The AARP Hat My Dad Thought Burglars Left Behind

On Fear, Control, and Learning to Translate My Mother's Worry

I shaved my head last Tuesday, and my mother acted like I’d joined a cult.

And not a fun cult with matching Nikes and a comet-watching schedule. More like the kind where you stop calling your mother and start referring to her as “birth vessel.” She stood in her kitchen, staring at my scalp like I’d shaved a confession into it. “God gave you hair,” she said, with the tone usually reserved for discussing neighbors or other Asian ethnicities. “That’s how you thank Him?”

Within five minutes, she’d retrieved my dad’s AARP trucker hat—you know, one of those promotional freebies they send you when you turn 50, and they want you to feel both valued and ancient—she insisted I wear it. Mesh back, snapback closure, “AARP” emblazoned across the front like early-bird specials and prostate health supplements sponsored me.

Oh God, the hat itself has a whole backstory. Dad got it in the mail a while back, before the dementia really kicked in. He called me, genuinely panicked, convinced someone had broken into his place and left it there as a calling card, like some burglar’s signature move was leaving age-appropriate swag. “Why… would they leave a hat?” he kept asking.

I didn’t have a good answer then. Honestly, I still don’t.

Now here I was, his bald disappointment of a son, wearing the hat that started as a senior citizen marketing campaign and briefly became evidence of a nonexistent crime. “You catch cold,” Mom said, which is what Asian mothers say when they mean you’ve disappointed me in ways I cannot articulate but will communicate through relentless climate-based concern.

So there I was, twenty minutes later, troubleshooting her iPad situation. She has two, which sounds excessive until she explains her system: “One for using while the other one charges.” She said it like I was the idiot for not immediately grasping this obviously brilliant tablet rotation strategy.

And look, I wanted to argue. I wanted to point out that iPads hold a charge for like eight hours, and she could just, you know, plug it in at night, like a normal person.

But her logic was airtight in that specific immigrant-parent way where efficiency and paranoia have been welded together into an unbreakable alloy of preparedness. So instead, I just sat there—bald head wrapped in AARP promotional gear, looking like a spokesman for elder care I didn’t sign up for—trying to figure out why her email app was stuck on messages from 2019.

The Invisible Reset That Wasn’t Working

I shaved my head because I was stuck.

An ex once told me, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting it one day to be completely different.” (He was talking about my inability to remember where I put my keys, but the point stands.) I needed something to change, and the invisible stuff—fixing my business pipeline, overhauling my schedule, addressing my tendency to doomscroll instead of prospecting—felt too hard, too slow, too much like work which would all be for nothing anyway.

So I grabbed the clippers and made a change I could see in the mirror right away. It was spontaneous in a time when nothing felt spontaneous anymore.

And besides, hair grows back.

What I didn’t anticipate was that my mom would read my buzz cut like a press release announcing my complete abandonment of filial responsibility.

The Translation Problem

She didn’t calm down about the hair, but she moved on to the junk mail. There was a “check” from one of those businesses that buy homes no-questions-asked and prey on the hope that lower-middle-class families will cash in their childhood Bay Area home, take their windfall, and relocate to beautiful Stockton. “Is this real?” she asked, holding it like evidence. I explained it was spam. She looked skeptical.

“Mom, read the words at the bottom of the check.”

“Ai-ya, it’s too small. I don’t have my glasses.”

“It literally says, ‘THIS IS NOT A REAL CHECK.’”

“You should call them. Make sure.”

I did not call them.

Then: “We need more coffee. The Korean instant kind. The one with the yellow packet.” I added it to the list on my phone—the list I keep because if I don’t, we’ll have this exact conversation three more times this week.

Sitting there—AARP hat on, iPad in hand, junk mail to the side—I realized what was actually happening. My mom wasn’t mad about my hair. Or she was, but not because God was genuinely upset about follicle management.

She was managing fear the only way she knew how: by managing me.

Her world has gotten smaller and less controllable. My dad needs help at Fremont Village. Her mobility isn’t what it used to be. I’m barely afloat financially. She can’t fix any of that. But she can make sure I’m warm. She can make sure I call about fake checks. She can make sure there’s instant coffee with yellow packets.

Control is care in a language I didn’t choose but have learned to parse.

Two Kinds of Stuck

I manage my fear by changing myself—new hair, new systems, new routines, new plans that I’ll half-follow for three weeks before the next reset. My mom manages her fear by trying to keep everything (and everyone) exactly as it should be, which is to say: predictable, safe, not-cold, properly-haired.

We’re both stuck. We’re both reaching for something to hold onto.

The difference is I can buzz my head and feel like I did something. She can’t. So she hands me a hat for old people, adds coffee to the list, and reminds me to check the mail, because those are the moves available to her in a game where most of the pieces have already been played.

And honestly? The hat was kind of warm. Also made me look like I was about to corner you at a rest stop to talk about the benefits of joining AARP, but whatever.

The Language We’re Learning

I’m getting better at translation. When she says “You’ll catch cold,” I hear “I’m worried about you, and I don’t know how to say it except through weather.” When she insists on the hat—the hat that exists because organizations know that free shit makes old people feel seen—I hear “I need to feel useful.” When she asks about junk mail for the fourth time, I hear “The world is confusing, and you’re the person I trust to make sense of it.”

Humor helps. It’s always been my bridge language—between generations, between her Chinese pragmatism and my American irony, between what she says and what she means. I can wear the ridiculous AARP trucker hat and make a joke about it, and that joke is also an acceptance, a way of saying I see you, I’m here, we’re both doing the best we can with what we’ve got.

The buzz cut will grow back. Slowly, unevenly, in a way that makes me look vaguely like a Chia Pet in progress. My mom still doesn’t love it, but she’s stopped mentioning God. Small victories.

The trucker hat’s still in my car, though. Just in case she’s right about the cold.

Or in case I need to feel close to my dad again.