Dear Dad

Broccoli has always been a fascinating little vegetable to me. Ever since I was a young child, I would look at this little chopped up green thing, pick it up from my plate, squint really hard and then exclaim to my mom proudly: “Tree!”. I mean I wasn’t wrong - this peculiar little vegetable did indeed look like a mini tree meant for mini people quite like me. I’ve always wanted to like broccoli, and here is the reason why; there are three things that the rest of my family are quite passionate about, and that is - basketball, cheesecake and…. broccoli. And let me get this straight, there are only three things that I really really don’t enjoy in this entire world - and that’s basketball, cheesecake and broccoli. Let’s be clear, the only reason why I watch basketball is because I think Pau Gasol is the love of my life, I don’t believe that cheese and cake should be a thing that goes together (I mean cheese and cake, really?) and not only does broccoli look like a tree - but it also tastes like one.

I’ve lived a really great life. I have a house in a beautiful place, people to help me out and all the food in the world is accessible to me at a pull of a door. Sometimes I think I’m a little too blessed. I don’t cook most of my meals, and I know you’re probably thinking that that’s pretty normal for most people here but this honestly has really sheltered my life - It limited my knowledge of where foods come from.

Let me tell you a story. It’s almost already 8 o’clock at night and my mother is in the kitchen, bustling all around, knocking pots and pans back and forth, she looks straight out of one of those cartoons, with spaghetti sauce stains on her skirt and her face. Disaster scene. I could tell she was stressed out. I walk into the kitchen, her eyes widen in rage as she says, “VEGETABLES, WE NEED VEGETABLES!”. I slowly try to back up and avoid whatever is going on right now in the kitchen, but my mom throws her car keys that hit my face and land in my palms and she sends me to the grocery market. I take the keys and walk to my dad, who is sitting outside of the kitchen with Earth Wind & Fire pounding in the Beats he stole from me last Christmas, blasting in his already-deafened ear drums. He is simply oblivious to the horror show occurring in the room next to him, his wife in a complete frenzy, and somehow doesn’t seem to smell the burnt chicken or see the currently steamy room.

“We have to go get vegetables.”

I point at mom. He turns around, ready to rebut that he again “has too much work”, but sees my mother’s searing red face, and says: “Let’s go get the vegetables Lauren.”

My father speeds through the roads to get me to the grocery market. I race to the vegetable section. I see every type of vegetable, but where in the devil's name is the broccoli? And finally I see some horrible, puke-colored, disgusting vegetable in the corner of the refrigerated section - Broccoli. Now this wasn’t the broccoli I’ve known. It’s massive compared to the little broccoli I’m used to seeing on my plate. To me, it was a gigantic tree. I think to myself “Why is this broccoli so big?” and I go to ask the stocker, “Do you guys have any smaller, you know normal broccoli?” She looks at me like I’m stupid, and says: “Um… no. I don’t think we sell that kind of broccoli here” and walks away. I furrow my eyebrows in confusion, and I am dreading to see my mother's reaction to this huge broccoli. She's going to think I'm incapable of doing anything right! I pay for this stupid big broccoli. I get to the car, and I whip open the door and show my dad the ginormous broccoli. He pauses and says: “Yee? Why is this broccoli so big?”

We get home, and my mother is at the door waiting for the broccoli. I’m ready for her to get angry at me when she sees this Tyrannosaurus of a broccoli. I immediately start apologizing “Mom, I’m really sorry I have no idea why this broccoli is so big, I did exactly what you would do and asked if they had smaller broccoli…” My dad joins my apology and throws me under the bus: “Rulin you know if I was up there I would have done a better job than Lauren and gotten the right broccoli…” I hold up the broccoli and my mother looks at both of us with disgust in her face and in her oh-my-god-I’ve-raised-a-bunch-of-idiots voice says: “笨蛋! (Which means stupid eggs in Chinese) This is normal broccoli! You cut it up in smaller pieces to make them the normal sizes!”

Welp.

