The day before my father passed away recently, one of my two cats disappeared. I adopted her and her brother from the humane society last August, when both were about three months old. They were homeless but fortunate animals, their cuteness, eliciting human kindness. The sister and brother came in different colors, not birds of the same feather. One would wonder, as many of us do in this age of globalization and polarization, if they are of the same kind. A Facebook friend told me that different fathers could contribute to the same litter, which would account for the different pigments and patterns in coats. For me, origins do not really matter, though it surely did for our Founding Fathers, who declared all men were created equal. Do we extend our love to tabbies or tuxedos alike, Republicans or Democrats, as we do to those close to our hearts?
I named the tabby “Jas,” short for “Jasmine,” among the favorite of my scented flowers. Jasmine is also a common girl’s name in India. Indians in historical India and the Chinese in China live together in Asia, the Orient of Occidental imagination, populated by Mongolians and dark Caucasians alike. I named Jas’s brother, “Jive.” An alliteration, a linguistic Jive as in a session of jam, as ebony black as Louis Armstrong and as yellow as YoYo Ma.
Both cats defied feline stereotypes, neither of them aloof. After a day or two, they recognized their names. Jas wouldn’t confuse herself with Jive and vice versa. Like a baby between 6-12 months old, they’d entered the “mirror stage” and achieved individuality. They responded, like my son nearly thirty years ago, cooing to my touch. I knew at that moment that we’d be bonded for life. My feline children might die before I do and I’d say “safe sailing” like I’d done to my father on Facebook, unable to say farewell in my hometown Shanghai, due to the pandemic. I accept and celebrate nature’s cycle of life.
When Jas didn’t answer my call, as she’d always done, I checked the nooks and crannies of my compact condo. I knew her hiding places, the crevices of bookshelves, the undefined spaces below my hanging shirts and above my suitcases. Still failing to show, my call had become desperate. The balcony door was open, Jive looking lazily at me with his Hello-Kitty eyes. My calling became more urgent as I looked down from my balcony and saw a dog walker with her greyhound. I didn’t think it would help if I dashed downstairs, beseeching Jas to come home. I’d be willing to let her be. She’d chosen her freedom and I shouldn’t stop her.
What a false alarm! She came out of hiding minutes later when I’d given up hope. Loss lost. Love regained.
*
I wasn’t at a loss when BaBa breathed his last at 97. I didn’t need to hire a “wailer” in a funeral procession that MaMa wouldn’t have planned. BaBa has lived as I am still living with him. I wasn’t sad when my father died, either. I don’t know if I’ll follow the seven stages of grief. Is it Ok if I compress the stages, like China’s frog-leap of modernity? If I don’t go through the stages to recover from mourning myself, would my father think of me as an unfilial son? Would my mother—who was also 97 and still kicking—regard me as a prodigal son? MaMa had prepared for the inevitable, as I had. His departure has also hastened the mental preparation for my own forthcoming one. It is not how and where we’ll lay down our lives, but when. I’ve learned only with death waiting on the vanishing horizon that we begin our life in meaning.
BaBa reached his palpable end at 9:30am, June 26th, 2022 Beijing time. At about 5:30pm Pacific Standard time on June 25th, MaMa called on WeChat voice rather than video, doing away with our customary greetings. Your father’s temperature went up to 39c, she told me. Give him another 1000m Tylenol, I said, if the time he’d taken it was 4 hours ago. When I picked up mother’s call one hour later, I anticipated the message. He went in his sleep, apparently without much suffering. His decline was gradual: an unsteady gait, unpredictable falls, followed by momentary clouding of the mind lack of facial recognition. In moments when he’d recognize me, though, his eyes would light up, smiling his toothless smile. Are you doing well? he’d ask. Do you need money?
His fortune was pirated at the Taiwan Straits in the late 1940s, trying to escape Mao’s army. Failing that, he wanted to go to Hong Kong and tried to master English, which would help to facilitate his business. He murmured into my childhood dreams the magic lamps and flying carpets, reading my bedtime stories from his bilingual copy of The Arabian Nights. He’d never crossed the border to the British Colony. Neither did he cross to the English side of the page on his bilingual copy of A Thousand and One Nights. He’d accomplished was to turn his youngest son into an endowed American humanities professor, who’d earned his living in wiggly English.
The second half of my father’s life was good. He’d been recruited by the same communist party that had incorporated my mother to nationalize China’s private industries in the 1950s. This time, three decades and some later, it was BaBa’s turn to join the course of China’s revolutionary reversal. His rusty entrepreneurial skills were summoned to serve the Party’s capitalism with Chinese characteristics. China isn’t socialism of the Scandinavian sort. The authentic socialism belongs exclusively to the United States. It transpired when FDR rescued capitalism from the brink of its demise with taxpayer’s money. So did it happen again when Obama, the lone ranger, galloped into Wall Street to save the too big to fail. Socialism for the filthy rich, and capitalism for the wretched poor. This is the American Way.
