I named it 媽-GPT (MaGPT going forward) because the pun was sitting right there, and I have never once in 49 years left a pun on the table.

It’s a custom GPT with exactly one job: take whatever English I paste in — a Medicare notice, an IHSS form, a text from me about spoons — and turn it into Mandarin my mom can actually use. Mandarin for an 88-year-old woman from Taiwan. Big ideas in small sentences. Formal enough to be respectful, simple enough that she doesn’t have to call me to explain the explanation.

I’m not joking. This is how I start the prompt:

See that last sentence? It even handles Chinglish!

It has outlived several models and my patience with basically everything else in that app. It keeps its job because it does its job.

Here’s the thing about being a kid of immigrants: you get hired for a position you never applied for. Researchers have a name for it — “language brokering” — which is a very professional term for being a child and translating your own parent-teacher conferences. The literature says most of us start somewhere between eight and ten years old.

I don’t remember starting. That’s how you know a job is permanent. There’s no first day. There’s just the slow realization that you’ve always worked there, the hours are irregular, and the benefits package is your mother saying 好，我知道了 and hanging up.

In my twenties I once accompanied my mother to the DMV as she was retaking her written driving test. “But Ernie,” you say. “I thought they had written DMV tests in Chinese available.”

Oh, they do. As I corralled Mom toward the part of the building for written tests, I got a tap on the shoulder: an older woman from mainland China. “I’m sorry to bother you; I couldn’t help but overhear you talking to your mother. Can you tell me how she was able to get a version of the Chinese driving test?“

As I started assisting her, I got ANOTHER shoulder tap, this one from a couple in their 60s. “Oh, I’m sorry for troubling you,” the man said. “Can you tell us if we’re in the correct line?”

“WHY DON’T YOU GET YOUR OWN GAY CHILD TO TRANSLATE THINGS FOR YOU,“ barked my mother.

(No, she did not say that at all.)

Last year NBC ran a story about immigrant kids getting replaced by ChatGPT. Parents writing their own emails now. One woman said her dad doesn’t ask her to proofread anymore — he replaced her with a chatbot — and everyone in the piece described it as a relief. Less task-based. Closer, even.

Must be nice.

Because that was never how it went at my house. I didn’t get replaced. I built my own replacement, trained it on everything I knew about one specific woman, and the job didn’t shrink. It just stopped requiring me to be awake for every shift.

And MaGPT isn’t even the only AI in my mother’s life. She has her own — she named it herself, a proper name with a spot in the family tree. (That’s a whole other essay, and I wrote it.) Hers gets asked about dinner. Mine gets fed Medicare forms.

Then it was May, and my dad died.

Estate paperwork is its own language. I got conversational in it fast — death certificates, small estate affidavits, the phone tree at Bank of America. That part I’ve written around before and will write about properly someday, or never.

But somewhere in the folders was the other paperwork. The Chinese documents. His original marriage certificate; the original one, from Taiwan. His diploma from engineering school. But the ultimate mystery: a six-page handwritten document, in my dad’s unreadable cursive. The envelope is simply labeled “To 大姐, 1993.” His sister-in-law.

I uploaded the PDFs into MaGPT and asked it to run the other way. Chinese into English. Not for my mom this time.

For me.

The machine I built so my mother could read things was suddenly helping me read my father.

It reconstructed pieces of a family tree while it worked — names and relationships surfacing out of documents I couldn’t have parsed on my own, in a language I speak at a kitchen-table level and read at roughly a menu level.

What did I learn? Through the diploma, I learned my dad held great pride in his studies. Through his certificates, I learned my paternal grandparents’ Chinese names. And through the letter… sigh

…through the letter I learned that my mom’s eldest sister took my father’s military retirement savings and my mother’s income from the sale of a house in Taiwan and lost the money in a business investment gone bad. My mother eventually forgave her sister. My father never did.

The six-page letter reminded her of the money she owed him — money they both knew she would never be able to pay back — and demanded maybe her children should hear about the embarrassment she had caused his side of the family. It finally answered a question I had asked my entire life to shrugs: why, out of my mother’s twelve brothers and sisters spread across at least four countries, I’ve hardly met two aunts and one cousin. But realizing that opens up more questions than answers, and those answers almost feel as if they’re too late to pursue now anyway.

In the stack post last week I said this one was personal in ways I wouldn’t over-explain. A reader looked at MaGPT anyway and said it sounds like something a lot of people could use.

He’s probably right. Every family like mine has a translator. Some of us have been on shift for forty years. The tools are finally good enough to help, and the companies are finally noticing we exist, and I have complicated feelings about both of those facts that I’ll sort out on some other Thursday.

What I know is this: my mom still needs documents translated. The job was never going to end — I just finally got to hire staff.

And the staff, it turns out, works in both directions. I didn’t put that in the job description. Grief does things.

The envelope is still on my desk. “To 大姐, 1993.” Six pages of the angriest handwriting I’ve ever had to feed a machine. Inside: a full accounting of whose savings she took and lost 20 years before, the specific dreams that went down with the money, and a demand that her children know everything — that the reminder be eternal, that somebody besides him carry this.

But Dad was too good at resentment. Thirty years of it worked. The estrangement is so complete that I couldn’t deliver his message if I wanted to — I’ve never met these cousins. I wouldn’t know which continent to start on.

So the only people who ever opened the envelope and read its contents — the only ones still alive, anyway — are my mother and me, both of us people the letter was never addressed to. And the room it was written for stays empty.

Anyway. It’s Thursday. Mom has a form from the county. Back to work.

It’s a Wednesday morning in July, and I’m deposing my own mother in her kitchen.

I made a list of questions. Typed them out lawyer-style the night before because, at eleven sharp, a social worker named Zanikya is coming to decide whether the state of California thinks my mother needs help. My mother, who has spent four decades making sure nobody thinks she needs a damn thing.

So I start with the thing that matters most for this interview: what she can’t do on her worst days.

“On very bad days,” I ask in Mandarin, “what is your energy like?”

I get dizzy. I need to sit down for a couple of minutes. One time it happened in the middle of cooking.

“On very bad days, when you’ve been by yourself—have you fallen?”

I almost did. But I grabbed onto something. I wouldn’t be able to do that outside. Which is why I’ve stopped falling.

She stopped falling by just not going outside anymore. PROBLEM SOLVED. Stay inside and the house will catch you every time: counter, railing, wall. Her world shrank, and she called it home safety.

Here’s the deal with IHSS, California’s in-home care program. They rank how independently you can perform different tasks. Independent means no help. The more human help you need to do something safely, the more time the program can authorize.

But the system can only count the limitations my mother is willing to admit out loud. To get help, she has to describe the version of her life she has spent decades hiding—the exact opposite of everything my parents ever taught me.

This is a woman who broke her wrist and her arm falling backward off a stepladder in her own backyard and reported it like a parking ticket. A woman who—I learned this mid-assessment, in front of a stranger with a clipboard—had leg cramps so bad last year that she dug my father’s old walker out of the living room, used it for three days, put it back, and never told me.

“When did that happen, Mom?” I said, in the special calm voice you use when you are not fucking calm at all but have to be calm because company is there.

She shrugged.

I don’t want to be 麻煩. A bother. There are people in worse situations than I am.

The pre-interview was just me trying to get her to stop downplaying everything. Tell them about your bad days, Mom. Not the good ones. There’s no box for “fine.”

Zanikya showed up at eleven. For the record, she was very nice. I’d left a voicemail asking for a professional Mandarin interpreter. The county has them. But of course, I ended up doing what I always do at banks, doctors’ offices, and the DMV—translating everything myself while my mother watched for mistakes and heckled me.

Yes, she heckles me. Every single time. Halfway through, I’m giving Zanikya the backstory: the backyard fall, the broken wrist, my father’s dementia, his death in May, and the part where my mother—who has always cooked everything—suddenly started asking for frozen dinners. That scared the hell out of me.

My mother cuts in, using her calm voice, to tell me I’m talking too much. Why not just let Zanikya ask the questions?

Ma. She asked me a question. This is me answering the question.

Zanikya asks if Mom is able to wipe down the kitchen table right now. Sure. No problem.

The table, the kitchen counters, and the bathroom counters—all at once? My mother says she can’t do that. No energy. If I had to clean the whole house, I’d be wiped out.

Can she take out the trash?

My mother tells a story I’ve never heard. She can get the bag out, but last time she had to set it down outside the garage and sit for ten minutes before dragging it the rest of the way. The neighbor has seen her struggle enough that now he just rolls the bin to the curb for her.

Ten minutes. Sitting next to a trash bag outside the garage. She never told me. Same reason she stopped going outside. Once she absorbs a problem, it disappears.

The almost-falls come up again, and this time she gives Zanikya the director’s cut:

I’ve had a bunch of almost-falls. The good news is that there have always been railings or a counter. The house isn’t very large, so I’ve been able to grab onto something without doing a complete fall. Unlike your father.

Unlike your father, who is two months dead and still on Mom’s angry list.

(One genuinely light moment: Zanikya asks about the dishwasher, and I get to explain that my parents, like most Asian parents I know, have never once run it. They store pots and pans in it. As far as they’re concerned, its function is to increase the resale value of the house, and it performs that function beautifully.)

The county’s paperwork comes in English or Chinese. It also comes in large print—but large print only comes in English. My mother can have letters she can see or letters she can read. Not both. She picked Chinese.

I want to learn English, she tells Zanikya, but they keep saying it’s so difficult.

The form asks for emergency contacts. I give my name and number.

It wants another.

I look at my mother. She looks at me. It’s just us. One of us says, “Well, that’s depressing.”

She gets a “high three, low four” on chores. The county approves her.

The help arrives the way state help arrives: after a provider orientation, after fingerprinting—$67 cash, $59 with a card, a pricing structure I’ve decided not to think about—after a two-week wait for one letter and a month’s wait for another.

California will pay her provider about $21 an hour, retroactive to March 8.

Her provider is me.

I’ll just say it: part of me is relieved to have paid work again.

Is it humbling that I now have to decide whether “caregiver” belongs on my résumé? A little bit. Is it also humbling to have no incoming cash flow that doesn’t route through my dead father’s bank accounts? Yeah. Will there come a day when she needs care—bathing, grooming, the later stuff—that should not come from her son? Will getting her to accept a stranger in the house be hell on earth? Without a shadow of a doubt.

She’s in her kitchen right now, probably. Washing her one dish the moment she finishes with it. Not taking her blood thinners. Having one of her best days.

Somewhere in her neighborhood, a neighbor I’ve never met knows that my mother once had to sit down for ten minutes halfway through taking out the trash.

She didn’t tell me that.

A stranger with a clipboard asked the right question.

I don’t know what else she hasn’t told me.

A $27 salad ended a thirteen-year relationship.

I know how that sounds. I’ve told it as a bit before—Sweetgreen, the Chipotle clone with the artisanal grain bowls and the checkout experience that makes you feel like a bad person for wanting ranch—and people laugh, and I let them, because the laugh is easier than the rest of it. The order didn’t come through. There was an argument. And then, the way you sometimes know things before you’re willing to say them out loud, we both knew. September 2021. Thirteen years in Miami, gone.

