and I knew why the label of orphan meant nothing to me. My great-grandfather had begun a tradition of orphaned men in this country and now I realized I was the direct descendant of that original fatherless and motherless immigrant. Now there was a direct line from the first generation to the fourth generation. I was not hampered by the knowledge of China as home. The closest I had come to China was my own mother, who was the daughter of a Chinese dentist, schooled by private tutors in Tientsin in English and Chinese literature, French, piano, ballet, and painting. She married my father in 1947 when she was a student in painting and he was a graduate student in engineering in Berkeley. His life had been the opposite of hers, and the realm of his history and tradition did not resemble hers in any way. But in America they were expected to notice each other and, in fact, to know each other. He was working as a dishwasher at the Blue and Gold Cafeteria when he did notice her, and he dismissed her with his own form of racial arrogance. His traditions and history were deeply rooted like scars, and he remembered only the bitterness of his father and grandfather, and he cultivated his sensibility from the lives of those lonely men. And he noticed her that day simply because she was the same color as he and she was good-looking. They did not meet again until she took a course in drafting, and he was the teaching assistant in the class. When they first met, she spoke to him in Chinese and he told her he didn’t understand Chinese.
“You do not understand Chinese?”
“Nope.”
The way he said “nope” was all she needed to prod him. She seemed to know what annoyed him. Young Chinese girls from China annoyed him. She was talking to the side of his face. When a man says “nope” it was time to move on, and my father was looking off into the distance, ready to move. She was slowly moving her head, then her shoulders, trying to make him look at her when she spoke.
“You were born here?”
“Yes,” he said, looking at her, then looking away at a point in the distance.
“What generation are you?” she asked. Then she added, looking away from him at the same point in the distance, “I have an uncle who came from China to go to school in Pennsylvania and became a dentist in 1917.” She paused, feeling him looking at her. “And another uncle who was a Methodist minister in California in 1850.” It was a look of impatience.
“I’m third-generation Chinese,” he said quickly.
“You are not Chinese.” She caught him saying the word “Chinese” a little too forced, like a lie, just to dismiss her questions. And when they looked at each other finally he was half smiling and she was dead serious. She tested his patience.
A few months after they were married, my mother received a letter from her father telling her that China was closed to her, that it was no longer her home. She was now orphaned to this country and to my father. It would still be a few months before he told her about his history and the lives of his grandfathers because, among other things, he had to teach her how to cook.
When I started driving, I used to drive around at night through the hills, through empty streets, just drive around at night to keep from thinking about the pursuit of my own life. To keep from settling down into the dreams of Father and Mother. But in the end my life was nothing unless I pursued their lives, pursued the life of my grandfather, my great-grandfather. I mirrored them at the beginning, shaped everything behind them, told stories about them to myself, read yellowed letters from one to another. I knew more about them than they would have revealed to me if they were alive. I knew more about the love of my father for my mother than most sons know.
II
I AM THE SON OF MY FATHER, MY GRANDFATHERS, AND I HAVE a story to tell about my history, about a moment in the Pacific when I heard myself saying “ever yours.” “Ever” is a word that moves like a song, exposing the heart in its tone, never hiding, never patronizing. The word speaks directly, creates form, and has its own voice.
Great-Grandfather built the railroad through the Sierra Nevada in difficult seasons. Night was a time of peace. On warm nights Great-Grandfather would move away from camp to sleep, away from the night workers. There was a river nearby the camp, and farther upstream, the falls. He always walked beside the moonlit river at night, the cascading water glowing white with the reflection made his footsteps visible. And in the windless night he crossed warm pockets of night air, then cool dark spots, but as he moved closer to the sound of the falls, the night air became moist and only cool. His skin tasted the air. It was an uphill hike to the base of the falls and a steeper climb to the top, where he rested, looking down on the fires of camp. He climbed on large granite stones to reach the top of the falls. He began to sweat. The mist from the crashing falls soaked him and mixed with his sweat. The noise was relief from the railroad iron noise of the day. He rested for a moment, looking down into the river’s valley. The water appeared vague, uncertain, it became the sound of moonlight, rather than the sound of water rushing through the valley. The moonlit mist carved valleys out of the granite, not the river. The moon made sounds in Great-Grandfather’s eyes, made the mist from the falls look like gray smoke floating down the valley, washing out all the details of the canyon walls, losing its night walker in its movement, cooling his exhaustion, and leaving him dreaming a moan out of all his years of living. But he always woke from that easy rest, and demanded that the tradition he passed on be more than a dream and moan of breath. It was his own voice.
Great-Grandfather heard the last anger of his body in late summer, he craved for the violence of bare lighted rooms, that yellow glow to calm himself, that congestion of men without lovers, without families. He knew he was stuck here. In Wyoming, the thunderstorms moved in every day to bring afternoon showers. The raindrops made the dust rise from the ground, filled his nostrils with the smell of moist earth, he felt the ache in his body rise as the dust rises in the wide meadows. His giving in to America, here, was the violence of his soul and he felt it, chased it, and let it overcome him. After the rains, the humidity rose and moist air mixed with the dust the rain had raised. It was a good smell and he bared his chest to that air.
We do not have our women here. My wife is coming to live here. We are staying. Nothing was sweet about those days I lived alone in the city, unless you can find sweetness in that kind of loneliness. I slept in the back of a kitchen by a grimy window where the light and noises of the wet city streets were ground in and out of me like the cold. The bed was so small I could hardly move away from my dreams. And when I awakened with the blue light of the moon shining in, there would be no dreams. That one moment when I wake, losing my dreams, my arms and heart imagining that she was near me moving closer and I float in her movements and light touch. But the blue light and the noise were always there and I would have nothing in my hands.
“I left for San Francisco one month before my brother. In those days, ships were bringing us in illegally. They usually dropped a lifeboat outside the Golden Gate with the Chinese in it. Then the ship steamed in and at night the lifeboat came in quietly to unload. If they were about to be caught, my people were thrown overboard. But, you see, they couldn’t swim because they were chained together. My brother died on that night and now his bones are chained to the bottom of the ocean. Now I am fighting to find a place in this country.”
My father and I used to drive down a dusty road on that tropical island singing “Home on the Range,” the dust pouring through the windows, collecting on the big furry seats of our Buick Super Eight. I followed him on his rounds, checking building sites, riding shotgun, wearing my Superman shirt and a white starched sailor’s hat, and carrying a replica of a long-barreled Colt that made my arm ache whenever I lifted it to take aim. And when my father got sick and we had to fly home, I thought of all those jeep rides we went on, running down a dusty road, holding yourself on with both hands, and when we stopped, the dust would catch us and get in my hair and the corners of my mouth. And instead of making you feel dirty, it dried your back. Before we left, mother pulled the Buick into the garage, scraping the side, pinning us in. I crawled
