Dear 爸爸,
It is called mother tongue, yet I feel I owe you the apology for not knowing it. I’m sorry. When I think of men, I think of their expectations.
Every year I delay learning, my tongue calcifies further into English. Is this what you imagined when you left me on the street outside the welfare center, that one day oceans and languages would divide us? Or worse, is this what you hoped for?
Every year, we both grow older, grow closer to the day we will no longer be able to meet. White hairs have begun springing from my scalp, wiry and defiant of gravity. They point outward and upward, and I imagine they might point back across an ocean to you. I weigh them down with oil, smooth them down with yet-unwrinkled fingers until I point back to myself. I wait another year to give myself more time to meet the expectations I fear you have of me, conjuring your outline in wants borrowed from my friends’ fathers, from fictional fathers, from my own adoptive father. In utter absence, it is difficult to imagine anything more.
It is unfair, however, to speak of your imagined expectations without risking my own. When I was younger, I thought I had a boyish face, so I expect us to share the same severe gaze, the same jaw set with tension our loved ones tell us we must release. Last summer, I tied my hair into braids and glued a mustache to my upper lip, and I wondered if you might recognize your own youth. When I tame my white hairs into place, I imagine your hair in short whites and grays, pointing in all directions, searching for me.
In truth, I have fewer expectations than I have desperations. I rarely speak to the man who took up the mantle of being my father, and I fear that, because you are my father too, this has doomed us already. I fear that, should we make it past the barriers of oceans and languages, you will not understand me. I find myself being unfair again: I have not yet promised to understand you, and my inability is proof that I ask too much of you. I cannot promise this because it is not something that can be promised, only strived for. I hope, beyond white hairs reaching across oceans, we will share this too.
Your 女儿
