Preamble: For the lazy headasses like me out there, I’ve provided an audio version of the story so you can listen on the Muni, CTA, tire swing, while you avoid calls from your crazy ex boyfriend, etc.
“Two plus six minus five.”
A little girl sitting in a dirty school gymnasium is about to rage quit. She’s most likely sporting pigtails with clear-colored cubes dangling from the hair-tie.
She takes no interest in the numbers. More interesting thoughts steep in her mind, like: What kind of school hosts a parent-student math night, anyway? What demented psycho would do math using lima beans and not sour patch kids? When is the next Spy Kids coming out?
The other children surround her like waves. Their little heads mutate into bokeh in the background. She looks down, dejectedly, at her laminated green page once covered in lima beans.
Three beans remain. The others are pushed outside of the page.
Huh?
“That’s the answer,” the man next to her gently says.
She watches as he shifts the lima beans in and out of the page like musical chairs.
Add, subtract, multiply.
The problem, all of a sudden, is solved. The answer is clear. For one second. Then her mind quietly scrambles itself once again.
“Can we go home?” she asks, yawning.
How would I describe my dad?
For starters — he’s one foot in, one foot out of the archetypal Asian dad box.
His first name is “Cassidy”. My classmates in grade school would comb through the phone book and ask me, with smirks plastered across their faces, if I had two lesbian moms.
He never had an English name before he, as the only person in his family to ever leave Hong Kong, ventured to the great beyond called the United States.
His surname, “Chong” — which I always hated and was passed down to me — would be the finishing touch of creative racist rhymes of fellow third-graders. Later on, it generously and mockingly become incorporated into opening lines of dating apps.
He’s not particularly garrulous. He’s goofy. His guffaws and belly laughs fill our eardrums as we watch Shaolin Soccer.
He didn’t pass his music ability onto me. That man, though, is a composer with the tongs and spatulas at our massive barbecues if I’ve ever seen one.
We’d fill the large, vacant house we didn’t need with multicolored bodies. We’d laugh, play badminton. He’d silently celebrate his creation - the plates full of meat and bubbling crowds teeming on our petunia-covered patio.
He is an aspiring Instagram husband. He loves taking pictures of our family. The shutter speed gives us no time to smile, even less time to inhale. Half of the pictures are backlit, blurry, and put 10 pounds on me - but he’d persist on perfection. He’d cradle the camera with what seems like National Geographic precision.
“BIG CHEESE!”, he’d bellow. His mission was for us to crack wide smiles, even if we were in public. Especially if we were in public.
I’d want to curdle up and die on the spot as I hear people around us snicker.
He’d also never consider getting me a dog, no matter how much I begged. He’d humor me sometimes, but then refuse vigorously and with glee. I’d continue pestering him, using the brute force method.
Our go-to greeting on Facebook Messenger while I was in college became: “Morning — can I have a dog” or “My grades came in, where’s my dog?”
At the nosetip of dawn, I’d hear yelling duels in the kitchen over how risk-averse he is with money. My mother’s frustrated chatter about how he sold her stocks without asking her would ring throughout the night.
On one hand, it seems entirely in line with his character. He wears the same three gray shirts with logos on them and his sandals until they are gaunt and weathered like a mountain man’s hands.
He’s never shelled out more than $10 for a pair of earbuds.
But at a Korean barbecue restaurant with family friends, he’d announce going to the bathroom.
Instead of heading towards the back of the restaurant, he’d saunter up to the waitress. He’d take the bill from her hands, covering the triple digits with his thumbs. The plastic edge of his card would clink lightly as it hit the tray, almost drowned out by the chatter 30 feet away.
“For everyone,” he’d say.
Looking at the way that girls typically interacted with their fathers compared to myself was, well, night and day.
We’d go to these zany Daddy-Daughter dances for Girl Scouts. I imagined that these functions were, more or less, a caricature of what the Girl Scouts of America organization wanted for their sweet daughters.
So, being roped into these functions (to my mother’s great thrill), I’d make do with what I had. And that usually meant copping a truly absurd cowgirl hat, fringed shoulder pads and a skirt — looking like a K-Mart version of Toy Story’s Jessie.
The other Girl Scout troop members and I were like oil and water — to my mother’s chagrin. She (understandably) wanted me to have buddies so she relentlessly set up playdates left and right, with the vigor of a receptionist on Adderall. One on one, I’d hang out just to pretend that I liked clothes and American Girls and other stuff that normal girls liked — willing to break up with my lonesomeness for an hour or so.
My father, though? He never put much stock into my social interactions. It never perturbed him when I hung out in the corner while the other girls chatted.
