Aches
I cried the entire 33 minute commute from work to home. I got out of the car crying, unlocked the door crying, fell into bed crying, everywhere just hurts all over and I look like an awful movie. I’ve had teenage heartbreaks before, and even with the heightened emotions of those years… god, those aches can’t even compare to this.
Dad tells me to not be so sad but I don’t know what I’m going to do without him. I feel fractured all over. I just want you to be better, I just want you to be better, I just want you to be better.
Our conversation on May 28, 2013 at 3am
“Do you remember I would come home— you would stand on one end of the hallway and I would stand on the other, you would run to me and I would pick you up and throw you up in the air?”
“Yeah, I remember”
“And I remember I wrote some Valerie songs for you…”
“I still sing them.”
“Be happy, these are memories Daddy has given you to keep.”
More years
One of my saddest realizations is knowing that I will spend more years of my life accessing memories of your face, your smell, your voice, your habits, than I have been able to be with you.
Words
I’ve started to tell my dad I love him after every phone conversation, and today, he said “love you” too. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard it— there was one other time, a few months ago, when he was crying about the pain and the illness and the hardships of staying hopeful when the odds are stacked so highly against you, when he replied to my “I love you” with a “me too.” That was the closest we ever got to it being verbalized.
It’s not like he didn’t love me until he got sick, but to understand my dad is to understand that he has always been very nonverbal with his emotions. While he never spoke it, there’s never been a minute in my life where I didn’t know that he loved me (and my siblings). He worked tirelessly and gave me everything I ever dreamed of, from a graduation trip to Paris to my first car. I had every food or drink I craved, any money I wanted to go shopping, every lesson to keep me challenged and fulfilled, from horseback riding to abacus to chinese folk dancing. I once mentioned wanting a KitchenAid standing mixer (something I had mentally assigned to my dream wedding registry), and I stirred awake, on Black Friday 2011, to one of those in front of my eyes. When I professed interest in photography, he bought me my first DSLR. He was at work before I got up for school, and often returned home right before I headed off to bed. In youth, I remember fluttering my eyes open to see his shadow against the hallway light, and in adolescence, I remember heating up his dinner as part of my routine before heading to bed. Sometimes I’d try to keep him company, grasping for things to fill up the silence, but it never amounted to anything substantial. I didn’t understand his VoIP business, he didn’t understand being a teenage girl. He was always a thinker and not a speaker.
I lingered on the phone after he said it, not really sure what to do. Since he can only lay in the bed at the hospital, it takes a while for him to contort his wrist and hang the phone back up after we end our calls. So I waited for those several seconds of scratches and movements finalized by a click before I began to breathe again, then cry. We’ve been so, so brave.
Today was one of those days where I was leafing through old photo albums and came across a bunch of photos of my dad and me and just started inconsolably, silently crying. The date on the photograph reads July 3, 1995, which is the date my father had his major spinal surgery/implant this year — 17 years later. Here, we’re in our pool in the backyard of my childhood home. Sometimes, during the start of summers, we’d find a surprise in the form of a visiting frog living in the filter area of the pool. But normally, it was just me and my dad wading around, since my mother is afraid of swimming.
Looking through more pictures, I found ones from my father’s birthday in 1990, where I’m sitting on the table and my arms held in my dad’s hands as he helps me clap, and I remember (not from that birthday, but subsequent ones after) where he’d teach me to blow out his candles at the same time that he did because my wishes were and always will be his wishes, too.
I think and dread about some incomprehensible future where my dad isn’t there, and I fail to handle it for more than three seconds. My jaw gets sore and tingly, my heart feels wrenched, and my gut does too. When birthdays and summers become numbered, how does anybody live in the present with their chin up, eyes dry and bright? How brave you must be… I envy that courage so much when everyday, I feel myself threaten to crumble into fragments on the floor.
Locks
Dad has this bad habit of not locking the car. It’s always a “short drop-in” to anywhere we stop by, and he doesn’t think we live in an area that is so unsafe, a short peek in to the grocery will result in a stolen car. It’s true, we’re in Cupertino, but still, my siblings and I have to scold and plead him to just click the lock button before he slides it into his pocket.
One time, my sister and father went to a little auto shop to buy some part. My dad must have forgotten something in the (yes, unlocked) car, so they both went back to rummage for a paper, but couldn’t find it. Thoroughly confused after a minute, it dawned on them both that it was the wrong car. It was the same model and make, and most hilariously, same bad habit of not locking the car, but there they were, sitting in and furiously rifling through a car that didn’t belong to us. They backed away slowly and ran to the correct one.
We used to go to Memorial Park a lot. You can’t see them here, but there are a million ducks that just stay in the various ponds throughout the park. There are grassy hills and thin trees, and the ducks stay year-long: you can see small streams of ducklings following their parents around in the spring. We used to always bring our stale bread to feed them, playing favorites with the underdogs and purposely not throwing bread to the ones that were especially aggressive and mean.
Eating Fruits
Dad is really good at opening fruits. He’ll break open a navel orange or a pomelo with his bare hands — no tools! He literally just grimaces, the kind of look you wear when you’re using a burst of strength, and pulls apart the entire thing in an even tear straight down the middle. Then break it up into smaller pieces and hand them out to us to eat, like a mother bird returning to the nest.