We lived under the same roof until January 2023.

I didn’t write about those sixteen months. Maybe someday… What I will say is that somewhere in there I started a list—New York, Austin, Portland, Seattle. Royce had just moved to Chicago because it sounded cool and he’d never been there; why couldn’t I do the same? Hell, I spent two days seriously entertaining Nashville, which tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about the state of my decision-making at the time.

I had vivid fantasies about my imagined life in various cities for two days. Then, I stopped.

The condo was technically my dad’s idea. We bought it together in 2004—him and me—a loyalty test disguised as a real estate investment, ten minutes from my parents’ house in Fremont. I rented it to families for eighteen years while I was in Miami, being a person who had left. The tenants were mostly Indian families, and my mom would say, every time she visited, that it smelled like curry, which, okay, Mom. There were crayon scribblings on the patio walls that a Magic Eraser could mostly handle, if you didn’t look too close. There was a “Live, Laugh, Love” decal stuck to the front door that I still haven’t removed, three years later, partly because I don’t own a heat gun, and partly because, at some point, it stopped being their artifact and started being mine out of sheer laziness.

For years, I would associate this place with what my dad had left behind in the years before—entire mattresses propped against the wall, furniture he’d use the condo as a staging area for before finding his own place when he separated from Mom. He had keys. He read my mail, just in case the 風波 of 1993 happened again. One summer he found my 1994 Senior Ball photo—me and Christine Kamphaus, very heterosexual, very formal—and taped it to my bathroom mirror. As a reminder to, you know, not be gay. His version of the sweet notes white moms leave in lunchboxes, except I got self-loathing instead of Lunchables. That was the last summer I lived there before I rented a room from a friend in San Francisco and never moved back.

Until, you know, right now.

So when my two-day city list collapsed and I defaulted to the condo, I understood exactly what I was signing up for.

I chose it because if I didn’t, no one was going to advocate for my mom to get my dad into assisted living. No one was going to be there if my sister Angela showed up again — Angela who can speak English, who can act calm for the cops while my mom screams in Chinese and they side with Angela every time. I knew I could technically not go back. I knew I could ignore the calls. And I knew, with the certainty of someone who has been through enough cycles of this specific machinery, exactly what would happen if I did.

My dad sat on the garage floor with his arms folded the day they came to transport his things. Threw a full tantrum. Ninety-one years old, refusing to move, arms crossed like a toddler who’d been told no more iPad.

So yeah. I punished myself with it, a little. But I’ve been asking myself for three years what the alternative actually was, and I keep not coming up with one.

January 2023. The wettest day on record in the Bay Area at the time due to something called an “atmospheric river,” a detail the universe did not need to include but went ahead and included anyway. The fact that my water heater was broken didn’t help.

I’d hired a TaskRabbit to assemble the office furniture before I arrived. That part mattered. The mattress could wait — I could figure out sleeping later — but the desk and the chair had to be there, because my job didn’t skip a beat moving cross country and I needed to be functional by morning. I was working for a company called Strategio, running something called Enterprise Simulator sessions: thirteen-week courses teaching people enterprise software concepts, Java applets, the software development lifecycle, all of it, fast-tracked, so financial companies could satisfy their diversity hiring quotas and the people in my Zoom square could get hired.

My first session started at 7:30am. 7:30am, Florida time.

Except I was in California. I was up at 3:45.

I sat in my assembled office chair in the middle of an empty living room in a parka — an actual parka, because it was that cold, because the wettest day in recent memory doesn’t care about your timeline — and I opened my laptop and I waited for the call to start. There were no boxes unpacked. There was no mattress. There was a chair someone else had built and a screen full of people who needed to learn how enterprise software worked so they could get a job at a bank.

I taught the class.

Kareem was my executive function.

I mean that literally. When the terrible things were happening I would just — stop. Stare at a wall. Check out in the middle of a meeting, or at 4am when I was supposed to be asleep, or in the middle of a sentence I’d started out loud and then couldn’t finish. The grief and the anger would stack up and I’d go somewhere else entirely, and Kareem would find me there and hand me a plate of food. Just: here. Eat this. He’d figured out a whole sleep routine for me — NyQuil, weed, soft music, AC cranked so cold the room felt like a different season. He found legal resources for my mom four months before we broke up. Four months. I’m only now sitting with what that means, what it cost him, why he did it anyway.

He didn’t have answers. He just knew how to do the next thing.

What I didn’t clock at the time — what I’m only really understanding now, writing this — is that the last year or so before the salad, he was basically running two households. His own life, his theater work, and then this: my parents’ paperwork, my sleep schedule, my plate of food. The life I was mentally blanking out on.

Sitting in that parka at 4am, running through my Strategio slides — that was me doing his job. The mattress could wait because I needed the chair, because I needed to be functional, because something had been installed in me over thirteen years about how you survive: you do the next thing, and then the thing after that.

When class began, a voice shot out in the silence. “Why is Ernie wearing a puffy jacket?” And in the glare of the ring light, I shot back, “Because I’m chatting to you from Antarctica.”

The joke didn’t land, 50 or so faces in boxes staring back at me in silence instead. It’s okay, a thought shot out to myself. We move forward. I’d internalized the solve mode. I just had to run it alone now.

Somewhere in Miami, Kareem is continuing his life.

We’re still amicable. We still have a house to split up, financially — Miami property moves slow and complicated, especially when neither of you is in any rush to make it real. I still do the occasional project for the theater he founded. So it’s not like I’ve lost the signal entirely. I just get the public version now — the things you’d find on Google, a press release, what made it into someone else’s recap. There’s a boyfriend. They have photos on Facebook — the kind that just appear, the algorithm deciding you needed to know this today, while you’re eating cereal or waiting for a Zoom to start. They’re good photos. They look happy.

In most of them, he’s forty pounds lighter.

Good for him — I mean that, genuinely, healthwise. But it’s a version of him I don’t recognize, which is its own specific thing to sit with. He became someone different after. I don’t know if that’s about me leaving or just about time, and I’m not sure the distinction matters.

The wettest day on record, a parka, an assembled chair, a Zoom call at 4:30am, me alone in a freezing condo full of other people’s crayon marks and a “Live, Laugh, Love” decal I still haven’t taken down. Somewhere in Miami, a person who used to hand me a plate of food when I forgot to eat doesn’t look like the person I remember anymore.

That’s what thirteen years becomes.

I’m still not sure what to do with that.

LYD Classic: Editor’s Note, 2026

In 1994, when I was eighteen and still in the closet, I did an interview for a book about queer young people. I hadn’t come out to my parents. I’d come out to exactly four people on my dorm floor. Here, lightly cleaned up from the original scan, is what I said.

I am eighteen years old. I was born in Hayward, California1, and raised in El Sobrante, California, a small suburb a couple of minutes from Berkeley. I’ve lived there ever since junior high (seventh grade). I live with two parents and a sister. My father is currently sixty-two, my mother fifty-nine. My sister is twenty-eight, ten years older than I am.

Since my sister is so old, I consider her more of a mother than anything else. It was difficult living with my sister because I had to live with her through her hardships. She has a learning disability. She had a mental breakdown at fifteen. (I still remember the police dragging her out of the house when I was five.) I saw her life as she became dependent on medication, how she “gave her life to Christ,” how she now lives by herself in a rented room, barely making it month to month. Being Chinese, this puts a lot of pressure on me to succeed.

As a first-generation Chinese American, I was raised speaking English while my parents spoke to me in Chinese. (My mother to this day refuses to speak to me in English.) This causes many communication problems. While I can talk to my parents about conventional things — dinner, money for college, the weather outside — I am unable to talk to them about abstract ideas, such as my being gay, without added bits of fractured English.

I knew I was gay at an early age. Of course, I didn’t know it was being “gay,” but I felt a close desire to be with guys my age as early as age five. I knew the feelings I felt had a name by junior high. It was also about this time when I knew it was “bad.” My parents are Chinese immigrants, very conservative, and Christian. Bad things, when you’re growing up and coming to realize you’re gay. I wanted to be a good son, so I’ve always done what I was told. Unfortunately, that also meant a lot of pain, not being true to my own feelings.

One time, my mother was cleaning my room and read a couple of letters I wrote to friends about guys I had crushes on in high school. When my parents confronted me about this, they suggested therapy to change myself. But instead of telling them that they were wrong about being gay, that I couldn’t just change myself, I freaked out. I told them it was just a phase. They believed me and left it at that. I don’t know what I’m going to do about telling my parents. They’re currently supporting me financially through college, so I do not want to come out to them just yet.

Most of the time, I felt like an outsider. Because I didn’t really get along with the people at my school, I looked to the church for support and soon found a group of Christian friends who went to my church. Finally, these were some people who accepted me for who I was, and I didn’t feel like such an outsider anymore. Of course, I didn’t tell them I was gay; then they wouldn’t like me anymore. During high school, I told three people in my church group. One girl took it very well, while the other two guys accepted me as a friend but condemned “my sin” and didn’t want to talk about my feelings. It was okay at first, but it ended up hurting me because I couldn’t tell my closest friends how I felt toward other people.

Now that I am in college, things are a little different. I live in the dorms, and I am still hesitant every so often about coming out to people because I’m afraid that they will reject me or condemn me. I guess I’m expecting what some of my friends from church did. But so far, all of my coming-out experiences have been positive, even though I’ve only come out to four people on my dorm floor. I’ve been starting to hang around more gay people, also, so I am gradually coming out of my shell.

Six years of church and all your friends being Christian do rub off on you. Through high school, I had learned that while loving another guy wasn’t bad, having sex with him was. I’m not so sure if I believe that anymore. Some of it has gone away after going to college. I’ve told most of my friends that these are my years to “discover myself,” and they’ve taken it rather well that I haven’t gone to church at Davis.

I went to a financially troubled public school for high school, but hell, aren’t all public schools financially troubled these days? It was a very diverse school, with around 30 to 40 percent of the students being black, the rest divided among white, Asian, and some Latino students. I never really felt like I belonged with the people at my school — when I was a freshman, I was in Thespians and had a niche there, but that was gone when my father told me to enroll in computer classes. There were always people to hang around with, but I never got close to them, and they were never close to me. I didn’t need them anyway, since I had my friends from church. Of course, I had lingering crushes on various guys through high school, but I was too scared to tell myself I was gay in high school, much less tell them. Now I go to UC Davis, and I feel a lot more comfortable about my sexuality, although I don’t want to come out of the closet just yet.

As far as meeting other gay folks is concerned, I meet other people through the Internet.

The first time I went to a gay youth “support” group was when I was fifteen. I went to a group in Berkeley. I guess I was expecting there to be people like me. There weren’t. Instead, they were cliquey and arrogant. The only people they would talk to were people who acted and looked like them, and since I wasn’t like them, I didn’t belong in their little group. I ended up never going to a group again, and to this day, going to a support group makes me uncomfortable. Currently, I meet other people online.

