| My father died 11 years ago,
around American Father's Day, in southern China, without my
being there to bid him
goodbye. I had been living in the United States for five years
and was preparing for the bar exam. My family didn't tell
me until the exams were over. When I learned of his death,
I collapsed into my sister's arms and cried the whole night.
For the next few months, I stumbled
around the streets of New York in silent mourning. At 28,
I felt like a miserable orphan.
Since then, I have shed tears easily over father-son
stories that I see on TV or read in newspapers. And Father's
Day, which I had felt was an American celebration that I
could ignore, has slowly become a solemn day for remembering
the man I called "Baba."
My father's best legacy
were the dazzling smiles he gave when he could not afford
to. As a son of a former landowner, my father suffered during
the Cultural Revolution. When I was about seven, he was
hanged by his thumbs in our commune's headquarters, yet
he refused to write a false confession.
I was there, peeping
through a window, watching him scream as he was beaten.
It sickened
me to see him being treated worse than an animal. He caught
a glimpse of me. His screams ceased, and he threw a secret
smile my way. My young heart sank with love and pain. I
wanted to climb through the window and save him. Then he
smiled again, this time with a warning: Son, go home. The
smile came at a high price. The cadres
beat him till one of his fingers snapped.
One winter day, when we had eaten the last of our mouldy
yams,
my father sneaked
out of our commune
to try and earn money painting houses in a distant village.
It was a grave risk at that time, engaging in private business
was illegal. My mother, my three sisters, my brother and
I waited for him that night as the wind slanted
the winter rain. My mother cried and prayed to Buddha.
There was no electricity, so we sat in total darkness,
not having eaten since that morning. Dad finally appeared,
barefoot, drenched
and trembling with exhaustion and cold. With a difficult
smile, he put a small bag of cornbread
on our table, and we devoured
it.
Wrapped in a blanket, he told us that it had been tough
selling a paint job on a rainy day, so he had sold his
coat and shoes to buy the food. He would have been home
a lot earlier, he said, but a couple of hungry wolves had
chased him up a tree, where he waited for hours before they
vanished.
My father rarely prayed, but when his father was dying,
I watched as he knelt before our hidden shrine
and asked Buddha to take a few years off his own life and
add them to Grandpa's. With tears rolling down his face,
my father smiled as if Buddha had accepted his deal. In
that brief moment, he taught me what it really meant to
be a son.
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