My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents, Jonathan Silin [uplifting novels .TXT] 📗

book filled with stereotypes and that misrepresents Chinese culture. Nevertheless, I am still drawn to its central theme of loss and reconciliation, unashamedly moved by its sentimentality and descriptions of intergenerational conflict. When the book’s protagonist, June Woo, resists the suggestion of the club that she travel to China to tell her half-sisters about her mother’s death—“What will I say?

What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything. She was my mother”—I feel the truth of her words in the pit of my stomach. In the class, I talk about the ineffable mysteries that often surround the people whom we know most intimately, as if our very closeness prevents us from seeing and appreciating the whole. Images from the afternoon fill my head. How do my parents understand this last period of their lives? What do they make of my efforts to help them organize their affairs? Why are they so reluctant to trust me?

Further on in the book, when another middle-aged daughter gains enough distance to recognize that her mother is no longer the formidable enemy she once imagined—“I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a knitting needle for her sword, getting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in”—I think about being caught up in power struggles with my parents, struggles I presumed long over. We argue 6 n jonathan g. silin

over everything from household help and an appointment with the heart specialist to the purchase of a hearing aid and an application for a bank card. The frustration of trying to help two fiercely independent people sometimes causes me to lose all perspective and patience.

I am drawn back to the classroom by my twenty-something students, all women, who resonate with the stories of mother-daughter conflict in Tan’s book but complain that they have trouble telling the characters apart. They blame the author for failing to draw distinguishing psychological portraits of the mothers and daughters. I talk about cultural differences and the Western emphasis on the individual, and about the differences between novels, such as Amy Tan’s, in which the characters are defined by how they act or fail to act and novels that are predicated on extended exploration of their protagonists’ interior lives. I even manage to speak about some of the cultural myths to which my niece had alerted me. Afterward, however, as the students gather up their notebooks, half-eaten sandwiches, and containers of cold soup and coffee, I am left to gather together the emotional fragments of my own day.

During class I have tried to fend off thoughts of my aging parents even as I wonder if there are any larger lessons in their story for the students. Despite my parents’ growing fears and vulnerabilities, they are not childlike in any way. Nor do they give any indication that they expect or would like to be cared for. We have begun a complex dance in which I am learning to offer assistance, and they are learning to accept their new limitations. Never an accomplished dancer, I stumble frequently as I try to master new steps. I wonder about who is leading and who is following and find that I must listen carefully, for the music changes daily. Sometimes it is slow and sweet as we remember the past together, sometimes it is fast and staccato as we are pressed to make critical healthcare decisions. At other moments it seems that we are all on the same dance floor moving to different tunes.

This dance brings to the fore painful memories of my parents’ frequent and intrusive interventions into my own life. Hovering over me m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 7

as a child, they sought to read every emotional undercurrent for indications of restless waters, muddied streams, and paralyzing logjams.

While they celebrated my most minor achievements with pride, they also did not hesitate to secure professional assistance in the form of tutors and counselors if academic or emotional progress was in doubt.

When I was in the throes of an adolescent identity crisis, struggling to manage my first gay love affairs, my mother’s letter to the psychiatrist requesting information about my treatment seemed unforgivable to me. The fact that she was a former mental health professional made my outrage at her failure to respect the confidential nature of the therapeutic relationship all the more bitter.

Now I have become the intrusive one, no longer trusting my parents to provide accurate reports of their medical interviews. Some time ago, I timidly asked my father’s permission to call his doctor. I was taken aback by his response, “Of course. You should call. You’re my son.” I immediately reproached myself for having waited too long to do what sons should do. On reflection, I understood his reply not as a rebuke but as an invitation to become more actively involved in his care. My father was instructing me about what he expects and needs.

My mother too has ideas about what a son should do, although they are not about speaking to others, but about how to communicate in a crisis. These instructions were delivered from her bed in the intensive care unit of the hospital, on the day following the surgery to repair an ulcer that had burst through the lining of her stomach, when peritonitis threatened her life. My mother’s speech was slurred, the lingering effects of multiple painkillers, but her presence of mind was unshaken. She lay immobile, tubes of every description leading into and out of her body. When I entered the room, I immediately took her hand. Naturally shy and undemonstrative, I have been taught by HIV/AIDS the necessity of overcoming this reticence. Just as quickly, my mother asked, “Is your hand shaking?” My mother had not been given to straight talk in the past, and I was taken aback. Her words