Lucky

I reflect on my deviant adolescence and early adulthood, and I wonder what life would have been like for my family if I hadn’t been so lucky. I tested the reach of my ancestors’ protective arms. I am humbled, I can’t believe I survived. Already drunk at 13, I was fearless, audacious, feisty to a point unimaginable in my sober states. I found new ways to give luck the middle finger. Bottomless drinking. Drunk driving. Innocent recklessness. It was as if I were playing tag with death. I resented my family, especially my Papa, and I escaped in drunkenness just as he did. Go figure. I learned from the best.

Our families and relatives were big drinkers. Mama drank regularly with us inside her. We all had a predilection to alcohol. We never lacked lessons on drunkenness from Papa, and it became our refuge. I don’t remember much of my childhood, but his drunken episodes linger with foul clarity.

Our life was full of pretense. A good-looking family, we appeared happy. A shallow extravagance filled the void created by the absence of affection and integrity. A sleek, black Mercedes. A racehorse that never raced. A thousand dollars cash under my pillow for my birthday. Colossal losses at casinos. Our extravagance was borrowed. Our pretense shouted that everything was just alright. It was consistently shattered along with the glasses and ochawan, the cordless phones and remote controls, even my Mama’s ribs. And my childhood. But the pretense was as resilient as any other habit. It would be right back in place the next morning, though more fragile and less convincing to me every time it reset. I learned to feel disgust.

Back to my initial question…if I had run out of luck earlier in life, I wonder how my family would have reacted. If I was dead, would they be more reflective? When I was a premature baby with a high risk of retardation or blindness, did they pray? If I had fallen on the other side of chance, retarded or blind, how would they have treated me? With love? Remorse? Shame? Would they have embraced compassion, or would I have been too heavy a burden to carry? I began life with slim chances at survival or normalcy, and here I am now. Just lucky, I guess.

I haven’t received a single phone call from my parents since I moved to the States 13 years ago. Not on my birthday. Not at the New Year. Not even when my Obachan passed away. Never. I could be dead, sick, or in danger and they wouldn’t know it for months. There must be meaning in this. We exist without each other, except for our brief, annual visits. Without the extravagance, the pretense, nothing is left to fill that familiar void for me. This distanced silence accentuates their vanity. They ignore the problem and replace the feelings with luxurious gifts. That’s the solution they’ve cultivated and carefully preserved. I don’t want another Gucci bag, I just want them to call me.

I write to them. I write about them. I continue to write and there’s no response. Nothing.

Our minds, our memories…

Our minds, our memories, work in convenient ways. Pain fades over time and we’re left only with the faint idea of what we’ve done. With occasional flashbacks. So quick, it passes us by in a blink unless we are aware, wanting to catch it.  Explore it. Rip it open. Back to the pain.

Pieces of Me

On the one hand, I grew up with a strong desire to be just like my mother, Mama I call her. I had a deep, almost possessive love towards Mama to the point where my Onechan, older sister, would tease me, calling me a maza-kon, literally an abbreviation for mother-complex. On the other, I had an intense disgust for her weakness towards my father, or Papa, and prayed I wouldn’t be anything like her as a woman/wife. So dichotomous. So conflicting. A long-running love-hate relationship. As much as I loved and honored her generosity, her giving heart, I think my fear of ending up just like her, abused and powerless, gave birth to a righteous, maybe even religious belief in our differences. Language barriers. A generation gap. Her stubborn closed-mindedness. My stubborn open-mindedness. Her conservative need for stability. My liberal desire for growth. I’m constantly frustrated by her inability and unwillingness to step out to see me, devastated by her apathetic indifference towards me. My thoughts. Feelings. Values. Experiences. Even existence. I hunger. For recognition, maybe even validation. Not just cleanly sorted under her labels, “my baby”, “my youngest daughter”. She denies everything else that I am. But it’s not her fault, nobody is to blame. I’m left with my inner abyss, with this chasm between us. She may never really understand me. Ever. So I give up, it’s shoganai. “It cannot be helped, nothing can be done.” I abhor even the slightest possibility of my future regressing to resemble hers, so I do everything in my power to sail as far away as I can from her island of powerlessness and dysfunction. I bury my hopes in books and education. Wisdom will cure this curse running deep in our blood, our roots. I diligently embark on a journey for Independence, build a temple of self-respect, one accomplishment at a time. I have a relentless urge to metamorphosize into a stronger, surer self. And I choose to live in America, free from societal restrictions and filial obligation. So I think. I’ve run so hard, so far, for so long, yet it’s dawned on me that I may be running in circles. Or more likely, just desperately running away. Away from what is at heart. Away from really looking into my eyes because I know she’s there. I refused to acknowledge it because I feared the power of her voice. But not any longer. I realize this part of her/me I dread will destroy me, will never go away. Unless faced. She lives in me. She is me. A part of Me. Only quietly waiting for the best chance to take Me hostage. Little by little. Eating at confidence and esteem until nothing is left but a sunken face. Still hungry. Craving. Needing. Love. That me plagues Me. And I only empower it by ignoring it. So I look closer. Addicted to staying connected, like another sign of attention is a necessary stamp of validity. Another seduction of approval, a secret key to lock love away. A permission to be me. I feel like mother-earth is slipping under me. Am I losing control? Just so screwed up? I very much may well be. But I won’t ever unscrew these false convictions until I connect with Myself. All parts, including this me. Shifting inconvenient truths back into focus. Because I’m not so different after all from her. The way she gives all of herself to everyone but her self. That is me. How Papa and we, the kids, define her happiness. That’s me, too. Not so different at all. Pieces of Me ready to be acknowledged. Understood. (Consoled? No, not consoled.) Loved.

Excerpt from Essay “Remote Controls”

The next morning would be as any other morning. Normal. Like what happened last night never happened. Like it was just my nightmare. Were they blind? Nothing was “normal” or “the same”. The new beat-up remote. Scratched. Cracked. All taped up as if to “hold it all together”. Inevitably, some parts were missing. Desperate strips of black duct tape camouflaged the damage, bandaged the wounds. It never looked the same. Never worked the same. No easy, one-touch commands any more. Now, it required multiple tries, with more pressure, even needed a little banging before it worked. It just never healed.

And I can say the same for my family. We were never the same. Or, at least, I was never the same. I resented this pretense of a “happy family”. And like the remote, I was damaged. I am damaged. And I will always be damaged. Maybe that is why I remember only in Fragments. Stream of specific but seemingly unrelated images. A montage of broken scraps. Just like Papa’s sporadic surfing, nothing comes to an end; nothing is whole. I feel incomplete because I am incomplete. Without knowing what exactly is missing. Without knowing what those nightmarish nights of fitful fights robbed me of. Love. Normalcy. Self Respect. Honesty. Affection. Dignity. Truth. Trust. Memory. Memory of my childhood I hardly remember. Maybe to forget. Maybe. To hide.

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