Week 4: I hope you are proud of me (for the thing I’m about to do)

I think it goes without saying that my blog has been pretty deep into the personals… especially with my Rock posts lately, talking about identity and being open about my crying and writing. And then with my other topics, writing about the Better Luck Tomorrow film, writing about my hesitance to speak during seminar and all that stuff. It goes without saying but I said it anyway so that must mean I’m building this up to be another personal post. I mean, the title and the subtitle are both things that relate to the book we read this week but they aren’t in the book.

I don’t talk about my family a lot and when I do either it’s all okay I can make it through the conversation or my eyes well up with tears and suddenly I’m in a closed door meeting with my adviser talking about why it hurts so much to talk about them.

This week we read “Forgotten Country” by Catherine Chung and I have never cried so much at a book before in my life. THIS IS TRUE. Also what’s true is I have never had a book touch me so deeply. The themes of family, migration, secrets and death really got to me. The relationship between Jeehyun and her parents, Jeehyun and Haejin mirrored my own with my parents and older sister.

My family has kept secrets as well. My parents have kept secrets, I have kept secrets and I bet my siblings have as well. When they come out, it’s ugly. It’s all screaming and crying and saying “you did this to me” – just expressing a deeply hidden hurt that ends up making everyone feel guilty and shitty and then there’s no talk of “where do we go from here.” Life goes on with another pothole in the road we carefully tiptoe around.

Last year when I was in therapy I shared something I never told anyone before because it was just one of those moments you forget thinking it doesn’t affect you today. I remembered something happening with my sister, some little fight or something, and mom asked us what’s wrong. I sat on her bed crying saying “I’m such a bad person.” And my therapist asked me to think about what a child could ever do to make them a bad person. And then she asked me what I would have liked my mom to do in that situation. And I cried my eyes out because the thought of little me being comforted while crying was too much to imagine in my mind.

While reading this book I thought of the arguments my parents had when I started high school, opening up some wounds that were decades in the making. To this day I don’t understand why they screamed at each other in English rather than Tagalog which made me think they purposefully put on a show for us so that they could separate and it wouldn’t be a “surprise” for us. They never spoke to each other in English. I thought of the arguments my parents had with my older brother, older sister, myself and our younger brother. The really bad arguments make us bring up the past. But to my recollection no one has ever accused anyone of being the perfect child or getting whatever they wanted. When it was a siblings argument we didn’t accuse each other of anything, it was more like we say things, shut down emotionally and not talk for years. With our parents it was much more vocal. The fight before high school was a major topic in therapy last year, it lead to stuff happening to me in my sophomore/junior years that I only started talking about recently, after years of shame and keeping it to myself. As of right now I am closest to Bobo, the youngest one and have just recently reconnected with my mom this summer after being at odds for several months.

THAT STORY is one to tell on its own but this is already getting too long. I haven’t spoken to my brother or sister in years. We used to be close as children but when we started to get to teen-age things fell apart. For many reasons I bet, but we just never were the same. My relationship with my dad hasn’t really been one. I recognize the sacrifices he made to support us financially and all the hard labor he’s done to make that money. My idea of him shattered when I was a pre-teen after seeing something I shouldn’t have seen and then the fight before high school happened where he was accused of doing…some things. I haven’t really talked to him either, we didn’t have that kind of relationship.

So when the parents in the book pleaded with Jeehyun telling her to find her sister, I couldn’t help but think of the times my mom would plead with me in connecting with my brother and sister. I thought of the times she sat crying telling me that’s all she wants me to do, telling me she’s lost her brother and sisters. I thought of how it would make her happy if I did what she asked. I thought of how silent my brother and sister are when we’re in the same room. I thought of what happened when we were teens that destroyed our communication, how little and immature we’d all been and I guess we’re still the same to this day.

On Thursday after reading a couple of pages, I had to put the book down because I was crying so much. I texted my mom saying I love you and I miss you I hope you’re proud  of me and I can’t wait to come home soon. What I was originally going to write was I hope you’re going to be proud of what I’m going to do next. This book has really motivated me to reach out to my brother and sister, hoping we can reconcile and not be strangers anymore. I don’t know what words I’ll use but it’s going to happen this weekend. All the crying that I’ve done for this book is that built up-unreleased-unexpressed deeply hidden hurt that I’ve held close to me for years.

My partner Jackson always tried to push me towards reaching out to them, extending that olive branch, just putting myself out there to “keep my side of the street clean.” He cautioned me against be like them in the sense of hiding things, holding in resentment and being silent when there’s something wrong. All this time I’ve agreed with him and knew he was right and there’s just something in me that has to light up and actually do it. This book is the catalyst, I had to come to this conclusion on my own. Land my own helicopter, as my former counselor once told to me. Throughout the week of reading this book I knew I had to capitalize on the feeling, on the crying so that I would not forget to do it. It’s weighing heavily on my heart and I’ve got that in me – I really do just want to make my mom happy and proud.