“Define Situationship” should really
be a Jeopardy! question, I think now,
four summers after my trip to the Bay,
coming home to find out my new lover
was actually married. Do they even write
stories like this anymore? Or do I sit
with this femme humiliation while cishet
men throw in “non-monogamy” to seem
more interesting when patriarchy’s what
they’re really after? In 1950, my father
was born in Guangzhou, now a Metropolis,
the “City of Tomorrow,” a scene I imagine
straight out of Superman’s universe, he
wants to call home again. In the battle of
comic book cities, it’s Gotham for night-
life and Metropolis for tech, and do stop
at Martha’s Bruce Steakhouse for filet mignon.
On a summer night in Anaheim, my father
orders the filet, I order the ahi tuna, because
we process our generational trauma differently—
how aggression and sorrow play in the father-
child story. In 1961, he was shipped off
to boarding school in Macau since his parents
didn’t want him—his mother the concubine
unglamorized second wife to a man I’ve only
seen once in my life, the way misogyny
creeps its way into every culture. In the culture
of men, I hate ones who say “I have many needs”
in response to why they “need” multiple
partners—the made-up complexity when
every single canonical narrative is about
you. In 1996, I watch my father’s mother
die in our Allentown, PA home. Growing up,
my parents didn’t have to explain death to me—
how I still remember those last few moments
of the priest talking to her on the green
sofa—and this is a year after moving back
from Kowloon, HK, when I still slip up
at school, breaking out into Cantonese when
I can’t find the English words. My father has
gone through too much—I wonder what he
would’ve been like without this violence.