An American Lullaby
By Dennis Nau
“Yes, yes,” she would say. “Nothing like evil fortunes of neighbors to give you top-of-earth feeling.”
Translation: “When you see the suffering others endure, it makes you realize that you sit, by comparison, on top of the world.” My mother is Chinese, and much admired Al Jolson when she was young.
She met my father, a GI stationed in Korea, on leave to Taiwan, one rainy day in the fifties. He was on a four-day pass. He had to visit three more times before the marriage was arranged. “Stupid man, your father. He could get me after one hour.”
Mom, Mom, I would think. You shouldn’t say that aloud. What would the neighbors think?
Mom didn’t much care. Dad didn’t either. I did, though, the little half-Chink, quarter-Norwegian, quarter-Irish first-grader. It’s quite a combination of ancestries. “Albert Chien Larson?” people would ask themselves. “Who is he? He looks a little different. Doesn’t quite look Oriental, like all those Korean babies we’re adopting. Doesn’t look German. Maybe he’s Jewish.”
Of course, I think if I was Jewish, my parents wouldn’t have sent me to a Catholic school. Sister Pauline, the sweet woman, took an interest in me, thinking that I was from some poor backward family. She was always saving somebody. When it became evident that I might be able to save myself, she didn’t desert me, just kind of gently pushed me down to her second, third, or fourth priority.
“She good woman at heart, but never had baby, so how would she know anything?” my mother said, as if that would explain a truth which should be self-evident.
I was named after Albert Einstein, a man much emulated by my father, who went to work for the National Atomic Energy Commission after he got back from Korea, wife in tow. My father was a Larson, although his mother was a McGillicutty, and in order for a Catholic to be married to a Lutheran in the Catholic Church, the Protestant party had to agree that the child would be raised in the Catholic Church. My grandfather eventually capitulated and converted to Catholicism, but continued to hum Lutheran hymns for the rest of his life. Dad was a little more laid back. We’d go to Mass and he’d hum some Bing Crosby or Glen Miller number. The church members weren’t scandalized because nobody could ever recognize a thing my old man hummed. Mom would stay at home and cook. The bacon and the jazzed-up Oriental omelets would be ready when we got back from Mass. I used to love going to church as a kid, only for that reason, the Sunday morning breakfast.
“I provide pepper, as should you be accustomed to.”
She’d say that to my father and then she would slightly, ever so slightly, bow. Not too much, mind you. Enough to show respect, but not enough to show subservience. Just the right amount.
I got my ass handed to me in fourth grade when I got into a fight with Johnny Burke during the afternoon recess. He had been needling me since Labor Day. I had a black eye and a bloody nose and a rip in my jeans when the rest of the guys decided that the fight had lost their interest. Johnny had messed his hair. I’d put on a good show, though.
“What is this, boys?” said Sister Pauline.
“He’s Japanese,” said Johnny. “The Japs killed my uncle.”
“God teaches us to love all his children.”
There was a pause.
“Besides, he’s not Japanese. He’s half-Chinese. The Chinese fought on our side against the Japanese in the Second World War.”
Johnny and I looked at each other and Sister Pauline sat down on the pavement and started to cry.
“Please don’t cry, Sister,” I said. “Johnny didn’t mean anything. Honest.”
“I didn’t mean anything, Sister. Please don’t cry.”
Sister Pauline sobbed for another three minutes, probably not thinking how all of God’s children seemed to hate each other, and, in spite of her efforts, she didn’t seem to be making a dent in this hatred. She felt a fool because she hadn’t taught us history and geography better. Johnny and I became best friends.
“You tear your jean through knee,” my mother said, when I came home from school that afternoon.
“Mom, I was just helping Sister Pauline plant some flowers. My jeans ripped. I’m sorry.”
“Your eye black. You blood on your face.”
“I fell while I was shoveling the dirt.”
“OK, then.”
Everything was fine. No, it wasn’t.