I want to find that “perfect guy” as much as the next gay guy. I guess growing up the way I have has made me want the idea of the traditional family, with a wife, three kids, a job, and a picket fence. Being gay, I wouldn’t be able to have that, and that’s my biggest fear, something I’ll have to work out throughout my life. I see myself in a monogamous relationship, with a good job, a decent house, maybe a kid, somehow. I just want to live my life simply with someone.

You’re not alone in the world. I thought I was. I learned in college that many other people thought they were, too. But we’re not alone.

LYD Classic: Editor’s Note, 2026 —

“HORNEY” is from July 2004, back when I was 27, blogging out of Oakland, and apparently incapable of getting through a simple takeout order without incident. A man gave his name at a counter. The counter had a very large microphone. I’m sure people in Bakersfield heard.

(The scene: Chaat Cafe, last night. I’m at the counter with my boyfriend, ordering dinner. This time, instead of italics being in Chinese like in previous posts, italics signify a heavy, heavy Indian accent.)

Ernie: Hi, one chicken pesto-stuffed naan and a chicken tikka dinner, please, to go.
Woman at the counter: Okay. What’s your name?
Ernie: Ernie.
Woman: What?
Ernie: Ernie.
Woman: Ornie?
Ernie: Ernie.
Woman: ORRNIE? [flashes Ernie a dirty look]
Ernie: ... yes.
Woman: Hrm. [writes my name down, hands it to chef]

After paying with my credit card, I open up my wallet and look for some cash to put in the tip jar. Since I only have bills above $10, I decide I’m not that generous and put my wallet back in my pants, only for the woman cashier to notice and give yet another glare of death. “I think she hates me,” I say to Mike.

So, I’m sitting on one of the benches marked for to-go customers, taking in the ambiance; there are framed pictures of Bollywood stars, and the restaurant is still filled mostly with Indian patrons, a promising sign of whether the restaurant is going to be good or not. (As opposed to a restaurant that has a name like, say, “Rick and Molly’s House of Sushi.” Right?) I find it funny that the Indian chef calls out “Horny” for a to-go order. What kind of Indian name is Horny?

The chef repeats the name again. “HORNY?” on the giant microphone. Except this time he is looking straight at me.

Now at this point, I’m not necessarily thinking he’s trying to say the word “horny” - I’m thinking the cashier wrote the name “Ornie” and he’s just pronouncing the name a little differently because he’s not from America and it’s like the game Telephone, when you sit around a circle with your 12-year old friends and you giggle as the phrase “The love of Jesus surrounds me” turns into “I fucked arugula on a pony,” so I’m telling myself that it’s cool, no harm, no foul.

And only THEN do I look down at the receipt. And there under the order, written in large letters with a giant BIC pen, do I see my name spelled the following way:

H-O-R-N-E-Y.

I look over to the cashier in horror. She’s helping another customer, oblivious.

Let’s stop time right here. At that moment, I figured I could do one of two things: Mike hasn’t seen the receipt yet. I can grab the dinner and run, run for Mexico where no one will ever know about this somewhat awkward moment and live my life in semi-anonymity with sea lions and Tijuana hookers.

Or, I could tell Mike, and he could give me shit for the rest of the night.

Eh, what the fuck. It’s blog-fodder.

Ernie, to Mike: (Dude, look at the receipt. Look what she wrote as my...)
Mike: HOLY SHIT!

(Ernie and Mike run out of Chaat Cafe, hoping the chef doesn’t do anything embarrassing, like holding up a can of soda and screaming “HORNY, YOU FORGOT YOUR DRINK” while 30 Indians point and laugh)

At least the chicken tikka dinner was delicious. All it cost was a couple of dollars and MY SOUL.

The last time I visited my parents in California, I greeted my sister, kissed my mom, asked how everyone was, and then my mom started yelling at me.

“You’re Chinese is beginning to be awful,” she said to me in Mandarin. “The longer you spend with those Spanish people, the more you won’t be able to talk to your mother.”

“You should move home,” she concluded, as she often did.

So, not-so-dirty secret: my first language was Mandarin. That’s what you get when your parents moved to the United States from Taiwan in 1972. My sister was eight when she moved here, so Mandarin was her first language too. I remember digging through my sister’s elementary language books as a kid, finding worksheets where she wrote out complex answers in bopomofo, a fake alphabet created for Chinese kids since they were too young to memorize every single character. Then our family moved, and thanks to a steady stream of children’s public television and a penchant for getting reference books instead of new toys, I was the four-year-old Kindergarten Christmas narrator, reading out the script when none of the other five-year-olds could.

Dad has always been able to speak broken English—Engineer’s English, he calls it. For twenty-five years, he wore a tie and dutifully studied corporate office building schematics and read engineering books while my mother tended to the children as a housewife. Known during the day as “Jimmy,” he spoke in heavily accented but passable English, more comfortable with terms related to flow systems and air conditioning than asking his co-workers if they wanted to go out for drinks afterward. At home, he was strictly Chi-Ming, his Chinese name. His home was his domain, and he ruled his family with an iron fist because, between the military and the way he was raised, that’s the only rule he knew.

Mom never really needed to speak. My mother used to take English lessons at the local adult school when I was a kid, and that’s where she met Mrs. Chen, Mrs. Chang, and her Japanese friend, Yoshiko, who would visit every so often. But she let her skills slip away after years at home as a housewife, speaking Chinese to family members and cashiers at the local Asian food market, Ranch 99.

So we have these moments where we speak to each other, but we don’t really communicate. Sometimes I hear my friends talking to their parents about things, and I wonder: Am I able to talk to my mom about that? And sometimes the answer is no. She asks if I get exercise and what I’ve eaten. I ask her if she’s gone on a daily walk. She asks me if I can help her burn some CDs. Other times, Angela acts out, and Mom tells me that she doesn’t feel good, that my sister gives her high blood pressure. Nothing past that.

Do we talk about what will happen if she gets too old to care for herself? Do we talk about what will happen with Angela? I’m not sure we could have those conversations. I’m not even sure we’d want to, even if we could. It feels automatic now; she’s learned to use only certain words with me, almost like she can only speak to me as if I’m still a kid.

My parents enrolled me in weekend Chinese school, like all the other Chinese parents who had Americanized kids. The purpose was to keep up with their language and culture. It was also held at a local church, where the Chinese school headmaster was also the local minister.

Before moving to Miami, my knowledge of Spanish consisted of the following: two years of awkward high school Spanish, before deciding that I should refocus on re-learning Chinese, because I thought it would be great if I could speak to my parents fluently in their native language, like the ending of the Joy Luck Club, except with just a little less estrogen. Also in high school, I went on a missionary trip to Mexicali, where I learned the phrase “lo siento” and a praise song we sang multiple times a day: “Yo tengo gozo, gozo, gozo, gozo, en mi corozon.” Which is great, because then I can go to Rodolfo, the handyman who works at the boyfriend’s theater, and I can declare to him that I have joy in my heart. And then he could ask “porque,” and I would bow and shake my head and be all, “lo siento, lo siento.” I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

I shake my head a lot now, a thousand mini-bows like what my parents used to do whenever they didn’t understand that. I do that whenever I see there’s a family function and my boyfriend’s grandparents are there. “CHINO!” she screams at me from across the room before we go in for the standard besitos.

My sister-in-law turns to her and starts yelling. She is saying the word chino a lot, and she’s pointing at me, so I assume that she’s saying the word isn’t appropriate.

Abuela yells back, and my sister-in-law just turns to me and rolls her eyes. “She says she’s not being racist when she calls you chino. Because, you know, she knew a Chinese person back in Cuba.”

I turn to abuela and give a thumbs up. “Knowing Chinese people, AOK,” I telepathically communicate with her.

Which makes me uncomfortable because that’s exactly what my mom does when she talks in English to people she doesn’t know: she shakes her head and apologizes all the time. And I’m all holy fuck, I am turning into my mom.

So now I’m trying to learn Spanish, or at least get started with it.

Now I have an app, some flashcards, a boyfriend who helps me with pronunciation, and an Abuela who calls me chino, which I’m told is meant with love. I can order food. I can tell Rodolfo I have joy in my heart. At family gatherings, I can mostly keep up, nodding at the right moments and laughing just after everyone else, so it seems like I got the joke.

Mostly, I just shake my head and smile.

Which, yeah. I know.

Thirty years ago, I went through my sister’s bopomofo worksheets because I wanted to speak to my parents in their language, fluently, like the Joy Luck Club ending but with less estrogen. I never made it. My Chinese got good enough to argue about heart medication, but not good enough to stop my mom from yelling at me every visit that the Spanish people are stealing it from me. The longer you spend with them, the less you will be able to talk to your mother.

She’s not wrong. She just has the wrong language.

Here’s the thing: I crossed an ocean of vocabulary to get to Miami, but I ended up in the same place. I’m a grown man in a room full of people who love me, head bowed, hands a bit helpless, apologizing for words I don’t have. Lo siento, lo siento. Mrs. Chen, Mrs. Chang, and Yoshiko—except now it’s all in Spanish, and I’m the housewife letting it slip.

The only thing I ever got fluent in was apologizing.

Lo siento, Ma. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

LYD Classic: Editor’s Note, 2026 —

I wrote this at three in the morning in August 2005. I was twenty-eight. That summer, my relationship had ended, and my parents had separated, and one night the thing I’d been outrunning for years finally sat down on my chest and started talking back. This is the first time I had ever tried to put depression into words on this blog. The elephant came back that December. He never fully left — but he did, eventually, get less obtrusive, exactly like he promised.

Lately, it’s showing up more. Always late. Always when I’m alone, sweating in a bedroom that feels like a sauna, hacking up phlegm from too many cigarettes. I try lying on my back. Nope, that’s useless. Flip to my side, face in the pillow, hoping something—anything—will just knock me out cold so I don’t have to think for a few hours.

It’s there. It’s back.

A thought pops up. Not a voice. I’m not that far gone. Just this idea: It never left. It’s always been there. Years of negativity, self-doubt, all the usual greatest hits—work, family, life—swirl together into this heavy, dark cloud. Except now it’s shaped like a giant white elephant, and it’s parked right on my chest while I’m just trying to get some sleep before work.

Look, I’m not losing it. There’s no actual elephant in my bed. It’s just a metaphor. Roll with it.

“The fuck you doing here?” I would ask, theoretically.

And the elephant would answer, “Fuck am I doing here? I’ve always been here. Was there when you were a kid when you dealt with the family, was there all through college. I’ve never left. You’ve pushed me in a corner for the last two and a half years, I’d say. I was, maybe, a tenth of the size I am now. But I’ve never left.”

Hack, cough cough, sputter wheeze.

“You need to stop smoking,” says the elephant.

“Fuck you.” I pause for a second. “I’m going to pull through this, you know. You’re going to go away, for good.”

“Fantastic. Maybe someone will do a Lifetime movie on your life, Meredith Baxter-Burney. You don’t believe half the shit you say.” Goddamn elephant, he sees right through me. “Besides,” he says. “I’ll never really go away. I’ll get less obtrusive, perhaps, and maybe you’ll forget about me down the line. But I’ll still be here.”

Now the sheets are soaked, pillows a mess. I get up and start remaking the bed. So, I ask, when are you going to be less annoying so I can actually sleep?

