Yay food network

So Brian tells me to write, which adds another person to the list of people who have told me to write (mentioned earlier, therapist et al), but rather than focus on the words or message or prettiness I should just pull out a stream of consciousness thing here. But what do I say... there's too much and too little to say. It's not quite real yet, and it won't be until I see him, actually see him in the suit he wore to my brother's wedding, see him lying motionless and still never to take another breath, see him in the casket my brother and I spent a half hour choosing versus the "chancellor" or "embry cherry" or "ambassador" except maybe I think this casket is the "ambassador" one of "solid African mahogany" which explains why it costs as much as all of my life savings. I guess I'm only 22 so it makes sense that I don't have too many savings. The casket is "ambassador"... there's an obvious and sick ironic statement I could make here; I could also avoid that very modern-American-writing thing and just say something literally rather than ironically.

I could also avoid all of this and continue watching "24 Hour Restaurant".

Conversation with my father

See, this is the basis of the book in my dreams. This post is the equivalent of scratch work, like a rough rough draft. My math scratch work is just a bunch of numbers vertically, with some equations and thoughts and many question marks and capitalized words stretching diagonally across the page, hoping to head toward a solution. Generally I number my scratch work pages in hopes of finding some sort of narrative thread between all of them, and this thread is in fact the solution, more or less. With some editing. So here goes the scratch.

My father just said to me that I am the first person he has told his life story to, and we only had a one hour conversation. My father entered the war in 1965. Today is July 10, 2010. It has taken him 45 years, two wives, five children, and three grandchildren to find someone to talk to. And there's so much to say. Here's another quote. "Our conversation as 90% me and only 10% you. But you talked about knowledge, and I talked about... memories." These words do not convey what I want them to say, and that is because it's too difficult for me to translate both my emotions and the Vietnamese onto the page. Generally I can handle my own life and walk it into ink, but even with French I find it hard to transfer the emotions. For instance, in our conversation I kept trying to say 'a mon avis' and I couldn't figure out how to say that in either English or Vietnamese. Anyway.

My paternal grandfather died when my father was a baby. He was buried on the other side of a war zone, and my father and his mother could not visit his grave. In fact, the first time my father visited his birth father's grave was in 2004, when he first visited Vietnam with my two elder brothers with the same name. This is old news.

My grandmother remarried (also, she died last year and no one bothered to tell me for weeks) and had five more children. Dad ended up caring for the first three as they grew older, as his stepfather was at work and his mother was busy rearing babies. He had three stories about his three siblings. Watermelon, being sick, and calling your kindergarten teacher a bitch.

He was in the air force for 12 years. Enlisted when he was 20, in 1963, entered the war at 22 in 1965. Married in 1967, had my older sister in 1968. My oldest brother in 1969. Left Vietnam in 1975. Three stories of almost dying. One, the short runway. Two, the commercial flight. Three, the mid-air near-collision. A lot of bamboo.

In 1975, met my mother in Minnesota. Married in 1976. Had a child in 1977, named after his dead son left in Vietnam. Had another son in 1983. A daughter in 1988 (that's me!). When did he find out that my half-siblings were still alive? Not before I was born, certainly. I met my half-brother, I remember it so clearly. I was in my room, which means my oldest brother had gone to college already. So I was at least seven years old. A nice man made me an origami flower and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. That's it really.

Everything I wrote earlier, about our insignificance and how it's hard for me to take my life, my problems and my sufferings seriously? Straight out of Dad's book. Because he has actual problems, but they're nothing compared to some other peoples'. And nothing compared to our places in the universe.

Therapy

Sometimes when I strolled into the student mental health offices I was sure that nothing was wrong with me, that I had come here just out of some weird fluke in the previous weeks, that I was fully capable of dealing with life's hurdles without regularly falling to pieces. My cheery outlook was always evident in the usual preliminary questions, how was your week are you keeping up with schoolwork are you sleeping alright. And then the therapist would ask how my parents were doing.

