a few days after dad died, we found the love letters, hidden away among his things. one of them said, i love dota and i love peaches, but i love you more. i will quit smoking and lose weight for you. the happiest days of my life are the ones that start with you across the breakfast table from me.
my parents were not a love match. at 27 and 26, they were embarrassingly old by the standards of their small chinese port town. all four of my grandparents exerted enormous pressure to force them together.
my father fulfilled the familial obligations heaped on his shoulders without complaint. he didn't get along with my mother, or my younger brother, but this wasn't too bad; he often worked away from us (for months and even years on end), mostly in china, more recently in redacted, another canadian city.
the physical distance between us for most of my life has made his passing easier for me to come to terms with. i call him dad here but i didn't lose a dad, i lost someone who was abstractly a father to me. he was more often gone than there, had missed all of my graduations and birthday parties. there was one time he took care of me when i was sick. his hands on me were gentle, and he told me stories from chinese history while i lay feverish in bed. i was seven. this is approximately the only memory i have of him being a dad to me.
still, the two of us were close in our own way. sometimes, the two of us would go on long walks together. after fifteen minutes of silence, or twenty, something would loosen in him and he would start to tell me about the depths of his sadness and the disappointment in the way his life played out. i was good at not taking this personally. i didn't think he ever had a chance to be happy or authentic, his entire life. he sacrificed himself so i could.
i always thought that if he had a chance at happiness, he would be the gentle, funny, and sensitive aesthete that i caught glimpses of sometimes, instead of the bullheaded chinese patriarch others seemed to demand.
except it turns out he did have this chance after all. his lover and i ended up meeting soon after his death. edward lived in redacted, the city that my dad had worked in for the past year and a bit.
edward tells me their story, all in a rush. he and my dad had been seeing each other for three years, and had agreed to go exclusive a year and a half ago. they met while he was in china, and there was an instant spark between them, something special and precious that neither of them had felt before. dad convinced him to apply for a university program here in canada, to eventually get permanent residency in canada. so edward, in his 30s, sold his flourishing business and his house, and came to start over in a foreign land for the sake of being with him.
edward reckons they were engaged, or something like it; they lived together, toured open houses in redacted every weekend with every intent to buy something together, and there was an understanding that dad would soon come out, divorce my mother, and live in the open with edward for the rest of their lives.
edward gave me some photos he had of my dad, and i could scarcely believe that they were of the grim, sad man i knew. he beams in all of them, glowing with joy, his smile more incandescent than i've ever seen in my entire life. i steal glances at edward, the person who took all those impossible photos. the person he was looking at.
my mind keeps stuttering to boskovitch's installation, that single box fan behind plexiglass. i imagine the course of events from edward's point of view: a year living with the love of your life, and then they are suddenly gone in an awful accident and you are too late to see them one last time, to attend the funeral. your own grief is an isolating thing because you are closeted and no one else knew who you were to each other. i wish we had gotten in touch sooner, but edward is grateful to be allowed any affordance, at all.
their life in redacted seemed similarly impossible: a life where my dad splurged on the treats he never did at home (hagen dazs ice cream, honeycrisp apples, nice shoes) and left the house on a regular basis to explore the city with the one he loves. a life where he felt safe enough to ask for kisses and cuddles because he knew they would be provided, even to sa jiao playfully. all i ever knew him to do at home was to sit in a stupor by the television set.
and there was a new hurt, but it was sweet, to imagine the way life could have been in ten years time, a life i've never previously imagined; dad happily with edward in a nice new house where i'd visit every so often, shoulders loose and smiling, and we'd get to talk, actually talk.
according to edward, my dad had known that he had liked men at least since his university years. that makes it almost forty years in the closet, then; just thinking about it makes me feel a sort of dizzying claustrophobia.
i came out to mom years before i came out to dad. when i did, mom told me that coming out to dad was not a good idea, because he was such a traditionalist and she didn't know how he would react. but i came out to him anyways, one quiet afternoon when i visited him in china, because i thought our relationship was good and that he can handle it, and i wanted him to know this about me.
when i did, he took it well. he told me that though the path i am on is a painful one, he would be there for me, and that the most important thing was to find xin fu in life, not to live your life in accordance to the expectations of anyone else. in my staggering relief i did not notice the confusion. i just felt so grateful to have had that understanding, a precious gift that i did not have any expectation of receiving. now, i feel only bereft of the conversations we never managed to have, and grief for the life he never got to live.
dad lives in my living room these days, in a box made of cherry wood, because mom didn't want him in the house after the truth came out. so when edward visited, he got to see him one last time, and say goodbye. he held the box in his arms and wept, spilling more tears and emotions than his biological family managed to, and i escaped to my room for the evening to give them some privacy.
did i mention the shrines? we set them up for the dead in our culture. we had ours, a formal thing in a cabinet, and we had knelt in front of it like we were supposed to, given the correct number of kowtows. edward shared with me pictures of his. it sprawled over the entirety of his dining table. it had packs of playing cards from the brand he liked best and his favourite cuts of meat and the wine he finished off the day with. every morning, he would play my dad's favourite songs to him. i didn't know my dad's favourite cuts of meat. i didn't know he drank wine. i didn't know he listened to music.
so of course i let them say goodbye to each other. when i went out of my room the next morning, he was still fully dressed on my couch, bedding untouched, staring blankly at the box in his lap. it gleamed red in the morning sun. he rose at my approach, put my dad back on the mantle with gentle hands, and then stood quietly at a perfect parade rest in front of him as i managed breakfast for the two of us. his flight back to redacted was that afternoon.
i don't know how to thank you for all this, he says. the chance to say goodbye. he was really proud of you, he spoke about you to me all the time. he never told me that you were gay. edward tells me that dad had plans to go back to redacted in a few weeks time and that he wanted to tell me everything before he left, but he was anxious about how i'd take it. i don't ask edward how many times he'd made the resolution to tell me before.
because you see, my dad was a coward. mom had started asking for divorces by the time i was in my teens, and dad was the one who always said no. he would complain to her mother, a traditionalist, to ensure that she would berate her daughter back into line. his family and his culture had no place for him, so he used her as a shield to make sure that he would be spared the scrutiny. slowly, we found evidence of other affairs, going back decades. of course my mother did not want him in the house.
i sit by my dad sometimes, and i make sure he always has a bowl of fresh fruit. fifty seven years, most of them suffocating and miserable, the last three of them shot through with so much joy his smile absolutely glows.
he wasted his entire life, my mom said to me, the evening we found the love letters. his entire life, and mine as well.