Post Category → Life’s Awkward

I am thinking about 1978 and 2017.

Escape

That night, mom, when the hurricane blanketed our house with reservoir waters, did it feel like that evening in 1978? Back then, you were 22, packed anything you could eat or sell, and walked to the shore of a Danang beach. You boarded a fishing boat headed anywhere except Vietnam. I wonder, what was in your bag? Did you pack enough snacks and underwear? Did you ever step back towards grandma’s shuttered candy shop? Were you scared?

You never told me about the full journey from Vietnam to Houston, but I know slivers of the story. One day, in Galveston, we stood on the seawall and looked into the opaque waters. It’s scary, you said, being on a fishing boat for days, surrounded by nothing but infinite ocean. Once, you and I boiled water for a package of ramen. You laughed thinking of grandpa, standing portside, heating seawater for his bowl of noodles. He didn’t need salt, you said with amusement.

Before each first day of school, you would buy me a pair of Lee Jeans. One August, you proudly showed me the logo tags that I loathed to feel against my skin. You sewed those on in a Hong Kong factory, you told me. You were able to make a few dollars for boxed char sui fan lunches as you waited to be sponsored by a brother in Texas.

That night, when Harvey drove the floodwaters up to your ankles, I called you past midnight. I was 2,000 miles away, uncertain if what I read was what you were living.   The voice that picked up the phone was not the one that had once lulled me to sleep singing “Que Sera, Sera”. It shivered in tone, perforated with muffled splashes of you scooping away water with a cup. An abrupt electric pop severed one of your sentences. What’s that, I asked. You had to go, you said. You still haven’t told me what that sound was.

Hours later, through articles and our hurried conversations, I pieced together tatters of your escape. At sunrise, you put a few bottles of water and some valued papers in a bag. With our dog in your arms and a lifejacket on your chest, you left the house, walking into waist-deep water. As you waded, a boat found you, pulled you from boundless floodwaters and offered to steer you anywhere except home. I’m still waiting for the rest.

I wonder, what will we eat or see or touch that provokes the next scrap of story? The whirr of a boat engine? The feeling of wet shoes? The smell of salt? Will it remind you of that night in 1978? Mom, were you scared?

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Editor’s Note: Houston is home to a significant refugee population, many of whom fled from their home countries over the last 50 years.  In the 70s, the refugees were Vietnamese.  In the 80s, they were Central American and Cuban.  Today, many of the refugees are Syrian, Iraqi and Afghani.  A lot of them fled their countries by boat.  In 2017, during Hurricane Harcey, a lot of them were rescued by boat.  This includes my mom.

I am traveling.

In response to the confounding internet phenomenon of over-romanticizing travel, below is my interpretation of the “Stages of Cultural Adaptation” chart:

 

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Pre-Departure Phase:

  • (1) Futile, apocalyptically stressful attempt to do 2 weeks worth of work in 3 days.
  • (2) Anxiety about Zika and Dysentery.

Arrival Abroad/Honeymoon Phase:

  • (3) “Fuck yeah, this bag of indeterminate fried things is 4 cents.”

Culture Shock Phase:

  • (4) “Someone is slowly and systematically stealing my underwear from this Vietnamese laundry.”

This is a true story. Please see what I wrote in 2008 about my experiences with underwear theft during my study abroad experience in Vietnam:

Two weeks ago, I became very disillusioned with my inability to maintain a steady, reliable supply of underwear in Vietnam.  I had just washed my clothes at the giat ui – a place which will now be referred to as the black hole of Jen’s multi-colored floral undergarments.  In my confusion, I decided to count my underwear, a rather awkward scene in and of itself since I was both counting them and folding them into little squares because I am an awkward person.

As it turns out, currently walking the streets of Saigon is a small Vietnamese woman adorning my pink and blue speckled cotton fruit of the looms.  On one hand, I am an advocate for Vietnamese people wearing underwear.  It is a good thing.  On the other hand, I am not a fan of Vietnamese people wearing my underwear – and if they do, they should at least ask before deciding to put them on, thereby allowing me to stare at them for being nuts and, to an extent, very Vietnamese.

According to the inventory of my folded square underwear (it saves room), the giat ui has been stealing underwear from me.  This has been a consistent trend since they have also stolen underwear from the other Americans on this trip.  Not socks, not shirts, not pants.  Underwear.  The best part of this story is that none of us know where else we can possibly go to wash clothes and thus drop our clothes off every week at said giat ui knowing that we will suffer further underwear depletion due to the underground world of pastel panty trade in Vietnam.

Adaptation Please:

  • (5) “I found a trusted supplier of new underwear, but my American body only fits size 6XL.”

Here is the second part of my harrowing tale of the underground underwear theft circa 2008:

Facing a shortage of underwear, I ventured into the supermarket to purchase more.  Complicating the process is the fact that my American, calcium fortified diet has afforded me, in the words of my sister, Asian J-Lo-esque “Bronx booty magic”.  Yay calcium!  Although this bodes well for long motorcycle rides, it makes things infinitely harder when one must purchase underwear, resulting in situations like stretching underwear in the middle of Vietnamese supermarkets or, as I would like to call, a typical Sunday morning.

