my brother

Friday, August 28, 2009 at 12:07pm

Let it just be said that my dad was married to another woman once. My dad and this woman had a son together. When my half brother was 14 and I was 4, he left our home in Taiwan and went to live with his mother in Australia. After his move to Australia, my brother stopped speaking to my dad. I saw him once since. Five years had gone by and we were in America by then. It seemed the purpose of my brother's visit then was to extend his silence in person.

My brother got married to an Australian woman. And I got accustomed to my dad's complaints about his son. I imagined to myself that somewhere in Australia, a patient Australian wife is listening to the same complaints while skinning a crocodile with a large hunting knife. After my dad's diagnosis and with the birth of my brother's first child, I decided to take my dad to Australia to meet his grandson.

I pictured myself going on vision quests and befriending kangaroos. Then the possible remained an abstraction when my dad told me that Johnny had moved to Rome with his wife.

I continued my cases at the Public Defender's Office and got my teammates to cover cases that I couldn't continue. To save money, I had bought tickets with a lot of lay overs and arranged to share a room with my dad. Navigating though all the stop overs, I should have appreciated the foreshadowing my dad was providing me from his lectures on the dangers of constipation.

My dad was obsessed with remaining regular during the trip. Somehow, the trip was seen as a great interruptor of normal digestive functions. So after we arrived in Rome and through the haze of jet lag, I barely noticed my dad munching on metamucil crackers, drinking prune juice dissolved with metamucil powder, eating bowls of bran cereal, sprinkling his cereal with prunes and eating his cereal with whole milk.

Chinese people are lactose intolerant.

And so I became lactose intolerant through my dad's milk intake. I became intolerant of the loud farting sounds coming out of his rear at all hours. They kept me up at night when I tried to sleep in the next bed. They made me part of the Italian stares as he walked next to me on our cultural sojourns through the streets of Rome. They kept me company as a brave few on the same tour tried to hold conversations with me. Really, the farting became a social experiment unto itself. What do people do when they hear something socially unacceptable? Well, now I know because it was answered for me over and over again. The Italians stared contemptuously. What they said to each other was beyond me but I imagine it was nothing favorable towards Chinese tourists. I wondered if they knew that we were Chinese American, would the American part soften the blow (or blows)?

We got to meet my brother and his small family. The visit was about as awkward as my dad's farts. My brother and his wife went on to have another beautiful boy. I now am married myself with 3 kids. My dad survived his digestive ordeal and regards the trip as a failure to this day.

He never thanked me for the trip. If anything, the complaints about my brother intensified. Since then, I have learned from being a public defender that you help people not for the reassurance of positive feed back. You help people because it's the decent thing to do.