GongGong and Susie

When I graduated from law school, I moved back to Los Angeles, where I was born and raised and where my Chinese grandfather, my GongGong, lived so lonely all the time. He must have been happy when he learned I was coming home. I imagine he thought, "She will take me places. She will spend time with me." But I was a first year lawyer, and they pay lawyers a lot of money – because you have no life. I had a lot of money, but I had no time. So I bought him things. I bought him a big color TV. He was still lonely. He had no one to sit down with him, no one to watch with. I bought him fancy clothes. But he had nowhere to go. Then I got what I thought was a great idea: I'll buy him a dog.

I went to his house with one of those books of dogs with me. I said, "Hey, GongGong, want a dog?" He said, "Dog? Too much work." I said, "But studies show that if you pet a dog 10 minutes a day, you'll feel much better, your blood pressure will go down, you'll live longer, too." He said, "No want dog. Too much work." I looked through the book and found a nice small one with short hair, one that didn't shed. He said, "You call ‘em that a dog? Look like rat!"

I didn't give up. I left the book and one week later, when I came back, I found a napkin stuck inside. "American Eskimo?" He said, "Did I tell you? When I was a boy back in China, nine years old, work on farm, I had a dog like that. It was a good dog." I looked in the newspaper and found one place that was selling American Eskimos. I called the woman up and told her, "He thinks he doesn't want a dog, but he'd be perfect for a dog. He never goes on vacation. He walks around the block four or five times a day." She said, "Sounds like he'd be OK. If it doesn't work, you can always bring the dog back."

When you choose a dog, you want to get a good feeling about it, and I had a good feeling about the one I picked. But I was nervous. I took her over to GongGong's house and rang the bell wondering if he'd yell at me. He answered the door. He looked at me. He looked at the dog. He looked at me, real mean. Then he bent down – rather suddenly, I thought – and stuck his hand right by her mouth. She licked his hand. And he named her Susie.

This is a poem about GongGong and Susie. But it's also a poem about one of those stories I used to hear over and over at the dinner table, a story about how my grandfather came to this country more than 75 years ago, in the 1920s, and worked on the farms near Sacramento. He never thought he'd live here for the rest of his life; he came to Gum San, Gold Mountain, to get rich and go back to China. But something happened – the Depression – and there was no work. People had nowhere to live, nothing to eat. How did they survive? He used to tell me his story about that, and I've put it down in the poem "GongGong and Susie" from A Suitcase of Seaweed:

GongGong and Susie

Susie sure is good
watchdog.
Got to be.
I treat her right.
Last night
almost
kill a skunk.

Did I tell you?
Many times
I did eat
skunk
soup.
Take out them
stinky thing,
cook
with garlic, onion.
Skunk, snake, night owl,
I eat them
all.
It was Depression time.
No work, nothing
to do.
We hunt, we fish, we camp.

Hey Susie, Susie,
want to eat
some chow
mein?

*GongGong is one Cantonese word for grandfather.

– from A Suitcase of Seaweed

And this man, who in hard times ate skunks and snakes and owls, now – in better times – feeds his dog chow mein noodles, leftover steak and pineapple upside down cake.