Vietnamese people at the check-out counters have a tendency to judge people for their purchases.  On one particular Sunday morning, I was in need of underwear, water, and crackers.  This story ends with the check-out lady looking at me with amusement as she scanned my underwear, my Aquafina, and my saltine crackers.  If I had enough Vietnamese in me, I would have looked her in the eye and said, “Why yes, I eat saltines and drink water in my underwear.  Thanks.”

Pre-Return Ups and Downs Phase:

  • (6) “Oh!  Meat on a stick.”
  • (7) Shitting in a literal pile of Chinese garbage.

Also a true story:

After a long hike through southwest China’s Tiger Leaping Gorge, I hastily consumed a very greasy, satisfying bowl of fried rice. I proceed to a tour bus en route to our hotel nearly 2 hours away. Within 5 minutes of sitting, I develop painful, debilitating pains – the kind of pain one obtains when you ravenously consume dubious bowls of fried rice. I can best describe the pain as feeling as if a wild, rabid raccoon was stuck in my bowels and desperately clawing it’s way out – and down.

My partner, who is fluent in the Chinese dialects of Cantonese and Toisan, knows approximately 10 phrases of Mandarin. She somehow strings together a few of these phrases to successfully halt the bus so that I can scamper to a bathroom stall in the middle of a rural market. In my anxiety about holding up a bus full of Chinese people, I am too nervous and ultimately fail to go to the bathroom. I return to the bus. The pain returns. I teeter on the edge of exploding.

A sweaty, painful hour and 45 minutes later, I cannot hold it anymore. My partner convinces the driver to let us off in middle of a street, in an unknown town, in the middle of China with 10 phrases of Mandarin known between the two of us. I desperately search for a bathroom. There are no bathrooms, but there is most definitely a field of garbage.

End of story.

  • (8) Hella fluids.
  • (9) “I feel like I am going to die of dysentery.”

Return Home/Missing Other Culture Phase:

  • (10) “Life was so care-free abroad, except that time I almost died of dysentery.”
  • (11) Full-blown travel superiority complex.

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Editor’s Note:  I will be traveling, developing new materials, and intensively working on a new digital and audio project in the months of July and August.  This blog will be back in weekly form on Monday, 8/28.  I’m looking forward to sharing more then!

I am thinking that it is Pride and Father’s Day.

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All of my major, illuminating conversations with my father usually take place in a car, en route to the airport on Houston’s Beltway 8. I still have not figured out why these drives have been the literal vehicle to our relationship – perhaps it’s the desire to mask the terrible easy listening station, or the monotonous freeway scenery in our peripheral vision, or my father’s need to be candid now that months will pass before we will see each other again.

This trend started when I was 18, mere hours before I would fly to my first day of college in Washington DC, with a conversation that began in our car and continued into terminal A of Houston’s Intercontinental Airport.

He began: “Did you know that your grandfather died in a re-education camp?”

I’ve thought and wrote about that conversation for more than a decade. It was a statement that became an obsession with the historical circumstances leading to my grandfather’s death.

Now, I am 30 and still need to be driven to the airport. It’s an early Saturday morning and my final destination is the city I have recently labeled a second home – San Francisco. I’ve spent the past 10 years piecing together my family history and my dad has been much more open to all the questions I have about his prior life – the escape from Vietnam, his lonely arrival to the United States, the drunken lady-chasing, the constant struggle lingering in his life as a Vietnamese man with US citizenship.

“Can I ask you something?” he says, interrupting the synth melody emanating from the god-awful “work friendly” radio station.

I’m anticipating another significant life event to add the patch worked narrative in my mind so I say, eagerly, “Sure, dad.”

“What do you think of me dating again?”

I am befuddled by the situation. No one coaches you on how to react when you’re father casually informs you that a family members has died for political reasons in a Vietnamese re-education camp. Likewise, I’ve never been advised on how to approach a dating conversation with my 67-year-old father.

More confounding is this – for the first time, we’re not taking about his past or my next steps. It’s about his future now.

—

My relationship with my father is complex, enshrouded with feelings of guilt, misunderstanding, lost history, and a tension that naturally develops when two people share the same personality, but are divided by historical luck, cultural upbringing, and a generation.

I often imagine our relationship to look like one long, continuous steel beam – I’m positioned on the left edge, he on the right. In the middle, a fulcrum positions us in a constant, precarious pivot. Each gain on my side shifts the balance in my direction, lowering him further and further into the ground. Equilibrium in our relationship feels like an impossible illusion.

A few months after I graduated from college and proudly landed my first job, my father lost what would become the last job he would ever work. Our working-class family has always been susceptible to the ups and downs of an oil-dependent economy, but the cycle has, to this day, never come back up for him.

