My dad called. After 14 months without contact.
Not that I wasn’t expecting it. He e-mailed me two weeks ago (flagged with the little red exclamation point to note that it was important), telling me that he was having a party on New Years. “Can you come and join us?”, it said.
“Us?”
Is he dating now, I wondered. Married?
I sat on this e-mail, unsure of what to say. A little while before this, Merv struck up a conversation with me about fishing. I told him I used to go to this one fishing spot at a lift-lock in Peterborough with my dad, and it made me wonder what I would say if I ever talked to him again. He didn’t even know me when we were on speaking terms, how would he know me now? I’ve changed so drastically in the last year.
We never left things off on bad terms. We just stopped talking to each other, so there wasn’t any animosity, on my part, at least. I never contacted him because I never felt like it, and I was expecting years to go by before he contacted me.
Then he called on the weekend. It took me by surprise. I thought e-mail was a way for him to stay distant, while fulfilling the minimum parental responsibility. I had guests over and was entertaining and somewhat charged up. He started talking to me in Chinese, and I could only reply in English. It was too much for my mind, and I was too much on my guard. So I told him to call me next week.
And he did.
He starting asking me questions, as if he was reading them off a list:
- Is your life busy?
- Are you busy at work?
- Are you dating anyone?
- Have you been home (i.e. where I grew up, and where he lives now) lately?
- Have you dated anyone since your last girlfriend?1
I always keep my distance, because my dad has always killed me with indifference. I tell him things that are important to me, but he never cares, and that’s what hurt me the most. I ask him how to say certain phrases in Chinese, to make him know that I’m interested in the culture. I tell him I’m going to Hong Kong next year with my friends, and I’ll be visiting grandma. No reaction.
He tells me he has Osteoporosis, that his brother has it too, so I should keep an eye out because they’re only now discovering that it runs in the family. Calcium pills with vitamin B to help absorb it. He got a hair transplant that took five doctors and nine hours2.
It’s all a formality to him. No asking if there’s any news, no asking if I’m happy. He poses the generic questions, I give him the generic answers.
And of course, “Are you coming home?”.
I confessed this to Julie, and she was surprised at his audacity in asking me after such a long time without contact. The strange thing is that I never even thought about it like that.
Because I’ve never expected anything more from him.
- He reacted with a bit of surprise to my answer. I wasn’t sure if it was because he expected me to have dated someone, or whether he’s beginning to realize I may not carry on the family name. [↑]
- My dad has always joked about transplanting my hair to his head, because mine grows so fast and thick, whereas his is thin and grey. He’s always dyed his hair black to cling to his youth. [↑]
I obviously don’t know the whole history but it seems to me that he’s trying to reach out without really knowing how.
I know that in my case, my mom is pretty much incapable of showing caring or tenderness and I just assume it’s a generational thing. Her parents sent her to boarding school and so she never learnt it from them.
I personally think he contacted me because it’s what he should do, as society or friends or whoever tells him, not because he knows it’s the right thing to do. It could be a generational thing, it could be a cultural thing, it could be both. However, if, as an outside observer, you get the feeling that he’s trying to reach out to me from what I’ve said, I should pay attention to this.
From my point of view. He’s probing for a crack in your wall. To see if there’s any chance of reconciliation and reviving the father/son relationship.
“I tell him things that are important to me, but he never cares, and that’s what hurt me the most.”
Could this preconception be ruining any chance to another way of interacting with your dad? Because whatever he does, this idea is first and foremost on your mind? Is it blinding you?
If you read just his actions and not his words he did this:
Email you to warn you about contacting you… knowing that you probably don’t want to hear from him. He’s asking politely and bracing to be hurt.
He calls you, without hearing an email reply, putting his ego on the line. You speak to him in English when you always used to speak to him in Cantonese.
He calls you again, risking another dejection.
I mean, how can a dad, who’s so used to the Cantonese culture change fast enough to ask you the right questions? How can he care about you and read your mind when you are from completely different childhood backgrounds?
These are the same questions I am asking myself.
I think it’s hard for Asian parents to sometimes bond with their children. They grew up in a time where you made sure your kids were fed, educated and stayed out of trouble. Keeping them emotionally happy and sound wasn’t exactly a top priority. That makes asian kids who grow up here difficult, because we yearn for that connection but we never get it.
It’s hard dealing with people from another generation and culture, even if they mean well, it could come across as the opposite.
