who you were before / beyond me
My siblings and I plan to put together a photo album for a joint Father's Day and Mother's Day gift, since our parents were traveling during the latter last month. This weekend they're out of town again, so my brother and sister-in-law came over for dinner and to look through old photos together.
Our study room is where we keep all the memorabilia, alongside things like old books no one reads, winter clothing, and potential Christmas gifts. When we don't have guests over, it functions mostly as a storage room for things we don't regularly use, so to me, the items that make it up have sort of blended together into one big display β like a backdrop with no Conspicuously Light Patch. It was a weird feeling to be seeing it then as something to explore and interact with.
Of course I'd seen the scrapbooks my dad made of us when we were babies (I love thinking of my dad β who I've never ever seen do a craft β as a young father, cutting stuff out of magazines and comics or buying cute stickers), but I never picked out any of the other paper materials or bound books, assuming they were boring, important documents like birth certificates.
But after we'd picked out some photos from the scrapbooks and framed displays to scan, my sister found in the shelves an old planner from 2004. The three of us gathered around, not recognizing the handwriting as either of our parents'. After a bit of flipping through, we discovered that it belonged to Angkong, our grandfather on our dad's side, and our main mission fell by the wayside.
angkong's planner
The planner was very much not diligently filled in, which I thought was endearingly relatable. Instead, on the days he did write, he mostly scribbled in whatever events happened or things he wanted to think about, using it more like a logbook. I liked best the parts where he talked about his children: "Dinner with B and family," "G says he wants to go into business," "K introduced us to her boyfriend - very old, 40+, they travel together often," then later, "K called β broke up with E" (lol).
There were some scribbles in Chinese that none of us could read, but one I recognized as probably a family member's name. Angkong had been in charge of coming up with the names of every kid in my dad's generation, as the oldest boy among his siblings who could write Chinese. He'd also been in charge of that for my generation, but had lost the notebook he wrote the names in, and just gave us Chinese names that sounded like our English ones. Maybe this was one of those, for the newest member of our family β my youngest uncle's daughter, who was the last grandchild Angkong would live to see.
At the back of the notebook he kept a list of family members' birthdays. His siblings, his children from both his families, his grandchildren, with me as the last addition to the list (never mind the new baby, lol).
We noticed the haphazardly crossed out name and birthday of one aunt, a daughter he was estranged from after a big argument, and reacted with the appropriate scandalized noises but didn't discuss. I filed it away in my mind β SO much to speculate from that one detail.
(Since he'd written it down in the first place, did that end up being the year the argument happened? Or had it already happened, and he'd put her in his notebook anyway despite it all β before getting angry all over again one day?)
Angkong died when I was around 6 or 7, so though I remember him fondly for being the Cool Grandfather, I don't have strong memories of him, and have had to rely on stories from the rest of my family to get a feel for what he was like. He's the grandparent I most wish stayed alive much longer than he did, so I could get song recommendations from him (I love 50s music!) and tell him about choosing to study Mandarin in my last year of college β or better yet, be inspired to study it earlier/harder because of his presence in my life. I kind of mourn that β the relationship we could have had but never did, just because I'd been born too late, or he'd gone too soon.
dad's journal
We spent a lot of time on that notebook before discovering another one β spiral binding, with the cover completely separated after so many years, and much rattier than Angkong's planner. The first page told us (in lettering someone clearly put effort into) that this was our dad's journal from an immersion program he did when he was young.
In contrast with Angkong's planner, this journal was meticulous from the very first page. My dad wrote down the dates of his immersion (one week in 1985, when he was twenty), where it had been (a fishing village in a nearby province), and even all the names of the people who'd been on the immersion program with him. He marked the exact time he started writing in the upper right, and followed it with giant paragraphs about his day, complete with dialogue and personal reflections.
We flipped through and marveled at how densely packed this notebook was, then flipped back to the start to find he'd even included an introduction and a prologue β things that he seemed to have written after completing the journal, since he specifies the number of pages he'd written (70+!). It's cute to think of my dad carefully counting each page to make sure he got the facts right in the introduction no one told him to write.
