My Father's Fist

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My Father's Fists

Only once did my father ever lay his hands on me in anger. Just once. It happened on a spring evening when I was seventeen. The stinging pain seeped deep and lingered for a long time afterward. Pain that was not a result of the blow, but of the words that followed.

My father was born Marciano Goingko Dollesin. Because he had been a promising boxer in his youth, everyone called him Rocky. The night he struck me, he could easily have shattered my jaw. Or worse.

What had led to the blow was this:

In the front yard one of my brothers and a neighbor were wrestling on the lawn. Their bout got out of hand. There was blood, cursing, tears. I played referee and untangled them. My brother's emotions, however, had mounted to a frenzy. While trying to keep him and the neighbor apart, I threw my brother onto the ground. He got to his feet, pushed past me and ran indoors.

I told the neighbor boy to go home. Get out of there. When he did, I went inside to check on my brother.

My father was waiting. He called me into the kitchen. His voice rose to a shout, something he rarely did. Apparently, he had one side of the story. My brother's side. With his face just inches from mine, he told me I had no idea how important family was.

I stammered, and tried to explain what had happened. He shoved me against the wall. "Never," he said, jabbing a finger, "take someone else's side against one of your brothers or sisters. Ever."

Knowing the tragic details of my father's past, I did not say anything. Family meant more to him than anything else in the world. During the war his mother and four sisters were slain mercilessly by the invading Japanese. In the late nineteen-sixties, the dismembered remains of his eldest brother, a Philippine revolutionary, were discovered in a burlap sack thrown into a muddy rice paddy.

Although he still stood directly in front of me, my father shouted. "I hope you heard me."

I tried to explain again, but was stopped by his fist, which shot up quickly and smashed into the right side of my face. I slid down the wall onto the floor and glared up at him.

His hands trembled. He turned around and started to leave. When he got to the edge of the kitchen, I shouted after him. "You're not my family. You're not my father. My father is white."

He stopped.

"I hope you heard me," I said, mocking the last thing he'd shouted to me.

He whirled, crossed the room and stood in front of where I was still balled up on the floor. He got down into a crouch, rested his thick forearms on his knees. He narrowed his eyes. Inches from my face, his fists opened and closed. "You're a selfish punk." He hesitated a moment. We exchanged glares. Then he went on. "When we go to church and you sit three pews behind us . . . I know why. When you see your friends at the mall and drift away from us . . . I know why. When you ask to be dropped off a block away from school . . . I know why."

He got up and made like he was going to kick me. I pulled myself into a tighter ball. He didn't kick me, though. Instead, he shook his head and said, "You know what? Maybe if you didn't spend so much time trying to make sure people didn't suspect you of being part of this family, you'd see who really gets the stares." He paused, then with his voice breaking he said, "Try squeezing your selfish feet into the shoes of a Filipino man whose Filipina wife has a white-" He stopped then and swiped at his eyes. Sighing loudly, he left the room. I remained in a ball on the floor until footsteps faded and his bedroom door slammed shut.

After pulling myself up off the kitchen floor, I went into the living room and sat on the sofa. Beneath the coffee table was a stack of six or seven photo albums. I pulled one out, began to flip through it.

I came across a picture of my father cradling me in his arms while I slept. I looked at the next picture. It was a photo of my father pinning a ribbon on my blue Cub Scout uniform. There was one on the next page of my father standing behind me, bent low, instructing me how to swing a baseball bat. One of me and my father mugging for the camera while fishing off a Treasure Island pier. Another of the two of us standing at the gravelly edge of a clear stream, a canvas tent billowing behind us, a line of serrated pines bending in the background.

And then I realized, with a sick feeling, how selfish I had really been.

My eyes misted. How, I wondered, could I have denied this man, even for a second, of being my father?

I closed the photo album and padded down the hallway to my father's closed bedroom door. I knocked lightly.

"What?" he said.

"Can we talk, Dad?"

"Go to your room! Stay there and think about how selfish you are."

In my room I laid on the mattress and stared up at the ceiling. I thought about a lot of things. It must have been near dawn before I finally slipped off to sleep.

It was mid-morning when I got out of bed. I went into the kitchen. My brothers and sisters and mother were sitting around the table, having breakfast and joking about something. My presence did not bring the immediate silence I'd expected.

My father was in front of the stove. In one hand he gripped a spatula, which he used to press slices of Spam against the bottom of the sizzling pan. The whole time he whistled a bar of some familiar tune. He glanced over at me, smiling. "When we get done eating," he said, "grab your rod and tackle box. I hear they're landing monster trout at the lake."