Told you I was sheltered. I mean at least I wasn’t my dad who went around 50 years of his life not knowing broccoli had to be cut up.

    My dad and I are similar in this way. We are sometimes clueless to things around us. We can barely make our own meals because both of us are those idiots that put an egg in the microwave, and both those idiots that have no idea what true broccoli looks like. The thing is, I’ve always been a momma’s girl. I pushed my dad as far as I could whenever he’d ask for “bao bao” (which means hugs in Chinese), and cry for my mother whenever he tried to help me. Looking back, I feel so bad I was so mean to my dad as a kid. My dad is actually one of the most thoughtful people I know in my entire life. He has a passion for airplanes. He loves the magic of it all. He loves how they fly into the air and disappear from the size of my thumb to the size of a bead in the sky. He loves how they can travel through space and time, go back in time and relive a moment. As a kid I’ve always annoyingly known whether or not a plane was a boeing A380 or a 747. He had his pilot license, and used to fly in one of those super claustrophobic, little airplanes that made you want to vomit. He loved it though. He loved the mechanics of it, how many parts came together to make one incredible avion, and just how something that weighs 910,000 pounds can lift itself up in the purple sky and reunite families from one end of the Earth to the other. When I was fairly little, my father used to work at Dragonair. This was every explorer’s dream because he was able to fly us to different corners of the world when it was time for a great adventure. We would take spontaneous trips to wherever there were empty flights - from Phuket in Thailand, to Palau in Oceania. When the great SARS epidemic hit Hong Kong in 2003, my father grabbed my sister and I by our shaking hands as we got on a plane to wherever we dreamed - and that was Disneyworld in Tokyo, Japan. I don’t remember much about that trip but I know it was my favorite one, because my dad who could barely tie hair, braided the strands of my thin wisps so painfully and my hair turned out so god awful horribly - but there was so much effort, persistence, and love in every broken brush and snapped hairband. When I was lost in the parade of people, afraid of Goofy or Minnie Mouse, he scooped me off my feet and kept me soaring like an airplane on his shoulders. Before we got to Space Mountain, I looked at him with worried eyes and said in a broken voice: “Will I have to sit next a bear?” He laughed and told me that day I didn’t have to go on that ride to be a big girl.

However, as I grew older, I noticed that things began to change. When my grandfather told my dad that he had to quit Dragonair and work in the family company - I noticed that something in my father broke.

My dad and I are similar in this way, we don’t know how to say no, and we refuse our own happiness because we want to help others out of kindness and feeling a sense of responsibility. My dad is probably better at this than I am. He is the most selfless person I know. He was flooded with work, and was shoved into an important position in the company -  which get this, is a shipping company. 

    Ships. Boats. 

    The big heavy object that sits and sinks in the ocean. The gigantic, metal object that doesn’t. even. fly. This was a time where the container shipping industry spiralled into economic cataclysm. It was all too much. And I saw my father’s hair turn from black to grey, and saw as his smile faded into wrinkles. My heart hurt as I thought about him being across the ocean, working so hard. Somehow though, he always stopped to call me, listen to me complain about my little loads of work, stupid boys, and not getting what I want... every little thing, he listened. Deeply, and intently. He never failed to write me long letters on how things would get better, to have faith in myself and how proud he was of who I had become.

The thing is, my father is a unbelievable hard-working man. He’s wiser than the oldest turtle, his love runs deeper than the great barrier reef and his kindness goes beyond this vast ocean. He is my dad, but he is also my best friend, which I know is not the typical thing you hear from a 20 year old teenage girl. Unlike the way his dad treated him, he learned to treat his kids just as he wish he was treated by his father. He tells me to follow my dreams and I hope that one day he gets the chance to do that with me. I know that day will come, because just like when my dad and I board our next airplane, I will watch as hope shines and prevails itself - when the golden sunbeams radiate from his smile as he watches the magic of another plane take off into the horizon - and maybe, just maybe one day we’ll learn to cook and together, us stupid eggs, can find out that cauliflower is just like the broccoli together.