Archive for the tag 'Mother Tongue'

My Father’s Silence

Paul June 20th, 2010

I wrote a play in 1988 about my mother.  Although my father is talked about a great deal in Mother Tongue, he never actually appears in the play because I always thought he deserves a play of his own and that, one day, I would give him his due.  I still want to, but every time I think about him now, all I hear is his silence.

In December of 1969, seventeen months after I left the Philippines for the United States, my father died.  I wrote about those first seventeen months away from home in a short story called “Flight.” The story was published in 1970 and has been included in a number of anthologies, but I must admit that I haven’t read it, not since I wrote it, until just moments ago.

Here are bits and pieces from “Flight.”  It begins with my family seeing me off at the Manila International Airport.

I kissed my mother goodbye and told her to stop crying….Then I turned to my father.  There were so many things which I had wanted to tell him, but the words wouldn’t come.  They never do, when you most need them.  And then they sound false.  Luckily, my father understood….He grabbed my hand and shook it vigorously.  The strength of his grip surprised me.  I realized with a start that I had never shaken his hand before!  I withdrew my hand quickly, but he grabbed it again.  And this time he pressed his calendar-watch and amethyst ring into the palm of my hand.  The actual physical contact was brief, but his touching me like that brought back a load of childhood memories, many of them unpleasant as well as embarrassing.

Again I did not know what to say.  I could not imagine my father without his old calendar-watch and amethyst ring.  He had worn both for as long as I could remember and now he was giving them to me!

The calendar-watch had hands which glowed in the dark, so you could tell the time all the time.  It made no difference whether you were in your bedroom at 12:00 midnight or inside a darkened movie house at 12:00 noon—you could still tell the exact time because of those big luminous hands.  As for the ring, it seemed almost too large and ostentatious for anyone’s hand except my father’s.  The enormous purple birthstone was flanked on both sides by tiny white diamonds, and the whole ring sparkled with life every time light fell on it.

I fastened my father’s old calendar-watch on my right wrist and slipped his ring onto the ring finger of my left hand.  I wanted to embrace him, to tell him that I loved him, but I checked both impulses as I disappeared into the departing lounge that hot and humid day at the Manila International Airport. I vaguely heard my father’s voice ringing after me.  ”Don’t forget to reset the calendar date on the watch when you get to America!  Be sure to turn the hands back. You gain a full day when you cross the International Date Line!”  Those were his parting words.

They were also the last words he ever said to me.  My mother called me the night of December 6, 1969 to tell me that my father had died.  He had not been well for a couple of years, and now he was gone.  It was Sunday afternoon halfway across the world.  My father had died ten minutes past midnight on Sunday.  Mother said many of the people from the church were at the house.  They were a great comfort to her.  No, she didn’t want me to come home for the funeral.  She said my father would have wanted me to stay in school because it was the week of final exams, so I can graduate after just one more semester. “You can come home in May, after you graduate.”

I went to the kitchen and poured myself a Scotch-and-water.  Back in the living room, I remembered with a start that, seventeen months ago, my father and I had been drinking Scotch-and-water at the bar in the airport.  It was the first time we had ever drunk together.  I thought it ironic that the first time also turned out to be the last.

The living room was uncomfortably still.  Left to myself, I decided that I wanted noise, clatter, music, life.  I looked through my records—flipping through Liszt, Chopin, Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart—rejecting one and all until I chanced upon the “Farewell, Angelina” album by Joan Baez.

Joan Baez.  Her voice has an airy quality about it which reminds me of lofty rooms and high ceilings, rainy mornings and windy afternoons, snowy evenings and cold December nights.

“You must leave now—

Take what you need you think will last;

But whatever you wish to keep,

You’d better grab it fast.”

 I poured myself another drink in the kitchen and turned off the lights in the living room when I came back.  The house plunged into eerie darkness.  I looked at my watch.  Its hands glowed luminously in the dark.  It was only 11:30 P.M.

Then it dawned on me.

