Help Me Take This Mask Off

I visited my grandmother the day I turned eighteen. It was the first time I had been back to Taiwan after five years in the States. The trip was a gift from my parents for getting a full scholarship to university, or so they said. I had wanted to go much earlier, but there was no point arguing with them.

It was a sweltering summer afternoon in Taipei, and my cousin Erica took me on the MRT to a corner of the city I rarely visited in my childhood. The hospice center was clean and dim, its main room occupied by elderly patients in wheelchairs watching some television drama. A middle-aged caretaker guided us through a maze of partitions to where my grandmother lay strapped to a bed.

"Just for once, let me look on you with my own eyes."

He explained that she could no longer move, see, or speak, and her hearing had deteriorated. We had come at a good time, however, as she was often awake in the afternoon. He put a hand on her shoulder and shook her gently, saying her grandchildren had come to see her, then left us.

Erica had to nudge me forward. Finally, I took my grandmother's rigid, claw-like hand, leaned close to her ear, and said I was back. I told her I had graduated high school, and would be going to college soon. I told her she raised me well, and did not need to worry about me. I told her I was sorry I did not get to see her earlier.

Her eyes did not focus on me, but as I spoke she started to cry. Erica told me that it happened sometimes, that it meant she knew I was there. She had no other means of communicating.

We stayed with her for a while, and she wept until she drifted off to sleep. I followed Erica back out into the sun-baked street. I felt like I was underwater, as if everything came to me from a great distance. Even the heat and humidity of a Taipei summer could not banish the sense of disconnect. It was the first time I felt the vast numbness that passes for my grief, but it would not be the last.

Because the progression of Parkingson's Disease had been frightfully quick for my grandmother, I do not think that either she or her doctors thought she would hang on for so long, forlorn and cut off from the world. I will never know if she wished for death in her final years of darkness. If we could have known then what she wanted, we would have done it; but she could only cry.

Playing Chicken

People often ask why I do not eat meat. I can never think of a concise answer, because I have many reasons, not all of them easy to explain.  Often I just give the one that will satisfy the most people, even though it explains the least: I refrain from taking life as part of my practice of Buddhism.

It started in the fall of my sixteenth year, when my mother found an excellent deal on chicken leg quarters at the IGA supermarket. Growing up impoverished in the Taiwanese south had given her a strong frugal streak, so she bought enough chicken to fill up the entire freezer.

As my mother hated cooking, she worked out an ingenious scheme for expediting weeknight supper. Each weekend, she would broil as many chicken leg quarters as would fit in the oven, dice them up, and keep them in the refrigerator, ready for use.

I did not--and do not--begrudge my mother for saving money or time. After a month of bland, chewy broiled chicken, however, I was ready to snap. Raised in Chinese fashion, I harbored no notion of asking my mother to vary the menu. So I started making ramen for myself when I got home from school, arguing that I was too hungry to wait, then skipping dinner to study (and/or play MUDs).

Once soccer season arrived, though, I regularly made it home later than my parents and could no longer use hunger as an excuse to make my own meals. So I came up with a reason that I thought would pass the filial piety test: vegetarianism.

It did not impress my parents.

My mother, perhaps more perceptive than I gave her credit, insisted that I hated her cooking. There was no fighting her on that one. My father calmly explained that I could not possibly get enough protein to survive his PT regimen and varsity soccer without eating meat. I, with the stubbornness I inherited from him and perhaps a bit of teenage defiance, insisted that I most certainly could.

I did some research on nutrition and presented it to my father. He remained unconvinced. I kept a journal of what I ate for several days, demonstrating that I got plenty of protein. This annoyed him, but he knew too much biology to argue that protein from meat was qualitatively different from the protein in other foods. Reluctantly, he allowed me to continue, convinced that I would grow out of the phase soon enough.

Ironically, I might not have stuck to vegetarianism if my father had just let it alone from the start. The fact that I fought him (amicably) over the issue and won meant a lot to me, and thereafter my diet represented one of the few areas I controlled in my highly regimented life.

As the years passed, I often considered eating meat again--and at times have done so in limited capacities. I have a strong aversion to habits that do not serve any purpose, and make regular audits of my habits in order to eliminate or change unnecessary ones. My vegetarianism has survived several such audits, emerging at last with renewed conviction.

End of the Beginning

To the best of my knowledge, I have only disappointed my father once.

It had seemed like the end of the world. Perhaps so, in that it ended one epoch of my life--one I do not like to think about often anymore. Like it or not, though, I owe my cherished present to that unpleasant past.

In the winter of my senior year in high school, I withdrew my application to the Naval Academy, for which I had prepared the three years previous. My father has an Irish temper, and usually it flares bright and brief. That event, however, infuriated him to such an extent that I could not talk to him for nearly a month.

It probably did not help that my eldest brother had done something very similar years ago.  He had changed his mind about attending West Point at the last minute, went to a liberal arts college for a short while, then hared off to some Ashram in California.

