Bo

I was seven years old, I think.

My sister, five years old and stupid, she had ratted me out for something I didn't do. It was stupid. She told my dad I hit our babysitter's husband earlier that afternoon. Hit him. Nothing about what she said at all made any sense, but that didn't matter.

Fighting the grogginess from the nap he'd just woke up from, my dad stepped out of bed and pointed at me. Then he pointed at the floor, two feet in front of him. I was terrified. My stupid little sister watched on.

"Come here," he said to me. His eyes were red.

Every limb in my body shaking, every instinct telling me this was a bad idea, I managed to walk towards my dad, tilting my head upwards as I watched his eyes.

"What did you do?" he asked me.

I wanted to tell him that it was stupid, that it was all a big misunderstanding. I didn't hit anyone. My babysitter's husband was taking a nap on the couch, and every five minutes or so I'd sneak up to him and tap on his chest to wake him up, only to run off as fast as I could, giggling. I was just goofing off. That's all. It was stupid.

"Did you hit him?" he asked.

Thirty seconds passed. My dad's red eyes widened in impatience. He wanted an explanation. But I couldn't give one to him. I was so scared.

So I started stuttering.

So my dad backhanded me.

People probably hear their own heartbeat in their ears only a few times in their lives. This was my first time ever. He hit me really hard, the way a mafia don would hit a grown man, leaving me literally spinning from the impact. I did a 720, landing about five feet away from him. Unfortunately, my arms weren't strong enough to prevent my face from hitting the floor.

I was so small. His hand was so strong.

I had this thing as a kid -- I still do, actually -- where I absolutely refused to show any signs of weakness to my dad. Because of that fear, a great deal of my childhood was spent trying to prove to him how strong and capable I was. How perfect I was.

For a brief nanosecond, as my body slung to the ground, I thought about crying. But as soon as I fell, as soon as my brain was capable of making that conscious thought, as soon as my face met the ground, a voice in my head -- much louder than the sound of my heartbeat in my ears -- screamed, "NO!"

Push push push, the voice in my head demanded. Get off the floor. Now! Push push push!

And so I pushed myself immediately off the floor, and calmly staggered all the way back towards my dad. My horrified, stunned, confused dad.

"You can go now," he said quietly, slipping a cigarette into his mouth. "And go take a bath. Wash your face."

At that age, I usually bathed with the bathroom door wide open. I sat there in the tub, wimpering like a dog while my mom rubbed my back and put extra shampoo in my hair to try to cheer me up. This was all after she had explained to my dad what really happened, that I hit no one, that I was just goofing off. That it was stupid.

My dad walked past the bathroom and called me by my Vietnamese name. "Hieu..." he said. "Hieu. Bo is sorry, okay? Bo is sorry."

...

My dad doesn't have too many friends. Most of the people in my family despise him.

One Christmas in the early 1980s, I'm told, my dad got into a tantrum and trashed my mom's side of the family's very first Christmas tree. I'm told that he picked it up, threw it down, and started kicking at it. If I was old enough, I probably would have laughed, but I'm told that everyone cried.

I'm told that after that incident, my mom spent the next couple of decades trying to defend him.

The reason for the blow-up? I'm told that my dad had just gotten laid off at his very first engineering job. He came home that night expecting my mom to comfort him, but she was too caught up in Christmas decorations to give him the proper amount of attention. Enraged, my dad decided to become the Grinch.

Growing up, I wasn't too fond of my dad either. In fact, for a long time I was pretty certain that I hated him. He had this incredible reserve of anger inside of him that disgusted me; his rage was such a foreign impulse to me that I found it impossible to even like him.

And yet somehow, some way, here I am as a 24-year-old, and I love my dad more than anything. The thing about the Christmas tree, I wish my mom's sisters had really known what was behind all that anger. I've been watching a lot of Lost on DVD, and there's this character named Sawyer who is the quintessential douche bag, yet because I've seen his backstory and enough hints of a substantial soft-side, he's won me over. The same, I think, goes for my dad. You just need to know him first, really know him, to appreciate how great a man he is.

These days, in his old age, my dad's become really mellow. He sleeps in on Sundays, sings to himself while washing dishes, and spends too much time working on the backyard. He watches C-SPAN and he loves war movies. He's newly obsessed with Netflix, which he calls "Netflux", and wants to watch every foreign movie title on their selection. The glasses that he puts on for his farsightedness swallows up his face and magnifies his eyes, making him look smaller than he already is, at 5'4", 90 pounds.

This is my dad lately.

And who would have thought that he and I would end up having a lot in common? Every time I come home for the weekend, we engage in conversations about architecture, sports, and politics -- things that he can't talk about with my mom or my sister. More and more, I've looked forward to these conversations. By the time I'm 50 and he's 77, I know that we will be best friends.

I've noticed that out of all of my family members, I've blogged about my dad by far the most. Some of it has to do with the fact that he's quite interesting and always provides hilarious sound bites, but most of it is because the world needs to know how great he is. He's getting too old to be misunderstood.

Today is my dad's 52nd birthday. I'm probably not going to call him since neither of us go too well with phones, but I definitely will think about him a lot all day.