Joan Is Okay(10)

Doctor Baby-Blue Eyes was Reese, but we couldn’t call him that in public anymore since HR had informed everyone in a training that there would be no more derogatory nicknames or ragging on other colleagues or on specialties. No more “dermatology is on dermaholiday” or “orthopedics is run by boneheads.” Though the main issue I had with Reese’s nickname was that he had green eyes, not blue. I reminded the director of that detail, and he joked that I was getting soft.

Not soft, I said. Accurate.

We laughed.

So, we’re good? he asked.

I said indeed. At this point, I thought the director would leave, but he remained perched on my desk with a far-off look.

I followed his gaze to an empty corner of the room. I worried he was having a seizure or seeing a ghost.

Sir?

Incredible to him that I had gone to China for a weekend. There and back, in only forty-eight hours. Extraordinary, he said. But what was even harder for him to believe, and he didn’t mean to offend, only to be transparent, was that though he knew me to be ethnically Chinese, he hadn’t expected me to still have relatives back there, let alone a father. Further, it wasn’t the sudden death that had struck him, but the thought of my having a father at all. Maybe he’d never imagined me in relation to a father, even though I obviously had one—everyone had a father, even a child with two mothers; it made perfect biological sense.

I looked back at that corner again, which was still empty, but now I worried he had seen my father’s ghost and I had missed it.

This is coming out wrong, the director continued, waving a hand across his face as if to erase it.

The motion reminded me of an Etch A Sketch and how in clearing the screen you had to violently shake the apparatus of aluminum powder.

To comfort him, I said that I had the same thought all week about the sun. I had forgotten about it all week, though the world would perish without one.

Right, but fathers are quite different from suns, aren’t they? Suns. Sons. Icarus should’ve listened to his father and not flown so close.

I didn’t quite catch my director’s drift and asked if he was trying to be clever. He cleared his face again and said he was just trying, unsuccessfully, to lighten the mood.

So, what was he like? Your dad.

Normal guy, I said. Nothing out of the ordinary.

My director said he’d had a look at my file.

Oh yeah?

I know your mom is still in China, but you have a brother here in the States, in Greenwich. That’s not too far.

Not at all.

The two of you get along?

Very much so. I love my brother. We met in Wichita.

Met? You mean where you were born.

No, I was born in Oakland.

And him?

He would probably say Connecticut.

What’s he like?

My brother? Just another average Joe.



* * *



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THE AVERAGE JOE IN America is expected to move 11.4 times in his life. Who knows about the average Jane. From Wichita, we moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania. From Scranton to Bay City, Michigan. More town than city, Bay City was the last place we would live together as a family, and for only two years. Then counting my moves within Massachusetts, from dorm to dorm and later to New York for work, I was right under the average at eleven.

During my childhood and adolescence, we moved because of my father. His dream enterprise was in construction, like an enterprise that sold tarps, specifically the waterproof tarps used to cover unfinished sites. But wherever he tried to start this business, no bank would lend him money for it and the enterprise would fail. He could look suspicious: gaunt cheeks; extra-small, inset eyes; a few very long whiskers that sprouted out around his mouth. Whenever the business failed, he would wash his hands of the state. Time to start anew, he would say, time to break new ground.

My father was an optimist. For the number three, he would touch his index finger to his thumb, the same hand gesture as for the A-OK.

The only business routes available to him were to open a Chinese restaurant or convenience store, and neither he was interested in. There wasn’t enough time (or money) to go back to school for an MBA, which was where he thought the real problem lay, not in his appearance but the lack of American degrees. He took on odd jobs, washing dishes at restaurants, delivering newspapers, landscaping, stocking store shelves, while my mother cleaned houses. Average people, my parents. Who raised two average kids.

But as average parents, they still differed in small ways. I could have told Reese this memory of my father, but he wouldn’t have understood.

A Chinese saying: Hitting is love, berating is love. Had I explained that to Reese, he wouldn’t have known what I meant. He would have overreacted and judged me. What kind of love is that? What kind of parents did you have?

When my father was truly angry about something, he could berate me for hours but afterward offer to buy me ice cream. My mother could berate for hours too, but no ice cream afterward, and while berating, she could multitask, she could move swiftly through a room to collect a large portion of my things. She would put my things in a plastic bag and double knot the bag. Then she would put the bag on a high shelf. In hindsight, she was trying to fortify something in me. A person shouldn’t sentimentalize or believe anything to be precious. But in a month, there would be two or three bags on that shelf, and inevitably all of my things would be gone.