November 23, 2025
A few days after Dad passed away, we found love letters hidden among his things. One of them said, I like Dota and I like peaches, but I love you more. I will quit smoking and lose weight for you. The happiest days of my life are the ones that begin with you at the breakfast table.
My parents were not a loving couple. At 27 and 26, they were embarrassingly old by the standards of their small Chinese port town. All four of my grandparents applied enormous pressure to bring them together.
My father fulfilled the family responsibilities that fell on his shoulders without any complaint. She didn’t get along with my mother or my younger brother, but it wasn’t too bad; He often worked away from us (for months and even years), mostly in China, recently redacted, in another Canadian city.
The physical distance between us for most of my life has made his passing easier for me to accept. I call him dad here but I have not lost a father, I have lost a man who was actually a father to me. He was often there, missing all my graduation and birthday parties. Once when I was sick he took care of me. His hands were gentle on me, and while I lay in bed suffering from a fever, he told me stories from Chinese history. I was seven years old. That’s pretty much the only memory I have of him being my father.
Still, we were both close in our own ways. Sometimes, both of us would go for long walks together. After fifteen or twenty minutes of silence, he would loosen up a bit and begin to tell me about the depths of his sorrow and his disappointment in his way of life. I was good at not taking it personally. I didn’t think she ever had a chance to be happy or authentic in her entire life. He sacrificed his life so I could do this.
I always thought that if he had a chance at happiness, he would be the gentle, funny, and sensitive aesthetic that I sometimes get glimpses of, rather than the arrogant Chinese patriarch that others demand.
Except he finally had this chance. Her boyfriend and I met shortly after her death. Edward lived in Redacted, the town where my father had worked for the past year or so.
Edward told me their story very hurriedly. She and my father had been seeing each other for three years, and had specifically agreed to leave a year and a half ago. They met while he was in China and there was an instant spark between them, something special and precious that neither of them had felt before. Dad convinced him to apply for a university program in Canada, so that he could eventually get permanent residency in Canada. So Edward, aged about 30, sold his thriving business and his home and moved to a foreign land to be with her.
Edward believes they are engaged, or something; They lived together, visiting open houses every weekend with the intention of buying something together, and there was an understanding that Dad would soon move out, divorce my mother, and live with Edward in the open for the rest of his life.
Edward gave me some pictures of his father, and I couldn’t believe that they were of the serious, sad man I knew. He smiles at them all, glowing with happiness, his smile brighter than I have ever seen in my entire life. I glance over at Edward, the man who took all those impossible photos. The person he was looking at.
My mind keeps going back to Boskovich’s installation, that single box fan behind the plexiglass. I imagine the sequence of events from Edward’s perspective: a year of living with the love of his life, and then they suddenly get into a terrible accident and you’re too late to see them one last time, attending the funeral. Your own grief is a different thing because you are away from each other and no one knows who you were to each other. I wish we could have contacted sooner, but Edward is grateful for any permission.
His life in Redacted seemed similarly impossible: a life where my father spent money on treats he never had at home (Häagen Dazs ice cream, Honeycrisp apples, nice shoes) and left the house on a regular basis to explore the city with his favorite person. A life where he felt safe enough to ask for kisses and hugs because he knew they would be provided, even live like Playfully. I always knew that at home all he had to do was sit numbly near the television set.
And there was a new hurt, but it was pleasant, imagining what life could have been like in ten years, a life I had never imagined before; Dad lived happily with Edward in a nice new house, where I would often go, shoulders sagging and smiling, and we would get a chance to talk, In fact to talk.
According to Edward, my father had known at least since his university years that he liked men. Then again, this keeps it in the closet for about forty years; Just thinking about it makes me feel a kind of dizzying claustrophobia.
I came to mother many years before I came to father. When I did this, Mom told me it wasn’t a good idea to come to Dad, because he was very traditionalist and she didn’t know how he would react. But I came to him anyway, one quiet afternoon when I visited him in China, because I felt our relationship was good and he could handle it, and I wanted him to know this about me.
When I did, she took it well. He told me that even though the path I walk is painful, He will be there for me, and the most important thing is to find Him xin fu One should not live one’s life according to someone else’s expectations. In my startled relief I ignored the illusion. I felt so grateful to have that understanding, a precious gift I had no expectation of receiving. Now, I just feel missed by the conversations we never got to have, and sad for the life he never got to live.
These days, Dad lives in a box made of cherry wood in my living room, because Mom did not want to keep him in the house after the truth came out. So when Edward comes to visit her, he gets the chance to see her one last time and say goodbye. She was holding the box in her arms and crying, shedding more tears and emotions than her biological family, and I ran to my room in the evening to give them some privacy.
Did I mention pilgrimage sites? We have established them in our culture for the dead. We had our own, a formal thing in a cabinet, and we knelt before it as we were supposed to, provided there were the right number of kovtos. Edward shared his photos with me. It spread all over his dining table. It contained packets of cards of the brand he liked best and his favorite pieces of meat and wine with which he ended the day. Every morning, he would sing his favorite songs to my dad. I didn’t know my father’s favorite cuts of meat. I didn’t know he drank alcohol. I didn’t know he listened to music.
So of course I let them say goodbye to each other. When I walked out of my room the next morning, he was still fully dressed on my sofa, not touching the bed, staring blankly at the box in his lap. It was glowing red in the morning sun. He got up as soon as I came to him, gently placed my father back on the blanket, and then stood calmly on a perfect parade rest in front of him and me arranging breakfast for both of us. His return flight was that afternoon.
He says, “I don’t know how to thank you for all this.” A chance to say goodbye. He was really proud of you, he talked to me about you all the time. They never told me you were gay. Edward told me that Dad planned to go back in a few weeks and he wanted to tell me everything before he left, but he was worried about how I would take it. I don’t ask Edward how many times before he had resolved to tell me.
Because you see, my father was a coward. Mom started asking for a divorce when I was a teenager, and Dad was the one who always said no. he will complain His The mother, a traditionalist, made sure to nudge her daughter to get back in line. There was no room for him in his family and his culture, so he used her as a shield to ensure that he would escape scrutiny. Gradually, we found evidence of other cases dating back decades. Of course my mother did not want him in the house.
I sometimes sit near my father and make sure he always has a bowl of fresh fruits. Fifty-seven years, most of them suffocating and miserable, the last three of them passed with such joy that his smile absolutely brightened.
he wasted his whole lifeMy mother told me, the evening we received the love letters. His whole life, and mine too.
(Disintegration)
#diary #longform