If you want to see me cry, you just need to ask me sincerely how my parents are doing. Or more specifically, how my father is doing. Ask about what he does with his day-to-day life, inquire about what makes him happy, tell me you hope his health is holding up. Just thinking about him nowadays brings tears to my eyes. I'll probably smile and blandly murmur something about how he's alright, he has a few grandkids now, he gets sick sometimes but that happens when your'e older. Push me a little bit and I'll break down. His days are spent in the two rooms of our apartment, either sitting on the futon staring at the muted television or lying on the bed staring vacantly at the ceiling. Nothing seems to make him happy, but then again, few things ever did. According to him, opening the refridgerator makes him sick, wearing anything less than full Minnesota winter gear on a trip to the grocery store here in sunny Southern California makes him sick, and if I open the front door too quickly, the slight gust of wind will make him sick.

It's not so much the old-man grumbling that gets to me, it's the fear that lies behind it all. He's afraid to leave those two small rooms, afraid to venture outside, afraid to talk to people. I've seen him stumble through ordering a meal at Boston Market and get angry at himself for the rest of the day for not handling it well. He doesn't answer the house phone, ever. I ask my parents why they even have a house phone if they never answer it, but they claim it's for emergencies. It's very evident why he chose to commit himself a few weeks ago, as anyone would go a little crazy from spending all day everyday in a tiny apartment with few distractions for months on end.

I can see two reasonable options here, neither of which will actually occur. One, I stay home from graduate school for an indeterminate amount of time, spending most of my days with Dad and giving him a social vent, hence helping his general mental health. I can also persuade him far better than any other family member to get outside and do things, like visit his grandchild. But I and everyone else in my family knwos that I won't do this. Two, I somehow find a nursing home with a Vietnamese translator that I and Mom approve of. This will also not happen. This is something that everyone deals with, but normally it's when they're in their 40s, not in their 20s. Boo-hoo life is so unfair. Boo-hoo why do these things happen to me, boo-hoo I am so special and alone and significant in my troubles.

This is why I struggled so much in therapy. Because yes, these are legitimate issues. My father is aging and someone needs to take care of him. But I cannot acknowledge the seriousness of this issue in my life, since my little life seems so insignificant to me. All these words, all this sound and fury, for nought. All my plans, options, worries... they disappear when I think about, well, anything at all. I can't take my own life seriously. Because it's just, well, mere existence.

Title of the blog

Quote from Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky. (This is in the epilogue):

"Vague and objectless anxiety in the present, and in the future a continual sacrifice leading to nothing—that was all that lay before him. And what comfort was it to him that at the end of eight years he would only be thirty-two and able to begin a new life! What had he to live for? What had he to look forward to? Why should he strive? To live in order to exist? Why, he had been ready a thousand times before to give up existence for the sake of an idea, for a hope, even for a fancy. Mere existence had always been too little for him; he had always wanted more."

What have I to look forward to? Sometimes I find myself staring off into space, picturing the film of the rest of my life. I finish my studies, I publish my dissertation, I fall in love a few times, I marry, I travel, I eat, I write, I stare off into space picturing the future. And this list, this catalog of Polaroids from the future, always seems so bleak to me. So empty, so meaningless, so full of apathy. There's nothing real to hold onto, there's nothing incredible about this one small life. And I know that this is my life and it's the most valuable thing in the world to me, but I place no value on this movie. Two stars, if that. But there's only one theatre and there's only one screen; this is what we get. We get mere existence. And we hope that it's enough.

Tastes like summer

Yesterday Dad didn't want to cook lunch so we drove to Boston Market and ate there. Dad has only eaten Vietnamese food for maybe seven years now, so this was a surprise to me. That's when he told me about the hospitalization, and I realized that we were at good old Boston Market as a direct result of nostalgia, fear of aging, and acceptance of helplessness.

