It’s 6:57 PM on November 17, 2017, and my father has already made his mistake.
He sat down to write me a birthday email. He typed my address wrong—“one of your wrong names,” he’d explain later, which meant he had more than one wrong one saved—and the draft vanished off the screen. Gone. He’s 86, and the stupid email program ate another email again, so he does the reasonable thing: he writes a new one. It’s short. He sends it.
Happy Birthday Ernie:
How’s everything Ernie ? The best wishes, always happy and healthy! for healthy seems the best go to more exercise now!
Times are going fast! For really happiness actually need hard work fight to be success. It’s time to make more decision now Ernie !
Happy Birthday !!! Father 2017 November
All of this is trademark Dad e-mail: Exercise, grammar of an old immigrant from China, hard work, make more “decision.” Standing orders. He’d been sending some version of that email since I was 19, and the correct response was no response. I had gotten extremely good at that.
But then he doesn’t go to bed.
I don’t know what he did during the next five hours. Maybe he sat at his desk, rearranging the same windows, clicking through folders one at a time the way he did everything on a computer. Maybe Mom told him to come to bed, and he said, fine, in a minute.
At 11:56 PM, he found it.
He sent the lost email.
Happy Birthday Ernie, Your Father miss you Ernie !
Best wishes this Birthday will be a great Day for my son Ernie ! From this day my son will real grow up, and knowing life is fighting for value, for getting success ! The Real Happy Life !
Take Care yourself Ernie, healthy is also most important, you definitely will be finally success ! Father Chi-Ming 2017 November
And underneath the signature, this:
Note: This is the letter I wrote to you early today for your Birthday, but because of made mistake used one of your wrong name, not be send out, and suddenly disapple from screen, so that I did wrote another one instead. I finally find this original letter, This is the father’s mind still hope dear son to see it, sorry! Father
I was 41. I had been living in Florida for five years.
In 2017, I skimmed both of them, muttered something under my breath and went on with my life. I want to tell you I felt something that night—irritation, embarrassment, a flicker of anything—but I didn’t. By then, DAD and EMAIL were two words that, in combination, gave me panic attacks, and the system I’d built for that was simple: don’t. Don’t open it today. Don’t answer it. It’ll still be there.
It’s still there.
I only went back because I had the bright idea to put thirteen years of my father’s emails into an AI for a larger project.
The emails were only the latest delivery system. The lectures started as paper letters, back when I still lived at home, and later moved online. Dad kept drafting them in Microsoft Word, as if email were just a faster envelope.
I expected it to find a treasure trove of moments where disappointed fathers wrote to disappointed sons through bad Chinese grammar. Those had never been particularly well hidden. I didn’t expect it in 2026 to find the sentences inside them that I’d trained myself to NEVER see.
The subject was always the same, although he never typed the word gay.
In 2007, gay meant “old styles.”
August 2007, I went to the Daft Punk show at the Berkeley Greek Theater, on their Alive 2007 tour.
I posted it on Flickr, where there was a public feed from my blog; no written posts or captions. The response email was swift: “Sorry Ernie I have to telling the truth. I feel pain when I watching one of the photo in your recent internet weblog (Photo taken on 7/27/07).”
He called my friends Adam and Dan “Axxx and Dxx”, too humiliated to even give my friends’ names for fear I would turn into one.
“It is the time to stand up and give up some old styles for march forward. Select the friends is select the life.”
In other words: don’t be gay.
By 2011, gay was war: priorities, the battlefield. “Human Being is the slaves of circumstances.”
By 2012, gay was an engineer at PG&E who died young and left behind a long sad letter. AIDS? Suicide? Didn’t matter. The moral was: move to Fremont instead.
That’s also the letter where he wrote that he didn’t think he’d acted “like a military officer to tread his little soldier.” I’ve used little soldier about myself in my own writing. At first, I thought I made it up, used it ironically. Nope.
He wrote around the subject for more than fifteen years — good versus bad friends, good versus bad groups, old styles, right and wrong directions, “walk too far away” — and I understood him perfectly every time, dying inside even if other people thought he was really just talking about war or trying hard to achieve your dreams.
That’s the point.
I never wrote back to any of them. (Okay, not strictly true: a one-line reply here, a Snopes link there, once a “THAT’S A FUCKING LIE AND YOU KNOW THAT, FATHER” run through Babelfish in a brief, failed experiment as to how being overdramatic could land in Mandarin. But mostly never.)
So what does “real grow up” mean, said to a 41-year-old man?
I asked an AI that had read all of the letters. It offered me the kind one first.
It suggested that “from this day” might be carrying the shape of 從今天起, the beginning of a wish rather than a deadline. And that 長大 can stretch beyond literally growing up—maturing, coming into yourself, taking your place—so perhaps a Chinese father could say it to a grown son without meaning it as an insult.
When I asked how sure it was, it admitted that this was a guess.
The other reading is that it’s his verdict toward me: that I was being immature in my obvious decision to be temporarily homosexual, that it was time to “real grow up.” The same one since 2007: Give up some old styles. Make right decisions. Real happiness. Every one of those draws a line between the life I had and the life he meant.
But what I keep thinking is this: The letter he recovered five hours later is the one that tells me to grow up. It is also the one that begins, “Your Father miss you Ernie.”
Every one of those letters says he misses me.
It’s the first line of the one he went back for—Your Father miss you, Ernie. In the 2011 letter, it’s “always think about my son, and I hard to fall in sleep.” Even now, all the crossed-signals mean I can’t tell where missing me ended and worrying about what I might become began.
It took me until almost fifty to read those sentences on their own. The problem was that the same paragraph also told me what a disappointment I was.
When both things arrive in one email, you keep the one you need to defend yourself against.
I kept the verdict. “Your Father miss you Ernie” blinked off the screen.
Those was the last emails Dad would ever send me directly.
By the next year, I had started using the word senile on social media to describe him. He got paranoid and accused my ex and me of trying to defraud him the year after. Alzheimer’s in 2021. Memory care in 2022. He died in May.
Maybe the apology was for sending two emails. Maybe it was for losing the first one. But it comes immediately after “the father’s mind still hope dear son to see it.”
He apologized for wanting me to read it.