories. Also did calligraphy. Useless reactionary things. I
mean, for the Communists. She tried to flee from China like a lot of other people. She could not
stand wearing the fool’s cap in public with the taunting characters written on it saying: I’m a
bourgeois good-for-nothing. Your grandparents tired to stop her from going. It was very
dangerous. Min Chiang which flowed down to the Formosa Strait was heavily patrolled by border
guards. At the height of the exodus, hundreds of swollen bodies floated night and day in the
brown river that led to the South China Sea and freedom. Jiang Ren was never seen again after
her escape attempt. Perhaps she drowned. Perhaps she was shot. Who knows? Who cares?
During any revolution, human life is cheap.”
Papa Kai Sin shook his head. “The bitter irony of it all was that it was your grandparents who
reported her to the authorities. Ironic and, perhaps in hindsight, unbelievably stupid. But you
have to remember that this was at a time when everybody was policing everybody else and public
confessions of private errors were the order of the day. Children were encouraged to squeal on
their parents, parents on their children, friends on friends. After a while, you begin to believe it is
the right thing to do. You became transparent. No secrets were safe. Walls grew ears and,
windows, eyes.”

Gloomily, I looked out of our window.

“A further irony,” he went on. “For all their effort to ingratiate themselves to the authorities and
portray themselves as law-abiding Communists, they did not fare well. During Mao’s Great Leap
Forward, entire populations from towns and cities were moved to the countryside to participate
in the massive program of agricultural recovery. Everybody became farmers. They tilled the soil,
harvested, and worked under the sun. Even those who did not know rice shoots from weeds.
Doctors, teachers, clerks, everybody. Young people and old people. Children. Your grandmother
did not even last a year carrying buckets of human waste to fertilize the fields. How could she,
with her small feet? Even in better times, walking in the garden, she hobbled and leaned on the
arm of a servant by her side. Your grandfather lasted longer, maybe a couple of years longer,
living on an atrocious diet of watery rice porridge and boiled cabbage. He died in the big famine
of 1959, during the disastrous Great Leap Forward. Thousands, probably millions, perished of
starvation, although you did not read this in the papers inside or outside China. To preserve the
good name of the revolution, I guess.”

“Why didn’t anybody tell us about this before?” I said, hurt that they could not trust us to
understand. I remember Father’s drunken fits, how he would weep and cuss, “Communists!
Damn Communists!” in a drowning choked voice, his shirt front slimy with vomit, while Lisa and
I cowered in the doorway, unable to understand the roots of his rage.

“What would be the point? Who were the Red Guards after all? Who were the executioners? Our
very own people. Relatives, friends, nieghbors. People we knew, grew up with, lived with. My own
nephews were members of the Communist Party in Foochow. Kim Tong was a Red Guard in Nan-
p’ing.”

It dawned on me then that our father must have suffered while those things were going on in his
homeland. Perhaps the very horror of those events drove him to the reckless oblivion of the bottle
and mahjong. For the first time, I began to understand his loneliness and bewilderment.
Understanding his wretched humanity, I could finally begin to forgive.

The Bearer of Distant News

“Your mother died last week,” Papa Kai Sin said before he could even sit down. This was a year
after his last visit.

For a moment, we were confused. Our mother died a long time ago, when we were still kids. Then
we realized that he meant our father’s Chinese wife, which I suppose boiled down to the same
thing, according to his strange notion.
He said that they had a very good harvest and had been busily picking mushrooms all day. After
work, An-An sat on a chair in their yard and rested, her feet propped on another chair. All that
bending and squatting could be hell on your back and feet. She just leaned back in the wicker
chair, with the warmish spring sun on her face, and closed her eyes for a quick nap. When they
went to call her for supper an hour later, she had slumped to one side, her head tilted from her
neck in an angle. But her face was peaceful and content.

“Oh, this is terrible,” Lisa said.

“At least, she did not suffer,” Papa Kai Sin said, his eyes a bit teary.

(Two years later, in 1986, Papa Kai Sin himself would be dead. Papa Kai Sin had left Nang Inday,
his Filipino common-law wife of twenty-five years and taken another woman, a much younger
and prettier woman who drove him crazy with her incessant demands for new clothes, matching
shoes, expensive perfumes. His daughters, Chutching and Lingling, sensibly took over the
management of their store in Campo Doce. One time, Papa Kai Sin asked for a large sum of
money that his daughters naturally refused to give. Papa Kai Sin cussed and shouted. Chutching
and Lingling, who took after him in more ways than one, shouted and cussed back. Seeing that he
could no longer intimidate them with his anger, Papa Kai Sin cried, perhaps in frustration and
defeat, and later shot himself in the head.)