Mao practically terminated my father’s first life of prosperity in the 1950s. Deng Xiaoping made possible his second life as a come-back kid at age sixty, two years younger than I am now. That was about mid 1980s, when I flew to the land of milk and honey without any intention to join the huddled masses from old Europe and to be sheltered under the Statue of Liberty. My father was fulfilling his youthful ambitions from his pre-Mao times. I, on the other hand, wanted to get educated in America and contribute to a neo-New China, like my mother did for the new China in the 1950s. My father and I both had the wheel of Chinese fortune turned in our favor, thanks to the invisible hand of the market with the visible state violence of June 4th in Tiananmen Square. This was when Reagan, Thatcher, and Deng Xiaoping began to restructure the global capitalist order.
*
In the morning after BaBa’s passing, I was lost in the meandering of my mind. A jolt of Jive put me on sudden alert, the shriek of Jas tightening my heart. Dashing to the rail of the balcony, I saw my feline daughter wailing. She’d jumped, perhaps at a bird or for a fly. She’s always been the adventurous, agile, and audacious one.
I ran down the four floor flights of stairs, as though my body was defying gravity in my childhood nightmare. Jas hadn’t run to the bushes nearby to hide, as she was paralyzed by such excruciating pain that even my always welcome hug didn’t alleviate it. There was no purring as she snuggled against my bent head and cheek. Just a couple of hours before, she’d been sniffing me, her soft paw patting my closed eyelids in bed. Get up and feed me, she’d nudged. The sun‘s up, you lazy man.
Jas’s crying persisted. Her eyes, usually affectless typical of her kind, betrayed panic. Our entry into the building’s lobby didn’t lessen her exasperation nor our ride in the elevator. It’d taken a few minutes after our entry into the apartment before she finally relaxed a bit, her whine tailing off. But she didn’t want to stay in my arms, refused my stroking, and struggled to get off me. I complied, putting her down on the sofa. Still, she managed to get down to the floor with her limp right leg.
Jive approached, saying hello, his whiskers rubbing that of his sister. She didn’t lick him in response. She didn’t want me around either, as if needing her privacy in her pain. I got her favorite yellow blanket, which I used to cover my thighs with her as my reliable leg-warmer. I put it over her de-spirited body. The throw tented her up with a gap from which she could still observe her familiar surroundings, the safe space of her shelter and the limits of her liberty.
I didn’t panic at Jas’s brush with death, just as I hadn’t been overcome by the sorrow of BaBa’s physical disappearance. After my “voluntary early retirement” from the University of Oregon, I’d seen the ends of my life with increasing clarity. Ends being both the purpose and destiny of my life. YOLO has entered the Oxford English Dictionary. FOMO is on its way in. I know You Only Live Once. Do I lament the brevity of my life so as to burn both ends of the candle? Work hard? Play hard?
I have no Fear Of Missing Out, either, because I’ve been with myself, with my parents and son in my life. I have no need to find myself. When you’re not lost, is there anything for you to find? I have a life of the flesh, being a carrier of my biological heritage. I have a life of the mind, being an heir, carrier and creator in an endangered line of human civilization. A life of the mind needs a body. The survival of the species needs earth. Do we have nine lives?
*
For the moment, Jas didn’t even smell the Greek yogurt on my fingertip. She was moaning and groaning, saliva oozing from her mouth. I’d prescribed BaBa Tylenol, and MaMa’s administration had brought his fever down. Going to a hospital was virtually impossible in Shanghai’s partial lockdown. One day later, my father was gone, sailing peacefully and contentedly to the other side.
I decided on Tylenol for Jas, too. Her pang was evident, her joints were not swollen, and her runny spit was devoid of blood. I could put her in her royal carrier, escort her down to my basement parking spot, and shuttle her through the morning rush hour to the vet. That would exacerbate her scare for another half an hour. Psychological trauma or physical pain, which would be better? The vet would probably reaffirm my diagnosis: there was no fracture of the bone, no internal bleeding. Jas just had a panic attack and sprained her leg. What I could and needed to do was to let her rest, letting her nature and nature’s god, do the job.
Should she have major organ injuries, what could the vet do, beyond surgery, beyond putting her on a tube or a ventilator? Wouldn’t it be better for me to manage Jas’s personal palliative care? She was about thirteen months old now, a tiny bundle of energy when I brought her home at three months. She’d have a more loving passage in the only home she’d known rather than in a pet hospital amid a chorus of barking dogs. Neither BaBa and Jas, nor I myself are deciders of our life’s term limits. We were not endowed with a re-run. We should feel blessed with our one shot, whether it end with a whimper or a bang.
