Hapa Girl: A Memoir

6. The Banana’s Revenge

And then, suddenly, things seemed to take a turn for the better. At one of my father’s NYU night classes he met a young redheaded law student named Nancy Oxfeld who had elected to take one of his classes on China. She had enjoyed his lectures and thought he’d get along with her father—so she arranged for them to meet. It turned out that her father, Emil, was also a lawyer, a founding member of the ACLU in New Jersey. My father and Emil hit it off immediately . Emil was unflappable. Nothing my father told him shook his faith in the world. Once I watched him toss his head back and roar with laughter while my father told him stories about his fractious days at CCNY. His laughter had a calming effect on my father, and soon I no longer heard the tinkling of ice before he came to bed. He no longer had to whisper to my mother in the kitchen. He could laugh with Emil on the phone. As the phone happened to be in my room, rather than in my parents ’ (a design quirk of our house), I heard many of his late-night conversations, as my father shouted and laughed into the phone while I lay with a pillow over my head, pretending I was asleep. My father was most concerned about the potential for violence on the campus.At one point the dean actually was assigned armed guards to protect him in his office. But Emil quickly thought of some solutions . He knew many radical speakers—more radical even than the 6 The Banana’s Revenge ones the students had been able to bring to campus—and he said he’d help my father bring them to his classes. This would help to bring down my father’s square quotient and gain the students’ trust. Then he offered advice about avoiding confrontation. “Conciliation,” my father repeated into the phone. “Right, right. Conciliation, not confrontation.” And then Emil must have said something funny because my father started laughing again, bending over and holding his hand to his thigh as though to keep himself from falling over with mirth. The turning point came when my father discovered that some radical agitators were trying to organize the students to demonstrate against him at an upcoming faculty senate meeting. The president would be there and they wanted to show him that my father had no support, that they, not he, should choose the chairman of the department . My father was so worried he couldn’t eat breakfast that morning . Instead he paced in the kitchen, wiping his sweaty palms against the knees of his polyester slacks. “If these radicals show up, the president will fire me. He’ll say I’ve lost control of the department.” He paced between the stove and the avocado-colored refrigerator. “Eat your breakfast,” my mother commanded and forced a slice of toast into his hand. “I’ll lose my job,” my father said, then nibbled the toast. He tried to say something more but started to choke. My mother patted him on the back calmly and handed him a cup of coffee. “Don’t worry,” she said. “God will protect you.” My father’s face was bright red now, whether from panic or the choking episode I couldn’t tell, and I stopped eating my Froot Loops to stare at him in alarm. My mother patted him on the back some more, and slowly his face returned to a more human color. “Just remember what Emil told you,” she said.“And if all else fails, remember to laugh.” As my father would later recount, not once or twice but at least thirty times before I gave up counting and plugged my ears just to avoid hearing the story again, Emil’s words were indeed prophetic. 44 • Chapter 6 As the faculty senate convened, my father looked up at the dais and saw the dean and the president sitting side by side. They looked tired, stressed out. They looked terrible. They looked exactly as my father imagined himself. And then, with horror, he could see them pouring into the room—demonstrators! My father recognized clearly the angry faces of the radicals, many of whom had in fact already left City College and were no longer students, as well as the befuddled faces of the young people they’d...