Interior Chinatown

The truth is, she’s a weirdo. Just like you were. Are. A glorious, perfectly weird weirdo. Like all kids before they forget how to be exactly how weird they really are. Into whatever they’re into, pure. Before knowing. Before they learn from others how to act. Before they learn they are Asian, or Black, or Brown, or White. Before they learn about all the things they are and about all the things they will never be.

There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.

She whispers to you: Let me do the talking. You nod, unsure why you’re going along with her, oh yeah, you are probably in love with her already, that’s why.

This gap, always there. Somehow unbridgeable, whether it’s across a wide Pacific gulf of language and culture, or just a simple sentence, father to son, always distance

You’re so deep in the background, you’re almost out of frame. The script doesn’t give you anything to say, your only action to sweep the floor. And watch your father get talked to like that. It’s his reaction that breaks something inside of you. Or his nonreaction. That this is who he is, Old Asian Man. Nothing more. His acceptance of the role. You have to do something

“Country Roads,” try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to “West Virginia, mountain mama,” you’re going to be singing along, and by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.

You keep thinking about Old Fong. Not that he died alone. Not that he died naked, or wet, or with soap on half his body. That he died waiting for his son’s phone call. That he lived, absolutely sure that one person in the world would always care, would always remember to check in on him. And then in his last moment, he was unsure of whether that was still true.

KUNG FU KID

I’m sorry, Ma. I’m really sorry.

MA

(waving you off)

I don’t care about that. Just promise me something, okay?

KUNG FU KID

Okay.

MA

Don’t grow up to be Kung Fu Guy.

KUNG FU KID

Okay, okay, I promise.

(then)

Wait, what?

MA

You heard me. Don’t be Kung Fu Guy.

KUNG FU KID

Oh. Then what should I be?

MA

Be more.

their marriage having entered its own dusky phase, bound for eternity but separate in life

To enter the theater of his dotage quietly, sit there in the dark and not ask him any question, however simple, that might cause momentary confusion, might turn your rote interactions into something too raw, remind yourselves or each other of what was happening here, the inversion of the relationship, the care and feeding, the brute fact of physical dependency: If you don’t do this, he can’t do it for himself