My father immigrated to the US
carrying with him very little and quite a lot at the same time. What he lacked
in material possession, he made up for with his aspirations to give a good life
to his only daughter, whom he carried through customs. There’s an old photo of
me in pink overalls, burying my head in his shoulder, refusing to see the alien
place where we arrived, as he’s striding through the airport lobby. The man in
this photo is still young and still so full of energy. His smile is a testament
to that. Over the years, however, as my mom and dad attended state college to
obtain degrees, as was a necessary condition of their visas, that smile slowly
faded and only left behind sad ghost ridges on his face. Those ridges gradually
blurred into deeper lines of fatigue. His intelligent mind was not enough to
compensate for his unnatural tongue that could never wrap itself around the
edges of American English. The raw investment of time and effort was not enough
to obscure away his foreignness and it was not enough to make him worthy enough
of the respect he truly deserved. I always likened my father to Stephen Hawking
for this reason. The wisdom of both men is trapped by their circumstance: one
in his non-responsive body and one in his unreceptive tongue. Neither of them
have control over their everyday lives. They say that the smartest people make
the best liars, which explains how my father was so good at keeping me so
blissfully ignorant. He never let on to how much he had to endure and how much
he had suffered at the hands of the United States of America. To live without
respect for 15 years. Not from his colleagues and not from his ungrateful,
naïve children. What a terribly cruel Herculean trial.
My father doesn’t live in the US
anymore, even though my mother, brother, and I do. He’s taken refuge in his motherland
from the onslaught of forces that chipped away at his dignity. I think he had
to get away before there was nothing left to erode. At first, I truly despised
him for his weakness because I felt like he was abandoning us to save himself.
Just another failure to be a good father and a good husband and a good man. I
don’t blame him anymore. I bleed for him with his blood in my veins. How can I
begrudge him for wanting to escape the perverse feeling of always being an idea
and not a human being? For wanting to not be constantly pestered by that
nagging voice in the back of your head that tells you that you don’t belong here? For wanting
to dispel the feeling of lingering eyes that leave behind a dirty film on your
body, a trace of who they want you to be? For wanting to be able to breathe without
thinking about how that breath should be perfectly enunciated?
My father comes to visit us every
so often for big holidays. It must be odd for him to repeat his arrival at the
airport time and time again, but without the burden of having to carry me with
him. I guess the lessening of his baggage has lightened his soul as well. His
smiles have returned with him and they feel as full to the brim as his backpack
is that bears gifts for his expectant children. There’s something quite different
about my father now. He carries himself with a confidence that roots his feet
to the ground and lifts his chin to the skies. While he’s physically absent for
most of they year, he’s not an absent father. If anything, being away from this
place has made him a better father. And better yet, it has made him a better
man.
