STORIES

Caroline Hau

Manila/Japan

MY FATHER TELLS me that he once planted a circle of sunflowers around the house where he grew up. In
autumn, the sunflowers burst forth in a bloom of coppery light that seemed to form a magic circle around
the family. For this he got up at dawn every day to draw water from the pond on the outskirts of the
country. For fertilizer, he took the snake trail that wound through the peanut fields, shadowed by mist
and dew, to the neighboring countries for ten bits’ worth of cow dung in the basket. On rainy days, the
dung was worth even less; it was, in fact, given away. My father had forgotten that manure smelled. The
writer Lu Xun wrote that if a man stays long enough in a room full of orchids, he will miss the scent. But
all this happened long after the hungry years, and long before my father left the T’ang Mountains—for
“home” to the elders was always teng sua in Fujian—and joined his family in Hong Kong, long after he
settled down in the Philippines, married my mother, and raised a “table with four legs,” a son, and four
daughters. None of the relatives who stayed behind cared for the sunflowers, or even harvested their
seeds for oil. The garden wasted away, and finally had to be scraped off the land because the rot was
poisoning the air in the house.

When I started looking for the man my father had become in his childhood, I discovered that he had never
abandoned his garden, although he could not raise potted sunflowers on the window ledges of our
apartment on Lavezares Street. What he tried to do instead was to weave a circle of memories around his
children, watering it with countless telling, enriching it with years. But my father is a storyteller who
waited many years before he found a willing audience in his offspring because, as children, we could not—
would not—imagine that our parents had a life in which we played no part, and as teenagers, as we were
too busy being teenagers to think that our elders may have felt or thought the way we did. My father’s
stories seemed as remote as the tales of the Monkey King or the Three Kingdoms in the land of Rizal and
Coca-cola.

Another thing: my father has a peculiar way of telling his stories. He uses the pronoun nan—we—even
though he appears to be talking about himself. Thus, of his earliest memory when he was a little boy, my
father would say: “When we were tsihana, a group of bandits stormed our house, smashed open our
wooden closet, and made off with the only thing of value that we had during the Japanese times—our
blankets. Remember, this was autumns, we were four years old, and we barely survived the winter.” I
never knew for certain if, at any given moment, he was referring to himself alone or to his family or to the
whole country, or if he included me as well.

But I was intrigued that my father grew up without knowing his father, whom he would see only after the
war. Grandfather managed his flour business in the Philippines, and the Japanese blockade had cut off
communication and all means of sending money to his family in the T’ang Mountains. My father
associated his father’s absence with the hungry years. With no men in the household, my great
grandmother, a woman with very short patience, ruled over her daughters-in-law and their children. She
rationed their food; they had sweet potatoes from their farm. My father remembers his share of the meal
amounting to a bowl of broth. He had to poke for his one piece of potato beneath the cloud of soup.

Making salt was another matter. “That was how low China had fallen in our times,” my father would say.
“We had to steal our own salt from our own sea.” On a certain night each week, the women, bearing poles
with dangling cans, would sneak to the coast, fill their cans with seawater, and creep to a clearing in the
middle of the wilderness just beyond the country. The clearing was a concrete plate onto which my
grandmother would pour her can of seawater. Then the women would watch the wind and the darkness
soak up the water and leave the salt. The salt on the clearing made it seem as if they were all standing on
the moon. And what would my father be doing while the women worked? “We played, but most of the
time, we stood beside the baskets with our hand around the cord.” He had been afraid of being eaten up
by the shadows.

My grandfather come home in 1946. My father was six years old. “All of the sudden, we heard noises
outside the house. We couldn’t see anything except the yellow flicker from the lamp of evil-smelling oil
that your great-grandmother had lit for the evening. We went outside, and beyond was a line of donkeys,
twenty donkeys with packages strapped to their backs. All the young men in the country had come out to
help your grandfather unpack.”

My grandfather brought six years of deprivation in his bags: mirrors, combs, bolts of silk sloth, picture
frames, toothbrushes, slippers, iron works, everything useful and useless that he had accumulated in the
Philippines. From the war, he brought back a small coin and a sheaf of papers with ribbons on them. My
father learned that grandfather, a big, strapping man who had lost all his hair by the time he was thirty,
had fought as a guerilla in a place called Lucena, and the small coin and the papers were the reward. They
were promptly lost along with some of grandfather’s belongings after he died in the early sixties.

