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Parents and Children
PARENTS AND CHILDREN
Dear Mother, keep up your mind. Pray to Buddha silently. We will have a future and I hope it will be soon.
We want to swim in our own pond.
Clear or stinky, still it is ours.
Letter to My Mother,
tran thi nga
Then I looked again at this thief, this “Loaf-of-bread gunman” as the papers had tagged him. He had taken five loaves of bread, along with twelve dollars. Suddenly I could not stay there condemning this man, my father. It seemed such a waste, this magnificently strong man sitting there, his tremendous chest barely moving, hands
resting quietly, talking to me, his whole being showering torrents of words about me.
I Remember Papa,
harry dolan
Today at the beach my chubby-legged, brown-skinned daughter ran laughing into the water as fast as she could. My wife and I laughed watching her, until we heard behind us a low guttural curse and then an unpleasant voice raised in an imitation war whoop.
For My Indian Daughter,
lewis p. johnson
After the service at the funeral home, after we had moved outside, a woman
I didn’t know came over to me and said, “He’s happier where he is now.” I stared at
this woman until she moved away. I still remember the little knob of a hat she was wearing. Then one of my dad’s cousins—I didn’t know the man’s name—reached
out and took my hand. “We all miss him,” he said, and I knew he wasn’t saying it just
to be polite.
I began to weep for the first time since receiving the news. I hadn’t been able
to before. I hadn’t had the time, for one thing. Now, suddenly, I couldn’t stop. I held
my wife and wept while she said and did what she could do to comfort me there in
the middle of that summer afternoon.
My Father’s Life,
raymond carver
TRAN THI NGA
Letter to My Mother
Tran Thi Nga, who was born in China in 1927, was a social worker in Vietnam. In addition, she has worked as a journalist in both Asia and the United States. This letter, written in the early 1970s, suggests the connections she feels to her mother as well as the differences she sees between their lives and the places they live.
Suggestions for Prereading or Journal Writing
1.
Write a tribute to an older relative in your family. In this tribute, describe what you admire most about this person. What have you learned from observing and hearing about this person’s life experiences and everyday values?
2.
At this point in your life, what is the greatest sacrifice you have made? What is the greatest sacrifice someone else has made for you? Write a descriptive narrative responding to either of these questions.
3.
If you could make one wish for either one, or both, of your parents, what would be your wish? Explain the significance of your response.
———
Dear Mother,
I do not know if you are receiving my letters, but I will keep writing to you as you are always in my mind.
We have been here three years now. I have moved from Greenwich and have a wooden shingled house in Cos Cob. We have a garden in the back where we plant vegetables, flowers in the front the way we used to when we were together. I have a pink dogwood tree that blooms in spring. It looks like the Hoa dai tree, but has no leaves, only flowers.
We worked for months to clear away the poison ivy, a plant that turns your skin red and makes you itch.
We are near a beach, a school and a shopping center. Green lawns go down to the streets and there are many cars and garages. I am even learning to drive.
When we got our new house, people from the church came and took us to “Friendly’s” for ice cream. Americans celebrate with ice cream. They have so many kinds—red like watermelon, green for pistachio, orange sherbet like Buddha’s robes, mint chocolate chip. You buy it fast and take it away to eat. Our house is small, but a place to be together and discuss our daily life. At every meal we stare at the dishes you used to fix for us and think about you. We are sorry for you and for ourselves.
If we work hard here, we have everything, but we fear you are hungry and cold and lonesome. Last week we made up a package of clothes. We all tried to figure out how thin you must be now. I do not know if you will ever receive that package wrapped with all our thoughts.
I remember the last days when you encouraged us to leave the country and refused to go yourself. You said you were too old, did not want to leave your home and would be a burden to us. We realize now that you sacrificed yourself for our well-being.
You have a new grandson born in the United States. Thanh looked beautiful at her wedding in a red velvet dress and white veil, a yellow turban in her dark hair. She carried the chrysanthemums you love.
