Tag: Father

100 Years of Vanity, Part IV

BettyLeave a comment

The young woman was thirty-two, the same age as my aunt, and forty-eight years younger than my grandfather. And she was beautiful. Petite with strong, high cheekbones, full lips and a full head of thick hair, a shock of surprise rippled through the family when they met her for the very first time. She was beautiful, my aunt recalled, but she had a hard look about her, as though something or someone was forcing her to marry this drastically older man. But far from it, her decision to marry my grandfather was entirely her own.
            She was working as an administrator at an appliance company, filing forms and payments on air conditioning units and refrigerators, when a coworker, the sister of an aunt, suggested that she meet an elderly man she knew.
            I was two at the time and living an ocean away in a leafy suburb of southern California, utterly oblivious to any grandmother but my mother’s mother, who lived in the neighboring city and made sweet buns for us at Chinese New Year’s. As I played in American sandboxes, the union that would provide me with a Taiwanese grandmother was being arranged in the humidity of Formosan air. The mental intricacies that would push a young woman of thirty to agree to meet a man of eighty with the implied expectation of a partnership remained uninvestigated for years, but as I grew older and my grandparents’ relationship became clearer, I opened my ears and became very still when my grandmother was out of the room and the other women remained behind. In this way I pieced together a shadowy history of my grandfather’s last wife. 
Five years prior to her marriage to my grandfather, she had been in love with a man closer to her own age. They had both come to Taipei from the poorer southern city of Tainan, hoping to make a new life for them in the big city. A friendly and sociable woman whose confidence was boosted by the move to a bustling city with the love of her life, she quickly found a job at the appliance sales company and worked diligently, saving most of what she earned towards buying a house with this man. He on the other hand, remains largely a mystery – my grandma only ever told my mother once, vaguely, about what happened – but what’s clear is that after five years of life in the city, her savings close to what was needed to buy a house, she came home from work one night to find the house empty and the man gone along with every penny in the bank.
I’m not sure what sort of conversations they had on their marriage night or in the days after, but I believe that my grandfather asked no questions. The ease with which he lived was the same ease by which others conducted themselves around him. His new wife felt this immediately. My grandmother, the only one I have ever known on my father’s side, did not marry for money per se – though of course the money was welcome – rather, she wanted a decent man. I am not one to explain the psychological process that leads one to marry a man forty-eight years older – maybe my grandmother was a little crazy – but in all the years I have known her, and him, neither grandma nor grandpa ever gave any indication that they were nothing but meant for each other.
Just as with wife number four, my Grandfather lavished his new bride with gifts and countless trips around the world, except this time with grandchildren in tow. Which suited my grandmother fine, because she was as humble as my grandfather was vain. She delighted in the old man’s vanity and even encouraged it, for she loved to comb his hair for him, to buy him the latest Japanese beauty creams, and to pick out brilliantly colored ties and handkerchiefs. In China, she bargained fearlessly for the best prices on suits and shoes, her Mandarin saturated with a heavy Taiwanese accent that would normally cause mainland vendors to disregard her, but her easy laugh and friendly nature made her hard to dislike. And while in the first decade and a half of their union my grandfather was fully capable of doing all these things himself, he delighted in her company and the looks they drew as they walked down the street and into restaurants.
Had the age difference not been so wide, they would still have made a strange couple, for my grandmother was notoriously the most tackily dressed member of the family. She wanted none of the finery so coveted by the fourth wife or the social status of the third. She wanted only the security of being with a good man, and my grandfather, aside from his narcissism, was a good man. It wasn’t until after his ninety-sixth birthday that the first signs of senility began to show, but even then my grandmother rose to the occasion. Though she had the financial means, my grandmother refused to hire a caretaker for my grandfather and gamely assumed the role of nursemaid, chef, driver and secretary. Despite his growing need to sleep and a diminishing appetite, my grandfather maintained a robust social schedule, keeping memberships at several of Taipei’s ritziest hotels, to where he treated his friends for lunch. When these men, many of whom were also retired customs officers had begun to die off, my grandfather took to treating officers from later generations or his colleagues’ grown children and their families. These elaborate, time-consuming meals were by no means exclusive to customs officers. I remember many a summer afternoon whiled away at a ritzy hotel buffet or within the dim, wood-paneled dining room of an upscale steakhouse. My grandfather specialized in treating people to the business lunch: three courses for the price of two. These meals became a family tradition – a rite of passage for anyone who wanted to know the family better and it was during these meals that any outsider, and the family as well, acknowledged just how necessary my grandmother was to my grandfather’s wellbeing. 

