We can see how you would think so, the counselor said, but we worry about your daughter. An excellent student but has trouble connecting with peers, is rigid, inflexible, things have to be done a certain way according to Joan, according to her peers. She should be tested for…， and each counselor gave a list.
She’s shy, said my father.
But sometimes she has outbursts.
Is she physically violent?
No one is suggesting that.
Then I don’t see a problem.
We’re not suggesting there is a problem. We too want Joan to succeed.
Does she need your permission to do that? he wanted to ask, but couldn’t get it out clearly and the counselor didn’t seem to understand him. She needs no one’s permission, not mine, not yours, and because this was the extent of his English while angry and arm-crossed, he just repeated the phrase—not mine, not yours—until it was time for us to go.
The last counselor I saw was in college, freshman year. She asked if I had ever met with a counselor who was more like myself. A well-meaning question that she asked cautiously and in a circular way, at 7:30 a.m., before I had class at 8:00. I think the word she didn’t want to use was Asian. The nonexistent Asian therapist—had I ever met one of those? To understand difference requires difference and someone who has been in your shoes. At least she was the first counselor to admit not quite getting it instead of trying to pinpoint a fault. After her I would have no more time for counselors, and once I started my training, I needed only to turn to the person beside me in lecture to know that we were the same. At face value, medicine was still a meritocracy and the most straightforward path that I could take. Moving through the ranks had less to do with what I looked like or my family, but had everything to do with if I could watch and listen carefully, if I could carry out the tasks that were asked of me and then pass the same instructions on when my turn came to teach. The joy of having been standardized was that you didn’t need to think beyond a certain area. Like a death handled well, a box had been put around you, and within it you could feel safe.
* * *
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HAD MY FATHER BEEN happy raising me, been happy to be my father? And had I posed those questions to him, would he have considered them important questions or simply Western ones? Americans he found to be so outwardly happy all the time and superficially positive. To be indiscriminately happy seemed to him as much of a curse as to be indiscriminately sad.
We often went months without speaking, not out of annoyance with each other or any real reason except that there wasn’t a need. The longest stretch was a year in my mid-twenties when I was body-deep in clerkships and my father was, as usual, busy. I spoke to my mother that year and to him indirectly through her. Tell Dad about this, and she said that she would. The year of no contact ended just as casually as it began. He called me about his vertigo, a possible ear infection, and some red fungal spots on his chest. I asked if he had seen a doctor, and he said wasn’t I the doctor, his daughter the doctor, unless the doctor was not in today and it was just his daughter. If just the latter was in, he would call back tomorrow for the doctor.
My father could be playful, mixed in with Asian stoicism and formality. I said no, the doctor was here today and ready to receive patients.
Then we went through his symptoms and I told him the kind of medication to buy and how often to put it on.
It was a twenty-minute conversation, one of the longest that we would have.
Thanks, doctor-daughter. Or do you prefer daughter-doctor? Which one?
I said the former was fine.
All right then, doctor-daughter, so long, goodbye.
But the phrase for goodbye in Chinese is zài jiàn, or “see you again.”
* * *
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TO WRITE A CHINESE word, we sometimes do it in halves. On the left-hand side, we can put a person （人） on top of an ocean wave （？） and, on the right-hand side, give this wave-riding person a knife （刀）。 A knife for fighting with, for striving with; a knife to accompany you on the unknown sea adventure ahead.
Chuàng （创）： to create something that never was, to forge a new path, to innovate, to achieve, to strive; anything worth doing requires a person to chuàng.
I did have Mark to thank for my new book stack that rose a foot and a half beside Suede Chair like a stalagmite. I’d gone through each book again, reading titles and back cover summaries, maybe even the first page. One in particular, the smallest and thinnest book, caused my heart to skip and accelerate, then, I thought, to stop altogether. The Old Man and the Sea, but another title could have been Father. I read it, on and off, over the next few days and found in it everything that Mark had talked about. Baseball and homage to a player whom the old man believes to be the greatest of all time—“have faith in the Yankees, my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.” The old man is a fisherman and has suffered eighty-four days of no fish. On the eighty-fifth day, he catches a marlin and, in his quest to bring the big fish home and sell it at market, he is attacked by sharks that have caught the scent of the marlin’s blood. The old man fights the sharks, punching some in the nose, killing several with his spear. More sharks appear and eventually devour the marlin, leaving only its skeleton. The old man, however, survives, makes it ashore, and stumbles home.