“I don’t know,” the elephant says. “When I feel like it. When you feel like it. Days, months. Not so sure. But in the meantime, while you’re sulking and feeling sorry for yourself, I’ll be watching infomercials.” Since this is my imaginary sequence, the elephant can pick up my remote control, turn on my cable television, and change channels. “You know, Ernie, you can become a millionaire just by working from home, thanks to tiny, tiny ads.”

But I’m not paying attention, because I’m on my bed, curled up in a fetal position, wishing everything — the dark elephant-shaped cloud, my coughing fit, myself — would disappear forever.

A couple of weeks ago, my dad’s side of the family all got together at a Chinese restaurant. We hadn’t done that in about twenty years. The last time all my cousins and I were together, I was three, and we were just playmates—not the “smart cousins,” the “popular cousins,” or the “freak cousins.” (Angela and I are, of course, the freak cousins.)

The reason for the gathering was my grandmother’s 90th birthday. I love her so much. She’s amazing.

Everyone loves their grandma, of course. But has your grandma ever had to share a husband with two other women, escape both the Communists and the Japanese, and then move to a country where she didn’t speak the language?

That’s why I think she’s a trooper. When I was four, I used to spend whole afternoons at her apartment, looking through old photo albums. There were pictures of my family in the 70s, when my mom was pregnant with me, then earlier, when my grandfather was alive, and even earlier, when he was in his twenties.

“Nainai,” I would ask in my tortured Chinese, “who is he?”

“That’s your grandfather, honey,” she would reply. “Here, have some more orange slices.”

She always bought the sourest oranges in all of Oakland Chinatown, but I would eat them anyway.

“Where is Grandpa then?” I would say “Grandpa” in English because I didn’t know the Chinese word.

I honestly don’t remember what she said to that. I probably wouldn’t have understood the whole story anyway. My grandfather was in the Chinese military, fighting under Chiang Kai-Shek. My grandmother was the second of his three wives, and none of them got along—they argued with each other and with him. I can’t imagine my dad going through the same tough family stuff I did. My grandma is a strong Christian, and from what I know, wife number one was a Buddhist. I’m not sure if that made things harder, but I like to think it did.

But what she did say to me was this. She would give me a look I can’t really describe—somewhere between sentimental and troubled—and simply say, “He is a very good man, but he has many faults.” Then she would kiss me on the forehead, and I would smile, eat more sour orange slices, and watch Grover explain near and far on Sesame Street.

She’s been through so much in her life. I’m sure she’ll live another ninety years.

Hey you. Come here. Come a little closer.

Wanna know a secret?

I’m gay. Imagine dramatic silence, crickets, maybe a cell phone going off at the worst possible moment.

What?!

Fine, you got me. Not exactly a state secret. If you’ve read my blog for more than five minutes, you’ve probably done the math. Even if you just skimmed the parts about my family being a mess or my brief, shining moment with ecstasy, you’d get the picture.

And after some thought, no, maybe it really isn’t a secret. My friends know. People who read my weblog know. My dad knows, although it’s an uncomfortable subject ever since the trip to China, where he tried to set me up with a girl. And on a subconscious level, I’m sure my Mom knows. She’s not ready to deal with it at this point in time, but trust me on this one.

As far as strangers are concerned, if they bring it up, I’ll tell them. But usually they never bring it up. Stereotypes suck, and I don’t consider myself feminine at all anyway. Well, there was that one time I answered the telephone and the telemarketer thought I was a chick. Stupid bitch. Incidentally, my voice isn’t that high, is it? No comments from the peanut gallery, por favor.

So, do you really wanna hear a secret? Okay, maybe not so much a secret as it is an unusual fact about myself.

I was in a book. Flash back around six or seven years ago. Seventeen years old, out of high school, living in the dorms, away from parents. I was the kind of guy in high school with no friends. You know, the type of guy that hung out by himself, daydreaming about the school bursting into flames. I was the one whose name would be brought up at a lunchtime crowd, and someone would say, “Ernie? You mean the guy who got crapped on by a seagull in 11th grade?” True story, by the way. No comment.

I knew I was gay, but telling anyone? Not happening. Growing up gay is bad enough. Growing up as the gay freak? No thanks. You couldn’t pay me enough to do high school over.

So, leaving high school, I was gonna change myself. You know, the whole “you’re out of high school, you get to start over” mentality. And that’s what happened, with mixed results. It was easy to make friends in the dorms. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as good at finding gay friends. Other people like me. Add that to a mixture of internal hang-ups and the college environment. Davis was known for having queer activists and closet cases, with not much in between. Times may have changed since then, who knows?

So I did what any Asian college freshman with internet access would do. I went on IRC. Don’t laugh. You’re online right now, probably talking to some Asian girl typing in alternating caps. I see you.

On the newsgroups, there was a woman who was writing a book about gay teenagers. “If I asked you a couple of questions about growing up and parents and religion and such,” she wrote, “would you be okay with answering them? You can even be anonymous.”

Why the fuck not.

So I answered her questions. Did I always know I was gay? Yeah. Did my parents know? Absolutely not. Religion? It was there, somehow. Was I happy? Not really. I was more detailed than that, but you get the idea. I typed for four hours, editing, re-reading, overthinking. For once, everything was out there. Me, flaws and all, staring back from the screen.

Then I did something that even surprised me. Instead of being anonymous, I used my real name. Ernie, insecure about himself, his sexuality, his relationship with his parents, just about everything, used his real name in a book that would be available in queer bookstores around the nation. All my cards are on the table. What was I gonna do? Was I going to call? Or was I going to fold? Call or fold? Call or fold?

I clicked on the send button. Call.

Then I waited. And waited. Four years. That’s how long it took her to finish the book.

So when I was told that there was a book in the mail, I was shocked to say the least. And when the book came in the mail, a book called In Your Face - Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth, with my name in the table of contents, I didn’t know what to make of it. I read it cover to cover that night and the morning after. It’s a strange feeling, reading something that’s been forgotten about for years. Kind of like finding a yearbook from junior high, seeing girls with teased hair and hot-pink LA Gears. There was a mixture of feelings swimming through my head. Wonderment that something I wrote was actually in a book, horror that I could reveal so much about myself at the age of seventeen, happiness and yeah, a bit of jealousy because other teenagers profiled in the book were comfortable with themselves in a time when I wasn’t.

But mostly, I was relieved. Relieved that I could look back four years and realize that I had grown a bit. Slowly, I had become comfortable with myself during that four-year period. I had a solid group of friends to rally behind me. Most of them weren’t gay, but that was fine by me. I’m more comfortable with being plain old dumb-ass Ernie rather than Ernie, the gay-Asian-Chinese-Insert label here-guy anyway. But they didn’t kick my ass when I told them I was queer, even when I was drunk as fuck off half a wine cooler, even when I couldn’t bear making eye contact. My friends were cool with it. Even the macho wannabe ruffneck guys. Imagine that. Didn’t even talk shit behind my back… about the gay stuff, anyway.

Am I completely comfortable with my sexuality? I’d be lying if I said I was. My dad isn’t too thrilled that I won’t be pumping out grandchildren. “I will never be happy again,” he told me in a busy Shanghai department store, after I wigged out under constant attempts to “just talk” to the pretty nurse who was conveniently living in the same apartment where we were staying.

But it could always be worse. He could have disowned me. You know the drill. I try to be pretty careful revealing myself in certain situations. But then again, coming out to a bunch of ghetto ass lowered-Civic riding Asians says something. Although what it says, I’m not quite sure.

Cards on the table, took my chances, and didn’t lose too big. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

Alright, so I have this thing for video games. Call it Asian upbringing, call it parental rebellion. When I was ten, I’d go to a friend’s house and watch him play Kid Icarus and Metroid on his Nintendo, mesmerized.

“Dad, can I have a Nintendo?”
“No, you should be studying.”

Months later…

“Hooray, it’s Christmas!”
“Open your present, Ernie.”
“Is it a Nintendo? Is it a Nintendo?”
“No, even better.”

Unwraps Christmas present

“Uhmm… Dad? This isn’t a Nintendo.”
“I know. It’s an Encyclopedia.”
“This is only volume 2. Where are all the other volumes?”
“Too expensive.”
“Oh.”

Video games have always been my escape. When my parents were fighting, when there were issues at school, when I was dealing with the whole sexuality thing, I went back to them. Some habits die hard, I guess.

This year’s video game of the moment? Dance Dance Revolution. DDR is one of those things every trendy Asian kid in California knows about and has some type of experience with, similar to going to a rave or rebelling against your parental units. In case you’ve been living under a rock, DDR is a music-based video game where, instead of a joystick, there are giant floor panels marked with arrows. The arrows come up on the screen, and you step on the correct arrow panel to the beat. Kind of like karaoke, except you’re dancing.

The songs, for the most part, are cheesy Japanese pop tunes about lost love or dancing to the beat. Anyone who plays the game is so concentrated on stepping in the right place that they leave their hands to their sides, so it looks like they’re doing a bad Asian Irish jig. And usually the DDR machine is flanked by flashy, multi-colored lights and placed in an easily visible area of the arcade so everyone taking a break from their miniature golf can point and laugh. A lot.

A dollar a game. That’s how much it costs. You get such a workout playing a couple of songs that you’re out of breath by the time the game is over, reminding everyone watching you how chubby you are playing video games instead of, say, taking a walk. It’s embarrassing.

And I’m totally addicted to this game.

It all started innocently enough. You move to a new city; you don’t know anyone. Hey, there’s a video arcade nearby; I think I’ll go! What’s this? A new video game? Hey, I like music! So I started going a couple of times a week and putting in more money.

Now I’m at the point where I set the difficulty to hard and play both sides at once. I can draw a little audience and get applause from the white people and dirty looks from the Asian ones. The kids at the arcade know me.

It’s like being a heroin junkie, except with cheesy J-Pop music. God help me. Or at least help me find the nearest DDR machine.

People keep telling me I need to talk about my “unique experiences.”

You know the advice—every career article and every spotless LinkedIn strategist preaches it. Your unique story is your edge. Lean in. Stand out.

But that only works if your experiences are photogenic. Mine were, at first. Then, for years, they weren’t.

Life became a loop: condo, parents’ house, assisted living, repeat. Screens everywhere. Emails you don’t answer. No conference swag, no business trips, no team dinners with awkward small talk. Just the fluorescent buzz of decline. Someone is always dying. You juggle paperwork and job boards and hope nobody notices you’re failing at both.

That’s what caregiving looks like from the inside.

But let me back up, because the story doesn’t start there.

I moved to Miami for a relationship. This is, as I have said before, a thing people do. Miami is many things, but it is not, historically, a great place to maintain a career in engineering if you are the kind of engineer who needs a certain kind of infrastructure around them and didn’t think too hard about what that meant before getting on the plane.

So I found work. Remote gig for a Texas company. Civic tech fellowship. Almost started my own thing, but turns out I need other humans to bounce ideas off, not just my own echo. Joined my friend’s startup. Cue the usual: burnout, forced sabbatical, fired the day before I was supposed to come back. So I taught. Until I didn’t.

