Father’s Day

Commemorating family history, featuring work by Dan Shiffman, Roberta Schine and Nicholas Samaras, plus excerpts from an interview with Roy Cheng Tsung.

TRANSCRIPT

Intern Arianna D’Italia recently asked Passager author Roy Cheng Tsung why he decided to write a series of books about his parents and his childhood.

ROY: “I wanted to leave something behind for my two daughters.”

He said, for example, that they only knew his mother “as a grandma who can make potstickers and Chinese pancakes.” He said, “My mother is much more than that.”

ROY: I was born and raised in New York, and I had no idea what China is or about or our people, the Chinese people. My father loved to tell stories from history. This is the only way my father could educate me.”

Part of what Roy left behind were three books about his family’s history, Beyond Lowu Bridge and Ox Horn Bend, both of which Passager published, and a third book that he’s completing about his mother.

On this Father’s Day edition of Burning Bright, three pieces from the brand new issue of Passager about fathers who came to the United States from elsewhere.

Dan Shiffman said that his story “‘Americans All’ Week” blends elements of his imagination with some family history.

My father had been struggling to advance his English which hadn’t improved very much because he had had few opportunities to speak with native born Americans. After years of working in the back of restaurants – chopping potatoes, rinsing dishes with scalding water, stocking freezers in the icy air that cut through his thin frame–my father dreamed of a newsstand but needed stronger reading and writing skills in order to manage the paperwork and interact more confidently with customers.

When my father was only a few years older than I was on the day my mother spoke to my class, he escaped Russian conscription officers by riding on the tops of trains toward Constantinople, passing carts of sugar beets pulled by starving donkeys. A month later he arrived in Hamburg without money for passage to America. He spent several nights sleeping on a bench by the Fischmarkt until a mysterious man hired him to help deliver ice. Later the same man purchased a steerage ticket for him.

Was my father thinking of his parents? Did he miss them? My uncle once mentioned that my father was separated from his mother during a pogrom, but for how long. Did he ever find her? My grandfather often traveled to other shtetls selling shoes. Was my father able to say goodbye to him? I had so many questions. My uncle once said, “There’s only so much we can talk about, Harold.” My father seemed the most wounded of them all. Both my uncle and mother formed a protective wall around him. I wanted to push this wall away but the thought of doing so also terrified me.

Excerpts from Dan Shiffman’s story “‘Americans All’ Week.”

Roberta Schine said that when she was a child, her grandmother told her about a ship filled with German Jews who were fleeing Nazi persecution during World War II. Cuba, Canada, and the United States all turned them away. They were sent back to Germany where a third of them were killed. “Nobody helped us,” her grandmother said. As a result of growing up with this story, Roberta became an immigration activist. Here are excerpts from her memoir “Asylum Clinic.”

Soon I’m seated at a small table with Manuel, his four-year old son, Caesar, and Omar. Omar interviews and translates; I take notes and ask additional questions in my somewhat decent Spanish. Manuel begins.

“I was attacked by gangs claiming to represent the Nicaraguan government. They said they knew my parents went to demonstrations and voted against the current government. They wanted me to join their group. I knew they were violent, and I told them I didn’t want anything to do with them. They began to harass me, and it got worse and worse. On the way home from work one night, they threw rocks at me and beat up my buddy. We ended up in the emergency room.” Manuel rolls up his sleeve and shows us the scar on his arm.

“A few days later I received a text threatening to kill me and my son. I knew we had to get out immediately. So, Caesar and I left our small village the next morning. My mother was in New York, so we headed north. We walked, took buses and hitchhiked. Caesar got sick in Mexico, and we had to stay in a hotel for a few days. It was scary because I heard the hotels were being raided and people were getting deported. But the boy had a fever and was too sick to travel. When he got better, we made our way to the border town of Reynosa and crossed the Rio Grande River. Caesar was by my side in an inner tube. I kept telling him, ‘Make believe you’re running, hijo! Verdad que es divertido, no? Isn’t this fun?’ I tried to make the dangerous trip into a game. When we got to the Texas side, we walked for days in the scorching hot Chihuahuan Desert without food.”

“We walked for days in the scorching hot Chihuahuan Desert without food,” he repeats. Finally, he spotted a border patrol agent, turned himself in and told him he was asking for asylum for himself and his child.

Excerpts from Roberta Schine’s memoir “Asylum Clinic.”

Nicholas Samaras said he wrote his poem “December Sixth” “to commemorate my father’s 94th birthday and my nameday, which we shared.” He said, “I’m from Patmos, Greece and was brought in exile to be raised in America at the time of the Greek Junta military dictatorship.’

Lampglow. The whole parlour air, golden,
and the hour growing tall and stooped.

I sit in my father’s chair, in the place of my father,
meditating a prayer, a birthday wish for him,

ninety-four in heaven. I breathe in his place,
each year slowly approaching his age,

my beard in the slow turn to winter,
December sixth, the day of Saint Nicholas,

my nameday and my father’s birthday –
our shared day. Lampglow suffused

where the molecules of air
are the molecules of prayer exhaled,

blue incense smoke spiraling upward,
a staircase to ascend.

“December Sixth,” Nicholas Samaras.

All three pieces on this Father’s Day episode of Burning Bright are from the brand new Winter 2025 issue of Passager. To purchase that edition, subscribe to, donate to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, visit passagerbooks.com.

Passager offers a 25% discount on the books and journal issues featured here on Burning Bright. Visit our website to see what’s on sale this week.

Thanks to Oberlin College intern Arianna D’Italia for interviewing Roy Cheng Tsung, parts of which we used on this podcast.

For Kendra, Mary, Christine, Rosanne, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.