Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary Fiction About Learning to Be American Read Online Free PDF

said. “We may be eligible for a VA pension because of the time your father spent in the Navy.”
    That took me by surprise. Nobody had ever told me my father was in the Navy.
    “In World War I,” she said, “he went to Webb’s Naval Academy on the Harlem River. He was training to be an ensign. But the war ended and he never got his commission.”
    After dinner the three of us went through the closets looking for my father’s papers, hoping to find some proof that could be filed with the Veterans Administration. We came up with two things, a Victory medal, which my brother said everyone got for being in the service during the Great War, and an astounding sepia photograph of my father and his shipmates on the deck of a ship. They were dressed in bell-bottoms and T-shirts and armed with mops and pails, brooms and brushes.
    “I never knew this,” I found myself saying. “I never knew this.”
    “You just don’t remember,” my brother said.
    I was able to pick out my father. He stood at the end of the row, a thin, handsome boy with a full head of hair, a mustache, and an intelligent smiling countenance.
    “He had a joke,” my mother said. “They called their training ship the S.S.
Constipation
because it never moved.”
    Neither the picture nor the medal was proof of anything, but my brother thought a duplicate of my father’s service record had to be in Washington somewhere and that it was just a matter of learning how to go about finding it.
    “The pension wouldn’t amount to much,” my mother said. “Twenty or thirty dollars. But it would certainly help.”
    I took the picture of my father and his shipmates andpropped it against the lamp at my bedside. I looked into his youthful face and tried to relate it to the Father I knew. I looked at the picture a long time. Only gradually did my eye connect it to the set of Great Sea Novels in the bottom shelf of the bookcase a few feet away. My father had given that set to me: it was uniformly bound in green with gilt lettering and it included works by Melville, Conrad, Victor Hugo, and Captain Marryat. And lying across the top of the books, jammed in under the sagging shelf above, was his old ship’s telescope in its wooden case with the brass snap.
    I thought how stupid, and imperceptive, and self-centered I had been never to have understood while he was alive what my father’s dream for his life had been.
    On the other hand, I had written in my last letter from Arizona—the one that had so angered Aunt Frances—something that might allow me, the writer in the family, to soften my judgment of myself. I will conclude by giving the letter here in its entirety.
    Dear Mama,
    This will be my final letter to you since I have been told by the doctors that I am dying.
    I have sold my store at a very fine profit and am sending Frances a check for five thousand dollars to be deposited in your account. My present to you, Mamaleh. Let Frances show you the passbook.
    As for the nature of my ailment, the doctors haven’t told me what it is, but I know that I am simply dying of the wrong life. I should never have come to the desert. It wasn’t the place for me.
    I have asked Ruth and the boys to have my body cremated and the ashes scattered in the ocean.
    Your loving son,
    Jack

Rules of the Game
    AMY TAN
    I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect from others, and eventually, though neither of us knew it at the time, chess games.
    “Bite back your tongue,” scolded my mother when I cried loudly, yanking her hand toward the store that sold bags of salted plums. At home, she said, “Wise guy, he not go against wind. In Chinese we say, Come from South, blow with wind—poom!—North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen.”
    The next week I bit back my tongue as we entered the store with the forbidden candies. When my mother finished her shopping, she quietly plucked a small bag of plums from the