Henry Mar
I didn’t know my father as well as I would have liked. I wish I knew him better. I was two months old when we were separated and when I met him again, I was already seventeen and a freshman at UCLA.
I remember traveling back to San Francisco the weekend of his arrival and meeting him at the busy San Francisco International Airport terminal with the rest of the family. I remember being excited and a bit wistful – wistful because so much of my childhood had been defined by the long wait for the moment when I would finally meet him and now I was no longer a child and no longer living at home.
I remember standing back and watching as he broke through the crowd coming out of customs. He looked much like the pictures he had sent, but even so, I was shocked by how thin and gaunt he was. I remember how everyone rushed up to greet him, especially my mom, and he had this huge grin on his face when he came forward to greet me. I can’t remember if we shook hands or hugged, but I remember having these conflicted thoughts like, “wow, this is my dad. How exciting. I finally have a dad, but he’s a stranger. Trippy … ”
For the first seventeen years of my life, I knew my dad through his letters. Sometimes they were written in English. Sometimes in Chinese. My mother would translate his letters to us and they were always encouraging and upbeat as well as the usual extolling of Chinese work ethics – you know, study hard, listen to your mother, that sort of sentiment. When I was in the fourth grade, I told my teacher about how my dad was “stuck in China” and couldn’t come join the rest of the family in the states. She was touched by my father’s story and encouraged me to send one of my school projects to him. It was a story I wrote about a school field trip, written and illustrated on construction paper and bound like a book. Nothing of note, but it was my first book, indeed the first story I had ever written. Thanks to my dad, it would not be my last.
As I grew older and entered junior high, my letters to him became a repository of complaints about all the things I was unhappy with, like how strict my mom and Uncle Jack were, how they wouldn’t let me have fun and hang out with friends. You know, the usual “tweener” and teenie stuff that is “soooo important. Of course, I didn’t know that while I was writing to dad asking him to tell my mom to “chill out” and let me be a typical All-American kid, his letters were being intercepted and closely scrutinized for evidence that he and his family members were “westernized,” which in the eyes of the Gang of Four and their Red Guard is the worst possible offense. So while I was trying to be All-American, dad was being “re-educated.”
It wasn’t until I was in film school doing research about the Cultural Revolution for my first screenplay that I learned what “re-education” really meant. As part of my research, I asked my dad about the Cultural Revolution, but he never wanted to talk about it. He probably felt those difficult years were best put behind him and forgotten rather than excavated and revisited. He never talked about what happened to him with me, or my brother or even my mom, who only saw the faint scars remaining on his body. Increasingly curious about what made dad so tight-lipped, I joined Uncle Jack on one of his trips to China so I could interview my dad’s old friends and colleagues about his experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Our relatives hooked me up with dad’s best friend, Gum Sook, who also was one of Dad’s underlings when they worked together on the construction of a factory in central China.
It was Gum Sook who took me to the factory dormitories where Dad was imprisoned for a year and a half. It was Gum Sook who took me to the very spot where the Red Guard had Dad kneel on broken glass while hoisting steel I-Beams on his shoulders. It was Gum Sook who told me how he was forced along with all of Dad’s other friends and colleagues at the factory to scream insults at him and denounce him as he stood at the front of a room silently taking it all in and most likely wearing one of those humiliating dunce cap we may have read about in history class. It was Gum Sook who told me how he would then quietly sneak food to Dad when the Red Guard was hell bent on starving him. It was Gum Sook who shook his head sadly and recalled how my dad suffered all those years. For his family. Because of his family. Because we were “westerners.” The communists tried to “re-educate” him. They tried to break his spirit. But in his steadfast fashion, Dad refused. He endured.
I remember hearing Gum Sook’s stories and seeing how his daughters spoke of my dad with such reverence. I remembered feeling a pang of jealousy thinking how well they knew him while my brother and I hardly did. But those stories I heard and the man I saw through their eyes brought me closer to the man my father had become.
I went home and finished my first screenplay for film school. It was entitled THE ONION SHED, a story about a little girl who worked in an onion shed, dreaming about being reunited with the father who was a political prisoner trapped in China during the Cultural Revolution. Sound familiar? That screenplay garnered a Sony-Streisand writing fellowship and two other writing awards. Later, it evolved into a stage play I renamed THE CONFESSION that won a national playwriting contest and was staged in Iowa and Los Angeles. The nature of my writing changed over time, of course, as I tried to sell them rather than just win awards, but my passion for writing and storytelling never abated. It’s ironic that the father who was a stranger for much of our formative years was also the single most influential inspiration in shaping who Doug and I became.
