Links by Michael Chin
My son calls me Dada. At four, he’s rapidly approaching the point when Dada will shorten to Dad. He’s already started dropping the second a, most often when he addresses me in the second person, as I sit with him in calm moments as in, Dad, more juice or Dad, iPad, as opposed to speaking of me in the third person, when he references to my partner that Dada go to work.
I remember a point when my father called me Wimp. Sometimes, it was Wimpy, not as an adjective, but as a proper noun. He sang a sing-song tune of Wimpy and Blimpy about my older sister and me, a point in our development when he’d determined I was old enough not to cry so much and that brief period, late in her elementary school years, when my sister had grown past our family’s tendency toward small frames and skinny arms, to, objectively, be a little chubby.
We can call that version of me Wimp. I’d internalized the moniker enough to respond when my father addressed me by it. Wimp loved The Legend of Zelda, playing daily for two- or three-hour sessions. He learned to navigate the eight-bit world of Hyrule better than in his own neighborhood.
Wimp developed strategies for the hardest parts of the game. There were fleets of villainous knights — Dark Nuts — to defeat in one of the dungeons, hard to kill because their blue or orange armor deflected blows that came at them head-on. The key was to attack from behind or below. Wimp learned those spots on the screen where he could hide from their detection — most notably doorways at the edges of screens. Wimp would send his avatar out to deliver single strikes and then go back to hiding. It took three or four hits per knight to kill them, so the game stretched on and on, sometimes a half-hour per screen to see this part of the game through.
Wimp beat Zelda innumerable times, developing quicker strategies for gathering Rupees to buy magic shields and life potions. He usually sat cross-legged on the basement floor so that it left small, stippled impressions on his ankles where they pressed down on the carpet. He sat four or five feet from the big tube television, face aglow. In his heart of hearts, he imagined something different might happen in one iteration. Maybe he’d find a secret doorway in the side of a rock wall that might lead him on a separate quest, or even in those days before there was a modem in the house — maybe, particularly, because he didn’t yet know what a modem was — someone who’d been watching him play on the screen from afar might reach out and proclaim him the chosen one, a special player worthy of some accolade or new weapon to wield, a new enemy to face.
More than anything, I suppose Wimp was after that feeling from the first time he’d beaten the game. Dad, Blimp, and Wimp had been stuck on the final level for days, unable to wound Ganon, the final boss. It was Wimp who stumbled upon the Silver Arrow which turned out to be the lone weapon that could win this fight. He’d handed the controller to his father to have that first fight with Ganon with the silver arrows in hand, and so it was Dad who beat the game first in the household as daylight faded, sometime in the late spring or early summer. It was getting late and Wimp had assumed they’d go upstairs, and maybe he’d try to beat the game himself the next day, even though he doubted he ever would. Wimp had never finished a Nintendo game before.
His father told him no and pressed the reset button while Zelda and Link stood together holding pieces of the Triforce overhead, while the music still played before the credits scrolled. “You do it.”
I can’t remember with certainty what Wimp felt that first time running through the last stages of the game — if Dad instilled him with confidence for believing in him or the dread of what it would mean to disappoint his father if he really couldn’t beat the game. I don’t remember how many hearts of life force Link had for that first final battle or how many licks Ganon got in on Wimp’s avatar, but I do remember Wimp won and the tears welled up in his eyes. He didn’t dare shed them with his father so near.
If I could reach back through time, I imagine giving myself a good book. Maybe Patricia C. Wrede’s Dealing with Dragons, which I’d discovered a couple of years later and loved. Maybe The Hobbit in those days before a big-budget film. I don’t know that I’d have been ready to appreciate these books yet, those days when I was a good but reticent reader — a big vocabulary, scoring highly on all the tests in school, but rarely enjoyed reading for myself yet. How do you give someone what they need before they want it? How do I communicate to myself the escape of these words, this sensation of accomplishment from both vicarious experience and reaching the final page?
I’d tell myself to always read the final page in private, far from Dad. Somewhere I could let my breath falter when I sighed and wouldn’t have to hold back the tears.
I learned early in my own fatherhood that trying to prevent my son’s tears was a fool’s errand. When he cried for milk it was a precursor to tears of frustration, tears of scraped knees, tears of fatigue, tears of being overwhelmed by the music in a particularly poignant car insurance commercial. But I don’t call him Wimp. I reach in for the hug, not to tell him to stop crying, but to say let’s sit in this, too, together.
Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. His debut novel, My Grandfather’s an Immigrant and So is Yours (Cowboy Jamboree Press) came out in 2021, and he is the author of three previous full-length short story collections. Find him online at miketchin.com and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.