100 Years of Vanity, Part III

BettyLeave a comment
His sons were horrified. They warned their father about the rumor they’d heard: the woman’s last husband had died in a mysterious manner. Though extremely rational and normally disdainful of anything that bore the slightest whiff of the superstition, my uncles went to consult a fortuneteller (most likely on the recommendation of my second aunt, who seems to know all the good fortunetellers). The prophetess said this: “Beware this fourth wife: she has the qi (energy) of a husband killer!” What the fortuneteller meant was not that she had murdered her last husband, but she had a ruinous air about her – whoever married her would succumb to her insatiable karmic appetite and have his life drained from him. But my grandfather chortled, “Husband killer! Doesn’t she know she’s wife number four?”
Filial piety bound my uncles to let their father do whatever he wanted, including squandering a small fortune on the wedding, gifts and anything else his high-maintenance bride wanted. They honey-mooned for what seemed like half a decade, traveling across the world twice and taking photographs in front of every famous monument – their pictures have an air of glamour about them, my handsome grandfather in his three-piece pin-striped suits, arms crossed confidently across his chest, and his beautiful wife, dressed in luxurious silk and linen pantsuits, elegantly at his side. On the surface they were a beautiful couple, and when they weren’t abroad they were entertaining at home, attending parties and premiers, concerts and theater.
The things that brought them together – her beauty, his wealth – could only last so long, and as her looks faded she became more and more demanding, wanting each year to transfer more and more property to her and her children’s name. When his sons approached him to put a stop to it, my grandfather shook his head lightly and shrugged, “She loves money. What can I do?”
He put himself first and this meant avoiding confrontation at all costs. He would never be the one to suggest a divorce, or even think it. They were messy and in bad taste. Instead, my grandfather continued to live. It was around this time however, that he began to practice selective hearing and while his wife’s screeching for money became louder and louder, he perfected his inner calm, tuning her out to gaze at her once beautiful face.
One day, after nearly ten years of marriage she became enraged after being refused one thing or other and screamed, “I want a divorce!” Before she had paused to take a breath to reevaluate my grandfather stood up from his desk.
“You got it,” he said, and walked calmly out the door.
The marriage ended and my uncles breathed a sigh of relief, though they wondered if their stepmother had escaped with her life. However, not too long after, she too passed away from illness. She was a year shy of seventy.
By now, my grandfather was eighty years old, but looked not a day over sixty. His daily regimen persisted through the years and had served him well; it became apparent that he was in impossibly good health for a man his age – he would live a very, very long time. No one knew this better than my grandfather.
Months after the divorce he called in his second son’s wife, a sociable young woman with a large network of friends and family.
“I want to remarry,” he said.
“Of course,” she replied, “You’re in excellent health and have plenty of years ahead. You ought to remarry.”
“To marry someone young,” he said.
My aunt smiled, “I’m sure we can find someone who knows a nice woman of sixty or seventy.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
At this, my grandfather leaned in and said more words to my aunt than he had spoken to anyone else in a long while, “I’m eighty,” he said, “And I know I will live for a very long time. If I marry someone now who is sixty or seventy, in ten years they will be seventy or eighty – and I don’t need to be a fortuneteller to know that they’ll need someone to take care of them by then. I don’t want to be old with old. I need someone who can take care of me – for however long I live.”
My aunt was stunned, perplexed. How young was her father-in-law thinking? Certainly not someone younger than fifty? A thirty-year age difference was cause for scandal, but then again, so was a money-grubbing B-list movie star. My aunt kept the conversation to herself, replaying it in her head and wondering what to do. She didn’t have to wonder long. A few days later, it was announced that for the patriarch, a new bride had been found. 

Security Blanket

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A few days ago my mother came in to say goodnight and saw me hunched over my work phone, typing something out to my boss. I looked up, aware my eyes projected fatigue if anything.

She kept her hand on the door handle, as though deciding whether or not she should come in – it was late. She was constantly reminding me to sleep earlier but at the same time saw so little of me during the day that the evenings, right before bed, were the only time we really got to talk

I look forward to talking to my mother at night. Now, she is busier than my father (though he will never agree to this); after teaching a few hours she comes home to make dinner (unless my father, having left work early as he often does now, comes home to make it first) and then prepares to leave again to play two hours or so of badminton at the local club.

When I was younger and she didn’t play badminton, I often watched her sneak in a short naps here and there. I would come home from school and shout something to my brother who would say, “Shh. Mom’s sleeping.” And she’d be in the living room, stretched out primly on the flowered couch, her knees propped up or feet crossed at the ankles, a slight frown on her face. A light sleeper who stirred at the slightest sound, she was never fully asleep. I pitied her for it because my father’s snores are murderous – meaning you will either die from exhaustion, or kill him in the middle of the night.

Whatever my mother thought of her sleeping situation, she and my father worked it out long ago. She took to retiring earlier than he – to get a head start, I suppose. Her tactic was to enter REM before my father came to bed, and would thus be immune to the noise. But I doubt this. It is one of those sacrifices women make when they marry. My father gives her love, warmth, a family, the financial stability to pursue her non-profit Chinese school dreams – all that and more – in exchange for the restful slumber she had before she met him.

And yet to my surprise I observed that my mother slept poorly when my father was not there. As they grew old together, she came to rely on the rhythm of his breath to put her heart at ease. At the end of the day everything was fine – he was there, alive and well, and together they were whole. Her children may grow and fly the coop (though this has yet to happen with the youngest bird), but at the eleventh hour through the first, her husband was there, sleeping peacefully albeit noisily by her side. 

So perhaps it was not the sleep. Whatever it was, she seemed to be always tired, in the same way I feel now. For a long time we thought it was her liver. My mother is also very gullible – fatigue and gullibility do not mix. Fatigue makes one desperate, even more gullible than usual, and she bounced from one doctor to the next, collecting a docket filled with lies about her physical condition.

She was never known for being fair, yet one doctor said her skin appeared jaundiced, which indicated her liver was failing her. Another doctor pointed to the white hairs along her hairline, saying it was something to do with her blood. Lupus. Cancer. Hypothyroidism. We never really did figure it out, but thank goodness my mother, despite her gullibility, hates western medicine with a passion and refused to take any of the medication. “Why damage my liver further, if my liver is already weak?” she reasoned.

