Monthly Archives: September 2016

Sadness

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I arrived back at JFK at about 4:50am; the winds were in my favor overnight, and so our plane landed about an hour and ten minutes earlier than scheduled. I grumbled at the idea of going back to the office on time, so I decided to sleep a bit longer and come into the office late.

The first full day back in New York is always strange for me. It’s me, back in the freedom that New York City provides, away from the prying, manipulative hold of my parents. It’s away from all the clutter of my parents’ house, the endless screws and paper clips and razor blades that are scattered all over the floors in certain rooms; it’s also away from the darkness that is increasingly becoming my parents’ house.

My bedroom always looks a little more depressing every time I come home. It’s the bedroom that Ed and I grew up in, where both of our beds still stand, where the frames of photos of us and our parents are turned inward, looking stupidly organized (“the light will eat them up and they will fade!” my dad insisted, when he turned the photos away from frontal view. In other words, you cannot see the photos; you can just see the backs of the frames. What a great way to display photographs!!). The blinds are closed, which means no natural light comes into the room. My parents’ bedroom is even worse, with thicker blinds that block out the light even better, and piles and piles of paper, buckets with endless tools and screws, and who the hell knows what else all over the floor. There’s barely any space to get around the bed, and I honestly do not know how my tiny mother hasn’t had an accident tripping over something in her own bedroom yet. Oh, and they lock that room when they aren’t home, even when it’s just me home, which makes their bedroom even more like an unwelcome lair, hiding needless secrets that they never want exposed. In fact, they lock both their room and my old room, always fearful that someone will expose their secrets and get whatever rare valuables they seem to be storing.

In New York, I’m also away from all forms of irrational thinking that my parents have. So while they lock the two bedroom doors, my dad has had this strange desire, since Ed passed away, to leave the gate unlocked when he or my mom is home. It drives me nuts. Why would they keep the gate unlocked but lock their bedroom doors? Even though I grew up in this house and lived there until age 18, my parents don’t think I will close the gate without slamming it because many visitors slam it. My dad put in this weather stripping for it over a decade ago, which for a lot of people, makes the gate harder to close. You really just need to press it for an extra second, but everyone is too impatient and slams it. So my mom and I will usually bicker when I try to close the gate and my mom insists she will do it. That’s the kind of thing my parents like to argue about — how to close a gate and who will do it. When I’m in New York, I never have to worry when I go out with visiting relatives or friends about someone sneakily paying the bill behind my back (and thus my being “indebted” to them); I also never have to worry about others paying the bill and then getting mad at me later that they paid it. I always have to think about that whenever I go home. It’s a really irrational worry and form of stress, but that is instantly on the agenda as soon as I step into my parents’ house.

So despite all the above, the truth is that as soon as I enter SFO, go through security, and reach either the airline lounge or sit down at the gate, I actually miss my parents a lot for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. I miss my mother’s love and hugs and kisses, the way she is always concerned about whether I’ve had enough to eat or whether I will be safe. I miss my dad’s sheepish hug at the end of my trip, the way he usually pats my back awkwardly in his own way of showing fatherly affection. I miss my dad always asking me if I want anything at Costco (his Costco love will never die; he’s an Asian dad, after all, and loves his deals) even though I usually decline. This time, because we had to get some wedding photos printed at Costco before dropping me off at the airport, I humored my mom and agreed to bring back women’s gummy vitamins. She was so excited; my dad wasn’t, though, because my mom insisted on buying me the name-brand gummy vitamins vs. the Kirkland Signature brand (Costco brand) gummy vitamins.

I wish they could be happier and more content with life. Every time I leave, I know that their level of happiness will decline and pick up again the next time I come home. With my coming home, it’s something they look forward to. I’m honestly not sure if they look forward to anything else in life. And that always is a worry lurking in the back my mind, that they really aren’t living for much outside of me, their one living child. It always makes me feel sad and a little helpless, kind of like how I felt when Ed was at the end of his life and I knew he was struggling, but I had no way to feasibly help.

Leaving home

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Leaving home always leaves me with mixed feelings. I love my parents very much, but the harsh truth is that I cannot be with them for long periods of time, otherwise I lose my sanity. I always feel sad on the way to the airport because I know that my mom has that sinking feeling in her stomach, knowing her only living child is leaving her for the other side of the country. She starts worrying about every last thing: the weight of my carry-on roller bag, whether the night flight will make it all the way to New York (she thinks that flying at night is more dangerous, but obviously she’s just basing that on her lack of knowledge of how airplanes work), and if the driver who takes me from JFK back to my apartment will be a creep or not. She always reminds me right before I leave her at the curb side to stay longer the next time I come home so that she won’t miss me as much (that doesn’t really make sense, but it just means she wants me around longer, even if we do argue).