For that reason, I surprisingly enjoyed these ridiculous, over-decorated dances where suburban moms temporarily spent more effort on party favors than on their blogs about good patio chairs.
I’d watch my dad as he slides into intermittent, small-to-medium chats with the other dads. We’d both scour the party favors, because — well, some of them, like snap-on bracelets and glow in the dark stars, were to put it quite frankly, pretty fire.
Then, the BPM would transition to a slow crawl. I’d survey the room and see daughters cling wrapping their arms around their dad dearests everywhere. It’s a Girl Scout tradition — where the daughter steps on her fathers’ shoes and sways.
You could have sliced the awkward tension around us with a knife. I mutter a middle school version of “fuck it” underneath my breath. I awkwardly balance on the tips of his loafers.
I fall off. I try again.
I would have rather leapt into a pile of lava than engage in any sort of physical affection with someone who I could not remember when I last hugged.
“Come here!” he finally exclaims.
It sounds exactly like the “big cheese” voice.
My father puts my hands in his and the balls of my feet stop feeling like eggshells about to crack.
We mimic the rest of the pairs in the gymnasium. We fluctuate into nightfall.
He never taught me a single word in Cantonese, his native tongue. To this day, I still don’t know why. Every Asian mother in Naperville who has a pulse has signed up their child for Mandarin Chinese school. My parents follow suit.
Upon arriving in class, I feel cult-like vibes from the teacher. My other friend who joins and I promptly get busted for note-passing within the first few hours of class. Chinese school becomes my biggest nightmare.
My father plucks me out of a Big Lots next door once during a session. I am playing hooky. I am caught red handed, looking at inappropriate Sesame Street greeting cards and Cool Ranch Doritos.
He escorts me out, and I defiantly march to the vehicle like a prisoner of war.
My father blocks me before I open the door.
“We’re not going to sign you up again if you’re not going to appreciate what we do for you,” he says. I almost don’t recognize his cold eyes.
His tone is flat, unamused. His brows are coiffed, ready to pounce and veto my next move.
As I get older, he goes from good cop and messenger pigeon to being putty-molded into my mother’s minion who carries out her evil deeds.
And when I say evil deeds, I mean enforcing my groundings. Or, in a way that comically feeds into stereotypes, telling her the truth about how much piano I actually play when she’s out (told you so).
Or the dreaded “wait until your mother gets home”. It’s a phrase I fear more than the idea of bypass surgery. He could detect malingering to avoid Sunday School from 40 miles away.
He bugs my laptop to take periodic screenshots of my social media, installs a camera in our house office, and downloads the new addition to the app store, Find My Friends — possibly the most invasive, un-called for invention — so he can track my whereabouts. (I have since reverted this opinion. My friends and I now religiously use it to locate each other at Dolores Park when we’re sloshed.)
My parents now know if I’m really spending the night at Rachel’s house, which is massively inconvenient for me when I am clowning around with my ex boyfriend (who admittedly is the worst person I have ever met, but hindsight is 20/20). Even worse, they’d dial Rachel’s parents who will not do me any solids.
My interactions with my dad start edging into transactional territory. While girls would send text their fathers about their day, I would hit up mine about pre-algebra, trig, calculus.
I would sit in the back of a calculus class and feel my eyes molt. I’d watch my professor as she blazes through projector sheets like dirty underwear. I’d squint my eyes. It looks like the Webdings font is scribbled all over the sheets.
One day, I return home and fling my worksheets and textbooks onto the office table. They lay there, sprawled and powerless.
My dad paces back and forth.
He assesses the squiggles and lines that look like what someone would scratch into wood if they wanted to summon demons.
After a pause that seems like two years, he shakes his head.
“I don’t understand this math anymore,” he says. His voice teems with frustration. “I can’t help anymore.”
I sure didn’t ask for his help as I struggled through my econ minor, but I asked for plenty of help to pay for my groceries. Or to pay for my tuition.
Once in a while, I would trek home from college.
At the dinner table, I’d sit staring at the wall, thinking about the parties I was missing, the people I wasn’t kissing, the jungle juice I wasn’t downing.
My parents’ staunch conservatism and views on pro-life didn’t help. Tame dinner table talks would often segue to heated chatter.
I’d silently fume, looking at my untouched noodles forming cold vines around my fork.
I would especially never ask for help in the job process. As I scoured for full-times after business school, I was pelted with questions from my dad like:
“Why aren’t you going into consulting?”
"Why am I paying for such an expensive school for you to have this type of job?”
“Why did you get that test score? You should pay for that semester”.
This won’t be the first time that you hear me say that pursuing journalism was elating, dynamic, high octane. But I’d often look around, and find myself in the loneliest of rooms.
