Re: go to taiwan

My uncle died Friday morning. I found out from my mom via email. She told my brothers and me she was going back to Taiwan, effective immediately, and returning on August 2nd.

When I received the news, I didn’t know what to think. I calmly finished my morning routine and pushed it out of my head until the commute to work.

Ever diplomatic, my thought process went something like this:
1) It’s good that it happened when it did: during my cousins’ trip to see him back in Taiwan.
2) It’s good he got to see Patty, pregnant with his first grandchild, before he passed.

And then:
Should I be sad? Am I allowed to be sad? And I concluded there are more people who have priority on the sad scale. I shouldn’t be sad. My aunt, his wife, should be sad. My cousins, his children, should be sad. I imagine my mom, his sister-in-law, would be sad next, because she was so close to that family and she would be so worried for them, full of love that she is. They could be sad, I decided. For me, however, he was just another extended family member across the Pacific and half a world away.

I started to think of how many hours I must’ve spent with him in my lifetime. He was not a constant presence. He spent most of his time in places other than mine – in Taiwan, San Francisco, and Vancouver while I grew up in New York, Texas, and Philadelphia. He was a passing topic of conversation whenever I spoke with my mom. One of those people I asked about off my checklist during my weekly phone calls in university. I took to asking the latest developments in their family, a doppelganger of ours except 5 years more mature. I would use them as a way of seeing how we would dys/function down the road. And now one of them was gone.

I arrived at the office to find the same email sitting in my work inbox. It appears my mother has mastered the art of the CC. I pressed ‘delete’ and started my workday.

At the time, it seemed very important to impart a sense of stoicism. Like nothing was wrong. No one knew about my uncle’s state of health to date; it didn’t seem like a high priority to give them the play-by-play now. I only told my closest colleague about the news during our lunch break, inadvertently guilting her into seeing ‘No Reservations’ with me that evening. I felt I needed a romantic comedy to take my mind off things.*

Sometime that afternoon, however, my new manager came storming out of her boss’ office yelling my name. I could not catch her exact words except for the emphatic-ness with which she pronounced “N” over and over. Everyone within a 20-foot radius heard her. A coworker by the fax machine – to whom I defended my new manager the evening before – looked at me as if to say, I pity you. I had miscommunicated something via email, which now seem to be blown out of proportion. I immediately went to right the mistake and – full disclosure – had to tell my team why I might not have been operating at 100%. I remember thinking this is not the way I would have wanted it to come out.

I haven’t really let myself feel for a long time.

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