It's my dad's birthday today. He's 61 years old.
I just read Nam Le's The Boat last night. How similar are our stories! Perhaps Vietnamese dads are more alike than not.
Perhaps the many upheavals of their generation have erased, forged and subsequently hardened their individuality into something unified. Like sand melted and pressed by the fires of war, escape and reinvention and remade into mirrors that reflect their shared experiences, my dad shares the same sense of guilt, bitterness, powerlessness and rigidity of Nam's dad.
I don't know where we went wrong. Like the tsunami waves that shatter our best intentions, the fissures of our relationship happened way before I recognized the irreconcilable differences. The quakes were there when I was born, when he crowned me as everything his life could not be. I was to be everything that was not given to him, to be his dreams realized, to rectify what history and circumstances had swept away. I was the haves to his coulds, the whats to his ifs.
How existential - that he wanted me to fill the nothingness of his not being.
I love my dad. And he loves me. And we both know that the integrity of our beings is somehow paradoxically and illogically stronger than this great love. We both gape at the same moon, he told me once. We both share the same perfectionist traits, the same love of poetry and nature and laughter and mischievousness. His genes dictate my being. And because I am the part of his flesh and blood that has rejected its host, I am no more than a tumor.
I half wanted to call him today. I wonder if he uses the telescope I got him for his 60th birthday.