Sons and Fathers (I)
Based on true events
Grandpa, do you know
Only time I saw Dad cry
Tears fell on your grave
ⓒ ine fandango 2022
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My father was the firstborn son in his Chinese family, which was rather a big deal, if unsurprising. Such was the weight of generations of inherited memory gone unquestioned. Even bigger a deal, I imagine — although no one has ever really talked about it in my family — was the fact that in the prime of his life when he was a newly-wed twenty-something, he promptly upped sticks and left, on a one-way ticket to the other side of the earth. Literally someplace on the other side of the earth Downunder. (Whether it was because of his job, or my mother’s insistence born out of an inexplicable wanderlust, is unclear, although knowing my parents, the truth gravitates towards the latter.)
That is a big deal when the unspoken code (written long before even my grandparents were born) was that you stayed close to your family, took care of your parents in old age, and generally provided a good role model for your siblings. All his younger brothers would also leave and put down roots in other countries, yet another sore point I’m sure wasn’t lost on my father.
Still, my father would regularly send money back to his parents, and he would go back for visits. If there was any emotional debt of obligation between them, and if he managed to discharge it, it wasn’t something anyone talked about.
My grandfather passed away some years ago. My father didn’t make it back for his funeral. Again, I don’t know why. Except I know he was torn about it. Not because he showed it, but because I knew the unspoken code was you showed up for your father’s funeral.
My father did make it back a year later to pay his respects in person. I have never seen my father cry the way he did that day when he stood by my grandpa’s grave.