“Your mother said you got into a fight.” That was dad, at the supper table. My nose was cleaned up then, my eye still a little discolored.
I should mention that I have a twin brother, Frankie, named after Frank Sinatra, whose LPs my mother used to listen to at her sewing machine in a sweatshop 20 kilometers southwest of Taipei, where she slaved for 7 cents an hour as a teenager and waited for some handsome American to rescue her. She could listen to these LPs because her production foreman, Chiu, was a kind and generous man. My dad wasn’t particularly handsome, even in 1955 (I’ve seen photographs), but he’d do. Frankie was born three minutes before I was.
People like me and Frank got to be fashionable during the seventies. People would assume that we were Vietnamese. Conservatives figured we had been saved by America from those Godless communists, and fellow college students thought that we’d been chased out of our idyllic village by some American napalm device. People would ask us profound questions. I could never think of any profound answers. I was studying Classical Music, violin, at the time, working towards my Bachelor’s degree.
“Albert, Albert,” my mother would say, during those years. “You should trust them no-ways. They will stab-back-you.”
God, she is something, that woman.
Frankie was always ten steps ahead of me. Twelve. He skipped fourth grade entirely. My classmates looked at me. What, you’re not skipping too? You’re his twin brother. We can’t tell you two apart. Yeah, maybe, but they have these things called tests.
Frankie took an extra four credits a semester in college and bubbled up quicker. Frankie was the scientist, with a major in chemistry and a minor in pre-med. I was the artist. Let me rephrase that. Frankie was the success. I was the failure—well not exactly the failure, but the failure by comparison. Frankie graduated from college two years before I did.
“We have college-passing party for your brother.”
Indeed we did. Nobody at the party caught the real irony in this, including all of my father’s brainy, atomic, friends. The real irony was that I was named after the scientist and Frankie was named after the artist, and we turned out vice-versa.
My college-passing party two years later was a more modest event, but the music was great. Janice played the bass viol, Henry the piano. I played the violin. We clicked. Actually, I had been trying to click with Janice for upwards of seven months. She was a harder nut to crack than my mother had been, but then Janice wasn’t a seamstress.
“Nice looking girl,” my dad said.
“Evil witch girl,” my mother said.
“I’ll pay for the food and liquor,” my brother said. He’d gotten a nice job at Merck, in pharmaceutical development, and he moved to Philadelphia. He was showing off. Still, I appreciated his generosity. My old man had been out of work for three months. Atomic energy was out of fashion.
Now, how do you explain these things, the fortunes of mankind? My dad had enough intelligence to fill an army fuel tanker, not enough intelligence so that he could fill a tanker with fuel, enough that if you poured his intelligence into the tanker, it would overflow. He wasn’t in Korea in the fifties in infantry, or as a cook. He was a Colonel in logistics. How you get things where they should be, when they should be. That’s logistics. In ’53 my dad was a Lieutenant, in ’55 a Colonel. He was good, my old man.
“He shit luck, out of.”
Well, let’s not split hairs. Times were tough, around my parents’ place, that is. That year was 1979. I was getting ready to leave home, but I couldn’t. I hadn’t found a job, one that would pay, that is. Janice and Henry and I had played at a number of places. We were an ensemble. We did some fundraisers, grand openings, that sort of thing, made almost enough money to pay for our mileage to and from these events. Things couldn’t continue as they were and I got a job managing a Burger King. Two years later I became assistant manger at Gucci’s, a plush restaurant south of Lake Street. Janice and I were living together by that time. Henry left for San Francisco. I haven’t seen him since. My brother was holed up in Philadelphia, picking up money as easily as if it fell from the clouds. My dad fell off the kitchen chair one day as he was trying to explain to my mother what relative humidity was. He had a heart attack and was declared DOA.
