The summer I turned ten, I spent most nights in the dressing room for “champagne babes” at my dad’s nightclub. My mother worked long hours and my parents did not want me to be home alone, so, this was (obviously) the best option.
The first night, I tried to take everything in excitedly: the slinky champagne-colored dress perched on a chair, the jumble of heels stashed haphazardly under the table. The second night, I heard my dad argue with his business partner about hiring an Asian Michael Jackson impersonator for Fun Friday; their voices floated in and out, clashing with the music. The fifth night, there was a bar fight. My dad rushed in to tell me to stay put, and then, as an afterthought, added, “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”
Which he did.
My father does not believe in the phrase “age-appropriate.” He encouraged me to read Dostoyevsky at age nine because “taste should be cultivated early.” He described bar fights in great detail to me over lunch, offering me advice like “choose friends who are happy drunks.” He ignored my gold stars from elementary school, but praised me when I started listening to The Smiths. He would forget what grade I was in, but remember my favorite poet.
From him, I learned a love — and indeed a near-reverence — for art and literature, the two things he leaned on for comfort as a teenager with an unstable home life. When I arrived home one day in sixth grade complaining that my teacher marked my reading comprehension answers as wrong, he calmly told me, “Great literature generates more questions than answers. Try and do well in school, but don’t believe everything someone tells you.” Thereafter, every time I put down mind-numbing standard answers to multiple-choice questions on exams that reduce nuances to A, B or C, I knew that I could always discuss the text with my father afterwards and gush over the brilliant metaphors, subtext, and dialogue that genuinely excited me.
Of course, our relationship was never perfect. As I grew up, I resented that he never taught me to ride a bike or picked me up from school, chose to drink with friends over staying home with my mother and me, and drowned himself in cigarette smoke. And despite his youthful cynicism, he would still drop statements like, “Women unmarried by 30 clearly have problems,” or refuse to go to Japan for a family trip because it would “give money to the Japs.” When our opinions clashed, we could argue for hours. Sometimes, my mother would chide him, saying, “She’s your daughter; she’s only sixteen!” Yet, I knew he would always take my opinion seriously, never being condescending or dismissive. We would lock eyes across the dinner table, still in disagreement, but in perfect understanding. I felt well-prepared for every difficult debate in school and life, because I had already experienced them all at home.
When I read that Haruki Murakami was a bar owner turned novelist, I thought about my father, who lived Murakami’s life in reverse: aspiring writer turned computer salesman turned nightclub owner turned unemployed. He has passion, but I see what also happens when you dream big and do not follow through. At 17, I have dreams: becoming a documentary director, writing for the New Yorker, contributing to gender equality in China. My father taught me to believe in them, but also inadvertently shows me through his example how not to grow bitter in failure.
He used to boil yellow wine on the stove every winter. It was the first fire I ever swallowed, rich and gnarly down my naive throat. He told me stories of ancient Chinese heroes who would conquer armies and return to their boiled wine, still warm as the blood that salt the earth; when I grew older, I wondered what he was conquering, and whether it felt lonely.
One late night recently as we went home, I was answering his drunken jumble of nonsense questions, when he suddenly lapsed into silence. Pause. Then, equally suddenly, he exclaimed in the unnaturally loud voice that only very drunk people have: “My daughter.” Pause, again. He repeated, “My daughter,” but this time, his voice was infinitely soft, barely a whisper. I thought, yes. Yes, I am.