Nostalgia: growing up in Minnesota, we ate Boston Market pretty regularly when Dad didn't feel like cooking in the winter. While I enjoy my rotisserie chicken as much as the next gal, I always looked forward to summers. In the summer, the local boy scout troops would set up the sausage stand in front of Cub Foods. After grocery shopping with your cranky kids on a hot summer day, you could get a fresh-grilled bratwurst (or even better, a Polish potato sausage), a bag of chips, and a can of soda for one dollar. ONE DOLLAR! Needless to say my entire family loved this deal, and this was one thing we would never fight about.

Nowadays my friends and I joke about my second sausage stomach. When I visited Berlin for a few days, I could eat three full meals a day and several sausages on the side. I love sausages, bratwurst, knockwurst, weinerwurst, weisswurst, bierwurst, and especially potato sausage. Sometimes I wonder about my endless capacity for sausage, but I'm pretty sure it's just like any Southern Californian's endless capacity for summer. It's hard to get sick of something with so many good memories attached to it, especially if it's a food item. Sausages taste like summer taste like family taste like no fighting, if only for the length of time it takes to drive to Cub Foods.

Fear of aging: my parents are older. My mother was 38 when she had me, my father 45. This isn't so crazy if you realize that my father was 25 when my half-brother was born and 23 when my half-sister was born. Maybe he married the love of his life when he was 21. My mother married the love of her life when she was 26. Too bad those two sentences don't refer to the same event. They divorced in 1988, either shortly before or shortly after I was born.

These are just facts. But we're all going to be old people someday, maybe senile, probably cranky, with an abundance of physical and mental ills. That's a fact too. Just because something is a fact doesn't mean you have to acknowledge it, or accept it, or tell it to your kids before they're teenagers.

Acceptance of helplessness: when I asked why he had my mother drive him to the hospital, which then took him in an ambulance to another one, my father tried to explain. My Vietnamese translation will do very poorly here. He said that his thoughts were blocked, and it was too difficult to live with. That's when he knew he had to go. But when I asked why he came back from the hospital, he said that the people there were not there at all, really. And so he had to go.

Did it help? Is this just how growing older works? Do things just get worse?

As I said, my father hadn't eaten non-Vietnamese food in several years, but there we were at Boston Market. The medicines had made him paranoid of food prepared by others, the aging made him afraid of change. Or maybe it's the other way around. In any case he had American food at the hospital and felt fine, and he also realized that now was the time for some changes in his life. So there we were, at Boston Market, having a calm conversation about falling apart. My mashed potatoes tasted like summer.

On Another Plane

So allegedly I'm starting this blog because several people, including two of my closest friends and a psychiatrist, have told me that I have to write. But really I'm starting it because I told me that I have to write. I used to have a plain black journal that I brought with me everywhere, tucked into my teddy bear's arms. I tried to write in it on a regular basis, but it ended up just being my "airplane book." Seeing as I'm up in the air at least once every four months, I figured I could just vent all the emotions and events of the past several weeks into the book then instead of whiling away my time staring out the window. The thing is, every single time all I wrote about was what I was seeing out the window. I wrote about the geometry of farmland America, the pillows of marshmallow fluff above the Atlantic, the mysteries of impenetrable darkness over the Pacific. I wrote about European city skylines, Vietnamese rice paddies, and the desperation you could see in Detroit's neighborhoods even from 10,000 feet above.

Then one day I lost the book. I left it on a plane from Budapest to Frankfurt, or maybe it was Budapest to London. And I haven't written anything in an airplane book since. Until two days ago, in transit from Raleigh to LAX. I was, as usual, staring out the window, thinking about my very-near future as a graduate student in mathematics. The sun was setting, and since we were flying due west, it had been setting for two hours and didn't look like it would ever go down. And then I realized: the poetry that lies behind my proofs, trapped in an airplane book somewhere, has never and will never leave me. So I wrote this on my boarding pass, right over my seat assignment (11F) and flight number (1069):

