Honor and Duty Read Online Free Page A

human wishes, turning dreams into vapor. My mother had been proof of that. Whatever I openly liked, she uncannily took.
    “Do not,” said Uncle Shim, “ever speak unpromisingly about family. This is
ji hui
, inauspicious words to be avoided, where speaking sourness invites it, and uttering desires chases them away. One receives rewards by not wanting. To ask for something directly is bad manners and exceptionally bad luck.”
    In the Negro neighborhood where I had grown up, Reverend Stamina Jones had led prayers in the storefront church for Kingdom Come. But Chinese spirits were superior to the gods of Western faith; they had
yuing chi
, life fortune,
sze
, death,
jing ji
, taboo,
ji hui
, inauspicious thoughts, and
k’ung hsu
, living abandonment, while Baptists awaited Grace in a world that disliked black skin.
    I had told four people—Coach Barraza, Toussaint LaRue, Jack Peeve, and Christine Carlson—my secret of wanting to go to West Point. With each admission, each more hazardous than the one preceding it, I had known that I accordingly could not go.
    Jack Peeve had also wanted to go to West Point, but had been eliminated because of a history of scarlet fever. I had trouble telling him the good news, but he had no trouble hearing it.
    My father, the former Colonel Ting Kuo-fan of the Chinese Nationalist Army, wanted me to go to the Academy. To him, West Point was escape from diaspora and attainment of America itself.
    “Go to West Point.
Must.
” It was his refrain.
    “Sit up straight, like a West Point cadet, like the cadet you’ll never be,” hissed my mother, providing the coda.
    I had always wanted to leave. Years before, Toussaint and I sat on the tin-roofed sheds of the Empire Metal Works in the South Mission yards, studying the freights, watching 4–6–2s pulling long strings and little 0–8–0s humping cars in the yard, light gray smoke merging with the dun mist. We were from the Panhandle, a Negro neighborhood similar to South Mission on the other side of San Francisco, but the draw of locomotives on youth knew no boundaries. I was the only Chinese at the yards, but Mission boys customarily put up with me if I didn’t pretend to own the view.
    “What’s a China boy doin’ here?” asked a kid one day. He was built like a big, rectangular caboose with rhino-sized limbs.
    Toussaint had taught me to leave my new glasses be whentrouble called. I made my hands quiet, fingers itching as the glasses slid down the modest bridge of my nose.
    “Aw. he’s cool. Boy thinks he’s colored,” said another.
    “He don’
look
colored,” said Caboose. “He look
white
.”
    “Ain’t white,” I said in my high voice. “See, I’m colored.”
    “Bool-shit!” spat Caboose, frowning.
    “He’s colored,” said Toos quietly. He had heart and knuckles. It looked like a lot of work to take on those fists, having that strong, high-cheekboned face bent on putting the hurt on you.
    Caboose poked the insides of his mouth with his tongue, inventorying teeth and thinking, while Toos ran his cool icebox gaze around the challenger’s profile, getting ready for fate.
    I hated those pulsing eternities before a fight, when breathing stopped and sparks and silence filled the air as the heart pounded in the anticipation of losing blood. I hated this more than I hated the tussles. Fear would put cotton in my brain and pump all my circulation into my ventricles and atria.
    I remembered Toos’s advice. “Don’t jump to fist or to scat. Give words a chance. And don’t scream China stuff at ’em.” That was easy for him to say. When he spoke, talking came out and people nodded. “China, look ’em inna eyes and talk it real slow.”
    Later, Coach Barraza trained me. The first round, when anxiety ruled, was my worst; in the third, when I was working too hard on saving my life to worry, I fought in accord with
ho
, sweet harmony, which drew left hooks and countering rights from me like long noodles from a good-fortune