He was a piece of work, my dad, unafraid of anything except my mother. I don’t think those North Koreans bothered him one bit. He would scoff at the Russians and the Red Chinese. Damn idiots. They can fire their missiles and they’ll go up in the air and come right back down on themselves. Their people will have stolen a bolt here, a nut there, some circuit board from the navigational system. All these things are put up for sale on the black market. My dad’s old service buddies used to stop by, and they’d drink with my dad until very late, past the point when my brother and I, lying in an upstairs bedroom, could manage to stay awake. Lots of laughter.
His buddies always used to treat my mother with the utmost respect. She was the wife of an officer in the United States Army, a colonel, or former colonel.
My mother inherited a lot of money. My dad had a metric ton of insurance.
“I will buy new, big, house, with many rooms. I want you to come, live with me. You must have wife."
“She not evil witch girl, Janice. My humble apologies.”
So, what-do-you-say, Janice? Both my mother and I think you should marry me. How could a girl resist?
We were married in a Catholic Church towards the end of July, when the temperature was 98 degrees, but there was not a hint of wind. I knew what my dad would have said. Son, this is why windpower doesn’t work. We were married in the same church where my dad was baptized. On the way out, people threw popcorn at us, since rice wasn’t in fashion. The sky was overcast by that time. Son, this is why solar power is not the solution.
We need atomic power. That’s what my dad would have said, as if it would make any difference, since the church didn’t have air conditioning. We sweated off at least three pounds that day.
Janice and I moved into the huge, 5,000 square foot new rambler two weeks after, my mother at the helm. Put couch here. Put chair there. My mother wasn’t so bad. Janice had no control over the kitchen or the sitting room, but she could do whatever she liked in the other rooms. Our bedroom she painted in gold and red, the way you painted rooms in the early eighties, when bad taste was at its highest point. The living room she did in beige, with burnt sienna accents. “Not bad,” said Mom. That was quite a compliment, by my mother’s standards.
Our home could’ve been a very deadly combination, my wife and my mother under the same roof, except for one fact: both women liked to play Cribbage. Cribbage, as in an obsession, to play Cribbage. I began to despair of having any children, my wife and my mother playing cards ‘til three in the morning.
In January, ’84, my mother decided we should go back with her to her home for a visit, all of us, Frankie, Janice, and me, home to Taipei.
“We will go in September,” she said.
In May, Frankie was to come home for Mother’s Day. “He will stay here.” “Of course, he will, Mom. We can put him up for a few days. You’ve got room.”
“Not a few days, many, many days. Frankie got in argument with dumb-ass supervisor.” Just like old times, except for the fact that I had a wife, and on Mother’s Day I told my mother that Janice was pregnant and that we wouldn’t be able to go back home with her to Taiwan. I think that was only the second time I saw my mother cry. The first time was at the cemetery after my dad’s funeral, when it started to rain.
There had been a night or two that Janice and my mother hadn’t played Cribbage.
My mother took a deep breath and stopped crying. Frankie gave me a blank stare. That blank stare said, I’m the older and more advanced brother; I should have a child first. If you’re a twin, you know what the other one is thinking. I was sorely tempted to take Frankie aside and say, true, but you need a woman to have a baby. You’ve studied science. You should know these things.I didn’t say that, but Frankie knew what I was thinking.
My mother suggested, suggested twice, then insisted, “Baby needs a proper garment for baptism, Albert. We will go, you and Frankie and myself, to Minneapolis downtown Friday. Your baby will have a proper garment. Janice will sit home and have rest, watch stupid American television, as befits woman awaiting baby.”
Janice agreed, thank God, anxious to watch stupid American television, anxious to eat stupid American popcorn, anxious to be rid of her new family for an evening. I’ll bet a long, hot bath didn’t sound bad.
“Just what we need, Albert, a shopping expedition.” Frankie shook his head, but he knew mom’s word was law. We were going shopping. Our car quit moving at 7th and Hennepin, the busiest intersection in Minnesota. It was my mother’s car, a Saab, a new, high-amount-of-life-insurance, Saab. I was driving. My mother got out and started kicking the tires, kicking violently. A cop on the corner looked on with mild amusement.