I always wish my parents could be more positive, that they could try for once to see the best in people and stop nitpicking at everyone in their lives, including each other. I wish my dad wouldn’t have a last argument on my last day with me about the shower, insisting that his tiles never mildew because he always wipes the tiles down after a shower (they will always mildew, just at a slower rate). I wish my mom wouldn’t accuse people like my aunt of trying to take advantage of her. I wish my aunt would stop inviting random Jehovah’s Witness strangers to what are supposed to be “family dinners.” I have a lot of wishes, but they will always just be that — wishes. I know they want the best for me and miss me when I’m gone, but that’s why I do try to come home at least two to three times a year to see them, and when I do see them, I try to have them participate in enjoyable, productive activities together. It’s always hard. That’s all I can say. It’s just inevitable that my mom will get upset over something irrational, blame me and start yelling. It’s also inevitable my parents will argue about senseless things, too, and blame each other for everything that is wrong. It is always hard. No peace exists at the house on the hill in which I grew up. It’s just a cold place with a lot of bitterness.

Space

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Being in my parents’ house, the home in which I grew up, makes me realize that having a small Manhattan apartment really isn’t such a bad thing after all. When you have a smaller space, you tend to have a lesser desire to buy more stuff, which means less chance for clutter. Less space also tends to mean less to clean, which is always a positive in my book considering how anal I am about cleanliness. But to be honest, being in this house for too long ends up getting me angry for some reasons that have little to do with Ed. It has to do with how inefficiently this space is used and how worse it seems to get every single time I come back.

This second floor flat is technically three bedrooms and one bath. Only two people, my parents, live here. Yet there is stuff everywhere — all over the floors of the bedrooms, on the breakfast room booth seats, and even sitting on multiple chairs throughout the house. The sunroom (the third bedroom) floor has model trains, busted computers and hard drives, nails, and screwdrivers everywhere. There are papers scattered around the perimeter of the room. And then right in the center of the room are two vacuum cleaners; one is busted open while the other one has a cord that is undone. In my bedroom, there are two beds. My bed is usually covered with papers piled high everywhere when I am not home. I know this because my mom told me. Maybe, just maybe if my dad cleared all the clutter on the desk in the room, he could actually have space for all those piles of paper.

The sunroom makes me pretty mad because it used to be the play room in the house, the house where we had plants, an extra bed, and fun things. Now, it’s a room that is completely wasted and serves zero purpose other than to dry clothes. A desk sits in there with two chairs (one of which is obviously extraneous) piled with junk on them. The desk is covered in about 10 different open hard drives. As someone who’s lived in Manhattan for four years now, I get mad when I see space that is wasted. You have all this great space, but you’re not even going to use it the best way?!

And then I thought, one day, I’m going to clear out this house, and I’m literally going to take everything and dump it into a massive garbage bin. I can feel my blood pressure going up when I see all the clutter that has zero meaning. This house is Marie Kondo’s worst nightmare. She’d get heart palpitations walking through this place.

Updated stats

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We spent a lot of time the last few days looking at views of the Golden Gate Bridge and on Saturday, even drove across it twice. The drive didn’t make me cry this time, but it still felt pretty miserable crossing it. As we drove across the bridge, I wondered if anyone walking across it was suicidal and thinking about jumping that day.

I googled the latest statistics on jumpers at the Golden Gate Bridge last night. In 2013, the number was around 1600. In the last three years, over 100 people have since jumped off, contributing to over 1700 deaths from this tragic “international orange” beauty. We will never know the actual number because of all the bodies that get swept out of the bay.

During my Google search, I found this New Yorker article published in 2003 — ten years before my brother jumped off. The article is aptly titled, “Jumpers: The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge.” This is the paragraph and quote that infuriated me the most:

“In 1976, an engineer named Roger Grimes began agitating for a barrier on the Golden Gate. He walked up and down the bridge wearing a sandwich board that said “Please Care. Support a Suicide Barrier.” He gave up a few years ago, stunned that in an area as famously liberal as San Francisco, where you can always find a constituency for the view that pets should be citizens or that poison oak has a right to exist, there was so little empathy for the depressed. “People were very hostile,” Grimes told me. “They would throw soda cans at me, or yell, ‘Jump!’”

When I read this quote, that was about all I had left for this city. This city makes me more mad every single time I come back to it. If it’s not the stupid parking fees in South of Market (where you have to feed your parking meter until 10pm) or the lack of attention to the homeless problem here (I actually detect a stench on Muni now; I must have just been blissfully ignorant before), then it’s how outwardly liberal this city is and how they truly do not give a crap about anyone other than themselves. They just want the perception of doing the right thing all the time. The dog and poison oak comment could not have been more true.

