Voices on the New Diasporas - an MIT student journal
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The Departures of Ramón
by Anonymous
In 1992 my sister Patty and I dreamed about Olympic Games in Barcelona. We obsessively collected newspaper cartoons of Cobi, the mascot, and followed the competitions on TV imagining the glamour surrounding the athletic superheroes. We probably also got excited once in a while when Mexico placed first in female weightlifting. Actually, I suspect that was Sydney 2000. To be honest I don’t remember. What I do remember is the fact that my classmates at English school used to call me Cobi. I don’t know why I hated that name, although I preferred it to the other name calling I had constantly experienced: Chinito, Chino Cochino, Chino Chino Japonés come caca y no me dés. Being a charming flat sheep dog was certainly better than eating shit like a dirty Chinese. Name calling was something my siblings and I eventually got used to with time. In fact, my brother Roberto never got mad at it. He was smart enough to take his ethnicity with pride and when he graduated with honors from Engineering School in Mexico he was widely renowned not as Roberto Yan, but “El Chino.”
1992 was also the year when I developed my compulsive disorders that I would ritualize over the years. I learned to step sixteen times on two tiles in front of the porcelain of Guan-Yin in order to avoid her anger and rage which would cause the teleportation of my parents to obscure parallel worlds with UFOs and black holes. Later on, when I had become a teenager, I often claimed that I was an atheist. However, that was a big and dirty lie. The truth is that Guan-Yin has always exerted certain dread on me, but also an exquisite sexual comfort that reminds me of the sandpaper hands of my mother grabbing my two hands and reciting a prayer to the goddess: On this day, October 12, please bless Han with maturity and judgment. Was it like that? Maybe it also included the names of some ancestors from my father’s side, of course not my mother’s, because as my father said, I was born Yan, and not Zha, my mother’s surname. Because Chinese inherit through their male side, not like these crazy Mexicans who need two last names. Listen Han, your maternal grandfather was Du, a wealthy man that lost everything thanks to the bastard Mao and gave your mother in adoption, do you understand? Those old peasants that send letters to your mother are not her real parents; they just want money from me, because the people in the village are lazy and expect money in envelopes.
My father was and still is a tough man. Throughout the years I’ve learned to understand him, or at least to feel compassion for him. Yung Kwong, a few years before he had responded in Aguadulce to the name of Roberto , experienced a Japanese invasion of his Cantonese village and later on escaped from a Cultural Revolution that decimated his family. With his father and brother —my uncle Yung Pui or Ramón— in jail for owning some properties, his oldest sister hanging her own neck to a ceiling together with her aristocratic husband, and his mother dying from a leg gangrene, Kwong, being only seventeen, falsified some documents in China that allowed him to arrive in 1957 to a small town in the coast of the Gulf of Mexico to work with his uncle Arturo in a prolific grocery store. During his days in the coast, Kwong learned to flirt with Mexican women and to drink Corona beer next to the stillness of the waves. He also learned zapoteco curse words from indigenous people in Oaxaca and visited towns in Veracruz where women would attract men through menstruation witchcraft and monkey head diets. Kwong was definitely seduced by the Mexican mystique, but at the same time, he was obstinate in his principles and paranoid in his beliefs. One day he woke up and reached the brilliant conclusion that although he had been living for more than twenty years in Mexico, the mestizo Mexican women would never take him seriously, and so after several trips back to China in which old matchmakers would introduce him to nubile women as the businessman from the Gold Mountain, he rescued my mother Tian Zha from the black bean factory of the Long Tou Wan village. It didn’t matter that Tian was twenty six whereas he was forty; nobody would care as long as she was healthy and strong to propagate the seed of the Yan family.