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You always loved the fall in Hanoi. You liked the cold. We don’t. We have just had the worst winter in a century, snow piled everywhere. I must wear a heavy coat, boots, fur gloves, and a hat. I look like a ball running to the train station. I feel that if I fell down, I could never get up.
Your grandson is three, in nursery school. He speaks English so well that we are sad. We made a rule. We must speak Vietnamese at home so that the children will not forget their mother tongue.
We have made an altar to Father. We try to keep up our traditions so that we can look forward to the day we can return to our country, although we do not know when that will be.
Here we are materially well off, but spiritually deprived. We miss our country. Most of all we miss you. Should Buddha exist, we should keep praying to be reunited.
Your daughter,
Nga
Suggestions for Writing and Discussion
Describe the tone of Tran Thi Nga’s letter to her mother. From the words and images she chooses to use, explain how you think she feels about the United States and about her homeland.
In much of this letter, Nga writes about common, everyday scenes and events. She describes flowers, her neighborhood, ice cream, the clothing she wears, and even the weather. Why do you think she spends so much time explaining these simple things? What do you surmise she wants to convey to her mother?
Look again at the parts of her life Nga chooses to share with her mother. Can you speculate on parts of her life she does not mention? What are possible explanations for these omissions?
4.
From reading this letter, do you think Nga believes that she will see her mother someday? Do you believe she will return to her homeland? Support your response with specific evidence or well-founded inferences from the text itself.
5.
In her last two lines, Nga writes: “We want to swim in our own pond/ Clear or stinky, still it is ours.” Stop and think about this metaphor. What exactly is she comparing to a pond—her old way of life, her homeland, her neighborhood, her yard, or something else? What does the metaphor of the pond imply about her life now?
Suggestions for Extended Thinking and Research
Assume the part of Nga’s mother. Write to your daughter responding to the letter from her that you have just read.
What was China like in 1927? Research this time and place in history to get a feel of what life was like the year Nga’s mother gave birth to her daughter.
Read (or reread) Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. Examine the values and hierarchy within the Chinese family as suggested by the relationships among Wang Lung, O-’lan, their families, and their children. Write an essay discussing the roles and values of each member of Wang Lung and O-’lan’s family.
HARRY DOLAN
I Remember Papa
In this essay, which first appeared in From the Ashes: Voices of Watts, edited by Budd Schulberg, Harry Dolan shows the pitfalls his parents faced as they struggled with poverty, illness, and negative racial stereotypes. By explaining his father’s life, Dolan urges readers to examine and, perhaps, reconsider their own views of families like his and, particularly, of the choices made by the men who are the fathers of those families.
Describe the earliest memories you have of your father (or grandfather, uncle, older brother, stepfather). Try to focus on specific, vivid images: eyes, hands, gestures, facial expressions, bits of conversation.
If you were in charge of writing a manual that defined a “good” father, what would you include? List the top ten qualifications, in order of their importance to you, that you believe all fathers should possess. Then reflect on the reasons for your choices and for the order in which you arranged your choices.
Describe a time when someone in your family embarrassed you; explain what happened and why you responded as you did.
The other night after attending a gratifying function which had been initiated to help the black man, specifically to help build a nursery for children of working mothers, and after seeing and hearing white people make speeches professing their understanding and desire to go to any length to help, I found myself suddenly cornered and forced to defend the fabled laziness of the black man.
What was especially surprising was the fact that I assumed this white acquaintance—since he had paid thirty dollars to attend this dinner held for the purpose of helping the black man—did, at least in part, have some sympathy with what his, the white people, had tried to accomplish.
As I stood there watching his eyes I became suspect of my own sincerity, for I stood attentively nodding my head and smiling. I lit a cigarette, raised an eyebrow, performed all of the white man’s laws of etiquette, and all the while I knew if it had been others of my black brothers, they would have cursed him for his smugness and invited him outside to test his theory of black man’s courage and laziness. Of course I did none of these things. I grinned as he indicated in no uncertain terms that as soon as the black man got off his lazy butt and took advantage of all the blessings that had been offered him for the last two hundred years, then he, the white man, would indeed be willing to help.
