My dad died over 3 years ago. One afternoon last week, I went through all the papers he kept — the records of everything official that had happened to our family in the 20 years we spent in the States.

Turns out 20 years was plenty of time to amass a small mountain of paper for me to go through. For at least 3 hours, I was a document processing machine. I skimmed every page, read topical words out loud to my mom (I didn’t know about a lot of this stuff), got some stories in return, threw out the vast majority of the documents, and relabeled/sorted the remainder.

Turns out if you’re only a few years into mourning the death of your father, going through every document he ever kept is an emotional roller coaster.

I started from the beginning, so it started out well enough. I found my parents’ English-translated marriage license. My mother’s scribble of “Yi-Tzu” — a sad representation of her actual name —had me in giggles. My mother’s English handwriting is beautiful, trained in an era where handwriting was respected, but not well showcased here. I suppose she’d never practiced the cursive z. Or maybe she forgot if the translators decided the Mandarin “t{zs}” sound ended in an s or a z in a language that doesn’t support that consonant, so she wrote both. I got the nicest warm fuzzies imagining my parents as they’d been then. Just married. Not much older than I am now. Only writing in English on the rare occasion some American demanded it.

The next notable document raised a fierce rush of pride in me. I’d found my dad’s phD diploma. Plus a paper he published. It had something to do with laying out circuits on chips for better blah, blah efficiency. I didn’t stop to read it, but I’ll come back for it shortly. Maybe I’ll even understand a fraction of it.

After these pre-States documents, I went through a whole phase of immigration-related paperwork. The most touching document was a copy of a letter sent by my dad’s first American employer. I didn’t take a picture, but it was one of the few functionally-unimportant documents that I kept for sentimental reasons. In it, someone in the company wrote to Immigration Services, to sponsor my dad’s H1-B. This was the first document that brought tears to my eyes. Someone, a stranger, really, in the grand scheme of things, believed in my dad enough to basically tell the US Government that they wanted to keep him, and would take the fall if he screwed up. They explained, in surprisingly technical language, my dad’s skill set, how it would apply to his work for the company, and promised that if his employment ended, they would buy a plane ticket to ship him right back to where he came from. They never had to.

After that, it got more boring. 20 years worth of tax documents.

However, as I flipped through every paper, some important, but most not, I started to see the body of papers through the eyes of my father. I was struck with the worst case of heartache — in Chinese, we say 心痛, a more empathetic pain than then English phrase implies— as I imagined my dad reading all these documents, translating them to Chinese in his head, and trying to do the right thing in response. Often not. English is hard. Officialese is even harder.

It takes me about 3 hours to do a given year’s taxes for me, my mother, and two of her friends. It used to take my dad several weekends, and the many mis-prints and return mail, all carefully filed away in these folders, sometimes with fines/requests for corrections, were evidence to how much of a struggle it all was. A document that takes me 5 seconds to skim, and 10 more seconds to decide what to do with, must have been a significantly more annoying artifact for him to decipher.

My fierce pride in his whole endeavor was weighed down with a deep sense of regret. If only I’d been older and mature enough to help…