This summer, I parachuted into Florida. Little did I know that I would broach a controversial subject in one of my news assignments. It was on Armenian genocide. Once I gathered my notes and was ready to hit the keyboard, I wasn’t even sure if the genocide was spelled with a capital G or a lowercase one. The AP stylebook did not have the answers for many of my questions.
One sweltering afternoon, I stumbled into the Florida Holocaust Museum to sample its air-conditioned breeze. And a new exhibition by artist Apo Torosyan caught my eye. Up the staircase I climbed. I tiptoed around four giant mud mounds built by the Armenian American artist, and stared at loaves of bread wrapped with Armenian newspapers that topped the pyramids. The headlines I couldn’t decipher, and the paintings of crusts framed on the walls were even more disorienting.
Collages of toasted bread were pasted together with Xerox photos of the genocide victims. A bloody handprint alluded to the Turkish perpetrators. Burnt toast was strapped together with a rope like well-worn sandals. Gauzes veiled images of idyllic villages and pastoral scenes.
When I looked into the faces from long-ago Armenia, I saw my moon-faced father with a receding hairline. He shared with them the mark left by unspeakable fear.
Torosyan was paying homage to an atrocity of WWI. But I know another volatile war from my distant roots all too well.
At age 10, I came across a photo book left by my Chinese history teacher in the classroom. I thumbed through the pages with my classmates in Hong Kong. Our spring-onion-like fingers frigidly peeled spread after spread of grainy black and white images of disfigured Chinese civilians: women disemboweled by Japanese swords and bundles of sorrow-wounded babies and toddlers were scattered on the dirt.
The captions were too small for us to read and the images too grave to comprehend. But they were vividly imprinted in our young minds. Somehow we knew that among the wretched who perished could very likely be a distant relative. Such thoughts made me cringe and shudder in horror.
1943. Two years after Pearl Harbor was bombed, my father was born in the frays of Nanking. The Golden City once cherished by Chinese for centuries had lost all its luster.
His parents were survivors of the horrific Nanking massacre in 1937-38 where Japanese invaders killed more than 200,000 Chinese during the Sino-Japanese war.
To escape poverty, my teenage father fled to Hong Kong in the 1950s. He hopped on a train with his mother and brother and went all the way south, till they could go no further in China’s boundary. My father said he only had fleeting memories of his hometown and would not divulge any detail to me or my younger sister.
A stern patriarch, my dad won’t take no for an answer.
What’s unsaid often holds a family together, until the invisible ties can stretch no more and break.
Fear of poverty prompted him to toil seamlessly day after day. He became the silhouette that was cast on the living room walls, between our slumber and waking hours.
Years later, I realized that my father, who grew up in the wasteland, was haunted by the phantom pain of a war that butchered more than 300,000 of his countrymen.
His latent depression numbed his senses, and slowly chipped away at our bond. He shunned human connections and befriended only a select few chess players in the park.
He was consumed by the void that filled up his universe. To make sure I was not infected with his past, he decided for me who was safe to befriend, which jobs promised financial stability. He could not see my panoramic worldview through his rigid lens.
At age 17, I turned my back from him. I left, like a rice-paper kite cut loose, flew to England, and landed in a boarding school in Buckingham (but not next to the palace).
Never return, I said to myself. Never return.
But I did.
After five years.
The parenthesis in my burgundy-colored British passport declared that I was a British National (Overseas). The arcs were so big that they separated me from the others.
I was among the masses of inanimate subjects of the British Empire. Even though I was forbidden from holding a job, somehow everybody assumed I opened a Chinese restaurant.
Caught between the transaction of China and Britain, Hong Kong’s citizens had no bargaining power to determine their fate. Time would eventually reveal that they were were more inferior than the Indians or Caribbeans, who had full British citizenships after the British colonial rule ceased.
Unlike this betrayal by my step-motherland, my father, in his non-verbal but diligent way, promptly paid my school bills, and stood by me till my adolescence rebellion subsided. He was always there, like the lamp post glowing on a pitch-dark main street.
Now a new retiree with ample time to kill, my dad slowly churned out clues of his enigmatic past.
In one of the rare dinners he had with my sister recently, my father mentioned that his family was so poor that my paternal grandmother sold homemade tofu in the train stations.
The diabetic, wheelchair-rendered woman I remembered as a statue occupying a corner of my childhood apartment used to carry the fragile squares in two rickety bamboo baskets and hustled the train passengers. She often went home with soot stains on her clothes.
Long after the tea on the dinner table turned cold, my father admitted he regretted that my sister and I had sprouted up so fast that he missed all our birthdays, our graduations and my news award ceremony. He started to worry that I would marry a blond American and bear a child with a name that he cannot utter.
I dare not confront the gray-haired man with the elusive carnage that haunted him for years. Rather, I decided to let him take his pace and brave the subject on his own terms.
As he sat in his Boston home, the artist Torosyan told me that human suffering is universal and genocides transcended borders. “The bread paintings could be done with rice or potato,” he said in the other end of the phone.
For a moment, I saw my world book-ended by the massacres in Armenia and Nanking.
Hatred breeds the vicious cycle of sorrow.
Nanking is connected to Hiroshima. Hiroshima to Nagasaki.
And no toll on me and my father.