Dad attributed my change of heart to 'nerves', cowardice, the liberal media's brainwashing, and pretty much everything except for the reasoned decision I thought I had made. Neither he nor my mother would accept my choice, and kept waiting for me to 'get over it'

I heard them talking in the living room at night about how I would never make it in civilian life. They thought me too intellectual and too sensitive to brave the world without the structure of the military to prop me up and give me direction.

At the time, I believed them.

Like my brother, I did find my own way to higher education. Unlike my brother, I did not drop out to join a commune, but our life experiences still have their parallels. Academic scholarships made moot my parents' reluctance to foot the bill, and I never returned home again except for short, uncomfortable visits.

Though I kept in touch with my parents by email and by telephone, we rarely had much to discuss. They no longer brought up military service, or other unsolicited advice that they knew I would ignore. Nevertheless, it seemed plain to me that they did not particularly approve of my life choices. I could live with that.

A couple of months ago, I called my father to wish him a happy birthday. We talked about the weather and our workout routines, and about my mother, as usual.

Then, he dropped this bomb: "I don't think I say this often, but I'm proud of you. You may not have done things the way I would have, but you've done good, and I love you."

To put things in perspective, I do not come from a warm and demonstrative family. By "I don't think I say this often", my father actually meant he had never said it before--at least not to me.

So I gaped for a moment, wondering who had kidnapped Major Farrington, USMC (Ret.) and replaced him with this understanding, modern dad. No, it defied the bounds of belief to imagine someone breaking into the home of my aging but freakishly in-shape ex-military parents and leaving with anything other than injuries.

"I love you, too, Dad," I replied at last. "You're my hero, and the best father a son could have."

Even typing that now kind of makes me cringe, but I meant it. Before we hung up, he added that, in retrospect, he believed I had made the right choice in not attending the Naval Academy, and he respected me for holding my ground against him.

It felt like some strange, belated rite of passage: a blessing from the man whose opinion I had valued above all others for the better part of my life. Sure, I did not any longer wait on his approval like the child his anger once devastated, but in a way that made it easier for me to appreciate the gesture.

Entering military service, in and of itself, would not have made me like my father as I once hoped it would. Becoming my own man, honoring my word, respecting others, and taking responsibility for my actions--these things make me my father's son.

And I did not even have to join the Navy to do it.

Beginning of the End

On the second day of Naval Academy Summer Seminar, they woke us at 0530, lined us up in the passageway, and told us to run five miles in half an hour. I made it in under the time limit, winded and nauseous, but triumphant.

My limbs felt like noodles as I struggled to keep up with the squad on the way back to the dorms. A squadmate, the only one who finished ahead of me, threw my arm over his shoulder and helped me along.

He had platinum blond hair, buzzed very short, and ice blue eyes. Though almost two inches shorter than me--no mean feat--he probably outweighed me half again in pure, rippling muscle. I could not decide whether I envied him or wanted him.

It turned out he lived near the beach, and would run down to the water each morning, swim across a cove (in all seasons, no less), do a ton of push-up on the beach, then run home.

To me, his accomplishments seemed godlike. Sure, I played varsity soccer, but it mattered more to me that our quiz bowl team made it to the nationals. I jogged three to five miles every morning, and visited the weight room every other day, but it did little to improve my whip-thin physique.

The rest of the squad had already written me off as a nerd--even our midshipman squad leader vocally disdained my "book smarts"--but they shunned him for reasons entirely mysterious to me. Perhaps he just seemed too well-prepared, too gung-ho, and too unconcerned about their opinions.

The next day, during personal time before lights-out, he confided his motivation for joining the Navy. He needed structure and regulation in his life to compensate for something he lacked.

He looked right at me, no emotion in his perfect Aryan eyes, and said, "I can be very cruel."

I stopped envying him, but wanted him more than ever. Maybe the others avoided him because they could sense his sociopathy, or something. What did it say about me that I liked him?

When he asked me why I wanted to join, I could not summon any of the high-minded drivel about duty and service and 'being a part of something bigger than myself' that we all write in our admissions essays.

"I want to be like my dad," I blurted.

He actually smiled then, a strange, thin smile. "You can do that without joining the Navy."

"He's a Marine, actually, a Mustang," I conceded. "Said he would rather have a daughter in a whorehouse than a son in the Naval Academy. Guess this counts as rebellion for me."

"You can do that without joining the Navy, too," he pointed out.

It did not occur to me to turn that around on him--to say that he could find structure and purpose and whatever in all sorts of places. It did not occur to me because his words had triggered a revelation of sorts.

Until then, I had embraced the naval service as my destiny. If not the Academy, then NROTC, or enlistment. The very thought of civilian life seemed ridiculous and untenable. I did not consider the litany of reasons I might not belong in the military, and, more problematically, I refused to consider why I really wanted to serve at all.

Later that night, I lay in my bunk, waiting and dreading as cries of "goodnight" traveled down the passageway. I joined in when our turn came. When the last, distant "goodnight" sounded, I thought for a moment the next part might not come.

Then someone outside shouted, in a sing-song voice, "Goodnight, Jane Fonda!"

"Goodnight, Commie bitch!" my fellows roared, without me.