LYD Classic. Original publish date: April, 2016 (39)
Editor’s Note 2026: It went on for another couple of years after this – a rotation of Board and Care facilities and county jail, which, if you’d asked 39-year-old me, would have landed somewhere between “saw this coming” and “still somehow worse than expected.” What eventually stopped Angela from showing up at Mom’s door wasn’t a breakthrough or a better social services system or anything that tidy: Mom’s hearing had gotten bad enough that she couldn’t make out the knocking, and we’d put in a security camera system . I don’t know where she is now. I’ve made a kind of peace with that sentence, the way you make peace with anything you’ve said out loud enough times that it stops feeling like confessions.
I’m hitting 40 this year, and it hasn’t hit home until realizing I’ve never known TFW means “those feels when.” I just assumed the unspoken that F was always short for “FUCK.” It had always been the case, why would it be the exception now?
These past six months have been intense; I finished a one-year Fellowship with Code for America, and from there, it was out of the frying pan and into the fire, so to speak: I bought a house with my partner on my 39th birthday, went back to my corporate job, a plan B of sorts. I’ve had a health scare — a year-long ghost cough, but not pulmonary-related, thanks to the good folks at Miami Beach Mt. Sinai Center. GI related? Maybe an ulcer? All this is… stressful.
And then I got a call from mom, saying my sister — lifelong severe bipolar schizophrenia — hit my mother with a remote control because they both wanted to watch different television shows.
This is not the first time Angela has hit Mom, and I don’t believe how fucking cavalier I am typing that sentence out, but there it is, something we’ve all gotten used to because this is what Angela does every six to eight months or so when her moods swing manically. But this time around, Mom turned 75 this year.
Which constitutes elder abuse in the state of California.
Resources suddenly appear, with representatives from Adult Protective Services and pro-bono legal services calling like second cousins contacting a lottery winner. A temporary restraining order is enacted—the permanent one for five years will be scheduled a month or two later—and Angela needs a place to stay for the night. I’m on the phone with someone from a different social services agency. I am told there is one place she can go, but it’s… “not optimal.”
“Like, as in crackheads.” Got it, I say.
Having Angela live with Dad is the logical option, but he bristles at the idea at first. “It’s too small for two people to live here,” he says to the policeman who shows up at his door. He only agrees when the only other option is the streets.
It lasts for about two months before he announces he wants to move into a Chinese retirement home in Walnut Creek. “Girls should live with girls,” he says whenever I ask why Angela has to live with Mom and not him. (He later denied knowing my sister hit mom on bad days. “Your mother stretches the truth. You know that.”) But this time, Angela, who has steadfastly refused to live in a board and care facility, agrees to the deal.
The residential care facility is a little out of her means, her case manager Phoi says, because she opened two secret bank accounts which violate the low assets requirement of her SSDI, or Social Security disability insurance. She has to pay a penalty, and those wages are being garnished through the county human services department. Phoi is about my age, someone I probably would have seen at an Asian frat party when I went to college back in California in the 90s. “Your sister wanted to save up money for a car,” Phoi says. Angela got her driver’s license taken away from her dad twenty years ago when she ran away to LA to visit someone she made up in her head.
“I’m telling you this because her SSI won’t cover all of her boarding care facility.” I get the gist of what she’s implying.
Phoi goes on leave the day Angela moves into her boarding facility, an unassuming women’s residential house ten minutes away from Mom. I learned from Mom that they violate the rules of the restraining order and have breakfast every Saturday morning at the local McDonald's.
It’s a stable situation for approximately three months. I get a call from the new case manager, another Vietnamese woman. She gets my phone number from dad and she calls me. I can hear the panic in her voice: this time, Social Security is garnishing her benefits completely as Angela has opened up another savings account; when she confronted Angela, she got agitated and threatened to hit her. “You’re stealing from me,” she reportedly says. (I learned this from both the new case manager and my dad, who enjoys sharing this story repeatedly due to previously mentioned senility.)
But you should know this, the new case manager says: Her Social Security disability insurance is gone. This means Angela will be out of her home by the end of this month unless she closes her bank accounts.
“Can you tell her to close her bank account, Ernie?”
“I can’t.” Even if I tell her to do something — there’s no guarantee she’ll listen. Only Jesus, Satan or her conscience will tell her what to do, depending on the time of day. A sense of guilt and shame washes over me anyway.
Barring that, I can either pay an additional thousand bucks a month for her boarding and care, understanding this could be the tip of the iceberg for unknown costs, or we accept the very real thought Angela will be homeless. Either way, I will have to accept this.
To the surprise of absolutely fucking no one, I’m detaching. I can tell I’m detaching. I’m on anti-anxiety meds, anti-depressants and yes, I realize America has an over-reliance on meds, but seriously, I think I get a bye on this one. They work. I think.
I keep busy here in Miami. When I’m not doing community organizing work, I’m at a computer working on side projects for my day job or anything else. This is how I try to mesh with this city, which is still pretty new to me, even though I’ve been living here for four years or so.
But even that’s stressing me out, sapping my energy rather than building it, which means I’ll probably be figuring out how to lower some of the intensity of my life right now. This long weekend, for example, was playing video games: The Witcher 3 (Grand Theft Auto: Sexy Polish Wizards), The Uncharted Series (Modern Day CGI Indiana Jones), and even Overwatch, for god’s sake. I don’t even play video games where you run around a battlefield trying to blast someone’s face off with a shotgun, but the $60 charge to my credit card two days ago says otherwise.
The distraction was nice, though.
It’s a situation I’ve been mentally prepping myself up for when I was 23 and didn’t know there were other options besides family obligation, someone to just take care of elderly Asian parents and bipolar schizophrenic older siblings. And now everything is happening, and I’m realizing it’s not a big rush of stress, but a quiet, dull ache of burden and responsibility.
But now I’m in Florida, and I’m finding myself on cross-country phone calls using the Google Translate app while on speaker phone, desperately trying to figure out how to translate the phrases her Adult Protective Services case manager — a well-intentioned, sassy gay man — are saying to my mom as she explains to her why restraining orders and legal services are being filed, why people are asking for her social security number over and over again.
At one point, he’s fed up. “Excuses, excuses, excuses. Say that to her, Ernie,” he says as to why she dealt with Angela’s abuse repeatedly, why mom has been evading all questions he’s thrown at her through me. On the one hand, I’m like bitch, step off, and on the other, I see where he’s coming from and want to correct him. It’s not how Chinese people work, I want to say. But it may fall on deaf ears anyway, in two languages no less.
Instead, I typed “this is an excuse” into Google Translate and read out the romanized pinyin to her, unsure if she understood the sentiment.
Next week, I’m arranging for my parents to meet at the new case worker’s office so a professional can explain the entire situation to them in their native language. I don’t know if my parents think Alameda County is taking my sister’s board and care away from her, the government, or something in between. I’ve arranged for the case worker to hire a Chinese translator and someone else to explain what an SSI asset limit is. I know Angela can’t — won’t — go back to living with any family members, myself included. She wouldn’t agree to anything told to her anyway, thanks to a combination of mental illnesses and genetic stubbornness.
Next month, I’ll fly back to California. To care of what, I’m not entirely sure.
TFW you've done all you can and you have to step away to salvage what mental health is left.
Yeah. That.