#289

5.8.22

8:17p

Sometimes I wonder if I’m destined to abandon my parents, give up, and live my life without them.

My Dad and I don’t talk. We’ve spoken three times in my whole life. I cried the whole time for two of those conversations. Yet we live under the same roof.

My mom is delusional. Making up stories to assuage her fear of abandonment, while still living with her divorced husband who has strangled out every ounce of her happiness.

I want to leave Columbus already, run away from the problem. This house is moldy and gross, we are boarder line hoarders with all the clothes we bought to try on the American Dream. The walls are stained with my parents screams.

Yet the only reason why I’m here, typing from my $2800 macbook pro is because of them. They worked their asses off, and still do, both currently working two jobs, mom is flirting with a third, so I could grow up in Columbus, OH, learn American English to a degree that makes it extremely difficult to speak Cantonese with them now.

My family is the hardest and biggest problem of my life. I am only just now trying to fix things. And it’s hard. Harder than quitting porn. Harder than quitting sugar. Harder than climbing Half Dome while every leg muscle is cramping, harder than finding a date for the prom when you’re an ugly high schooler. How funny all of those problems are first world. Access to a computer to watch porn, hooray! Access to fat, delicious foods loaded with sugar, more please! Access to a touristic mountain to hike up for fun, yippie! Access to education at a great high school where we dance to celebrate literally nothing, hopefully my date is hot!

What about swimming to another country so you don’t have to be sent to labor camps for “reducation?”

What about not being able to afford oil, or meat, or soy sauce, or vegetables so all you eat is rice?

What about learning how to chop of a chicken’s head and cook when you’re 12 because nobody else is going to take care of you?

What about having your “family friends” steal all your life savings?

What about constantly searching for illegal jobs to feed your infant kids who will one day grow up to help you translate job ads and applications so you can get more money to pay for their fucking clothes, iPods, and shoes so they can win the approval of their white classmates, who actually don’t give a shit about them while their white parents bully the fuck out of you at your shitty grocery store job?

Even though, I want to say my parents did a terrible job raising me, there is nothing I can do to repay them. Nothing. As a powerless infant, they fed me, clothed me, raised me. Just because of that simple fact, I can do nothing to repay them.

So I can quit right now, accept the fact they’ve sacrificed their whole lives for me and run off and try it on my own (which I have multiple times).

Or try and be a good son, to talk to my dad, to tell my mom not to worry.

Thank you mom.

Thank you dad.

Kiubon