“Today I have so much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again—”
— Anna Ahkmatova
“It is time that the stone took the trouble to bloom.”
— Paul Celan
Forgive me, I do not know my father well. I recover a moment of pride in remembering my father does not know me well either. My anger begins with my father, my father begins my humility. I do not know if my voice is worth my longing. If I speak of my father he can no longer be mine. How I remember him scours his dignity. He becomes someone else’s beginning, the father of one who does not yet exist. I cannot tell who I have deceived. I cannot say on whose behalf I have wished to speak for my voice seems an orphan of history. What history I have learned I can no longer trust, and what history I still need I cannot yet settle for as mine.
Some years ago he returned to China to bury his father. He was the youngest of four children, the only one in his family to come to America. Once, at his former colleague’s wedding, I watched his humility animate his pride. He was retelling the only story he had ever told me. The story often began with these words: “I arrived in America with five dollars.”
He arrived in America with five dollars. He returned to China to bury his father. He pushed his father’s body on a gurney across eight lanes of traffic. When they arrived at the cemetery the groundskeeper said there was no room left for another grave. He had money now, he said. Money could not make more earth for them to dig up. What had he done? He did not know much. He had become a man with money. What do you want? my father once asked me. I want money, he said. Money could not make more earth for them to dig up. But his father’s body deserved its dignity. This body, beneath a white sheet.
To my father’s shame this body had believed in communism; this body had framed a portrait of Mao in the family photo album; this body had fought in the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II, and the Korean War; this body had forfeited its surname to protect its family when it gave its life to serving its country. This body in life had served a country that would not open for it in death. This body had known love only through times of war. This body was the surplus of its dignity. My father never finished telling the story.
He arrived in America with five dollars. He returned to China to bury his father. Between his arrival and his return, I was born.
My father said my passion resembled his father’s passion. This resemblance in my father’s mind embarrassed my passion. I asked him only once where he had buried his father. I forgot what he told me and I did not ask him again. I had a passion for understanding. I took pride in the possibility that I could understand the history of thought behind almost anyone’s action. The tyranny of my imagination was to bear witness to an infinity mirror of reasons behind two opposing actions, and to record a language kissing its reflection through my gaze. Even if my passion once shared the blind intensities of my grandfather’s inheritance of ideology, I believed it was a different passion from his. Beware of your passion, my father said. Like my father, he said, you may leave nothing behind in your death, which means you will have gained nothing in your life. His favorite brother had longed passed away. His father had left an apartment for his oldest and only sister, resentment for the oldest brother, and nothing for him.
In my father’s voice I began to believe his father had left nothing in his death for his children, not even a place for his own body to rest. His ideals desired both his selflessness and the passion of his embodiment. The dignity his father thought China would give him through his service to a political party occupied the source of his convictions, a space within himself, just like the one within my father some decades later, where my father, to cultivate his own dignity in America, tilled a land in his mind: the land of the free. Dignity meant to be worthy of respect. What happened when someone worthy of respect had to nonetheless achieve respect through less than respectful means? What happened when a whole country came to pay their respects to someone who had long lost their worthiness, who, yet, as a permanent inhabitant of collective memory, still had an adulterated form of dignity? To be respected affirmed and preserved one’s dignity, and yet one could also say that to have been respected one had dismissed their dignity as irrelevant to the insularity of recognition. Dignity was equally vague as it was resilient for one could still remain dignified while being disrespected. In fact, to have dignity was to be immune from a particular attachment to respect. Though, dignity had also its fallow years. Perhaps dignity named the fallow period of our own perspective glancing at its history, through which we might have come to accept the limited powers of our judgement. One could strive for dignity by seeking to express a truth that might puncture the containment of his social existence, or one could retain that truth through the composure of their adaptability, abiding by an evolution of the containment itself. We called this abiding theatre our socialization. Its success could also describe the accomplishment of fatherhood. It could have found its language through the logic of socialism or capitalism. How? Had his father forgotten his duty, or had his remembrance of duty grasped certain instructions too firmly such that he had forgotten himself? Were his ideals his own? Why did he listen to them? A want of power, a love of belonging, a banality of conviction, any number of inarticulable sensations that led us to settle for the word “dignity” could disguise themselves through an ideal. To my father an ideal merely tempted his father, as it had tempted others, to satiate that part of man which made freedom the most beloved end and an even more frightening means. The imagination could seduce the individual into oblivion. His father’s selflessness was the family’s myth. Idealism aged, and what surfaced through age was a lack of foresight. His father’s failures dignified my father’s faith in American capitalism as the sophistication of man’s freedom. The same love which brought him into the world had spurred on his disillusionment over the dignity of love itself. As Wendell Berry wrote in The Unsettling of America: “Work is the health of love. To last, love must enflesh itself in the materiality of the world—produce food, shelter, warmth or shade, surround itself with careful acts, well-made things.”
The spirit of love needed proof of itself through flesh. The need for proof arose from the facts of flesh. Even love could not bear the solitude of its flesh alone. I wanted more of my father when I was a child. In wanting more, as I came of age, my memories of him became less and less fair to his possibilities, less and less fair also to myself when I began considering the health of a man through the questions of fatherhood.
