My second oldest daughter, Yu-shan, took the comprehensive entrance examination in Hong Kong for the admission of overseas Chinese to universities in Taiwan and was given her first choice, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Taiwan University. When I heard the news, I breathed a sigh of relief: I won't have to worry any more that all four of my daughters will marry Cantonese boys.

It's not that I'm prejudiced against Cantonese boys, of course. During our six years in Hong Kong I had many nice young Cantonese fellows I rather liked in my classes, but if you're asking me to let all four of my daughters be snatched away by those "hipsters" and "cool dudes," I just couldn't bear it. On the other hand, who my daughters marry depends, speaking rather nonchalantly, on their own free choice or, to put it more mysteriously, on their fate, so why should their father worry about the outcome? What's more, in this kind of thing the mother usually occupies a strategic position and naturally becomes her daughter's confidante and ally, with the object of their military operations being not the boyfriend but the father. By the time the father realizes what's up, he finds himself surrounded on all sides and the situation as good as lost.

In the eyes of a father, a daughter is at her loveliest under the age of ten, because that's when she belongs completely to him. In the eyes of her boyfriend, she's loveliest after seventeen, because that's when she's just like a senior-year student, her mind set wholely on the outside world. There's an inherent contradiction between fathers and boyfriends. For a father, nothing in the world is as perfect as his tender little girl. Her only defect is that she'll grow up--unless you use cryogenics to store her--but that's probably illegal and her boyfriend, sooner or later, would ride up on a stallion, or a motorcycle, and wake her with a kiss.

I've never made use of spaceage cryogenics, just letting time roll on and the days and months go by, and now I've rubbed my eyes and found that all four daughters have grown up one after the other, and the fairy-tale gate of the past has banged shut leaving no return. My four daughters, in order, are Shan-shan, Yu-shan, P'ei-shan, and Chi-shan. They line right up into a coral reef [tr. note: shan means coral]. One time when Shan-shan was twelve, P'ei-shan, not yet nine, suddenly said to some visitors, "My sister's an adolescent!" The grownups present all laughed.

It has been some time now that P'ei-shan herself, who caused the laughter, and even Chi-shan, the youngest, have turned into "adolescent young ladies" at the touch of the magic wand of time. And somewhere out there four "adolescent young men" are creeping up stealthily for the attack. Even though they are walking on tiptoe and muffling their breath, I feel four pairs of eyes watching me from behind, gleaming eyes, the same as those of all bad boys up to no good, waiting for their chance to stand out in the light, put on a hypocritical smile, and call me father-in-law. Of course I won't answer. How could I, as simply as that! I'm like a fruit tree that has stood for years and years in the wind, frost, and rain, until the fruit has grown too heavy to bear. And you, some little pipsqueak who happens to pass by, just stretch out your hand and pick it. It would serve you right to trip over a gnarly old root!

And the most annoying thing of all is that the fruit looks as though it may have dropped into the passerby's hands all by itself. The tree blames the passerby for picking the fruit, but the passerby says that the fruit fell by itself and he just picked it up. This kind of thing only happens when there's been collaboration from within. When I got married myself, wasn't there a young lady the too who opened the door and welcomed the intruder inside? "The fort falls most easily to attack from within," is true indeed. But that was then and this is now. The same person who hates cars when crossing the street may hate pedestrians when driving a car. Now it's my turn to drive. For years now I've been accustomed to sharing quarters with five females: the bathroom full of the fragrance of scented soap and perfume, the sofa covered with handbags and hair curlers, no one to fight with me for the wine at the dinner table, these all are matters of course. It's also been a long time since I've facetiously referred to my humble abode as "the girls' dorm." And as the supervisor of the girls' dorm, I naturally frown on unfamiliar male visi tors, especially those with ulterior motives. But the co-eds under my care, especially the three oldest, have long been showing signs of "instability," remindin me of a line by Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

My four imaginary enemies, be they tall or short, fat or thin, majoring in medicine or majoring in literature, sooner or later will appear in their true shapes from the bewildering haze of my doubts and fears and step forward one by one, perhaps mumbling their words in a roundabout way, perhaps straight to the point and brazenly bold, but what they'll want in the end, excuse me, is to take away their sweethearts, my daughters that is. An invisible enemy is the scariest. What's more, I'm in the light and he's in the dark, and there are hidden accomplices working within. It really is an untenable defense. I only wish I had put my daughters in cold storage back then to prevent time from stealing them away and the world from sullying them. Now they're all grown and there's no looking back. And those four imaginary enemies of mine, those four insidious underground workers, have also grown full-fledged and irresistible to force.

