my dad is my hero

The order in which my family finishes our meals goes like this:

1. dad

2. me

3. mom

4. michael

My dad and I eat like the food will disappear if we don't scarf it down fast enough. My dad learned it from his boarding school full of boys. Everyone would sprint to the cafeteria at lunch, inhale their first meal, and quickly line up again. This was a fast-paced, high-risk environment. Be a little late getting to the lunch line and there would be nothing left. Eat too slow, and there would be nothing left for seconds. 

As for me, I suppose I just learned it from him.

I inherited much from my dad. My turbulence, my impatience, and my pride are all from him. Even my big nose and sensitive teeth, all heirlooms from my father. You would think all these hand-me-downs would make us closer. But there was always this wall between us whenever we spoke, like I was talking to an acquaintance instead of a friend, a distant relative rather than a dad. 

And he's always been stubbornly particular. In third grade I begged to get my ears pierced, and he was adamant on waiting until I was eighteen. 

"Think of your ear as a donut. When donuts get fried, the whole thing gets bigger, and the holes get bigger as well." He would always draw it out for me with blue pen on a pad of sticky notes. Nevermind that ears were nothing like donuts. 

Even as I resisted, he would not relent. Every time I asked, I'd come away with a warning that one day, I'd look like the buddha with his huge earlobes, and a giant hole in each one. As if I'd ever grow as old as the buddha. As if we even believed in the buddha!!!?

He also told me to stop using wooden pencils, because they had to constantly be sharpened. "Wooden pencils are pathetic, Nicole. It's better to use mechanical pencils." He promptly bought me a box of mechanical pencils and told me to never use wooden pencils again.

I will never understand why these small things mattered so much to him, why it always had to be his way or the highway. To me, he was always blowing things out of proportion. But to this day, my ears are free from any piercings, and I only carry mechanical pencils in my pencil case. So, I guess, nicole: 0, dad: 2.

Whereas I would argue with him and try to preserve my own way of doing things, my brother, who was less stubborn, was more receptive towards my dad's advice. After all, my dad was the one who drove him to all his hockey games and practices, recording each one for the team to review. For his services, he was revered as "Mr. Bin" by the whole team (a very honorable title). He's the one who still drives five hours to Pittsburg to help sharpen his son's skates. In my brother's college essay, he wrote that my dad was his hero. I was confused. Of all the great people to write about, Po Shen Lo and Sabrina Carpenter and the like, why our dad? It just seemed basic.

In my brother's absence, my father's attention shifted onto me. Now, I am starting to see why. 

When my brother left for college, it was my turn to practice driving with my dad, and wow was that rough. Learning to drive also taught me that I am slower than an iPhone 6 after 3 months of use. My dad would be yelling at me to stop the car, clutching the handrest on the door, and I'd be sitting there like this hamster, proceeding to drive the car into the curb. 

After many tears and lectures and modeling my mistakes with our phones on the glovebox, I became a fine driver. my friends like to lie and say im not, but they don't know cus i've never driven them!!! guys I promise I know what I am doing. That was all in the past. 

He also taught me how to fix things. We worked together to troubleshoot a chain of lights with a burned out bulb. We'd tested almost half of the 50 bulbs to find the broken one, and finally after an hour, the daisy-chain lit up properly. I had never felt so much euphoria, and all over some christmas lights. This was a habit of his. Whenever he was working on a project or installing something in our house, he'd call me over and explain it to me. He'd ask me questions and let me try to figure out the issue and how to solve it. I'd rarely get the right answer, but still, I enjoyed shadowing his work, curious about how he would do it. 

Looking back now, it's so easy to see how much he does for me. He pulled me out on a run in early morning Shanghai to keep me active during the summer. He taught me to take pictures, play pool, and fry an egg. He tunes my piano, he re-insulated my freezing bedroom. If my mom's version of love was making me food and buying me clothes, my dad's was to fix any problems I had, and teach me everything he knows. 

my dad and I on the ferry

In class, Mrs. Valentino brought up this really interesting point about the book. (as she always does, yay thanks mrs. valentino!) She remarked that while Bo seemed like a horrible father who traumatized Thi in many ways, he was undoubtedly the hero in their odyssey out of Vietnam. He navigated their boat all the way to Malaysia, avoiding pirates and Vietnamese navy ships. It puzzled me how these two stories could exist in one person. Now, I understand that humans carry many stories, especially our parents. In our shortsighted memory, they seem like adversaries who just hurt and confuse us. Yet their invisible, tireless work for our sake is the reason we are privileged enough to complain about them in the first place. 

My dad is my hero because he is an engineer, through and through. He excels at solving problems, coming up with creative ways to make something work. He shaped my brother into the same vein, and continues to inspire me with all his fatherly competence. Though we disagree all the time, my own uncompromising temper against his, I've come to appreciate him instead of antagonizing him. 

These are the final heirlooms he passed onto me in my younger years: his ability to congratulate himself on a job well done, and his personality. Who knows how timid I'd be if my boisterous father hadn't taught me to speak up? And who knows whether I'd ever put myself out there, if he hadn't built up my confidence throughout my childhood, praising me whenever I solved a question or finished an artwork, reminding me daily that I am his pride and joy.

I can't think of one immigrant child that grew up with a perfectly healthy relationship with their parents. I suppose we are just the fruits of thousands of years of fractured families. I think this leads to a lot of us overanalyzing these relationships, trying to figure out exactly what went wrong. I'm still a child, and a selfish one, so I can't speak on being a parent like Bui does. But as I've grown and come to see my parents not as just mom and dad, but as real, living people with the same hopes and dreams that I have, with flaws that they, too are trying to correct, even as they raise their own kids, how can I go on treating them as if I am the only center of the universe? 

During one day of our trip in China, my brother pulled me aside. "Nicole, our parents are getting old," he'd said to me while we walked ahead of our parents on the sidewalk. "We've got to repay them once we get out of school. That's why I want so badly to be rich in the future". This reality hit me like a stack of bricks. It was the first chime of this huge clock that I'd only just realized had been ticking for so long already. I'd only been thinking of how I would make this gorgeous life for myself once I'd grown up, neglecting those who raised me and loved me to the best of their ability, despite all their own unresolved issues. As my own high school graduation approaches and I inch closer to leaving the house like my brother did this year, this weight continues to dig into my shoulders. Something like guilt, something like grief. 

That night, I sank into my hotel bed and cried. 

I am searching for ways I could possibly repay my parents. Like Thi and her coins, I only keep coming up short.