The King

Once when I was 18, an astrologer cum palm reader at the Pike Place Market asked me about my father. “Is he in the military?” Her steely blue eyes looked into mine, and I smirked, “no, but he might as well be.” I never talk about my father, much less write about him. My mother has been the subject of many an essay—it’s a lot easier to write about my dilettante mother. She’s well past fifty and she still lives a Pollyanna fantasy. I lived with her for many years, and after she decided to retire and move back to the Philippines, I finally felt free of her and the crushing weight of her unfulfilled ambition.

Most girls, especially Filipino girls, when they turn 18 they get a fabulous coming out party—not unlike the quinceniera. I’ve been planning my coming out ball for years—only for my life to be uprooted and transplanted into the US, and while most of my friends received balls, presents and roses on their 18^th birthday, I received an inheritance. Well, not quite an inheritance. The moment I turned 18, my father decided he was finished taking care of his wife, financially and otherwise. After I turned 18, it was understood, although it was never discussed or never even talked about that I was to take care of my mother, and my younger sister, and a few years later, her child born right out of high school.

I take after my father, in so many ways. I have his exacting perfectionism, and his absolute inability to forgive people’s shortcomings. He has a strong obsession about his health, and this has lead him to try every kind of new age cure there is. His medicine cabinet, if he had one, would look exactly like mine—a pharmacy of pills, potions, and liquids to drive away all the maladies waiting to strike us dead.

He’s a Chief Engineer, I’m especially proud of telling people. He started making serious money at the age of 30. Not bad for a boy who is one of nine children, and his only way out of the farm is a two year vocational degree. He’s third of nine children, I’m third of four; but somehow, the chronological order of our births is skewed—we both acted like the oldest, the one which had to care for everyone else. Everybody else can do as they pleased, but not us, we were the responsible ones.

It’s a great childhood to have lived in a massive house, with cars, and clothes and candy bars that came from America. All our neighbors were poor, most of them so poor they lived in a cardboard house, but we were not. Our name was synonymous with money, a hateful giant house, and cars that suck up petroleum. I would have lived in that cardboard house in exchange for a father who was at home most nights. I would have given up the cars and the private schooling, to have a father who saidI love you, and didn’t look so angry all the time if he had to spend time with his children.

In grade school, I had gotten a zero on an assignment asking about my parents. I was seven, and I knew nothing about my father. My mother told me to lie and come up with an answer. I vaguely remember saying, “I don’t know what fathers do.” I do remember the awe I felt, looking at other people’s homework. Pages filled with stories about their fathers, and I had nothing to write. Not one word. For other people, having a father around was normal. I guess I was lucky, he wasn’t around because he was too busy making all that money. Some people don’t have parents at all, and some, walked away in the middle of the night and never came back. What people didn’t know was, despite his placid appearance, he had the temperament of a jealous Greek god. You never knew when his outbursts or angry, spiteful words would fly out.

He reminded me of King Midas, he’s had tremendous material success but his own family can’t touch him—his callous heart could ruin anyone. I suppose, one could say the same thing about me. I’ve had tremendous success with the physical, and the material plane. Just don’t let me near anyone—my angry, bitter heart poisons quietly and without much notice.

I wish he knew that I'm one of the highest paid Filipino employees in a notoriously clique-ish, Euroamerican midlevel company. Even better, there are less than a dozen Filipino employees in a 500-employee strong company and I happen to be one of the highest paid. My ascent to the top pay scale is extraordinary, less than a year and my name should be on the company record book somewhere. This is the kind of accomplishment that would make any parent proud, but he's always looked at my work choice as something akin to migrant labor, or even prostitution. He has zero respect for people in the food industry, despite the fact that I've been running restaurants with P&L statements upwards of $5 million, and I have an arsenal of people under my command.

Replace food industry with the words "shipping industry" and inflate the P&L figures, and you have his career. A couple years shy of 30, and I've been running businesses for so long it's become thankless, derivative. Unlike him, I started making good money at 28. He started at 30, and we both had to fight off bottom feeders, more than anyone would stand for, to get to the upper wage scale.

When I think about him, which never happens at all, I think about the wall of ice around his heart. A man whose money mattered most to him, more than anyone, he’s like Thierry Le Tresset in The Girl with No Shadow, he never lights up. For all his material wealth and success, so many people’s lives he can’t touch.


Works Cited

Harris, Joanne. The Girl with No Shadow. New York, NY: Wm Morrow. Second Edition. 2008. Print.
Strayed, Cheryl. Wild. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. 2012. Print.
Sundeen, Mark. The Man Who Quit Money. Riverhead Trade/Penguin. 2012. Print.