Homebase

A Novel

Shawn Wong

• Verlag: University of Washington Press
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295999722
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Literary Criticism

Homebase is the coming of age story of Rainsford Chan in 1950s and '60s California. Rainsford is a fourth-generation Chinese American named after the town where his great-grandfather worked during the gold rush. Orphaned at fifteen, he attempts to claim America as his homebase, and his personal history is interwoven with dreams, stories, and letters of his family's life in America. Moving through time and place, the story allows the reader to discover the past as Rainsford does, to see the world through his eyes, and to learn the truth about the Chinese American experience.

CHAPTER ONE

I

BACK IN THE EARLY FIFTIES, WHEN I WAS FOUR, MY FATHER AND mother drove from Berkeley to New York and back. The sound of the car’s little engine is still buzzing and working away in my head. My sense of balance comes from lying asleep in the back seat of that car, my unsteady heartbeat comes from my father’s night driving and my watching the chaos of passing headlights floating by on our car’s ceiling and gleaming tail-lights reflected and distorted in the windows. In those nights, sleeping in the back seat of my father’s car, I heard conversations my mother and father had, saw places I visited later, and remembered it all when I started driving. And the places I’ve never been to before were dreams, were whole conversations my father and mother had.

I will eventually travel to all the places I’ve dreamed about. I will meet my friends and know them as if I’d known them all my life.

I was named after my great-grandfather’s town, the town he first settled in when he came to California from China: Rainsford, California. Rainsford Chan (Chan is short for California). Rainsford doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no record of it ever having existed, but I’ve heard stories about it. I’ve spent many days hiking and skiing through the Sierra Nevada looking for it. I’ve never found exactly where it was, but I’m almost sure I’ve seen it or passed by it on one of those days. I recognized it from a hill. It was one of those long, wide Sierra meadows. A place of shade. The sound of a stream reaches my ears. Dogwood trees make the place sound like a river when the breeze moves through the leaves.

My father knew all his grandfather’s stories about the town or towns like it. Stories of how they survived there, of how they were driven out of the west and chased back to San Francisco. As they rushed back across the land they worked on, they burned their letters, their diaries, poems, anything with names. My father never told me these stories. He died too soon. He only taught me to sing “Home on the Range” and I’d teach him the songs I learned in school. But I knew all his stories because my mother told me all his stories and later I found stories he had written down and put away in an old shoe box.

The year before his death we moved from Berkeley to Guam. In 1956 my mother called the dirt road in front of our house on Guam “Ocean Street,” and gave the only house on that street the number “25.” We began to receive mail there from home. I was six and until we had moved to Guam I remembered only a few isolated events out of my childhood in Berkeley, where my parents were students. When we returned to Berkeley in 1957, Father was dead. And I remembered everything.

In 1956 my father taught me to sing “Home on the Range” on that island in the Pacific Ocean. Standing there in the heat of an ocean lagoon, I sang out for my father about our home on the range and my friends the buffalo and antelope. The sun was shining, it was raining, and the steam of the humid day filled my lungs. The waves washing up on the edges of the lagoon made the green grass seaweed between my toes.

I must have been calling my father “Bobby” for a few years before we arrived in Guam, but it was there that I actually remember for the first time calling him by that name. I had given him that name when, as a baby, I mispronounced “Daddy.” That wasn’t his real name, just my name for him, it made him the object of my play, a friend I learned my imagination from. When we lived on Guam, I got the last good look, the last clear view of my family at the age of six. On Guam, my world was a boy’s paradise and I remember all of it and its memory is constant. In 1956, World War II was still on for me. If I dug beneath the fallen leaves and loose earth near the base of the tree, I always found gleaming brass bullet casings. And there was a fighter jet in the woods behind our house. It was a world of real aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, bombers, sunken ships, and palm-lined white sandy beaches. At night the humid animals of the day, the lizards, insects, and rodents, made a zoo of noises in my sleep.

