If I Told You

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We fly back a couple weeks later, and things are okay. The government has changed hands by the time we arrive. The economy
improves, protests taper out. As a child growing up in my city, I am okay. I attend school alongside other Chinese and native
Indonesians, experiencing no prejudice that I can recall. After sixth grade, we move to Malaysia, to an island called Penang. I go to an
American school there, and I become friends with Danny. Three years later, we’re smoking on the edge of a reservoir on the outskirts of
the jungle. Three years after that I’m in America, far away from the city with the smoking rooms and cigarette billboards, far away from
the place where men lit angry fires, blackening the air with the smoke of their misplaced hate.
I don’t blame the angry rioters. Then again, I don’t have the right to accuse or absolve. My father, growing up with discrimination in
our smoky country, has that right. As a Christian, he forgives. He understands why the looters did what they did. He grew up poor, like
them. He looks down on the inept government for letting the situation grow out of control.
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When I talk to my father, I appreciate the things that he’s been through, being Chinese, being Indonesian. But I know it’s nothing that
I’ve lived, nothing I can relate to. It’s been decades since those childhood days when my father smoked, when children called him
pig-eater. The riots that happened in my lifetime are too long ago for me to remember. So I feel like thin smoke, the last curling wisp
of a transgenerational memory, only a little Chinese, only a little Indonesian. From the first flame, the culture stoked by my Chinese-
Indonesian forefathers, comes the thick smoke of my father’s experience, of his father’s experience. I am but an afterthought: a trickling
vapor, insubstantial and barely visible, a shamelessly Westernized wisp whose Indonesian identity amounts to a brokenly spoken
language and dubious memories of cigarette billboards between city roads.
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Even the memories of my childhood and my city are smoke. Psychology teaches that all memory is reconstruction, a never-perfect
piecing together of things that once were. Every recollection is just a thin reflection of the original event, fading with the passage of
time. That’s why what I remember about the city of my childhood lacks detail. That’s why I had to contact Danny again to see if our
memories matched up. That’s why my father had to repeat the stories he told me when I was younger of his own childhood and of our
escape from the riots. His memories, too, must be smoky after all these years.
Smoke is still something, though. It’s not a thing you can fully grasp, or hold in your hands. But it’s substance of a sort, however
insubstantial it may seem. If we squint hard enough, we can see that there is a form to smoke, and it is beautiful. Memories are a little
bit like that. It’s a beautiful thing to recall an experience, to put structure to smoke.
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Danny’s driving up from Arkansas to visit for spring break. It’ll be good to see him again. I think we’ll have a smoke, for old time’s sake.
Perhaps we’ll talk about Kundera and the girl he’s engaged to and Tolstoy and the faith I’m sure I have and Vonnegut and how America
isn’t as bad as we thought, that it’s just as screwed up as the rest of a humanity that sends smoke out of the broken windows of Chinese
stores in Indonesian cities. That it’s just as messed up as the rest of a world that produces kids like us, like my father, who happily
breathed the fumes of a slow-killing poison.
And then, when the substance of our conversation is burnt out, we’ll stomp our cigarette butts out on some Massachusetts sidewalk, a
far cry from the reservoir we frequented in the twilight of our tenth grade year, and laugh at how thinly we resemble the people we once
were. We’ll find it funny that all of life, that childhood and violence and memory and culture, is really just smoke curling up into air,
fading away.
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