A Chinaman's Chance Read Online Free Page A

whether one’s true self is somewhere else. To Americanize is to shed and to accumulate, to wipe the past away and to frantically try to satiate a hunger for memory. The first generation—my mother and my father—had to contend with their own forms of loss, but by the time they came to America they had deep foundations of Chineseness. The third generation—my daughter—has intermittent experiences of what W. E. B. DuBois called the “double consciousness” of minority identity. But in the second generation, my generation, the doubling is ubiquitous. Faith in something lasting, an original creed, is precious. And elusive.
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    I’ve realized lately how devoid of rites my life has been. The first time I ever bowed three times to honor a dead ancestor was at my father’s funeral. I did it only because other people were doing it. It was the first time I’d witnessed these people I knew—family friends, my uncle, my mother—doing it. Now, whenever I visit my father’s grave, I always end my silent, tearful visit with three bows, the last one deepest and held for a beat longer than the first two. I bow even though no one is looking. I do not visit my father as often as the rites say I should. When I arrive, I sweep and polish his grave and flat bronze memorial marker—his “spirit-tablet,” as the Confucian texts call it—pulling at strands of grass that threaten to encroach the clean border of marble. His grave sits on a hill facing a tree and a river—the wide silent Hudson, far enough upstream that it seems as still as a lake. To sit here is to contemplate the unceasing current beneath the stillness. It is to find in nature what the rites were meant to make a person embody.
    When I was a boy and my father was sick, I did not have prayer or church or the organized comforts of a faith tradition. The first time my father was hospitalized, my mother encouraged my sister and me to pray. We found an old Bible with a thin, flimsy black leather cover that looked as if it had been used by itinerant preachers a century earlier. I still do not know where it came from. But the Good Book was as bewildering to me then as The Analects would be later. It gave no guidance about how to pray in this situation, what to say in the midst of this crisis. So my mother—brave and, I realize now, so young—simply encouraged us to make up our own prayers—“Pray God take care of Daddy”—and we prayed together silently.
    It didn’t feel sufficient. I began privately to devise my own ritual, my own convoluted ways to ward off the badness. I would refine it in the weeks and months and years ahead. There was a certain doorway where I’d stood when I’d learned my father was in the hospital, and so in that doorway I would stand when no one else was around, facing the jamb, getting right up close to it, and letting a deeply private obsessive-compulsive liturgy unfold: counting tiny steps to and fro, muttering in Chinglish, praying to a kind of god with whom I had no acquaintance, slapping my own cheek periodically to banish dark thoughts of death, inhaling and sighing. And when my father recovered that first time, it confirmed that these rites I had invented had worked. And so I continued them, prophylactically, to keep my father alive. This was my expression of filial piety. It was an autodidact’s hodgepodge prayer, with all the sincerity and hybrid incoherence of the self-taught. It was superstition and fear speaking a pidgin tongue of hope and devotion. It was my Chinese American prayer.
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    I ask Chinese Americans, especially others of the second generation, what makes them Chinese. They have many answers. No one ever mentions Confucianism. The closest they come is to speak of respect for elders and an acute awareness of social hierarchies. Otherwise, when they describe how they are