More notably, he has done the same thing with a durian (google it if you can’t visualize this one!), which is something I don’t know how I can eat again if I’m ever without him. Every memory of durian is with him, every durian candy or chip or ice cream I’ve found, I’ve always reported back to him. I also don’t know how I’ll be able to drink fresh coconut juice out of the hairy shell itself, I don’t know how to poke a hole with a hammer when I’ve always relied on my father for that. I don’t know how I’ll choose bing cherries and strawberries as well as he, I don’t know how to spot the ripened kyoho grapes, I don’t know where to find the next untried fruit to try.
Surprises
One of my earliest memories ever is when Dad came home from work late one day and presented three new outfits before me. I was in preschool or pre-preschool — I know this because there aren’t any photos of me wearing them around after I had started school, and my mom took enough photos of me every day all the time that I should definitely have a photo or two in some of my photo albums.
The one I remember most was a little tunic covered with a large print of a cat making a silly smiley face. I don’t remember the pants, only that it was obviously a set. I remember waking up groggily and seeing the three laid out before me in the master bedroom (secret’s out — I was a co-dependent sleeper), and that surprise and happiness you get when you really don’t expect something so nice to be happening to and for you. I have felt this feeling few and far between — with my anxiety of having to know everything, from squeezing out surprise gifts from Dave to reading the entire wikipedia and IMDB entries for any movie or TV show I’m about to watch, I’m as omniscient as a human can be. But Dad has always been able to catch me off guard.
Famous Sarahs
It must have been 1999, ‘cause that was when the song hit its peak, and it was before Google was the natural thing everyone ran to search for things they couldn’t find.
We listened to the radio all the time, my dad took me to school in the morning, to little treat trips to Barnes & Noble, where he’d let me choose a new “Dear America” book, or Baskin Robbins, where I’d get some artificially colored ice cream and him, Cherry Jubilee, or Fry’s, where I’d browse the aisles of magazines and computer games and he wandered around to find some cable or something other, only finally reconvening at the checkout line the moment they were announcing the store would be closing in 15 minutes.
One of our favorites (we had two) was “I Will Remember You.” My dad is a sucker for that breathy, ethereal, angelic female voice, and as everyone anywhere knows, Sarah McLachlan has mastered that perfectly. We never caught the title of the song though, so we’d just grasp on to whatever lyrics we could and just hope that the next song on the radio was always that. In describing it to my cousin Betty one day (she was in high school and thus much more knowledgable than both Dad and me), she said that it was by “Sarah Blahblahblah.” The Blahblahblah is significant because we just didn’t, or couldn’t, remember the name. I think my dad’s English was just too poor, and my vocabulary too young. We went to the record store the same day, asking the sales clerk for all their albums by an artist named Sarah, and we bought them all. I think there were 3 or 4 at the time, and I remember one of them being Sarah Brightman because my dad ended up liking her album, too. It was the album with a moon on the cover.
The biggest thing that makes me smile to this day is when that McLachlan song will play at some café or on the radio, he still cannot remember her name at all.
Gardener Park
After work, but before dinner, Dad would sometimes take me out to Gardener Park, a quaint, tiny park nestled in Saratoga. Our secret shortcut was a weathered dirt trail on the other side of the fence, outlining our backyard, and would lead us to the dirt-mound area of the park. The trail was sandwiched between the fences of our neighbors and a creek that was dry most months of the year.
Before its renovation, it was a basic park, with a swing set for two, a tin merry-go-round, a tire swing, and a tall metal slide. There was a smaller children’s playground too. That one was made of pebbled plastic in bright primary colors. The middle of the park had a small grass area lined with lean, tall trees and dense brushes. Once, we bought a bright pink wooden boomerang and decided to try flinging it around over there. To this day, we don’t know what we did wrong, but during its maiden flight, it never returned to us. Dad and I ended up crawling among the trees and bushes for a while before we gave it up for good. Things haven’t changed much then: I was standing outside, too prissy to get my clothing dirty from the hidden spiderwebs and loose bark and leaves, hands crossed and burrowed under my armpits. I might have pushed a few branches away and craned my neck here and there, pointing at various places and suggesting “there!” or “how about there!” but that was it. Dad scavenged under all of the greenery, trying to make it come back. I think I was upset, the kind of upset the shock of losing a new item gives you, but my dad laughed it off, the way he always does, and his carefree response was contagious, the way it always is. He told me it wanted to be free and I fully believed him.
Another time, I was swinging in the swings, him pushing me higher and higher until my little legs could help propel and maintain the height I reached. I think I was 6 at the time, I don’t remember, but I know I didn’t have Richard in my life yet. This was around the time I wanted to do everything myself, so I made him stand aside so I could slowly stop on my own. I don’t remember how it happened, but the next thing I knew, I had fallen backward out of the swing and on to the prickly tanbark. I was wearing shorts or a skirt, something that revealed my legs, and it left scratches on my legs and small remnants were caught in my hair. He ran over when I started crying and began telling me it was okay, but the shock of the fall and the disgust of the tanbark were too much for me. He brushed me off clean and held my hand and we went home.
On the short walk from the swings to our old white Plymouth, I remember being able to do little leaps and bounds as he we held hands, his just a little below where mine would naturally fall, so I could push myself up and be propped by his arms. We sang his “Xiang Hao” song, which I’ll record on the piano in the upcoming days. He wrote a lot of silly tunes, but I only remember this one.
