I hugged her, and a river of tears followed. I’d spent years listening to teenagers, hearing their family dramas, listening for the quiet signs of abuse. I’d been trained to do this. I’d even had to call CPS once on behalf of a student, yet when it came to my own sister, I’d found it easy to look the other way, to bury any questions about how she might truly feel.
I’d sold out my sister, so I could play out a father-son fantasy.
“I never want to see him again,” Ga Jeh said.
“I don’t either.”
tape
Two years later, Bah Ba had retired in San Francisco, and I was refusing any contact with him. Ga Jeh had skipped town, like she’d vowed, moving down to San Diego. I was living in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, in an in-law apartment with my girlfriend at the time, L.
Dressed for a jog that morning in shorts and a soccer jersey, she was rummaging through the TV cabinet in our bedroom for her iPod. “What’s this?” She held a videotape for me to inspect.
My cheeks warmed. The last time she discovered an old videocassette, it was Luke’s Freak Show, basically a guy with a camcorder trailing behind any large ass he could find, on the streets, in a hotel lobby, at a Mickey D’s. L’s gripe wasn’t on feminist grounds—objectification, exploitation, nothing like that. She was pissed I might still have a thing for Black women, not that she had anything against Black women. L was a community organizer who was all about intersectionality and coalition building. She just didn’t want to be stuck in a relationship with a guy who not only secretly preferred someone who didn’t look like her, a Filipina, but who also secretly preferred someone who didn’t look like himself. “This is some self-hate shit right here,” L had said when she found that Luke tape.
“That’s not even my tape,” I’d said. “I love Asian women.” She didn’t say another word. Just picked up her overnight bag and strolled out of the apartment in her wedge heels, the bag hung on the crook of her elbow, a cigarette held between her fingers.
The spine on the home video L now held in her hand read: “L.A. 1988.” The handwriting was mine. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and I leaned back on my arms. “I forgot all about that,” I said. “My dad took us to Disneyland. I must’ve been in middle school.”
“I thought your dad was never around.”
“He wasn’t.”
She held the tape as though weighing it. “Your pops—at least the way you’ve described him—doesn’t sound like a family vacation kind of guy.”
“It was a one-time thing,” I said.
She sat on my lap and placed the video next to us on the bed. Rocking side to side, she sang a song in Spanish while redoing her ponytail. Half the songs on her iPod were songs in Spanish. She’d spent a year studying in Mexico, and relished any chance to speak Spanish, whether it was translating for a client at her nonprofit job or just somebody at a taqueria. To her, she struck just the right balance between her Pinay pride and her appreciation for Mexican culture, while the way I juggled being Chinese with an appreciation for Blackness was unhealthy. Not enough self-love in my recipe, according to her. This was one of many things we’d argue about. Though we loved each other deeply, deeper than each of us had ever loved, we were always on the verge of breaking up. We’d started couples therapy to try and save the relationship.
I knew L was waiting for a real explanation of the tape, but if there was one thing I didn’t want to talk about, it was my dad. L knew my reasons, but she didn’t understand how raw my feelings were, how I couldn’t stop daydreaming about strangling my father. To say this desire aloud was to admit weakness.
I pulled L’s body close, her back against my chest.
She wiggled free. “Tell me about this trip with your dad.”
I rubbed the inside of her thigh. It didn’t seem a terrible strategy to try and fuck my way out of the conversation.
“Dime,” she said, tapping my hand on her thigh.
I grabbed the tape, turned it over a couple of times, and slid it out of its sleeve. Nothing written on the face label. I told L about the only scene I remembered on the video, the one I had recorded.
I’d set up the camcorder on a table by the hotel pool. My mom wades in the shallow end with a swimming cap. My sister leans on a kickboard, drifting. I pretend she’s sinking. I grab a lifesaver. “I’ll save you,” I say, and I toss the ring at Ga Jeh, attempting to encircle her with it like a lasso. It knocks her across the head instead. She screams.
My father’s not present in this scene. If he was poolside off-camera, I don’t recall it. I can’t picture Bah Ba in swimming trunks. I have no image of his naked torso, only the surgical scar across his belly button from an operation he had before I was born. The surgery to repair a hole in his intestine forced him to postpone his wedding with my mother until the following year. Bah Ba never actually appears anywhere in the entire videotape. For the rest of the video, my father was always behind the lens, the one charged with recording us. A year after this trip to Disneyland, my mother talked Willie into taking us again, as though to upstage my father.
My mom disagrees with my version. She says I have the order wrong. Willie was the one to take me first, and instead of keeping it a secret, she bragged to my father on the phone about the fun we had, substituting friends from her ESL class in the story for Willie. Bah Ba felt slighted he wasn’t invited