It’s lonelier when your parents completely despise that their daughter chose what they deem to be a ridiculously limiting path in her life.
As I edge towards graduation, providing them job updates becomes my least favorite chore. It feels like feeding crocodiles.
I continue to tell them that no — I do not want to go into consulting — and no, I do not want to work at Google — and no, I am probably not aiming for options that will fill my bank account as they pour theirs into tuition no matter how much I want that to not be the case.
One day, between reeling from a breakup and dousing my nights with substances that created artificial happiness, I see a notification about a message from my dad that I’ll never forget. I click on it, hoping that he has some sort of reprieve or advice. I’ll never forget what I read next.
“No parents like us would still support you after you graduated since last June,” the message says. “If you can’t find a job, this all your fault. You don’t listen to our advice. Our friend’s kids all work for great companies like Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, Aon. So sad you can't find an average company.
You are hopeless”.
I grab my phone.
“Dad won’t be hearing from me ever again. I am never going to speak to him again,” I type, furiously. My thoughts practically singe through my thumbs and into the digital troposphere to my mom. I hit send.
In the corner of my room, I plant my head between pillows and keep it there as my eyes flood through the fabric.
Asian parents will rarely take what you say at face value -- for better or for worse -- and this was no exception.
The emails kept on rolling in.
The subject lines say things like: “you should apply to these” or “hello? apply now!” and then the more lonely — “hello”. No quotation; no question mark.
I archive them, almost marking them as spam so they will go straight to the junk. Once, I actually do— only to dive into the digital trash to retrieve it again.
After a few weeks, my birthday rolls around. I receive a mysterious package at work, and I eye it carefully, trying to recall who would send me a surprise. My boss cocks an eyebrow as a coworker prattles on and on about a secret admirer.
Out from the wrapping falls four furry little dogs.
A golden retriever, a husky, pomeranian, and a mutt. The mini plush toys all look at me, with shiny little eyes. There is no note.
My mom texts me later that it was in fact, a gift from my dad.
My Chinese Zodiac animal. Not quite what I’ve always wanted since I was five, but it’s close enough.
I recall the corner of his eyes crinkling as he helped me with long division, angles, derivatives.
Just like that, something in my chest bursts like a tiny pinata.
I won’t lie — to this day, I don’t know where to start poking the often over-sensitive bear that unpacks a relationship that I do not even entirely understand. I have not bothered to explore it in fear of hiking into society’s problematic characterization of the “daddy issue” territory. This is my attempt at an excavation, I guess, in my own stigma-free space.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think twice when I put his name down as my emergency contact. I’ve never put down anybody else in my life. I ask him constantly for the Direct TV password I can never seem to remember.
Then, I would turn salty as I realize that he’s only ever used my brother’s name or birthday to unlock his accounts.
He sends me tennis racquets when I forget them.
We’ve never exchanged I love yous. I’d close my weekly video chats with my family with a quick and hasty substitute -- “eye-auv-oo”, avoiding the consonants like the plague.
After my grandfather was diagnosed with colon cancer, I had continuous, horrific visions of my own father tucked into a cocoon on a gurney, about to be wheeled away for the last time.
Would I say I love you then?
Why the hell would or should I wait that long?
Yet, there is not an ounce in me that will throw in the towel. Not yet.
I hope this will change someday. Or at least the day that the thought does not stagger and unmoor me.
I look like nobody in my family but I’ve been told by others that I have his eyes - the ones that excitedly steer the camera pointing towards his loved ones, the ones that harden into austere rocks when I skip Chinese school, the ones I have never seen pool with tears.
He spends hours putting together my furniture when I moved to San Francisco, until his back aches.
When I get mugged on public transportation, he express shipped me my birth certificate across the country— from the house that we liked to fill with bodies, to my tiny box of an apartment in San Francisco. I know he’d express ship himself through the circumference of the earth for his family. No questions asked.
I don’t know who I’d want to attend a dance more with, looking completely preposterous.
A good gift is a dog you’ve wanted since you were five. It’s also love from a father that you’ve needed all your life.
Because he’s the only one who’s made two plus six minus five make sense.
One day, I’ll find the courage to pick up the phone.
I’ll say something like “hey, dad”.
“Hello,” he’ll reply. He’ll speak a little too loud, like he always does into the receiver.
There will be a little silence. Then I’ll say the three words that will make his eyes crinkle -- the crinkles that are more and more permanent every visit I make back home.
“I need help.”
Thanks for reading. Honest Fiction is a gritty selfie in newsletter form. Also, aiming to be like the really good tried and true chapstick that you find and rediscover every week in your drawer.
The curious case of my Asian father: feeding crocodiles, weird dances and four furry dogs