Our Papí. A man of so many talents and potential. Some may say his potential was wasted. Laid fallow for a lifetime. And maybe that’s true to some extent. He toiled for nearly 40 years in Chinese restaurant kitchens for meager wages. But what’s also true is that our Papí played the long game. His patience was strong, like thick ropes of fine silk, spun and woven over that lifetime.
When we were kids, he worked at a restaurant far from home, with one day off a week when he made the drive back to us. Every week, when he stepped out the door to go to work with a weary sigh, he knew what he was doing. When he spent that one day off a week taking us to parks and zoos and arboretums, he knew. When he spent every hard earned vacation day gained by trading shifts for weeks ahead of time, driving us for hours on meandering road trips to the Grand Canyon, Lassen, Bryce, Zion, Arches, Death Valley, Yosemite, Monument Valley, Monterey, he knew. He was completely self-aware that he was pouring so much energy into providing for his family and showing the world to his children in the way he knew how, he had nothing left for himself. He knew his ultimate fulfillment would be in my and Jenny’s success.
But you know, he lived an entire life before he married my mom at 45. He was an avid photographer, even getting one of his images published in a Hong Kong photography magazine. He worked for his older brother, a rising architect. At that position he managed a team of people and under the mentorship of the lead surveyor, was the person trusted to measure and lay down the physical guidelines with string on construction sites, marking where the foundation would be poured. He led group hikes deep into nature, up mountains and past waterfalls.
And before that, he spent a childhood defined by war. When the Japanese invaded he was seven years old. His education essentially stopped. His mother had him wear most of his clothes to bed in case bombs fell in the night, and they had to flee. He always blamed that time for his inability to cope with any smidgen of cold - saying he grew up wearing so many layers to bed as a boy, his body was now used to being warm all the time. World War 2 finally ended when he was 15.
And before that, his father was a prominent herbalist and Chinese medicine doctor who was in line for a position in the imperial court in China’s last dynasty before it become a republic. His brother had become headmaster at a school, which meant my dad could attend for free and he was advanced enough in his studies to skip a grade or two.
Education was prized above almost all else for my dad, probably because that was his heritage, yet he wasn’t able to achieve it for himself. So he made sure Jenny and I valued education just as much. He used to say, “Everything you learn is yours. The knowledge belongs to you forever. No one can take it from you.”
And we did it. I was part of a nationally winning academic team in high school and he proudly sent the newspaper clippings to his brother - a by then retired and published university professor in San Francisco. I graduated from Boston University and went into the corporate world. My sister graduated from Occidental College and my father proudly watched as she earned two more masters degrees, and then she proceeded to stay in academia. We parlayed our education into careers that have provided really good lives for us. We are safe and happy.
And Luca (or Yao-Woo) was born and he finally became Gung-Gung. The way he looked at and loved Luca was thrilling to watch. He told me that Luca is smart and that we better be careful to cultivate it into good because you know, it could go either way. One Thanksgiving, when Luca was only a year old, or maybe two, when we were going around the table saying what we were thankful for, he said he was pretty happy with his life, but you know what would be perfect? A sister for Luca. Classic grandpa move and a rare verbalization of a desire from him. Well, it took a bit of time but Chiara (Fei Fei) finally arrived in 2019 and he was so happy.
Even before my mom passed, and even more frequently after, he would say to me, “See-See, I’m fulfilled. I’m 91 years old. Every day, every minute I am still alive, is extra.”
So, I don’t think he wasted his potential in the end. He may not have lived up to the promise he held inside himself, but he gifted that promise to his children and eventual grandchildren. He poured all the could-have-beens, into us and in the end, HE won.
He won it all.
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