A suicide barrier has been debated since the bridge was unveiled and argued supremely in the 70s to lead to zero action, and finally in the 2010s, we’re actually seeing potential action. There really is zero empathy for those truly suffering from depression or those who are suicidal. It’s saddening to me that it still has to be so stigmatized where people don’t want to acknowledge it openly as a real health problem. I hate it when people are so awkward about my brother’s death. Why can we not just treat it as the disease that it actually is?

So when I Googled jumpers, I actually found YouTube videos of footage of people jumping off the bridge. This is real. Some film maker left his camera running and would record people one by one, month after month, jumping off that damn bridge. So one by one, I watched them jump. Some people climb over the ledge and jump off as though they are sitting. Others stand on the railing (they must have really good balance) and jump off. One did a little prayer and jumped off back first. Another removed his shoes neatly first and dove off like he was doing a dive into a swimming pool. The film shows their descent all the way down, 250 feet into the Bay. And all I could think as I watched each of these people jump was, which part of their body exploded or imploded first? Was it their ribs that shattered and punctured their lungs and heart? Or was it their neck that snapped first and had bones that scrambled their brains? The coroners have said that oftentimes when examining bodies, they see blood coming out of the victims’ ears, as well as organs oozing out. The Columbarium did a really good job cleaning my brother up. I’d ever have guessed he jumped off a bridge looking at his corpse in his coffin. I guess we did pay them to do that.

I wonder if there is footage of my brother jumping. I probably shouldn’t see it even if it is available. But I always wonder what he did in the last moments of his life — what his face looked like, if he was calm, if he was crying, if he was at peace with himself and the last decision he would ever make — to leave this world. I wonder if he dove in head first or if he jumped backwards. I also wonder what the effect was on the person who saw him jump and dial 911, and if s/he still thinks about my brother to this day.

This city will always be a reminder that my brother is gone. And thus a visit to San Francisco will never be absent of pain.

Touristy day in SF

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Today was a touristy San Francisco day starting at the Coit Tower, progressing into Chinatown, visiting the Ferry Building, and ending in the Financial District and Downtown to check in and have dinner at Chris’s hotel with my parents. I think that after seeing my parents and their mood over the last three days of all four of us being together, they are definitely the happiest when they are in San Francisco. Once they leave the city, they tend to get more moody and easily annoyed. Coit Tower and the general area around it holds a special place in my dad’s heart since he grew up in Chinatown, which is right next door to it, so as a child, he visited that area almost weekly. Outside of the Richmond and the Sunset, my mom’s third favorite neighborhood is undoubtedly Chinatown. She loves finding her bargains, especially her beloved bitter melon. Oddly enough, we found out my dad to this day had never visited the Ferry Building post renovation, and so we took him there to explore. The Ferry Building has become a massive tourist attraction, one that has more than anyone’s fill of expensive and borderline overpriced shops (overpriced because they guilt you into thinking they should cost that much because they are all local businesses). I’ve always loved browsing there since my early twenties, and I still love visiting it when I’m in town, especially when it’s to have lunch or try a dessert or have Blue Bottle Coffee. My parents enjoyed it in their own way, grimacing and complaining over the high prices and how ridiculous the vendors were to charge so much. I suppose we all get excited about different things, and ridiculous, overpriced goods are what excite my parents. At least they got a free meal at the end of the day to make them really happy.

Durian

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Whenever I come home, my mom, like most moms, wants to make sure I get to eat all the things I like to eat, whether that’s food that’s homemade or store-bought. One of the things she decided to get me this time around was a big whole durian. I actually didn’t grow up eating durian and only got introduced to it as an adult. After having a literally rotten durian experience in Cambodia four years ago, I always feel a bit wary trying the fruit now. But if there’s one thing I can trust my mom to do, it’s to know when durian is good. This afternoon, she showed me how to cut it open in the most optimal way and slice out all the big pockets of durian meat. I was so intrigued by it because I’d never seen anyone do this before, so I even recorded her cutting up part of it. I helped cut part of it, but mid-way through, my mom got slightly possessive, and she insisted she cut up the rest of it. It’s an extremely prickly thus painful fruit to hold, so you have to hold a towel between you and the fruit when gripping it to cut it. This is my mom’s labor of love.