Chinese medicine, with its strange herbs and animals parts were another story – my mother believed in eastern medicine with the same principles with which she adhered to Buddhism. Not strictly, but willingly, out of familiarity. Eastern medicine could be explained in Chinese terms more readily than western medicine and procedures, and was, in general, a more holistic approach, which appealed to my mother’s nature-loving bent. She spent a small fortune on carefully measured packets of horsetail, cordyceps, starfish, feverfew and fenugreek which she dutifully boiled every night with dates and ginger root so that our house smelled not unlike the strange, dim doctor’s offices she visited on Taipei’s outskirts.

As a family we tried to persuade her to take on less. Cut her private tutoring classes. Forget doing the Chinese school – not only was it a non-profit, it bled money. Don’t serve on the advisory board of this Chinese committee and that. Stop editing Chinese textbooks for free. And for Chrissakes stop traveling to China and Taiwan for exhausting two-week long conferences while staying in shitty hotels with bad food.

But my mother is stubborn when she sets her mind to something and she had learned long ago that married or not, a woman must have her work. So she persisted in building her Chinese school, and despite our protests, took on more private tutoring students. For a while I feared she would die of exhaustion. And somewhere in the middle of all this, she began to play badminton, hours at a time, three or four times a week.

I thought, “Oh goodness. She will collapse one day.”

Instead, the opposite began to happen. She became more energetic, more lively, more ambitious. It wasn’t just the exercise but also the growing profile of her tiny Chinese school. The two together: a woman’s work and the care she devotes to her body – is a powerful combination for happiness. Yes, she still comes home exhausted some days, but for the most part I have never seen her look so vibrant. My father noticed too, and rather than continue to persuade her to quit, he now accepts his growing role as Mr. Mom – he cooks more, takes care of more things around the house – not that he didn’t before, but he is home more often than my mother is, and the role of half-house husband suits him well.

From my mother I learn that for a woman – or any person, really, to stick to their work, stick doggedly to it even though no one pushes them to do so, they must really love the work. She has the energy to do it because that is how the mind functions – it provides phantom energy, the most potent and secret kind, to help you accomplish what you most love and need in order to feel whole.

And now my mother, armed with phantom energy, comes into my room each night to ask me about my work.

“Does it make you happy?”

“Is your boss a nice man?”

“Do your coworkers like you?”

Yes, yes and yes, I say, but still, there is a feeling that everything about the job is fleeting, much like every other job I’ve held in the past.

I tried to go in with an open mind, thinking, “Who knows how long I’ll stay?” Maybe I will love it and end up staying three, four, five years. A decade?

I heard a hollow laugh when I posed the possibility to myself. 

I’m too young to think that any position I hold now will be my “career,” but I can’t shake the feeling – both paralyzing and liberating – that I may never have a “career,” not in the conventional sense of the word. What is industry? What industry? How should I categorize myself and where, in the vast career planes and skyscraping corporate verticals, do I belong?

“It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to . . . the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. . . . I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.”

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 

All of the Lights

BettyLeave a comment

Across the street, my neighbors have already put up their Christmas lights. Yesterday, as I was backing out of the driveway on my way to a family dinner, I saw two young men standing on their front lawn, an intimidating tangle of Christmas lights at their feet. 

One of them had his hands on his hips, a concerned look on his face. The other was texting someone – it didn’t seem like they would get the job done anytime soon, but then again, they were professionals. I wished them a silent good luck and drove off. This morning, the “icicles” are up and dripping rainwater.

We used to put up Christmas lights, the only family on the block to get up on a ladder and do it ourselves. My brother, father and I would spend the morning untangling the lights, go in for lunch, and then come back out and hang them up on nails we had driven into the edge of our roof when we first moved here. At our old house we used the giant, multicolored bulbs that now, mostly evoke the 80’s and early 90’s, but moving here, we saw that the neighbors used the smaller white lights so we switched, too. A few years ago we stopped putting lights up. It was, as the excuse goes, “too much trouble.”

Too much trouble. Photo from digsdigs.com.

 And though I missed them at first, I too, was relieved when the holidays were over and there was one less thing to put away. On top of that, we live in a strange area which, once a year is assaulted by the Devil’s breath, also known as the Santa Ana winds. They blow ferociously around the house, knocking over my mother’s potted plants, rolling them into the swimming pool and sometimes, cracks brittle tree branches. They cause fires which is the last thing anyone needs around the holidays and make your skin dry and ashy, which is also blows (pun intended) when you are trying to look your best for friends and family and photographs. They tear the Christmas lights this way and that, and sometimes, damages the bulbs so that when we plug the lights in, half of the strand is dark. Our house then looks like a sullen face with one garish eyebrow.

But the winds can’t touch what’s on the inside (unless some idiot leaves a window or two open). 

—————–

Except for a few outlying years where Christmas was randomly held at my cousin’s or aunt’s house, the party is at our house. Those exceptions however, occurred three years in a row and burned themselves in my father’s brain – he began to think that perhaps Christmas would never be at our house again.

Somewhere in the middle of this, we remodeled our house. During, my father took stock of all the things we had in the garage and made the decision to clear out our junk. He informed me of his decision, and I applauded him. He, my mother and the rest of the Asian immigrants from their generation are notorious pack rats, so it was nice to see that he was making an attempt to be otherwise. And for a while, it did seem like we had more room in the garage. Except when the holidays rolled around and it was decided that our house, newly remodeled, would once again be the place to have the annual family Christmas party, I couldn’t find the Christmas decorations.

