How to Camouflage

Even in death, my father camouflages.

A long rainy season has loosened the soil around his gravestone, grass spilling over to cover his picture. Moss colonizes the surface of the plaque, stations itself in the engraved grooves of his name. The green reminds me of a bay leaf’s underbelly. Dark paint smeared onto soldiers’ faces. I wonder, briefly, if the marker is worth cleaning. Ignoring the overgrown foliage would be disrespectful, I know, but my father has camouflaged for so long that it seems almost appropriate that he continue to do so. 

During my spelling bee days, I used to make fun of his inability to spell the word camouflage. I’d sing in his ear, What do you mean you can’t spell it? It’s e-a-s-y! I knew fully well that half my classmates butchered the word—and these were homegrown Americans. For a long time, my father put up with the patronization. Once—and only once—I was stupid enough to cross the line between mischief and blatant disrespect. This was when I made fun of him in public. A dinner party, I think. I hadn’t even known how angry it made him. He had followed the rules of camouflage so well: keep quiet, swallow pride, become so still you melt into your surroundings and the passerbys move on. It was only at home, hours following the incident, when I’d forgotten about the joke entirely, that two slaps of the bamboo stick straightened out the lines for me. 

Staring down at my father’s grave, I try to imagine the last time I saw his smile. But the thoughts spiral into one another. I see flashes of my father crawling, belly to the earth, in the jungles of Vietnam. The scene morphs, and I see him in a new terrain—Oakland, California—where, at school, he stays as still as possible, a praying mantis on a twig, waiting for the predators to leave. For the most part, it works, but occasionally the birds descend. Chinaman, fob, chink. You can’t spell camouflage? 

And then I begin to think of how his skin must be decomposing now, blackening, the roses we buried with him shriveled up atop his chest. Finally I see the smile, but the teeth are crooked and blackened from decay. 

Today is Ching Ming, the day we celebrate the dead. Other Asian families have gathered on the hillside of the cemetery, clustering like bees over tombstones. Mr. Harding is here, the only white man on the hillside, as he married into the family. He looks incredibly prim and proper amongst the stooped backs of Asian grandmothers, aunts, and uncles who get on their knees scrubbing gravestones, burning incense and money, setting out offerings of food. He’s aged considerably since the last time I saw him. Eight years, I realize. My mother tells me has Alzheimer’s, which I find awfully convenient. 

Looks like he’ll be here soon, I think, looking at tender shoots of green crushed underneath my sneakers. I don’t dare tell my mother this. She’d panic at how morbid my thoughts are, how violent. She, of course, doesn’t know. I try not to upset her too much nowadays. Considering how young my father was when he passed away, I figure the clock between us is ticking too, and there’s no use in agitating buried memories anyway. 

For my father we’ve brought flowers, paper money and shoes, clothes, fruit, and roast pork. Since rituals for my maternal grandparents have already begun, we leave the boxes by his gravestone and head to where my maternal family is gathered, a few hundred feet away. I don’t like the idea of paying respects to fossils I never met before my own father, but my mother says this is tradition. No point in arguing once the T word is brought out. 

She hands me a stick of incense, and I go down on my knees, bowing three times before impaling the sticks into the soil. My mother implores me to be respectful and greet Mr. Harding, then grabs her own incense and kneels. 

I first met Mr. Harding when I was ten years old. At the time, he’d owned the most prestigious piano studio in town. Our aunt marrying him was like striking gold. When my mother first asked him to evaluate me, Mr. Harding had said he couldn’t make any promises, not even for his niece. 

He hadn’t been impressed by my piano-playing skills. That much was clear. My trills weren’t crisp enough, the emotion in my playing was stale and deflated. I couldn’t sight-read. He had me play a few songs, then ended the evaluation. It’d been exactly an hour. My mother showed up on the dot—she’d been waiting in the car, since Mr. Harding required lessons to be private. Claimed that parents sullied that sincere connection between musician and music. Her face had brimmed with anticipation.

Come back next Thursday. 

My mother had squealed. 

“Dina, I told you to go say hello. Don’t be disrespectful,” my mother says, having finished her prayers. She gives me a meaningful look, and when I don’t move, puts her hand on my back, guiding me towards Mr. Harding and Aunt Mae. 

I smell him before he registers my face. He reeks of cigarettes, so at least that hasn’t changed. The smoke itself has hands that reach out and smother. The studio used to be stiff with the presence of those phantom hands sliding up against skin, lingering, strangling anyone within ten feet. And speaking of hands! Mr. Harding used to have the most beautiful hands—a pianist’s, long and thin and sculpted. I used to watch them with fascination. How else could he spin gold from the keys? Make Rachmaninoff seem so easy? He made it look so easy, so effortless. But now the muscles have deteriorated, leaving behind a skeleton. These, I think, are no longer a pianist’s hands. They are ruins of an empire. Can he even play anymore? I wonder how much he remembers, how much he forgets. At the very least, his Alzheimer’s hasn’t erased his love for Cuban cigars. 

I’m two feet away when he finally registers my face. A smile lights up his face, and his mouth moves to form a greeting. “Oh, dear, it’s been too long!” Mr. Harding says, clapping my shoulder. “How’s college?” 

I tell him it’s fine, the usual. 

“You still play, of course,” Mr. Harding exclaims. 

