I spoke with T., an old family friend. He is a few years older and we sort of grew up together. He always got made fun of by his family; they used his name as a byword for stupidty and incompetence for years.
He was a really good person, but the pressures from his ultra-competitive family had always made him kind of hard. I remembered that he used to try to lash out in acts of rebellion that was ... well ... he wasn't very good at being a rebel so it just made him look like a try-hard and people just made fun of him more.
I was sitting at his father's table after breakfast and he strolled out in his pajamas cradling a newborn.
"T.?" I asked confusingly, stunned by the crossing image of him as I met him last as a confused teenage and now, fatherhood.
He smacked me in the back of the head. A brotherly "fuck you" gesture.
He was taking the baby to the vapourizor. His son's broncii are phlemed up. I wanted to talk with him. I hadn't seen him in ... what? ... fifteen years? I asked him how he was.
Conversations are like paths, y'know, how ways lead onto ways. He sold insurance. I asked him how he liked the job. I probably shouldn't have done that.
He launched into a massive diatribe about all jobs are equal, that everybody starts on the bottom, and everybody have to specialize to be somebody. Then he kind of said how my father was a bit of a dillettente and how I should never be like him.
He told me to come back to Macau so I can work hard and be a real man. Canada is a place for fun and games, he said.
I didn't disagree with him. I told him that my problem was that I couldn't really read Chinese.
"What?" he said, "then you're a fucking failure. I had much less education then you did, but when I came back to Macau from Canada after high school, I could still make my way. What the fuck is wrong with you?"
I can't really disagree with him. In fact, I wasn't really feeling bad about it. I suppose, if it came from anyone else, I would be pretty offended. From T., I don't know, he has been called a failure most of his life. He, from the looks of it, is doin okay in Macau. As if I was hearing beyond words I knew what he was saying: don't get fucked.
He had to live so much of life equating love with success.
He actually mean very very well by all the stuff he was saying. He was really concerned for me. I felt really good, if somewhat embarassed, by it all.
He remembered and cared after all these years.
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