To be more specific, I couldn’t find our ornaments – none of which were particularly expensive, but they had great sentimental value – at least to me. There were ornaments my mother and aunts had made for their first Christmas here in the United States and a few others that solely by being manufactured three decades ago, were simply of better quality than ornaments today. Lastly, there were the half-dozen or so handcrafted popsicle stick ornaments my brother and I had made in preschool and elementary school – rudimentary but completely original creations with our childhood photographs in them. We wrote things like, “Merry Christmas Mom and Dad,” in our child’s script on the back of them, and even though they were meant for our parents, I would have been happy to take them with me to my future home.

Inexplicably, my father saw the ornaments as “junk” and kept instead the dozens of empty jars, boxes, paper bags, unused yet outdated appliances and suitcases – all utterly replaceable.

When I discovered that the ornaments were gone, glittering lonesomely in some distant landfill, I berated my father. What a Grinch he was, I cried (though I do not think there is a Chinese word for “Grinch,” and instead must have used the Chinese word for “shitty person”), how could he throw away things with so much history and keep all the junk?

“We stopped putting up lights so many years ago and haven’t had the party here for three years,” my father said, “I imagined it was only a matter of time before we stopped putting up the tree too.”

I was old enough then to accept that what was done was done and I said so.

“What’s done is done,” I said, “but we are going to put up a tree for as long as I live at home. That’s something I don’t ever want to give up.” 

My father nodded, “Yes.” His face was thoughtful, but he did not seem particularly sorry.

A few days later however, he accompanied me to buy the tree, and when we had stationed it in the corner of our newly remodeled living room, he stood back and said, “It is quite nice to have a tree, whether we have a party here or not, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Will you go and buy more ornaments?” he asked.

I nodded again, though my heart winced to think of our old ornaments.

“Buy some nice ones you really like,” he said, then with a sigh, “I didn’t know you’d want to put the tree up again.”

I looked at him then and realized he must have been feeling a subtle but supreme regret. He had had the best intentions when he was clearing out the clutter, but erred in his judgement.

It didn’t matter. It was Christmas and in a few days the family would be gathered at our house again, There would be presents and people around the tree; good food, rowdy laughter and fond memories. The ornaments, no matter how old or handcrafted, had never been the focal point of our gathering.

“Thanks Bah,” I said, “I’ll get them tomorrow. It’ll still be a beautiful tree.”

Love, a Facet

BettyLeave a comment

When my mother goes abroad, which is often, her greatest fear is that we will let her garden die. And by “we,” I mean “I.” My track record for watering mom’s plants lags far behind even my brother’s, whose record would be deemed abysmal by any green thumb’s standards. If asked, he will water every other day for about a fraction of the required time, standing in one place like a statue in a fountain so that a very lucky spot in my mother’s garden will continue to flourish while all the plants around it wilt and wither to the ground like an empire fallen around a tyrant king. Occasionally, if he feels generous, my brother will flick his wrist to and fro, like tossing crumbs to serfs and peasants so that by the time my mother comes home those plants are clinging on for dear life, their stomata (a dusty word, pulled out of 9th grade biology fog) puckered beyond recognition.

But being male and being her son, my brother would only be mildly chastised by my mother’s furrowed brow. She would say, sadly, “Thank you for watering my plants,” before inevitably turn on me because really, watering the garden is a woman’s job, “Why didn’t you water the plants?” she’d say, implying, “Where were you when this massacre happened? Why did you not stop it?”

And really, if my only shortcoming as a daughter was a reluctance to water my mother’s plants, then I’d say, “Oh boo hoo, deal with it,” but this is far from my only shortcoming. For one, I love my mother’s garden in the same way I love Target. I love shopping there and would be terribly, terribly distressed if one day it were to implode and Wal-Mart became my only option for “cheap mega-stores in which to spend too much time and money,” but I would never in a million years enjoy working there. I will take from it (hell, if Target had a “blind employees only day”, I would don soft slippers and leave with an ungodly amount of stolen Hawaiian Tropic Sunscreen, cheap t-shirts, and NYTimes Bestsellers), get what I need to live my good life. But give back? Never!

And so too with my mother’s garden. She plants and tends to a variety of my favorite fruits, vegetables, and herbs: tomatoes, yam leaves, leeks, green onion, mint, basil, cilantro, doughnut peaches, apricots, and those are just what I can name off the top of my head. She does the harvesting as well as most of the cooking (though my father will beg to differ); I merely nod gleefully when she brings in basket after basket of my favorite produce.

With such a plentiful garden that makes so many people so happy (we often swap with my other green-thumbed aunts and grandma), it is only natural for my mother to worry about it in her absence. I worried too, briefly, wondering how many minutes of my day I’d have to devote to watering plants during her recent trip, as my brother would not be here to split the responsibility with me. Watering always turned out to be a rather enjoyable experience – I found I enjoyed the cool breeze at dusk and the grass between my toes, the soothing white noise of the water, but like many things enjoyable or not, I prefer selfish acts of indolence to productive acts of generosity that ultimately benefit myself as well. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about touching the hose at all – not even once. My father, the jack-of-all trades that he is, saw to that.

If my mother is not traveling with my father, she knows in her heart that my father will take care of not only the plants but also of everything else. It is not in his nature to sit still for longer than an hour long news segment (unless it is very late at night), or to let things fall apart or stay in disarray. I inherited this from him, a desire to purge and clean and organize – though I do it almost exclusively in my own space. My father has a larger conscience than I – and even though rather annoyingly, he likes to be recognized for his “achievements, (“Do you see what I did with the bamboo grove today? Doesn’t it look so neat like a Japanese garden?” Or “Look at these lunches I packed you!”) I would be very narrow-hearted to say that he does not deserve it. Thus my mother knows that her husband – he who masquerades as a sloth on weekday evenings in front of the TV but in actuality, is the king of efficiency and productivity – will take care of the garden, take care of the house, take care of the lazy, easily fatigued, adult, live-at-home daughter in her absence because it is in his nature to do so.