Hello! Hair transplant? He’s feeling like he’s getting older and feeling guilty that he hasn’t connected with you. Just because he has no clue how to relate to you doesn’t mean he doesn’t (somewhere very buried) want to, even if it’s just because he’s realizing he’s slowly approaching a pointless demise.
Whether it’s good for you to respond or not is questionable, because with communication skills like his, he’ll still respond the way he always has, probably not because he wants to, but simply knows nothing else.
My thinking would be to give him a kindness he might not quite reciprocate, and go — but don’t expect anything in return, and don’t critique him for it afterward. If anything good happens, fine; if not, you didn’t invest an emotional fortune.
@Causalien — I admit that I do have preconceptions about our relationship. However, I constantly probe the truth of these ideas by putting myself out there, offering parts of myself that are personal and intimate), if but a little at a time, and seeing how he reacts. I do this because I still harbour the hope that he’s changed, that I’ll have an actual father, and not just a dad. It’s always been the same, even with this phone call; indifference.
I’m guessing you meant he risks another “rejection” instead of “dejection”. I hadn’t actually rejected him, formally or otherwise. He wasn’t risking anything. Besides, even if he was risking such a thing, I’d say that as a parent I would expect nothing less from him.
The reason why I get let down from his inability to read me, is because I’ve broken the cycle of culture stubbornness. And if I was able to, he should have been able to as well. Do you think that, if you were a parent and you moved to another country, you’d have a hard time adapting to another culture, and raise your kids as you were raised? Ask yourself this first.
@Sophia — Making your kids emotionally happy and sound wasn’t a priority at all with my parents. It does completely come across as the opposite of love, to me, at least. And you’re right about the fact that it’s not only cultures, but generations, that have this miscommunication.
@xibee — Actually, my dad has always been one to try these youth-catching things. For years, he’s dyed his hair black. He even got cosmetic surgery once to remove the liver spots from his face.
I wish it was true that somewhere in his subconscious, he wanted to connect with me. But I really doubt it. As Sophia said, his only concern is that I’m well fed, and out of trouble (the education part isn’t an issue anymore).
Even if I stay distant, showing kindness without expecting reciprocation hurts me more than it helps me, because I think of what I don’t have, and grow sad.
This reminds me of the older brother of one of my best friends and neighbor. Their parents are Shanghainese, but the two sons grew up in Wisconsin. Every time we talked, I got the impression he was just going through the motions. He would ask questions like the ones you listed, merely looking off into the distance and not offering any commentary to the plentiful and open responses I gave. I wrote him off as one of those people who just goes through the motions and don’t care really about people.
I got to slowly now him. My friend was fighting leukemia, and for the last 3 or so months when it was clear he was losing, I saw a lot more of him. We spent time working on the funeral presentation and some of the details, and I displaced the feeling of unease because we had a common goal. We later drove my friend’s convertible from New England to Chicago together, which was a rather odd experience.
Since then we’ve spoken a few times, and it’s the same pattern of speech. It throws me, and irritates me, that I can’t read him because he offers back so little. What’s different now is that I know he loved his little brother, one of the best people I’ve ever known, and that puts a human face on his lack of expression. We don’t naturally get along because we have completely different priorities in communicating, and communication is very important to me.
One trick I did learn was to ask him hard questions involving self-reflection and empathy. “What do you think of this…”
I have no problem talking about stuff like that, but he does. He tries, though, to answer. Or he says he doesn’t think it’s important, and that’s OK with me because it’s his opinion. I think it would be different, though, if I thought he was bullshitting me.
Perhaps the Chinese culture has created this distance, to deal with horrifying things like the Cultural Revolution, where art, emotion, and love were replaced by terror and suspicion.
It’s interesting that you say it’s throws and irritates you every time you talk to this father, and he’s not even your father. I suspect it’s much worse when they’re related by blood. I’m a big believer in communication as well, but mine always comes in the form of words, because I’m a terrible reader of body language. A relationship, no matter what kind, is based on communication, and I agree that it’s frustrating when the other person doesn’t offer anything back, because it feels like you’re doing all the work.
Perhaps I should prod my father more, the way you prodded your friends, and ask him questions that can’t be answered with one word. I’m pretty sure that he’ll give me good answers; he’s a smart man. The thing I’m afraid of is that he won’t ask me the same things, because he never has in the past, and it’ll simply confirm how one-sided our relationship is.
For Osteoporosis, vitamin D help to absorb calcium, not vitamin B. Usually women tend to get more of it after menopause due to the hormone known as Estrogen which usually help in absorbing the vitamin D. — Nice site -
I don’t talk to my dad after he disown me cause he can’t afford to take care of me.