Since the coronavirus outbreak, my parents – Chinese immigrants in California – have insisted on having weekly meetings on Sunday with my two siblings, also in California, and me in Berlin. Once they happened, I found the sudden frequency of familial presence equally lovely and tedious, because it’s hard to be a child. Sometimes I make excuses not to go, though more often I sit through the allotted 45 minutes my father’s free account grants, and stare at the four glowing boxes of my family members with my close-lipped smile.
The older I get, the fewer common interests my parents and I share, so these Zoom meetings usually loop around news about coronavirus, secret lab accidents and 5G towers on fire. My father rambles about Chinese politics (as far back as December, he had told us of “a new swine flu” that “China is lying about”) while I quietly stare at his meek smile. It had frustrated me as a child, that smile, though it betrays the single greatest lesson he passed down to me as a father: humility.
I’m a conceited man, though I am not proud of the bratty child I become in the presence of my family. There are times I can be seen, in my Zoom box, scrolling through my phone: a visible rudeness I wouldn’t dare show close friends, but flaunt to my family. When my mother asks what I cooked for dinner, eyes brimming with sweet interest, I snap at her curtly: “Eggs and tomato.” These Zoom meetings are profoundly boring, because intimacy is boring, but I wonder if my parents are grateful for the virus because it has given us an excuse to see each other regularly. I myself am glad of it. I like the sugary pleasures of looking at the kind, open face of my mother even though when she opens her mouth, my blood rises with impatience. Maybe you know what that’s like?
Sometimes, our conversations can be interrupted, but for adorable reasons – they’re cut short by my niece and nephew, my sister’s toddler children, who scream and demand attention from my older sister, glamorously exhausted in her chic black sweater with the Apple logo in white. My sister has a demanding job as an architect there, and since the lockdown, she has had to work from home while taking care of her two children. Recently, she wrote me that “being with the kids all day make it so I couldn’t bury myself in work which has always been my means of escape”. Suddenly, her days are devoted to making chicken nuggets several times a day, cleaning, wiping butts, saying “no”. She said the intensity of boredom and monotony shocked her, but in its mystery made her miss in advance the time she’d lose with her children once lockdown ends. “Love is such a fascinating and mundanely unbearable and illogical emotion sometimes,” she went on.
Once quarantine lifts and we no longer have these Zoom meetings, I know I will miss my father’s kindness, my mother’s dark sense of humor. Recently, my friend sent me an Adam Phillips essay that reads: “Ambivalence is the way we recognise that someone or something has become significant to us” – which reminds me of my love for my family. I think about the time when I was a young man, my father, a Baptist pastor, sat me down to tell me that when he was a young man, he was addicted to porn. I’m still a young man, but older, with my own sins to count. Even as I dread these Zoom meetings, once they’re over I miss them hotly. Some days ago, at four in the morning, I missed them so much I cried on my bedroom floor. I had just had a drug relapse, during the loneliness of quarantine and unemployment that muffled me like a chloroform-soaked cloth, and I wanted nothing more than to fly back home, to California, where the forgiving clear sunlight lays like a sheet across Laurel Canyon.
I can’t bring myself to tell them about my relapse during our next Zoom Sunday. But I know I’m already forgiven. Even as I have virtually left religion, what I remember from my father’s sermons is that forgiveness does change you. I know that from my parents’ open, needy faces, hungry for love, displaying the complicated grace that I will always be accepted back by them, unconditionally, over and over and over again.
Geoffrey Mak is a writer in Berlin
