I used to think that I grew up with poor role models for love, and that I had to learn how to love from movies. My mom and dad slept on different beds. She would say things like, “I could never love your dad.” My mom would scream whenever my dad tried to hug her. I had never seen them hold hands. Physical intimacy was rarely shown in my family, and I wondered if that’s why I have always been afraid to show it.
For years, I had thought that our parents didn’t love us. There were a lot of unkind things said to my sister, to the point where she felt the need to run away and live at her friend’s house for some long duration of time. I was a hikkikomori, having trouble maintaining in-person friends, failing classes and was more adamant on staying at home on the computer. At some point in our lives, our parents lost any expectations that they had for us. We already failed them. And, for a lot of reasons, I was scared of my dad. For those same reasons, I found it hard to feel anything for my dad.
My dad’s kidney failed around the time I was born. That failure led to a chain reaction of failures in his body, wreaking havoc on his heart, eyes, and lungs. My mom told us the stories of waiting hours in the emergency room with him, taking him home in a wheelchair, bathing him and helping him go to the bathroom. My sister told me how my mom’s marriage with my dad was supposed to ensure her a rich and easy life, that my mom expected to be a trophy wife, that they systematically went into a marriage without love, and how she now had to fish for cans out of the food pantry and buy clothes at Goodwill. I don’t think it is true that my mom doesn’t love my dad.
In 2019 my dad’s kidneys failed again, and he needed a transplant. When my dad got his second kidney transplant, his heart had flatlined during surgery. The doctors told them that there was a chance he might not survive. My mother and aunt both waited, quietly, in the hospital. They held each other’s hands. My mom waited, and cried.
I find it hard to believe that someone who doesn’t love the other person would wait for hours at the hospital, crying. That someone who doesn’t love the other person, would wash and bath the other person, would help them shit and piss when they couldn’t get out of the bed. That someone who doesn’t love the other person would lay in bed and calm the other person, when he had night terrors and screamed “Mom!” after his mother’s funeral. Even after the obligation of “staying in it just for the kids” had expired, she would stay. For richer, for poorer. In sickness, and in health. Other people in our extended family divorced, or ran away with a mail-order bride – it would have been the easy thing to do for my mom, but she didn’t.
When I visited Vietnam, I found so many different variations of love. Someone who was married but waiting for their real love. Love thrown away through an act of drunk lust. Love that lasted far after the other person’s death. Confused, one-sided love, awaiting for the other person’s answer. Love, served with kumquat and a smile when I accidentally addressed myself as “Con.” Love, beautifully imperfect. On a Saigon balcony overlooking city lights, wine in hand, a girl tells me how “Yeu”, “Thương”, and “Thích” are so naively translated to “Love” and “Like” but cannot express the worlds of differences that sit between each letter. On the backdrop of all this, I listened to an audiobook of Ocean Vuong’s, “On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous.” Ocean also speaks of the intricacies of “Yeu”, how those words are almost never said through Vietnamese mouths – but instead expressed through hands.
I remember my dad coming home and surprising me with my first guitar, after seeing me playing Guitar Hero. I remember him coming home with video games and VHS tapes of Pokemon that he borrowed from the library. I remember the bowls of fruits my parents would cut and bring to me when I was so busy in the middle of playing a video game. I remember my dad showing his friend a drawing that I had made, and telling them that I was an artist. I remember showing my mom Wingstop for the first time, and her offering to buy me some when I got sad. “You like this right?” I remember all those countless days my mom would take us to Golfland. I remember, at 8 years old, waiting in the kitchen until 2 AM when my mom would come home from work, and I would run up and give her a hug. I remember, at 28, giving my dad a hug for the first time. I remember going to the hospital to visit my dad the day after he almost died. “He keeps asking for you,” my mom told me. I walked in and saw a giant grin on his face. I felt the net sum of everything that he did for me in my life, the good and the bad, and the weight of it all pulling down my heart. “Thương”
Years before, we had taken a family outing to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. My parents had gone off on their own while we stayed back on the sand. My sister was holding a stable job, and I just recently got a promotion at work. In incredible unlikelihood, squeezed out of the pressure chamber of a dysfunctional family, we managed to carve normal and stable lives. In the distance, my sister and I could see the silhouettes of my mom and dad, walking across the boardwalk. I could see it, “Yeu.” For the first time, on that beach, backdropped against an orange setting sun, I saw my mom holding my dad’s hand.
Hollywood designs love stories to fit into a 2-hour movie. The one between your parents is a flower that took a few decades to bloom. https://listverse.com/2013/08/11/10-ridiculously-slow-to-bloom-plants/