Dying Wish

So, I don’t know what it’s like to be dead. But only a few seconds ago, I would’ve told you that dying isn’t so bad.
It sucked sometimes, especially after I stopped being able to walk around, but what’s there to complain about, right? At least I can go to bed as late as I want and wake up whenever; I stuff my face with sweets all day; I have all my favourite posters of Keanu Reeves and Naomi Campbell on the wall; loads of my friends come to see me after school; and the best bit is, I can fucking swear my head off whenever I want.
Actually, I don’t swear much now; kind of beats the point when my mum doesn’t care anymore. The day we got back from the hospital and mum went straight to her room when I told her to fuck off, I knew that things weren’t too hot. She had never done that before, usually it was me making a bee line to my room to ponder the finer points of a Taiwanese Roman Catholic life.
Since I don’t have that much time left, let me just cut my short story shorter. It all started when my nineteen-year-old mum fell in love with a Taiwanese man who was studying at her state university. After somehow getting pregnant, she left Minnesota forever and followed him to Taiwan. According to her, because my poor dad died shortly after his return and before I could make his acquaintance, Taiwan was a dump and if it hadn’t been because she hated her parents and couldn’t bear the thought of living anywhere near them, she would’ve got on the next plane back to America. As it was, she decided to stick it out and make my sixteen years of existence one hellish journey of repentance for the sins of my father. Personally, having lived under the same roof for so many years, I don’t blame my dad for dying so soon after meeting my mum, I’m just surprised I haven’t died sooner. My mum, like the mosquitoes of Minnesota that she hates so much, is relentless.
Some people say that what you see is what you get; others say that books shouldn’t be judged by their covers. I think I believe the others. Looking at my mum won’t tell you anything about who she is inside. She has the cutest, roundest blue eyes I have ever seen with long lashes that curl upward like happy waving arms. Her nose is not thin, as you would expect of a strict woman, instead it is fleshy with the nostrils completely hidden: the type that Chinese people love because they say it is a gold mine – no pun intended. Her earlobes are long and fleshy, another feature that the Chinese love because it makes you look like Buddha, and as a bonus you can hang ten earrings off each lobe. But I think what my dad must have loved most about my mum, something that has fascinated every oriental person she has encountered is, well, was, her blazing red hair. From the day she was born, she had never had a haircut and the curls hung down her back like hundreds of copper satsumas. I used to dream of playing with her hair, but she wouldn’t even allow me to touch it – I don’t really care to now anyway because it’s going grey and mouldy. As a matter of fact, satsumas rot pretty quickly in tropical weather. My mum has never broken the habit of wearing bright colours, especially dresses with floral patterns because she likes the way it shows off her hair, but her clothes have a tendency to send off all the wrong signals. When you see her, you guess that she is a cheerful person who is all flowery and soft, but in truth she is like a bag of rusty nails – a bit dangerous if you put your hand in it.
Three, that’s all the friends my mum has in the world, and only two of them visit us regularly: Thomas, an Irish priest who used to live in Hong Kong, and Sally, an American woman who is a colleague at the language school. Thomas and Sally are basically my grandparents, even though, come to think of it, I should have some Taiwanese ones knocking around. Sally taught me things that she thought girls should know. For example, when I was eleven, she told me about my periods: how it would look like and what it was for. When I was fourteen she taught me how to bake cakes, hers were famous because she had a talent for decorating them so beautifully that some people bought them as artwork. Many an afternoon, as I watched her beat the eggs or make the icing she would throw in bits and bobs of wisdom like how eating rice everyday can make you ill so you must also eat bread and potatoes to stay healthy. She told me about her own daughters and granddaughters who were all grown up and lived in America, except for the youngest granddaughter who married a Malaysian muslim and looks beautiful in a headscarf. Sally and her husband had travelled to many countries before deciding that Taiwan was the place for them; they loved Taiwan because everybody was so polite and friendly, made them feel like royalty were her words. I think Sally treated me like a granddaughter because she knew exactly how to, but Thomas loved me like one because he had none.