I realized with a start that I had been staring at my father’s old calendar-watch.  I was wearing the watch he had pressed into my hand the last time I saw him!  What had I done with his amethyst ring? Why wasn’t I wearing that, too?  Again I stared at the watch, my eyes following the voyage of the second-hand as it overtook the minute-hand and then the hour-hand.

I remembered my father’s parting words at the airport:  ”Don’t forget to reset the calendar date on the watch when you get to America!  Be sure to turn the hands back!  You gain a full day when you cross the International Date Line!”

Saturday night was nearly over in Lawrence.  Then I realized with another start that, soon, it would be midnight.  Soon it would be Sunday.  Soon the luminous hands of my father’s old calendar-watch would indicate that it was ten minutes past midnight, in mid-America.  Technically speaking, right here, right now, my father was still alive, and he was going to die all over again, for my benefit–in Kansas!

“Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,

Crying like a fire in the sun.

Look out!  The saints are coming through.

And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.”

I swallowed the rest of my drink and held back my tears.

Forty-one years later, I still haven’t wept for my father.  Perhaps because I wasn’t with him when he died, perhaps because I did not go home for the funeral so I never actually saw him dead, for whatever reason, there has never been any closure for me when it comes to me and my father.  In my mind, he’s still very much alive, although these days I no longer remember what his voice sounds like.  He never spoke much, to begin with. And now all I hear is his silence.

Today is Father’s Day.  Bless me, father, for I have been remiss.

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My Mother’s Laughter

Paul May 9th, 2010

Although I emigrated to the United States in 1968, my mother did not come to visit me in Kansas until August of 1976, after she had already been in America for four months.  The reason why she decided to make the long journey from the Philippines was because my play Conpersonas was being performed in April of that year at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and also because (I think) she finally realized I was never going to be a doctor or a businessman, so she might as well see what I was really up to.

I was still in Kansas when my mother’s early-morning flight on Philippine Air Lines landed at Dulles International Airport in Washington.  I was arriving later the same day, but I had made arrangements for someone to meet her at Dulles, and to check her into the room which had been reserved for her at the Watergate Hotel, right next door to the Kennedy Center.  I was about to leave the house for my own flight to D.C. when the telephone rang.  It was her.

“Why weren’t you at the airport to meet me?” my mother asked hysterically.  She had been flying for nearly 16 hours, had been in transit for over 30 hours, probably hadn’t slept a wink, and had probably been terrified of going through U.S. Immigration and Customs all by herself.  ”What kind of a son are you?”

“Mom,” I reasoned with her, trying my best to explain that I had no control over airline schedules, but that I would be at the Watergate in time to have dinner with her.

“Hurry!  I’m hungry!” she wailed.

“Order something from Room Service.”

“It’s okay.  I’ll wait for you.  But hurry.”

“I’m on my way.”

“Take a taxi.  It will be faster.”

To this day, I don’t know if my mother was trying to be funny with that remark, or whether she really had no idea that, unlike the places in Manila that she frequently visited and patronized, Lawrence, KS was not a short cab ride away from downtown Washington D.C.

But, back to the momentous event at the Kennedy Center. If nothing else, I think my Chinese mother was truly impressed by the fact that my play in English was being performed by Caucasians, in front of mostly Caucasians, at the Kennedy Center.  Although Conpersonas was a serious drama about identical twin brothers who commit suicide within hours of one another, my mother sat through the entire performance at the Eisenhower Theater with an enormous grin on her face.  She might as well have been watching My Fair Lady or The Sound of Music. She had been introduced from the stage earlier in the evening, so people knew where she was sitting. If anyone in the audience had seen her beaming happily as the two unhappy brothers in the play shot and killed themselves, they might have jumped to wrong conclusions as to why I had left the Philippines, why I had safely chosen to keep my mother 7,000 miles away from me.

In any case, to my great surprise, after the hoopla of Conpersonas at the Kennedy Center was over, instead of returning with me to Lawrence, KS, where I had already been teaching as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the English Department at the University of Kansas, my mother decided to spend some time with her friend Helen from the Philippines, whom she hadn’t seen for some time, who was now living in Brooklyn.  ”Helen never graduated from college,” my mother confided, “but already she is running her own business in Chinatown!”  My mother thought it might be fun to live with Helen for a while, perhaps even work for her for a while.

