Dad

So I read ahead and I’m terrible at not giving spoilers (really shouldn’t have read ahead, sorry guys), so I’m going to write a bit about my father instead.

There was a boy in China who walked three miles to a schoolhouse with a stool and sat outside the door for three days, hoping to be let inside a year early. On the fourth day, the teacher threw a book at him and it landed in a puddle, and he watched the water seep in and turn the pages translucent.

My father was a peasant boy, in the most fantastical romance that sounds like it should have leaps and bounds, flourishes and fantastical twirls, but reads more like a hard-earned life.

He doesn't speak of his childhood often, but when he does, he pauses. Thinks. Imparts each word with careful weight. We ask him about his family back then, and he tells us anything from a word to a story, but sis and I are always hoping for the latter. He doesn’t bring it up much himself, but not out of any deliberate intent. My mother actively avoids her childhood, but my father treats it like any other experience- irrelevant to the moment, but existing and as much a part of him as anything.

“My mother told me two things. I didn’t understand them at first, but now, I think I might.” He pauses, thinks, and continues. “One of them was a chinese saying- you can be poor to others, but not to yourself.”

“I didn’t understand that- I don’t think many kids really can? And you know how we couldn’t afford meat that often. But when families would come over- we lived in a small neighborhood, and if something big happened, we would get together- my mother would send one of us out to buy meat. A very small bit, the most we could afford. And we would cook it into a stew, because we always ate stew those days.”

To this day, my father harbors a penchant for rice, which they couldn’t afford often, and a hatred of carrots and sweet potatoes, the primary ingredient for their stews. (They couldn’t afford meat or eggs either, but as they could only have them once a year at new year’s if they were lucky, they don’t qualify as a comfort food.) Some of my father’s friends were treated to meat during harvest but starved during the winter because meat was too expensive and they hadn’t rationed well, but my father’s only been grateful for having food on the table.

Ironically, my father’s family produced enough food for an entire village, and raised enough cattle to eat meat daily. My father was a part of the Communist youth party, but looks at it only with bemused laughter at an ill-spent childhood.

“And then when people came over, we’d give some meat to the guest of honor, then give the rest to families who had children, and we’d never have any left for ourselves.

Mom laughs, the harsh sound a contrast to the soft lines of her face. “That’s not some great teaching, that’s because you had to. Small communities are always like that.”

This is common. My mother enjoys downplaying my father’s childhood, for reasons my sister and I have discussed and come to separate conclusions about.

She’s a city girl. She grew up with her grandmother and a largely absent military father as an only child, and she doesn’t talk about her childhood much. She dislikes her mother and aspires to be nothing like her, a trait my sister and I seem to have inherited.

“And I didn’t understand that. Especially because in those days, we would have to report the number hours we’d worked in the fields for the government to give us rations. And people were so, so insistent and angry about that- no! I’d worked 5 hours that day, and you took a break! well, I remember your son-. And they would argue over rations that they might give to a friend in need, or meat that they would not eat themselves, and I never understood that. Until now. I think it was about pride and community, even then. Everyone had to prove they contributed. Everyone argued that they cared, I guess? It’s hard to explain.”

My father is a genius, and sometimes I think about this school and every brilliant, spectacularly intelligent and intuitive and breathtaking mind it has and know that my father is smarter and more hardworking than every last one. He was the youngest of four (and it’s always hilarious to see him visit China and slip from a boisterous yet passive man to a somewhat mischievous, vulnerable little brother), and carried his brothers’ tradition of studying incredibly hard to improve their lot in life. He tested into the top school in China, and more than that, tested into the “genius class”, the 1% of the school that could double major. He originally majored in ocean engineering and electrical engineering, but switched the latter to computer science due to his color-blindness. (Ocean engineering was chosen not out of some particular interest, but because that major was the school’s particular speciality. EE was simply what he heard was the hardest major. That does seem to be my father’s life- an amalgamation of careful study and selection and important decisions made on a whim.)

This apparently proved too easy for him, and he was known in his dorm for playing staggering amounts of poker. My mother often tells me I should work as hard as him. I don’t think she is yet aware of this fact.

He participated in the Shanghai student protests, but was filmed on television and came to America at the insistence of his older brother, who was living in America at the time and had seen the footage that my father was actually unaware of. (Apparently this led to a brilliant conversation, when the phone lines could be tapped and my uncle knew that the Chinese government would be tracking down the student protesters, and had to convince Dad to leave China without saying anything of the sort.) It was too late to go to apply for an Ivy League graduate school, so he finished his Master’s at University of Florida with $5 to his name, floundered in boredom for a short while, and went to Harvard for his PhD. He met my mother, a student at Boston College, then. After a lightning 6 month courtship that I don’t think anyone really understands, least of all the two of them, they were married. They moved to Detroit after my father received a job offer from Ford and started a family there.

This story is the barebones, and I could probably write for a day and not even come close to what I would like to say about him. I hope you enjoyed the story, though, because that’s what we are in the end. We live and die with the cadence of voice and flourish of a pen, and touch other stories in a name, a punchline, a act of extreme emotion. My father is the kind of person to write stories about, but if you can spin a tale well enough, so is every one of us.