“In our college days, the girls crowded the bleachers,” Lee said. “Just to catch a glimpse of your father in those white athletic shorts.”
“Lee! Don’t make up stories.”
“Sometimes he even played bare chest,” Lee said, grinning. He pantomimed pulling off his shirt with a flourish of his arms. “Quite a scene you created, brother.”
“You, Baba?”
“Not me,” he replied. “You must be remembering someone else, Lee.”
“Don’t be so modest,” said Lee. “Your father was the school prince.”
Baba shook his head.
“We all knew he’d be the one to go to America.”
“I was lucky, that’s all,” said my father.
“Luck!” Lee exclaimed. “You’re brilliant. You worked hard—”
“I made certain choices,” Baba said. “Left or right—”
“Like deciding to move back here,” I said, with more force than I intended. “And stay here,” I added. “Or was that luck?”
A silence. Then Lee laughed lightly, a sound almost as if he were clearing his throat. He exchanged a look with my father, and I saw something pass between them, the wordless language adults believe only they know how to speak. My father was silently apologizing to Lee: My daughter is a moody, sensitive girl prone to bursts of emotion, and something about these old stories puts her in a sour mood. She’s in her last year of high school but still a child. Still childish. I’d better get her home.
“The university students your father helps are the lucky ones now.” Lee’s eyes fell on me, and I forced a smile to my lips. I nodded, pretending to agree. But the way he spoke about my father in the old days gave me the creeps. I couldn’t imagine Baba like that at all—someone the girls swooned for? Who was that person?
* * *
? ? ?
The job in Taiwan was only supposed to be for one year. And sure, there’d been emails, and phone calls when the hours aligned. But why hadn’t he come home to visit?
He left the summer after my freshman year. Before that, Baba had been out of work for I didn’t know how long; at some point when I was still in junior high, he’d been laid off from his job at Boeing out in Long Beach. Mah was selling houses, out every weekend at showings, wooing clients over dim sum, managing contractors in every suburb in LA County where Chinese-speaking families lived: Alhambra, West Covina, Torrance, Cerritos. All I remember Baba doing during that time? He stayed in bed and read comic books. He’d dug them out of a cardboard box in the garage. Sometimes I sat next to him with my own reading, a novel assigned for English class, or an issue of Sassy borrowed from Fiona, my best friend. The pillow smelled like Mah’s face cream, even though she’d started sleeping in the guest room. “Because Baba snores,” she’d complained.
Weekdays, he didn’t get dressed or ever leave the house. No more badminton at the park on Saturday afternoons with the other church dads, and he stopped accompanying Mah to Sunday service at First Chinese Calvary over on South Street. He wasn’t acting like a normal father anymore. I was in the ninth grade and embarrassed about everything, including this.
One Sunday afternoon, the church dads showed up unannounced. They dragged Baba out of bed and forced him into the shower, chanting, “Jesus loves you! He will provide! Praise Him!” Crowded outside the bathroom door, they sang a rousing hymnal while Baba cleaned up, their voices ringing through the house. They came the Sunday after that, and again on the third Sunday. They wanted Baba to get back to himself, and this was how they thought they could help, with earnest harmonizing, shouts of Hallelujah, wreathing my father in God’s holy spirit.
It didn’t work. After they left each week, Baba crawled back into bed, surrounded by his comic books. There were volumes stacked on the nightstand, a few tossed on the ground. One time, I flipped through a copy. All those hours of Chinese school homework, that dreaded calligraphy notebook with pages of black grids, and I could only understand about half the text in the comics. The illustrations filled in the rest. A teenage boy wakes up on a Taiwanese fishing boat with amnesia; he’d survived the typhoon but remembers nothing about his past.
What finally helped, I guess, was finding another job. He and Mah told me together in July that year: Baba was moving to Taiwan for a position at his alma mater, working to secure overseas internships for their engineering grads. I can’t remember who packed the suitcases or if I rode along in the car to LAX. Just that one day he was gone, like nothing.