Tribute to an Outlaw (我們路不同)

Since his passing, people have often asked me what kind of a man Father was. In all fairness, understanding a man of his reputation and caliber was no easy task. To use a common cliché, the depth of his character was like the many layers of an onion to which we, his children, were only partially exposed. But over the years, I’ve come to find that they’re never quite interested in the truth; it is a story they want, and they are usually just searching for the right sound bites to satisfy their own more colorful conjectures. So I’ll do my best to piece it together from the start and tell Father’s story through the only lens I was privy to.

In our household today, love is expressed routinely; it sits on the tips of our tongues in daily life, casually bookends our phone calls (goodbye, I love you!) or is pecked on the cheek before parting ways in the mornings. But as a child growing up in Father’s household, love was seldom expressed directly, and the Western concept of unconditional love certainly did not exist. Love was a resource to be carefully rationed and came with prerequisites beyond the shared blood which flowed through our veins. Due to the circumstances surrounding his own upbringing, I imagine it was his logic that love and affection, if parceled out too frequently, would soften our minds and weaken our fortitudes. Therefore, a terse nod of the head was given in lieu of outward praise when we achieved outstanding marks in school or placed first in competition; what would normally be cause for celebration was perceived as simply maintaining some unspoken family standard and often passed by unremarkably. Other telling signs of his approval sometimes came at the dinner table when he insisted that we take a larger morsel of pork during a period where rice was already a scarcity and meat was a luxury reserved for soldiers. More subtly however, it could be seen when the fire which burned beneath those dark steely eyes would momentarily quell, and the thin lines of his mouth relinquished their hold to settle into the crude approximation of a smile. Of course, these were the things that we children cherished the most.

When people ask me if Father was a loving parent, they are surprised at my response. To them, a man of his reputation was surely incapable of harboring these emotions, and the expression of love therefore would not fit into their narrative of such a character.

A memory central to my childhood is the setting of wine gourds and ashtrays and porcelain cups over the large circular table in our parlor room with my siblings every Sunday morning. When Father’s friends arrived, the maids would usher us out of the building, leaving the elders to conduct their business while we played among the peach blossoms and magnolias and splashed around the ponds which lined the paths of our courtyard, shimmering with all their colorful varieties of carp. Occasionally we would enlist the help of one of Father’s bodyguards that stalked the property to hoist us up to an out-of-reach tree branch or play catch with us. I remembered thinking it was odd that these men always seemed to carry a gun or a large knife, but the country was in much turmoil at that time and the law of the jungle ruled. Citizens had to take it upon themselves for self-defense, and therefore growing up in the presence of armed men at our home just felt like a sign of the times. As for Father’s business, Mother told us that he worked in imports and exports, the specifics of which were left unsaid. As was typical in our society, the worlds of children and adults existed on separate planes, never to be conflated, and for years we turned a blind eye not out of ignorance but out of adherence to custom. To us, it was a simple gathering of old friends, no different than us consorting with classmates after school, plotting our latest mischief. And so now, when people ask me about the things that Father traded in, I tell them I did not ask.

I was eight when the war finally arrived at our doorsteps and wrested me from my cloistered childhood of relative comfort. As I lay sleeping in bed, vividly do I recall the stillness of the night suddenly shattered by the squealing of tires and the crunch of gravel followed by the bark of sharp, urgent commands. A staccato of what sounded like firecrackers erupted in the distant background. Crawling to my window, I looked on as a procession of armed, uniformed men - wraiths in the night - filed through the southern gate of our property and into the courtyard where they were greeted by Father. Those of us who were home had just enough time to grab a bagful of belongings before we were quickly shepherded onto a convoy of vehicles and shuttled to an airfield, where we were then escorted onto a twin propeller aircraft bearing the sovereign symbol of some unfamiliar nation on its fuselage. I had only ever seen planes from afar, flying in purposeful formation, and oft accompanied by the mournful wail of airhorns. The events unfolded so rapidly and unexpectedly, and with such terrible urgency, that some of my siblings who were away with friends or relatives were simply left behind - how could I have known then that I would never see some of them again?