Hard as I tried, I could not picture my mother working in a sweatshop alongside all the illegal immigrants from China and Hong Kong packed to overflowing on the second floor of an old building in Chinatown that probably should have been condemned years ago .  And I was terrified that she might get mugged in the subways.  But there was no dissuading her.  In the Philippines, my mother was accustomed to having servants attending to her every need, chauffeurs driving her everywhere.  But now she was determined to be independent, to earn her own keep in America, just like an American, walking the mean streets of Lower Manhattan, daring anyone to mug her, in the subway or anywhere else. “Don’t worry about me,” she said.  ”Go back to Kansas.  I’ll be fine in New York with Helen.  She is like a daughter to me.  She will treat me like her own mother. If I get mugged, it will be God’s will, because I would not be here in America had you not invited me to come and see your play about those two brothers who killed themselves at the Kennedy Center.”

And so, with a heavy heart, I deposited my mother with Helen in Brooklyn.  But, before I left, I cautioned my mother never to look anyone in the eye when she’s out and about, never to argue with anyone who accosts her and, most importantly, to carry at least $20 at all times on her person, so she can give it to anyone who wants to rob her, to keep muggers from harming her because she wasted their time when they could have been mugging other rich old ladies. My mother looked at me oddly, as though I were in cahoots with her would-be muggers, but I wouldn’t leave until she promised.  And so she did.

Months went by. I called my mother two or three times a week from Kansas, and was delighted to hear that she loved New York, that she was “Miss Popularity” in the sorority of sweatshop sisters, and that she had yet to be mugged. According to my mother, Helen’s “factory” was turning out high-end clothing for fancy department stores like Bloomingdale’s, and it was her job to inspect the lingerie which were coming off “the assembly line.”  She was Inspector #17, and she tucked a slip of paper into every piece of lingerie after she was done inspecting it, signifying that the garment had been inspected by Inspector #17.

I used to daydream about anyone who might have bought any lingerie at Bloomingdale’s on Lexington Avenue and 59th St. in New York City between early May and mid-August of 1976. Chances are my mother had her finger on the unmentionables of unsuspecting shoppers like Kim Novak or Jane Fonda long before they slipped them on (or off) to charm their beastly bedmates.

When being Inspector #17 finally lost its glamour in that non-air-conditioned loft in Chinatown in the heat of August in New York, my mother decided it was time to visit me in Lawrence, KS.  Her arrival had been much anticipated by all my friends and colleagues at the University of Kansas.  She was going to stay for a couple of weeks, so I prepared a bedroom for her on the upper level of the house, with a bathroom all to herself.  I was giving a cocktail party for her. Lovely finger sandwiches were being prepared by a woman who was nearly blind, who lived in North Lawrence.  The only way I could ever find her house was by the three-foot tall statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary she had out on her lawn. A bartender had been hired to mix and serve drinks, and to help clean up the place afterwards. Invitations had been sent out to 75 people, and everyone had accepted.

When the appointed day arrived, my mother emerged from her bedroom, resplendent in one of the many bejewelled evening gowns she had brought with her from Manila, one of which she had worn the evening of my play at the Kennedy Center, but the others she had had no occasion to wear in Brooklyn or the sweatshops in Chinatown.  She was a big hit at the party, a merry widow too young to have a son like me.  Everyone loved her.  No one suspected her secret life as Inspector #17.

The morning after the night before, sometime around 6:30 A.M., I heard my mother scratching on my bedroom door.  ”Paul! Paul!” she whispered.

“What?  What time is it?  Why aren’t you still in bed sleeping?”

“Paul! Paul!” she repeated, more urgently.  ”Did you take the toothpaste from my bathroom upstairs?”

“What’re you talking about?  Why should I take your toothpaste?  Go back to bed, please.”

She went away, but only briefly.  Moments later, she was again outside my room, scratching on the door.  ”Paul! Paul!” again she whispered.

“What is it now?”

“Did you take the Revlon Blush-On from the bathroom upstairs?”

