The Secret My Sailor Grandfather Kept for Fifty Years#

Last time I saw my grandfather eat bull penis, he was seventy-three, sitting in a plastic chair in his Kowloon kitchen, scraping the last gelatinous piece from a chipped ceramic bowl. He held it up to the fluorescent light, turned it over the way a jeweler turns a stone, and said, “Good for a man’s strength.” Then he winked at my grandmother, who was washing dishes with her back to him.

She didn’t turn around.

She never turned around for the wink. I was eleven. I figured she was just tired.

~

My grandfather was a sailor. That’s the first thing anyone in the family ever said about him. Not his name, not where he came from, not what kind of man he was. Just: he was a sailor. As if the ocean explained everything—the absences, the silence, the way he’d scan a room like he was calculating how fast he could leave it.

He shipped out of Canton in 1928, sixteen years old. Worked cargo routes between Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, Yokohama. Came home to marry my grandmother in 1932 because his mother told him to. Had three kids in five years, then went back to sea for stretches that kept getting longer. Six months. Eight months. Fourteen months.

My grandmother raised the children alone. When neighbors asked where her husband was, she’d say, “Making money.” When they asked if she was lonely, she’d say, “Who’s got time to be lonely?”

She was a practical woman. Loneliness was a luxury she couldn’t afford.

~

I started collecting the fragments after he died. Not on purpose—there wasn’t some grand investigative project, no moment where I sat down and said, “I’m going to find out who my grandfather really was.” It happened the way most family archaeology happens: somebody says something at a funeral, and you file it away. Somebody else says something contradictory six months later, and the two fragments start grinding against each other in your head like tectonic plates.

My uncle—my father’s younger brother—was drunk at the funeral dinner. He said, “Your grandfather had more friends in Manila than he ever had in Hong Kong.” My aunt kicked him under the table. He shut up. But the sentence stuck.

More friends in Manila. What kind of friends does a sailor have in Manila?

~

The answer came in pieces over the next decade. A photograph I found in a shoebox in my grandmother’s closet after she died: my grandfather with his arm around another man on a dock somewhere tropical. Both of them smiling. The other man’s hand resting on my grandfather’s hip. Not on his shoulder. His hip.

A letter, written in English that was grammatically broken but emotionally precise, from someone named Eduardo. “I miss your laugh,” it said. “The room is quiet without you.”

A conversation with my father, who was eighty-one and losing his memory, but who snapped into focus when I showed him the photograph. He looked at it for a long time. Then he said, “Your grandfather loved that man.” Said it without surprise, without shame, without any of the emotions I’d expected. Said it the way you’d say the sky is blue.

“Did you know?” I asked.

“Everyone knew,” he said. “We just didn’t say it.”

~

I’ve thought about that sentence more than any other sentence in my life. Everyone knew. We just didn’t say it.

What does it mean to know something and not say it? Not for a day, not for one tough conversation, but for an entire lifetime? My grandmother knew. My father knew. My uncle knew. The neighbors probably knew. And my grandfather knew they knew. And they knew he knew they knew.

An entire architecture of mutual silence, built and maintained for fifty years, so a man could eat bull penis at his kitchen table and wink at a wife who’d never turn around.

~

My grandfather wasn’t a brave man. Wasn’t a coward either. He was a man who understood, with the animal clarity of someone who’d survived the war and the occupation and the poverty and the gangs, that the world wasn’t built for people like him. Not the world of 1930s Canton, not the world of colonial Hong Kong, not even the world of 1980s Kowloon where he ate his bull penis in peace.

He built his life the way a sailor builds a ship in a bottle—carefully, patiently, through an opening that was never quite wide enough for the truth to pass through.

I don’t blame him. Don’t pity him either. Pity’s for people who had choices.

~

This book isn’t about my grandfather. But it starts with him because everything starts with a secret, and his was the first one I ever learned to see.

The man at the center of this story—Namchoi, who the British called Pakchoi because they couldn’t be bothered to learn Chinese names properly—built an empire on secrets. Other people’s secrets. His own secrets. Secrets about sex, about money, about loyalty, about betrayal. He stacked them like mahjong tiles, each one balanced on the ones below, and when the tower finally fell, it killed him.

But that’s the end. The beginning is simpler. The beginning’s always simpler.

A boy in a village. A wound that never healed. A mouth that learned to stay shut.

~

My grandfather died on a Tuesday in August. Humidity was ninety-four percent. The air conditioning in the hospital was busted. My father held his hand and said nothing, because in our family, the most important things were always said by not saying them.

I stood in the hallway and watched through the glass. A nurse came out and asked if I was family. I said yes. She said, “He was a good man.” I said, “Yes.” Because what else do you say?

Later, going through his things, I found a mahjong set he’d kept for forty years. The tiles were ivory, yellowed with age, smooth from thousands of games. Inside the case, tucked beneath the tiles, was a second photograph of Eduardo. On the back, in my grandfather’s handwriting: “Manila, 1951.”

Nothing else. No declaration, no explanation, no justification. Just a place and a year. As if that were enough.

Maybe it was.

~

The secrets we keep don’t die when we die. They just change owners. My grandfather’s secret belonged to him for seventy-three years. Then it belonged to us. Now it belongs to you.

I don’t know what you’ll do with it. Don’t know what I’ve done with it, honestly. I’ve turned it over in my hands like one of those ivory mahjong tiles, feeling its weight, tracing its edges, trying to figure out what game it was part of.

The game, I think, was survival. And the first rule of survival is: never let them see what’s in your hand.

My grandfather played that game his entire life. Namchoi played it too, with higher stakes and bloodier consequences. This book is the story of Namchoi’s game—the tiles he held, the tiles he traded, and the tile that, in the end, he couldn’t hide.

But before we get to Namchoi, I need you to understand something about secrets. They’re not lies. A lie is something you tell other people. A secret is something you tell yourself—every morning when you wake up, every night before you sleep, in every silence between every sentence of every conversation you’ll ever have.

A secret isn’t a thing you carry. It’s a thing you become.

My grandfather became his secret. And so did Namchoi. And maybe, in some small way, so have you.

~

The bull penis, by the way, was supposed to boost virility. My grandfather ate it three times a week for thirty years.

Draw your own conclusions.