Dickson Lam - Paper Sons: A Memoir

Contents

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Praise for Paper Sons

Dickson Lams Paper Sons combines memoir and cultural history, the quest for an absent father and the struggle for social justice, and namingtraditions in graffiti and in Chinese culture. Violence marks the story at every turnfrom Mao to Malcolm X, from the projects in San Francisco to the lynching of Asians during the California Gold Rush. After one of his former students at the June Jordan School of Equity is gunned down on a street corner, Lam is compelled to tell a mosaic of stories. What does it take, in this social context, to become a person who respects himself and holds hope for those coming up through a culture of exclusion and violence? Lam writes with a depth of hard-won understandings both political and psychological. This is an important book, beautifully crafted, rich in poetic images and juxtapositions, that offers insight and compassion for a nation struggling to make sense of its immigrant nature. I congratulate Dickson Lam on this fine work.

alison hawthorne deming , contest judge for Autumn Houses 2017 Nonfiction Prize

From China to Hong Kong to San Franciscos North Beach projects, Dickson Lams Paper Sons (and daughters) navigates the mysteries and betrayals of deleted and recovered memory, of tagging crews and migrant parents, of generational secrets. Dickson Lams unforgettable characters blaze like falling stars and illumine a world. Paper Sons , written in short pieces like a document torn and reassembled, is also the story of a determined younger brother who reclaims the truth, and the fierce, protective sister who shows him the way.

jayne anne phillips , National Book Award Finalist

Raw, monstrous, white-knuckled recollections of love-hate, hate-love, abuse, regression, repression, and all the darkness and light any foolish-brave memoirist could possibly summon forth. It rings true to anyone who has gulped deeply from that well of pain. Highly recommended!

andrew x. pham , author of Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam

This moving memoir about coming-of-age in the hardscrabble streets of San Francisco while coming to terms with a dysfunctional family sheds fresh light on the Asian American immigrant experience. Dickson Lam presents an unflinching and poignant portrayal of his troubled father and the emotional toll of being a father figure to inner-city youth. Charting a heart-wrenching journey of strength and forgiveness, Paper Sons is an exhilarating debut.

rigoberto gonzlez , author of Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa

Dickson Lams Paper Sons is a groundbreaking memoir about growing up Chinese American, about working-class kids of color in the Bay Area, about the sorrows and survival of his troubled family. Through his roles as a son, a student, a teacher, and a writer, Lam creates three-dimensional portraits of people who have too often been silenced in our culture, and he rings immense sympathy even to those who have hurt or disappointed him, particularly his father. This is a moving and necessary work, and I thoroughly agree with one of his students, Youre a deep man, Mr. Lam.

david mura , author of Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei

With Paper Sons , Dickson Lam dissects his own life as a vehicle for understanding what it is to be a good man in this world. Paper Sons isnt just a memoir, its a triumph. Dickson Lam yanks you into his heart and sews up his chest behind you. The only thing breaking out is this debut.

mat johnson , author of Pym and Loving Day

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Copyright 2018 by Dickson Lam

All rights reserved. No part of this book can be reproduced in any form whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews or essays. For information about permission to reprint contact Autumn House Press, 5530 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15206.

Autumn House Press and Autumn House are registered trademarks owned by Autumn House Press, a nonprofit corporation whose mission is the publication and promotion of poetry and other fine literature.

Autumn House Press receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Cover Art: Cafe Racer/Shutterstock.com

Book and cover design: TG Design

Digital production: Joel W. Coggins

ISBN: 978-1-938769-31-3

For my sister

and

my students

My aunt haunts meher ghost drawn to meI alone devote pages of paper to her.I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her.

maxine hong kingston

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You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2 + 2 = 5, and the path out is only wide enough for one.

mikhail tal

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chapter 1

King

advisor

Two months after my student Javon King was killed, I boarded a plane to see my father. The last time I visited my dad in Minnesota I was fourteen, the same age Javon was when he first entered my classroom, a small kid who wore his hat backwards, afro leaking out the sides. While standing on a crowded corner, he was gunned down, the fatal shots fired from a bus. I blamed myself for why he was there that day and not at school.

Javon was part of our inaugural class of a hundred freshmen. Id joined with a handful of gung ho teachers to start a school in San Francisco, my hometown. We were a diverse school, half Latino, a quarter Black, a quarter Asian and white, the white students mostly from Russian immigrant families. The name of our school contained our mission: June Jordan School for Equity. How we got that name probably tells you more. We left it up to the students. We gave them three candidates they could name the school after, unsung activists we admired, civil rights leader Ella Baker, labor organizer Philip Vera Cruz, and poet June Jordan. Once the students heard a spoken word recitation of Jordans Owed to Eminem, it was a wrap. The first lines of the diss poem: Im the Slim Lady the real Slim Lady / the real Slim Lady just a little ole lady.

We were an alternative school. We didnt have a principal; we had co-directors. We didnt have counselors; we had advisors, and each of us had to take on that role, responsible for a caseload of fifteen students. Id added the phone numbers of my advisees parents into my cell phone, and Im sure they had mine added on theirs.

Originally, Javon wasnt my advisee. I wasnt even his teacher, and boy, was I grateful. He was the schools biggest headache. His nickname was Waga. Sounded like baby talk to me. Hed skipped a grade back in elementary school, his proof he was a genius.

That first year of our school, San Francisco State University housed us, our classrooms on the same floor as college classes, but within a few months, we received enough complaints that we feared wed get the boot. When wed investigate a complaint, the trail inevitably led back to Javon.

He dribbled a basketball in the hallway, disrupting a professors class. He took a groundskeepers golf cart for a joyride across campus. He stumbled upon a wheelchair in the gym and rode laps around the court, even though the owner of the chair, an SF State professor, shouted and hobbled after him on crutches.