“What Revlon Blush-On?  What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“My Revlon Blush-On.  You know, for my make-up.  I cannot go out without my Revlon Blush-On.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.  What on earth would I do with your Revlon Blush-On?”

There was no going back to sleep, so we searched through all the drawers in her bathroom upstairs. The guests at the party had been using that bathroom all night.  All her travellers checks were still there, as were some of her more common everyday jewelry.  Nothing was missing except her toothpaste and her Revlon Blush-On.  It was a big mystery.  My mother burst out laughing.  She laughed so hard the tears rolled down her cheeks.  She laughed so hard, her knees were weak, and she had to sit on the toilet.  I’ve never heard her laugh like that, ever.

“What?  What’s so funny?”

“I lived for four months in New York, and nothing happened to me,” she howled.  ”Everyday, I put $20 in my purse like you told me, to give to muggers, and no one ever mugged me.  But I come to Lawrence, Kansas to meet your friends, and someone goes into the bathroom during the party and steals my toothpaste and my Revlon Blush-On!”

A couple of days later, when I was telling this story to some friends from the Theatre Department who had not been able to attend the party because they were in rehearsal with a play, one of them snapped to attention

“Wait a minute,” she exclaimed.  ”at one of our parties, the morning after, we discovered that someone had taken the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo!”

Others began to remember losing similar sorts of things from their bathrooms after parties of one sort or another. Nothing valuable.  Always small, inconsequential items.  A bathroom freak was among us!  An academic klepto!  We began to compare the guest list at these parties, and it did not take long before we thought we had our man…or woman.  No way of proving it, of course, but when I described the woman in question to my mother, she lit up immediately.  She remembered the woman, a recent arrival from Poland.

“Why, yes,” my mother laughed.  ”That woman asked me how I managed to keep my skin so soft, and I told her that the only make-up I use is Revlon Blush-On!”

Mystery solved.

After that first visit in August of 1976, my mother has been back to see me in Kansas three or four more times, and each time she doubles up laughing whenever I tell people about how she once dazzled an “admirer” in Lawrence with her pearly white Asian teeth and her blushing pink cheeks.

My mother is now 86 years old, living in Manila with my married sister, her husband and their three children.  It has been thirteen years since she has visited me in Kansas.  If she is reading this now, I doubt if the story will make her double up and laugh, like she used to.  I don’t know if she will remember the story at all.

My mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s.  My sister says that, these days, our mother just sits there all day, not recognizing anyone, but she smiles whenever she feels a friendly presence nearby.  I hope she is smiling right now because it’s Mother’s Day.  She has had many sorrows in her remarkable life, which I’ve written about in my play Mother Tongue, so perhaps it is a blessing that she no longer remembers the wars in China and the Philippines that she has lived through, the children she bore who should not have died so young. Although my sister, my brothers and I now choose to remember only the happy times we’ve had in each other’s company, someday we too will forget that we were ever even happy together.

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Embracing or Erasing Race?

Paul October 22nd, 2009

In the bad old days, where racism is concerned, even though they frequently wore white hoods to cover up their faces, we knew exactly who our enemies were.  In public, they were unafraid to call us “Nigger” and all its equivalents–”Chink,” “Jap,” “Gook,” “Flip,” “Spic,” “Wop,” “Kike,” “Polack,” ad nauseam.  Then came the Age of Political Correctness.  The white hoods disappeared from view, and the racial slurs went into hiding.

With the election of President Obama, we briefly fooled ourselves into thinking that this was, indeed, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.  It’s now clear, however, that we’ve been hoodwinked, and the hateful epithets and images are back, uglier than ever. In some quarters, they are even worn and displayed proudly, as badges of honor, shows of patriotism, signalling a call to action, perhaps even a licence to kill.  Aquarius never felt more like Armaggedon.