“Cheap, American car,” she shouted, then cursed in Chinese. The amused cop got a tow-truck. The car was hauled away to a reputable dealer, and we stood for a few minutes in the center of Minneapolis on a beautiful evening in May.
“Your Saab, Mom, is made by a Swedish company.” She cursed in Chinese once again. Then we were off shopping. What a trip that was, looking for a Chinese Catholic Baptismal gown retail store. Well, it wasn’t that simple. We first went to a store, just up Nicollet, where they sold Chinese specialties, and a woman shook her head and pointed south. At the next store my mother talked with a woman in English and in Mandarin for 20 minutes. I caught bits and pieces. Good, yes, and you. Oh, your husband, I’m sorry to hear. Well, we don’t have anything like that, but we occasionally use a seamstress who might know something about … There were phone calls and chatting, more phone calls, more chatting, and then, apparently, everything was all arranged. It took a little over an hour. I didn’t have a kid yet, but I was going to get a magnificent Chinese baptismal gown.
The car wouldn’t be ready until 11 the next morning. We got hotel rooms, one for my mother, one for Frankie and me.
“It’s only eight o’clock. We will go out. We are in city.”
Frankie looked at me. I looked at him. Both of us were thinking, what could possibly be more exciting than hitting all of the local hotspots with our own mother, and, of course, since we’re twins, we didn’t have to say a word.
The lights on Hennepin sparkled more brightly than they did 15 years earlier, when the clientele on a Saturday night was maybe less respectable, and the lights were mainly neon. We stumbled upon Murphy’s, an Irish bar, not crowded. It was a comfortable, not-too-racy place, and we stopped there, had a drink and talked.
My mother and Frankie would fly to Taipei, via Tokyo. The very thought of a visit to her homeland turned my mother’s face to the color of a petal of a rose. “We are children of the Sweet Potato,” she said. “My land, it is the shape of sweet potato. We were happy there, when I was young. Then there was the war. The Japanese took my father into their army, and there he died. My mother died too.”
“I thought Grandma lived almost until you married dad.” Frankie said that.
“True, but her soul died when my father died. My older brother cared for me mostly, and then the factories came. Factories everywhere. But there was work. I could sew shirts for American men. Sew, sew, sew, then eat at noodle shop, then sew, sew, sew.
“At noodle shop one day your father walks in, all polished up in American Army uniform. He removes his hat, politely. He sits next to me and makes little talk. I know some English. He kiss my hand when he leaves. My brother say, you poor fool. Your father come again and again. I show my brother. I was no fool!”
“Mom, what was dad like when he was young?”
“Handsome. Brilliant. Nice guy, too.” She leaned back in the booth we were in, smiled, and looked up towards the ceiling. “I was lucky girl.”
“Mom, he was lucky also,” I said. I was always quicker at saying things that would ingratiate me with my mother than Frankie was, even though we’re twins, and he is the smarter twin. She grabbed and hugged me.
“Yes, he was. I never met man so smart and dumb at same time. He couldn’t tie shoes. He works at atomic energy bowlshit.”
“Mom, it’s bullshit, not bowlshit.”
“What you know, Frankie, can’t even find wife? We go to next bar.”
What a night that was, up and down Hennepin Avenue, over a block or two east and west. There was some place on 10th Street that we stayed at for almost an hour. A Karaoke singer massacred a song and I grimaced. “You can do better?” my mother asked. A minute later I was on the floor singing, before almost twelve people, “Pretty Woman.” “Good growl,” my mother said. “Like Roy Orbison. You have much talent, Albert.”
“Thank you, Mom.”
“Please take care that you don’t end up like your father. He had much talent, too. He ate too much fatty food. My fault, I think. I cook fatty food. You should know, Albert, and you should know, Frankie, that I miss your father oh so much.”
