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  • Secrets of Happiness
  • Joan Silber (bio)

My father was on the road a lot when I was growing up, off to parts of Asia to oversee the cheap manufacture of ladies’ garments. You couldn’t stay still, he said, in today’s business world. “Ever ask him about the local babes?” one of my friends wanted to know. “You should go with him next time.” He was just being a smartass—we were fifteen-year-old boys at the time, obnoxious whenever we could be. “Cut it out,” I said.

My father complained about too much time away from home—he missed us, he missed New York—and always came back with great presents. My mother and my sister got silk scarves and pearl necklaces. I had a kung fu T-shirt from Hong Kong and crazy pop CDs from Thailand. Mike, my friend, had once tried to get me to gamble away my T-shirt to him in a card game.

In fact, I had a crush on Mike, a skinny loudmouthed guy who was actually quite brainy and who had tastes in music like mine. He was not my first crush, but I was still keeping these things to myself. It was the late 1980s, which were not as free as people like to think. I lived in a world of heated imaginings, a long inner movie with a cast of highly appreciative lovers culled from real life, rock ’n’ roll, TV, anything. It was a happier world, of course, than any I ever really entered. I wasn’t out till my first year of college.

In high school everybody liked to hang around our apartment. It was homey and messy, with sprawling rooms, very Upper West Side, and big for Manhattan. My mother left us alone—she taught school all day, she didn’t need to see kids every minute—and then she’d burst forth at dinner, taking an interest, asking my friends the very questions they wanted to answer. Mike told her he believed in reincarnation, which I didn’t even know. And my mother loved parties. Once, when my father came home from a trip, she got all my friends to sing some goofy version of “Love Shack”; she had sparklers flaming away in a platter of pasta. “Where am I?” my father said. “Is this the right house?” He kept his arm around my mother’s waist, beamed at all of us. My sister had to tell him every single thing she’d done in [End Page 5] school. “Home is the sailor,” my mother said, “home from the sea. And the hunter home from the hill.”

My mother was always hoping to get to travel with him—maybe in the summer, when she was off from teaching?—but he avoided going when it was so hot over there. Over the years his destinations shifted, as American outsourcing shifted, in what he still called the rag trade. First it was Hong Kong and Thailand, then Malaysia and Indonesia, and later China and Bangladesh. “Every country is different,” he said. My sister used to ask him about the languages—he could say hello and thank you in Cantonese, Thai, Bahasa Malaysia, which was almost the same as Bahasa Indonesia, Mandarin, and Bangla. “Only ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’? That’s all?” my sister said.

“Also ‘delicious’ and ‘very good,’” he said. “People speak English, they have to. They know we’re idiots.”

Sometimes he took us to a favorite Thai restaurant in Queens, out in Elmhurst, where he traded a few phrases with the hostess, who always gave us a good table. The food was vastly better than any namby-pamby Thai food in Manhattan and we bragged about it to our friends.

My mother always meant to learn more about the textiles, which she was a big fan of, from getting all those scarves. And all the religions! Buddhists, Taoists, Communists, Muslims. “Asia is fascinating,” my father said, happy capitalist exploiter that he was.

I waited till he was home, during spring vacation of my freshman year, to break the news to both of them that my new love interest was someone named...

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