American Knees, page 3
The freedom Raymond’s father had given him as an only child hadn’t prepared him for working within the patriarchy of a large Chinese family business. Neither had his studies in public administration prepared him; the courses he would have needed were all in the psychology department. In Darleen’s family Raymond became just another son, another brother. He had no other social life.
His life at the restaurant became separate from Darleen’s life and from their life together. At work under bright lights, his life was on constant display, surrounded by background music, the constant chatter bouncing off the walls as he moved between tables, and the metallic and ceramic noise of the kitchen. He came home after closing, craving a darkened and silent anonymity, and moved about the house without turning on the lights. Sometimes he pretended he was alone and unmarried. He stopped cooking for himself and Darleen, stopped eating meals at home, stopped listening to music, and watched television with the sound off. He never answered the phone; any call at home was for Darleen.
She was comfortable with Raymond’s silence, which was just like her brothers’. Her brothers never spoke of work because it seemed they had been working and living in the restaurant for their entire lives. Darleen had an M.B.A. degree and a CPA license and had written a master’s thesis on minority businesswomen who had received loans from the Small Business Administration, yet there was no place for her in the family business. She worked for a bank, in the commercial loan division. She understood that the power in the family rested on the shoulders of the men. This wasn’t the legendary and oppressive Chinese patriarchy at work; it was freedom and the luxury of choice for Darleen.
In order to prevent arguments, Raymond avoided discussing work at home, because any dissatisfaction with work meant a dissatisfaction with the family. To express dissatisfaction meant he was an ungrateful Chinese son-in-law.
“The cooks don’t listen to me, Darleen.”
“You don’t speak Cantonese.”
“They understand English when your father speaks to them in English.”
“He’s the boss.”
“What am I?”
“The son-in-law.”
“Worse. The boss’s youngest daughter’s husband.”
“You should be grateful Daddy pays you the same as you get on the outside.”
“On the outside,” Raymond thought, had a familiar ring to it: Stalag 17, perhaps, or What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
His past was equally dangerous conversation, because everything he had done in his adult life, he had done with another woman. All his postpuberty experiences in Los Angeles were tainted with the company of former girlfriends. Darleen wanted him separated from them. At first her jealousy was amusing. Then it was not amusing. If he admitted to having been to UCLA or Newport Beach, or mentioned a couple of nice restaurants in Venice Beach, an interrogation would follow, or stony silence. He learned to control the urge to participate in conversations that required him to relate experiences other than childhood ones. A casual listener might have surmised that as an adult he had seen no movies, taken no vacations, had no girlfriends before Darleen. He would have admitted to going to Disneyland as a child, but no one in Los Angeles ever asked about that.
“I WISH I WERE MARRIED TO LORETTA YOUNG,” Raymond muttered. He paused. Sylvia Beacon-Yamaki waited. He had barely mentioned the usual subjects of divorce—money, infidelity, sex. Not that there hadn’t been any infidelity.
One day a red-haired wine rep wearing a dress with a zipper from the neckline to the hemline had stepped into the restaurant office with two bottles of wine, introduced herself, apologized for being late (she was supposed to meet with Darleen’s father, but Raymond didn’t enlighten her), sat down at Raymond’s desk (it was her last appointment of the day), slipped off her high heels, and asked if he knew any of “that Oriental acupressure stuff.”
Raymond was a good Chinese boy who never cut class, always had the proper letter from home, kept his gym clothes clean, returned his library books on time, never tore up a parking ticket, didn’t burn his draft card, wrote thank you letters the day after Christmas and the day after his birthday, never ran out of gas, took driver’s ed, asked about birth control at the proper time, kept written warranties in a safe place, and had inhaled only ten times, at a party.
He looked the wine rep in the eyes and lied. In order for it to be done right, she’d have to take off her panty hose, “so that negative ions flowing outward won’t be blocked.” He threw in something about the Yangtze River flowing to the sea. She had green eyes. She wasn’t wearing panties. An unexcused absence requires a note from home. Void where prohibited. He removed the tag under penalty of law.
In her Venice Beach apartment, miles from West Covina and General Chan’s Palace, Raymond became fascinated with her pubic hairs, a mound of very tiny, tight red curls. He ran his fingers through them, straightening them, then released them and watched them bounce back into tiny curls. After that there were freckles to count.
He began to keep a bathrobe at her place. She rented an extra parking slot. There was a sudden public administration conference out of town. On another occasion, he gave a waitress a ride home sixteen nights in a row. His life, which had become so separate from Darleen’s, was no longer equal.
Given Darleen’s jealousy, it didn’t take her long to discover his infidelity. Suddenly he knew his way around Venice Beach without asking for directions, he remembered the plots of recent movies they hadn’t seen together, he revealed a newfound knowledge of vintage wine. Exhibit A, Your Honor—red hair and a phone number next to the notation “15,237 freckles” in place of a name. Bad Chinese son. In the end, the infidelity itself was incidental to the drama of Raymond’s disloyalty to and eventual divorce from the family. Technically, it needed the betrayal or it wouldn’t have been a complete Chinese tale.