While eating the fresh durian with vanilla ice cream tonight, Chris and I looked up all the nutrition facts about this fruit. While we initially scared my dad by telling him that durian is the one fruit that actually has dietary cholesterol content, he was pleasantly surprised to learn that this “king of fruit” is very high in fiber, potassium, vitamin C, manganese, thiamin, riboflavin, folate, copper, and magnesium. I suppose the high caloric content of durian is now worth it. 🙂

“Hiking” with family

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The hiking day in Marin kind of turned out the way I expected it, meaning it pretty much got derailed. On our first trail along the Tomales Bay trail in Point Reyes National Seashore, it was quite foggy and cool, meaning that the beautiful seashore I was hoping to see was barely visible from our trail. We did, however, see deer and mule elk, and just smidgens of the ocean. It honestly wasn’t enough to make that trail worth it, though, and I certainly got that message loud and clear when about a third of the way, both my parents insisted they were too tired to continue. They complained and said the dirt path wasn’t good (even though it was extremely flat along 95 percent of it), and my mom complained that she almost fell. We probably made it about 70 percent of the trail before we decided to turn back. I really did not want to elicit the wrath of either parent on the ride to Mount Tamalpais or back into the city in the evening.

But then what really made the trip frustrating was when the gas tank of my dad’s car was about half full, and he said he needed to fill up. It was like my mom’s paranoia radar went off, and she continued to obsess over the gas and running out for the long, windy ride along Highway 1 to the gas station, and finally to the East Peak of Mount Tamalpais. We had no gas problem, but my parents made it into a needless problem to create a problem on this day trip. We took the short cut route by parking in a lot that was 0.3 miles away from the East Peak summit, and about 0.1 miles into it, my parents turned back and said they couldn’t do it anymore. On their way down, my dad loudly complained that he’s just not used to this type of activity. I could hear the complaining on my way up. When Chris and I reached the bottom and we were driving back to San Francisco, my mom insisted that they’re not as young as us, and they cannot go as far and as long. And I said to her, there are people in their 80s who are on this super short trail and they did it just fine. You can do it, too! It’s a useless argument because my mom loves to use the excuse that she’s old, therefore she cannot <fill in the blank>. She is technically 62 years old, and definitely able to walk up a bunch of wooden stairs that she refused to go up.

I would love it if my parents had a grab-life-by-the-balls attitude, if they took life as it came and didn’t complain endlessly about everything that either happened or has the potential to happen (the latter is real in my parents’ house). Why are we doing this hiking? my mom said. Because I want us to do an activity together and so we can see some good views! I respond. That was a bad response on my part, though, because my parents don’t really care much about views, and the only activity we successfully do together is eat.

Chris noticed that on the way back to the car along the trailhead, my mom was walking about twice as fast as she walked when we first started. This is how we know my mom is 120 percent capable, but she just wants to be perceived as not because she doesn’t like going outside and walking on anything that is not paved cement.

Not in that chair

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It doesn’t seem to matter how much times passes. Every time I open the door into my parents’ house, the part of my brain that apparently doesn’t register reality thinks that Ed is going to be sitting in his chair at his desk in our living room. That part of my mind thinks he will swivel his chair, turn around and see me, and then hurriedly get up to hug me and help me with my luggage. I thought this when I arrived home from the hotel this morning, turned the key, and opened the door to let myself in. He isn’t there, I saw, and a part of my  stomach just fell.

It’s not that I wanted him to be at home forever, living in this house with our parents and doing all his same usual things. But this is how I remember him. In an ideal world, he would have gotten a decent paying job and moved out years ago. In that world, when I’d come back from New York to visit, he actually would not be sitting in that chair when I would open the front door. Instead, he’d come home to see me, or I’d go to his apartment, or we’d all meet at a restaurant and reunite. So many options had the potential to exist for my brother. It just makes me sick to think that all those potential realities are now dead along with him.

A talk about nothing

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Tonight, I went to dinner with Chris, my two good friends, and their husband and boyfriend. We spent almost two hours chatting about a lot of random things, but really, it wasn’t like there was anything very substantial or serious we discussed. It was a really long talk with all sorts of tangents about seemingly nothing, yet the entire time, I was enjoying myself and the company of my friends. A talk about absolutely nothing was entirely satisfying to me, and the laughter that came out of it was genuine. And when it ended, I knew this experience would not happen again until the next time I’d come visit home, and it made me feel a little sad on the walk back to the hotel from South of Market. It made me realize that I really do miss having a friend group like this back in New York. I have individual friends I can catch up with there, but I don’t have the same dynamic with them the way I do with these two friends. We can’t really talk about nothing and have that be satisfying or sufficient for me. And then I thought, why is it that I haven’t made friends like that in my entire eight years in New York City? I guess I married my best friend (not that that’s a bad thing, of course). I guess I go through these same thoughts every few months, but it still makes me wistful. I could potentially leave New York City without a real friend group developed at all.

Or maybe the problem is really me. You can’t really expect to have the same dynamic with friends you just met as with the friends you’ve had for two decades, right? Maybe my expectation is too high. But can’t a satisfying talk about nothing occur between two strangers as easily as it can with two friends who’ve known each other for years?