A Recap In Your Ass, Part 2: Injustice Is Blind, Too May 12, 2008

Had we been born a family of Greek humorists, my father – he of one seeing eye – may have appreciated the comedy in being called Cyclops from time to time.
 
But, as it were, we were born Koreans. A people who pride themselves on perfectionism, discipline, the use of metal chopsticks, love procured through immediate acceptances into top universities, and a brand of humor that plays like a macabre game of Hot Potato – the main objective being to pass any focus on you and your faults onto a nearby unsuspecting family member as soon as you can, with extra points awarded for verbal bullets directed at nonexistent weight gain or that time you fell off the seesaw you shared with your hefty-and-perhaps-appropriately-named friend, Asia (you know, like the continent) because if you couldn’t tell her you were afraid to sit on a seesaw with her, then it’s only fair you were catapulted off.
 
Everyone being fair game, that is, except for the patriarch himself.
 
I guess in his defense, the story of my father’s lost eyesight is more tragic than humorous: An immigrant in pursuit of the American dream with a wife and two young daughters conducting the mundane task of pruning a small tree in the front yard of his first American business when an errant branch pokes his healthy eye and he is rushed to a hospital where a doctor with malpractice leanings slips and slides with a scalpel too freely and leaves my father almost entirely blind in one eye.

 
It’s the kind of stuff that reeks of injustice and hard yanks at the heartstrings. Of Lifetime Made-For-TV movies dowsed in sepia hues.
 
And, as his children came to learn, the kind of stuff that could add that extra oomph of guilt to already lofty expectations.
 
The story became intertwined with demands to do well in school. To become doctors one day, but - as a twist from that classic Asian demand! – doctors who could fix their father’s eye and restore his sight. A demand that my younger sister followed to Johns Hopkins and I followed to my junior year in high school, when I finally confessed to my parents that I had no desire to apply to Pre-Med programs when it came time to apply to colleges.
 
It led to my parents both not speaking to me for two weeks.
 
A relative period of peace and quiet in my childhood memories.
 
When the speaking resumed, the new future handed to me was to become CEO of big company, maybe Coca Cola or IBM! Or to pursue politics because, surely, the position of Freshman Class President would look fine on any future senator’s resume. But first, law. Yes, law would have to do.
 
And so the story of my father’s eye gained a new spin. While my younger sister pursued a career of medicine to fix the eye that lost a little more of its sight each day, I would become a purveyor of justice and use my father’s eye as my marker for what the kind of injustice I would someday fight in this country looked like.
 
Slightly cloudy, a little withered, and, on its bad days, the provocation of a bad golf game.
 
A part of me could accept this. While the story of my father’s eye served useful in guilting his daughters into hand-picked careers, on a day-to-day basis, my father’s complaints about his injured eye and its implicit frustrations were non-existant. Sometimes, in the car, when he explained with regret how he hadn’t seen that car coming up on his left side that my father nearly crashed into it, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him. A pang of sadness in my heart and a re-commitment to offer this man something that could help him justify his pursuit of a Dream that started off littered with small trees and errant branches.
 
A diploma from Harvard Law School, after all, can still be seen with only one good eye.
 
But it’s been two and some years after my graduation from college and I’m no closer to holding a Harvard – or any – law degree in my hands. By my choosing. And, therefore, it makes sense that the gods who have always favored fathers over their children (Ed. note: Abraham and Issac, for one) decided to step in during my visit to my parents in Michigan back in March and remind me that it’s not really living if I’m not feeling an omnipresent panic that I’m disappointing everyone all of the time.
 
So there I am in the car with my sister to meet our parents for dinner. We are discussing her upcoming plans to apply to medical schools and her consideration of MD-PhD programs. I tease her on the fine job she has done making sure our father’s eye and the horrors committed by that errant branch and the villainous doctor so many years ago will finally meet their remedy and a pause far too long and silent passes after my comment.
 
And this is how I come to learn that it was me that caused my father to become blind in one eye.

 
“How is that possible, though?,” I stammered. ”I remember the day that Ahp-ba was rushed to the hospital. I was outside while he was pruning that damn tree but I wasn’t anywhere near him! And I remember that eyepatch he had to wear for weeks afterwards. He looked like some awful Korean caricature of Zorro with that moustache he used to have.”
 
“Yeah, well, one day shortly after that eyepatch was removed,” my sister reluctantly began, “I guess he was holding you up in his arms, and you had some picture that you had painted at school that you wanted him to see and he wasn’t looking at it so you kept waving it around and you cut his eye with it.”
 
“A first-grade picture is why he’s blind in that eye?” My jaw dropped. “But what about the doctor? The bad doctor?” I protested.

 
“I guess there were two doctors.” My sister paused. “The first one, after the tree incident, did a good job. But Ahp-ba had to go to the hospital again after you paper-cut his eyeball since the eye was still recovering. And that’s the doctor that screwed up his eye.”
 
“So if I hadn’t waved around some first grade piece of watercolor or whatever and poked his eyeball with it, he never would have had to see the doctor that destroyed his eye and caused him to become blind ??”
 
When I relayed the story to my friend Pete once I arrived back in Chicago, he seemed unimpressed. “It was still the doctor that fucked up his eye,” he observed.
 
But, see, that’s not how this works.
 
When my father’s car was rear-ended my sophomore year in high school while he was on his way to pick me up from a golf match, it wasn’t the other driver or the rain or the bad road conditions that were at fault. It was my fault.
 
That’s how this game works.
 
While I find it admirable and somewhat surprising that my father never used this juicy piece of guilt-trip trigger against me in the eighteen or so odd years his eye has been injured, I have to say that knowing he chose to keep this information from me only makes knowing it worst.
 
Had he told me, I could haven chosen to play Card Bitter. I’d still feel guilty, but hey, I’d be a victim too. He terrorized me for something I did as a kid!
 
Because that’s also how this game works.
 
But knowing that he told my sister this a couple months ago as they discussed her thoughts on pursuing surgical in the field of ocular diseases and disorders in some spirit of twisted confidence and bonding and I then unintentionally found out due to my sister’s inability to lie because she considers staying silent actively lying – and yes, we are blood relatives – is sugar icing on the cake tiered with mishaps committed by this eldest daughter with all that potential just going to waste!
 
It’s also a reminder that for all ills my father is, he’s a man that’s sacrificed a lot for his family. Who – rather than throw piles of money to fight a doctor’s malpractice that would have taken tedious amounts of time and maybe ended in a settlement nowhere near what he deserved – chose to save for his daughters’ future college funds. And music lessons. And clothing and housing and food and whatever else our family needed.
 
Who never let me have any idea that I led him to see that doctor who left him blind in one eye.
 
It’s a hard yank at my heartstrings.
 
I remember when I once caught my mother struggling to keep one eye shut as she drove us home from church. This was a while ago. She explained that sometimes she tries to grasp what it must be like for my dad to conduct the mundane tasks we can all do without a second thought.
 
I don’t have to go to those lengths, though. Trying to make sense of the tragic comedy (or is it comedic tragedy?) that sums up life with my father – to  justify the surges of rage that can all too quickly be followed by remorseful waves of gratefulness – can feel all too much like I’m using some kind of single-viewed tunnel vision just to get by, turning a blind eye to everything else.
 
But I see the humor. I have to see the humor. So go ahead and just call me Cyclops when it comes to my emotional baggage.