It was because my father’s health had deteriorated to the point that he could no longer live alone that I came to possess his copy of Chinese Household Furniture, the Dover paperback edition with the pale yellow cover. It remains the only affordable, mass-produced study on the subject. First published in 1948, Chinese Household Furniture catalogs over a hundred individual pieces of furniture including tables, chairs, desks, stools, and chests that were in people’s homes in the 1930s. There are black-and-white photographs of each item and short accompanying text providing some historical background, descriptions of the design principles at work and the materials used. I was thrilled to find in its pages a version of the first piece of furniture my dad ever made (Plate 38), a narrow table two feet seven inches tall that stood on “horse-hoof” legs, “relieved from absolute rectangularity only by the remarkable delicacy of its proportioning,” the book’s author wrote.
My father, I should explain, is actually my stepfather, a white guy who grew up in a small town outside Birmingham, Alabama. He was still in his twenties when he fell hard for Chinese furniture. A friend who was studying Asian art history introduced him to it. They first met in Taiwan, where he was teaching English. This was after Vietnam.
My father’s love for Chinese furniture was the kind of love that convinced him that admiring its lines from afar was not enough: he wanted to master it. He taught himself to make the furniture by hand, using the type of interlocking joinery techniques and waisted corner leg construction illustrative of the classic Chinese style.
Over the years I’ve learned a handful of things from my father about how Chinese hardwood furniture is made. For example, the joinery of traditional tables is expertly constructed so as to make nails superfluous. One popular style of low table was built so that the legs could be easily collapsed, and the whole piece carried by one’s servants across narrow mountain passes in search of the perfect overlook to have conversation and tea. I’ve seen ancient scroll paintings of just this scene, two tiny robed figures at their cups in the mountains, dwarfed by the size and reclusiveness of the landscape.
At college and for a few years afterward I wrote poems, but in the period between my mid-twenties and my late thirties I stopped writing—or rather, I stopped writing “for myself.” Instead, for my first job out of graduate school, I wrote press releases, reports, op-eds, and marketing copy for social justice organizations. At the time I was impatient to make myself useful in the world in a way that didn’t seem possible with the writing of poems, which had come to feel increasingly ludicrous. And, of course, the job paid the bills, just as my father eventually paid the bills by working in a carpentry shop that made custom windows and doors. He stopped making Chinese furniture entirely. Were we just lazy, my father and I, or had we been too quick to shake off our fanciful ambitions?
George Norbert Kates, the author of Chinese Household Furniture, was a Harvard graduate, possibly gay, who stayed in China for seven years before the Japanese occupation drove him out. He published a memoir and several articles about Chinese history. For a while he lived in Austria, researching the life of an obscure fifteenth-century archduchess. The manuscript never found a publisher, or perhaps was never finished. In 1982 he fell down a flight of stairs, which led to his confinement in a Connecticut nursing home where he would live out the rest of his days.
Eventually my father, too, ended up in a nursing home, with dementia. He went in able to walk, albeit in slow, shuffling steps, leaning heavily on a walker and only across a short distance. He could still bring a fork to his mouth and pine for his Netflix and cigarettes. None of that was true in his later months there. I remember weeping in a stairwell on the phone with a rep from his insurance company after they had officially declared him “plateaued,” meaning there was no more point to having physical therapists work with him on “life skills” like tooth-brushing or going to the toilet. The rep, who had a slight, musical South Asian accent, was not unkind, and somehow the quiet sympathy she extended made me feel worse.
Early in January, my sister called me from the nursing home to tell me there was some fluid in our father’s lungs; she could hear gurgling as he breathed. The nurse told her she had had to give him his meds through a syringe earlier that morning because he was having trouble swallowing. After we hung up, I started looking into flights. Like the rest of the Northeast, New York City was digging out from the bomb cyclone. Sub-zero temperatures had snarled traffic and created a backlog of flights at all the local airports. I bookmarked a one-way ticket for Tuesday.
I imagined by the time I got there the staff at the facility would have removed the padded mats on both sides of my father’s bed. (A few months earlier, even though he couldn’t stand on his own, he had gotten agitated, tried to launch himself out of bed, and crashed onto the floor.) I planned to turn the chair so it faced the sliding glass door in his room, so I could look out on occasion at the narrow yard and the line of benches under the trees where no one ever sat.
That night it was too frigid to leave the house. I made a lentil soup and broiled English muffins with grated Parmesan in the oven for dinner. I gave the cat his daily steroid folded into a Pill Pocket for his inflamed bowel condition. My partner and I read, watched a little TV. Then, after we’d fallen asleep around one-thirty in the morning, my sister called from California to tell me our father had died. It was still Saturday her time, Sunday mine.
Lisa Chen is a Brooklyn-based writer born in Taipei. Her recent work appears in Catapult, Seneca Review, and Ninth Letter, and she is currently writing a book about the performance artist Tehching Hsieh.