I could have answered him—and was tempted to, for he was obviously sincere. Instead, I found an excuse to slip away and let a white man fight my battle, a friend, even a close friend. I went to a far corner and blindly played a game of pool by myself as the voices of this man and my friend dissected me. I stacked the pool balls, leaned over the table, and remembered a black man I had known.
It was said of him later in his life that he had let his family down. He’d been lazy, no-account, a troublemaker. Maybe so, maybe so, but I can’t help remembering nights of his pacing the squeaking floor muttering to himself, coming back across the floor, sitting down, his legs trembling as he listened to the woman plead for him not to do anything bad.
“I’ll go to hell first before I’ll let you and the children starve.” God, how many times had I heard him say that! How many other men standing bunched in helpless stagnation have I heard vow to take a gun and get some food for their children! Yes, they were planning to commit a crime; yes, they were potential criminals. Then. They are usually black too—another crime, it seems.
I remember that man, but more I remember his woman, my mother. Curiously though, I never remember her dancing, running, playing; always lying down, the smell of disinfectant strong, the deep continuous coughing, the brown paper bag filled with the toilet paper red with bubbly spit and blood, lying half concealed under the bed.
I never remember her eating food such as bread, meat, potatoes; only apples and only Delicious apples. In those days five cents apiece. She was a small woman, barely five foot.
“Junior,” she would say softly. She never spoke above a whisper. “Go to the store and get me an apple.” The thin trembling hand would reverse itself and slide up and under the covers and under the pillow and then return as though of its own volition, the weight almost too much, and as I’d start out the door, she would always smile and say, “Hurry, Junior.”
I’d nod, and always, always there seemed to be a need to hurry. Those trips were always made with a feeling of breathless fear. I didn’t know why then, only that for some reason I must always come back as soon as possible.
I was returning with an especially large apple, walking along, tempted to bite just a tiny piece, when I turned the corner and saw the black police ambulance standing in front of my door. Suddenly I had to go to the bathroom so bad I couldn’t move. I stood watching as two uniformed men came out with the stretcher, and then the sound of my sister’s shrill voice hit me.
“Mama, Mama,” she was screaming. I could see her twisting and swinging at the lady next door as she was held back. I stood there feeling the hot piss run down my trembling legs, feeling cold chills spatter through my body, causing frozen limbs to spasmodically begin to move. I forced myself toward the police wagon as the men opened the doors and slid the stretcher along the bare metal. I saw my mother’s head bounce on the floor.
“Wait,” I moaned, “don’t hurt her.” Then I was running, screaming, “Please don’t hurt her.”
I looked down at her pain-filled face, and she smiled, even then she smiled. I showed her the apple. The effort to nod seemed a terrible effort but she did, her eyes so very bright, so very shiny.
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“You eat it, Junior, you and sis.”
“What’s wrong, Mama?” I asked softly. “You really, really sick now?”
She nodded.
“Your father will be home soon. Tell him I’m at the General Hospital. Tell him to—to hurry.”
“I’ll tell him, Mama,” I promised. “I’ll tell him to hurry, Mama.” She nodded sadly and puckered her lips as she always did since we weren’t allowed to kiss her.
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That was the last time I saw my mother except at the grave. My father came to the funeral with two white men who stood on each side of him all the time. There were people crying all around us. My grandmother kept squeezing me and moaning. I saw my father try to cover his face but one of the men said something and he stood up stiffly after that. I didn’t cry, because my mother seemed to look happier, more rested than I had ever seen her. For some reason, I was glad she was dead. I think maybe, except for us, she was too.
I was nine, my sister five. It was not until ten years later that I saw my father again.
We sat on opposite sides of a screen and talked into telephones. I had come there to tell him that in spite of my beginning, I had made it. I was nineteen, and a radioman in the U.S. Coast Guard, ready to fight and die for my country. There had been something mysterious about his smile.
