In Wisconsin—where I was for a week and a half before college graduation, nearly eight years after my mother’s death—lightning swung in the fields and far from the interstate. I drove a rental car, my friend Lucas and another classmate with me. We wended our way south to Madison from Green Bay, here for a journalism class to cover the gubernatorial recall election. Lucas was in the back seat with his window open. He aimed his camera lens at the car’s side mirror. In the reflection, he wanted to capture the exact moment the lightning collided with the horizon.
You can take your time, our classmate said as she gripped the door handle. We’re not in a rush.
I hadn’t realized I was speeding through the storm, the speedometer ticking up the longer we were on the highway. I eased my foot from the gas, but a few minutes later, we sprung forward again.
In a few days, we’d return to Seattle, and in less than two weeks, I’d be in Phnom Penh, working as a fellow at an English-language newspaper.
For now, Wisconsin:
It was strange how my father had once lived here and my mother had also wanted to attend college here; something about the American heartland must have been compelling. My father first encountered snow here. The first time I saw snow, I thought it was really beautiful, he recalls to me, when it has been years since either of us have been to Wisconsin, but my classmate told me when it melted, it was really dirty. That was the only description he could muster about the snow, that this moment of soft, gleaming sheets of white—all of it new—would soon be mussed by grime. He was always anticipating the worst; always hearing the worst; always remembering the worst. It is an inheritance I do not want.
I want to go back into my father’s memory with him. I would convince him to enjoy his first snow. Just let it be soft snow for now. Look at snowflakes on your gloves and how they’re formed.
He learned to sail on a lake near campus. It might have been the same one my classmates and I had sat by when we visited the University of Wisconsin, days before our drive in the lightning storm. I was too distracted to take in the lake and the campus. I had wondered, instead, about the possibility of a state university selling beer on campus, my mind drifting toward potential liquor and liability laws.
But my father, he figured out how to heel and tack on this lake using intuition, the wind carrying him. I realize now, as he bent his limbs on that sailboat, that his mother was alive then. He must have thought he’d return to Hong Kong to see her; he was likely monitoring his savings to see how much more money he’d need to bring her to the U.S. But he did not think about this then, on that boat on the lake. He just ducked beneath the swinging boon, adjusting to the breeze that glanced off of the water.
* * *
A few months earlier, one of my university’s financial aid counselors called me into their office for a meeting.
I owed the school something like $4,000, the counselor told me. She was accompanied by one of her colleagues. While I studied abroad in Spain the previous year, the office accidentally mailed me an extra loan check. It was a technical detail that related to how I was an out-of-state student, but enrolling in the study abroad program allowed me to pay in-state tuition, which was a cheaper fee. This resulted somehow in leftover, unaccounted-for money.
What check? I could not remember any checks. It must have gotten lost in the mail, I insisted.
They read out the address. My father’s.
I don’t understand.
The check was cashed, one of the counselors said, careful not to assign blame. You’ll have to pay it back.
I don’t have that money. Sweat soaked my lower back. I don’t know what happened. That’s a lot of money.
The counselors assured me that I had options. I could return the money. I could borrow another loan to pay off that one, for example.
I’d always been meticulous about my loans and my tuition payments. Caroline taught me this; she’d been the one to encourage me to study abroad.
We’ll figure it out, together, she’d promised. You might not get another chance to live abroad. You should do it, Sticky. When I arrived in Spain, she wired me $800. She included a note: This is a gift. You should travel while you’re there. I was thrilled, and did not think then how that sum of money was not insignificant for her, only twenty-seven at the time and with her own loans to pay off.
All throughout college, I lived off of scholarships, government grants, and student loans. I juggled various gigs to cover my rent and tuition and also had tried to freelance and complete unpaid internships that mostly only kids with rich parents could afford. I did not sleep much, and I went about my life with flashes of anxiety that I was not doing enough. At the time, I was proud of how I thought I was doing whatever it took to make it. When friends who also wanted to be journalists worried about job prospects or the economy or how so many newspapers had folded, I was confounded by their discouragement. Just apply, I said. It can’t hurt. What else can you do besides just keep applying? It would only occur to me later how much I’d started sounding like my father; how I believed that work and success translated to survival and independence.
Except for me, I was certain, it was less about money or success, since each of those things seemed so distant. It was more about what the promise of a career could afford me. But it was a luxury to not worry about money. I never had $4,000 in my bank account, unless it was a loan disbursement, but then, I understood the money was not mine.
I excused myself from the meeting in the financial aid office and called my father while I walked to my apartment.
Well, he said. His voice was curt.
Well?
You wanted me to visit you in Spain, and I needed money to take the trip, he said, so I cashed the check.
But it wasn’t yours to take. The check wasn’t in your name. I knew this hadn’t stopped him before. After my mother died and my father could not access her bank accounts, he used her checks. When we found a few addressed to her that she had not deposited, my father signed his own name on the back and brought it to the bank. As long as you use your signature, it’s OK, he had explained. It shows you’re cashing it for that person.
Over the phone, he started to yell, and my voice grew with his.
Hey, he said. I’m the father. You’re the daughter. You and Caroline say, ‘Oh, let’s visit Spain,’ and I needed the money. You wanted me to come visit you, so I come.
You needed it, huh? I was confused and started to cry again. Was it that he’d thought that money was his to take—that he’d spent so much parenting me and that it was my turn to look after him? Was it that he was really so broke? I was not opposed to helping him. Just not like this.
You need to respect me, he said.
Respect you, I said, over and over, still shouting, unsure if I was asking a question or repeating his words or trying to will this into myself.
* * *
When my father settled in Connecticut a decade after leaving Wisconsin, he was nostalgic for his days there on that lake. He bought a sailboat with aspirations for towing it often to the water, either the Connecticut River or Long Island Sound. He only used it once or twice before he claimed that neighborhood kids had stolen its parts, all of which were too expensive to replace. What remains of his boat sits in his backyard by the shed, just a few feet from where our dead pets are buried.
I always forget that separate from my father, my mother had originally wanted to enroll in this university, as well. She would have enjoyed sitting on the lakeshore. She would have been a remarkable student, majoring in whatever she wanted, finding a job near Madison that paid her well and provided her and her family with excellent health insurance. Maybe in this alternate reality, she would have wound up with the man she dated when she was in her early twenties, before meeting my father. I do not know much about this boyfriend, just that the letters I’d come across years ago and have not read since were filled with pining. They were earnest and pleading, which made me think she had left him and he was eager to get her back. But the fact that she had saved their correspondence must have meant something. I imagine her in Wisconsin, possibly still with this boyfriend, though this is an unfortunate exercise in picturing me and my family’s non-existence. Year after year, she would have been in awe of the snow, both as it fell and days after; in my fantasy, she would have thrived, is what I’m trying to say.