—
After she left, my father spent a lot of time lying on the floor. I tended to him, coaxing him into bed, yelling at him to wake up. He moved sluggishly and defeatedly, his shoulders slumped as I checked my watch and told him I’d be late for school if he didn’t move faster. I tried to distract him from his pain with movies or shopping or nerding out over Lord of the Rings. But he often turned to me and said with teary eyes, “I wasted my life.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said, holding his hand. “Look, you came from nothing! You came to America! You became successful! You have me, right?”
“But I never should have married her. What was I thinking? Why? Why? And now maybe she’s a lesbian,” he speculated. “She was probably cheating on me the whole time.”
“You didn’t even like her very much. You were always threatening to leave her anyway.”
“But I never would have. Because we’re Chinese. Nobody gets divorced in this family. Too much shame. I’m the only one.”
“Well, look. You still have lots of life left. You’re really smart and funny. And you were withering away in that marriage anyway. She was so boring! Now, we’re gonna make you cool. Let’s go shopping!” I said, hopping around eagerly, yanking on his hand. I made him drive us to the mall, where I forced him to try on a rack of Tommy Bahama Hawaiian shirts. He twirled around in a colorful array of parrots and palm fronds, and I clapped. “Look how young you look! This is more like it!” He giggled and pulled out his credit card.
In this way we survived the next two years together. We had to sell the house and move into a much smaller apartment, so we threw away everything that reminded us of my mother—which turned out to be almost everything we owned. All of her ceramic figurines, all the family albums, the piano, the rattan furniture, the batik prints, the teak chests and the linens inside of them, the Magic School Bus books. I picked out a leather couch, chrome light fixtures, and tiki mugs for our new apartment. The result looked like a fourteen-year-old’s bachelor pad—which, in essence, it was.
I made him a new, absurdist email address that he accepted without question. I talked him through conflicts with his friends and family, advised him through decisions in his job. I even showed up to bar nights with his pals, and they used me as a parlor trick: How many shots could my fifteen-year-old body take without appearing drunk? Before the divorce, my father used to call me a pet name, Noi Noi. It’s a sweet diminutive for girl. He never called me that after the divorce. I was not a girl. I was his caretaker.
But it wasn’t all bad. In some ways, this messiness was a relief. For the first time, nobody meticulously structured our every waking moment, watched us like a hawk to ensure our productivity, or lectured us on our manners. We took our newfound freedom to extremes like a couple of irresponsible college students. We stayed up late watching R-rated movies. I quit all of my extracurriculars, started failing my classes, wore dog collars and miniskirts, and became a tiny, foul-mouthed pirate, spewing all the furious expletives I’d held inside for so long. And I stopped believing in God. I drew Sharpie pentagrams on my wrists and binders. Being virtuous and good hadn’t gotten me anything but a ruined family. I might as well go the other way.
My father also began a delayed adolescence in which he tried to convince me that he’d been a friendly bro the whole time, a frog under a spell who was just now turning back into the prince he was always meant to be.
I made him drive us to art galleries and bookstores in San Francisco so we could become cultured. He took me to Haight-Ashbury, even chaperoned me while I explored the head shops, oohing and aahing over the shiny glass bongs. He told me stories about all the ex-girlfriends he should have married and about getting high in college with a guy named Volcano. We’d always listened to my mother’s soft-rock station growing up, but now on the ride home, we blasted Pink Floyd, chanting, “Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!”
I’m not sure why, but I started affectionately calling him “Poop Dawg” instead of “Dad.” When I yelled, “Poop Dawg!” and he yelled back, “What?” all of my friends would scream with delight.
Our most valuable bonding time was over dinner. My father didn’t know how to cook, so he’d take us out whenever it was time to feed me. And there, over quesadillas at Chili’s, one of us would start. We never used the word “mother.” Never uttered her name. We simply said “she.”
“She never would have let me eat this because she’d say it had too much fat, too much sodium. She was the one always getting sick, yet she worried about everyone else,” he spat.
“What a fucking bitch,” I said way too loudly, and people turned to look, but neither of us cared. “Do you remember all of the times she wouldn’t let me eat dinner because I couldn’t choke down the salad?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t remember that,” he said. “What a horrible woman.”
“Total whore. HUGE whore! Did I ever tell you about the time she beat me for an hour with chopsticks because I didn’t want to eat the Chinese broccoli in my soup?”
He sucked his teeth. “I wish I’d known; I would’ve left her a long time ago,” he muttered, and I knew that was a lie, but it was okay.
* * *
—
Hatred, I learned quickly, was the antidote to sadness. It was the only safe feeling. Hatred does not make you cry at school. It isn’t vulnerable. Hatred is efficient. It does not grovel. It is pure power.
If a kid bumped into me in the hallway, I’d bodycheck him back. This one chola girl gave me a dirty look and I knew she was talking shit about me, so I called her a slut. She spat in my hair, so I crept up behind her as she stood at the edge of a hill and tried to whack her so hard with my tennis racket that she’d roll down it (I failed, luckily). I threw a jar of paint on a girl. A boy called me a goth bitch in math class, so I turned around, said, “I’m not a goth,” and slapped him across the face. A kid wrote “Ab Dominal” when he meant “Anno Domini,” so I doubled over laughing and called him a fucking dumbass, and, come on now, why are you walking away? Well, fuck you anyway.