dear dad

i wish I could write this letter in mandarin

There are stories you've told me over the last 20 years I still tell myself at night. How you loved to eat canned peaches when you were sick in elementary school.

How you pulled a mattress from the dumpster when you first came to the US as a PhD student.

I tell myself these things because they make sense, I feel myself carrying these pieces of you with me. Your sweet tooth and resilience. 

Dad, do you remember that afternoon in late October on the playground next to our apartment? 

Back when we lived in a different country — one that touches the edges of my memories, your home when you were in your 30s and you could still carry me with one arm. In the playground you are singing me a song from your youth, and I ask if it's a lullaby, and you say it's a funeral song.

What I remember best from that apartment was how you would pour me a glass of milk in the morning and brag about how my bones will be stronger than yours.

There are so many things I can’t picture about how you grew up – in China, during the cultural revolution. Here is what I know: your parents were rich city kids sent to be farmers on the countryside when they were 16. You grew up hungry, in all senses. At my age, you were like me, always itching for elsewhere. This restlessness is an inheritance. You got an offer to study math across the Pacific and took your family with you.

You spent decades toiling, studying and working everyday, to give me art classes, stacks of novels, time to wander and wonder, a childhood in a neighborhood where we never had to lock the front door. You gave me native fluency in a language you'll never have dreams in. 

Growing up, you were often angry and afraid. I had no patience for your fear because I couldn’t understand it. How could I? Your childhood was shaped by a communist regime that took all of your family’s wealth. I couldn't see the sacrifices you made to make sure I would never relate to this part of you. You made sure my world wouldn’t be defined by scarcity and hunger.

 You are getting older now. We have lived in a blue house in the suburbs of New England for the last 15 years. I have not heard you yell in almost a decade.

These days, we play a game where you collect all the sad facts in the world and deliver them to me on phone calls. In this game, when I hear your voice, I am already boarding a submarine to the ocean floor knowing that is where I'll find you. You recite your list of tragedies to confirm that there’s enough sadness in the world to drown us both and I can see the glow of fear like phosphorus in your bones.

I play this game because it is the only way I know how to feel close to you. But if I am being very honest I would say: Dad, I wonder if the weight of the past will ever leave you. What would that look like?

I asked you last winter if you’d consider therapy and you looked surprised, told me you are too old, and it’s too late. I nodded and said I understood. But really I didn’t. You are only 54. There’s so much of life left.

Maybe instead of trying to anticipate suffering you can still learn to live, just be here, for this moment, and the next, and the next, trusting the world enough to savor it and be curious and try to make the best decisions you can, without collecting a laundry list of landmines and hauntings and debts. I know joy was never a thing you learned to reach for. You still wait for me at the bottom of the ocean floor. But despite your fears, you were able to make a daughter who seeks buoyant things with the same meticulous consistency you map the world in threats. Maybe we could learn to surface for air together. 

It could go something like this: 

You call to tell me how our dog tried to catch a duck by the pond this morning. I’ll tell you about the woman with lemons on her dress and tangerine earrings on the bus in San Francisco – how looking at her I couldn’t help but smile. You tell me you can’t wait for me to come home, and I agree. 

爸爸, I can’t wait to come home.