Back in the fourth grade, the same teacher encouraged me to write letters to President Nixon to ask him to bring down the Iron Curtain. And, so I wrote to President Nixon, exhorting him to bring my daddy home to me. So when Nixon went to China, I of course took credit for that historic event. In retrospect, it’s doubtful whether my letters even got to the White House, but back then, the experience convinced me of the power and influence of words on paper.
My dad didn’t say much in person, but he spoke volumes in his letters. He continued to write to me all through my college years and he came to life in those letters, expressing the hope and joy that he no longer seemed able to express in person. My dad gave me my greatest gift. I discovered writing when I was a young girl, long before I met my dad, because it was there in the writing that I found him. And now I will find him there again.
The year my father arrived in the United States, my brother and I came home one weekend so we could spend time with Dad and get to know him. We still didn’t really know dad that well and he was more like a good-natured, agreeable, kind Uncle than our dad. But that weekend gave us memories of our dad that will last us a lifetime.
It was the weekend that the third installment of the all-time, industry changing blockbuster, STAR WARS, was released. The only place it was playing in our area was in Monterey, but he happily agreed to accompany us even though we knew it would be crowded, crowded, crowded. Indeed, the line wrapped around the four blocks surrounding the theater and we waited almost three hours to get in. We were dizzy with excitement and dad gamely stood in line with us without a single complaint and was as excited as we were. We finally saw the movie and it was, of course, awesome. We came out of the theater buzzing about what a cool movie that was. In fact, I was so spellbound and excited that I blurted out, “Dad let’s go see it again!” To our surprise, my dad responded “Okay!” And with a good-natured shrug, he got back in the two-hour line. Not one complaint. After that, Doug and I thought dad was the coolest ever. Right up until two weeks ago when Daddy breathed his last breath, Doug and I would periodically glimpse that happy-go-lucky kid-at-heart with the big, easy smile, even though that side of my dad had been increasingly shuttered by a lifetime of suffering and hardship. My cousins tell me that my dad was a gregarious, charismatic man before we left China. After we left, he talked less and no longer smiled. It was as though he had poured all that he had to say into his letters to us. I noticed that about him. He rarely spoke unless someone else initiated the conversation. Then he would light up and occasionally that big smile would remember how to find its way back to his face. I'm glad that Doug and I got to see that big, easy grin that magical Star Wars weekend so long ago.
Sometimes it seems that people who emigrate to the U.S. from other countries shrink to a shadow of who they truly are. What they’re truly capable of. It’s a shame really that we can don different personas, and one that doesn’t fully engage the full potential of our being, simply because we are uprooted from familiar soil to one less familiar and fertile. This seemed to be the case with my father, who was revered and loved by friends and colleagues, and whose intellect and strength were admired attributes among those who knew and worked with him in China. Although my father was content with his life here, wanted to be with us - his family - and enjoyed his friendships, I sometimes wonder if he had to leave behind a large part of his Self to be here with us. Both the part that was so revered and the part that wound up so damaged.
My mother told me that shortly after he came here, his company in China begged him to return to his old job and offered him a position with perks that were enviably high in those days of China’s early modernization and development. At the time, dad was working at the assembly line putting together circuit boards in Silicon Valley. He said “no.” His place was with his family. I always suspected that Dad’s heart was tugged in two different directions. He loved China. He missed the livelihood that gave him such pride and fulfillment. He was a “big boss” there with position and prestige. But his family was here and he chose us. I’ll always be grateful for that choice, that I was given this chance to know him.
So … I didn’t know my father as well as I would like. But what little I’ve gleaned suggests a complex portrait of a man with quiet grace, a kind soul, endless patience, and an unbeatable spirit and determination. I will never know everything I’d like to know about him. But do we ever really know our parents as much as we’d like? Do we take the time to excavate the interiors of their mind and heart when they’re with us?
In many ways, my dad was and remained a mystery to me right up to the end. But I know he suffered tremendously for me and my family. I know he was grateful that I cared to learn about the man he left behind in China and the man he came to be. I know he loved me without question. I know he was proud to be my dad. I know I was proud that he was my dad. I know he gave me the means by which I can continue to discover and celebrate him, and all whom I love dear, through the writing. A passion and purpose that will carry me through a lifetime. What a great gift he bestowed upon me. And when it’s all said and done, that’s all I need to know.
So now we’re separated again, my dad from his family. But this time we’ve had the good fortune to have known and loved him and, someday when my journey is complete, we’ll reunite again. Until then, ease your mind and rest well, Daddy. I love you.
August 14, 2012
Struve and Laporte Funeral ChapelSalinas, California
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