Claudia Chang, Professor of Anthropology

Today my daughter put on her Brownie hat that we found in a used clothing store. A very bizarre memory came back to me: my thoroughly eccentric father used to take my own Brownie hat (of similar color and style) and wear it around the house like a skull cap. In fact he insisted on wearing it to work. I remember being mortified -- except everything in my home was like that. We were never the right kind of suburban folks. We always lived in some microcosm of Chinese-American culture that no one else could understand.

I consider this with a growing sense of relief that he was so weird. His strangeness contributed to my own abilities for understanding weirdness and for learning how to be a marginal person.

My father had a really strange collection of hats. The one hat he wore most frequently and the one that seemed to become his mark of distinction was a black beret purchased in Paris. He also bought a bowler hat in London in the early 60s. The bowler caused quite a sensation at a conference where he insulted some English scientists who unkindly referred to him as a Chinaman.

Last September a sixteen-year old friend who needed a hat for a theater performance borrowed the bowler hat. It is strange how my mind works -- when I thought about Greg wearing the bowler I imagined that the really weird actions of my father could end up through osmosis visiting Greg as a kind of mental transference. Would Greg then want to wear Brownie hats? What if he developed a weird penchant for hats? Maybe he might start wearing the red fez that my father wore during the two years that he came to drive me home from my girl scout meetings or when he listened to me play the violin in the junior high orchestra. I imagined Greg on the stage with the black bowler, speaking my father’s English, asking if anyone wanted to take a ride with him on the "turning-pike" or wondering where Eespa was, the closest he ever was able to pronounce my mother’s name Isabelle. Or even more outrageous than that, what if Greg ended up wanting to behave like my father during the period when he actively used this hat collection? Would Greg start thinking about the rabbit experiments? Maybe the idea of crossing snowshoe rabbits with cotton tail rabbits might cross his mind as a valuable exercise in reproductive physiology. What if he started to keep notes in his daily journal about the number of ejaculations he had? Or the cost of every lunch he ever ate?

I wanted Greg to wear that hat on the stage, but I didn’t want him to experience any of the stuff that went along with the hat. Nor did I have the stamina to explain in great detail to Greg what he might wind up doing when he wore the bowler. Greg’s a great kid -- he’s one of the few people I know who would probably like and understand my father’s eccentricities. I can even picture Greg walking around for ten minutes trying on the daily thoughts that went through my father’s mind as he wore the bowler, the red fez, or even the Brownie cap.

I said to Greg, "Go ahead, try on the hat. You know my father, he was quite a fellow." If I had thought much further than that, I would have realized I had just made one of those empty statements that embarrassed adults make to precocious sixteen year olds. But that’s the beauty of talking to Greg. He expects adults to be dopey most of the time, so he’s smart enough to let a comment go untouched. Also he knows my father was a famous biologist with his own kind of agenda. I think he knows that the hat like everything else my father owned has a kind of abnormal significance for me.

Part 2 of the Life and Hard Times of Dr. Chang’s Hat: The Commander Schmuck Hat

I later found out that Greg likes hats too. As a ten year old he was given an aviator’s hat with long flaps that he named the Commander Schmuck hat. When I was visiting his family one day I asked if I could see the hat. After all how could I write about what a hat means to someone else if I didn’t have any mental picture of what the thing looked like? In my father’s life hats became his method for changing personalities. Perhaps like my postmodernist friends I didn’t need to see the Commander Schmuck hat nor did I need to try it on. I could simply theorize the hat through a series of unintelligible signs or symbols. The Commander Schmuck hat, which I was shown once, appeared to be better rendered as an aviator hat with a wool lining and long drooping ear flaps.

Greg, who also writes about Nazi chickens (dead I believe), wanted to wear my father’s bowler hat. If my father came back from the dead I am quite sure that he would want to trade the black bowler for the Commander Schmuck hat, if only for ten minutes. Imagine the delight that Dr. Chang might have if he could walk around with the aviator’s hat, its woolly insides, and the nice ear flaps dangling below his chin.

My father, a frail Chinese man who attempted but failed to understand his American born children, resurrected from the dead would be 85 years old. I would like to believe that my father sporting the Commander Schmuck hat complete with Greg’s sixteen year old thoughts might achieve a real understanding of American culture at the end of his life. The rock concert that my father attended in San Francisco in 1989 might now make a lot more sense -- the cacophony of sound through the sensibilities of Greg’s bloody versions of dead Nazi chicken chorales might elicit sweet harmonies, lullabies of discordant gongs and cymbals. Let’s just say that the idiosyncratic genius of Commander Schmuck’s latest move in Dungeon and Dragons, his palpitations toward the leggy girl in black, and the frenetic dance moves on the theater set would charge my father’s emotional landscape.

Imagine my father, who loved color television and the convenience of a microwave oven, discovering the video arcade at the mall. Even the little yellow pac men on the computer screen with their slanted eyes would change my father’s self-concept. Picture the Asian scientist watching the pac men take over the world. My father would morph Greg’s world into the logical moves across a computer screen. No doubt he would demand an instant replay of the leggy temptress or would ask for another bar of the dead Nazi chickens’ theme song. Then there’s the business of Greg’s campaign speech at the local high school. Even if that wasn’t part of the ten minute romp through American culture my father might experience while wearing the Commander Schmuck hat, he would tap into Greg’s future ambitions as a politician. Perhaps the student flying the F-15 bomber through the high school corridors on a necessary mission would so permeate the wool lining of Commander Schmuck’s warped mind that my father would begin to repeat the winning campaign mantra that said simply: “I don’t want to be your best friend.”

Claudia Chang is an aspiring author who has taught at Sweet Briar College since 1981. She has published a number of scholarly articles and book chapters on dead subjects -- mainly archæology. This piece represents a recent foray into the world of letters, dead Nazi chickens, and family history. The original version of this short story was written in 1994.

Dr. Chang will not be available to discuss her work, as she is currently digging up dead things in the wilds of Central Asia. Some of this work can be seen at http://talgar.sbc.edu.