I split a 500mg Tylenol in half. My fingers clawed Jas’s jaw open, like I’d done for her forerunners, “Happy,” a 6th year birthday gift to my son, Art, when we first relocated to Eugene, and “Lulu” who I’d adopted a decade later. That was after Art had gone to college and Happy had served her term limits under the care of a German family. I did a term of exchange teaching with a professor of English in Freiberg as he taught my classes in Eugene. We swapped houses but not wives (I had none to exchange in equivalent currency, be it dollar or euro). They buried Happy the tuxedo on my backyard slope at the bottom of a Douglass fur. One or two felines lives afterwards, the hillside to which both cats ventured out for their freedom was where I’d entombed Lulu. They were indoor cats, as are Jas and Jive. They all clicked their tongues at the sight of birds through the glass, but Jas had a balcony to leap up onto.
The tablet landed in her pink throat and I clamped her mouth shut. One second, two, three, and four. I let go and Jas spit the pill out. Never giving up on doing the right thing, I hammered the 250mg Tylenol into powder. I’d buried Happy’s syringe with her and Lulu’s body was on her side. Lulu’d turned into worm food, too, the towel I wrapped her up with and the rhododendron petals on her mound had become soil.
The syringe may survive eternity, which I don’t wish it for myself. I should have kept it to serve a Jas I’d never expected. But why would I need the syringe, whose raison d’être could be replaced by another? With my DIY act. The spoon was not as precise as the syringe, but it did its job. Jas swallowed the milky Tylenol and minutes later her breath eased and she dozed off. By dinner time, she poked her head under my bed and licked the yogurt on my fingertip. She chewed on her Purina, crunching the pallets vigorously, and she jumped into the litter box, her limping leg less lame. She’s a come-back-kid like my father, healthy again. How do I know? Like BaBa used to say, if you can eat, shit, and walk, you’re alright.
*
I heard Jas meowing and the thump of Jive against my bedroom door next morning. 5:25am, read my I-phone. I fed them, put on my eye mask and returned to bed. In my semi-consciousness, I felt Jas’s kneading paws on my chest. I stroked her head, she butted my palm, moving listlessly before settling down with her back and butt between my chin and Adam’s apple, purring satisfactorily. Then, I slipped into my recurrent dreams of seafaring sailors, spawned by BaBa’s bedtime stories of a thousand and one nights.
Jas and Jive were playing catch when I was done with my breakfast. The summer sun was up, the air still chilly from the window ajar. When I’d discovered Jas’s fondness for the sill, I’d kept the awning three inches open, wide enough for her to breathe the air of freedom without being overwhelmed by it. Letting my feline children out on the balcony, I always watched attentively like I’d done with my young son on the swing set. I don’t know if the set is still grounded, unshaken by time’s relentless march in the house I’d sold two decades ago. I’d installed the swing set for Art, my first and only child, in my first American home, a fixer upper with a stamp sized yard. I wanted him to have the pleasure of motion on the swing, the joy of gravity’s rainbow without being lost.
I thought I had taken similar caution with Jas and Jive. But in reveries of my BaBa, I’d become a negligent feline father until Jas’s wrenching cry. I knew cats would adjust their landing midair, the higher the building from which they fall, the safer they’d fare. I was shocked at Jas’s shriek and her lame leg. In her case, the scientific law of feline physiology and gravity didn’t seem to apply. Or, did it? A mere 20 hours after the accident, Jas was able to eat, shit, and jump again. Did she have eight lives left? Am I able to keep count of her many lives, as I’m enjoying and exhausting my only one?
I opened the balcony door deliberately, letting in the cool morning air. Jive walked out when Jas was looking out tentatively after him. It was historically unprecedented that her brother took the lead. Invariably, it had been Jas who’d led Jive on her expeditions in the apartment. She walked onto the balcony, sniffed the concrete floor and the pots containing my scallions, and the cacti that migrated with me from Los Angeles twenty plus years ago.
Jas was still sniffing my potted scallions. They were my second growth spice, 50 cents a bunch at H Mart, non-sale price. I always scissor the green parts off to use and plant the bottom parts with their white mustaches. They’d generate a second life for my dishes without compromising the qualities. I give them a second life which also invigorates mine.
Jas looked through the balcony’s glass panels at the dog walkers on the sidewalk down below. She didn’t jump on the rails and I was certain she won’t do it again. She has learned the limits of her liberty, and I’ll let her free range on the balcony. I am my father’s son, a continuation of his life, same and different at the same time. BaBa has met his term limits, as I too will meet mine. That’s life as we know it and that’s the liberty and limits of human life. The sky ain’t the limit; our bodies are. BaBa, I miss you. You haven’t left. You’re in my heart.
