Texts from my father

My father has been texting me more recently. Not texts asking how I’ve been but rather glimpse of the internet he has been noticing that supposedly make the world a better — more efficient — place. Speeches, interviews, movie clips in languages he struggles with but wants me to speak fluently in. I imagine him searching up adjectives and expressions that younger generations use to tease each other. A man of above average height for Asians but short for North Americans.

I have not been the type of rebel that choose a career path to prove a point to my parents. Me and my father fight about odd things. He urges me to hustle more but complains that I work too much, sends me motivational quotes but orders me to sleep more than 8 hours. “You must read this,” he writes, it’s so important for you because you don’t know much about the world, and you don’t know what you want, so me and your mother choose it for you. The content of his texts will always coincide with some random career ideas I had mentioned a week or so ago.

He says he wants me to call my grandmother more, but through his social media account. I do miss them, after all, more than they know. Whenever we call, I would tell him to visit my grandparents more and spend more time with them, just as he scolds at me to show his parents that I miss them and that I’m homesick. I was always convinced that he is an angry man.

It’s only since recent years that I’ve come to realize that he uses anger as a tool. Not one that controls me, like I thought when I was younger, but a coping mechanism — for me. To him, maybe, if I didn’t miss him that much, I won’t be sad at all. And if I didn’t have a reason to be attached to him, he probably thought, I wouldn’t miss him at all.

“You need to be capable,” he had always told me, “I’ve always told you since you were a kid. Be capable and the world won’t punch you in the face.” I agreed to him for most part of my childhood. But once I’ve hit my teens, I reminded him that I’m not as useless as he thinks I am.

He didn’t respond then. After a while, he grunts that I never listen to anything he says. “I don’t care. You’ll do whatever you want and it has nothing to do with me. Go ahead,” says the man who was too stressed to let me walk home alone in broad daylight even when I was 17. My father lives in Beijing, in an apartment he bought a few years before he and my mother moved me to Canada. Sometimes when he complains like this, I feel his reluctance and the anxiety over his own vulnerability.

“Do you still fight with your mom?” we talk about my mother a lot.

“Sure,” I said, “She gets sensitive and I would shut down. That’s it.”

“You must understand her,” he pronounces must a bit harder, “she’s stressed too. It’s not easy to be doing so much at the same time. ” Without asking how I’m doing, he would send me those texts and articles and videos, offering help he wishes he had given me, but was too scared that I would one day have to live without it.

“You should tell me if she bothers you too much,” he says about his wife, “You know she’s stressed, and you shouldn’t bother her back, but I’ll make sure she tones it down.” My parents had showed love for each other in their willingness to play villain while raising me.

“Do you want me to visit?” he said unexpectedly, “Dad will be in North Carolina somewhere around March. I can watch your Home Duals.” I told him that it would be too late for a competition that had already happened in October. “Right,” he’d say, ignoring the tabs in his incognito browser, “I’m too busy to check your schedule anways. ”

“Your mother said that I should drop by during Chinese New Year and take you to food.” He texted me in strict grammar.

“I’ll be away for collegiate tournaments, but you should walk around the town.”

“Your town is too boring. Nothing is there. I don’t wanna visit at all,” he would say, “Wanna go on a family trip in London? The tickets are still in my account.” I had to stop typing and catch up on processing his exceptional interest in entertainment and relaxing. “We should bring your grandparents too.”

“I’ll check my schedule, okay? Hahaha, yes we should. I’m so busy right now I wanna cry!“ I made the keyboard fabricate my joy.

I slide my phone across my desk, staring at my slippers, annoyed that I might have made him mad again. Eventually I reached for my phone again, urgently browsing for some internet material somehow relevant to me but not inspiring enough for him to start a new conversation about.

I compromised for a picture I had taken 3 months ago in the library, ”So many books here but none of them useful… I wish they went fully electronic so I can browse through any material I need more efficiently.“ I let out a sigh.

“Stare at your screen less. UV light hurts your eyes.“ Two brief sentences held together by a comma sent with no space in between.

I thought it was so symbolic of our family dynamic. Three East Asians struggling to grasp whether we miss each other or scared to hurt each other more.