Tian, on the other hand, might have felt very excited because she could finally dump the factory that had metamorphosed her hands and feet into sandpaper to pursue her dream of coming to the Gold Mountain, following the dozens of people that had fled overseas and come back to the village to deliver goods and souvenirs to the losers still stuck in town. For the villagers in the Long Du region in Guangdong, Gold Mountain could mean anywhere ranging from San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, Toronto, to London or Sidney. It seemed that nothing could go wrong. All the anecdotes were filled with miracles of economic success and the existence of big Chinese communities where the co nationals would help each other and where it was not even necessary to learn other languages to move around. However, my mother probably didn’t realize that her voyage had a slight twist, for Mexico City wasn’t close at all to the original gold mountains of San Francisco, and the Chinatown in Mexico City was an absurdity, a pain, precisely like the name of its neighborhood, Dolores . After all, how could she have known where Mexico City was? World Geography wasn’t her academic strength. Tian graduated from a fiasco propaganda education where it is very likely that she never saw a map of America. In any case, Tian left her Marxist pride of black bean production in the village to become an isolated and submissive housewife in the polluted and monstrous capital of Mexico. A few years before 1992, when my mother was crying at home because according to my father, ten years was too early to go back to the village to visit her parents, my mother would look at my sister and reproduce the scripts of the silly Cantonese soap opera tapes she would borrow from her only Chinese friend in Mexico City, the mother of my only Chexican classmate at elementary school, Juan Luis Leung Li: Patty, when you grow old, don’t be stupid like me and please don’t get married. Men are all the same…
I feel I am digressing too much and circumventing the most important moment that highlighted my trivial childhood in the year 1992. It was in fact the year in which my uncle Ramón decided that he was retiring from almost twenty years of cleaning bread trays and doing the cafeteria accounting chores with his superb Chinese abacus abilities. After Ramón was released from jail in the sixties, he migrated to Hong Kong and married a woman my father always made fun of for her supposedly feminist inclinations. Not being able to find a stable job, Ramón left The Feminist temporarily in Hong Kong and moved to Mexico City in the seventies to work with my father and my aunt Aurora in Café Lucha, an eatery catered towards the occasional flaneur, mariachi, brothel madam, late night comedian, and every other prototypical creature of the Mexican downtown folkloric and countercultural scene of the sixties and seventies, except maybe the burlesque whores who, according to my father, were cheaper and wouldn’t dare to step in our place, but would rather get their fake Chop Suey in the unnamed Chinese cafeteria four blocks from ours. Ramón was a very likable guy with a warm character. He probably never developed a tough personality like his brother because my grandmother raised him as an outlier for being left handed. All the waitresses following Chabela, the major waitress who supposedly was a whore in La Merced in her twenties, used to call him Ramoncito, a name that my father would consider corny and lame, but that my uncle would receive with a mischievous smile.
My uncle Ramón did not teach me Chinese abacus. He did not even instruct me on the art of fortune telling, knowledge that, according to the rumors of my mother, he had learned from a wise man in jail who would read your fate through the shape of your nose. I do remember however, that whenever I would run inside the cafeteria towards him and called him loudly, Pafu, uncle in Long Du dialect, he used to interrupt his activities immediately to carry me on his back. Afterwards, he would probably give me a recently baked custard cake from the oven and sit me on his lap while chatting with my mother about political gossip in Communist China. My mother had a special affection for him because he would defend her against the comments of my poisonous aunt Aurora. On December of that year, Ramón decided that it was time to return to his feminist wife and meet his grandchildren that had just been born in Hong Kong (a boy and a girl, one from each of his sons!). I still remember our farewell in my house. My siblings, my mother, and I outside of the garage, waiting for the outdated blue LTD to come out with my father driving and my uncle sitting in it. My uncle stepping out of the car, and my mother shaking his hand and telling him to enjoy his family in Hong Kong (“You’ve worked so hard, now it’s time to enjoy”) and thanking him for all the help he gave her throughout the years in Café Lucha. Roberto, Patty, and I standing in line probably with our hands in our pockets trying to express an awkward “Good bye,” but in Chinese. I guess my parents never taught us how to say “We will miss you” so we didn’t say that. We didn’t even hug. Do Chinese hug in farewells? At least not in my family, for we hardly ever engage in any display of affection. Then he left and we locked the garage. And our trivial relationship ended forever. Just this simple. I don’t even think I felt very sad. It just felt like vacuum, no more rides on Pafu’s back, only a straightforward absence of him. For the next fourteen years, my parents would make long distance calls to him on special occasions, and they would bring the phone close to me, but I could only try to hold a small talk with him and sometimes I would even reject the phone to avoid the feeling of anxiety. What was I going to say in my broken Long Du? Besides, uncle Ramón had already forgotten most of it because he spoke Cantonese most of the time with his real family. I have always been a fake Chinese anyways, I don’t even speak any useful Chinese language, only the peasant dialect Long Du with the vocabulary of a Chinese old lady mixed with a more sophisticated Spanish (You are close to becoming a ghost, my mother complains angrily). I was not going to babble a sentimental speech in Long Du. I don’t know how to be sentimental in Long Du.
