Home Dysfunctional Home March 27, 2008

Getting me to agree to visit my family in Michigan isn’t an exact science but well-proven methods are often involved.
 
Phone calls which increase in both frequency and urgency as mere weeks pass begin the whole process. Inquiries of but it been since Christmas! Why you not come home every weekend? It take birth of Christ make you come home to family that love you? 
 
And I not even remember how my oldest daughter look like! It be that long! How about butt, Daughter, it get smaller?
 
Inquires that allow me to appreciate my decision to approach all of this with a good sense of humor and fast typing fingers. Because you can damn well bet that I’m at least getting this shit down for blog fodder.
 
Like some mutated process of adaptation that never evolves completely, their phone calls incorporate a rationale that only achieves convincing a person - namely, me - to want and do the exact opposite of whatever it is that rationale is intended to convince someone to do.
 
Okay, maybe not make sense you come home every weekend. But at least once a month! Mr. Chang daughter come home once a month - you tell me Mr. Chang daughter love her father more than you?
 
Rational reasoning that’s always delivered with a healthy dose of guilt because they’re Asian immigrants and that’s the way Asian immigrants love their children. If your father from China or your mama from Vietnam never gave you or doesn’t continue to give you the kind of emotional shit that keeps you consistently trapped in a padded room of mental self-doubt, then I’m sorry to break the news to you but your parents don’t really love you.
 
When the compromises and the pleas and even the guilt fails to move me, my parents resort to bribery. But we cook you anything you want, they promise, and we not even make fun of you that you eat too much! We take you shopping - don’t you say you need new clothes for the work? How about Ipod or new laptop? We don’t give you car because remember when you have Jeep and you crash in high school parking lot? So painful memory. For you no car never! But Ipod maybe okay. 
 
Because it is, after all, my father. The same man who still likes to remind me of that time in first grade when I received a 4.5 on a scale of 5 in “School Spirit” on my end-of-the-year report card. When grades weren’t even bothered with because you were being measured on things like school spirit. Cold-call drops of painful memories are his forte.
 
I know that once my father - that no-frills immigrant! - is verbalizing purchases of playful items like an Ipod, rather than, say, Madeline Albright’s latest book or a large and obtrusive piece of exercise equipment to go along with the treadmill he bought for me my freshman year to keep in my 12×15 dorm room, then we’re only moments away from my father dumping our entire family into the car and driving to Chicago.
 
And the only thing that would be more inopportune than me making the trip to Small Town, Michigan and finding myself in an arm-length radius from my father is for him and my entire family to come to Chicago, unwarned, and barge my apartment. That houses booze. And mess. And still shows boxes left semi-unpacked from when we moved in once upon a time ago in September.
 
The last time my father arrived in Chicago with little warning was two Octobers ago. Him, and the rest of my family, around 11p.m. on a Saturday night at my apartment - that gorgeous Wicker Park 4-bedroom loft with stainless steel appliances and hardwood floors and a fire place and granite countertops with a place for bar stools. He sniffed a few times disapprovingly and made a comment about the pile of clothes in one corner of my bedroom. Reminded me that a clean room means a clean mind. Then, as my mother, two younger sisters and I giggled together and threw a bag of popcorn into the microwave as we got ready to watch Law and Order: SVU together, my father laid down on a couch and said, with a contemplative and calm smile, that he was ready to drive back to Michigan.
 
At one in the morning.
 
Rather than spend the night and drive back the next day.
 
Once I’m really ready to accept that I will be spending a string of days shaking like someone on their 14th day of a 21-day methadone rehab program, I give my parents the Yes, this weekend, I’ll come home, but you better deliver on that new laptop, knowing full well there will be no laptop. And I prepare myself to be pretty damn happy to be at home - fed, pampered, with access to a car and PARKING LOTS and MEIJER (it doesn’t take this city girl much to get excited) - all with the uneasy bated breath of someone who knows that the ball of gloom and doom that always drops will drop once more.
 
I make my trek today after work and I return on Monday. You? Can anticipate some great fucking stories. Hell, I’ll probably blog while I am at home, unable to suppress all! the! inspiration!
 
Just last night, right as my boyfriend and I were ready to fall asleep, I sat up with a start and yelled Shit! And when my boyfriend asked if everything was all right, I told him that I had just remembered that I would have to attend church on Sunday with my mother and sisters. And when he asked if that was really that bad, I shuddered. I thought of the swarms of mothers who have known me since I was little. Pinches of my cheeks between perfectly manicured fingernails and the exclamations that I get more and more beautiful whenever they see me but wait - is this some extra face fat for them to pinch on to? The shrill questions of when I plan to marry and mirthful reminders that I’m not getting any younger.
 
No. Perhaps it’s not really that bad. However, while I don’t consider myself a very materialistic person, perhaps a new laptop and Ipod aren’t bad ideas. They’ll provide something to occupy my hands once I feel the inevitable urge to gauge the eyeballs in my head with the metal chopsticks that can be found in any self-respecting Korean’s kitchen.
 
 
 
[You can find me and more of my literary abuses at Indie Blogger today. It's a site run by the fantastic, brilliant, and worthy-of-(intense)-idolatry Anastacia. If you haven't checked out IB yet, you must. And if you haven't submitted something, fucking do. Give Stacey the chance to spread your good word. In her name I demand. Amen. And look at that. Maybe I'm ready for church after all.]