I grew up with overt racism in the Philippines.  Being Chinese, belonging to the wealthier middle class, I was taught to distrust the Filipinos, whom we all referred to as “primitive dogs.”  The Filipinos, in turn, taunted us with a sing-song chant which I can still hear inside my head, over half a century later.  Intsik beho, tulo laway! which I can only roughly translate as Chinky workhorse, saliva drooling! Odd as this may sound, I did not know the meaning of racism until I saw the movie adaptation of South Pacific in 1958. After I heard the anger, the pain and the outrage as sung by John Kerr in the song “You’ve Got To Be Taught,”  I would never be the same again. I began to dream about what life might be like in “the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave.”  But it would take another ten years before I could finally leave for the United States.

In all honesty, I cannot say that I have ever been discriminated against, overtly, here in America, not the way I see and hear stories about how other People of Color continue to be treated in certain parts of these United States, not just by the ignorant and the ill-educated, but also by people who really ought to know better, some of them our own elected State Representatives and Members of Congress, all of whom claim to be right-thinking and right-minded Christians.  Is this why they are called The Religious Right?  What’s wrong with these people?  Have they never seen South Pacific on stage?  In the movies?  On television?

There’s discrimination, and then there’s discrimination. Some subtle, some not so subtle.  I remember Luci Tapahonso, a senior colleague of Navajo descent at the University of Kansas, telling me about salespeople following her vigilantly in department stores, suspicious that she might be a shoplifter. She also talked about a particular grocery store in town where she was frequently informed by cashiers who probably meant well, that she might want to “check out the week-old fruits and vegetables in the back of the store because they are cheaper.”

After Luci told me about these embarrassing encounters, I recalled that I too had had a peculiar experience at this same grocery store.  It had happened a while back.  As I remember it, on that particular occasion, there were a couple of people ahead of me at the checkout line.  While waiting my turn in line, I picked up a copy of TV Guide which was on display near the checkout counter. As I was leafing through the magazine, the young cashier, who looked like she might have been one of my students, suddenly yelled at me.  ”Are you going to buy that magazine, or are you just going to stand there and read it for free?”  Everyone heard her, and now everyone was looking at me.  I mumbled an apology and quickly put the magazine back on the rack.  I could have abandoned the groceries in my cart but I didn’t. When my turn came, I paid my bill in silence and left the store in silence.  Driving home, and for a couple of hours afterwards, I seethed.  Why didn’t I throw the magazine in the stupid cashier’s face?  Why didn’t I demand to see the manager and insist that the employee be fired for her rudeness to a customer who had been shopping in that store for years?  And then, of course, I found myself wondering if the Caucasian cashier would have treated me the same way had I been white and comely, not yellow and cowardly.  But, the moment had passed, and now I’ll never know.

When CONPERSONAS, my first play, won the National Student Playwriting Award of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival in 1976, the prize included representation by the William Morris Agency in New York, the best in the business.  Biff Liff, my agent, said he was happy CONPERSONAS had won the award, but that he would have a hard time marketing the play because it was much too “intellectual.”  He said I should capitalize on, and write about, my own unique Asian background.  That particular scenario, he said, he could sell.  He mentioned Frank Chin, whose plays Chickencoop Chinaman (1971) and The Year of the Dragon (1974) had been produced successfully in New York, and whose book Aiiieeeee: An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974) had also just been published.  I told Biff Liff that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as an “ethnic” writer, that I was already hard at work on two other plays, neither of which drew from my own unique Asian background.  He urged me no further and, shortly after that, we had a predictable parting of ways.

Although I have no regrets about the chronology or the subject matter of my plays to date, I must admit, grudgingly, that Biff Liff was a visionary of sorts.  In the same year that I rejected his offer to market my ethnicity, Maxine Hong Kingston burst onto the scene with The Woman Warrior, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 1976; followed by China Men, which was given the National Book Award in 1981.  Then came the plays of David Henry Hwang, among them M Butterfly in 1988; and the novels of Amy Tan, starting with The Joy Luck Club in 1989.  And, of course, the movies of Ang Lee were waiting in the wings.

What’s interesting about Ang Lee is that he made three wonderful movies about Chinese Americans—Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)—before he broke into the mainstream with Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Brokeback Mountain (2005), etc.  I am a great admirer of his work, and I sometimes wonder what might have happened to my own career had I taken Biff Liff’s suggestion and written MOTHER TONGUE first, the one and only play which draws almost completely on my own unique Asian background; and which, ironically enough, is also my most-produced play to date.  Is MOTHER TONGUE really a better play than CONPERSONAS or CHAMBERS or HOMERICA or FLESH FLASH AND FRANK HARRIS?  Or are audiences more willing to embrace MOTHER TONGUE because it’s an Asian-American play by an Asian-American playwright?