But a smart woman, my mother knows better than to ask him directly. My father no doubt grew up thinking that old joke, “Today is opposite day” was endlessly amusing. In Chinese, we say people like that take great joy in “singing the opposite or minor chord” and for the most part, these people are huge pains, as my father is. But my father is also reliable in the way a man ought to be, especially if he is to talk so loudly and be, in general, a huge pain. He assumed the role of housewife upon my mother’s departure, donning yet another hat in addition to the ones he already wears: bread-winner (and maker, as lately he’s been tinkering with various banana-bread recipes), voice-of-reason, advice dispenser, organizer, laundry man (though this is one chore I do prefer), and a long list of other roles.

Long ago the divisions were made: my mother’s domain was the garden and the messy vanity area in their bathroom. Rather than makeup and perfume – the accoutrements of most women’s vanities – my mother had stacks of Chinese homework and textbooks, pens and pencils she scavenged from wasteful students, and special offers from nearly every Las Vegas casino resort, a testament that even otherwise frugal educators can have foolish and extravagant vices. My father lay claim to the family room, taking the central spot on our curved black leather couch and the small, wooden round table in the corner where he reads his emails, browses the paper, and clips Costco coupons. He is also in charge of cleaning and organizing the garage. The kitchen was like the middle part of a Venn Diagram, where husband and wife converged to cook grand dinners together when they entertained or simply, when they each had ideas about dinner that just so complimented each other.

Old Man in Garden by Don Lindemann

Here’s the thing: when my father is gone, my mother stays in her domains and never ventures into my father’s. Why should she? She doesn’t read the newspapers, nor does she watch TV. The garage is just where she parks her car. But when my mother is gone, my father, though you could not tell from his face, almost gleefully assumes the role of gardener as well, and disappears into the yard for hours on end. The garden, because of what is produces, is closely tied to the kitchen and when my mother is home, the clanking pots, running water and tinkling glasses are usually an aural sign of her presence. However, sometimes the kitchen falls unexpectedly quiet and I come out of my room to find the kitchen empty and the back door slightly ajar, a pair of black house slippers awaiting my mother’s feet to re-inhabit them, sounds replaced by this simple image. Recently however, I still hear the clanking and the rushing and the tinkling, and sometimes, when the sounds stop, I enter the kitchen to see that there are pots bubbling on the stove, vegetables diced on the chopping block, and the back door slightly ajar with my father’s beige house slippers standing by. The television is invariably on, the sounds wafting into the kitchen – and the overall effect is calming, as is the knowledge that even without my mother, my father can keep things running smoothly for all of us. 

Like clockwork he removes his socks after dinner each day and steps out and into the backyard to water his wife’s plants until the sun goes down. He does this after a full day’s work, after spending a half hour making dinner for himself and his adult, live-at-home daughter, who during the summers, comes home from work to swim and then sleep for an hour. She eats with relish because her father cooks what she loves, and after dinner, does the dishes, memories of her father being a huge pain briefly suspended in her gratitude for the meal, lovingly prepared. She soaps the dishes and thanks her father for dinner, reminding herself that nothing and no one, no matter how steady or reliable or invariable, ought to be taken for granted. The father nods, pleased that his daughter is both fed and happy and without further ado, steps out into the warm evening air to water the plants his wife adores.

Father’s Day

BettyLeave a comment

Yesterday afternoon it occurred to me that I am often rude to my father. To anyone who has seen me speak to my father, this is old news. Sometime after my 19th birthday I gained a false confidence that allowed me to bite – not always back, but just bite. It was always there, brewing. My mother always said, “We could never control you. We could never tell you to do anything you didn’t want to do.” And it was true. I have always thought, “What do they know?”  They mostly being my father.

As a child, I would wait at home for my father to bring me books from the library, where he’d stop by on his way home from work and pick out a few picture books for me to read. He reads. I read. He is where I get it from. I got older and started to check out books for myself, rolling down literary hills like the proverbial stone, gathering moss until one day it seemed my tastes would never change. I was stuck in fiction while my father hoped, what with all our magazine subscriptions and shelves filled with reference, history and business books, that I’d transition my tastes to non-fiction. Useful stuff.

“There’s little to be gained from reading fiction,” he would say, “Or at least low-quality fiction.” And perhaps it started then, perhaps it didn’t – but I began to suspect at some point that my father did not and would not understand me. Ever. I admit for many years I read low quality fiction. And while I falsely considered myself a reader from a young age only because someone had pointed out to me in middle school that I always seemed to have a book in hand, it wasn’t until I met other, truer readers – boys and girls whose reading levels seemed years ahead of mine and whose favorite authors wrote single novels about extremely well-developed individuals rather than a series involving a boy named Leroy aka Encyclopedia Brown or soulless novels with gruesome covers that ultimately disappointed in the end (Christopher Pike, anyone?) – that I realized where the really good reading was.

