My Father as an International Student

When my family travelled back to Beijing in 2011, my father attended a reunion dinner with his old colleagues and friends from medical school. Most of them were well-off, their doctor salaries affording them vacations and elegant cars and overseas tuitions for their children. He came back that night with an unusual quietness and went straight to bed.

It was easy to forget that my father, too, once had the hands of a surgeon. Chasing his dream of an American education, he relinquished his medical education in China for a Bachelor’s in Chemistry, relying on penny-pinching and scholarship money to survive his undergraduate years in the scorching Texas heat. My parents later moved to Cincinnati for his Master’s, where they slept on a floor mattress and made ends meet by working odd jobs here and there. Both of them seldom spoke about this period of their lives while I was growing up, and my childhood naivety manifested itself as ignorance. I was perplexed that my father never mentioned friends from his alma maters; confused that he knew so little of American media and culture; baffled that I had to help him fill out legal documents in elementary school. Even then, watching him dye his prematurely gray hair back to black, I knew that he had suffered, and I was always prouder than what words can convey for having a father like him.

In “Death in Chicago” by Bai Xianyong, protagonist Wu Hanhun endured countless trials and tribulations over the course of his studies in Chicago. The decay and squalor of his surroundings, combined with his oppressing schedule and isolation from the rest of the city, reflected the devolution of his psyche as he grappled with impending graduation and the death of his mother back in Taiwan. Throughout the work, Hanhun repeatedly exhibited existential doubt about his sacrifices for his education, describing how he “poured his time and energy drop by drop into the infinite abyss of knowledge” but remained “a prisoner” of his own making to 6 years of chasing degrees. I read that and I think of my father, an international student who was much older than his colleagues, who learned another language while living on instant ramen and peanut butter sandwiches, who could not go home when his own father became permanently hospitalized, who worked an exhausting office job so that our family could sustain itself — I think of him and I wonder if he regrets leaving in the first place. I wonder if he ever perceives the same kind of fear that Hanhun did before his demise, and I hope that he is never ashamed of where he is now.

Before I left home for my first semester of college, my father sat me down and told me that yes, sometimes he does think about that as well; had he stayed in China with his peers, he and our family would be much better off financially than we are now. He then tells me that this line of thinking is incredibly stupid. “I’m not ashamed. In the end, I do not think I would have been happy staying. I left to chase a dream, and now I am waiting to retire so that I can raise chickens on a farm.” He laughs at me when I tell him I will buy him all the chickens he wants. He doesn’t know that for him, I would.

"Sunrise Farm Landscape" by Cochrane Ranch House.