Colonel Sanders

The first time I asked who my father was, my mother pointed at the box TV and said, That’s him. We were watching a period drama where the empress poisons several concubines with coal gas, and when my mother pointed between the butterflied eyes of the lead actress, the screen switched to commercial. In walked Colonel Sanders, a Chinese man with a white goatee and square black glasses. He sauntered out of a bruise-black portal to the past, emerging into the fluorescence of a KFC so bright and clean it looked like the surface of a lemon. He was husked in plastic armor like a terra-cotta soldier, his hair a Qing-style braid, yellow-white as a sickened cornea. I stared at the screen and tried to remember his face, the smoothness of his cheeks clashing with the whiteness of his hair, but the image submerged into the mist of my mind as soon as another commercial came on.

I didn’t see my father again until my mother started taking me to work after school. She managed a hair salon with my fifth aunt, and I got to ride in the front seat even though she said I was too small and light and would probably catapult through the windshield if she braked too hard. If you see a cop, duck, she said, even though I was too short to be spotted through the passenger window. Next to the freeway was a billboard with Colonel Sanders’s face on it, except his hair was short and his face decorated in pigeon shit, his goatee whisked away by the wind of passing cars.

Stop, stop! I always called, but my mother didn’t stop—she sped on the freeway, complaining the whole way that all my fifth aunt ever did at the salon was gossip and smoke. She didn’t watch over any of the girls, who stole from each other’s tip jars. She didn’t keep the books. She didn’t take phone calls, citing bad English, even though—according to my mother—she seemed to have no trouble reading old issues of People magazine. Fifth aunt tore out pictures from the magazines that were stacked on the glass coffee table for waiting customers, claiming that she was only saving the hairstyles to paste to the walls or glue into the binders for customers to graze, but all the photos she ripped out were mostly of shirtless men. My mother tore out the holed pages and said, That woman is a rodent. We are not related. She summarized all of my fifth aunt’s vices as we drove to the salon, one window cracked wide enough for the wind to hook the voice out of her mouth and scatter it onto the hood of the car behind us, while I craned my head and tried to keep my father’s face in sight.

But I only ever saw him blurred and behind me, a face the size of a city, and one day I saw that a corner of the billboard had been dog-eared, his face vandalized completely, teeth redacted with black spray paint, his mouth stuffed with a floppy-eared dog, even his head mauled bald. My mother didn’t say anything, didn’t slow down, but I thought maybe she noticed, because that night while we were driving home, she veered off the highway and jerked into the parking lot of the KFC. My eyes were fried by the sight of my father’s face gilding the side of an entire stucco building: I imagined it was a temple advertising its deity, a god in a bleached goatee. Grabbing my hand to cross the parking lot—my mother always said little girls get killed when they’re not soldered to something—she led me through the doorway, which blistered with light so bright I had to squint as we walked in. My heart floundered like a fish, and I wondered if my mother could feel the panic through my palms. It was empty inside, which watered down my hopes of worshippers and effigies, monks dedicated to the missing, but I walked up to the cash register with more divine purpose than I had ever approached anything, including the time I was a substitute flower girl for my fifth aunt and walked up to the altar, proceeding to spray my patent leather Mary Janes, glittered white tights, and tulle purple skirt with piss—I’d been so nervous about missing my cue to walk that I hadn’t gone to the bathroom all day. For years after, my nickname was Dog-Baby, and though everyone who split their blood with me had been present that day, I pretended there was another family who had never met me, who was still waiting to know me, and who never once saw me kneeling, attempting to lid the puddle with my shadow.

My mother stood behind me and pulled me back from the counter. She ordered for us both—a bucket of bone-in chicken, mashed potatoes, corn. When our order was ready and our name was called—I was startled to hear our name in the maws of strangers—my mother prodded her plastic fork into the Styrofoam cup of potatoes and said, This is what Americans call vegetables. Corn and infant mush. The gravy gripped the potatoes like a scab, and she pierced it with her fork before pushing it all to me, the chicken, the corn, the potatoes I pretended to savor, when really it reminded me of crumbled sofa stuffing. My mother propped her chin on her hand, and only under the fluorescent showerheads did I see how exhausted she was, how little she’d wanted to stop, her eyes sinking into her skin like my fork into the creamed corn. Still, even tired, she was more beautiful than any billboard: her chin pedestaled on her palm, her profile shadowed holy. She only lifted her head when I started to gnaw the chicken, the skin singeing my fingertips, grease garnishing my wrist. Around my mother’s wrist was a gold peanut pendant I tried cracking with my teeth whenever she was asleep, though this only resulted in deforming my only adult molar into a meteorite.

My eyes were fried by the sight of my father’s face gilding the side of an entire stucco building

In front of the TV, she could crack chicken bones with her teeth, sucking out the marrow, and she ate the bones so clean they must have been born that way. I suckled at a drumstick larger than my fist, but even when I finished, the bone was a flagpole, flapping with sinew and skin, and she pried it from my fingers, vacuuming the cartilage into her mouth, the bone coming out clean as an arrow. How do you do that, I asked her, and she smacked the back of my head and said, Don’t eat and talk, even though her own mouth was meshed with meat. But how? I asked. Cause I’ve got teeth inside my teeth, she said. And extra tongues, six of them, that come out like the brushes of a car wash.