Everything had a Tech label. I didn’t ask if it was real engineering. The titles sounded good. Good enough.

Spoiler: it wasn’t.

What I was actually doing: teaching people to become programmers instead of being one myself. Writing curriculum. Building the apparatus that explains the thing rather than building the thing. I was good at it. It kept the lights on. Each individual step made sense. Collectively, they added up to a resume that, by the time I looked up, no longer read as “engineer,” even though the 20 Under 40 profile in the Miami Herald said otherwise.

Didn’t even notice it happening. Still sitting with that.

I moved back to the Bay Area three years ago. I was going through a breakup. And my parents needed me — that part was true and real, and I’d do it again. But I also came back with a specific, quiet confidence about the job situation. This is the Bay Area! There is always demand here! Surely, with my background — Code for America, civic tech, years of experience, all these words on a page — something would materialize.

I want to be fair to myself: that logic wasn’t crazy. It just turned out to be wrong.

Caregiving went from background noise to full volume. Dad’s decline wasn’t something I flew in for anymore. It was every day. Packed his stuff. Took him to the hospital. Had to get him sedated because he’d get angry if we tried to get him on the shuttle. Four blocks away, but might as well have been Mars. Back and forth. Parents’ place. Assisted living. Condo. Paperwork. Screens.

And running in parallel, or trying to, was the job search. Which, in practice, meant it ran in the background. Which, in practice, meant it ran badly.

The Bay Area has demand. Just not for whatever showed up in my particular resume.

About a year in, I made it through the first round at a FAANG company. This felt like something. Progress. Evidence that the logic hadn’t been completely wrong. I had been cramming for the DSA exams like a Japanese teenager trying to pass a University entrance exam.

Then, a few days later, you get a call.

“You were being interviewed as a mid-level engineer,” they told me. “Not senior. With your years, we can’t keep you there—you’ll retake it at the senior bar.”

Which was the opposite of what I wanted. Mid-level was the point. I’d come in hoping to be measured against a rung that matched the actual shape of my career, not the one my resume implied.

I tried to explain: the Miami years, the teaching, the pivot that wasn’t really a pivot so much as a slow drift I didn’t notice until it was already the shape of my life. A special case, I said. Couldn’t I come in a level down, where the bar matched the work I’d actually been doing? I’m a special case.

“Doesn’t matter when you have the experience,” they said. And then, there was nothing they could do.

I’ve thought about that sentence a lot: You have the experience. As if the experience I had was the thing they were measuring, and the gap between what they saw on paper and what showed up in the interview was just a performance problem, a calibration issue, something I could fix if I prepared better next time.

What they couldn’t fathom — what the rubric doesn’t have a field for — is that special cases exist. A resume can tell a true story that the industry’s hiring pipeline isn’t built to read, because why bother with the special case when there are literally 100 other people in the pipeline, fifteen to twenty years younger than you, who did exactly what they wanted them to do?

“I understand,” I blurted out. I didn’t. I said it was fine. It wasn’t.

So I retook it at the senior level. I failed.

The industry has a specific idea of what counts. Titles at recognizable companies. Continuous tenure. Output that can be expressed as scale — users, systems, team size. The narrative of someone who kept moving forward on the approved path, who didn’t stop to do anything messy or hard to quantify or god for-fucking-bid human.

Caregiving has no metrics, besides “try not to have them die today.” But there’s no good way to put “kept two elderly parents who hate each other alive and functional for several years while managing their finances, their medical decisions, and the slow bureaucratic machinery of decline” on a resume in a way that parses. It doesn’t compress into a bullet point. It doesn’t have a title. Nobody gave me a performance review for it.

Teaching? Same problem. At least if you’re trying to get slotted into a box. You can explain it, and it makes sense, but by the time you finish, the rubric’s already moved on.

The specific cruelty isn’t being rejected. Rejection, I understand. The specific cruelty is being told: you have all this experience — and having that be, simultaneously, true and completely beside the point.

Three years in, the money is draining. I’m not going to dress that up. My dad died in May. I inherited some of his savings. I have opinions about all of these things.

The Bay Area I came back to is doing its thing: building, funding, pivoting, AI-ing. Everyone has a deck. Everyone is in a moment. The energy in this city is, as it has always been, the energy of people who know exactly what they’re doing and are moving very fast toward it. They throw terms I was unaware of before I left for Miami, their new mantras: 996. Permanent underclass.

I’m not one of those people. Not right now.

The question I keep not quite answering is this: who am I here, professionally, if the version of me that existed before I left is no longer relevant? I came back expecting to find that person waiting. The industry looked at my resume and said, “We don’t see him either.”

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by. I do think it made all the difference. And I’d do it again. But I’m still paying for it.

All three of those things are true at the same time, and I don’t have a tidy way to end that sentence. So I won’t try.

The inbox is still open. I’m still looking. There are no photographs.

LYD Classic: Editor’s Note, 2026 —

“And That’s Okay” went up on iistix.com in February 2001, which makes it approximately a thousand years old, or twenty-five, depending on how you count. I was 24, recently out, still doing that thing where you keep a very specific kind of pain at arm’s length by naming it and immediately shrugging. The essay is about church, and high school, and a phone call I thought about for years. “And that’s okay” is the refrain, and I’ll say only that the phrase reads differently now than it did when I typed it at 24, which is probably why it felt worth dusting off. Anyway.

The last time I went to church was for a candlelight Christmas Eve service. The actions to go to church seem so mechanical… My sister and I jump into a car. We drive through the Berkeley hills. We park in the compacted parking lot a block behind Telegraph Avenue, and instead of getting your nose pierced or buying a water pipe (for tobacco use only), you enter the familiarity and sanctity of the House of God, Presbyterian denomination.

But have you ever been to a place that feels familiar, yet not comfortable? That was exactly how I felt. I recognized a couple of faces: teenagers I spent countless Sundays with six or seven years ago, now marked by facial hair, breasts, or wedding rings. None of them recognized or acknowledged me. Maybe they don’t even recognize each other anymore.

And that’s okay.

When I was in high school, I was heavily involved with my church. I had joined the church and its youth group for very selfish reasons, however. I was one of those guys in high school who would dread lunchtime. It meant walking around the campus by myself, figuring out what the hell to do for the next 45 minutes. People in high school didn’t know what to make of me. I was the “weird guy,” the guy who would hang out with a clique of people and then quietly wonder why they wouldn’t invite me to their poker nights on Friday. You wanna know how I was known at graduation? I was “Ernie, the weird guy that got crapped on by a seagull that one day in April.” I wish I were kidding.

So going to the youth group on Sunday became a social outlet for me, not to mention a great way to escape bickering parents. I even played piano for the church high school choir, going on trips to Alaska and Chicago every summer. From there, I developed friendships with a group of guys, and we would hang out during the week, when one of us had access to a car anyway. All I had to do was somehow survive Monday to Friday.

But it was never about God. Mind you, I believe in God, whatever that entity may be. But I was angry at God. Maybe I’m still a little bit angry.

If there was a loving and just God, like everyone at church said, why did my parents fight? How could God explain what happened to my sister? I won’t even touch the issue of my sexuality with a ten-foot pole, but you can probably imagine. Looking back, Christianity wasn’t my religion; my friends were. I know how cold that sounds to anyone who once saw me as spiritual (which was a long, long time ago), but it’s true. My friends filled a niche I desperately craved.

Eventually, I went off to college with a plan: “I’m going to start over,” I thought to myself. “I’m not going to be an outcast anymore.” So I did.

Not to say I abandoned my spiritual side outright. At college, I joined a Christianity group for the first couple of months. But they were very intellectual, very matter-of-fact about their spiritual matters. I remember falling asleep in the middle of a five-person bible study. Not good.

But the nail in the Christianity coffin came when, during my first year of college, I came out to one of my close church friends from high school over the phone. He was then attending Northwestern University and planning to enroll in Seminary school. After I told him, he fell silent, then muttered something about living in a den of sin. “I’ll pray for you,” he said, and then hung up. I haven’t heard from him since. I was never angry at him for that—just a bit sorry. I’ve moved on. (A quick Internet search later showed he’s now married and works as a case manager for an adoption agency—good for him.)

By now, it’s after midnight, and everyone is in a sudden rush to get 200 cars out of a parking lot that only fits one hundred. The air is cold and damp, and I quickly reach into my pocket to light a cigarette.

I get a lot of dirty looks, but no one tells me to put the cigarette away.

And right there, I realized that in seven years, I had transformed myself. I went from a piano-playing Chinese boy on a mission for Jesus, sitting in the front row, eager for each hymn, to a person among hundreds walking quietly out of a church after midnight—tired from the late hour, confused because my beliefs conflicted with things that mattered deeply to me, and yet, just for the night, content because I had fulfilled my duty at a house of worship on a Judeo-Christian holiday.

And that’s okay.

LYD Classic: Editor’s Note, 2026 —

This one’s from late 2018, when I was 42 and apparently had Feelings about it. The original subtitle — “Improv classes! A trip to Mexico! Crippling depression!” — does most of the heavy lifting as far as summaries go, though the actual essay is less zany-fun-year and more about aging parents, a city I’d lived in for five years without ever quite landing, and the specific weight of a depression that felt hard to claim out loud. I’m reposting it now at 49 mostly intact, which required reading it in full, which was a thing. I’m doing okay, for the record — not “everything is perfect and I’ve learned so much” okay, but okay enough to dust this off and put it back out there. Anyway. Here’s 42.

It’s been a rough year for me. Even though there have been some bright spots, I’ll remember 2018 as the year depression kicked my ass.

Okay, may not past tense. Maybe present tense, too.

This is the year depression is kicking my ass.

I don’t talk about my depression publicly. I don’t do that for several reasons — one, you don’t really bring it up in regular conversation. A friend of a friend or someone you have to call for work makes small talk and asks, “how was your weekend?” You’re not supposed to answer that with, “I woke up stupid early due crippling anxiety, go to sleep feeling resigned to the world around me, and spend the time in-between wanting to feed my emotions because it brings me brief but fleeting moments of satiation.” Instead, you reply with a polite, “it was fine. And yours?” And life goes on.

Two — if you know anything about me or read anything I’ve written at all over the past (checks calendar) sixteen years, you know that I have a very severely mentally ill sister, cognitively slow and unable to interact with another human socially on the good days, profanity-laced and physically assaulty on the bad ones. As this has happened since I was four — in an immigrant family on top of that — anything I feel would be deemed null and void, compared to what my sister goes through. “Aww, you’re depressed, Ernie?” I imagine my sister’s schizophrenia would say if it were an actual person. “Hold my beer.” And then poof, there goes Angela having a screaming fit in the middle of a suburban McDonalds, while we all shift our seats uncomfortably in the plastic booths.

I’m not 100% sure what the trigger has been.

It may be my parents. They’re getting older, dad has gotten senile, and it’s clear some sort of intervention will be needed. The TL;DR version: my parents are divorced, but it would make financial sense for them to get back together, as they have to see each other on a regular basis because of my sister, and my mom can no longer pay the bills to their house. Her central heating has broke, and it’s too expensive to fix, so she’s wrapped herself in electric blankets and bought an army of space heaters. So they start to reconcile until they have a bitter argument and swear never to be in the same room again or my dad’s short-term memory loss kicks in, and he’s forgotten the whole part about reconciling. Repeat this two or three times.

