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Talking Story |
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From The Asian Reporter, V17, #39 (September 25, 2007), page 7.
Our father is eighty
Eighty years have passed since our Celebes oma brought our father into this life. Imagine living 80 long years on our vigorous green planet, spinning at our odd angle through all that silent cold space. Earth like a rock ’n ’rollin’ Makassar morning bus packed with nagging elder aunties and chattering children and market-bound chickens under farmers’ sinewy brown arms.
Imagine lovely planet Earth sending laughter and lament, last night’s dreams and today’s dinner feathers into all that vast quiet as we arc around our distant sun. Our suriya sun.
Imagine 80 years.
Begin by opening up any high school history book.
Our pretty planet looked very different 80 years ago. Much of Asia, most of Africa and Arabia, still belonged to European empires. Our occupied valleys and highlands grew sugar and coffee and tobacco for Western tables and parlors, instead of rice for our babies’ bellies. Our families came with the land, same as morning birds and evening bats. Same as farm animals.
Eighty years ago, Oma’s tall Catalan husband pedalled their Batavia district delivering Netherlands East Indies post. That iron Dutch bike, black and serious, was everyone’s envy. Everybody else walked in those days. Some masters had horses, but most ordinary pribumi went only as far from home as feet could carry you between dawn and dusk. About 20 miles this way or that.
Things changed. Heaven and earth changed places. Horribly. Suddenly. When our father was a smart teenager, the Chrysanthemum Emperor’s dreaded navy appeared under angry steam over our horizon. Ferocious Imperial Japanese soldiers overran the distant Dutch Queen’s arrogant armies in a few days. They took all of Oma’s boys to slave as labor thousands and thousands of unimaginable miles away. Away from her. Imagine.
Two times more in our father’s young life, over his next 20 tumultuous years, our sweet soil and all those gentle souls living from her ancient history and elegant elements heaved up and up, up toward our bright blue sky. It rained splintered timbers and pulverized clay for days and nights. Many of us never came back down. Many grumpy grandpas and funny uncles and pretty babies went straight to heaven. Our father got our ma and his boys the hell out of there. To Europe. He stayed behind. Where and how he won’t say. We don’t ask.
Then he appeared again.
Well into his third decade — always quick as kampong macaque, muscular as harimau — our father moved his family between slim shadows and bad politics to Salem, Oregon. The American president was murdered, his handsome brother too, and then that beaming buddha-soul Reverend King, and then Los Angeles and Detroit burned as bright, as bitter, as our bombed-out cities back home. Even Washington, D.C. charred to within ten blocks of the White House.
One early Monday morning I saw him pausing, our father pausing only a moment in front of his living room window — across S.E. Commercial from that big Ford dealer, gleaming grilles, dismal rain running off swept-back windshields — wondering just a minute, worrying whether he had done the right thing. Moving his family here. Making our lives here.
Inside our next American decade, while our father scrubbed toilets and stirred wool and stacked warehouses, we had our big family’s first high school finisher. In another decade, we brought him our university bachelors and masters and doctorates. We filled our mother’s tidy house, we filled his lush back yard, exploding with sakura and suriya azaleas and intoxicating roses, we filled his failing tiger’s heart with grandchildren.
Bright and brave grandchildren — painters and doctors and filmmakers and stay-at-home moms — now young men and women who will be, exactly and only be who they want to be, not what awful war or ugly racism make of us. Have always made us, before our father got us out of there. Got us here.
Eighty years have passed. Eighty years since our father began his journey, our journey across chaotic continents and deep blue oceans. From those far gone days folks walked and walked but never ended up out of sight, to our times of leaping through our tender planet’s thin air for thousands of jet miles and still arriving well in time for dinner. For dinner at a table set with him, with our father at our table’s head.
Eighty years passed, not in a flash, but slow, in real slow-mo. Every next heartbeat, some in anguish but many more in sheer joy, each heartbeat we recall on our father’s 80th birthday as a distinct blessing from our kind but distant God.
And we celebrate these 80 years, our four generations of his offspring. And we speak in tears — a little ocean of sorrow, but with a world of pride — about what he gave us, who he made us, this man with his muscular harimau heart.
The Asian Reporter’s Expanding American Lexicon
Batavia: Nederland Oost Indies (NOI or Netherlands East Indies) administrative city on Java island, now called Jakarta.
Catalan: An edgy ethnic community inside the Spanish Kingdom.
Celebes: NOI colonial name for Indonesian island, now called Sulawesi.
Chrysanthemum Emperor: referring to Emperor Hirohito (or Emperor Showa) of militaristic and expansionist Japan (1905-1945).
harimau (Malay, Javan): tiger or great spirit of a tiger.
kampong (Malay, Bahasa): village or neighborhood.
macaque: very clever, very quick long-tail monkey.
Makassar: big city on Sulawesi island, also called Ujung Pandang.
suriya (Thai, Khmer, Malay, Bahasa Indonesia): sun. Sun gold.
oma (Indo patois): grandma. Yours or mine don’t matter. A respectful and intimate form of address.
pribumi (Bahasa): indigenous folks.