I never made the list.
I didn’t make the list because I was confused about what to put on it. What would fix things? Was there really anything that could make up for what had happened? Remember my birthday? Be there for me when I’m falling apart? Come visit me one time? Decide that for just one Christmas, shit, even one minor holiday, you’re going to spend it with me? Call me, text me, just to ask how I am? Fully acknowledge all the things you’ve done wrong instead of minimizing them and claiming that I’m obsessed with the past? Acknowledge how much this hurts?
I didn’t make the list because I was resentful of it. Why did I always have to do the work? My father had given love and affection to his two stepkids. To them, he’d been a mostly stay-at-home dad, the one who cooked for them every day, took them to school, went to their sports games. Once, when I was in Malaysia with him, I overheard him on the phone with them. I heard him say in a tender voice—a voice I found completely unfamiliar—that he loved them. That he missed them. He did not go on a long soliloquy about his own life. Instead, he asked about their grades and their scores on their latest golf tournament and what they ate for lunch. He loved them, genuinely, and I watched him show it. If you really loved someone, I thought, you wouldn’t need a list. If you really loved someone, it would emanate from you, sincere and overflowing, generous and unconditional. But for me, my father’s love had always been conditional. Here again was just another condition: In order for me to love you, I need you to write out a list. Why should I have to teach my father how to love me?
And, I’m ashamed to admit, I didn’t make the list because I was afraid. Afraid that even if I wrote out everything I needed, and he gave me all of it, spent all of his time, money, and energy trying to make things right, I would still be too afraid to love him back. I wouldn’t be able to forgive. And then it wouldn’t be him who was the real asshole. Not anymore. Then it would be me.
* * *
—
A few months after he started calling me regularly, I asked my father for his wife’s email address. This had gone on long enough.
I wrote her a very long email explaining my mother’s abuse and subsequent abandonment. I wrote about when my dad left and how painful it was. I wrote about how I blamed her for it and how I still felt resentment toward her: How do you ask a man to abandon his own child to take care of two of yours? But if she was willing to apologize for the past decade’s worth of pain, maybe we could begin to move on.
She and I exchanged a couple of emails and phone calls where I learned that she had never known my mother was abusive. She hadn’t known my mother abandoned me. She’d never known I lived by myself when my dad left. He hadn’t told her anything about my situation except that I yelled at him and disrespected him, and all she’d thought about at the time was protecting her young sons from that kind of behavior. She admitted, with regret, that she’d never thought about me at all, really. She was sorry.
I was not as furious at her as I always assumed I’d be. I was upset at her for not thinking of a child, not asking where I had been on all the Father’s Days and Thanksgivings. But she only knew as much as my father had told her.
* * *
—
They visited me in New York later in 2017, in the fall. My father, his wife, her two kids, Joey, and I all spent one day in Manhattan together. I got them New York’s best doughnuts and some mediocre pizza, showed them how to swipe their MetroCards, walked them around the enormous buildings of Midtown.
Her sons were sweet. I’d spent my teenage years and entire adult life despising these children, lamenting about them to my therapist, calling them “brats,” and complaining that they had stolen my father and my life. But in the flesh, they were just kids. Of course they were. Well-behaved, curious, innocent—giddy at New York’s giant Uniqlo and Bape, thrilled at the underground jostle of the subway and the chaotic process of transferring between the A and F trains. He’d raised them well.
His wife loved skyscrapers, so after Uniqlo we went up to the top of the Empire State Building. On the way in, every visitor was asked to stand in front of a large green-screen backdrop, and an employee snapped their photo. The final product was an image of guests in front of the glowing crown of the Empire State Building, as if we had floated all the way to the top somehow, the date superimposed on top. It was hammy and touristy, so I made a dumb face when they took the picture.
We went up to the top and relished the brilliant views of the city, all of its massive buildings tiny from so high up. It was a perfectly clear blue day, and we could see for miles. The boys oohed and aahed. On the way out, we passed the gift shop. And that’s when they hawked our photo back to us.
There we all were. Everyone was smiling widely, looking overjoyed to be together, a true blended family. And then there was me, my brows knitted, my hand on my hip as if I was fed up, my lips a sideways, dissatisfied line. Snottily superior to this tourist trap.
But my father barely saw the exorbitant price, barely saw my fed-up mug. When he looked at that absurdly tacky image, his face lit up. For the first time in decades, here was photographic evidence that it was possible for him to have everything he wanted, everything together, everything he loved, in one place. He bought a framed five-by-ten copy.
That evening, I took everyone to my favorite joint in K-town, which had delicious, meaty stews and opulent spreads of banchan—tiny, sweet, chili-infused dried anchovies and fish cakes with salty bean sprouts and strong, funky kimchi. As we gorged ourselves on galbijjim and chicken stuffed with ginseng and sticky rice, my dad and his wife chatted about the day while his kids grilled me and Joey on what our lives were like.
“How did you guys get into your careers? Where did you go to school?” the younger son asked.
“I went to UC Santa Cruz, and then I moved to San Francisco, then Oakland,” I responded.
“Wow! You lived in San Francisco? And Oakland, too?” he asked, turning those hopeful eyes on me, and the questions poured out of him like bubbly soda: “What was that like? Did you like San Francisco or Oakland more? And how’s San Francisco different from New York?”
I kept a smile on my face. I told him about the differences in food and weather. But inside, my heart thumped harder and I felt light-headed.