• These stories that are shared from my father, I can’t tell them like he told them. I can’t reiterate it like I was my father, simply because I’m not. It’s extremely difficult to think back, even if it was about fifteen minutes ago when he first uttered the first words for his story. Why? Because I suck at remembering things. That doesn’t mean I forgot the meaning or the summary of the story. I remember what I was doing when he was telling the story, I remember my reactions to the story, but I can’t remember every word my father used, every detail he included in that story. That doesn’t mean I can’t try.

    “Daddy, I’m hungry!” I said, trotting downstairs, happily, although I wasn’t immensely hungry. I just didn’t want my dad thinking I like to trap myself in my room.
    “You’re hungry? Hmm what should I cook for you...” He walked into the kitchen and opened the white fridge we’ve had since my junior high days, maybe my elementary school days too. “What about dongfen? Wheat noodles?”
    “Yep! That’s fine!” I chirped in a cute voice I use whenever I talk to my parents. Let me remind you, this is when I was sixteen. Why would I use a little cute voice to my parents? Because I know my parents like it, because I feel like it makes them feel appreciated.
    So my dad’s cooking and boiling and what not, and I am eating Tostitos tortilla chips with mild-spicy salsa in my dinner seat. I sit on one of the far end of the seat, my mother’s seat is to my left, my brother’s seat is to my right, and my father’s seat is across from mine. There’s a window that’s shaped as a rectangle, longer horizontally more than vertically, behind my father. There are two smaller windows on each side of the bigger rectangular window. They’re both rectangle as well, but they are longer vertically than horizontally. My father waits for the noodles to boil, and he walks over to my mother’s chair. He just leans against it, his fingers intertwining each other, and he stares out the window. It’s bright, sunny day, and you can even tell that it’s hot outside.
    “There’s a story I want to tell you,” My dad starts, and I from the mushy salsa and chips to look at him. He didn’t make eye-contact with me, so I go back to eating my chips and salsa. “One that I still remember even today. The place where I lived was near a beach. I lived in a neighborhood of train workers. In the neighborhood, there are kindergartens, trains, railroads, grocery, and...a hospital. The houses were made by Japanese, so they’re very rare. They were all made of wood.
    “I remember, we kids were playing outside, and then a big kid comes over to our house and says, ‘Andy’s dad is swimming!’ There were adults biking towards the beach, so we too followed the crowd of people on the only road that could go to the beach. When we got there, I remember about a dozen adults there, looking at only one direction. I look at the direction as well. I see Andy’s dad, swimming....but he was swimming the opposite way. He had red swim trunks on, and he had very dark skin... We could see the dark skin slowly go away from us, getting smaller and smaller. He was swimming fast, but constant. I turn to my one o’clock and see a fisherman boat there, only being present for duty, for look out. It’s going towards Andy’s dad’s direction, but there’s no way they could reach him in time.”
    Now, I was someone who loved language arts at that time. I remember I was also eating my chips and salsa when he was telling me this story of his. To be quite honest, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to that story, but I was still listening. I didn’t get why he was telling the story. So I asked him, “So what happened to him?”
    My dad looks at me. He was really surprised I asked that. He said, “Even after I told the story, Jason even knew what happened.”
    Obviously, I felt stupid, because Jason wasn’t quite literate. He didn’t like literature, so that just meant I was even more unskilled at observing stories as he was.
    So in the end, yes I got what it was. Andy’s dad had committed suicide. My dad was saying, “That is just a determined way to commit suicide. You’re swimming from the seashore, all the way out of the Pacific... You’re going no where. And what can you do if you get tired? You can’t swim back, because you have no energy left.”
    “You drown.”
    “Exactly. This wasn’t like a sudden death. It wasn’t like a gunshot to the head or a jump. He could see his whole life going down when he was swimming, until he drowned. The reason why I remember this story, is because I thought it was a determined way to die. I remember this story even after forty years. I mean, have you ever heard of someone committing suicide like that? Unbelievable!”
    At that moment, I could see in his eyes. The yearning to be free from life as well, the hope that he could in the very near future die and be free.