The Wind: The Tragedy?
On Being Filed
This is a special non-Thursday, my-father-just-died-so-fuck-the-rules edition of LYD.
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.
Me: Does the Chinese translation for “the wind” also mean tragedy or the drama or something like that?
ChatGPT: By itself, 風 mainly means wind. But the word you may be thinking of is: 風波 — fēngbō. Literally, wind and waves. Actual meaning: disturbance, controversy, turmoil, incident, uproar, drama.
Me: Gross. That explains why Dad saved these emails and called it that.
ChatGPT: Yeah. “風波” as a folder/title for saved emails from 1993 strongly suggests he was labeling them as “the incident,” “the controversy,” “the whole mess,” or “that drama.” So if he named those emails something like 風波, he probably saw them as documentation of a difficult episode — maybe something he wanted proof of, or couldn’t quite let go of.
Me: lol they were letters from a penpal confirming I was gay, so…
ChatGPT: Oof. Yeah. That is… not “wind.” That is family surveillance folder energy.
Me: Well he wrote it on an envelope in English to distance it even more. He called it “THE WIND.”
ChatGPT: That is somehow worse and more revealing. Calling it “THE WIND” in English feels like a double translation of avoidance: 風波 → “the drama / scandal / incident.” Like the problem was some weather system that passed through the house, not a parent secretly saving letters about his child’s sexuality. So the emotional move is something like: “I cannot name this directly, even to myself, so I will turn it into a coded object.”
Or to hide it from Mom, who, in theory, couldn’t understand English labels in the first place.
Me: It gets better. There is a subtitle. It says “THE TRAGEDY?”
ChatGPT: Jesus. “THE WIND” was already Olympic-level emotional laundering. “THE TRAGEDY?” as a subtitle is the part where the file cabinet looks directly into the camera. That question mark is doing a lot of work. “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.”
Me: Yeah.
ChatGPT: And to be clear, the tragedy was not that you were gay. The tragedy was that he made your private self-discovery into evidence. The tragedy was secrecy, fear, shame, surveillance, and emotional cowardice dressed up as archival procedure.
Me: I know.
ChatGPT: There are many possible readings to this:
Literal mistranslation as concealment. He may have been thinking of 風波, then translated only 風 as “wind,” leaving out the “waves/turmoil” part.
Euphemism: “The Wind” becomes a private code for “the incident we do not discuss.”
Emotional displacement: By naming it as an external force, he avoids naming his own fear, shame, anger, confusion, or need for control.
Archive-brain compartmentalization: The folder title turns something intimate and invasive into “documentation.” The act of filing makes it feel procedural instead of emotional.
Me: …
ChatGPT: The bleakly funny title would be: THE WIND: A 1993 Collection of Totally Normal Parental Boundary Violations. But the real translation, emotionally, is probably: The Thing I Could Not Bear To Name.
Me: That’s great, ChatGPT.
ChatGPT: Would you like me to make an image out of it using Open AI Image 2.0?
Me: I’m good.
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.
That's quite a ChatGPT conversation. I know it can be very conversational, but wow, that's something.
As for your father, the failure was his, not yours. You were born the way you are. I'm sorry he labeled things that way and thought of things that way. Dog knows, we've all faced some degree of that bullshit, but this is coming at a really shitty time for you. I hope a bit of reflection will help you put that envelope in its proper place... perhaps a shredder or a roaring fire? *hug*