“Have yourself a merry little Christmas”
As Christmas approaches, I want to take a short break to reflect on previous Christmases over the years with my parents—and without them. Even though we were not Christians and Mom was a lapsed Catholic at best, the winter holiday season was always a special time for me. Just like for most other people growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was not just about the gifts (most of which I’ve forgotten—except for the Dawn fashion show in 1970), Christmas was all about the thrill of the first snow, decorations, lights, holiday music and cartoons, and of course, parties. It was also about anticipation for the school vacation, free from homework and tests. And even if we didn’t get what we wanted under the tree, it was still the most magical time of the year.
I do not recall my earliest ones—that is, until 1969: it was easily my favorite childhood Christmas and remains one of my most memorable ones. After all, as an only child, I did not have peers my age to chat and play with once I arrived home from school. So although I had mostly a blissful childhood with few squabbles, I rarely experienced that pure, sheer fun that can only be shared with other children.
That is, until the family of one of Dad’s friends arrived right before the start of the Christmas holidays from the Philippines. The Lins had a daughter, Lisa, and her brother, William, who were two years apart, with Lisa being a year older than me. In fact, it was a Thursday night because I recall feeling very impatient to leave the classroom the next day despite the day before vacation festivities.
Even though we had a smallish one-bedroom apartment, it didn’t feel crowded at all but rather exciting: despite—or perhaps because of the dried, liver-shaped fish roe cakes, oi-chi, some of which were strung all across the living and dining areas like so many extra Christmas decorations, and others which were flattened between encyclopedia volumes. (Decades later, Mom and I would laugh at the thought of those cakes filling up the rooms.) The children and I played in Dad’s tiny study right off the kitchen where Mom had propped up an old table top against an armchair as a makeshift slide. We laughed when we fell with a hard thump as the top accidentally slid off the chair.
The next two weeks were full of enjoyment and late nights like I had never experienced. Even our standard downtown weekend jaunts felt that much more eventful. Dad took our two families to Manhattan where we headed to Macy’s to see Santa. (I still have no idea how he squeezed the seven of us into our VW Beetle!) Except we didn’t because we were all a little impatient and hungry after an hour of waiting with what seemed to be an interminable line in front of us. As it was, we didn’t want to be late for a Saturday matinee at the Empire State Building where the Rockettes kicked up a storm onstage before the movie. We stopped briefly by the Rockefeller Plaza to watch the skaters amidst the Christmas lights. Then it was off to Chinatown before returning home.
It felt all the more like an adventure as my parents and I slept on the living room sofa bed while the guests had the bedroom. How comforting it was to be nestled by Mom and Dad at night rather than in my own bed. Even with the fish roe hanging above us. If only every day could be like this!
But, of course, all good things must come to an end. We were actually fortunate as the family wound up staying an extra week before flying to California where they would settle permanently. It was to be another three and a half years before I’d see them again. Although we enjoyed ourselves immensely then, particularly at Disneyland, it was still not quite the same as that Christmas we had together.
I also reflect happily on our first Christmas in Illinois where we stayed for a year with the family of Mom’s cousin—the aunt who would develop a very strong bond with my mother and eventually visit me on the night of her passing. Little did I anticipate that that Christmas with the Changs would be the first of decades of winter holidays together until the baby turned 33 and we had moved to Connecticut. Not unlike the Christmas with the Lins, this particular Christmas was one of the few in my childhood that we spent with another family. I still remember how we all cooked and dined before changing our clothes for the pictures by the tree. It didn’t matter that no one else was coming; my mom and aunt (as I called her) slipped on their maxi skirts while I couldn’t wait to show off my first adult outfit.
(Mom, Kenny, Albert, Dad, and me)
(Me, Albert, Kenny, Aunt, and Steve)
There were less happier holidays as well. The first was my sixteenth when Dad went to Taiwan, ostensibly for work. Although my relationship with him had already begun to deteriorate since late childhood (more on this in future posts), this was probably the first sign that all was not well in our family. I myself did not mind his absence over the Christmas holidays; if anything, I felt relatively relaxed. There would be no Dad poking his head into my room to check if I was studying—and not just “merely” reading a novel. There would be no Dad to interrogate me at meals on my physics tests, a class in which I had zero interest. There would be no Dad sitting cross-legged at the dining table, writing and farting away with reckless abandon while devouring a box of cookies. (Why couldn’t he be like other stately Princeton graduates?!)
But I did mind because Mom was worried. This was the first time he’d been away during the Christmas holidays—and also the first time he didn’t call immediately. When we stayed overnight at my aunt’s, I noticed how Mom didn’t seem too happy despite the bustle. Finally, that night, she confessed she was worried. Why hadn’t Dad called? Did something happen? And yet, as if not wanting to frighten me too much, she would try to shrug it off. Oh, well, maybe he’ll call tomorrow on Christmas Day. (Again, not that it truly mattered since we weren’t Christian.)
It wasn’t until the following night that he called—around 10pm, which I noticed was quite a bit later than he used to call when he was away. It would almost always be 8pm at the very latest. He told Mom that he was staying at the home of a soldier so everything had to be top secret. (I forget why he was there in the first place…) But he was doing fine otherwise.
