Behind Closed Doors

Cory Liang

 

Cliché as it may be, I’ve always liked the analogy of life as a train ride, in which there’s no preventing people from getting off at their designated stops, just like there’s no predicting who will join the ride and become part of the journey. What I’m curious about is what happens when the train heads towards a completely different destination. I wonder, did my mom change her destination when my dad got on?

My mom and I are like best friends. We never fight. We watch movies and recite Buddhist sutras together. Sometimes I sit in the kitchen and read news to her while she cooks. I tell her everything; well, except my sexuality, though I can trust her not to make a scene if I eventually come out to her. Over the years, she has asked numerous times what I want to do in life, and no matter how indefinite my answers sound she always reacts with enthusiasm and encouragement. But we never talked about her lifelong dream—what she could have become if not shackled by the role of housewife. Maybe she would want to be an artist, since back in elementary school she did all the illustrations for my class posters. Maybe, with her great taste in clothes and superb sewing skills and a magical power to mix and match colors and fabrics, she would want to be a fashion designer. Maybe she would simply want to travel around and see the world with her own eyes. But it’s hard to imagine her as a solitary traveler, someone who would go on a trip alone for her own purposes. It has nothing to do with courage or confidence or independence; she has all these in her pocket. What she lacks is a bit more self-regard and a pinch of callousness, just enough to allow herself the liberty to leave everyone and everything behind once in a while and just think about herself. Just herself.

With my dad around, I doubt it’s ever likely to happen.

My parents met because of a train journey. My mom was 24 and fresh out of the army. She was working as a train attendant when two passengers got into a fight and had to be pulled apart. One happened to be a distant relative of hers. Feeling ashamed, the relative left with a promise to set her up on a date with someone he was doing business with, and that someone was my dad.

My grandpa wasn’t happy about the arrangement. My dad was ten years older, lived in another city, and didn’t have a secure job. He met with my mom twice while on business trips to her hometown, and on their third date, if you can call eating at a food stall a date, asked her to move to Shanghai with him. She did, for reasons, in retrospect, none of us can quite grasp. There wasn’t a proper wedding, and she was banned from home until she was pregnant with me.

When I tell that story to friends, I stop right before the no-wedding part, which makes the whole affair sound almost romantic, while in reality my dad is the last person on earth I would associate with the word romantic. To withhold the detail about the lack of a wedding, however, is not to glamorize or lie about our family dynamic, but to yield to my own inability to decipher the enigma that is my dad.

My brother once described him as “a cultural relic living in his own portable museum.” He’s definitely got a point. My dad is a genius at the art of not-belonging. He doesn’t have a phone, let alone social media. He doesn’t spend because he rarely leaves the apartment, and only asks my mom for pocket money when he goes to the barber shop every other week. He doesn’t have any friends, and refuses to catch up with former acquaintances from the farm he worked on as a youth. He is against dining out, since he owned a restaurant a long time ago and hates spending money on food that he, or as more often is the case, my mom, could make at home. He doesn’t talk much; when he does it’s not to entertain. He isn’t a very good listener either, as he always forms his judgment before the conversation even starts; it would take the patience and tenacity of an ultramarathon runner to convince him otherwise. Sometimes his mere presence makes everyone else uneasy. Sometimes it’s the other way around. It’s really hard to tell whether he chose seclusion or had it forced on him because he was so bad with people.

When I was a teenager, I thought his seclusion and privacy meant that my mom and my brother and I got to be the privileged few with access to his secretive, thus all the more intriguing, inner world. Instead, he just committed himself to a life of extreme discipline and minimal interaction with anyone, including us. He would wake up at 5:30 a.m. every morning, shut himself up in the first-floor study reading newspapers, sit through the entire stock market trading hours in front of the computer screens, have a brief lunch break, and then confine himself to his bedroom upstairs and practice calligraphy for the rest of the day. Entrance into his domain without legitimate reason always feels like a form of violation. He even worked out specific times to use the bathroom every day, and suggested we do the same.

We were left on our own, free to do whatever so long as we were available when he needed us. He needed us more than he would admit, only those needs were translated into certain expectations, things we were supposed to know and follow even when they didn’t align with our own interests. He expected my mom to stay home and take care of us and keep our apartment tidy and maintain ties with other relatives. He expected my brother to help him with all the electronics and software that he had to use for stock trading. He expected me to sit with him and talk, but really just listen, whenever he felt like giving a lecture on how screwed-up the country was. He expected us to stay somewhere on the other side of his closed doors, not too close, not too far, just the right distance so he could leave an imprint on our lives without complicating his own. And he thought our family would always be in good shape if everyone just did their part, and left each other alone as much as possible.