My therapist says I don’t have any obligation to tend to my parents whatsoever; that we don’t live in a time where it’s expected for unmarried Asian children to drop everything, fly home, take care of their elders. My brain knows this.

It may be that after five years of living in Miami, I’ve inadvertently decided that the best way to cope with things around me is to isolate myself. I don’t have close friends here, tried to find a tribe, ended up in evenings where it’s easier to just lie on the couch watching YouTube videos of cats rather than the spent energy.

My partner has been supportive overall but is a staunch defender of where we live. “What’s to say you wouldn’t feel that if you moved somewhere else?” And a part of me passive-aggressively send definitions of “gaslighting” over Facebook messenger, but another part of me knows he’s probably right, the asshole.

So, I’ve poured it all into work. Ahhh, work. See, putting your anxieties into your job is fantastic, because it gives you a distraction from yourself, but then it just opens more opportunities to create more stress that you’re unable to cope with. But you don’t know what else to do, or what other creative or social outlets you have any more, so you spend that all on work! It really is the gift that keeps on giving. Maybe karoshi — that whole death by Japanese salaryman overwork thing — will kick in for me, and I imagine having a heart attack in the middle of the office, grabbing my chest before I dramatically slump over a keyboard. Until I do some internet research and most of them work a hundred hour weeks, and I would be too lazy to commit suicide by working too much.

I went to Mexico City with Kareem and some friends. That was nice, and the break was good, although I ate this chicken and rice dish at some themed restaurant where the waitresses are dressed as nuns and caught food poisoning for forty hours. So I missed the Day of the Dead and would just have to settle for celebrating the Day after the Day of the Dead.

So that’s where I am right now. Next month I’ll fly back to California again for an unspecific amount of time. My goal is to convince mom to sell her house, and at the very least consider moving into the condo I own. A part of me thinks I’ll be staying a while, even though I know my parents, separately or together, will drive me over the edge. But it’ll be something different, and something different is definitely need right now.

The email is two sentences. I’d have called it one, which tells you how fast I read it. I’m standing in the kitchen, phone in one hand, and I say it out loud, to nobody in particular:

OH, HELL NAW.

Here it is:

is everything you write ai generated these days?
if not, just fyi, reads like slop.

The lowercase is his. So is the fyi, which – and I need you to appreciate this – is doing a lot of work for three letters. “oh hey, I can be a jerk but i’m coming from a place that looks helpful” (I would know. I have an fyi of my own I owe somebody. We’ll get there.)

This isn’t a stranger off the internet. I’ve known him since the blog days – back when you paid actual money for a domain name and posted about your feelings into Moveable Type and a small, weird community of people you’d never meet IRL actually gave a shit. He works in AI now. The actual models part, not the people who say they’re part of the AI movement because they write listicles called “10 Ways AI Will Change Everything.”

So when my face works again after the temporary but seething blinding rage, I copy his one sentence into my Obsidian journal – where I keep the stuff I’m not ready to be publicly embarrassing about yet – and I write underneath it: obviously this has me on the defensive. instead of being reactive, how can I be better?

Look at me. So measured. So grown.

Narrator, in British accent: “He would then spend the next three hours being neither of those things.”

The thing you do

The thing you do, of course, is question whether everything you’ve published HAS been AI slop. You can’t just be offended. You have to find out if he’s right first. Which means you can’t sit there and stew – you have to go back and reread everything you’ve published in the last two weeks.

Look. I’ve been publishing on the web since 1999. I have a whole bit about AI being the Adderall of the writing world: useful for getting something on the table, addictive as hell, and real easy to convince yourself what it wrote for you is you. I also have ADHD bad enough I once went a full year without writing anything, because the blank page is a terrible place to start a story when your brain refuses to give you a single drop of dopamine for building a paragraph. So I use AI as a tool. I’ve made my peace with using the tool. The line I thought I was walking was simple: AI does the boring scaffolding, I write the actual piece.

I know what slop looks like. I can feel it when I’m writing it.

So I reread. The old stuff I’d already flagged – that’s the easy category. There was a phase early on where you can practically see the novelty oozing off the prose; that specific brand of AI enthusiasm that reads like someone describing what a good blog post should contain instead of just writing one. Fine. Caught those a while ago. Embarrassing, but caught.

What I wasn’t ready for was the other category.

The words

Not “delve.” Not the em-dashes. Not “it’s not X, it’s Y,” which, yes, fine, the entire internet has agreed to be very annoying about.

These were words. Plural. A cluster of them.

I found phrases scattered through several posts – confident, technical-sounding vocabulary – that I cannot prove I ever used before there was an AI in the room. I’m not going to list them. The second I do, you’ll either nod like you’ve always known them or you’ll clock them as tells, and I don’t fully trust either of us right now. They were the kind of words you absorb from a smart magazine and just assume belong to you. You nod along while you’re editing. You think: maybe I know these words. Maybe this is just me.

Maybe this is me.

I sat with that one for a while.

The half he was right about

Here’s the fyi I owe you.

The email he got wasn’t a blog post. It was outreach – I’d been emailing a loose circle of people about freelance and consulting opportunities, and apparently I had gotten a little aggressive about it. The message he got, the one that read like slop: I didn’t write it. Not exactly. I drafted it with an AI agent I’ve been experimenting with, and then, per my own instructions, the agent sent it. On my behalf. Probably without any of the anti-slop rules I so carefully apply to everything else.

I handed the whole thing over. The drafting, the voice, the send button. I was juggling a lot of caregiving stuff at the time, I went hard on the automation, and I told myself that was just efficiency. Uhmm… oops.

So he’s half right. The half he’s right about isn’t my blog. It’s the email. It’s the fact that I let a machine talk as me to someone who’s known me for twenty years, and the machine got close enough that he couldn’t tell – except for the part of him that could, the part that fired off one lowercase sentence and then cause that teeny, tiny, low-key mental spiral you’re witnessing right now.

What you can actually prove

What I keep turning over is whether it even matters that I can tell the difference.

You can’t prove your writing is yours. Not really. Same rhythm, same vocabulary, same indefensible fondness for the en-dash – there’s no test you pass that a good model can’t also pass.

But you can prove it isn’t.

When the machine invents a word and you don’t catch it. When the agent hits send and you never read it. When you’re three paragraphs into defending a sentence and you can’t remember if you wrote it or just approved it.

That’s the part nobody tells you. You don’t lose authorship in one big dramatic sale. You lose it one un-read sentence at a time, and every single one felt like efficiency when you did it.

And it didn’t get me where I was watching for it. Not in the posts I reread four times. In the email that wasn’t even a post.

I wrote him back. Tried to be all casual. hey. you mean the email you recieved? or everything i’ve written lately?

Lowercase. Matched his. Didn’t even notice I’d done it until just now.

He hasn’t written back.

And here’s the part I can’t shake: I read that little message of mine four times before I sent it. To make sure it sounded like me. To make sure it sounded casual, which is a thing you only have to engineer when it isn’t.

Same trick the agent pulled. I just did it by hand.

There’s a companion piece coming in Late to the Future about the words. The mechanics of how it gets past you, and how you actually catch it. But Ernie, you say, aren’t YOU one of those people who write about AI through an AI Substack? Hey – what’s that thing in the sky?

My cousin is a county undersheriff. Has been for years. He’s good at his job in the way that quiet competent people are good at their jobs — you don’t realize how senior he is until you mention his name to someone in law enforcement and watch their face change.

His number has been in my phone for as long as I’ve had a phone. I see it when I scroll. It sits next to my mom’s, my hairdresser’s, and a cousin in Taiwan I haven’t talked to in fifteen years, in a contact list that hasn’t been cleaned out in two decades. I do not call him.

I could. I could call him today. The conversation would be short. The conversation would be: hey, I’m looking for my sister. The conversation would be: yes, that sister. The conversation would be: no, no one has heard from her in two years; last we knew, she was in a board-and-care somewhere. The conversation would be: yeah, I know. I know. I’ll text you what we have.

He would do it. Or he’d put me in touch with someone who would do it. There would be a window of maybe a few weeks where I’d get phone calls and texts I didn’t want to look at, then one phone call I really didn’t want to look at, and at the end of it I would know.

I haven’t made the call.

When you’re ten, your dad sits you down — you don’t remember if it’s at the kitchen table or on the brown couch by the sliding door; you have tried to remember and you can’t — and he tells you that your sister is going to be your responsibility one day. Legally. After.

He doesn’t say after what. You know after what.

Angela is twenty. You are ten. You don’t call her Angela when you’re ten, of course, because that would be rude; you call her 姐姐, and then just 姐 before you call her Angela as everyone else does. As if she somehow loses the title of “older sister” because of her mental demons.

Even at ten, you know something is wrong with Angela, though no one has given you the words for it yet. She was a surrogate mother to you, mostly when Angela felt that Mom treated her differently from how she treated me. She’s in some ways more of a mother than your mother. She is also, on the bad days, the most frightening person in your house. You can hold both. Ten-year-olds can hold a lot if you ask them to.

What your dad is doing here is, in his way, the responsible thing. He is a man who plans. He has insurance. He has accounts. He has a back-of-the-napkin operating plan for what happens to his family after he isn’t there. He has identified the family member who will, statistically, be around the longest, and he has briefed that family member on what comes next.

But if present-day me could jump in some sort of time machine and visit the moment Dad is talking to an 11 year old Ernie, I would carefully not touch the child — because, you know, grandfather paradox — but I would sit next to him, look the old man in the eyes and say “yes, he does need to hear this, this is his burden, but for the love of all things good and holy he is only in the fourth grade.”

Here is what telling a ten-year-old he is legally responsible for a twenty-year-old does to the ten-year-old.

The ten-year-old believes you. He files it. He carries it. He is bad at school for the next decade and a half partly because there is a parallel file in his head labeled Angela he can’t look at and can’t put down. He grows up. He goes to therapy and doesn’t bring it up because what would he even ask? He becomes a man who is excellent in a crisis and confused by an ordinary calm Tuesday, and the only honest answer for why is: he’s been waiting for the call for thirty-nine years.

The call never comes because Angela goes missing instead.

Angela’s timeline, if you want it. (You don’t, but it’s useful.)

• 1982: First break. She’s fifteen. Bipolar disorder with schizophrenia and delusions of grandeur is a phrase you distinctly remember her being described as at some point. Auditory hallucinations. Delusions that TV personalities were speaking to her. Paranoia about celebrities trying to kill her. Not always celebrities. Usually, it was Satan, Jesus Christ, or Barbara Bush.

• 1995: she’s twenty-nine, living independently for once, working as a substitute teacher in the East Bay. She stops her medication — she’s decided Jesus will cure her. She burns her diploma. She drives to Los Angeles to find a man named Michael, who does not exist. The car gets repossessed. She moves back into the family home. The independence experiment is over.

