Made and Married and Made Again; Family History and the Remaking of Commonhood for Commongood

In the spirit of the American confessional, in this first post of over a year, I declare: I am finally willing to attempt to forgive my father. Ten years since he wrote me that letter asking for my forgiveness, 29 years since they made me, 35 years since my mother married him and he married my mother, 63 years since he was made, 77 years since his parents were married, 100 years since my paternal grandmother was made and 102, my dad's dad.  I've been reviewing with my cousin Sheryll (first cousin, the other side) the intensely detailed family history my father and his elder brother made in 2007, and through this remembering my bloodline and deciding I have to learn to see what in there is common with the self/ves I struggle so much to embrace in order to stop searching for a father in just about everybody else. 

I start by thinking about my parents, about their common.  Now a part of the humorous yet tragic mythology I make of my parent's marriage -- the curious, adventuresome and troublesome quest of my youth, that is, slaying their dragons -- I once asked my mother, "Why did you and dad get married?" and she replied, "Well, you know, well, we - uh - we liked the same things, you know, we liked the same music, the same movies ... you know, like Neil Diamond."  "NEIL DIAMOND?!?!" my inner and future retaliatory inner voice screamed.  Like the pesky flies that won't leave my apartment (they have taken to heart the Christian edicts from my paternal legacy to breed and to prosper), I become stunned and incensed and consumed by the crafty desire to obliterate.  I vowed never to settle for anything less than a love marriage, and proceeded to thwart my ability to do this by frequently running back to save theirs.

But bygones is by the by and gone.  To revive them without reconciliation is to live with the despair that comes from constant ignoring and resulting forgetfulness (earlier post: "forgetting is already a form of apocalypse"). Because there are rooms of my house I am unwilling to see -- am I the caged, the unkempt, in the dust and the dark? or are they? -- I can feel stupid and ashamed, I indulge in masterful avoidance techniques, I have a blurry destiny rather than an expansive unknown. I am jittery on the inside, clawing at histories and herstories with rubber nails too blunt to scratch, too long to control, with ever weakening force. Yet I keep swiping, and as they slow, I like to watch the shadows dance.

So I think about their marriage, their commons, their common goods, their commongood. In another similarly humorous and frightening quip, I once asked my father after we'd quelled their biggest crisis how it was he knew he loved my mother. He thought, head cocked to one side, now greying and grisly hair swept to the same direction, in his usual plaid or striped collared shirt. As usual, he had a pen and a post-it pad in his front pocket, and pensively he removed a shiny black 0.7 rollerball pen. He held it in two hands, thinking, and then said, "You see this pen? Your mother has the exact same pen." His eyes widened, as if I had protested. "No, but you see, we didn't buy them together, no! I didn't ask for it. But we have the same pen." Then he kept thinking, head tilted, twirling this pen. And then he put it back in his pocket.

I probably applauded him then -- it was my job at the time to either separate them for good or keep them together come hell or high water, so every little bit of self-reflection about their togetherness was welcomed. Why a frightening admission to this otherwise lost 26-year-old waiting for an American visa to just get back to where she thought she knew who she was, which was away, away from all this? Frightening, then, because I knew how much I wanted the comfort of that material and sociohistorical and cultural sameness, that tricky synchronicity, and at the same time knew I couldn't have it, wouldn't want to keep it, wanted to be bigger and better than the produce of our fruit farm. I still look at journeying Japanese couples with envy, or Swedish couples or Colombian couples standing on a subway platform, looking lost at a street corner, or walking roadside with their big gap year backpacks, speaking their own native tongue to each other, and I want it. I want to go out into the world unalone and I want to return home -- in a glance, a handhold, a non-English reprimand -- to a common. But I "know" I won't have it, I've been telling myself for years. Not same enough on the inside to warrant a different match, so many non-matching parts to find a matched mismatch, my soul an eclectic found object, a treasure specialized to beneath the deepest sea.

But I'm reading this paternal family history loaded with 19th century contextualizing maps, Singapore photographs, clan photographs, aphorisms and Biblical scripture and Christian poetry in little shaded text boxes that more or less liken our strewn Chinese migration to that of the ancient Israelites. Page follows page of tables and spreadsheets numbering the five generations stemming from my great-grandfather and great-grandmother who followed their new faith from farms in Fujian to colonial Singapore: 381 progeny, including by marriage, including living and dead! Since the book's publishing in 2007 ... 383 at least! (that's Yang Mee's baby Sophie and Sue's baby Rohan at least taken into account) There are lots of photos of marriages and children, and quite a few reminders to "take heart from the example set by those who came before ... in having families." There is an extremely embarrassing picture of me in a split taken while I was stretching one day on grass. Likely to protect the feelings of those they concern, there are noticeable gaps in narratives about divorces and education that is not academic in nature; I understand the desire, but it does mean negligent history, and a curious absence of the fatherhood of some of my cousins and my wonderful aunt's influence at the Royal Academy of Music.