He reads no fiction now, preferring history and finance books on Sunday afternoons, but my father is extremely well-read in classic Chinese literature. Fiction, yes, but vastly different from the emotive, English literature I prefer. Or so I’ve heard. I won’t knock it until I’ve tried it, but this is more than my father is capable of. He sees my novels and glossy fashion magazines and wonders (sometimes correctly, oftentimes not so much) that my brain is all fiction and fashion and frilly.

Misunderstanding breeds contempt, and while my father can never harbor contempt for me, I let my contempt for him grow because I did not – do not- understand how he cannot understand me. It is always a shame when your child is someone you cannot get along with, but my father is blind to this. He likely thinks we have a wonderful relationship, filled with smiles and laughter and understanding – and to a certain extent, in small doses, thirty-minute intervals (or however long it takes to eat dinner), we do. I admire my father for many things: he is calm under pressure, he is knowledgeable, he is organized, a good cook, generous, kind – he is all these things and many more wonderful things. But he is also loud, obnoxious, self-involved, a poor-listener, humorous in a way I find contemptuous rather than truly funny, and alarmingly narrow-minded at times (“No one will read your blog,” he has said, “If you only write about personal things.” Oh father, I beg to differ.)

In college, I began to expand my reading tastes. Thanks to the likes of Jon Krakauer, Russell Baker and Erik Larson, I learned that non-fiction can be just as fascinating as fiction if not more so, as it was real. I ate up biographies, social studies, and eventually opened myself to business books – or at least books that seemed more business like. In the back of my head, I thought perhaps it would give me more to talk about with my dad, but (and this may seem small, but day after day it can become exhausting) he is always more interested in showing what he knows and testing to see if you know it to, in which case, if you don’t, you’re in for an irritating session of “How can you not know this?”

It is not a fun game, especially if one has as much pride as I do.

So my contempt. What is it made of? One part exhaustion – frankly, I am tired of my father. We do better when I am far away. One part empathy: he has none, so I make up for it. Who knows whether it is actual strength or a missing link, a gaping hole in his emotional makeup; I have a hunch however, that it is a enigmatic mixture of the two. No one, and I mean NO ONE, has ever seen him cry. When my grandfather died, he merely smiled and patted my sobbing cousins on the back. “It’s the way of life,” he said. When his mother passed away some forty years ago, he paid his respects and then called my mother, whom his mother extremely disliked. “My mother’s dead,” he said, though perhaps a bit more eloquently, “Let’s get married.”

He is a thinker, but in the most pragmatic way. I am a thinker too, but in the most useless, ineffective way. He sleeps anywhere, without issue. I can no longer sleep. He is a businessman. I like to write personal essays on a blog. All these things caused our personalities to butt heads, but now as I get older, I see that I’m the only one butting.

My father tries now, to accommodate me in every which way. And this is where his vulnerability lies: he does not want his children to be very far away, except that my brother has already flown the coop and may never come back in the way that he came back, just a year ago. And while I’m nowhere near financially ready, my father can probably sense that my feet are itching to go. He does not mean to smother, and honestly I cannot say that he does, but my irritation with him, my narrowed eyes and sullen face and one-word monotone responses that too soon give rise to sharp, ungrateful tones and sarcasm smother our relationship and threaten to unravel an already thin string.

But this Father’s Day, I recognize it is I who needs to change. Not my dad, whom I thought was set in his ways and incapable of change, but me, a kind, happy girl to anyone else but to her own father, who can’t cry or hug or listen or understand, but who loves.