Looking out yet another airplane window over the wing (a Boeing 757 is over 150 feet long and the wing takes up about 15 feet of that length, but somehow I am always sitting over it) at yet another seemingly-endless sunset over the actually-endless horizon, I suddenly realize I am looking at perfection. The clean, smooth metal line and regular heartbeat of red warming lights sit at the Golden Ratio, the Holy Grail of angles, to jaggedy layers of mountain, blood-orange blood, spilled Hi-C, and slow tears in autumn before a slowly darkening sky. There is no contrast here, no good Mother Nature and villainous Technology. Sorry Ted Kaczinsky. We are part of this world and it is part of us. Frank Lloyd Wright had some of it right when he build houses to meet landscapes. But landscapes were also built to meet us, and we were created with tools and power to change both the land and ourselves to live in this harmony. This metallic, striated melding that tastes of warm honey mixed with aluminum, this meeting of man and nature.

The Sofitel

Memories are such a funny thing. They shimmer and change right before our minds' eyes, until we're not sure we remember anything at all correctly. Our memories are "proof" that time moves forward, that the past happened. But I sure as hell wouldn't call on my memory to the witness stand, since if I know her she'll look me straight in the eye and lie through her teeth during the cross-examination.

I am five years old. Somehow I haven't even noticed that my father has been away. My mother packs up us three kids (or is it two now, has my oldest brother grown out of our house and headed to California for freedom and college already?) in our brand-new 1994 (or is it '92?) green Windstar. I'm excited. I don't know where we're going but I can see the fancy old Sofitel as we pull in. We've never been to such a fancy bakery before. Mom tells me to choose one of the shiny pastries behind the glass case. I pick a chocolate eclair; we've had those before from the grocery store. My brother chooses something with uncountably many layers of buttery crust. We don't get to eat our intimidatingly expensive treats though, "they're for your father" my mother says in don't-argue-with-me, no-nonsense Vietnamese.

We hop back on the freeway and take the exit toward the Southdale shopping center. Did you know that it's the oldest indoor mall in America? There's something ironic and maybe even sick about the fact that the largest mall in America, the veritable Mall Of America, is in the very same town as this respectable ode to mass consumerism. I've been to both countless times, and in the end, they're both just big ol' malls with elevators and fountains and cheese samples. Across the street from the mall, I can see Fairview Hospital, where I was born. My mother likes pointing out the hospital every time we drive past, remembering how my father took the boys fishing that day and she had to give birth to me, the baby girl, all by herself. My parents were in a rough patch back then, or maybe it was just rougher than usual. I finally wonder where my father is.

And here is where my memory fails me. I know we didn't drive past the hospital to the mall; instead we stopped at an annex of the hospital and took our pastries in. We must have signed in at a desk. Maybe Mom was blinking very quickly, trying to hold back her tears from her children. Maybe she was snapping at the nurses so she could see her ex-husband as soon as possible. I'm sure that as we entered the quiet room with floral curtains, they looked at each other over our rapidly-growing heads with some silent acknowledgement of their love for each other. I think I remember my father in the bed, wearing a hospital gown. But I'm not sure.

Sixteen years later, I can see her, my memory, perched eagerly on the edge of my coffee table and ready to gab on and on about this scene and others. But she's lying through her teeth. It wasn't until years after 1996 that I learned that my father had been committed to a mental hospital after an angry incident at work, and was deemed too mentally incompetent to work. I knew that now Daddy got to stay home and play with me, and he loved me more than anyone else in the whole world, and that when he and Mom fought it was probably because Mom was just being annoying. Not because Daddy literally could not handle his anger after twelve years in the South Vietnamese Air Force and twenty more as a refugee in a cold and isolating new country. His anger shaped my childhood, it bubbled and brewed around me and sloshed within me. In my veins ran his outrage at his former employer, his rage at his impotence to provide for his family, his hatred of everything holy in this world that let his first wife and son and daughter die in a meaningless war.

She looks me straight in the eye and lies through her teeth. He ate the Sofitel pastries and said they were delicious, and he eventually came home and stayed with me because he loved me so much.