Fatherhood creates bond between son and departed dad

In the winter of 1949, as Communist forces swept to victory over the Nationalists for control of mainland China, my grandfather Song Cai, foreseeing the dark days to come for his family, made arrangements for my father to leave the country.

James Tien-Yung Tsai was just 19 when he left Shanghai for Taiwan. He would eventually make his way to New York, an immigrant in an unfamiliar city.

My father had enjoyed a privileged childhood as the only male child among a brood of 13 girls. Chauffeured to and from school and lacking playmates his own age, he’d spent his afternoons lingering in the family kitchen with the cooks. In New York he used this modicum of experience to talk his way into a job as a line cook in a Chinese restaurant.

When asked to prepare a dish, my father would reply, “We do this a little differently in Shanghai. Why don’t you show me how you do it here?”

He was, it turned out, an early practitioner of the “fake it until you make it” philosophy of success.

My father earned enough to pay for an undergraduate education at New York University, where he earned a degree in accounting. After graduation he joined an accounting firm and worked his way up to full partner. Along the way he met and married my mother, a Hawaii girl working as an occupational therapist in the city, and started a family of his own.

My father worried that communicating directly with my grandfather might put his family back home in China in jeopardy, so he left it to my mother to keep up the correspondence. By 1966 my grandfather and his family had been displaced from their home by the Red Guard and had taken shelter in a small shed on the property. In one of the last letters she received from China, my grandfather described a subdued birthday celebration to mark his 70th year, a “homely and simple feast at home, and only one table without any candles and other things like the old days.”

In August 1968 my mother wrote to my grandfather to let him know of the birth of his third grandchild in America — me. She received no reply. She would continue to write to him for the next several years to no avail. Her final letter was sent in 1973, informing whoever might still be on the other side of my father’s death.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about my father, and about fatherhood in general, over the last year or so.

I was 4 years old when my father died, and much of what I know about him has come through the remembrances of others, through stories passed along from my immediate family and from aunts and uncles who knew him. It’s through my Aunt Caroline Kubo, for example, that I know how my father stubbornly refused to let anyone else clean his children’s diapers — it was his responsibility, not anyone else’s — and how my Uncle James Kubo finally convinced my father to at least let him show him how to use a washboard properly.

After my father’s death, my mother moved the family to Hawaii to be closer to her parents and siblings. Here I was never lacking for male guidance. My maternal grandfather taught me how to tie a tie, fix a flat tire and shave without cutting myself. From my Uncle James I learned how to turn back a bully with a straight left followed by a right hook; from my Uncle Francis, how to tie a lure and cast a line; and from my Uncle Richard, how to work every city-and-county phone line until I get the answer I want.

My older brother, though just a boy himself, played an even bigger role in my day-to-day rearing, teaching me not just how to talk to girls and throw a split-finger fastball, but also how to work through adversity, be kind to others and take responsibility for my actions.

Despite all of this, I’ve always been aware of how little I know of what it’s like to have a father and to be a father’s son. And I’ve always wondered what that would mean for me should I ever become a father myself.

This Sunday I’ll celebrate my first Father’s Day with my 5-month-old son, Eddie. With his arrival in December, and with each day since then, I like to think that I’ve come to know my father more deeply than I ever have. In the joy I feel whenever I’m with Eddie, I like to believe that I finally understand the love my father had for me. I also perhaps understand a bit of his fear.

I have one very clear memory of my father that has not been passed down, that has always been mine alone. It’s late winter in 1973, and my father and I are spending the day at the Central Park Zoo. I’m not used to being with my father in the daytime, and every few minutes I ask him if my mother is off work yet and if we should go home.

I learn later that this day in the park comes as my father is recuperating from his first heart attack, a complication of Type 1 diabetes. Against his physician’s advice, he’s checked himself out of the hospital early and has made it a point to spend some extra time with me.

He’s afraid I won’t remember him if he dies.

It’s true that my father will not live long enough to see the spring, but on this day he sits patiently on a park bench while I lie on the ground beneath him.

“What’s my name?” he asks.

“Daddy.”

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.