Is racial profiling “bad” when the profile is meant to be complimentary and flattering?  In America, Asians are frequently referred to as “the model minority” because we are quiet, we don’t complain, we are non-threatening sexually, we are conservative and vote mostly Republican, we are studious and hard-working, we all excel in math and calculus.  After all, didn’t we invent the abacus?   I don’t mind it when people seem surprised that, at K.U., I’m teaching English literature and creative writing instead of anything dealing with numbers. Go figure.

There are in fact four other Asian-Americans at K.U. who are in the arts, not the sciences.  Unfortunately, three of them are now retired—Roger Shimomura and Norman Gee from the Visual Arts Department, and Andrew Tsubaki from the Theatre Department.  Pok-Chi Lau in the Design Department and I are the only ones left. Although the five of us look nothing alike, in town as well as on campus, we are frequently mistaken for one another.  I guess it just comes with the territory.  And so, in class, at the beginning of each semester, I always jokingly tell my students that it will take me a while to identify them all properly, because “all white people look alike to me.”

But, sometimes it’s hard to laugh things away. I remember a dinner party I gave at home some years ago, when another senior colleague from my department ooh’d and ahh’d over a dish which I had prepared.  “What is it?” she gushed between happy mouthfuls.  “Ratatouille,” I said, and offered to share my own special recipe with her.  “Ratatouille!” she shrieked merrily.  “What are you doing in French territory?  You should stick to soy sauce!”

For many years, first as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and then as a part-time Lecturer, I was allowed to teach only Freshman Composition and Intro to Drama at K.U.  Meanwhile, on my own time, I had written and published about half a dozen short stories, many of which went on to win major literary awards in the Philippines.  Also, I had now written a number of plays which were getting modest productions Off Broadway in New York.

And then it came to pass. Sometime in the mid-1980s, when the English Department decided to hire a full-time tenure-track creative-writing person, and a national search was being conducted, I asked the Chair of the Department if I should apply for the job.  He seemed surprised by my question and, after a while, he said, “Why, yes, of course, by all means, apply.  You’re about as qualified as anyone else.  Besides, it would really make Affirmative Action happy!”

I did apply, but I didn’t get the job, not once but twice.  Apparently, the pool of applicants was so impressive, the administration gave the Department permission to hire not one but two creative writers, one male and one female, both of them Caucasian.   I have no idea if my application was ever taken seriously.  I only know that my application was never formally acknowledged, and that I was never actually interviewed by the search committee.  But, I’m sure Affirmative Action was really “happy” that I too had applied for the job.

Four years later, when the Provost at K.U. was genuinely dismayed by the lack of People of Color within the faculty, and was determined to do something about it , word went out that any Person of Color who was “qualified” and who was ”already around” can bypass a national search, and can be brought in as a Direct Minority Hire.  And that, to make a long story short, was how I finally came on board in 1989 as a full-time faculty member at the University of Kansas.  Shortly after that, I had a startling encounter with a junior colleague in the department, another creative writer who, like me, had been slaving away for years as a part-time lecturer; but who, unlike me, was Caucasian.  She stopped me one day in the hallway and said bitterly, “All things being equal, I may be the right gender, but the color of my skin is wrong, and the shape of my eyes is wrong.”

And now, of course, Affirmative Action is viewed with great suspicion by many in this country.  There is much talk of “reverse discrimination.” It may or may not be amusing, depending on whether you are on the inside looking out, or on the outside looking in.  Filipinos who continue to revere their colonial masters are said to be “coconuts, brown on the outside, but white inside.”  And among many Asian-Americans, those who are perceived as erasing what makes them unique while they are busy embracing the mainstream, are said to be “bananas, yellow on the outside, but white inside.”  Those apples in the Garden of Eden…the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil…what color were they?

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