We’ve got this home video – it shows my older brother as an infant, presumably trying to sleep, as infants do. My father is lying nearby, whispering something soothing into my brother’s ear, as fathers do.
He’s whispering the times tables, though, which might not be something most fathers do, but I can’t say so for sure.
***
My father loves to tell stories. Parables, really – he likes it when stories have lessons, especially lessons that could be applied to make you a more useful and employable individual.
There’s this one story he used to tell all the time. I first heard it when I was maybe 7, and even then I was unable suspend my disbelief. It goes something like this: once upon a time, there was a man who worked at a factory that produced freezers.
One day, while inspecting a freezer, he lost his balance and fell in. The freezer door shut behind him and he was unable to escape. The man was certain that he was going to freeze to death before anybody found him, so understandably he was rather distressed.
The next morning, some coworkers found the man dead, still inside the freezer. An autopsy revealed that the man had indeed frozen to death.
However, that freezer was actually out of order. In fact, the temperature inside the freezer was the exactly the same as the temperature outside of it, a comfortable 75 degrees. The man shouldn’t have frozen to death, but he did.
“It just goes to show,” my father said, “It’s all in your head.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
When I was around the same age, he told me another story with the moral: “When you’re in deep shit, it’s best to keep your mouth shut.”
***
He’s made a few adjustments with the times. Now that he has an iPhone, he spends a lot of his free time browsing what I believe to be a mix between Tumblr and Reddit, except in Chinese. That’s where he gets a lot of his stories nowadays.
Another benefit of the technological age is that story time is more multimedia than it used to be. We watch a lot of movies in my house; really, my father does, though he falls asleep during most of them.
His favorite movies are Gifted Hands (because my father loves doctor stories and started-from-the-bottom-now-we-here stories), Capote and anything with Robert DeNiro in it. I’m not sure if he actually likes DeNiro, or if he just claims to like DeNiro because he can only remember the names of about five actors at a time.
He especially loves Capote. He always says that it’s a must-see for any person studying journalism, such as myself. But even though he’s seen it so many times, he still refers to the author of To Kill a Mockingbird as “Lee Harper.”
***
Perhaps due to a healthy imagination, or a lifelong refusal to ever say “I don’t know,” he likes to make things up and pass them as fact. While he is actually pretty well informed about a lot of things, he likes to feign expertise in just about everything. You’re usually better off asking somebody else.
I think he just gets a kick out of lying to children. I do as well, so I suppose it’s one of the many things he and I have in common. He used to tell me that he found me in a trashcan when I was a baby. I must have believed him, at least a little, because I think it used to cause me a lot of distress. Even though I’m too old to believe him now, he hasn’t stopped trying to recreate that success.
A year or two ago, while on a business trip, he visited a national park in China that’s famous for its golden snub-nosed monkeys.
“The scientists at the park said that there are 300 Bigfoots in the world,” he told me. “They’re related to the golden snub-nosed monkeys.”
“No, they definitely didn’t say that. How would they even find that out?”
***
I only reign in my skepticism for biographical stories. My parents grew up in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, which is a pretty interesting time in China’s recent history. My mother’s stories are about college and dating and rebellious music. My father’s stories are about food, usually.
He doesn’t tell it often, but he has a great story about cookies. Apparently, back in the day, when you visited guests, you brought them a special type of expensive cookie. However, since his family was so poor, he never got to eat the cookies because it was the most economical just to regift them. Thus, he vowed that when he grew up, he would be able to eat all the cookies he wanted.
“Is that why you always want to buy cookies when we go grocery shopping?”
“I don’t do that. I don’t like cookies.”
“You love cookies.”
“No, cookies are poison. I eat them so you don’t have to. Now go to bed.”
“Father, it’s 8 p.m.”