“I’m proud of you, boy,” he said. “You’re a real man. You know I volunteered for the front lines too, but they turned me down.”
We don’t want you, I thought, we’re not criminals, we’re honest, strong. Then I looked again at this thief, this “Loaf-of-bread gunman” as the papers had tagged him. He had taken five loaves of bread, along with twelve dollars. Suddenly I could not stay there condemning this man, my father. It seemed such a waste, this magnificently strong man sitting there, his tremendous chest barely moving, hands resting quietly, talking to me, his whole being showering torrents of words about me.
25
“Be careful, boy, there are so many ways to fail, the pitfall sometimes seems to be the easiest way out. Beware of my future, for you must continue, you must live. You must, for in you are all the dreams of my nights, all the ambitions of my days.”
A bell rang and we stood up and a man pointed me toward a heavy door. I looked back, and saw him standing easy, hands at his side, so very calm, yet my mind filled to overflowing with the many things he had not said. It was to be ten years before he walked again as a free man, that is, as a physically free man.
I remember an earlier time, an earlier chapter of my growing up. I remember the first time my mother said we were taking lunch to my father’s job. We had been down to the welfare line and I had stood with her, our feet burning against the hot pavement, and slowly moved forward in the sun. Years later I stood in chow lines over half of the world, but no desert, no burning deck was as hot as that day.
At last we reached the man sitting at the desk and my mother handed him the book of stamps. She smiled, a weak almost timid smile, as he checked her name and thumbed her to the food line.
As we headed home, my wagon was loaded with cans of corned beef, powdered milk, powdered eggs, and white margarine that she would later color yellow to look like butter.
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At home we made sandwiches and off we went to my father’s job, to take him his lunch. I pulled my sister along in my wagon, a Red Flyer.
It was to be a picnic, a celebration really, my father’s new job.
I remember the wagon did not have a tongue or handle but only a rope with which I pulled it wobbling along. We were excited, my sister and I, as we left our district of dirt streets and unpaved sidewalks and began to make our way along roads called boulevards and malls we had never had occasion to travel. The streets themselves were fascinating, so different. They were twice as wide, and there were exotic trees along the sidewalks and lo and behold trees down the center of the street as far as I could see and then we turned the corner and before us stretched an overwhelming sight. An overhead highway was being built. Columns rose to staggering heights, bulldozers thrust what seemed to me mountains of dirt before them, and hundreds, no thousands of men seemed to be crawling like ants hurrying from one point to another. Cranes lifted nets of steel and laid them in rows on the crushed rock.
I stared in awe at important-looking white men in metal hats, carrying rolls of papers which they intermittently studied, then pointing into space at what to me seemed only emptiness.
And then I saw my father. He sat among fifty other black men, all surrounded by great boulders marked with red paint. They all held steel chisels with which they cut along the marked lines. They would strike a certain point and the boulder would split into smaller pieces and as we approached there was a silence around them except for the pinging of the hammer against the chisel. In all the noise it was a lonely sound, futile, lost, oppressive. My father seemed to be concentrating, his tremendous arm whipping the air. He was stripped to the waist, black muscles popping sweat, goggled eyes for the metal and stone only. We stood there, the three of us, my mother, my sister, and I, and watched my father work for us, and as he conquered the huge boulder my chest filled with pride. Each stroke shouted for all the world to hear: This is my family and I love them! No one can tell me this was the act of a lazy man.
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Suddenly a white man walked up and blew a whistle and the black men all looked up and stopped working. My father glanced over at me, grinned and winked. He was glistening with sweat, the smell strong and powerful. He dropped his big hand on my shoulder and guided me to a large boulder. “Hey, boy, you see me beat that thing to bits? This one’s next,” he said, indicating the one that shaded us from the sun. “I’ll pound it to gravel by nightfall.” It was a challenge he expected, he welcomed. That was my lazy, shiftless father.
And then one day they brought him home, his thumb, index, and middle finger gone from his left hand. They sat him in the kitchen chair and mumbled something about carelessness. He sat there for two hours before he answered our pleadings.
