Did I ever tell you about the orange flowers in my Dad’s underwear?

My father left China as a teenager in 1947. He did not see his parents again until he was in his 50s. Civil War, Mao, and geopolitics had delayed his return by some 30 years.

After 1979, he would visit China every other summer, but never daring to take my mother, sister, or me. He told us that the conditions there were too primitive for his precious daughters.

But every time he would bring back presents:

Jade chops carved with our Chinese names.

Jade Bangles.

Rose pendants carved from ivory. Decades after this purchase and after learning about the ivory trade, he would still lament the elephants sacrificed for those rose pendants. “I wish I had known!”

One year, as he opened his suitcase and my sister and I waited patiently to see what bounty they would yield, he began rummaging in his dirty laundry bag. He pulled out some seriously gray and dingy Fruit of the Looms. I scrunched up my nose. But I could see that the underwear had been used to wrap a few tiny plants: small green leaves attached to roots with a bit of dirt.

“These are from my Mommy and Daddy’s house.”

My Dad planted each seedling into a planter about 10 times larger than the actual seedling. Over the years, they grew larger and larger and my father would dutifully split them into other planters. With pride, he took their portraits and sent the pictures back to China. I didn’t pay much attention to them. They were just boring plants to me.

After my father died, I took a plant to my home as a memento. That spring, I was surprised to see orange flowers blooming on my Dad’s plants. I don’t know if the orange flowers had been blooming all along and I had never noticed them because I had been a self-involved teenager, or a self-important 20-something, or an overwhelmed 30-something new mother struggling to care for aging parents at the same time. Or if the flowers had waited some 30 years until after my father had passed to finally bloom.

The flowers have bloomed every year in the five years since my Dad’s passing. Every time I look at them, they remind me of the questions I should have asked my Dad while the plants were still just seedlings. Of the weekends I should have come home and visited him and helped him tend his plants. Of the family stories I should have recorded before memories and cognition faded.

But I am still lucky for the chance to savor the orange blooms and to solve the mysteries my Dad left behind.