—————————— I ROLLED OPEN THE DOOR OF THE garage. It sat unused behind our home and now served the same function it had throughout high school: a place for me to be away from Mom.
The overhead light offered a murky yellow to the big room. Everything sat in a settled chaos, shoved away in a hurry and then forgotten for years: an upturned table hugged the wall, picture frames leaned against each other like dominoes.
One corner was dedicated to my stuff, which Mom had stored after I left for college: the electric guitar I’d begged for in high school collected dust in its elegant curves, cardboard boxes marked REED formed a small pyramid. I opened the one on top and saw it was filled with my old paperbacks: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Stranger, a handful of Murakamis—the heavy philosophical shit CJ and I discussed over boba, beginning, in our clumsy, not-yet-Ivy-League way, to amass cultural capital.
I felt like an archaeologist reconstructing the life of an eighteen-year-old, the one who’d used that trite “be the change you want to see” Gandhi quotation in his college essay; an eighteen-year-old who couldn’t wait to vote for Obama that fall, who would check Politico and spout off on bills moving in the House, who went to high school debate just to argue with moral superiority against the Orange County kids about the death penalty and gay marriage.
Of course I swung to the other extreme, embarrassed by that naive faith in American democracy. I wanted to pretend I’d never been the freshman who threw away the Band-Aid Tiff handed him, who always understood policing, who had never been anti-Black in any way. So I desperately buried that self, shoveling so much analysis over it that the grave became a conspicuous mound.
Dad cleared his throat behind me. He looked small in the big mouth of the garage and blinked inquiringly through his glasses. “You and Mom haven’t had one of your . . . upsets in a few years,” he said. He came over and peered into the open box. “Back in the day,” he continued, “we called that a denouncement. You had to struggle with your parents’ bourgeois tendencies.”
“We have the Marxist-Leninist weapon of criticism and self-criticism,” I said, quoting Mao.
“Right,” he said. “Unfortunately, turns out it’s hard to build a movement when you keep ejecting people for not being perfect.”
Dad shoved a box to the side, revealing an imposing set of hardcover blue books. “Since you’re so into our pasts, maybe you’ll want these.” Gold letters etched into the spines read The Works of V. I. Lenin. The tomes were authoritative and alluring, promising a young revolutionary the accumulated knowledge of one of the few people who actually did the thing—had the analysis and statesmanship and timing to change the world one October a hundred years ago. Never mind how it turned out.
But a fatigue came over me just looking at the volumes, and I knew there was no way I’d read them. I’d never be a good communist. I’d have to be a good something else.
“You read all of those?”
Dad laughed. “Never. It was a wedding gift from one of our movement friends.”
“At least it’s better than a food processor.”
He shrugged. “I would’ve used a food processor.” He picked up a metal folding chair off the wall, wiped off the dust, and tried to look natural as he placed himself in it. He took off his glasses, which made him look blank and doughy, all the structure gone from his face. This meant Dad was about to say something serious, as if by not seeing the world as clearly, he could bear it better. “Have you ever googled us?”
I cocked my head. “Why would I do that?”
“You’ve never been curious what they say about us out there?”
I pulled out my phone and typed his name into the search bar. Even though it was the most public, obvious way to find out information about him, it felt sneaky, as if the person in front of me was not who he said.
The first link was his employee profile at the union; the second was an L.A. Times article quoting him about the minimum wage increase. I clicked on the third, which brought me to a wiki-style page. I did a quick scroll: it was a detailed article, the length a semifamous actor’s would be. It had photographs, a timeline of his organizing work, and a record of his trips to China. I scrolled back to the top and saw the tagline for the website: “Uncovering the Globalist Influence in American Politics.”
My head popped up. “What the hell is this?”
“Someone already did your movement history for you,” he joked drily.
I read back through and it did, indeed, talk about his communist days, with blue links to Mom and a dozen of their friends—people I knew from dinners and parties at our house. There were records of fundraisers they’d attended, conferences where they’d spoken.