I'm reading this, and it occurs to me that my father's father -- who he in later years acknowledged as a misogynist in order to explain his indifference to the hurt feelings of my mother (the culture of corporate America could explain the same, or just an indifference to hurt feelings generally without making extra effort) -- had probably more to him than I thought, in that he had secrets, and he had pain, and he had reasons. I learn that my grandfather's father died when he was seven, that my grandfather had a first wife before my grandmother, unknown and unacknowledged to his children. I learn that his second brother died during the war. These are all told in factual ways without emotional resonance, which is likely the way these experiences were really lived. Yet I can't but help to think on this, my head upright.

So Mom - Dad - your commonhood and commongood. They were also married, the fable goes, because of curious coincidences and seeming cultural destiny. My mother adored her father; my father had his same initials, and his same birthday. Both their fathers were prominent teachers, and they had in fact first met each other through these common circles at my father's 17th birthday party where, evidenced in the now famous photograph and anecdote, my dad looked like he was 12 and my mother was so pretty he thought to himself, "that's the kind of woman I want to marry." Both were born in 1947, post-war, pre-independence, meaning mostly that they were lucky to not have to go through many years of the demands of learning Mandarin Chinese and unlucky enough to watch a generation rising beneath them become fluent and successful with it when it became compulsory from 1959 on. Both were Anglophiles, but my mother the unabashed one. Both, it seems, really wanted to catch up with everyone else at the age of 27 since they got engaged after only 6 months of dating.

Both, it seems, had fathers who lost a parent at a young age. My mother's father, my Opa, lost his mother as a child and was raised by his older sister; my Kong Kong, as said, lost his father when he was 7, he the tenth child, all of which remaining (and some grandchildren) to be raised by his mother.

Both would really like to do the right thing, which in our culture usually means right by everybody else, and that can serve some well but not others, and both have tried and fluctuated and suffered for it.

* * *

I have so many printed Powerpoint slides from my father I don't know what to do with them; the latest, of my nephew's birth, is actually laminated, so I considered using it as an actual placemat but have placed it more usefully as a drawer liner instead. The other prints start to tell me more of my dad's inner story the more I try and listen or read it than to read my constant disappointment that he is not the perfect, openly communicating, emotionally deep feeling man that I wish he was -- partly because I want it, mostly because I am it, and I'd like him to know who I am. Again, when the door is opened, does it get revealed which of us has been in the dark and trapped all this while? Or are we both coming out of the closet?

There is one Powerpoint print-out collection seemingly, at first, gratuitous -- pictures from a sudden family reunion at my sister's in San Francisco in May of 2009, a short four or five day unexpected gathering. My mother had finally made an effort for herself outside of her role of "wife" or "mother" and made a liberation trip to Peru -- "while my knees can still climb Machu Picchu!"-- and my sister recently announced her pregnancy. My mother planned a stop to SFO on her way back from the trip, and I was convinced to go see her -- I had left Singapore with three-year-US-visa in hand just six months prior.

I landed in San Francisco both eager and reluctant, mostly reluctant to feel isolated in company again with my latest love lost in England and my latest jobs evaporating into another future-less, waiting summer. But I became full of love and eagerness thinking about having a common (read: "normal") relationship with my mom, going shopping or taking her out to a spa and letting her blithely gossip, as some women should, especially those who never get an outlet. I could love her more when we didn't need to solve or process her and her husband. I was excited upon landing that myself and my sister, for whom she has made her life, were going to be there to greet her off this plane coming back from her liberation "When I'm 60, I'll Wear Purple (and go to Peru) (and then come back) (to where I'm comfortable)" trip.

