Translation of Love

21

Daughter

I had visited my father again yesterday. As much as I didn't want to, I felt like I owed it to someone—whether that be myself, my mom, or my father, I still wasn't sure.

There was actually one customer when I came in, an older man, but he seemed upset by the quality of food.

It made me feel bad to see how much this family was struggling, I thought all this time that my father was a rich asshole who didn't send my mom and I child-support money because he didn't want to. Turns out he can barely make enough money to take care of himself. This made me feel like shit whenever I looked at him. Maybe that's why I came, to make up for my assumptions of him.

When I was helping him wash dishes he finally decided to acknowledge the fact that I am his daughter.

"I still remember what you looked like when you were born." He looked at his hands as he washed a plate.

"You had a mop of black hair, it looked like a wig," he chuckled. "And your eyes were already so big. It was as if you were trying to take it all in, trying to see all of the world at once."

I stopped scrubbing my plate at this point, soaking my hands in the sudsy water and zoning out.

"You didn't cry right away when you came out, like you were still sleeping. But once you did cry, my God you were loud. Your poor mother was too tired to even plug her ears."

My mother.

"Why did you divorce?" I asked, my eyes fixated on the wall so intensely that it blurred.

He sighed heavily. "It was a hard decision. Your mother was homesick. Very homesick. She wanted to move back to Canada but I wanted to stay here which caused a lot of arguments, and my parents also wanted me to stay here."

I began to scrub the plate again, despite the fact that it was already clean.

"This caused a fight between both of our parents too and tension between your mother and me. She wasn't happy anymore, so one night after thinking really hard I told her she could leave me. I didn't like to see her so sad, so unhappy with where she was living."

He dried the plate he was washing, "Unfortunately that not only meant losing her, but you as well."

I felt my body grow cold as I heard the sincerity in his voice, the sadness of the years that he had lost.

"How did you meet?" I had heard the story once from my mother when she was drunk. She never liked talking about my father. Maybe because all that time she missed him. This realization makes my stomach churn in pain.

I hope I'm wrong, I can't stand knowing my mother missed him all that time.

"I had some family in Vancouver and my parents and I would sometimes visit. I had remembered seeing her around the neighbourhood. It was hard to not notice her with that red hair. Then I ended up going to university there and I gathered the courage to ask her out."

His smile was distant, his eyes fixating on a time before my existence. "When we married she insisted that we move to Korea to make my parents happy. And she loved it... until she didn't anymore."

"How long did she live here?" I felt a bit bad asking all of these questions, but this was a part of my mother's life that she never spoke about. A secret period of time that she hid away in her distant memories, barely letting me get a glimpse.

"Three years. We were married for three years before she left. You were two."

I was two.