In the movie version of his life, Raymond is seated on a three-legged stool in a gray Cultural Revolution-era prison uniform, his politically correct autobiography in hand. The men in charge of his reeducation are seated at the far end of the room. They all look vaguely like the cooks from General Chan’s Palace. Raymond begins to read the twenty-ninth revision of his confession.
I have betrayed the nation-state and lived a selfish life of avarice. I have proven myself ungrateful and unfilial by immersing myself in wanton pleasures outside the boundaries of the nation-state.…
He reads for three days without sleeping, and at the end the men organize a tribunal where they will decide whether Raymond should be sent out to (1) plant rice, (2) break big rocks into little ones, or (3) carry his dick in a jar in public.
As Sylvia continued reading in silence, Raymond thought of the television footage of tanks pushing and clanking into Tiananmen Square. He wanted to be the lone man facing a line of tanks. To be heroic in battle. In the end, all he wanted to do was step aside and let his wife’s tank push by while he shouted, “Take everything! Take everything!” He resisted the urge to blame someone else for his divorce and the pitiful bargaining position he had placed himself in.
Chinese actually believed in good luck, happiness, long life, and other phrases forged in steel and dipped in gold and used to decorate Chinese restaurants and the front of bright-red wedding invitations. To ensure all this good fortune, they backed up their good wishes with cash and jewelry at the appropriate times. Weddings and the births of baby boys were big cash days in couples’ lives. When someone died, fake paper money was burned and food was offered to the dead to guarantee a journey without hardship. One did not burn real money; Chinese might be superstitious, but they weren’t stupid.
Divorce was another kind of death, Raymond thought as he stared at a line in the settlement agreement marked “Loans.” Each sum corresponded to a monetary gift from Darleen’s family—on their wedding day, at New Year’s, on their birthdays, and other holidays. As supporting evidence, copies of canceled checks bearing Raymond’s name were attached. Darleen was utilizing her CPA training to full advantage. In his next life he would take cash only or fake money.
Later, in Raymond’s only angry moment during the divorce, he returned every gift Darleen and her family had given him during their marriage. No item was too insignificant or too trivial. In fact, the more trivial, the better. He returned T-shirts, slippers he’d never worn, an electric shaver, sweaters, socks, old magazines, shirts, suits, shoes, a half bottle of aspirin, ugly boxer shorts, books, records, tools, anything he had taken with him when they separated that could possibly be construed as a gift. Then, for all the food he had eaten at their restaurants, he bought Darleen and her family a gift certificate to a competing establishment. He had already left behind all the furniture, artwork, towels, kitchen utensils, dishes, pots and pans—everything except what he’d had when he graduated from college and moved to Los Angeles. After he had deposited all the cartons on Darleen’s doorstep, he left a note saying, “I’m returning the things you ‘loaned’ me.” He felt unencumbered and less fearful about his failure.
SYLVIA CLOSED THE SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT. “They’re burying you.”
“She and that attorney of hers, Tasmanian Wombat, can have everything,” Raymond muttered.
“Then you’ll need a backhoe operator, not an attorney,” said Sylvia.
A good Chinese son would automatically have said at this point, “I don’t want to hurt her family.” What did a man look like after having been run over by a tank?
“If you give them everything, will Darleen’s family like you more, Raymond?” Sylvia asked.
If I gave them a discount on my half of the community property, they’d like me more, Raymond thought to himself. Getting a discount was more Chinese. “Let’s give them my fifty percent of the community property and discount it by an additional twenty-five percent. And throw in a case of toilet paper.”
Sylvia smiled. “If you want a lawyer, then let me be your lawyer.” It was the equivalent of a car salesman saying, “What will it take for us to make a deal?”
RAYMOND NAVIGATED the divorce proceedings relatively smoothly, even when he discovered Darleen’s attorney’s car in her garage at three o’clock in the morning. Sylvia immediately had the lawyer’s presence in the about-to-be-disputed community property documented by a private investigator for two weeks, in case the divorce went to trial.
He got his revenge later, when Darleen’s attorney took a deposition that Sylvia would use with students for years as an example of how not to take a deposition. The highlight of the transcript was Raymond’s proposal that Darleen be given custody of his restaurant knowledge and that he be allowed to patronize Chinese dining establishments only on alternate weekends. Sylvia had to call a break from time to time just to escape to the hallway and laugh. The humiliation, on the record, of his wife’s attorney ended up costing Raymond real dollars later, but it was worth it. In fact, he ended up having to turn over the entire settlement check to Sylvia for attorney’s fees, but he spoke fondly of winning the battle of wits, if not the war.
After that, Darleen mounted an international telephone campaign, insisting to every friend they had in common that there was a choice to make and that the choice, after the evidence was heard, would be her. Raymond’s silence was a guilty plea. No one called to say, “Say, Ray, we’re sorry about the divorce, and we know there’s always two sides to every story. Let’s stay friends.” He hated it when people said, “Say, Ray.”
Then it was over. Raymond and Darleen’s seven-year marriage had come to an end.