A few years later, I flew back home to Houston during a Christmas holiday with two goals – to help plan my parents’ 30-year anniversary party and to formally “come out” to my parents. I remember the intimate family gathering – a small room with a little bit of champagne and re-prints of their wedding photos with “Happy 30th Anniversary” scrawled across the gloss. It was followed, a few days later, by my pre-dawn “coming out” to my father before his daily walk. He cried, blamed himself, but ultimately relented to his philosophy – life’s too short, be happy, don’t waste time.

As I entered my long-term relationship with my partner, Tracy, I concurrently witnessed the formal dissolution of my parents’ 30-year marriage. As a bystander to their marriage, it was a long-due decision. Their union was a strained pairing which felt analogous to a steam burn – a simmering, innocuous pain that seared relentlessly once you step away from the source of what is hurting you. I remember sitting in a hostel in Paris, simultaneously writing transatlantic postcards to Tracy while reading divorce paperwork that had been transmitted through e-mail. It’s an odd feeling to write in cavalier, romantic language and to read, in legalese, all the reasons someone needs to leave you.

Now, as I try to build a life with my partner, my father has worked to minimize his belongings and luxuries to fit into his single life on a slender budget. No amount of phone calls or digital zaps of money can bridge the physical and emotional gulf of our lives. We’ll always be at two ends of a steel beam, swiveling back and forth.

—

My proudest moment in adulthood was standing behind my father as he led a tour of the townhouse he had managed to purchase. After months of moving from one bad living situation to another, he had decided to take half of his savings and invest it in a small two-bedroom place that he could call his own.

Each time Tracy and I visit, he has a customary protocol. He opens the door and you walk into the kitchen.

“How you doing?” he will say to me.

“How y’all doing?” he’ll say if I’m with Tracy.

He offers you a plastic bottle of cold water from a fridge that, at most, has 10 items. He tells you to sit down on the used floral patterned couch he bought from a friend. It’s seated in front of a flat screen television that he purchased on a 5 AM Black Friday excursion at Wal-Mart.

To the left of the TV, there is a built-in shelf. A single shelf is occupied by a gift my partner and I purchased a few years ago – now empty beer bottles, which once held a craft Belgian ale. To the right of the sofa, is a kitchen counter. Typically, there are three items perched on the counter: a loaf of white bread, a fresh pineapple and a rose he placed in a used plastic water bottle with ridges slightly dented from his grip.

His physical space is a manifestation of his current lifestyle – simple pleasures, reflective, and sparse.

“I like it,” he describes of his living arrangement as we’re driving – he towards the airport, me towards San Francisco.

“I like it, but it can be lonely.”

—

“What do you think of me dating again?”

I look at him anticipating self-deprecating laughter that usually rescues me from responding to his statements. Unfortunately, he’s fucking serious.

I’ve engaged in dating conversations with countless people, most of who are not my father and are not 67-years-old. Many of these conversations end with my watching with fascination as they swipe left or swipe right on their smart phones with bored indifference.

I think of the steep learning curve my father – a man who spent a lifetime cutting pipes for oil companies – endured to learn how to right click a mouse. I think of the incredible frustration I felt trying to navigate the more advance skill of double-clicking a mouse. The man handles a smartphone with the same finesse you would use to mercifully kill a spider – jamming your finger into the glass with disbelief that a machine to can transmit touch to action.

Say something, I think. Say something other than “Please don’t fucking date someone my age.”

“You supported me being with Tracy,” I respond. “So, I’ll support you in any decision you make.”

I started to count the green exit signs to prevent myself from crying.

“Okay, good to know,” he says.

For a moment, I could teetering of our seesaw, an ease toward equilibrium.

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This year, Father’s Day landed on the same weekend that Houston celebrated Pride. It was beautifully coincidental.

For so many Prides, I’ve searched for individual desires – my self-actualization, my chance at romance, my exclamation of bring queer.

Most of all, Pride, in the thick of the marriage movement, has been about the fight for equality. Typically, what this means is the fight to be considered equal to what is “normative” – legally married (usually to someone of the same race), monogamous with biological children, striving for physical and financial accumulation.   There is nothing wrong with this “normative” way of being. There’s also nothing wrong with the “other” way of life.

This year, Pride feels much more communal – the family I will build, the family I am already a part of, and the community I belong to. To celebrate queerness is to celebrate all the familial arrangements whether they are “normative” or not –same-sex couples, interracial couples, foster families, adopted children, chosen families, or non-monogamy.

In my case, it’s a celebration of my family, which, ironically, has been altered by heterosexual divorce, yet developing with a same-sex partnership. It’s about a 67-year-old father looking for an over-50 (thank goodness) educated woman to talk to and his queer daughter looking to build a family.

This Pride, I’m not fighting for equality – I’m hoping for equilibrium.

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Happy Father’s Day, daddy. Happy Pride, daddies.