Jose

Jose

Here is a man who’s traveled and lived on three continents only to die alone in a hotel room. Not that he didn’t have family; he had two, one in Hong Kong and one in Peru. He was married twice, once in China and once in Peru. None of “his” children were his, however.

Jose was the oldest of my maternal uncles. When he was twelve, his second maternal uncle got him to Peru. My maternal grandmother let her son go to make his fortune in Peru, where his uncle was raising guyoes, rabbit-like creatures who never drank water. They get their moisture through their nose when their keeper burns leaves. When Jose was 21, his uncle took him back to China to marry. Once married, he had to leave his bride in China and followed his second-maternal uncle back to Peru.

According to Jose, he had many opportunities. First, there was a German industrialist who wanted him to marry his daughter. Jose told me that the Germans in Chile took over the copper mines in Peru after an unjust war with Peru, that is, a war a little bit on the imperialistic side. Those Germans in Chile had technology, but the Japanese were in Peru and they were competition too. Jose then tried logging and one time his vehicle flipped over on the mountain road so that its four wheels “all pointed towards Heaven.” Jose survived unscratched. However, logging in the jungle was not good for his health, for he developed rheumatism from the damp and wet in the jungle. Those days, though, Jose was young and full of ambition, he drank with the Indios and marveled at how the natives which he called “mountain devils” could haul heavy loads day and night without end, without eating, and only ask that they be given enough cacao leaves to chew. And when they run out of cacao leaves, they would just rest their loads and refused to work.

Jose married Carmen, a mestiza, in Lima, and he worked principally in chifas, or Chinese restaurants. Carmen had already a daughter when she came to live with him. While he was in Peru, my family was in the United States, and while Jose’s age when up as his potential declined, ours were improving slowly. Our Chinese-American restaurant in Aberdeen, a coastal town in Washington State along highway 101, got busier and busier. Normally my parents and my siblings work in the kitchen and we hire two white waitresses. But when we were old enough to leave home for college, it became a sore point who and how much anyone was sacrificing for the family. My father decided to get needed help in the kitchen and so he looked up J. P. Sanderson, the immigration lawyer who did the paper work for me to come over from China to join my family some two dozen years ago. We went to the Sanderson private residence. Mr. Sanderson, an old man at that time, was still working from his home near Lake Washington in Seattle. I finally connected the face with the Christmas card I receive from a J. P. Sanderson, P.S.. He was a white-haired, tall thin man. He moved about quietly and deliberately. We were mostly silent in his presence. I have to admit that my father had the ability to employ ability where he lacks it. Not long, when I was living at the Albert Yu house in Seattle’s University District, Jose and my mother and a brother suddenly dropped in to see me. Jose was jubilant and he hugged me. I stepped back a step. Our nuclear family is not very demonstrative with feelings. We went to Tai Tung Restaurant to eat. My mother was disappointed for her older brother did not look very robust, but lately on, we found that it was deceptive. Jose started complaining right away that Tai Tung was not much of a restaurant compared to the chifas in Lima that partied two thousand or more people. And they were owned by Japanese. What Jose complained about was that the Japanese always placed their toilets next to the kitchen.