2 gold spike
AFTER HIS DIVORCE, RAYMOND MOVED BACK TO THE BAY Area, where his father still lived. An ominous unspoken thought descended between them: Raymond would never again marry a Chinese woman and would thus be the first in his thin branch of the family tree not to be married to a Chinese. He was already the first to divorce.
Raymond’s father’s name was Woodrow, or, as his friends called him, Wood. His immigrant parents named him after a President, as they did his brothers, Abraham and Theodore, also American born, as if their American names could guarantee greatness and wealth.
Did a search for identity have to have symbolic momentum? Was it enough to push “deep” into the heart of America in a romantic search for identity, or was it enough to find something somewhere on the surface, a momentary acknowledgment of a specific time and place? Perhaps even the faded glory of an American lie would suffice, the driving of the gold spike to signal the completion of the transcontinental railroad built by Chinese workers from west to east, and from east to west by Irish workers—though no Chinese were allowed in the historic photo of two locomotives meeting at Promontory Point, Utah. The men holding guns in the photo kept the Chinese at bay. Raymond’s father had told him this version of American history, yet when he was in school he could not find any mention of it. “Grandpa said it was so,” his father had said.
Wood and his two brothers were a rarity, all born in the late twenties in New York’s Chinatown, a Chinatown that was still reeling from the effects of immigration laws, a Chinatown of aging bachelors. America liked to call them sojourners, because it meant they wanted eventually to return home. But if this was true, why did America need over a dozen different exclusionary immigration laws, and why did several states pass antimiscegenation and alien land laws? A second generation of bachelors were dying out as the gift of American citizenship was bestowed on them. Could the “loyal minority” now bring their wives and families from China? Yes, said America, but only 105 per year. Those with wives were royalty, and the children born to those families walked the streets of Chinatown like princes and princesses among the aging kings of a generation made impotent by law. Old Chinese men patted the children’s heads, gave them candy, bought them toys, prodded them to eat, told them stories, and put lay shee in their hands, because giving money to the next generation would bring both of them good luck.
Every one of those men knew Wood as “Hong Mak’s number two son.” If an old man, even a stranger, waved him over on the street, he always went, not so much for the gift he would receive, but because his father had told him that he represented the family and should always be respectful of his elders. He thanked each man for his gift and called him ah bok, uncle. The uncles had herbal cures for every one of the boys’ illnesses. Sometimes a man they didn’t know would stoop down and tie their shoes, pick up a lost mitten, find a quarter hidden behind their ear.
Years later, the boys would hear stories about the old men’s lives in America, told over the clatter of mah-jongg tiles or sitting at the back table of a restaurant, where the kitchen help ate.
“Hey, kit, dat train from Oatlan’ to Reno go ober the Sierra Nevada mountains in Californ’. We Chinese builded dat trains. No boolsheet! You read about da gold spike in school, huh?” Now set the history books straight, they said. They told the boys to ride the train to Reno someday. The owner of the restaurant gave them each a silver dollar to play on a lucky number.
When Wood and his brothers joined the army, they were war heroes to these old men even before they marched out of boot camp or stepped off American shores. There were other, bitter old men who would argue with Wood’s father because they couldn’t understand why the boys would go and defend the country that had kept them out and made pariahs of them in their youth. Theodore died in Germany. Wood’s entire division was packed and ready to ship out to the Battle of the Bulge when his name and two others were called to fall out. They were transferred to the Army Corps of Engineers and sent back to college to finish their engineering degrees. But the war ended before Wood completed his degree and before Abraham got out of boot camp.
Raymond suspected it was easier being Chinese American when his father was his age. After World War II, Congress had repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act, finally allowing Chinese to become naturalized citizens. They had proven their loyalty in the war, fighting the Japanese. They had proven they were not Communists by marching in the streets of Chinatown waving the Nationalist Chinese flag of Taiwan, a tiny island nation most of Chinatown had never been to. When Wood got out of college and out of the army, he could be an engineer, unlike the Chinese engineers he knew, who worked in Chinatown restaurants before the war. There was no longer any second-class citizenship in America. The loyal were being rewarded.
A man who had been a prince of Chinatown could now become a prince of the city. A paycheck, a car—a Cadillac no less, parked off Broadway, by a stage door—a pinch bottle of Haig & Haig in hand. They knew him, they expected him, Wood flashed the bottle, some cash, they opened the stage door, there was a pat on the back, a couple of white gals from the chorus said “Hi, Woody” and “Gimme a ride in your new Cadillac” on their way to rehearsal, down a hallway someone said, “The gang’s all here, Wood.” There was good luck in the air. Wood understood every wink, every OK sign, every expression that came down the pike. They needed his presence. He belonged. He pulled a chair up to the table, set the pinch bottle next to the glasses, and said, “Deal me in.”
Raymond’s father was built like Edward G. Robinson, short, compact, and powerful. Even though Wood wasn’t born in China and had never been there, he had inherited a traditional sense of what it meant to be Chinese, as if a generation’s separation from the homeland had intensified and magnified the will of his parents to make him learn traditional Chinese behavior. By the next generation, all that survived was respect for family, getting a good education, getting a good job, writing thank you cards for gifts, and knowing what to do at funerals.