Home 3

BettyLeave a comment
I helped my brother pack. My father hunted high and low for a matching set of suitcases as a sort of farewell present for my brother – while many things, my father is not a good communicator of things emotional and this was his way of saying, “Travel well, my son.” I emptied out my brother’s closet, carefully rolling his shirts and pants into neat piles, making sure to leave room for ties, underwear, hats, shoes. His life didn’t fit as neatly as anticipated into two suitcases, but most of it did – we zipped them up and set them upright, marveling that these awkward twins on his bedroom floor could hold so much and still so little. We dragged them out to the car along with a large cardboard box filled with office supplies. I was sure it would be cheaper to buy supplies in China, but my brother insisted he would rather just take them to spare himself the hassle of finding an office supply store in labyrinthine Shanghai. “Good point,” I said. Though really I wondered if any of those items he packed had some sort of sentimental value. Could a stapler, a tape dispenser, a few pens and notepads remind him of home? But perhaps not. For the most part, he wanted to travel light. He left behind quite a few clothes, along with most of his books, golf clubs, and shoes, and I, a closet clotheshorse (no pun intended), admired his relative indifference to leaving these items behind.
“I’ll come back,” he said, “So you better not donate anything.” 
I gave him my solemn promise.
And just like that, he was gone.
Shortly thereafter I disappeared to Taiwan for two months, and my parents reverted back to the quiet life they’d lived while we were away at school. In Asia, I visited my brother in Shanghai and realized that while he had barely unpacked, he had, in his heart, settled in just as hardily into our family’s condo just as he had done in Podunk. My uncle bought the condo in Shanghai some ten years ago, predicting he’d need a home base for his frequent visits when business was good. Business turned out to be okay, but the condo was frequently visited by family and friends who stopped by for weekend shopping trips or expos – I had stayed there once in the winter and once in the summer, and found the condo’s location to be its only draw. Located on the twelfth floor of a tall building (which in its heyday was THE address to have on that street), we had a wonderful view of the city and a short walk (by Shanghai standards) to the nearest metro. Behind us, a fancy theater was being built, designed in that new architectural style that likens buildings to eggs and nests. We were on a street nicknamed Bar Street, once rival to Hong Kong’s Lan Kwai Fong – at least in terms of noise –but was now a quieter place for expats and locals to gather. No matter how a man may boast of knowing Shanghai, no one can ever truly grasp its center.
My uncle had furnished the condo cheaply and on the fly, with matching, dark furniture in every room that ate up the sunlight and horribly mismatched drapes and bedspreads, most of which I suspected were gifts from relatives who wanted new drapes and bedspreads in their own homes. The kitchen was sparse, sporting only a few warped pots and pans and a paper cup that held disposable chopsticks. A broken hot water boiler sat collecting dust in one corner and holey, threadbare rags hung from a railing along the wall. There were two bathrooms, but one lacked a shower curtain.
“Yeah, I need to get one,” my brother said. I nodded, examining the dingy pink tiles and the yellow lighting. The fixtures depressed me. The place was cleaned everyday, so cheap is that sort of labor in China, but you can’t wash away bad taste – or age. But my brother, a man of simple tastes, was oblivious to all this.
“I suppose I’ll change it someday,” he said, zero intention behind his words, “but it’s pretty good for now.”
I thought about our home in California, and wondered if my brother still considered it thus. We had hugged and cried at the airport, but it had nothing to do with the actual house he was leaving, just the people inside. But had it been me departing, I would have cried just as heartily for my pink room, my books, my small but adequate closet, my bright, gleaming bathroom. I thought of my brother’s new old living quarters: this is not a home.
And yet.
I watched my brother move around the house in the comfortable way an actor moves around a set after a few weeks of filming – humans, we learn fast, adapt easily, don’t we? He worked at the dining table, which he converted into his workspace. Using water he bought on a weekly basis from the dingy convenient store downstairs, he poured hot tea in the kitchen always standing in the same spot, slightly to the left of the water boiler, and left his dirty dishes in the sink with the confidence of a man with a maid, who also washed his clothes and hung them up on the balcony to dry so that at night, my brother could bring them in if he felt like it. In the mornings, I wasn’t fully awake, but heard the beats – seamless sounds – of him readying for work, and those same beats in descending order (thump, thump of shoes being cast off, the jingle of keys, the creak of the doorknob) of his homecoming in the evenings. As a guest, I could imagine his life in the apartment without me – those same sounds, only perhaps the sound of my voice replaced by the sound of strange Chinese sitcoms complete with laugh track, or perhaps no voice at all but the sound of his fingers upon computer keys, another late with MS Excel. He slept well, ate well (by his standards, anyway) and while he spent most of his time at the office or at bars with friends, the condo was home in every sense that it could be, to a young man living in Shanghai in 2011.
Two months later I was back in the U.S. with my parents, in my room, throwing myself into working life, creating a routine that involved hot yoga, friends, and family. I had moved the coats to my brother’s closet to let my other clothes breathe a bit and wondered what he would say when he came back and discovered my little transgression.          
Very little, it turns out. On Memorial Day weekend my brother materialized at LAX with the express purpose of attending his best friend’s wedding. I picked him up, a huge American smile on my face, not really grasping how much I missed him until he was sitting in the seat beside me. Oh brother, where hath thou been?
“Man I missed it here,” he said. I sped down the 105, the LA skyline whizzing past, knowing that compared to Shanghai’s architectural beasts and beauties, LA seemed like the outline of a village. Soon LA disappeared altogether and we were in the quiet, tree-lined roads of our small town, driving past our middle and high schools like two visitors cruising down the proverbial memory lane.
At home he unpacked while I blathered on about dating, friends, family and hot yoga. A good brother, he nodded and smiled, moving a bit awkwardly around his bed and the lone suitcase, having left its twin in Shanghai, trying to figure out where to put everything. I wondered if he would want me to move my coats for the time being so he could hang his suit up for the wedding. He must have, at some point, noticed my coats in his closet – but he said nothing, nothing at all and instead hung his suit up in the bathroom on the hook behind the door. I found it there the next morning, slightly irritated that he had removed my robe to hang his suit there, then ashamed that this was the only space he could find.
The weekend flew by – the wedding passed, then Memorial Day, then Tuesday, Wednesday and finally, Thursday, the day of his departure. On Tuesday night we had gone out to dinner and he had said, suddenly, “I sort of miss Shanghai.” I realized then where his life was. Or more accurately, I learned how differently we, though siblings with a close emotional core, defined essential terms. He carried home in his heart, his being large enough to grasp it completely while I simply lived at home, it being a space to hold my heart until I moved on into the next. Is this the difference between people who are truly hardy and those who are only reluctantly so? My brother lived happily in Podunk, Pennsylvania and I only half-heartedly in Berkeley, New York, and Taipei. Space was merely space to him, a place a place. He possesses the only center he needs while I search for material, tangible tethers. World traveler, some people call me, but they don’t know the divided nature of my traveling. Abroad, I long to be home; at home, I long to be abroad.
On Thursday morning my brother woke up at six am to hug me goodbye. I was leaving for work, but something about the light, the time, reminded me of the morning he left for Podunk. That summer dawn, he had knocked softly on my door and whispered, “Betty, I’m leaving.” I started crying almost immediately, knowing not how our relationship would change, only that I would miss him terribly.

Now two years later he had left and come back again and again, with each departure feeling more and more final. And he was now leaving again. I hugged him tight, knowing that I would see him at holidays and on my own future visits to Asia, but that by then he would be at the door of or perhaps fully enveloped by his other life, just as my mother and father had been some thirty years ago, when they met and married and left childhood and childhood homes behind. But I do not dread this, this inevitable progression of life – we branch out, move out, move in, move on. My coats would stay in his closet and my brother would stay in Shanghai, for the time being, and then wherever he chooses to settle next. But we, regardless of where we are, remain close. Places, things, tethers – I’m beginning to learn they were always beside the point.