He who strikes first prevails. This thing should have been solved back when those four imaginary enemies were still in their swaddling clothes. At least that's what the American Ogden Nash (1902-71) urged us to do. In his clever "Song to Be Sung by the Father of Infant Female Children," he said that after his daughter Jill was born he felt anxious and ill at ease because somewhere a baby boy, still drooling and empty-headed, was also growing up and was fated in the future to steal away his daughter. Each time he saw a baby boy in a stroller in the park, his expression would change and he would think to himself, "Is this the guy?" As he pondered, he confessed, "My dreams, I fear, are infanticiddle." He would think of undoing the boy's diaper pins and pouring pepper in his baby powder, of sprinkling salt in his bottle, of putting sand in his spinach juice, and of casually tossing a crocodile into his carriage for him to play with so that he would be forced, after undergoing such miseries and woes, to marry another man's daughter. Suffice this to show that there's long been a precedent for poets viewing their future sons-in-law as imaginary enemies.

But now it's too late. It was really unwise of me not to have been decisive and taken extraordinary measures such as those in Nash's poem right from the beginning. The situation now, to use a phrase often seen in the history books, is one of "deep encroachment by the foe." The posters and clippings of the Beatles, Joan Baez, and David Cassidy that used to cover our daughters' walls and lie under the glass paperweights on their desks have all been changed for pictures of their boyfriends. The beachhead has been occupied by the invading force, and this battle, at least, has been lost. When we were young, I recall, pictures like those were considered important secret documents, to be hidden away inside a pillowcase next to the land of dreams or slipped under a pile of books and taken out once in a while for a wander in reverie. How could they be offered up for the eyes to feast on 24 hours a day?

Just which month and which year this band of suspicious-looking imaginary enemies began to invade the Yu residence on Amoy Street in Taipei can no longer be determined. I only remember that after we moved to Hong Kong six years ago, the campaign against the fort was taken over by a group of young fellows speaking Cantonese. As to details of the combat, you'll have to ask the several female generals who are nominally in charge of defense. This roi faineant can no longer figure it out. I only know that the enemy's artillery was aimed first at our mailbox, and after a while I learned to make out seven in ten of those lopsided characters. Then it was concentrated on our telephone. The "trajectory touch down point" was right behind my desk, my reading room was their firing ground, and in one evening I've had more than ten cerebral concussions. And those sing-song Cantonese tones, as many as nine of them in all, made it hard for me to study enemy intelligence. Now that I've taken Yu-shan back to Amoy Street, it's my wife's turn to fight against the Cantonese troops. I only have to watch out for the stalwarts of Taiwan, and my duties have become a lot easier.

A mailbox under attack, like a silent war movie, isn't so alarming. Actually I'd prefer that a sentimental young man fret away writing a love letter; that way at least he can practice his composition, and not let his Chinese run to seed in an age of audiovisual education. What's awful are the bombs through the telephone, the salvo of alarming rings expanding the battleground from the mailbox outside the door to the soft underbelly of the study, the silent movie changed to sensur-round sound, the imaginary enemy shooting with real bullets. Even more awful is when the imaginary enemy bursts into the fort and becomes a real live enemy of flesh and blood. It's no longer make-believe and just for fun, as though halfway through a military exercise the troops suddenly started fighting for real. The true enemy can now be discerned. With the collusion of a certain daughter, he occupies one corner of the sofa, where the two whisper softly and secretly together. Even as they gaze fondly at one another, the atmosphere is thick enough to cut with a knife and so stifling the whole family can hardly breathe. The other sisters are keeping their distance, and anyone can see that this time the situation is different. Should the enemy be asked to stay for dinner, the atmosphere becomes even more tense, as though everyone had struck a pose in front of a camera. At the dinner table, ordinarily as noisy as a duck pond, the four sisters seem to be rehearsing a dumb show. Even their spoons and chop-sticks seem to have heard the news and to have suddenly become cautious and careful. Clearly aware that this usurping intruder might be one's destined son-in-law (who knows which change of a teenage girl's proverbial eighteen changes one's darling daughter is at now?) one senses a faint feeling of hostility involuntarily welling up in the heart. Clearly aware also that a daughter, just like a ripe melon, will some day finally fall from the vine, one hopes that it won't be to go along with this stuck-up little pipsqueak in front of one.

