In 2010 I turned 19. Phone cameras were trash. My non-phone camera was trash.
I had lost a bunch of weight the summer before and was catching up on all the young person things I hadn't done when I was shy & chubby, like wearing a bikini. I published my first poems.
That summer I was mostly in Nashville doing research in lab by day and by night going to our local 18+ gay bar drinking & dancing myself into oblivion. That fall I started my senior year in college.
That winter, my mother was dying, and I both knew and didn't know it. She had been sick for 4 years, and I deluded myself into thinking it would go on that way forever--her being sick and cranky and a little suffocating but alive.
In the next decade, my mother would die, and no one in my family would talk about it. I would move to San Francisco and start and finish my PhD program, then my first long-term full-time office job. I would finally start dating. I would spend most of this time lost & alone & depressed and do a lot of reckless things to cope. I would have a lot of firsts. I would find my way back to writing. I would publish more poems and a handful of essays. Cameras would get better. Social media would get worse.
This last decade tested me like no other. So many times, I wasn't sure I would make it, & I wasn't sure I wanted to. I would not relive my early 20s for anything. At 28, I can't imagine how much better and worse things will be, so here's to 2020 simply being new & different.
In this first photo, my father is 27, a bit younger than I am now. The next two are undated, but I've tried to roughly order these in reverse chronological order. In the fourth photo, he is 16 practicing martial arts, then 13 climbing a tree, then 8 with his sister and parents, then 4 with both his older siblings and his mother.
Between the first and final photos, he (like my mother) spent years in a reeducation camp during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, performing manual labor in the countryside. His brother got out in time to start his academic career uninterrupted. His favorite person, his sister, died unexpectedly. There will still be many more difficulties ahead that he can't even imagine at 27.
I don't usually post things about my father. Our relationship has not been easy, and I think I'll spend the rest of my life processing it. As an adult, I am trying to remember (and grieve) these earlier, more hopeful versions of him & the difficult hand he was dealt, to explain the person he became. I am slowly learning to hold compassion for my mother and my father and myself side by side.