• 1999: She goes after Mom at the dinner table. You’re the one holding her back when she bites a chunk out of your arm. Dad won’t call the police. You do. You give your parents an ultimatum: put her somewhere, or lose me.

• 2000: In January, she runs away for two weeks. A hospital in Los Angeles calls; Dad drives down to get her. By April, she’s institutionalized — Mom can’t take the threats anymore and demands Dad admit her. You find out the way you find out everything: secondhand, on a visit home, Mom sorting junk mail. “Where’s jiejie?” “She’s gone.” You don’t remember how or when she’s released.

• 2016: She beats Mom with a TV remote. Police photograph the bruises. Mom files a restraining order; a judge makes it permanent for five years. Angela moves into board-and-care ten minutes from Mom’s house. Mom breaks the restraining order every week to take her to breakfast at McDonald’s.

• 2019: She leaves board-and-care, off her medication, and moves back into the family home with nothing but the clothes on her back. She refuses to leave.

• 2020: another assault, another TV remote. This time she’s arrested — for elder abuse. Then there’s the stint at Santa Rita — her first stretch — during COVID, when she tells no one about her mental health history. (You learn about the jail part secondhand. You always learn about the Angela parts secondhand.) She’s arrested four times that year. At one point, the jail-to-home cycle repeats itself almost daily.

• She finally agrees to a board-and-care facility. She stayed at two facilities for a couple of years.

• Two years ago, she called Mom from a board-and-care facility you don’t have the address for. She told her the food was terrible.

That was the last time anyone in our family heard her voice.

She could be dead. She could be alive in a shelter somewhere, in a different state, in the kind of place where people end up when their families have failed them sufficiently. She could be alive and well and choosing not to call us. And honestly — honestly — given everything, given that I am writing this sentence and haven’t made the phone call that would start to answer the question, I wouldn’t blame her at all.

I have not searched for Angela.

The for-the-record answer is: Dad was dying. Then Dad was in hospice. Then Dad was dead. There was a funeral. There was a will. There was Mom staring vacantly at the gravesite, remarking that it was too warm for an outdoor event. The bandwidth wasn’t there.

That’s the short version.

The real answer is: I think I have been quietly grateful for the silence.

I don’t love that sentence. I don’t love being the person it’s about. But it’s the sentence, and the law of this thing is that you write the sentence even when you would rather the sentence just not fucking exist.

If she’s alive and unreachable, fine. I can live with that. But if I find her, things happen. There’s a job I was assigned at ten that I still haven’t done at forty-nine. There’s a debt to my mother that stops being theoretical and gets a dollar amount. And there are the phone calls — case workers, county systems, the whole apparatus — possibly for the rest of my actual life.

So no. I have not searched for Angela.

The week you bury one family member is the week you finally count who’s left.

I have a mother. I have friends who showed up at the funeral and friends who texted because they couldn’t. I have cousins, including a cousin who is a county undersheriff and has had his number in my phone the whole time.

I have a sister. Or I don’t.

A ten-year-old was told he would someday be responsible for his mentally ill adult sister. Forty years later, his father is dead, the sister is missing, and he still doesn’t know whether the responsibility is legal, moral, imaginary, inherited, or simply the last thing his father left behind.

The phone is on the table. The number is right there.

Yep.

Yesterday, you pulled into a CVS parking lot somewhere in Castro Valley because if you didn’t close your eyes for ten minutes, you weren’t making it back to Fremont. It’s late morning. You’ve been at it since the night before helping your friend use AI to prepare evidence for his lawyers, a long detour involving a guy who recorded himself surrounded by five mirrors, which was a thing that actually happened, in this life, the one you’re currently driving home from.

The car is a 2009 Mazda3 Sport Hatchback. You bought it from CarMax in Miami-Dade County, Florida, on July 14, 2012, for $11,813.76. You paid $246.12 a month for forty-eight months. What can you say? You keep notes.

The odometer says 88,881.

In August 2024, you took it to Aztek Auto Repair for a smog inspection. The technician — Jose Antonio E. — wrote you a list:

Two engine mounts broken. One transmission mount broken. Coolant tank leaking, requires replacement of the reservoir. Valve cover gasket leaking oil. VVT solenoid gasket leaking. Mass Air Flow sensor damaged. Noticeable suspension noise.

He cleaned the MAF sensor enough to get the car through smog. Everything else, he wrote, was “the underlying cause.”

The engine mounts eventually got fixed — two years later, in the condo parking spot, by Jeff and Daniel — no shop, no receipt, illegal.

You did not get the transmission mount fixed.

You did not get the coolant tank replaced.

You drove the car.

You’re still driving it.

The plate has changed three times. The first was Florida — back when you lived in Miami and had a different idea of what the next decade was going to look like. Then a California plate when you moved back to be near Dad, who was still lucid, still in the house on Camden. Then a different California plate — 9XXX555, the one bolted on now. The car has been three different cars depending on what state you were in. The car never asked you why.

You drove it through the Florida Keys, turquoise water on both sides for 68 miles. A month after the breakup, you drove from Miami up I-95 and kept driving north, through Jacksonville, then Savannah and Columbia and Asheville, and spent some time in a bit of America that neither the Bay Area folks nor the Miami folks get to see too often, and may never get to see again.

You drove it to the car carrier in Miami, the one that transported it across the country in one shot. You paid the driver a little extra because you may have packed some additional things in the car you shouldn’t have. There was the week your car was “borrowed” five extra days beyond your knowledge and got unceremoniously returned with a bunch of drug paraphernalia and mud and bullet casings inside. (Yeah, we don’t associate with that guy anymore.) You drove it to Dad’s appointments. To Mom’s house. You drove it to Fremont Village, the facility you eventually had to move him into. Back to Mom’s house, which was four blocks away anyway. You drove it home from Fremont Village more times than you can count, including the last time, when there was nothing left to drive home from.

You drove the Mazda over to Mom’s this morning to start vacating Dad’s room — Fremont Village wants it turned over before they release the refund. None of this registers with the car. The car does not know that Dad is gone. The car does not know that you closed your eyes somewhere in Castro Valley yesterday and woke up not entirely sure how long you’d been out. It smells, faintly, like a hatchback that has been driven through Miami summers, Bay Area winters, and one funeral.

It has watched all of it.

It doesn’t know.

Daniel’s car got towed last week. A 2013 white Hyundai Sonata, plate 8AAA666. Nine hundred dollars to get it out. You ate the cost, the way you eat costs, the way the car eats potholes. The Mazda is, currently, the only car in your orbit that hasn’t been a referendum on someone else’s bad night.

This is what it means to own a car for nearly fourteen years. It stops being a car. It becomes the thing in your life that doesn’t need anything from you — the way most things do, all the time, in increasing volume.

Except the engine mounts.

And the transmission mount.

And the coolant tank.

But those have held.

You’re not making a metaphor. The car is a car. It has 88,881 miles. It uses 5W-20 oil. The front tires need 35 PSI. It has, by any reasonable accounting, been falling apart since 2024, and it has, by the same accounting, gotten you exactly where you needed to go every single time.

The next thing you’ll have to look up isn’t the odometer. It’s a date on a death certificate. They have them in El Cerrito. There’s no hard due date.

You ordered them mailed.

The car stayed in the driveway.

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It’s a Friday afternoon in May, and I’m at my mother’s kitchen table. My father has been dead for nine days. I’m here to talk about the service.

She says, before I can open the laptop: Name me any Christmas after we divorced where he came to us, wished us a Merry Christmas, took us out to dinner.

I don’t name one. There isn’t one.

She says: Name me any birthday.

There isn’t one of those either.

This is how my mother is grieving. If my mother has seven stages of grief, they’ve been rewritten with a new set of rules: anger, anger, anger, anger, anger, anger, anger. She’s been in the anger room for thirty years.

To be clear: she’s not wrong. He didn’t come to us at Christmas. He didn’t call on birthdays. The receipts are real. She is, in a very specific and well-organized way, telling me the truth.

She just doesn’t know that I have my own receipts.

In the second week of May, I’m organizing my father’s memorial service inside a project management tool called Asana. There are columns for “guest list” and “speakers” and a column for “what music.” I select-all and delete, because let’s be honest: Dad was 94. Dad’s lifelines were his naval buddies, also in their 90s. If they’re not dead, they’re not going to cross oceans on a day’s notice. There will be no phone calls to florists, no purchasing of hydrangeas. I have moved through grief, so far, the way I’ve moved through every other administrative task of my adult life — by pretending it is a project, and then completing the project.

Or at least, trying to complete the project. I literally don’t even know the church he attended post-divorce to notify the congregation. Which means I’m essentially the minister. Damn.

Somewhere in this column system is the truth that I’m the one who is doing this. Not Mom. She’s grieving in the way she’s earned the right to grieve, which is by being right. I’m grieving in the way I know how, which is by making a checklist for the hydrangea question.

When she lists what Dad didn’t do at Christmas, the answer she’s reaching for is: and so he doesn’t deserve to be missed, therefore we won’t miss him. I do not give her that answer. I also don’t contradict it. I just nod a little, like a man waiting for the tea to finish steeping. I’ve become, in middle age, very good at this nod.

There’s a thing my father did, in my early forties, that I hadn’t told anybody.

He told me he had married my mother out of obligation. His father had wanted the match. He had not. He told me this plainly, the way you tell somebody the weather. By then his senility was already underway, which means I get to wonder, for the rest of my life, whether it was true or whether it was the kind of thing a failing mind dredges up and hands to the wrong person.

I don’t get to ask him. I didn’t get to ask him.

It wasn’t the first time he had handed me something I wasn’t supposed to be holding; it was the latest time.

There’s a longer list. I’m not going to write it here. Some of it is somebody else’s story. Some of it I’m still deciding whether I have the right to tell.

What I’ll say is: my mother has her receipts, and I have mine, and mine are heavier. She’s mad about the Christmases he didn’t show up to. I’m holding the things he showed up to say. She got the absence. I got whatever the opposite of absence is when the presence is also a problem.

You would think that would be enough to cry about.

You would think.

I have not cried since my father died.

I mean at all. Not the heaving kind. Not even the kind that just happens to you, the way weather happens — the kind I cry at movies, at songs in the car, at the small absurd print of an unrelated invoice. I’ve felt sad at other things in the last nine days. I haven’t cried at this.

The last time I cried hard — the heaving, hyperventilating, can’t-catch-your-breath kind — I was nineteen years old. I won’t tell you what the situation was, because it doesn’t matter. Or maybe it does. I don’t know. What matters is how it ended: me in my bed, fetal, resolved that I wouldn’t cry like that ever again.

And I haven’t.

I thought this would do it. I really did.

I thought my father has died would be the thing. The thing that finally cracked the seal I made at nineteen. There is a version of me that’s been waiting thirty years to find out what could.

It turns out: not this. Not yet, anyway.

I don’t know what to do with this information. I’m sitting at my mother’s kitchen table watching her grieve in the only room she has — the anger room, the one she has decorated and hosted dinner parties in and is going to die in — and I can’t even do that.

I can’t find my room.

I’m not sure I have one.