Of course, my four daughters aren't always so well behaved, and sometimes I'm so mad I wish the four imaginary enemies would show up and take them all away at once. But when that day really arrives I'm sure I'll feel no end of remorse. The two loneliest times of life, I imagine, are the day one retires and after one's youngest child finally marries. Sung Ch'i once told me, "I really envy you having all your daughters with you." Really? At least I never felt there was anything enviable about me at the time. Maybe I'll really have to wait until Chi-shan, the youngest, has gone off with an imaginary enemy on her honeymoon before my wife and I can sit down together on the long, empty sofa and flip through their childhood photo albums, recollecting the grand scenes from our long-distance trips together, six of us in one car, or the brightly lit evening dinner tables with their piping hot steam we shared together. Many things in life, just like the waves in a ship's wake, don't look lovely until after they've passed. When I think about it that way, I can't help hoping that those four imaginary enemies, those four clumsy, callow pipsqueaks, will find the door slammed in their faces a few more times and show up a bit later.

Yuan Mei [an eighteenth-century author] wrote a poem in whicn he likened having a daughter to "passing the county exams on the supplementary rolls"; this bit of pedantic ostentation is interesting, but it also reveals the feudalistic way of thinking in which males were valued more highly than females. According to Yuan's saying, then, I've hit four supplementary passes in a row--enough already! The four little girls at the Yu house have turned into four young ladies now, and if I were asked what criteria I would use in choosing a son-in-law from among their cortege of imaginary enemies, I'm afraid I couldn't answer at once. After thinking about it for a long while I might say, "As for this kind of thing, up above there's the marriage book of the Man in the Moon, which no one can alter, not even Wei Ku himself, while down here below is a pair of sweethearts vowing eternal love, and "two people sharing one heart can cut through any obstacle," as the saying goes. What right have I to go against heaven and man and stand in their way? What's more, marriage is a mysterious and unpredictable affair, the most important event of one's life, something that can't be deduced beforehand and can't be taken back afterwards. Even a computer of the 21st century wouldn't be able to calculate the probabilities, I'm afraid. It's better to earn a reputation as an enlightened father by pretending to be broad-minded and relaxed and, when the time comes, to take along your personal seal and be their marriage sponsor."

The inquirer laughs and points a finger at me, saying, "What do you mean by 'pretending to be broad-minded and relaxed'? I can see you're still not relaxed inside!"

Of course I'm not relaxed; otherwise, I wouldn't be their father.The racial question, for instance, is very vexing. If my daughter were to become infatuated with a shoulder-shrugging, hand-spreading, nonstop-gum-chewing little weirdo, what would I do? Rationally, I'd want to act like a broad-minded citizen of the world and accept a son-in-law "without drawing distinctions." But emotionally, I'm still not broad-minded enough to let a fellow with hairy arms like a monkey carry my daughter over the threshold. This is no longer the era of "defending against the foreign barbarians," of course, but there's also no need for our pure and simple family to try to pass itself off as a little United Nations. The inquirer laughs again and asks me if I've heard that the children of mixed marriages are smarter than average. I reply, "I've heard that, but I don't cherish the thought of hugging a 'mixed-blood grand-son' who's a genius. I don't want a genius to call me Grandpa. I want a child who'll call me wai-kung [Chinese for Grandpa]." The inquirer just won't stop: "Then what about provincial origin?"

"Provincial origin doesn't matter," I say. "I'm the product of a mixed marriage between Kiangsu and Fukien provinces, and the result's not so bad, is it? When my mother wrote home from Fukien saying someone there had asked her to marry him, her parents made a big fuss about it and said, "It's so far away! How could you marry a southern barbarian!" Later they found out that their in-laws from Fukien, besides the difference in dialect, really had nothing else that could give grounds for suspicion. Cantonese boys have worked away incessantly these past few years and put a lot of pressure on our family, and I wouldn't be surprised if Fukien and Kwangtung provinces should some day be joined in an alliance. And if a young man from Taiwan should take the trouble to flatter me but have his mind set on something besides discussing literature with me, I won't give him a hard time either. As to other provinces, I'd welcome young men of any dialect, from Heilungchiang in the northeast to Yunnan in the southwest, as long as my daughters don't mind."

"Then what about academic background?"

"Anything goes. And he doesn't necessarily have to be a scholar. Scholars often don't make good sons-in-law, still less good husbands. There's just one thing: his Chinese has to be good. If his Chinese is bad, it'll louse up my grandson!"

The visitor laughs again. "Are looks important?" he asks.

"You really have your head in the clouds!" This time it's my turn to laugh. "My daughter will pay attention to that. Why should I worry?"

The inane visitor wants to keep on questioning me, when suddenly the doorbell rings. I get up to open the door and find that somewhere out there in a mass of long hair is another imaginary enemy who has come to plunder the Yus'.