you know, i once read somewhere, in a piece written by a pretty old guy at the time, that when a parent of yours passes away, no matter how much strife or unhappiness there might have been between the two of you, that all doesn't matter when he or she goes. the only thing you think is, i wish i had been a better son, i wish somehow i could have been a good son. the worst thing in the world a chinese person can feel is to feel that you were unfilial.
i get that, i think. somehow when someone's gone, forever, someone important, a strange kind of awfulness comes over every little thing you hadn't done. i know what it feels like, and maybe it's misery just kind of being self-actuating, but it really is something, a sort of cognitive phenomenon maybe, it really materialises.
today i was watching a singer's contest and one of the contestants dedicated his song to his mom. and in the pre-interview he said, translating, i love you, mom, and if in my next life it would be my great wish to be your son again, and if i get another chance i will treat you well forever.
in the two seconds that i heard that the most awful feeling came over me. honestly, i've never been so affected, and so instantaneously, in my life. i literally threw down my earphones and collapsed into my bed, weeping. that was crazy.
what a process. i felt so proud of that guy for loving his mom so, so much. i mean, thinking about it makes me shudder. but at the same time i felt, as i have for so long, that i would want never to have known my parents, both of them, if i ever had the chance. and you know, i felt immediately in my heart the truth of that profession, and i swear just the most awful feeling in the world struck me. it killed me to understand how i felt about my parents. never, i would never want to be their son again. wow, that just killed me.
you know, there's so much, i think, in all my memories of them, up to the more recent exchanges with them, where i always remember feeling so intensely disappointed, even angry at them. i can't remember ever having felt proud of either of them. i honestly can't. is that crazy, well it doesn't feel crazy to me because that's just how things are as i see it. and you know as a child how crazy it is that it's always an awful feeling when it comes to family, i mean that's just so tiring, fights and awfulness are so extremely tiring. yeah maybe i forget the good times, maybe i forget when my parents were kind and loving, and that's probably horrible of me, but at the same time, i mean, it feels like the awfulness drowns out the joy, the bad times are so much more prominent in my memories than any of the good stuff. it feels that way, it feels that way when i remember it. i hated my parents a lot when i was young. and maybe growing up i've tried to be a bigger person than that, i've tried not to judge the way they were, and the things they did, i tried to think of it as just an awful situation bringing out the bad in each of us, and probably i did or i was part of the awfulness as well. and i don't judge them now, i mean they still disappoint me but i do my best, i do my best to understand that they had to go through their own process of life, and somehow, some way by some incredible goodness of God they're in their own, happier places. and all i want to do is to keep them there, and say hey, that's where they wanted to go, and i'm happy for them, far away from me. and a lot of the time i don't want to talk to either of them, and i distance myself from them, and my thought process and the reasons i devise for my ways of dealing with them is that my relationship with them has evolved that way, it is path-dependant in the sense that today i hate them or today i love them because yesterday i felt so disappointed with them or yesterday i forgot that i hated them. i mean, that's just genuinely how i feel about them, and then i have to treat them the way i genuinely feel, that's me, so really the outcome depends on the relevant history. isn't that how we treat people? is that how i treat family or the concept of it? but that's just how it is, i mean, i remember all the times i felt sorry for them, and you know, i always felt that none of the years that they had to go through in their own wilderness, i felt that they never became better people, i had that sense of superiority-complex, as in i've become a better person and why on earth haven't you, after all that? and being disappointed with what i'd seen from time to time, i could hardly bring myself to just accept and communicate with that idea of family, to be a part of that idea of togetherness.
but i feel, thinking about it, that that's horrible, even if i feel it's one of the justifiable ways of dealing with people. it's so harsh, even if i'm right, it's just, looking at things from long into the distance, so harsh. am i harsh that way? you know, it's really possible i am, that the way i treat people is so harsh that way, justifiable or no. and so can't i just, on just the basis of i've got to be better to people than this, just forget all of that and decide to love someone with all of my personal capability? i mean yes, that's possible on one view, but that's also insane on one view, isn't it? isn't that just ridiculous, like a whipped dog returning to his master's lap? i feel that way, i feel that way honestly. it's extremely cynical, but it feels like a mindset that's justifiable to me, i feel that my way of looking at the world this way treats my idea of me with due consideration. and i think that matters, but then this harshness, too.
so i think maybe, if i did get the chance in the next life, i would accept if i had the same parents, if i had another shot with them i would take it, and i wish that in that life i wouldn't look at family the way i am, the cynical man that i am now. i think they deserve a better son, a better me. i do. and it's strange i'm saying this as if it's too late now, and i don't know if that's not the case, i don't know if tomorrow i can decide to forget everything and give them all my love, or at least more than i do now. i mean isn't it enough that they love me and are proud of me? i don't know. i might be willing to do it in my next life but i might not be able to do it in this one. isn't that strange? isn't that strange, for a guy who always preaches living in the present, isn't that just so strange?
i don't know. there's no next life the way i believe things. but i don't know if i can do it in this one. you know i'm afraid when the time comes i'll be gripped by that awfulness again, the force of that feeling that i was unfilial when it counted. unfilial. wow, that's crazy. family is crazy, i don't know how other people have it at all. it kills me, man, it kills me.
