A Feather On The Breath Of God

Table of Contents Title Page PART ONE - CHANG PART TWO - CHRISTA PART THREE - A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD PART FOUR - IMMIGRANT LOVE Additional Acclaim for Sigrid Nunez’s A Feather on the Breath of God Also by About the Author Copyright Page PART ONE CHANG The first time I ever heard my father speak Chinese was at Coney Island. I don’t remember how old I was then, but I must have been very young. This was in the early days, when we still went on family outings. We were walking along the boardwalk when we ran into the four Chinese men. My mother told the story often, as if she thought we’d forgotten. “You kids didn’t know them and neither did I. They were friends of your father’s, from Chinatown. You’d never heard Chinese before. You didn’t know what was up. You stood there with your mouths hanging open—I had to laugh. ‘Why are they singing? Why is Daddy singing?’” One of the men gave each of my sisters and me a dollar bill. I cashed mine into dimes and set out to win a goldfish. A dime bought you three chances to toss a Ping-Pong ball into one of many small fishbowls, each holding a quivering tangerine-colored fish. Overexcited, I threw recklessly, again and again. When all the dimes were gone I ran back to the grown-ups in tears. The man who had given me the dollar tried to give me another, but my parents wouldn’t allow it. He pressed the bag of peanuts he had been eating into my hands and said I could have them all. I never saw any of those men again or heard anything about them. They were the only friends of my father’s that I would ever meet. I would hear him speak Chinese again, but very seldom. In Chinese restaurants, occasionally on the telephone, once or twice in his sleep, and in the hospital when he was dying. So it was true, then. He really was Chinese. Up until that day I had not quite believed it. My mother always said that he had sailed to America on a boat. He took a slow boat from China, was what she used to say, laughing. I wasn’t sure whether she was serious, and if she was, why coming from China was such a funny thing. A slow boat from China. In time I learned that he was born not in China but in Panama. No wonder I only half-believed he was Chinese. He was only half-Chinese. The facts I know about his life are unbearably few. Although we shared the same house for eighteen years, we had little else in common. We had no culture in common. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that we had no language in common. By the time I was born my father had lived almost thirty years in America, but to hear him speak you would not have believed this. About his failure to master English there always seemed to me something willful. Except for her accent—as thick as but so different from his— my mother had no such trouble. “He never would talk about himself much, you know. That was his way. He never really had much to say, in general. Silence was golden. It was a cultural thing, I think.” (My mother.) By the time I was old enough to understand this, my father had pretty much stopped talking. Taciturnity: They say that is an Oriental trait. But I don’t believe my father was always the silent, withdrawn man I knew. Think of that day at Coney Island, when he was talking a Chinese blue s