I was urged to read a portion of it out loud. The bit I read was about a friend telling him he'd already picked up on the local dialect: Previously, Dad had already heard another participant getting complimented on their accent. This prompted him to reflect on how he'd wanted to achieve the same thing himself, but refrained from actively trying to do so β it was better if it happened naturally, he thought. So, of course, he was glad to have been told this by his friend who was none the wiser to all this, and ended this story with a sweet, earnest "Oh, happy day!", which made us all laugh.
From this one anecdote, I learned that a) my dad had always been interested in learning about and adapting to other cultures, which I already knew about him, and b) he'd also felt things like self-consciousness, and envy, and delight at being validated, which... I guess you do kind of know just by being aware that your parent is a human being, but don't really grasp until it's laid out so openly.
Reading the journal was probably a bit less Something That Was Okay To Do than reading Angkong's planner, since... well, being alive gives you a bit more of the right to privacy, I guess. We probably should not have read it, but:
- It was written like it was meant to be read. (There was an introduction, prologue, and conclusion, and he'd even pondered in the text what impression the reader would get from it.) And...
- It's rare that you're presented with a clear snapshot of what your parents were like when they were younger, especially when you're at the age to appreciate the opportunity. I can't believe how lucky I am to have this glimpse of my dad as a young adult, younger than any of his children currently are.
learning from my dad at twenty
This post is so long, and mostly because I'm trying to capture the details of our discoveries rather than my thoughts on them, but that's because I have so many feelings and can't begin to arrange them.
I'm so impressed by my dad's prolific journaling β my hand would cramp after even one of his paragraphs. I'm even more impressed by how much detail he managed to capture and so wonderfully too, even if he writes that he's "not a writer" and that he wasn't able to capture as much as he wanted. He expresses his thoughts so honestly, so clearly... It shows a reflective side that doesn't often reveal itself in the stories he does tell us, usually about his youth of mischief-making with his friends.
The thing that made the biggest impression on me is that he writes very positively, with so much appreciation for this new environment. He was excited from the get go, and it showed in his writing. I mention that he was reflective, but of the entries I did see, my dad was more focused on recording interactions, information told to him, even details like stuff his host family cooked for him... it's like he wanted to remember everything about it. Even at peak Thinking About Yourself age (which is what I think your teens to early twenties are), he was focused on learning from - or even just appreciating β what was around him, what he was lucky to experience. My dad has always been adventurous and curious, but there's something different about seeing it so clearly threaded into his way of being, by means of this little time capsule.
My dad and I have a lot in common β we like word games, study languages, read a lot, and even gesture similarly, according to my friends β and now I know we also share the drive to preserve memories. Unfortunately, I did not inherit his sense of wonder about the world, and that shows in my writing too. I don't not do things, but I find that processing how I feel about those things takes precedence over capturing the moment for a reader/future me to imagine/relive.
I guess it's not fair to compare my everyday journals with the one my dad kept on what seems to have been a pivotal excursion, and it's not bad to write about your feelings, but still. Reading even a little bit of his journal, gleaning what I did of his outlook and what he paid attention to... It's made me want to try and think less about myself, to experience more fully the people and things around me, and do so with a more open mind and heart. I want to be a little more adventurous, a little more curious, a little more like my dad.
before / beyond
One day, when I'm alone in the house, I'd like to go back and read through his journal fully, although I can't imagine rushing to do at the next opportunity β it has to feel like the "right time." I want to be in the right mood, take my time parsing my dad's handwriting, learn more about this life-changing trip, try to find extra details that tell me more about the person he was while writing this.
The side effect of becoming an adult is being able to see your parents as something like peers β complex people who've lived complex lives, rather than the authority figures they played most of your childhood. In particular, I like to try and imagine my parents at my age, or ages I've been. I spent one afternoon with my mom last week, eating popcorn and asking her questions about her life before marriage (at 24 β over a year younger than I am now, ack), or her experience as a high-ranking executive in the corporate world. Who were you before me? Who were you beyond me?
It's mostly positive, having this new perspective. Being able to imagine my parents in different contexts helps me see them more fully as the people they are now and appreciate them. I wonder if that's why my dad kept Angkong's planners, too.