one hell of a father (work in progress)

The first time I met my step father Paul was on March 23rd of 2003, I was ten years old. Him and my mom picked me up from Boston Logan Airport in a black Lincoln stretch limousine, and in that short thirty minute ride back to a suburb called Newton, I quickly realized that my life and the world as I knew it had been completely flipped upside down. So I threw up all over the expensive floor carpets in the back of the limo.

I threw up because I got super car sick almost immediately. In the ten years of living in China, I could count on one hand the amount of times I got to ride in a vehicle that’s not a public bus or train, let alone a limo. So as I was swallowed up in the plush leather couch in the back of the Lincoln, I found this new and luxurious treatment to be extremely foreign and nauseating to my up until then a pretty much rube like lifestyle.

I threw up because the travel from China to the US itself is incredibly demanding. If you were lucky and could afford a direct flight, you still spent about seventeen hours in the air stuck with crying babies and the ever lingering smell drifting out of the bathrooms. If you couldn’t afford a direct flight, well then you should prepare to spend anywhere between twenty-four and thirty-two hours on this overseas journey. Not to mention the hours spent standing in lines at the various custom check points, anxiously waiting to be let inside the greatest country of the world, or so they told me. 

But I’d like to think that I mainly threw up because the entire experience was as bizarre to me as something like, time travel. You know how in the films whenever people travel through time they always get sick, either a headache or a really sick feeling, sometimes the cure would be to drink chocolate milk, I think this happened in the latest Men in Black movie. But the point is to say that going from living in a world where I was sharing a bed with my grandparents and where we didn’t even have indoor plumbing, to all of sudden being in a multistory house filled with whatever one wanted from Costco, being chauffeured everywhere I went, surrounded by the likes of people I have never seen in the rural town of Yichang, not even on TV, was OUT of this world. And while my poor underdeveloped brain didn’t grasp that at the time, my body knew to react.  

But this was how I got introduced to Paul, a 6 foot 2, 230 pound Swedish guy pulling up in a limo, meeting him felt like walking into a cloud of mystery, just like the rest of my reality at that time. As the years went on the mystery unravelled themselves and they became examples both of who I didn’t want to be, but also exactly who I am today. I guess you really are a product of your environment, and I’ve spent much effort in the recent years trying to unlearn a lot of what I picked up from him.