The sheer shock of this experience, paired with the lingering drowsiness induced by my rudely interrupted slumber, must have dulled my senses. After the adrenaline subsided, I passed out and recall nothing further of the night. When I came to, we had landed on a foreign soil that was to be our new home. But from that day forward, our country and our ancestral home were lost to us forever. Certain memories of the old life as we knew it are stored in rare photographs, but have mostly been relegated to the crevasses of our minds, surfacing every now and then in wistful conversations between my siblings and me like the vague tendrils of some fantastic dream. And so now, when people ask me how an alleged common civilian family could have possibly been evacuated via military air transportation back then, I tell them I do not remember.

After settling into our new surroundings, Father’s Sunday meetings marched on, albeit to the beat of a sharply different drum. We would never again set out so many porcelain cups and ashtrays, and a palpable tension hung in the air much like the year-round humidity of our new home. The kindly smiles that Father’s friends customarily greeted us with were replaced by grimaces or pursed lips, and the thrums of lively conversation, once frequently punctuated by bursts of laughter and the clinks of porcelain, became muted, heard only ever after as echoes in memory.

Years later, word of Father’s passing came to me by telegram while I was abroad at school. By this time, my siblings - those who managed to escape - and I were all flung far across the world for boarding school and university. We all received the same summons:

YESTERDAY FATHER PASSED IN SLEEP STOP RETURN FOR FUNERAL ASAP STOP ARRANGEMENTS HOME ENCLOSED BELOW STOP.

I did not expect the funeral to be a large affair given that many of our family’s relationships were abruptly severed during the war, and while it was held in a rather impressive ceremonial hall, it was the sea of black-clad mourners, which counted among them numerous high-profile political figures that I was stunned to see, extending in rows and columns and blocks beyond the building, that remains most firmly etched in my mind. In stark contrast to the western attire of me and my siblings, these people were all dressed in traditional uniform and seemed uncommonly enthusiastic to pay their respects to Father. We had never seen most of these people, and I remembered wondering how did Father have so many friends? The news media, descending like vultures, all keenly wondered the same thing; the reporters would all berate me with the same questions: “Why are there heads of state here, why is the Generalissimo’s family here, what is your Father’s affiliation with these people?”, to which I could only reply that I do not know.

It was during this time that unsettling stories from our home country began to surface about many of Father’s friends who we used to regularly see in his Sunday meetings, and we learned that they, too, were not simply the avuncular old timers we thought them to be; like the Pockmarked Uncle who would occasionally slip us baked egg tarts and sesame candies with a sly wink and conspiratorial smile, or Uncle Buddha, whose big bald head, unmistakable potbelly, and contagious bellowing laughter delighted us to no end, or Brother Snake, nicknamed for the fearsome twin vipers which curled themselves down each forearm in black ink, who, in lapses between standing vigilant outside of the parlor room and appearing menacing, would make us paper boats to sail in our ponds.

In the eyes of the new administration, the ones who had vanquished us from our home, these were people of the underworld - men of ill repute and violent consequence who had committed ghastly crimes against their country and fellow citizens during the war. From these state sponsored media outlets, we heard the shrill cries of outrage, the accusations of treason, and the hissed whispers of murders and atrocities. Still, it pained me to learn the fates of some of those who had not fled the country in time.

Finally, it was alleged that these men belonged to an outfit led by none other than Father himself, who was also said to have had close ties to our new island nation’s leadership. At that point in my early adulthood, I was finally forced to challenge my naïve childhood notions of what Father’s station in life was - who he was, and what he did - and I numbly realized then that he was not quite the person that he and mother had raised us to naively believe.

In the years following his death, much speculation into his activities has been made by inquisitive journalists and historians alike who would go on to publish articles and accounts that ranged from the suggestive to the shamelessly sensational. To this day these rumors are still no less jarring to me. Depending on who you ask, you may hear a variety of different descriptions: from one, a patriot (respectfully), from another, Big Brother (caustically), and from the rest, things that I care not to repeat.

To us, he was our Father. And nothing less.

Much like arguing with a statue, I have long since learned how fruitless it is trying to convince those who have already set their minds, and so now, when people dispute my claims to the kind of man Father was or was not I simply shake my head, for they do not know.