In past columns, I have written about people who have been close to me. This piece is for someone separated from me by 6,480 miles: my father, who spent the greater part of his life behind bars.
Born April 21, 1963, in the Year of the Rabbit, he entered my life only in fragments as I grew up. My memories of him remain faint and indistinct. He was released from prison in 2021, at the height of my schizoaffective disorder and substance dependence. It goes without saying that he carried immense hopelessness watching me struggle through that period.
Even so, he never gave up on me. He urged me to come to China, telling me he would be my “medicine” and my “cure.” All he wanted was the chance to share time with his son. And so I came.
I still recall those early days after my arrival. Crippled by marijuana withdrawal, we would set out for long walks at three o’clock each morning. Night after night, he walked beside me, sometimes covering as many as ten miles. He stood faithfully at my side. In that space, we both stepped into roles we had never known: he became the father he had long been barred from being, and I got to be his son.
There is an old Chinese saying: Blood is thicker than water. It captures the truth of our bond perfectly. When I visited him in prison at age thirteen, he pressed me to read The Catcher in the Rye, though I did not grasp the weight of that English‑language title back then. Years later, at sixteen, I picked that very book out of five options for my high‑school language‑arts class, almost as if fate had arranged it.
My father studied philosophy at Guiyang University and is a lifelong voracious reader. While incarcerated, he read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time three times, devoting a year‑and‑a‑half to finishing the full work. I later learned he frequently turned to Haruki Murakami as well — my own favorite author.
I would go on to major in Literature at the University of Washington. I shared this deep love of books with him, even when we lived worlds apart and spoke very little. I truly believe blood ties and something larger, some pull of the universe, kept us connected across all that distance.
During my first year back in China, my father and I worked together on my memoir The Last Decade (by Tiger Song), translating the manuscript from English into Chinese across six months; the book is available on Amazon. We bonded through our greatest shared joy: literature. That process also became part of my healing. It helped me steady myself against my schizoaffective disorder and break free from cannabis addiction.
Growing up without a father left me perpetually anxious and unmoored. Yet I have come to see that life can circle back, if you are willing to wait. I waited twenty years. On my twenty‑third birthday — the very year he regained his freedom — I wrote him this letter:
In all the years I haven’t seen you, Dad, I’ve thought about you a million times. I’ve wondered what kind of person you really were. Were you truly the brilliant man everyone made you out to be? Were you gentle and charismatic in a white suit? I’ve read your letters. I’ve thought about what life must have been like for you there, without us. But to be frank, it was only after you got out that I felt the reality of our relationship. Time seemed to have fast‑forwarded, bringing us to this moment of meeting.
Dad, it’s my 23rd birthday today. You asked me what I have planned for this year. I told you I don’t know. You said that was too careless. I said I want to work out and get fit. You called me a good son. I’m 23 this year. This is the first birthday I get to spend with you. This is my happiest day.
You are free. You can read whatever books you want, travel wherever you wish, and see the world from something as small as a speck of dust all the way to the vastness of the universe. You are my father. I get to call you my father, and it fills me with such warmth. I am lonely at times, but with you, I am no longer alone. I have a father I can reach out to any time.
For these 23 years, I have carried so much pain. I see my mother suffering, and I cannot help but hurt alongside her. Because of that pain, I hated you for a long time — but that does not erase all the moments I loved you. I hope your love is pure and white like snow. I hope my love for you shines as bright as sunlight. I love you, Dad.
Five years have since passed. My father is now sixty‑three. I spend more of my days with him here in China, and I have reclaimed my health and my life. After so many hard‑fought years, I understand this: suffering cannot be avoided, but change is always possible.