My brother-in-law stroked his beard strangely as I descended the escalators from my arrivals hall, an odd knowingness and a finger placed to trigger on the Nikon D80 hanging around his neck. Where is Sue? Where is the peanut that is in the stomach of Sue? --well, the uterus of Sue! Where is the peanut? Instead, in a bizarre act of ninja stealth, my DAD appears hunch-shouldered and giggling as if he'd been ballet slippering his 180-pound mass between pillars, beneath staircases, and towards my defenseless figure. Yes -- my father, having less than a year prior finally gone to couples therapy (she'd been asking for 14 years -- I put them in separate rooms, and made them), less than that having placed an actual portrait of my mother on his desk for the fist time, perhaps around the same having written into his electronic scheduling devices: "Remember to do something/say something loving to Pat" -- my father had decided to show up in our lives.

Happy, surprised, "here's my dad coming for me and my sister! I've always known he'd be a great grandfather! Here's my dad! Here's my dad! And here comes my mom! --Shit!" Fear of impending doom subsides as my father quaintly, as always, plays the hiding boy. We figure she'll come out by the baggage carrels and we position DAD in his always grey cotton pants and plaid shirt seated by the restrooms flush to the mouth of the escalator landing. Ever imaginative, DAD shrouds himself in his parka throwing it over his head completely, peeks out, and snickers -- I feel like prodding to make sure he isn't just going to fall asleep in the position I know him best to do so, but he blinks alertly and promises me he's not "resting his eyes" and that I should just let him know when she's down.

MOM: highlighted bronze gleams off side-swept auburn strands making a light joke at being unable to fully cover her slightly balding head (a woman does more with less). She's tan, she's dry, she's a pear, oh she's a peach. She's happy. Oh good. Oh good god.

Embraces, obligatory photos of successful reunion, she's made an effort (at being herself), he's made an effort (at being a member of the family), Sue and Duleesha have evidently made an effort, have conceived and being with child. I have made an effort ... well, I came with a distinctly selfish motive to have a good little holiday with my mum, to be a good kid, yes, well, I made an effort. I've made lots of efforts at these other people. I've laid myself down for most anybody I loved, and if I couldn't give freely and therefore didn't really give greatly it's because I was rather busy laying low because I can go crazy loving and without knowing how to control it really, it's seemed to work better (for who? for others?) to take it out on myself. Any love, abusive love, guilty love, kiddish love, blind love, it's been like my gag banana peel, I trip and fall down. Better, it seemed, to stay there. Why fall another time? Oh wait, but did it make you laugh? Well if it made you laugh ...

Which is ALL to say -- these Powerpoint slides, of what at times was really a terrible gathering, my mother in photos smiling and tilting her head forwards and downwards to try to give her best face and a lowered hairline, whilst in the documents of experience thrashing and pained and trying but still unhappy. Too little too late? I was spared the mommysitting, but maybe my mom and myself should have stayed at the hotel and my DAD been sent to the couch fending off libidinous cats at bedtime and cats at Calvary before dawn. Perhaps he should have stopped being a hero and tried being brave, brave enough to admit that he was lonely without her and at a loss thinking we didn't need him to be an us. Perhaps he should stop shaking his head when she misbehaves, which she does, because she is special, and because who else is supposed to embody the authority that can intervene? Of course, we like having the pictures. Its a commonhood. Both of them seated at the museum "pong chet" (a Singaporean catch phrase bastardizing the English word, "punctured", meaning flat-out tired), leaning against a wall of framed rainforest butterflies and each other with eyes closed, jackets as blankets, like some sort of art installation. Pictures of my sister and I pigtailed like Pocahontas (still my unmanifested party hire character, destined to make me a living!), making faces like, aw, sisters do. I don't forget, this is the same man who made one his biggest guffaws on one of his earliest Powerpoint creations, depicting his family life to fellow servicemen on the Mercyships hospital boat he and my reluctant but abiding mom were being heroic at, with pictures of Sue and myself as cute kids with the bright yellow titling: "My China Dolls". Oh DAD. It probably wouldn't hurt so bad if we thought you actually had a better sense than that of who we might be -- besides something you hadn't quite raised us to be.

But I get it, or get it a little better, now, this thing, this thing he works with and obeys and fights with (a little) all his life, I get it, ok, maybe I get it. It's always a little harder to have an insight on someone who doesn't reveal much self-knowledge. This Powerpoint print-out with the cover title "Converging on San Francisco" and a ridiculous slide of a world map with overlaid arrows and airport codes showing not just our convergence but the actual flight routings we each took to get together -- I'm not rolling my eyes. I long ago learned to accept soft-edged oval portrait frames and expository captions. I still don't entirely understand why there are three whole pages of pictures of taxidermic Savannah animals from the Natural History Museum, but I'm sure if I really think about it, especially because they are uncaptioned, that something about them struck my father in a subconscious way and he had to express it. (I believe the best picture I couldn't take in that hall that day was a little Chinese woman standing by the wall of hominid skulls -- she had positioned herself accidentally to fall right in line with them, and her extraordinary stature had her at exactly the right height).

