Silent Pain

Hui Liu still gets the chills when he thinks about the twist on his American dream. It was supposed to include a big warm house and watching his only son grow. Never the cold, lonely chamber on the evergreen expanse of Rose Hills Memorial Park.

Buried there is his 9-year-old son, who died two years ago after an unsuccessful bone-marrow transplant in Los Angeles, a devastating secret the family continues to keep from aging grandparents half a world away.

“If they knew, I don’t know how they could go on living,” said Liu, a 43-year-old native of Tianjin in northern China now living in Alhambra.

To avoid telling them of his death, “we told his grandparents his vocal cords were damaged after the operation and he could not speak again,” Liu said in Mandarin Chinese.

As the only grandson, little Charlie Liu alone could have carried the family name. Until now.

A younger sister, two failed pregnancies and countless prayers later, his mother is with child again--a son. The baby is due on or around Christmas Day. What’s more, the child’s birth would fall in the year of the rabbit. Charlie was also born during the year of the rabbit. According to the Chinese calendar, that makes the two brothers exactly 12 years, or a full birth cycle, apart.

“It’s like reincarnation,” Liu said. “When my wife cries in the middle of the night, I would tell her, our son is in your stomach. God is giving him back to you.”

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The death of a child would devastate any family. Liu’s story shows how much harder it is for new immigrants to cope when faced with the additional barriers of language and culture. It is particularly tough on the Liu family because they are part of a wave of mainland Chinese to settle into the heavily Asian San Gabriel Valley in the early ‘90s. With little time to adjust to life on the fringe of the American mainstream, their heartaches rarely bubble to the surface.

“They are learning to live in that isolation,” said Jeanette Choi, a program director at Asian Pacific Family Center in Rosemead, who describes the Lius’ stoic reaction to the tragedy as common among new immigrants. “Anything negative they will avoid talking about. So there’s no way to even grieve and come to terms with their loss. They live in guilt, regret and self-blame. They don’t know how to get help.”

Liu’s wife, Lan Liu, 38, is still too fragile to touch the subject. But her husband is ready to open up. He thinks it might help his community take a collective step forward and be more honest with its own reality.

“I am a white-hair man saying goodbye to a black-hair child,” said Liu, using a traditional expression meaning parents burying children, as he blocks tears with a drenched tissue paper.

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Charlie was diagnosed with a deadly blood disorder, aplastic anemia, in third grade, shortly after he joined his parents in Los Angeles.

Like many Chinese families, his parents had left him behind with grandparents while they headed overseas to find work. After toughing it out as clothing retailers in Eastern Europe, the couple moved to Alhambra in 1993, where they ran a small travel agency booking local bus tours. The boy was only 7 when he touched down in the land of Mickey Mouse and happily ever after. But he was already ill.

At first his parents had no idea. Liu tearfully recalls the day he was called into the principal’s office and told that Charlie was not performing well in school. Like many Asian parents would do, he scolded his son for disgracing the family by not studying hard.

“We didn’t know he was already sick. . . . He couldn’t concentrate because there was not enough blood going to his brain,” said the father, choking on his words.

Charlie’s brave fight for life touched the whole school.

“The first day I met Charlie, he said to me, ‘If I don’t get a bone marrow transplant I’m going to die,’ ” said Esther Keshishian, Charlie’s fourth-grade teacher at Monterey Vista School in Monterey Park. “That really knocked me for a loop. It really did.” She would keep Charlie company during lunch because he couldn’t risk going outdoors and being exposed to germs.

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Like most immigrant children, Charlie quickly began to speak better English than his parents. While they strained to grasp the gravity of the medical situation through a parade of interpreters, the boy knew more about his fate than any child his age should have to.

“His parents didn’t understand a lot of medical language,” his teacher remembered. “The doctors were talking to Charlie.”

Maybe ignorance was a kind of blessing that kept hope alive while Charlie was in the hospital.

“The mother set up a special bedroom with new furniture and everything else, thinking he would come back home soon,” Keshishian said.

At the doctor’s suggestion, they decided to have a second child, hoping the siblings could exchange healthy bone marrow. A year later, Charlie held a tiny sister in his arms. The father has a picture.

But the sister’s marrow was not a match.

With little time to care for an infant and a dying child, the decision was made to send 2-month-old Elizabeth back to China. Since then, mother and father have seen the daughter only in pictures.

Now 3, the little girl is being raised by an aunt who has a grown daughter of her own. Elizabeth calls her aunt and uncle Mama and Baba. Her parents in Alhambra, she is told, are her “Daddy” and “Mommy.” The Lius will return to China for Chinese New Year, visit her and decide then whether to bring her home.

The search for someone to save Charlie continued. But the only matching donor extended Charlie’s life by just a few more weeks.

The question of whether or not to switch off his son’s life support nearly killed the father.

“In China, when my wife went into the delivery room, I was the one to sign the paperwork and I was the one to see our son first, even before my wife saw him,” Liu said. “The American doctor was giving me paperwork again to sign. It’s like asking me to kill my son.

“That day I came to the hospital with a knife in my pocket. I thought if he goes, I might as well go with him.” But in the end, that seemed too selfish.

He recalled his son in his hospital bed, urging his parents to have seven or eight more children. “I will take care of them. I can speak English!” he promised innocently, trying to leave his parents with a glimmer of hope.

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It only seemed right to go on, to be parents again. But more heartbreak awaited. The mother’s first pregnancy did not succeed. The fetus had to be aborted. The second time, same thing.

Every night, husband and wife got on their knees and prayed for another chance. On their third try, Liu says, God listened. “I am going to call him Zhu En or ‘Gift of God,’ ” said Liu. “To remind him that his parents didn’t give him life, God gave him his life.” The boy will go by Andrew in English.

Moses Ti is the minister at the Chinese Evangelical Free Church in Monterey Park, where the Lius have become regulars. He knows of many Chinese families who struggle with various jarring setbacks in the privacy of their homes. The church is one of the few places they know they can go for support.

“When he first showed up, he was in complete despair, crying all the time” Ti said.

But being in an environment where people were more willing to share feelings about life’s unexpected turns helped.

“Recently, you see a lot of mainland Chinese who made some money in China under market reforms, they think they can turn their savings into millions here,” Ti said. “But if they don’t speak the language and can’t drive, they don’t adjust. Success stories are as rare as phoenix feather and dragon skin--too rare.”

Sometimes, trauma inspires a new interpretation of success.

When Charlie was ill, a local Chinese-language magazine had published a small story about his disease. The writer was interested in Charlie because he had a relative who also needed a bone marrow transplant. Until then, Charlie’s father had not heard of another Chinese family in a similar plight.

The power of a publication to help inform people who would otherwise struggle alone intrigued him, although he had never dabbled in journalism.

After Charlie’s death, Liu stopped shuttling tourists to canyons and casinos, and started his own monthly magazine, AC (for American Chinese) Times, that takes readers into the bittersweet lives of Chinese American entrepreneurs in Southern California.

“People ask me, ‘Why do you want to go into a business that doesn’t make a lot of money?’ I don’t care about money anymore. My son is gone. I want to do something meaningful,” Liu said.

With no experience, no financial backers and a slow-building circulation of about 20,000 throughout the Southland, Liu hopes the magazine can be his new moral conscience, an attempt to shed more light on the complexity of Chinese immigrant life.

“My son is a hero,” Liu said. “Without him, there wouldn’t be this turning point in my life. Because of him, we now have his sister and a new brother. This is part of the history of Chinese in America. I want to help us remember this history.”