Thomas said that respect came from calling people correctly by their whole name, just as everyone should call China by its correct name Chung-kuo, so his given name was Thomas and not Tom. Thomas also said that my mum was smart to call me Kimi because it is a name that is neither here nor there, as I ought to be. From a very young age, I remember Thomas trying and me desperately wanting him to be my dad, but I don’t think he knew exactly what he was doing and I had to learn things the hard way. When I was around eight, Thomas would reluctantly accompany me to MacDonald’s and wait for me outside the playpen looking a little uncomfortable. I loved going to MacDonald’s because that was where all my friends went with their parents but, no matter how I begged, my mum would refuse to take me there. One day, after a hysterical game of catch, I ran toward Thomas screaming, “Daaaad!” I don’t remember ever seeing Thomas’ face go such a shade of red; he caught my hand, sat me down on a stool and said in the sternest voice I’d ever heard, “I’m your Father, not your dad.” One moment I was so excited and happy, shouting out to the only person who would take me to my favourite place on earth, and the next minute I was so scared and confused. I knew I had done something seriously wrong, but as far as I was concerned, father and dad were exactly the same things. From that day on, Thomas stuck to playing granddad and, even though I swore never to call anybody dad again, I prayed to my personal Roman Catholic God to send me a real one. I should’ve known then that I was screwed because no self-respecting Christian God was going to listen to a prayer that ended with “ami-tofu” instead of “amen.” Before I go any further, you must understand that at that point in my life I’d just started to tinker with the concept of guilt and it really didn’t help that my friend’s mum, who was kind, loving and bona fide Buddhist, was steadily undermining my mum’s position and religion in my heart. In retrospect, maybe I was being a little bit greedy too and wanted the best of both worlds because even though I was clearly seeing Jesus as I prayed, I felt a need to say “ami-tofu” to make my prayer complete. I probably should’ve also realised then that no self-respecting Buddha was going to grant my wish when all that I was doing was grab his legs in my time of need and call him names – yes, I did pronounce it tofu like the wobbly soybean jelly.
I believe Thomas befriended my mum so he could save her soul, and Sally just felt plain sorry for me. People say that I should be happy that I have a mum because I’m a girl after all, but is it so wrong to want a dad too? To be honest, I decided long ago that there just wasn’t much I wanted to learn from my female parent. Thomas says this is not the way good girls should talk, but I’d like to ask him: Don’t good girls usually have good mums too? It’s not that I don’t want to have a mum either – I like my mum enough – I just don’t think she knows how to like me back. Worse, she expects me to do everything perfectly, not so that I can be perfect, but so that she can do one better and prove how much greater she is. I would say 95% of our conversations are mini-competitions.
“Is that your lousy attempt at learning Italian? Can’t you roll your rs properly like this – rrrrrrrrrrr?”
“What you’re listening to is junk; let me tell you something about proper singers like Barbara Streisand.”
“Stop moaning about your part-time job, I’m the one with the full-time job that pays the bills.”
Finally, my all-time everyday favourite: “Kimi, wake up! It’s 7, I was up at 6!” Like, who cares?
My mum is so competitive she made me take piano lessons in order to practice everything I learnt, hog the piano and at the end of the day boast how much better she was at it than I was, even when I was the one with the teacher; she wanted me to be bilingual, just so that she could remind me how well she spoke English as a native and how excellently she spoke Chinese as a foreigner. I couldn’t win, could I? But if I find her competitiveness mean, I can only say that she is ruthless with everyone else and will jump on them for any number of reasons. Everybody is scared of my mum at her school because accents are her pet peeve and she will shout at literally anyone for “abusing” the English language in that way. She zones in on the smallest pronunciation or grammatical errors, hence her students learn English faster and better than anyone else purely because they are so scared to make the same mistake twice. My mum is so crazy she once lost her temper with the principal at a meeting because he said “sink” instead of “think,” a sound that too many Taiwanese people could not pronounce and she had had enough.
“The Professor” is my mum’s third friend, if you can call him that. There’s no-one else that gets the spotlight as often as he does in our house, even though he has never stepped foot in it. Thomas brings him up every so often, but every time he does it sounds like an afterthought, “Oh, the Professor donated money to the church again,” “Ah yes, the Professor sold his 3-bedroom apartment in Shin-yi District for 10 million,” or “Guess what, I met the Professor’s wife helping out at the old people’s home today.” To which my mum’s usual enthusiastic response would be “Humph.” Sally’s reports on the other hand were always more informative and elicited longer sentences from my mum.
“The Professor ordered a cake for his son’s twentieth,” Sally announced this year, as she had his nineteenth the year before, using a tone that always seemed to be seeking some form of approval from my nearest and dearest.