I've been reading, actually reading (rather than being offended and emotionally exiled by) this paternal family history, Dad, and I get it a little better. I am not sorry for who I am, the complexity I carry with me, and my continued awkward life choices to not be like what this book wishes me to be and yet that I continue to feel intimidated by and impressionable/variable because of. I believe you may have, in the past and in the present in some small ways much quieter with age, felt the same. I know you love Mom because she faces a similar conflict and has a passion in her that you thought bold and attractive until you couldn't understand it anymore and it affected your natural way of handling the conflict, which was to always, with virtuous intentions, acquiesce. I look at your PPT map cover in its plastic folder from a year and a half ago and I think of what in your heart suffers to have this family so flung apart, daughters who went to liberal arts colleges and not universities (yes, the best one, but not the most impressive), what status do we bring? You need to fit in by fulfilling symbols of your culturally designated manhood -- nevermind that you were a happy boy chasing photographs and devotional stories before you gave in, replacing mud-drowned jeep tires on tropical backroads or hitchhiking through Europe. Nevermind that you didn't own a suit until mom was refused the corporate hire because they were looking for a man, and she and Halcyon prepped you and grilled you and shoved you into the interview room. Or is that really the story? I'm not sure if you've actually told me your take on it.

You let mom handle all the finances; our Prime Minister did it first, and he called himself "a kept man" jokingly which I think I recall you saying too, once. A way to ease the discomfort of deciding how to make a life, how to make her happy even when you can't, how to be the definition of a loving father even if you can't understand how, you just can't! It's Ok. Now. I mean, now it's Ok. Now, it's a part of our history rather than a choice we are making about the future. It requests acceptance and forgiveness, not partnership and communicating together.

* * *

You left us outside your heart and let others enter in (only if you knew they wouldn't stay), but you gave us many riches not the least of which was inspiration.

I took up photography with your old camera, which saved me from complete isolation and loneliness as a repatriated teen. You raised me on National Geographics and Economists and Times and Newsweeks so I could know about the world, have a heart for it, and have a quest for it, as you and Mom did (and do). You allowed me to press you about your early sketches of Mom when she was pregnant with Sue, and though you never let me see the naked charcoal drawings, you rendered me two fast contour drawings in marker ink of our living room furniture after which I thought you were a secret genius -- which in recollection makes me cry, because I remember how earlier in my life you crushed my artistic passion at age 7 with a simple, cold response to my then proudest pastel drawing, abstract, expressionistic, like my mind: "Well, you can't do that until you're famous." This is also my mythology or moral tale, the trampled beetle beneath the elephant's foot and how it learned and grew only to be a slightly bigger and more compulsive beetle.

I am your daughter, and you have been many men, so it's often been hard to know exactly which daughter would stick. It's odd to come to at 28, or maybe it's not, but I get it, that to be a daughter doesn't mean to be contingent upon a dad. To be a daughter in comparison to other daughters, well, some are perhaps role models and some are perhaps species that will eat me or that I should rather eat.

I am the youngest daughter of the youngest son of the youngest son of a man and a woman who came by boat to Singapore from a farm in China and through hardship and fortuity were significant in growing the nation with faith- and prosperity-driven values. Their progeny have not grown their wealth, knowledge and that of the nation by indulging themselves, airing their grievances, pursuing fanciful dreamings, romance languages and romantic ideals. They did not come to success by living halfway across the world with an expensive degree spending the last summer plastering drywall and this summer coming to terms -- even if you, Dad, spend your happy moments outdoors renovating the garden again and again, doing honest labor and hands-on problem-solving, even if when I shared with you about my day drilling an exhaust box into the ceiling, you said with subtle protestation: "But you could have learned all that from me!" Even if you made a retirement gift for yourself of a wood-turning workshop, and even as you insist on making technical computer trouble-shooting a demanding shared activity with me, which I hate. When I was young and I used to think like this, I'd think, "See Dad, I am the son you never had," but really I'm your daughter, and Sue's also your daughter, and sometimes, I am both a daughter and an overeager, easily disappointed, trailing dog, the same way Sue is a daughter and a stubborn, sensitive, mysterious horse.