The mystery was not cleared up until the following summer. It turned out Dad had begun having an affair with a distant cousin the previous summer—and that he was enjoying himself with her during the Christmas holidays, although whether or not he was actually staying at the soldier’s home remains unclear since he did have acquaintances in the military. The affair certainly explained changes in Dad’s behavior: for instance, his erratic driving and his wish for a sportier car, which being the nerdy schlub that he was (whatever his pretenses about being the highest paid professor in his department) he ultimately never bought. It would explain the strange calls from Taiwan which Mom would answer only to be told by a male voice “none of your business” when she asked who was there. Then there was the time Dad tried to coerce Mom into adopting the daughter of that cousin as it was feared that the poor dear, who was about my age, would be unable to manage the tough Taiwanese curriculum for high school students: by the late 1970s, it was already known among the monied classes in Taiwan that American pre-college education was as easy as pie. Mom gave in very reluctantly—God only knows why she submitted at all—but the adoption was ultimately turned down by the immigration authorities. This is probably one of the few times in my life that I’ve ever applauded them for toughness.
Though caught red-handed during the summer—a friend of my maternal grandmother had alerted Mom—Dad did not give up so easily on his cousin/mistress/prostitute. During the days before the following Christmas of 1980, one of his students called to tell Mom that he had been asked to escort Dad and his cousin from the airport. He did not arrive home until after 11pm whereupon he and Mom had an argument—not surprisingly. And yet, even after promising he’d leave his cousin alone for good, he returned home late again the next night, albeit with an expensive handbag for Mom. (The old adage IS true, ladies: when your man starts giving you pricey gifts out of the blue, you know something is up!)
It was those two Christmases which changed my attitude towards my father for much the worse. That Dad wanted to adopt another girl—however much he pretended that it was only for convenience—didn’t sit well with me. It felt like a betrayal. In fact, her mother’s willingness to consider such a move only served to highlight how deficient Dad was as a parent. What was even more bizarre to me was why HE wasn’t making comparable moves for ME. Why wasn’t he schmoozing with other Princeton graduates and donating money so I would have an easier time getting in? After all, he made it seem as if getting into an Ivy was the be-all and end-all of life. If so, why didn’t he send me to prep school with a pipeline to the Ivies like his friends did? Why was all the pressure on ME? Why couldn’t I be like all of my other (white) friends whose parents let them study what they wanted? Did he want me to become a doctor so I could support him, Mom, and his mistress in their later years? Even more than 40 years later, particularly in light of the college admissions Varsitygate scandal of 2019, I am still livid. I cannot forgive him for fooling around with a cousin who didn’t even finish fifth grade while doing little to ensure for me what he deemed academic success. While those parents were undoubtedly wrong in resorting to fraud, and arguably even worse than Dad’s cousin/mistress/prostitute, who at least did not stoop to falsifying academic records, they were all better parents than my hypocritical dad. They were willing to move heaven and earth to help their little darlings. Better yet, they didn’t harbor unrealistic expectations for their children. And they cared about their children’s self-esteem and personal ambitions more than their own. My father? Not so much. He certainly wasn’t among those who worked hard so his children could study, say, art history. His daughter was going to be a doctor or engineer and that was that. His wishes were all that mattered.
So even though I am ashamed of my internalized self-hatred as an Asian-American, I cannot deny that it was caused as much by my father as much as by the racist world around me which I will discuss in further posts. If others referred to me as “chink” and “ching-chong,” my father would heighten my hatred of being Asian by attempting to hold me to what he called his Confucian ideals—not to mention a veneration of math and science that was akin to the Thomas Gradgrind philosophy of Fact! Fact! Fact! Yes, it was hard times for me. No wonder I detested being Chinese. No wonder I hated going to Taiwan. And no wonder why so many Asian girls and women in my circumstances have succumbed to suicide. Yes, we too are some of the colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.
(FUCK YOU, DAD. YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGIVEN FOR YOUR ABUSE! AND FUCK EVERYONE WHO REFUSES TO UNDERSTAND THIS!)
But if his selfishness was an affront to me, it was even worse for Mom. As Helen Reddy (once wedded to an abusive husband) sang to her daughter, it’s “you and me against the world.” And so it was for us: if Dad didn’t love either of us, at least Mom and I had each other. Even as a teen, I knew how much she had sacrificed herself for Dad. It was she who married into his family against her own mother’s wishes. It was she who gave money to him for his journey to America. She allowed Dad to send $200-300 every month to his parents: despite the fact that we didn’t have a lot of money. Despite the fact that she cooked for him, cleaned for him, held end-of-term parties for him, and did his taxes. Despite the fact that she had to deal with his tantrums—like the times he threw plates of food at Mom. She did everything for him and yet had to face the indignity of finding a love letter written to the mistress, telling her how much he missed her. How much he couldn’t wait to see her again.