“Lucky boy! And you’re going to make it for him again for free, aren’t you?” my mum would impatiently reply, getting more and more frustrated with Sally’s indecisiveness.
“It’s just a cake and a little charity in return for the Professor’s generosity,” Sally would usually try to rationalise.
“Trust me, he’s so filthy rich a little charity won’t dent his bank account, and neither will the price of any cake!” my mum would say tossing her mane like a disapproving donkey, “Haven’t you seen the sports car his boy’s speeding around in? That brat needs some serious disciplining or else he’s never going to grow up.”
Apart from the big role that the Professor seemed to play in our community and the conversational visits that he made to our small household, there was nothing else very interesting about him. He sounded like a decent man whose generosity could extend to my scrimping mother, but she on the other hand had no interest in charity of any shape and form. Since I’d never met him, I accepted him as a friend just as Thomas and Sally did, but grouped him with my mother’s other ghostly acquaintances who existed on an invisible plane.
When Sally found out that I had cancer she persuaded me to read Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie. I remember something from it: “Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.” I’m 16, I haven’t exactly aged yet, but I know that I’m going to die soon; I won’t have the chance to live a better life, but I had accepted death the way I knew how – I was going to meet my dad, spend some time with him, everything would be okay. There’s a recurring dream that I have like a favourite video that an eight year old never gets tired of playing. I am in a house with a man that I know is my dad. He is standing next to a partially opened window waving to somebody outside and trying to catch their attention. I walk over and see that it is me at the age of three playing on the grass; I see my mum and she is only 21. My dad waves with a slow, tender motion as if he does not want to frighten away the child. But I keep on playing without noticing him. I tell my dad that we’re looking back at the past and that I will not see him, but he insists that I will and continues waving. Suddenly, the child on the grass turns around and looks straight into his eyes. My dad declares triumphantly, “See, I told you!” But I am three again and as I swivel round on the grass, I am mesmerised by the brilliant reflection of the setting sun from a partially opened window. After I found out about my cancer, I told my mum about this dream. I knew each time I woke up from it that I was finally going to meet my dad, and I told her that that was all I wanted to do, even if it meant dying.
During my prayers with Thomas this morning, I lost consciousness twice. In a panic, he called Sally who was off work and she called my mum who had to leave in the middle of her class. I watched as the champion English master and single-parent extraordinaire approached my bedside walking as briskly and looking as severe as she always did.
“Kimi,” she said in a steady voice like a competitor psyching up her opponent, “I know that things haven’t been easy for you and you’ve been in a lot of pain lately.”
“No shit,” was the thought that danced around in my head as I prepared to duck any blows and try to return a clean one.
“You know that you are dying,” she said.
“I know! That one’s easy,” my thoughts jumped with a bit more energy.
“You have a dying wish, and I want it to come true,” something entered her voice that I couldn’t place.
“How the Hell are you going to do that?” my mind paused for a split second, was she cracking and about to reveal a gaping weakness or should I prepare for some kind of surprise attack?
“Things haven’t been easy for you, but it hasn’t been for me either. All these years, I have tried to protect you and teach you how to fend for yourself. I didn’t want you to make mistakes and hurt yourself; I wanted you to be tough and strong. We should be independent, we shouldn’t depend on others. Perhaps I have been wrong about you. You’ve always needed friends, people to depend on, and have foolishly insisted on clinging to an invisible father. So, I have been thinking about it and I’m going to give you back your father.”
That landed all my thoughts on the floor. One, two, three... I couldn’t collect myself together and laid there as a man walked hazily out of the fog toward me. “Professor,” I heard Thomas say. Then, I felt him pick up my hand and squeeze it gently, the touch was soft even though the hand was dry and verging on raspy. I tried to focus on his face, but could only make out his disturbingly black hair. “Kimi,” he whispered and broke down. This was the first time that I knew a grown man could cry, I squeezed his hand back. After what seemed like an eternity, I heard his voice again, “Kimi, this is your half-brother.” My heart jumped and I struggled to open my eyes, but they wouldn’t open no matter how I tried. Please, I cried to God and Buddha, please let me see my family. I strained my eyes and all I could see were orange trees with a thousand pieces of shimmering glass turning gently in a citrus-fragrant breeze. The light faded, the glass tinkled and the smell lingered a little longer before it too was gone.
Now, I need to live to know my dad better, but it’s all too late. My wish is going to die with me.