The seven stages of grief are a popularization anyway; people don’t pass through grief in order. They live inside it, in whatever room they have built for it.

My mother has her anger room. I’m still looking for the door to mine.

It’s a Friday afternoon in May. Between us, we’ve drafted nothing about the service. Mom has named four Christmases he didn’t come to. I’ve nodded four times. I close the laptop. We sit there.

She doesn’t say anything else.

I don’t either.

My father came to America with a plan.

He didn't talk much about what he left behind. A story here, a hardship there. What we knew was this: he came from a place of care — for family, for country — and he arrived here with his eyes pointed forward. That was just who he was. Once he committed to something, he didn't waver. He didn't look back.

Chi-Ming Hsiung was a commander in the Republic of China Navy, following a lineage that traced back through his father. He carried that quietly. You wouldn't always know it from conversation, but you'd feel it in how he held himself, what he talked about, what made him proud. Going through his belongings these past days, I've been finding things I never knew existed — medals, photographs, a record of a special diplomatic envoy he was part of in 1968, visiting Washington, D.C., and the Bay Area. Four years before immigrating to the United States. A whole chapter of a life he never felt the need to announce.

He eventually traded naval life for a career as a mechanical engineer at PG&E. He made sure the buildings people worked in stayed comfortable. He made sure his family had stability. Those two things weren’t so different, really. He was a man who showed up and kept things running, even when it cost him something.

If you were lucky enough to be at one of his dinner parties — and many of you were — you knew the other side of him. His naval buddies would come through, and the night would fill up with old stories and laughter. He was quick-witted. He had charm to spare. With people he trusted, he lit up.

He was also a product of his time and his upbringing. He was a commander at home the way he’d been a commander in uniform. He had expectations, and he made them known. Our relationship wasn’t easy. We fundamentally disagreed on a lot. He made his disappointments clear to me, and I to him. But I want to say something plainly: two people not always understanding each other doesn’t mean they didn’t love each other. I knew his world — the world that shaped him — was impossibly different from mine. The speed of change between his generation and my own was staggering. I think he felt that, even if he couldn’t say it.

Alzheimer’s took the ending from us that we might have had. They call it a long goodbye, but ours didn’t feel like one at all. The illness got in the way.

What I know is this: I moved back to California. I accepted the duty, sorted through the records and the hospital bills and the Medicare forms and the doctors’ appointments. To do what needed doing. I’m not sure he ever saw it for what it was.

But it was the most Chinese thing I knew how to do.

I am my father’s son. I have traits that some would call this passion but others would call a bad temper. I have his manic storytelling skills and the dreamer’s mentality he passed down, filtered through a discipline he also gave me, for better and worse. I’m still figuring out what I inherited and what I’ve made my own.

What I know about Chi-Ming Hsiung is that he was a good man. He arrived in this country with almost nothing and built a life. He loved his wife, Chi-Yung. He loved Angela. He loved me in the way he knew how.

He had all the best intentions in the world.

Last night, I was going through a sea of envelopes in Dad’s dresser drawers when I saw one not like the others. The envelope was in my dads handwriting and simply said “THE WIND.” Underneath that, careful writing that said “THE TRAGEDY?”

There were two letters, both from 1993, from a guy named Tony from San Diego. Printed out letters from a dot-matrix printer, asking if I was still crushing on the guy I had a crush on in high school.

And then my heart sunk. And then I had a conversation with AI asking why he labelled it like that, and it sunk some more.

I started to meet other gay people my age and found my place to fit in online. Since modems were still being used — a rough step above fax machines — I convinced my father to get an additional phone line, in the name of “getting an edge on college applications,” whatever that meant. Meanwhile, I talked over Prodigy’s messaging system with dozens of gay teeangers, mostly about stuff that gay teenagers in the early 90s talk about, like whether Paula Abdul or Janet Jackson was better. Sometimes — as teenagers do — we talked about the kinds of guys we liked. The crushes we had. Sex. In particular I chatted with a guy named Tony, from San Diego. He was excited to go to USD. He was around my age, Chinese-American, just like me. We traded two letters, and later, PLAYGUY magazines in a manila envelope, full of 90s porn stars with bleached hair. I kept the magazines in the envelope and put it in the back corner of the closet.

This, of course, is a stupid thing to do, when you have Asian parents and a mom who is a full-time housewife who cleans the entire day. To this day, I’m not sure why I chose to leave adult male magazines in an obvious hiding place; maybe I justified that the pros of having dirty mags in the house would outweigh the cons. Maybe I was more scared to throw it away; Asian parents go through garbage, right? Maybe all those college psychology professors were right, and I secretly hoped that it would be found.

Needless to say, Mom found the magazine. And she called my dad at work to tell him about it.

For now, I don’t want to talk about what happened next. Just know that Bad Things Happened That Affected Me Forever(tm).

Inside the envelope were the letters from Tony, as is. Dad kept the letters from Tony. The original letters from 1993. In pristine condition. Why did he keep these letters? Had them in an envelope in a drawer easily accessible to him for 33 years.

He labeled them “THE WIND. THE TRAGEDY?” The Wind? Is that, like, The Cure, but gayer?

I didn’t understand why he labeled it that at first. But then I remembered that the word in Chinese meant some other things, and I referred to ChatGPT.

Or to hide it from Mom, who, in theory, couldn’t understand English labels in the first place.

I added that last part about the image generation. I have no idea why. Grief does things.

But what he did was use a Chinese turn of phrase and translated it to English to give it distance. Which made it something equivalent to “I am framing my child’s sexuality as a catastrophic family event, but I am also putting a question mark there so I can pretend I’m being reflective.”

How do I feel?

I feel like I have to organize his funeral in two days, and that I should not let myself feel anything because I technically still have to drive up to El Cerrito to give funeral directors the clothes he’ll be buried in and the medals he’ll be buried with.

It’s not even anger I’m feeling. Just profound disappointment.

My father was the embodiment of ideals. He moved his family to America because it was the ideal of freedom. I was assigned to a Junior High school and when the opportunity came to transfer to a better middle school farther away, he refused because ideally, the selection of schools shouldn’t matter, because the education quality was both better than what he knew at the time.

His ideal for my schizophrenic sister was to have her married to a doctor that would love her and cure her at the same time. He implored her to “just try.” Spoiler alert: things didn’t turn out like that. Understatement of the century.

And the fact that he held onto these letters without me knowing since 1993 — 33 years — 33 fucking years — this symbolic piece of disappointment he had toward me, which would influence all of his macro and micro decisions, from convincing a nurse in China that she was as good as ready to move back to America with me, to not acknowledging a partner I had for thirteen years. That stopped being a problem with me; it became a problem with him.

I had moved on, had my entire life to live. I don’t even know who this Tony guy really is. (If you are a Chinese Tony who used to live in San Diego who is approximately 50 and corresponded with me by mail, drop me a line to say hi and we’ll go clubbing or something.)

My father couldn’t get this. He literally had to have Alzheimer’s to be at peace with the situation and move on with his life. The fact that right now I could make even a warped, factually-incorrect justification that his Alzheimer’s benefited everyone is a shame.

Everything is a shame.

My dad died at 5:44am. The hospice nurse called with the news. I made coffee, opened my journal, and my note-taking app handed me a Buddha quote about peace and freedom from resentment.

Reader, you can not make this shit up.

The Setup, For The Uninitiated

Obsidian is a note-taking app that nerds like me use to build elaborate second brains we will never fully use. I have a daily journal template — the kind of productivity-bro setup any therapist would gently raise an eyebrow at — and one of the modules at the top automatically pulls a quote from a corpus of inspirational nonsense.

Some mornings it’s Aristotle on happiness. (May 5th. The algorithm’s favorite intern.) Some mornings it’s Wayne Dyer telling me to stretch my mind. (May 1st. Always Wayne.) May 2nd was some guy named John Simone, on how bad situations change. They’ve been showing up at the top of every morning page for months — Pearl Buck, Maya Angelou, an Aristotle rerun, a Lao Tzu — like a very mild Greek chorus that thinks I should drink more water.

And then, on May 6th, this:

My dad had been gone for less than two hours.

The Ceiling Look

You know that thing where something so absurd happens that you actually, physically, look up at the ceiling? Like maybe there’s a hidden camera, or a director somewhere, or a guy with a clipboard taking notes?

I did that. Coffee in hand, in the kitchen, at six in the morning, staring up at a stucco ceiling like it owed me an explanation.

Buddha? Jesus? Wayne Dyer himself? Was this you? Did one of you hijack the random number generator? Because if so — well done. Tight pacing. Strong dismount. The system that’s been throwing up Pearl Buck and John-Whoever-He-Is at me for months chose this day to land the joke.

The quote didn’t make me feel better, exactly. It didn’t make me feel worse. I just felt… seen. Maybe a little too seen, exposed even. Which begs the question, how does one feel exposed by what was essentially a random number generator and an array of quotes?

The first thing I committed to the permanent record that morning, before texting anyone, was this:

Dad passed away at 5:44am. LOL that Buddha quote was completely by coincidence.

That’s the sentence. Not the funeral home. Not the breath. Not the long, quiet drive over to Fremont Village. A LOL about a Buddha quote — which is, if you are of a certain immigrant-kid disposition, exactly what you’d say to a friend at a bar four hours later, when you’ve already cried in three different places and need someone else to laugh so you don’t have to do it again alone.

The Universe Has No Plot. Algorithms Sometimes Do.

Here’s the thing about productivity systems. We build them to optimize ourselves — to track habits, journal feelings, capture thoughts, flatten our messy interior lives into something dashboard-able. Most days they hum along being mildly useful. They remind you to drink water. They surface a podcast you bookmarked four months ago. They suggest, with the gentle insistence of a low-stakes life coach, that you go on a walk.

They are not built for the day your father dies.

They don’t know to stop. They have no respect for the news, because they don’t have the news. The same Obsidian plugin that pings me to do my morning pages does not consult my texts, or my mother’s voice, or the call from the assisted living facility at 5:47am. It just does its job.

And so on May 6th, the system did exactly what it had been doing every morning for months. It opened a fresh note. It populated the metadata. It pulled a quote.

The randomness was a kind of mercy in disguise — or maybe it was just randomness, and I was the one assigning meaning, because that’s what humans, especially grieving ones, do. (We are pattern-recognition machines that occasionally cry.)

The universe doesn’t have a plot. Algorithms sometimes do, by accident, the way a thousand monkeys at a thousand keyboards will eventually type those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace on the exact morning your father is being moved to a funeral home in El Cerrito.

You don’t really get a choice about whether to laugh.

Still Running

The system has continued to do its thing this week. Today it gave me a Lao Tzu quote about water. Tomorrow it’ll probably be Aristotle again, who is, as established, the algorithm’s favorite intern.

I’m leaving the Buddha quote pinned at the top of the May 6th note. Not because it helped, exactly. Not because I think Buddha was talking to me, specifically, through a JavaScript random selector at 5:44 in the morning. (Though if he was, again — strong work, sir.)

I’m leaving it because the universe doesn’t owe me a punchline, and on the one day it accidentally delivered one, the least I can do is tip my hat.

lol, Buddha. You got me.