To top it off, the fact that he was fooling around with a woman with only a fifth-grade education led me to ask how he had the temerity to complain about Mom working sales at a department store, claiming that it proved that she was “uneducated” and therefore a poor role model for me. (Hello, Dad, maybe if you didn’t send so much money to your greedy, leeching parents, Mom wouldn’t have to work!) Little did Dad know then that some sales associates at Bergdorf Goodman and other upscale department stores earn more than physicians—not to mention his poor, miserable mechanical engineer self. Or even that some historians and literature professors earned far more than he did (the truth of which he was either ignorant or tried to hide from me).
Having said that, I suppose I was also selfish in my own way as I pleaded with Mom not to divorce Dad while I was still in high school. As it was, I felt I had so little: bullied and pressured at school and home alike. I had thought about running away. But how could I do that as a naive 16-year-old who’d barely been exposed to the world and coddled by Mom? The fact that I was relatively poor, compared to my friends who had solidly upper-middle-class houses with an ample number of spare bedrooms and decently new cars made it all the worse, it seemed. The two friends whose fathers cheated on their spouses were comparatively well-off—although I felt sorry for the one whose mother committed suicide by gassing herself in the garage. (I am ever thankful Mom did not resort to this!) With all that I was already lacking as a stressed-out, derided, dateless, acne-riddled Asian-American adolescent, did I have to suffer a broken home too? It felt beyond embarrassing.
It was only much later that I realized my parents should have gotten divorced right then and there. And indeed, I continue to be astonished at the many highly educated, high-profile women who’ve tolerated a cheating husband for far too long. (Here’s looking at you, Hillary!) Maybe Mom and I would have had more time to ourselves. Maybe Mom wouldn’t have been worn out by Dad’s constant demands and infidelity. And maybe she wouldn’t have died so early.
Indeed, one of my best Christmases was spent alone with Mom when she came to visit me in Oxford nearly 30 years later in 1998. I still recall that cloudy, drizzly morning when I picked her up at the bus station as we made our way to my flat before going out again into town for Indian food, a little shopping, and afternoon tea. Although there was a lot on my mind—I was still furious that my doctoral advisor had called off our meeting—it felt great to have Mom by my side: at least, there was someone who still had faith in me, I told myself. It didn’t matter that we were thousands of miles away from home—because home was wherever Mom was. How fun it was to try out the different foods at Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury! Or sniff the different shower gels and moisturizers at Boots. Nor can I forget our weekly jaunts to London: it was all like a dream come true as we sauntered around Oxford Street and Piccadilly Circus, enjoying the Christmas lights and windows before feasting at a carvery, complete with roast beef (mad cow disease be damned!), Yorkshire pudding and lamb. How wonderful it was to return home seated on the top level of the bus gazing down at the crowds. Even on more ordinary days, it felt comforting to find Mom cooking when I returned from the library. The then recently released song by the Pet Shop Boys seemed to capture our Christmas together so well:
It doesn't often snow at Christmas
The way it's meant to do
But I'll still have a glow at Christmas
Because I'll be with you
There wasn’t much snow but we had each other. We had each other’s love, laughter, and empathy. That’s why I cried so hard when it was time for her to leave three weeks later. It was the best Christmas of my adult life. Even today, it’s hard to hold back the tears when I see photos of a wintery Oxford and London on Instagram. To think that Mom and I used to be part of those scenes…
How things changed so drastically over 20 years! Little did I know then that Mom would only have 16 years left in her life. Or that the Christmases which followed her death would be mostly forgettable—except for their general melancholy. Like the time I sat with Dad at his rehab on Christmas Day 2018, seeing happy families seated around us…and struggling to hold back the tears when I heard Judy Garland’s sad “Have yourself a merry little Christmas.”
Someday soon, we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now
And ironically, that would be my last Christmas with Dad as I kept thinking how empty the table felt without Mom.
By comparison, the Christmases of 2019 and 2020 were not as stressful. At least, I didn’t have to worry about Dad who had passed away in March 2019. And yet, there was still a lingering sadness. In November and December 2019, right after I had handed in the entire revised manuscript of my book to the editor along with the abstracts, all I could think about was the very time I had begun that book exactly six years earlier. There was a renewed sense of emptiness: it was all done, God only knows how, but neither Mom or even Dad were here to see it. How different everything was from 2013 when we celebrated together! Interestingly, the completion of my project also seemed to signal a final departure from my mother. For five years, I had forced myself to complete it as a tribute to her. “Stop sniveling and finish it up for Mom!” I’d tell myself over and over. Yet, now that it was done, I felt more alone than ever. It was if I subconsciously thought to myself that if I finished the book, Mom would return to me as a much deserved reward. Perhaps that’s why I felt even worse last year—to the point that I called the Suicide Hotline. When you are nothing to anyone, it hurts. Why live?
God—if there’s one—only knows what Christmas 2021 will bring. But to all of you who are grieving your parents, I will not lie and tell you that it’s going to be easy. It won’t. However, as Helen Reddy also sings—
And when one of us is gone,
And one of us is left to carry on,
Then remembering will have to do,
Our memories alone will get us through
Think about the days of me and you,
Of you and me against the world.
Think of all of your winter holidays together—and appreciate the fact that you have wonderful memories of love and life. Only that can keep you warm through a cold winter’s night and months to come.