On this island, the tropical night still hisses its hot breath against my ears. The day must cool into evening, Father. When you and I sat on the front porch, there was no movement to cool the day. I followed my father into the jungle behind our house, the boondocks, the name itself was myth and legend. The enemies of all our life were hiding in the grasses, behind the rubble, a jungle of blood. I knew Jap soldiers were hidden away in the tunnels against the hill, still fighting the war. The terror of my childhood was a crashed and charred fighter-jet lying mangled amid the roots of the trees. Some nights I woke thinking I heard that jet crash into the trees with a noise so great that I knew it was a dream noise—it makes me deaf, but the dream still goes on. In the faint light of that humid night the fighter glowed, lifted itself in my eyes like silver smoke, and brought the taste of metal to my tongue. And I could not stop myself from peering down inside the cockpit, feeling the metal still warm from the burn, reaching down through the broken glass into that old air to brush away the smoke, and finding the broken body of a ghost.

When my father was a young man he tried to climb Mount Shasta in California’s north gold country, but was defeated by the wind rushing down the mountain face. My father said the wind was always the conqueror, not the cold, or the snow, or the heat, but the wind that makes you deaf, numbs your touch, and pushes blood into your eyes.

My father was sleeping in a stone cabin at the foot of Mount Shasta and was awakened by the sickening smell of rotting wood and the muted voices of Chinamen. His bed became soiled with the breath of poor men. He was getting sick in the pre-dawn night when a voice spoke to him, “Do you know me?” a woman asked, touching his ears with her hands.

“Yes,” he lied, seeing the dim outline of her naked body. His eyes filled with smoke. He tried to breathe. The wood of the room smelled like burning dust as he reached for her.

“Are you afraid of dying with me?” she asked, drawing his hand to her stomach, putting her moist mouth in his ear, making him deaf, his throat ached for the moist moss of trees.

“Yes,” he answered, knowing she was the nightmare that made China the bitterness of his grandfather’s and father’s life. He heard her heart beating in his stomach. He left tears on her breast.

In all the days I visited my father in the hospital when he was dying, I don’t remember a single day in detail. I do not remember what I was doing when he died. I do not remember what day he went into the hospital, how many days he stayed there. What time he died. I never asked. I just knew one day in spring, 1957, it was all over. All I had left was a pile of pictures and some clothes my mother put away for me to wear when I got big enough.

My father is twenty-eight years old in the photo I carry of him. I remember him like that. He is seated in a wooden chair on a lawn somewhere, his legs are crossed, he is looking to his right. It is a settled look and if I try there’s an ambitious feeling to the photograph. Perhaps that’s because I’m his son. He is wearing a white shirt, dark V-neck sweater, heavy wool pants, checkered socks, and black shoes. The table at his right is also made of wood. It looks like a wooden box standing on one of its sides. There are heart-shaped holes cut in the two ends of the box table. A folded newspaper separates two empty coffee cups on the tabletop. A stone wall behind him divides the photo in half. Longleaf bushes spill over the top of the stone wall behind him. He is not yet a father. He will not be a father for four more years.

My father will always stay the same in that picture. April, 1945. And when I am twenty-eight we will be the same age. It is dangerous to honor your father. It is hard to really love your father. It is easy to respect him. When you are the same age, or even when you grow older than your father, like growing taller than him, your love changes to honor because you yourself would like to be honored. I must simply love him. When a son takes a risk of love, he naturally loves his father. He commits himself to his father. It is a dangerous risk.

In three more years we will be the same age and I will have been to all the places my father had been.

I remember you, Father, now with urgency. It is night and I am more like you than I have ever been. I hear the same sounds of a tropical night, the clicking of insects, the scrape of a lizard’s claws on the screen door. Tonight I remember a humid night on Guam when I held your forehead in my small hands as I rode on your shoulders. My hands felt your ears, the shape of your chin, and the shape of your nose until you became annoyed and placed my hands back on your forehead and shifted my weight on your shoulders. It is April.

When I was a boy, my father whispered to me from his hospital bed, “Rainsford, I love you more and more.” He cried and I thought he was singing. He was a father to me even when he was dying. He said, “Fathers should confess their youth to their sons. Confess the lovers of their youth.”

My mother kept my father’s love letters to her. I found the letters in an old box. I saw my mother and father in their youth. I see them as I see myself now. They are the celebration of strength for me.

I was left a father to myself after my father’s death. When a son or daughter dies, the parents have another or adopt another child to raise and love. When a family loses a beloved dog, they go out and buy another quickly before the self-pity replaces that life. When a father dies, there is only violence. I am violent. I commit myself to love, saying it is there, but never going further to grasp loving. My real life eludes action. It leaves me a father to myself.

My mother died eight years after my father and it was then that I realized I was my great-grandfather’s son 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 ...