I look at him intently, searching. “No,” I say. “I don’t. Stopped when I moved to LA.” 

He seems horrified by this. “But you were so talented! And I taught you for so long."

I shrug my shoulders, a silent, noncommital nod. He plunges into a sea of old memories: summer music camps, sight-reading elimination games, competitions, lessons. I don’t do much talking, just nod at the flow of events. A while later, he dips into silence, sputters and then drops off, the same way an engine does when it runs out of gas. His eyes turn misty, his shoulders shuddering—from the cold?—and he doesn’t say anymore. Thank god, I think. I stare intently at the grass, at the way dew licks at my exposed ankles, dampens the cuffs of my jeans. My legs hurt from standing too long. 

“Dina,” Mr. Harding says suddenly, breaking the conversation. His eyes bright. “How’s college?”  

Smoke rises from behind him. A sudden gust of wind sweeps ashes out of the metal trash can where my uncle has been burning rolls of paper incense. The ash, flaky and light gray, settles on Mr. Harding’s shoulders like first snow. Pompeii.

Like I said, ruins of an empire. 

The winter I turned twelve years old. That was the only winter my father ever swayed away from his rules of camouflage. He found out my mother was in love with someone who wasn’t him. She’d been sleeping with his business partner, Liu, and for the first time, he didn’t care about camouflaging. He yelled as loud as he pleased in the house. At work, he punched Liu in the eye, right in front of a customer. 

This was when the divorce papers began circulating. Dinner was frought with tension, fighting words. I avoided the table as much as I could, because I knew it was a game of theirs, to see who I would side with. I spent more time at the piano, because it was a good excuse. Finally my trills were crisper, arpeggios strong, accurate. There were still glaring technical shortcomings in my piano playing, but Mr. Harding was an expert at dressing things up, covering bare bones with lace veils. Cunning usage of the pedal smoothed out my pieces, made them seem just as crisp and clear as his other students’. I won one of the biggest competitions in San Francisco that winter. 

It was also the winter I began having night terrors. I’d wake up trembling, cheeks raw with tear tracks. My father thought it was because of the competition pressure, the divorce. This place. Too ashamed to say anything, I agreed. Yes, certainly, I agreed, it must be this place. So stuffy.

One night he came into my room and told me he planned on moving to Los Angeles. Start fresh. Escape this place. I thought it would mark a new age, this man who was finally breaking free.

But in Los Angeles he returned to his ways of camouflage. It was what came naturally. Perhaps it was engrained in the genome. For the next eight years, until he passed away of a stroke, we moved between concealment and mimicry. On days when silence and blending didn’t work, we took on the pretense of a normal family unit. Exported it straight out of family sitcoms and into the dinner parties we sometimes attended. When we were alone, I watched him drink himself to sleep. But he always woke up at the crack of dawn, regardless. Never missed a bill. 

I never told him what had happened. Sometimes I wondered if he knew, or at least suspected, but he never said anything, and neither did I. Camouflaging was easier. We knew how. 

“Oh God, Mae—is he alright?” 

It happens so quickly. One moment, Mr. Harding stands, the smoke rising behind him, and the next he’s lurching backwards: unsteady feet, a wilted body falling towards the soil. Mae’s arm shoots out to grab him in time, as if she’s used to this kind of thing happening. The event scares my mother. She urges Aunt Mae to bring him back to the car, worried that the cold will seep into his skin and bones. Aunt Mae agrees with her; he gets sick easily nowadays, and the doctor’s told her that even a simple cold could take him if they weren’t careful. I watch as Aunt Mae and my mother flank both his sides and ferry him up the hill, into the car, presumably to lay down and rest. 

My mother and I head back towards my father’s gravestone. She starts setting out the different foods, burning incense. Then she hands me a brush and directs a finger towards the plaque. I start scubbing, sweeping the loose soil away from my father’s picture and packing it into the ground. Returning dust to earth. Ripping off the greenish film feels too much like peeling off my father’s skin, so I try to imagine something less repugnant. Scaling a fish, cracking open a lobster’s shell, skinning a potato. 

My mother busies herself, moving around the plaque like a bee, hands moving here and there, arranging oranges and apples. Her eyes avoid my father’s picture. It must be odd for her to see his face again, memorialized in stone. I wonder if she regrets, or if she recalls his memory fondly. After a while, she goes on to visit my grandparents' grave. I tell her to go ahead, I'll catch up.

Sitting by my father’s grave for a while longer, I imagine what it must be like to lay completely still. Unfeeling. Like the grass crushed underneath my sneakers. I decide to do a small experiment: lower my foot, crush the grass; lift my foot, watch it rise slowly again; lower my foot again. How easy it is to be a plant. 

How much better it is to camouflage than to fight. 

The wind knocks over the vase of flowers, right onto my father’s plaque. The roses spill out of the opening, and with a small snort, I realize my mother bought discounted roses; already they’re wilting, edges of petals browned and curled up. With a sigh, I rip the flowers out of the vase, tearing off the petals. For a moment, I consider putting them back; but I figure my mother won't be back till next year. I arrange the stems in a grid over his plaque, so that his photo is obscured from the strange white light berating the hillside. For his sake, I hope the weeds grow back quickly. Then I trek back up the hill toward my grandparents.