Excerpted from Black Rice:

“Riding the Tiger”

他谁骑虎难下

Tā shuí qíhǔnánxià

He who rides the tiger, fears to dismount.

—A Chinese proverb

Every man who leaves his native place thinks he will return.

Even as he toils away in lands he will always be a stranger, that man believes he can find his way home again. If not to stay then to marry a wife, conceive a son, to buy a piece of land he might one day live upon. To honor aged parents if they remain alive. To revere them as ancestors if they have gone to Afterlife.

This is what sustain us in the fields and camps and sweatshops. Memory is a cloth of comfort to wrap the sweaty brow when we take up tools. It cools our head as we chop the cane, hoe the cotton, break up land and build it into bridges and roads and railways.

Any man who has tried will tell you, home is no easy place to return. If he finds the means to make it back, it won’t be same as before, and he won’t be same as when he left. Yes, some of us return but I will not be one of them.

I will die here in America among those who love me, but can never really know me. Not the daughter of my dead son, that beautiful and stronghead woman mixed with so many people, she is of no people. Your mother’s scattered blood calls her everywhere but home. Not you, her son, who will grow up adrift from your ancestors. Not even the wife of these fifty years, who insisted to call you after me though family name should only pass from father to son, not grandfather to great grandson.

“Baby, don’t tell me you’re still fooling with that ink and paper,” wife comes in scolding.

“You need to eat you some food then lay yourself down and rest.”

“Yes, Vera, my Li-Li. One more set of words to write and then I will sleep.”

She brings food from kitchen to tempt me into health: kumquat and mooncakes, rice porridge congee and light soup I can smell is made with wrong spices. Moving around sickroom with towels and tonics, medicine bottles and hot bags, she is doing for me in my aged sickness what I did in her youthful wellness.

Doing even more, since I never had to clean up any food thrown out from belly, never had to push any wheelchair or carry wife to outhouse. She used to call me “baby” as loving word. Now I am not husband again. I am bigger baby than even you, siyun jang. Your lamp wick is just catching light as mine is burning out.

Living here at backside of grocery store we do have indoor tap and good kitchen. No need to pump water or draw from the well. No chopping of to outdoor stove like I did in Yazoo City. It is no disgrace when a man cooks food for wife, you know.

What else was there to give her? I had no money to court a bride, no land or betrothal gift. All I had was strong arms to pump water and heat her bath. To wash her clothes, empty her chamber pot. To stock her cupboard with food to eat. Every penny in my pocket was hers for the asking. If she wanted I would even give her my bones.

Other Chinese would abuse me for loving black woman. What else they wanted me to do, live for years with no wife by my side? In those days America didn’t let you bring woman from

China, never let you near their own. We were a village of bachelors, pouring loneliness into hard labor, fan tan gambling, opium and payday prostitutes. Some of us died from overwork. More of us died from homesickness and heartbreak.

If my generations never flourished here at least they didn’t fall like fading Forget Me

Nots. One bud is blooming even now, jang siyun. You, my descendant. And from your seed others may grow. Great grandson is healthy baby with bit of Chinese in you, a little Cuban too.

Your legs already hard with muscle, hands big and strong like shuai jiao wrestler. But black blood is so strong it may swallow all else.

So let us name you为李强李, Keung Man Lee. Or Kong, as they call it here. Shabby

Chinese grocery store and name is all I have to give you. Let this be your staff when life takes you to manhood. May you grow like the bamboo which bends, stronger than the oak which resists. May you never be mocked with ugly names made from fighting words. Coolie,

Celestial, Chino, Chink. China Man, Yellow Man, Gook.

People seeing ancient Chinese like me always want to know my age. When you are old man, people never speak to you as equal. They stoop to holler in the face, like you are child.

“Have you reached 100 yet, Mr. Kong?”

I do not know how many years I have. There are enough in me already for three lifetimes: my boyhood days in China, my twice-suffered time in Cuba, and my years here in Mississippi, where I write these words from the bed I soon will die upon.

Ruined as I am, I struggle against too much resting. When I close my eyes the memories come, flickering and fading like candlelight. But palest ink is better than sharpest remembrance.

I must capture these memories on pages you will read one day and know who I am. Maybe you will also find a hidden part of you.

“Tā shuí qíhǔnánxià,” I mutter half asleep, forgetting wife at bedside. Vera leans down, frowning. “Say what, Mr. Lee?”

“Tā shuí qíhǔnánxià,” I repeat. “He who rides…ah, how you say this? He who rides big fears to step down? No, this is not right word.”

“What big cat? You’re talking out of your head, baby.” She reaches over to touch my brow. “Must be thinking ‘bout them Mississippi painters used to roam the Delta when ya’ll worked the railroad. Here, drink this willow bark tea. It’ll break up that fever.”

I do not want to wash away memories with strong medicine, so I push the cup away. No, not panthers. What is this word for jungle cat with black stripes and sharp teeth? I am dreaming my remembrances but losing the words they are wrapped in.

How I struggle with my adopted tongues, especially now in my fading years. I hear these languages well enough for someone not born to them. But Spanish in my mouth sounds like machete cutting cane. And the English that seems smooth in my own mind, falls from my lips like clods of mud.

Yet I am no longer master of my native tongue. Who would think that a man could forget the language he drank with his mother’s milk? Yet I struggle to remember words I haven’t spoken in decades.

I wait until Vera leaves the room then pull myself to sitting. I gather my papers, my brush and inkstone from bedside table. I have forgotten more than I remember but still know the running script I learned in Master Cheong’s warehouse.

The memory is in my fingers, a jumble of words flowing from head to hand to page. It is old Cantonese and shadows of Spanish, a blend of several Englishes. I have been so long among the blacks I sometimes use their turns of phrase, their words stretched long like noodle dough.

For you who are reading after I am gone, I pray you make it through the muddle. Know this, siyun, my great grandson. Your ancestors rode as cargo in miserable ships, the African and the Asian both. They called us coolies, a word that means “bitter labor.”

Overseas Chinese that survived the passage came here half-slave, half-free.

We scattered like rice chaff to the cane fields of Cuba, the guano pits of Peru, the cotton fields and railroad camps of America. But bitter labor was nothing new. Peasants on the land at home were lower even than sharecroppers here in the Delta.

Yes, tiger! I remember now the word. I remember old Chinese proverbs, “Fear the wolf in front and tiger behind.”

I was born in the year of the tiger, early days of Opium Wars. I cannot recall name of my home village in Sze Yup Province but I do remember the home of my heart.

Ah Mooi was my honored mother, seventh daughter of a poor rice farmer. Her family lived in dianpu way, as many poor people did. Tenant farmers were made to pay rent and taxes on land they never owned. Whole families farmed the rice, paid tribute to landlords with gifts and money, serving them at weddings and festivals and funerals.

When rice crops failed and my grandfather could not feed his family he went to village market and sold off Ah Mooi, his youngest child. The man who took her was a middling spice merchant, cruel as any Mississippi cotton planter. My mother had to mind the children, no matter that she was a child herself. She cooked and cleaned for family, and even made goods for merchant’s trade. Ah Mooi hardly dared to sleep.