This feature of her mouth, I later thought, must be why she spent so much time with Rich Uncle—they shared an affinity for cleanliness. Rich Uncle owned all the car washes in the city, and he drove a BMW to our apartment building and parked it on the street even though it got robbed a few times. His BMW was like a beacon, brighter even than the windows of the KFC, and his hair was always wet and shining, a pelt he fingered as he talked to my mother on the sofa, his arm nudging hers. He wore glasses, but they weren’t square and black like the ones my father wore on TV: They were gold-framed, two slender ovals that reminded me of pried-open mouths, and sometimes I imagined jabbing my fingers inside.

My mother first met him when he came into the salon one morning, his hair shaggy and long like a Japanese pop star’s, and when my mother asked how short he wanted it, he said he only needed to trim an inch. He came back the next day and asked for another inch. Then another and another, and my mother laughed every time. He was a series of subtractions. I’ve never had a man shed his hair as an excuse to see me, she said, and I watched from behind the glass counter—I sat on a stack of holed magazines and suckled a hard green guava candy—as my mother leaned over him with her fingers threaded through scissors, her spare hand pinching the tip of his exposed ear until it pinked, a gesture so quick I thought I imagined it. She took a long time to brush the hair clippings from his neck, my own skin prickling beneath that touch, and after that, he came over to our apartment most weekends, most evenings. I asked a few times if he would live with us, and my mother always said no, our place was too small, though I knew it was an excuse, since our box TV slept in its own room. We watched it together every night, both of us on the white vinyl sofa, my head pillowed on her hip, and whenever my father came on, his square glasses so clean that there wasn’t even glare on them—He must own more car washes than Rich Uncle, I thought—I knew this was his room.

Rich Uncle sometimes called me his daughter, and that was a relief, since he didn’t know about Dog-Baby. On evenings when my mother fell asleep on the sofa early, without inviting me to beach my head on her belly and watch TV, Rich Uncle tucked me into bed in the neighboring room. I thought it was just like an American movie, getting tucked in at night. When he did this, he patted my floral Costco comforter smooth over my body, his hands pausing on my private parts, sometimes pinching them under the layer of cotton, the same way my mother had twisted his ear. I squirmed under my comforter, trying to roll onto my side, but he tucked in the edges of the comforter so tightly that I had to lie flat, and even after he left, the heat of his hands ironed me down until morning, and I didn’t move until my mother turned on the weather.

I wondered if my father would ever tuck me in, or if someone had tucked him in for so long that he became completely flat, stickered to billboards and the sides of buildings, unable to loosen himself and stand up and leave the parking lot he was assigned to stare at, no mother to indicate that it was morning, that he was free to face anything. I decided that out of solidarity for his inability to look at anything he wanted, for being pinned in place while the rest of us passed him, I would also abstain from free-ranging my gaze, and so I no longer taunted him by searching for his face on the freeway, and I no longer asked my mother to stop when we flicked by the KFC, and to this day I still can’t look at a bucket of the stuff or pass one of those glowing signs without wanting to puke out of all my orifices. I don’t like the sodium, the clots of corn, the way a bare chicken breast gets sheened in green grease. The shoulders, the wings, all parts of its anatomy make me gag.

It was years before someone told me Colonel Sanders was American, a white guy from Kentucky, not at all from the Qing Dynasty. They laughed when I told them what my mother said and that sometimes, when I’m driving alone on a freeway, pretending the radio is chorusing her old complaints, I mistake every headlight, every roadside sign, for that man’s face, and I have to avert my eyes, aim them at something empty. That sounds dangerous, they said. I don’t tell them about the bucket I kept from the first and only time I ate at KFC: After I watched my mother siphon the remaining sinew off my drumstick, my stomach filling with that sight, I ducked my head and forced myself to finish every piece in the cardboard tub as quickly as my single-rack teeth would allow. When I was finished, when our stacked bones were the aftermath of a pyre, I told her we could finally go home and sleep. She nodded and picked up the bucket, which had gone sheer with grease, but I tugged at the rim of it. I told her I wanted to keep it, because it had my father’s face on it, and my mother slackened her fingers and let go. Don’t worry, I wanted to say to her, I’m only asking for the part of him that is mine, just the face, no body, not even a leg bone. I told myself later that her lack of resistance meant approval, but I know now that she wanted to go home, and I was gripping the bucket with all my fingers, then squeezing it between my legs the entire drive back, accidentally crushing one side of it, and when we were home, I stuffed it with wads of toilet paper so that it would remain eternally round and drumlike, an artifact of the empty temple, where an echo could be the kind of love you never had to touch. The emblazoned face was translucent with oil, more of a window than a presence, and sometimes when I rotated the bucket in the light, I could imagine anyone filling it. The bucket now holds my toilet bowl brush. People sometimes ask how come I keep it, if it’s some kind of novelty item, the kind you can sell on eBay, complete with a grease stain that resembles Jesus, the whole thing saran-wrapped against erosion. No, I say, it’s just something that belongs to me.

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