“What are they good for?” my father would say to those of us who wanted the medal as proof of our
grandfather’s connection to his adopted country. For himself, my father received the best of presents:
notebooks, a fountain pen, a wristwatch, and a pocket knife the length of a child’s forefinger—he played
with the last one for the long time. My grandfather gave away most of the things he brought to relatives
and neighbors. To have done otherwise was unthinkable.

With my grandfather’s homecoming, the hungry years ground to a halt. But my father found that he could
not shake off the habit of poverty. He who used to eat a bowl of sweet potatoes did not want the luxury
of rice. Near mealtime every day, my grandmother would take a bowl of rice and exchange it for sweet
potatoes of the neighbors. Many years later, my father would sup on his bowl of sweet potatoes amidst
salad and adobo.
He also developed a taste for work, even though my grandmother was happy to indulge him. He would
boast that, “your great-grandmother never lost her temper with me because I had pa-ak.” Pa-ak is a
Chinese word of which the closest equivalent in English is capability, without the confident brevity and
implicit pride. Thus, on his way home from school, my father picked grass and twigs for the stove fire,
scavenged through the peanut fields for the leftovers of harvest, bought and sold dung, fished and sold
the excess catch, made and sold red-bean pastries, worked the farm and, of course, the sunflower garden.
The hands that shoveled manure, guttered fish, turned the grindstone, and plowed the fields are the same
hands that would later wield rabbit-hair brushes, that would move across paper and trail dragons and
carp and tigers in their wake, the same hands that would carve the sinuous ancient script on soapstone.
“I’ve never been a gentleman artist,” my father laughs.

Yet he was not above mischief. He hated school and sat through hours of Confucius, filling the blank spaces
on his book with a bestiary of animals and flowers, insects, and people. His first prize-winner was one of
his more conventional efforts: a portrait of Chairman Mao. He fought other children for the sake of
fighting but, afterwards, was forced to bribe them to silence with oranges and peanuts and crickets. He
cursed and swore more than any other boy in school. His schoolmaster, who once made a mistake of
sitting on a chair full of thumbtacks after ignoring my father’s snickers, decided to teach him a lesson by
painting a black circle around his mouth for every curse word he uttered. It was not unusual for my father
to go around the school with a face filled with concentric circles that reached as far as his neck, a human
target board.

My father carried everything to its extreme. Whenever I see him perform ten sets of taichi exercises every
morning, or hear him talk about copying his master’s paintings eighteen times, I remind myself that here
was one who bought pigeons that cost the ordinary laborer a month’s wages in China, one whose father
bought horses for a hundred dollars each in 1947 currency, one whose family built the largest house in
the country, a house with forty rooms, a house so big that all the relatives put together filled only half the
rooms. One of the rooms would later be converted into a stable where they kept my grandfather’s favorite
chestnut horse.

In later years, my father would glorify his childhood because he spent some of his happiest days during
those years. About the years after his childhood, he was more reticent. When I told my parents that I
wanted to be a writer, my father would said: “But what will you write about if you have not lived enough—
hiding yourself in the house as you do?” He wanted me to tell the truth, and that meant an exacting fidelity
to the narrative he felt he had lived through. I have found my taste for extremes in his own compulsion
to excel in this truth. I have taken for my own the circle of sunlight, planted by a word, a gesture, a turning
up of the mouth.
But does it matter, after all, if I can no longer tell where my father’s stories leave off, and where my own
pick up? Does it matter if I make up the rest as I write? The Chineseness that, for a long time, I insisted
was an essence, the birthright of children who have had to ask themselves the questions “who am I” and
“why am I different,” is often a way of seeking some comfort in the habit of memory, albeit not one’s
own. Yet it is never just a memory, for it is something lived. It is as urgent as a call to prayer, as real as my
father’s callus-encrusted hands. It is the face of my great-grandmother, her secret hidden behind the strip
of cloth that covered her head. We who will so soften believe the stereotypes about ourselves—our thrift
and industry, our clannishness, our ethnocentrism—must trust our own capability to fill the gaps in our
parent’s histories, for there will always be blocks of time unaccounted for, questions unanswered.

The next time my father speaks of taking us back to the old house in China, to the little room where he
had slept and played as a child, to the seashore where he will teach us how to dig for treasures, I must
find the words (my mispronunciations of my father’s tongue sounding so awkward in my ears, so lacking
in sibilance and grace) to tell him that I have not lost him in the sepia and shadows in my head. He knows,
and must have always known, that in the language into which the past intrudes only as an adverb, distance
is but another way of justifying the constancy of connection.