Home

BettyLeave a comment
Once, walking by my mother’s room and seeing her settling down for bed, it occurred to me that this had not always been her bed, this room, her room. She lay down on the right side – had she always slept on the right side? – and turned her face towards the lamp, preparing to read herself to sleep.
“When did you start to see this as your home?” I asked, standing in the doorway.
She looked up, the pillowcase hiding half her cheek, “What do you mean? I have never not seen it as my home.”
“No, I mean, when did you…” I faltered, wondering how to phrase the question. I used myself as an example.
“I’m home right now, right? This is my home.”
My mother nodded.
“But you once had a childhood home like this too. When did you feel like your childhood home was no longer your home?”
Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning, 1950 

My mother paused for a minute, fingers lightly holding the thin book she had been reading, “I guess when I got married. I lived with your grandparents until then.”

“Was it a strange transition?”
“No, not really.”
“You marry someone and move out, move in, and it’s home? Automatically?”
“It ought to be, but it’s different for everyone. Why?”
I shrugged, not knowing why I was asking except that I had, in that instance, caught a glimpse of my mother as someone younger, without husband and children, living in another house, sleeping in another bed.
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Five years ago, my father caved in to the leaky faucets, peeling wallpaper and yellowing fluorescent light covers of our house and announced that he would renovate. Among the things that I pushed for (including a ten-foot kitchen expansion and an entire second story with a game room) was my own bathroom, preferably en suite, and a walk-in closet, every girl’s dream. My father was receptive at first, nodding and taking notes to pass onto a Japanese architect with a fancy pedigree who came back with thousand dollar drawings of my dream house. But on the third or fourth floor plan, my father came to his senses. Among the things that my father actually implemented in the renovation: none of the above. I argued with him for a whole day, though knowing in the back of my head that he was right.
   “Why would I turn it into a two-story house,” he protested, “when you and your brother are about to move out?” 
    He painted a picture of life a few years down the road when the house would be home to just him and my mother, an aging couple with separate but faintly overlapping spheres: my mother’s being the backyard where her orchids and African violets threatened to overtake the lawn, and the dining room, where her Chinese school textbooks and papers had already smothered the smooth wood of our long table. My father’s territories included the living room couch where he often fell asleep in front of Jim Cramer and other Wall Street types and the small round wooden table to the right, where his computer sat and from where he generously doled out more spam than necessary. The kitchen was shared between the two of them, though more and more becoming my father’s territory as he neared retirement and discovered a passion for cooking and entertaining.
In my father’s vision, I saw my brother’s and my bedrooms, shuttered and empty, void of life except for a past life, embalmed in our childhood knickknacks, items that never made it to our new homes, shared with new people. The most recent thing among these relics would be the odd piece of mail that my father would inevitably bring in. Like a lonely mailman on the edge of retirement, he would come down our hallway every so often to set these envelopes upon our dusty desks, wondering when we’d swing by for dinner and pick up the mail. It was a cold, almost cruel image, one that would be realized, soon enough, and vividly so that I did not need to remind my father.
In a sort of compromise, it was decided that my brother and I would move out to a relatively new apartment complex in Irvine while the house was stripped down. My parents would hold down the fort until the renovations crept up to their side of the house, upon which they would then relocate to an Extended Stay on the outskirts of town. My brother and I rented a beige two bedroom in a beige complex behind a beige and purple shopping area. I took the master bedroom, which had an en suite bathroom and a walk-in closet that was sadly, larger than my parents’ at home. We would bring the old furniture from our rooms for our apartment and when the year was up and our house was done, we’d sell it and buy new pieces for our refurbished rooms.
On moving day my brother recruited several of his strongest friends to help us move into the apartment – we worked swiftly and within a few hours our childhood rooms stood empty with compressed patches of carpet lining the ground, where the furniture had been. Here had been my bed. Here had been my desk. Here had been my bookshelf. Only flat circles and rectangles remained from that former life. In the corners, corpses of unfortunate bugs had gathered, my ex roommates. As my brother and his friends drove off to our new apartment, I stayed behind for a while, tying up loose odds and ends, squeezing my belongings into the car. Our apartment was only fifteen minutes away, but it seemed much further than that, now that our rooms were empty. I returned to my room one last time, wondering if I’d miss the flowery wallpaper and matching drapes, adornments chosen by the elderly white couple who had lived there before us.
It was late afternoon as I walked back towards my room. I heard the familiar whirr of our old Kenmore vacuum cleaner, but aside from that, the house was strangely quiet. My mother was teaching Chinese school. I followed the whirr to my room, where I saw my father my father standing in the middle, vacuuming up the dead bugs on the compressed carpet. It clenched my heart, that sight. We were leaving only temporarily, but it was a preliminary stage to something absolutely necessary – my father knew it too. I stopped in the doorway, observing my father move as the afternoon sun danced around him. He did not see me and was framed by the squares of my old window, the view from which he often used to remark upon: “It’s quite nice, isn’t it?” Now he was no longer looking out the window for I was not there to enjoy it with him, not there to receive the old remark. Rather, he moved his arm back and forth with a mute, methodical sadness, stared intently down at the carpet, the fibers of which hinted faintly, only faintly, at his daughter’s footsteps.