“And how’s Pa?” Lisa asked.

“He’s heartbroken, of course. But in a couple of months, he’ll bounce back and go on with his life
like before. You know your father,” Papa Kai Sin said, his voice quickening with renewed
hopefulness.

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“Poor Pa. He’s alone now,” Lisa said.

“Not alone. He’s staying with Kim Tong and his family. In Foochow. You remember your eldest
brother.”

We, of course, did not remember our eldest half-brother (was he the one on the farthest left in the
old picture, the tallest among them, the one with the slight frown?), but it would be too
complicated to find out. So we just nodded dutifully.

“That’s good. At least, he’s not by himself, all alone,” Lisa said.

“If you can send him some money — just a small amount to help with the funeral expenses…,”
Papa Kai Sin continues.

“Of course, even a small amount…,” Lisa said.

I cleared my throat, lifted my cup, sipped, and looked outside the window at a scene of unrelieved
ordinariness. In a couple of months, the banaba tree would be in bloom again, its curly lavender
flowers hanging in lush bunches from the boughs. Right now, the tree looked scraggy, the brown-
silver branches only just coming to bud. Still I felt nothing, just a strange emptiness inside. She
was not our mother, although they always talked of her as our Chinese mother. I kept a respectful
silence because I felt it was the most I could do. Surely they could not expect anything more. I
could not, would not, mourn our dead mother for the second time.

Later, at dinner, we lingered at the table while Lisa’s two boys, Henry and Tommy, rushed ahead
to the living room to watch a rerun of the Lone Ranger on TV. We were silent. We could hear
their excited squeals above the racket of flying bullets and stampeding hooves. Lisa wore a loose
green household that failed to conceal her swollen belly. She idly stirred her soup and stared at it
as though it held secrets to the past or the future. Since her husband Miguel had left them, she
had become morose. She and her children were with me now, in our old house in Macahambus.
(Paquito, tired of waiting, had married a nurse. The last time we heard, they were getting ready to
migrate to the States.) Now and then, Lisa would look up, smile, and urge me to help myself to
more adobo or more bulalo. She herself hardly touched her food, though she probably should.
She was getting too thin for comfort, her once bouncy hair limp and dull.

“Mickey, I was thinking. Now with Pa’s wife dead, and all their children grown-up and settled…”

What was she saying? Dumbstruck, I sat there and stared. Her face held a frightening rapt
desperation as she leaned over her cooling soup, the yellow fat floating like drops of hardened
tallow. It came, just as I feared. The pathetic old refrain, more plea than question.

“You think Pa’s coming home now?”

Poor loyal Lisa. All these years, two young boys later and another, obviously, on the way, and still
holding on. Oh, let it go, for God’s sake, I thought bitterly. The old man is home where he belongs
— with his family, or what’s left of it.

But seeing the sad and faraway look return to her eyes, like a child who had lost something dear, I
felt guilt-stricken. And in a voice that was gentle and full of reassurance, I told her what she
wanted to hear.

For whatever comfort my little white lies might have given her, I did not feel proud of myself.
How much longer did we have to wait and fool ourselves?

Home

A month later, we received a letter from our brother Kim Tong in Foochow. It was a short one,
written in English (awkward but English definitely, perhaps a neighbor’s kid who went to the
university wrote it for him?) saying that our father had died the last week of April, on the 28th,
1984. April, nearly a month after his wife’s death. Ironically, this was nearly twenty years after
the doctor’s gloomy prognosis. All those years, in the back of our mind, we had been waiting in
dread for such a letter. When it finally came, we were still caught off-guard, stunned and shaken.
The letter did not give the cause of his death (his old illness? an accident? suicide? God forbid),
which left us to supply our own answers. Lisa, a romantic at heart to the end, felt the grief over
An-An’s passing killed our father. But being the family realist, I preferred to attribute it simply to
old age. He was born in 1904, the Year of the Dragon, so he would have been eighty in May. That
rainy afternoon we received the letter, Lisa and I sat across each other like two greying middle-
aged couple mourning the death of a prodigal son. We wept in grief, but also in relief.

Now we could finally lay to rest our dream of his return. It was over: the hope, the uncertainty,
and the silent wait by the window for an old man leading his long weary shadow home.