“This is nuts,” I said. “Who’s doing this?”
Dad shrugged. “Some right-wing crazies with too much time and money. Keep going.”
I went back to the search results. The next link was another site that ranked leftist public figures in L.A., with a meter that ranked him with four and a half out of five raised fists. A few links down was a fringe news site that had taken a clip of Dad speaking at a rally and tied it to his communist past.
Dad managed a half smile. “Not bad for your aging, moderate old man, huh?”
“You’re proving your lefty cred?”
He exhaled through his nose. “Mom told me about the threats.”
I avoided Dad’s worried eyes.
“It took me a long time to learn this, Reed, but these little threats, these fringe radicals—they’re very organized.”
“So what?” I snapped. “You’re unpopular with some conservatives?”
“It’s more than that. Did you know your grandfather always wanted me to be a politician?” Dad’s confident, rhetorical voice dropped away and he became a private person, almost shy. “He had it in his head: L.A.’s first Chinese mayor. Or the congressman from Chinatown. I never took it seriously, except once. I’d just joined the union and run a successful back-wages campaign. They were looking for some fresh blood to oust this old, corrupt city councilor who’d been there forever. And so this union boss called me in and asked if I’d thought about running. I said I’d give it a shot, and he told me that was great, and I’d be getting a call from the DNC. The DNC never called. The next time I saw the boss he avoided me, and I understood: they’d looked into my past and knew I’d be red-baited the moment I ran.”
I squeezed my eyes closed. As much as Dad’s unflappable confidence annoyed me, I didn’t want to hear this from him, didn’t want to think of him as vulnerable, as an idealistic young person confronting the limits of what he could do.
“It was hard to explain that one to your grandfather.” Dad shrugged. “Who knows, I might’ve lost. I always hated fundraising. But this is what those right-wingers want: they want to take away our options, want to paint us as Reds to delegitimize us. Back then, they probably had to hire someone to find all these old articles and research my past. Now it only takes one Google search, and just like that, all these doors shut.
“All our friends—the ones linked to on the site—any time one of them gets a public appointment or lands a new job we all take this breath of relief. We’ve lived with this long, long shadow. And the terrible thing is, you don’t know where it’s coming from or how much of it is in your head.”
I pressed my palms against my eyes. American meritocracy was a scam, sure; and I knew our police state bugged everyone from Dr. King to librarians, but I’d never understood how well it worked, how it had become so ingrained in the culture that the government didn’t even have to do the work.
I snapped my eyes open. “Well, what then?” I demanded. “We just stop organizing so that we can secure our professional jobs and rise through this shitty system—maybe become president of it one day?”
Dad’s face went weary, as if he were disappointed in my argument. “Of course not, Reed. I never said that. I’m only trying to show you how deep these systems go, how effective they are.”
“I swear, if this is going to be about compromise—”
“No one said that, either. You can keep going exactly like you are, and that’s fine—that’s what Mom and I did. We didn’t know about COINTELPRO back then, or the extent of the surveillance, but we definitely knew we were being watched. I don’t regret anything. The only difference now is that we’ve seen what this country did to our friends who weren’t as lucky—who didn’t have, as you say, the same privilege. So we want you to understand the choices you’re making. And there are ways to do it that are smarter, aren’t so confrontational, and are no less radical or effective.”
“Sounds nice,” I said petulantly.
“You’re smart enough to know the difference between performing politics and living them.”
“That’s not how it is anymore,” I said. “How you show up in the world is also how you change it. How you talk about the movement is the movement.”
I could tell Dad believed me, had seen this in the young people he worked with, and that he was at a loss. “That sounds very difficult.”
I shrugged, feeling another hollow point scored. I was tired of my way of being right.
Dad sighed. “You wanted our organizing lessons, and this is what we learned, what we have to offer. Because if you don’t know, it’s like Marx said: the first time is tragedy—”
“I know,” I cut him off. “The second, farce.”