Some manners of forethought were still forms of greed. His father had faith in the wrong philosophies, he said. A sensible if not a thoughtful greed would have dignified his father’s status as a father. In my father’s eyes, his father had corrupted his own dignity through his loyalty to the political atmosphere that controlled the meaning of dignity in his time. A father seemed a state of mind one entered and exited through recollecting the principles and habits of another father. One’s conscience rising to a status of fatherhood knew itself through the negation of the man who raised it. Know thyself. It was not written on the Temple of Delphi that one must know their father. Self-knowledge grafted onto the long history of being a father. It seemed the humor of fate in the English language that “father” sounded so close to “farther” and “further,” for the distance between my father and I had always been the perfect simultaneity of the literal and the figurative. Being a father grafted onto the self. Knowledge was the new growth of shadows. This body was a father. This body, beneath a white sheet. I did not understand how to think of dignity while we were alive if the dignity of our deaths was a memory depending on what we left for the living. We left behind what words we did or did not choose, the interpretation of duty we gave our lives to as a way of saying we had lived. We are still alive, I wanted to say to my father. My father said, you misunderstand what I say.
Perhaps dignity could not have existed before the fall of man in his primordial solitude. Dignity was a produce of relations, the sought-after destiny of comprehension, some manner of confirming the irrational perfection or the tragic triumph of one’s own lot, a state through which knowledge seemed to approach an equilibrium. A feeling had no promised source of reciprocation while we lived, yet shared the eternally same origin we foregrounded as the self. Dignity was the temptation of compromise, the humbling wonder of the self, the perpetual moment before transcendence: here, dignity, a word on a page. Life pronounced the word through a reader’s anonymity. My heart once swelled when I read it. If I had involved myself any further in the thought, all that dignity was, enfleshed, would have been better exiled from what could still be put into words. I felt the element of neglect in my love of dignity.
It would seem kindness was a condition of dignity. If not for a desire to love inhaling the absence of love, or the need for love left unattended within oneself, if not for strangers, or our disdain towards another’s particularity, would dignity have been a word? Knowing one might actually survive without love, recognition, or praise made dignity seem the last source and evidence of holiness. Though he praised a good heart, my father found my desire for kindness naïve. One would prefer, of course, to live in a nice society rather than a mean society. The English “nice” came from the Latin nescius “ignorant,” from nescire “not know.” “Mean,” in the sense of being unkind, came from the Old English mæne, a shortening of another word with a Germanic origin, gemǣne, which also shared a common Indo-European root with the Latin communis “common.” Its original sense thus meant “common to two or more people,” which later developed into a sense of inferiority, as well as the sense of being “small-minded.” A nice society was a mean society. To prefer one over another was to defer the question of how one might value oneself beyond the scope of dignity. Henry David Thoreau wrote that one chair meant Solitude, two chairs meant Friendship, and three chairs meant Society. If so, in the strict sense of describing it, Society was mean. The dignity of love in one’s solitude was what Friendship had the capacity to mean.
A romantic might extend the integrity of love enfleshed as a socialist’s affection for life. One could not love all of humanity. That being the case was not necessarily due to the same reasons Freud had suggested love could not make its object universal. Love was by nature an act of discernment. One could never love anyone: to have loved was necessarily to have loved one rather than another. One could not love all of humanity because one’s love for all had never yet been enfleshed for all. Love could be universal only if that love were comprehensive in its materialization for every individual, in every moment of their human time. Dignity, if the word could speak, might have consoled us that it was because we lived in our human time that we could only have loved all of humanity through a theory of love.
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Dr. Carlisle, the one man in Moscombe who recognized Steven’s true rank and profession, asked him what he thought dignity was all about. “I suspect,” Stevens replied, “it comes down to not removing one’s clothing in public.” Father Zosima recalled what another doctor from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov had said: “The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.” Dignity was both love in general and what remained where love would have been in particular. The more one performed a role, the more one made being worthy of respect so much more worthy in itself, whether or not that respect was sincere, whether or not that respect involved the same respect between friends, required of love. To be nice was to abide by the distances within dignity. To be kind was to void the surfaces that made dignity so essential as an ability to not have to remove one’s clothes in public. Dignity depended on our right to be forgotten and the unreliability of memory.
Catharsis was to have one’s clothes stolen, parodied, or decontextualized, then to name the thief, the mimic, or the ignorance that had enacted recognition. The loss of dignity reminded one of this necessity for catharsis through which one might be able to recover what had been lost. The beauty of professionalism was the absence of the self, a representation of one’s self-knowledge in relation to the indifference of the world, which was in itself an accumulation of discrete acts of sophistication, a gesture, like clothing, continuously worn. Dignity was the right to continuity, not only to remain in control of one’s understanding of oneself, but to have that control remain private, for the condition to survive unexpressed, at the risk of neglecting what was private. To profess oneself entirely, or at the least, as if entirely, without denuding oneself, was the urge of dignity. To be apprehended for one’s role, and yet to hold at bay one’s self-knowledge from the analysis of one’s actions, was the pride of dignity.
He arrived in America with five dollars. He returned to China to bury his father. He did not know much; he had become a man with money. Money could not make more earth for them to dig up. Between his arrival and his return, I was born. You must learn how to look ahead, my father said. I learned the word dignity before his father died.
Bibliography
Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America (50th Anniversary Edition). Counterpoint, 2026, 166.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Brothers Karamazov: Bicentennial Edition. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Picador, 2021, pp. X.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. Vintage Books, 1988, pp. 210.
“Nice.” New Oxford American Dictionary, Mac OS App.
“Mean.” New Oxford American Dictionary, Mac OS App.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and other Writings. Edited by Joseph Wood Krutch. Bantam Books, 1989, pp. 219