“Chain broke, I—I was guiding boulder. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t get my hand out from under in time—I, goddam it, Jean, they took my fingers off. I layed right there, my hand under the rock, and they nipped them like butchering a hog. Look at my goddam hand.”
My mother held him in her arms and talked to him. She spoke softly, so softly my sister and I, standing in the corner, couldn’t hear the words, only the soothing softness of her voice.
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“Joe, Joe, we can.” And then he began to cry like—like I sometimes did when I was hurt deep inside and couldn’t do anything about it.
After that there was a change in him. My father had been a fighter. He had feared no man white or black. I remember the time we were sitting on a streetcar and a woman had forgotten her fare—or maybe she never had any in the first place. Anyway, the driver slammed the doors on her and held her squeezed between them.
My father jumped up, snatched the driver out of the seat, and let the woman out. He and the driver had words that led to battle and Pop knocked the driver down just as a patrolman arrived. The patrolman didn’t listen to any of the people that tried to explain what had happened. He just began to swing his night stick at my father’s head. It was a mistake. My father hit him once and even today I can see all the people laughing at the funny look on the policeman’s face as he staggered back all the way across the street and up against a building, slowly sagging down.
The police wagon arrived with four other policemen and one told him they were going to beat his brains in when they got him down town.
My pop had laughed then and backed against the building.
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“I guess ain’t no sense me going peaceable then.”
They knocked out all his upper front teeth that day, but as he said later, “Them four white boys will think of me every time they shave.”
They finally overpowered him and dragged him, still struggling, to the wagon. One of them kept muttering, “He’s one fighting son of a black bitch, he’s a fighting son of a bitch.”
All the time I hadn’t said a word or cried or yelled as they stomped and kicked him. I had shut my eyes and held my lips tightly pressed together and I had done just as he’d always told me.
“You stay out of it, boy, stay real quiet, and when that wagon leaves, you run behind and keep it in sight. If they lose you, you ask someone where the closest police station is—that’s where I’ll be. You go home and tell your mother.”
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That’s the way he had been before losing his left hand. Afterwards, well, it took a lot from him. He told me one day, laughing and shaking the nub as he called it, “If I’d only had the thumb, just the lousy thumb, I’d have it made.”
Gradually he lost the ability to see humor in the nub. I think the whole thing came to a head the night I killed the kitten.
We hadn’t had meat or potatoes for over two weeks. Even the grease drippings were gone and my mother was too sick to raise her head from the pillow. So I had gotten the skillet and put it in the open grate. We had two cups of flour so I mixed water with it and poured it into the greasy skillet. I can still recall the coldness of the room on my back and the warmth from the grate on my face as my sister and I knelt and hungrily watched the flour brown.
You know, today my wife marvels at how, no matter what she puts before me, I eat with relish. My children say that I eat very fast. I pray to God they never have to experience the causes of my obsession. But back to the story—the flour finally hardened and I broke a piece for my sister and a piece for my mother and left mine in the skillet on the table.
I took my mother’s piece over to the bed and put it in her hand. She didn’t move so I raised her hand to her mouth and she began to suck on it. Then I heard my sister scream, “Topsy is eating your food, Junior, Topsy’s eating your food!” I turned around to see the cat tearing at my tiny piece of hard dough. I went wild. I leaped across the room and grabbed the kitten by the tail and began slamming her against the wall.
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“That’s my food,” I kept yelling, “my food!” At last I heard my sister screaming, “She’s bleeding, you’re killing Topsy. Here, here, eat my bread. Please don’t kill her.”
I stopped, horrified, staring at the limp nothing I now held. It was two weeks later that they got me to speak and that same night my father left the house for the last time. I don’t say that what he did was right. No, it most assuredly was wrong. But what I do ask is, what else could he have done? I need an answer quickly now, today, right away, for I tell you this, my children will not starve, not here, not in this time of millions to foreign countries and fountains to throw tons of water upward to the sky, and nothing to the hungry, thirsty multitudes a stone’s throw away.