Well, we knew that.
A police siren sounded in the distance. Someone popped open a bottle of Champagne. People laughed and clapped. My brother and I knew what a golden moment this was with my mother.
“He treated me like woman of high estate, not like seamstress, when we met second time in factory. I had blood on my fingers. A needle had gone through my skin. I was ashamed. Your father says, good afternoon. I was afraid to look him in his eye. My head was bowed. He could have got first-class seamstress, not someone who would stick a needle through skin. He could have got daughter of owner of shop. You kids would have a lot of money if he got her.”
“Well, Mom, we wouldn’t have you then. What good would that have done us?”
“You boys talk shit, you know.”
Well, we did, but then my old man, if I remember correctly, did too, and my mother would say, if I remember correctly, you must have $37 dollars for this or that bill by Friday, or there will be penalty, one point five percent, and my old man would say, well, of course I will have $37, dear, don’t I always take care of you?
“Yes, good care.”
“Thank you, but don’t write out checks ‘til Wednesday.” God, it was some household that we lived in. We used to have Catholic Irish Norwegian Chinese American ceremonies, but I guess that is what this country is all about, or supposed to be all about.
“You will have daughter. I know,” my mother said. Then we were on to another bar.
There was an ultrasound a few weeks later, and the baby would be a daughter.
At one place on 2nd Street we had a couple of drinks and one large man made some loud, very obscene comments. My mother was up in a flash and over to his table.
“You talk like asshole,” she said. “You must show respect for other people.”
My brother and I thought, oh, my God, we’re going to have to defend her. The man stood up. He was probably six foot six, weighed a good 300 pounds. I hadn’t fought anyone since my tussle with Johnny Burke. Mom stood firm, looked up into his eyes.
“I’m sorry, ma’m, I didn’t mean to offend you. Please accept my apology.”
That’s Mom. She slammed down another drink. “Frankie,” she said, “why you cannot find wife? You smart boy.”
“Well, I don’t know, Mom. I went out with Ann for almost a year, but it didn’t work out.”
“There are many fish in sea,” my mother said. “You should not talk chemistry bowlshit on first date, Frankie. Don’t take no Albert Einstein to know that. You must learn romance, like your brother.”
“I’ve been engrossed with my work and I haven’t really been looking for a woman that hard.”
“Look harder, Frankie.”
“OK.”
“Boys, I not go back to Taipei. My home is here. Past is past. Would bring me tears, to go back, see how country has changed. Brother is dead. Shop foreman dead. Probably shopping malls everywhere, and McDonalds. Albert, you and your kind, sweet, wife will have baby.
Frankie, you get married, have baby too. Albert, you have another baby. Frankie, you have another. You understand?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“It’s theory of relatives.”
“The theory of relativity?” Frankie asked.
“No. Theory of relatives. You live for your family. Only dead people in Taipei, not so sweet a potato any more. I should be grandmother, look to future, not past. I’m drunk.”
We had to hold my mother up as we took her back to the hotel. She was singing “Ol’ Man River,” exactly like Frank Sinatra recorded it in 1947, well, exactly like Frank Sinatra would have recorded it in 1947 if he was off-key, drunk, and a woman, and Chinese, and had two sons holding him up by the arms, and if he couldn’t remember the words. My mother vomited twice by the side of the street. We made it to the hotel, led her up to her room, undressed her, tucked her in bed. She was crying, murmuring something about my father. I kissed her on the cheek. Frankie did too.
We picked up the cheap-ass Swedish Saab the next morning at quarter to noon, with its cheap-ass fuel pump replaced. The warranty took care of everything. We headed back home to the suburbs. Mom was uncharacteristically quiet during the drive, spoke but once from the back seat. A hangover is a hangover, whatever your ethnic background. “Would not be improper for new wife to play Cribbage, Frankie,” she said gently.
All rights reserved to Dennis Nau