If only life were that simple.

There’s a Chinese saying that he used to say to me whenever I wanted to spend a few days away with friends: “The friendship between men of virtue is plain like water.” The less interaction and emotional attachment, the better. It’s the same philosophy he holds at home too, always keeping a distance and refraining from developing emotional ties. Sometimes I enjoyed his withdrawal; not all kids grew up with such liberty. But every time he casually asked my mom which grade I was in, which college I graduated from, or what company I worked at, I was reminded of how little he knew about me, how little it seemed to bother him, and how hurtful it felt to me.

The problem is we really don’t know how to talk to each other. During the summer of my junior year of college, I was doing an internship in D.C. and my mom and my brother came to visit for a month. As someone who didn’t even show up for my graduation, my dad, of course, didn’t come. Surprisingly though, he had asked my mom to bring something along. “A letter from home,” as she put it. She handed me a white standard letter envelope, the cheapest kind, without any writing or a seal. I opened it, secretly expecting an actual letter with his messy, almost illegible handwriting—the idea that he’d write me a letter itself was enough to keep me on the edge of my seat—but only found three newspaper clippings from a couple days ago, whose content was so unremarkable that even now I can’t recall a single detail.

It was more than disappointing. It had been over a year since I last went home, and the only chance he got to “talk” to me he chose to let the clippings “talk” for him. Had he actually written me something, maybe I would have more memories to cling to than just a bitter smile and the obscure but persistent feeling of being unimportant. It just puzzled me how he could be so content to be by himself, so comfortable without attachment to anyone, and so cruel that I, as his child, had never felt his love.

As I write, I try to think of moments, conversations we shared that might argue against this sentiment, but for a second I can’t even remember what nickname he calls me at home. I wish I could write about how he taught me to walk, how he helped me pack my backpack the night before my first day of school, how he picked me up after soccer practice, how he cried with the 13-year-old me at the airport before sending me off to America by myself, how he hugged me when I came back home for vacations, how he said he was proud of me when I graduated with honors, how he patted me on the back when I got my first paycheck, and how he sat with me during my breakdowns and told me that he would always be there for me. I wish I could write about all these memories. But I can’t, because none of them happened. I remember sneaking into his bedroom while he was out, hiding in his closet and trying on his blue plaid pajama shirt as a kid. I remember the heat of the day and the touch of the thin fabric on my arms, even the smell of it. But that was about as close to him as I ever got.

The older I got, the clearer it became that whatever I did wouldn’t be interesting to him, and that there’s no point in trying to impress him, because he wouldn’t care. There’s no point in talking back either, because he would just dismiss me by saying that he knows better because he’s lived longer. It never occurred to him that people might have their own opinions on how their lives should be, and that there is so much more to our lives than what he sees or knows.

He never found out how my mom sneaked out every night to feed the dozen stray cats in our apartment complex. He never learned about the names she came up with and the stories she told about them—how Soybean is the mother of three kittens, Big Orange and Little Orange are sisters, and Big G is a grumpy one that wouldn’t allow other cats anywhere near his territory. And of course he would never understand how lonely she must feel when a newly-wed couple wanted to adopt Little Orange and she said to me on the phone, “After all these months, it’s like sending off another child.” Likewise, he never considered the possibility that I might find my “greatest joy in life” outside of a conventional marriage. He has never even taken the idea of homosexuality seriously enough to suspect it in me. I see my sexuality and the people I love as an important part of who I am, but does he know? Does he care? I don’t know, and I dare not ask lest my deviation from his expectation disqualifies me from continue participating in his life, however insubstantial that participation is.

What will become of us then, as the path I’ve chosen for myself brings us further apart? Familiar strangers, perhaps. Two people talking without listening, interacting without engaging. He would always be the mystery sitting behind those closed doors, and I the prier, the eavesdropper, the child on Christmas Eve, filled with anticipation and excitement, inevitably disappointed. We would carry on with our separate lives in the separate worlds we placed ourselves in and pretend that intersections and overlaps don’t exist. But again and again, I would feel the simultaneous drawing in and shutting out of his enclosed self and the unbearable weight of his absence as presence. I write, therefore, for a way in, and a way out.

 

Cory Liang is a nonbinary writer from China, residing in California. Their work has been published or forthcoming in Hobart and the Pinch Journal. When not reading or writing, they can be found in the gym or immersing in nature with their dog.