How does Dolan feel about white people? Give specific evidence from the essay to support your response.
Dolan entitles this piece, “I Remember Papa.” However, he writes that “I remember that man, but more I remember his woman, my mother.” Why then, doesn’t he include the word “Mama” in his title? In your opinion, is this title a contradiction or an apt phrase that reflects his central idea?
Describe Dolan’s mother. What type of a person was she? How does Dolan’s father compare or contrast to her? Why do you think he would remember her more than he remembers his father?
Imagine you are a rider on the bus when Dolan’s father frees the woman from the bus door and then fights with four policemen. What is your response? Is he heroic? Foolish? Wise? Noble? Headstrong? Or something else? Explain your answer.
Dolan provides close-up, detailed views of several events in which his father plays a role. Examine these events and make inferences about how Dolan, as an adult writing this piece, feels about his father. How does this adult view compare with his views as a young boy and as a young man?
By examining Dolan’s childhood and adult views of his father, and by examining your own childhood and adult views of parents or other authority figures, think about how we try to discover what is true in our lives. How do our past memories embellish, cloud, tint, or taint our present perceptions? To what extent should we pay heed to our memories, and to what extent should we disregard them?
Argue for or against the following proposition: It is acceptable to commit a crime when your family’s survival is on the line.
Dolan’s father leaves his sick wife and two small children for the last time after his son frantically flings a kitten against the wall. Dolan says, “I don’t say what he did was right. No, it most assuredly was wrong. But what I do ask is, what else could he have done?” Write an essay responding to Dolan’s question. Did his father have any other options? What were the roadblocks in his way? Did he have anything or anyone who could have helped him out?
GRACE MING-YEE WAI
Chinese Puzzle
Grace Ming-Yee Wai, a first-generation Chinese-American, grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. When she was ten years old, her father was shot to death during a robbery that netted the killer twenty-six dollars in change. In the following essay, Wai offers a collage of episodes from her childhood as a way of describing her father and of suggesting how both his life and his death affected the values she developed.
Describe what you would consider to be the ideal family. In what ways is your own family similar to or different from this ideal?
Take twenty minutes today to write about your father in your journal. After you do this freewriting, come to some conclusions about what you know and don’t know about your father.
I am a first generation Chinese-American woman educated in both private and public American schools. I grew up in the mid-South city of Memphis, Tennessee, where there were very few other Asian families. We lived in the South, I realized after my teens, primarily for economic reasons. Although there were more Asians in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, it would have been very expensive to live in those cities, and our grocery store would have had much more competition. My parents immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong before I was born, for a better life for themselves and their children. Neither had a college education, but both emphasized hard work and the importance of education. Like all parents, they hoped their children would be fortunate enough to receive a quality education that would provide future opportunity and financial security.
My sister, brother, and I have been lucky to receive an education and all of us have reached or are near our goals, but not without pain and sacrifices. When I was 10 years old, my father was shot and killed while being robbed for $26 in change. He was the favorite son of seven living children. He took in one of my cousins from Hong Kong so she could study nursing. My youngest uncle was the only one of their generation to become a professional, primarily because he was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go to dental school at the University of Tennessee in Memphis.
Dad owned a small grocery store in a poor neighborhood. My parents worked more than 12 hours a day, seven days a week. We lived above the store in five rooms and one bathroom. At different times, my grandmother, three uncles, an aunt and her two sons also lived with us. My brother, sister and I had a maid who came six days a week to take care of us. I became very attached to her and cried on her day off. I still send Willie Christmas cards every year. My father had a fierce temper. Whenever something upset him a little, he yelled a lot, so my brother, sister, and I shuddered at the thought of angering him. His bark was worse than his bite, however. He was also very fair. He loved us all very much. He and Mom worked hard for us, for the family. Family meant everything.
Since Mom and Dad worked so much, there was not much time for us kids. We occasionally went to Shoney’s for a hamburger. It was a big treat to ...
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