Three weeks ago, my sister called to give me the sad news that uncle Ramón had died after he choked on a piece of an apple while at a birthday party of one of his grandchildren in Hong Kong. Whereas my father blamed Ramón’s wife for forcing him to go to that party even though he was apparently very exhausted, my mother seemed to remain more neutral about it and simply grieve his departure. It would have been hypocritical for me to cry, because I had established a very lose contact with him for the last fourteen years. Two days after Ramón’s death, my mother called his wife and after a long winded inquisition for the details on how my uncle died (Before the disaster, what was he wearing? Was he following the doctor’s instructions? Who gave him the apple?), The Feminist commented that the day before the choking catastrophe, Ramón had asked one of his sons for a piece of scrap paper and a pencil, and had written with his neat handwriting, “Yan Yung Han.” Nobody knows about the existence of a person called Yan Yung Han. But Yung was Ramón’s first Chinese name, whereas I am the only one in my genealogy named Han. My mother then told me, “Pafu always remembered that you have the same face and marks on your lower back as your grandfather. He missed your grandfather very much. He really liked you.”
During freshman year at MIT, I read a Puerto Rican coming of age novel where a young adolescent girl engages in a fruitful conversation with her uncle about which is the country they would call “their” own country. The uncle mentions the fact that in the beginning of the last century, Chinese workers in the railroads of San Francisco would actually request that their corpses be sent to China once they died, even though they had spent most of their lives in the Bay Area of California. In the same way, my uncle Ramón seemed to know very early that he wanted to die in China, a country that had given him a hard life thanks to the Cultural Revolution, but which in the end turned out to be his country. Maybe he never regarded Mexico as his final destination, but only as a waiting room. A waiting room that lasted twenty years. Sometimes I wonder if during the last years of his life he returned to Mexico in his Alzheimer memories. If he did, he probably didn’t think about anthropological luxuries like Teotihuacan or Xochimilco, but he might have recreated a little piece of his Mexico, the Mexico he owned for twenty years immersed in his Chinese arithmetic behind the counter: An alienated sensation of Gabriel Leyva Street with its rancid urine vapors in an unappealing harmony with the deep fried plantain smell. A market of street vendors selling “Made in China” por 5 pesos. Or even echoes of impossible love ballads that Chabela lipsinks next to the Gedasa 100 jukebox in Café Lucha while she boils water for coffee:
Things that people say,
Say that this love is forbidden,
Because you are forty but I am twenty.
And the image of this absent minded waitress who is touched by the Cuarenta y veinte melodrama because impossible love is also her lifestyle. But maybe I’m just being silly. The reality might have been that Ramón completely forgot the broken Spanish that he learned to sell coffee and cake. That he even forgot that the flirtatious waitresses once called him Ramoncito and he laughed behind the judgmental eyes of my father. Or that he and I once had a special code that eluded translation in Spanish or Long Du, a code in which he would be my little horse and I would eat egg yolk desserts sitting on his lap. But I want to believe he didn’t forget the latter, and that the cruel Alzheimer eraser felt pity for pictures that didn’t belong to any written language, and gave him a slight pre-mortem satisfaction. In fact, I am convinced that he passed away with a mischievous smile in his face. Rest in peace, Yan Yung Pui, a.k.a. Ramón Yan.
© 2007 MIT E-merging Journal
