1
My dad and I sat at the kitchen table after dinner, both of us looking at the homework I had been assigned for seventh grade geometry.
“How do you measure the angles of a pentagon?” he asked.
Panic scurried through my mind. “I don’t know,” I said.
My dad sighed. “Use your brain. How do you measure the angles of a pentagon?” “I don’t know, Dad.”
The conversation spiraled into chaos from there, leaving me doused in tears of frustration and surrounded by limp, used tissues while my dad paced back and forth. By eleven p.m., we had only labored over half of the questions, but my mother came down in her plush bathrobe to save me.
I only ever asked my dad for math help out of desperation, when I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of repeatedly consulting my classmates for assistance. I liked the neatness of numbers but dreaded anything beyond basic algebra. Unlike me, however, my dad loved math so much that my younger sister got a pentagon as one of her first tattoos to honor him.
Most of the time, my dad is usually quite easygoing and funny, treating everyone around him with a casual air. “Just call me Joe,” he says. His laugh is a full-on cackle that echoes from the kitchen and seeps through the closed door of my upstairs bedroom. When he gets animated about something—even if it’s just retelling how he ate spicy hot pot before a flight and ruined his colon—his voice projects like he’s shouting above the noise in a club. Whenever my mother admonishes him for talking loudly at dinner, he responds, “So what? I have a big head. Big head means big voice.”
Some of my fondest childhood memories include my dad. He taught me the Holy Bible and instilled in me a love for God that endures today. He let me ride on the wide orange trolleys at Home Depot, acting as my carriage driver as he peered in aisles for lightbulbs and screws. He took me and my siblings on bike rides through Portland, Oregon suburbia, rewarding us with Snapple drinks at the end. On weekend mornings, he and I went to Elmer’s or IHOP—just us
two—to drink coffee and talk about his childhood in Hong Kong. He was the first parent in the auditorium during piano recitals, busily setting up his tripod and camcorder. But my dad hated the way I did math. My calculations strewed everywhere on paper, resulting in jumbled numbers that often led to dead ends. When math stressed me out, my numbers appeared harried. My eights looked like deformed infinity loops. “When you write your numbers, they have to be clear,” my dad always said. “Clear. Okay?” Cue spittle landing on my notebook. To him, the answer to any math problem stared me in the face, and solving it was just a matter of precision and logic. All I saw was jargon. According to my dad, his kind of reasoning made sense. I got my first phone as a senior in high school, and it was a beautiful specimen of technology—a sleek white Blackberry with a keyboard that slid out with a sexy click. It needed an accessory, in my opinion, for Asian girls my age believed that a phone charm on your phone demonstrated classiness. I had coveted a dainty Hello Kitty one for a long time, and paired with a shiny new phone, I would become undeniably popular.
2
My Blackberry did not have a loop for a phone charm, so I came to my dad for help. He didn’t hesitate to remove the back of the Blackberry, whip out a drill—I repeat, a drill—and carve a perfectly round hole into it. Then he threaded the Hello Kitty charm through the hole, and there it dangled, hanging out of a random piercing in the back of my defiled phone.
When I protested that he’d damaged the device, he raised his eyebrows. “You asked for a phone charm loop, so I made one,” he said.
3
Besides my dad’s favorite phrase (“Use your brain”) there was another piece of advice he coined, which he either said in a fit of exasperated scolding or a coaxing tone, depending on how much I talked back.
“Always do things step by step,” he said.
He implored me to review every step of my calculations. If I kept track of each moment I divided, multiplied, or added, as minuscule as it was, I would always know where I might have made an error. There would be no confusion because everything was documented. The answer would appear, guaranteed. “Step by step,” my dad told me, “will not fail you.”
By nature, I do not like following steps. It’s been apparent since a young age, like the time when my seven-year-old self wanted a pony like every other American girl. I even mimicked a pony’s gallop around my backyard to see if there would be enough room for a sturdy golden Shetland’s abode. On the way home from ballet or church, I’d beg my parents to stop at Home Depot so I could examine the sheds on sale, thinking I could easily put up my pony in one. I only thought about acquiring a pony—the cost and the details of keeping it alive didn’t matter.
Once my whining had reached unbearable heights, my dad finally said, “If you want a pony, tell me how much a pony eats in a day and then you can have one.”
That easy? I thought. I crawled into my closet and plucked out my horse encyclopedia. Finding the answer took less than ten seconds. Bringing the book as evidence, I returned to my dad as he hunched over the monster of a PC he was typing on.
“One bale of hay every two weeks,” I said, thrusting the book at him. “Look, it says so right here.”
He turned back to the PC screen. “You still can’t have one.”
“What? Why not?”
“Do you know how much work goes into caring for a pony?”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
I never got a pony.
4
A year later, my parents relented to getting a pet—a bright yellow cockatoo bird we named Furry. Within another year, Furry was given to another family because my siblings and I, we lazy buffoons, neglected him. We didn’t take him out of his cage often to roam or bother to clean the droppings that littered his perch.
Somehow, my dad knew that wanting things without thinking would be my vice. As I grew up, my whims ruled my lifestyle—from hobbies to my appearance. As a child, I refused to cut my fringe bangs although I couldn’t see out of them. I thought they gave me an air of mystery. In high school, I changed my mind and clipped back my bangs with bows, amassing an alarming number of them to match my low-rise jean outfits. I also fixated on Hello Kitty and Korean pop, convinced that I would marry a boy band member one day. Plaid flannel took over my freshman year of college—I owned a plaid phone case, eight plaid shirts, plaid scarves, and plaid shoes. I always lived in phases of obsession.
My dad operates as the opposite. He’s worked at Intel Corporation as an engineer for over thirty years. If he wants to eat pizza despite his lactose intolerance, he deliberates on the pros and cons first. How many hours until he can find a bathroom? Are there multiple kinds of cheeses, or just one? Then he makes the most rational decision.
He keeps a notepad on the kitchen counter, his neat cursive in bullet points to outline the items he needs to buy at Costco or the bank documents he needs me to sign. He lives by lists and orderliness. I’ve never seen someone go to Costco and leave it within fifteen minutes, but that’s what my dad does—he knows exactly what he wants, takes it, and departs with a cold shoulder to the tantalizing dumpling samples and bulk boxes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates calling out to him. He can prattle on about insurance plans, retirement strategies, and credit card points for hours.
But I wonder if my dad ever felt like an outsider in our family. My siblings and I inherited my mother’s flair for the creative arts and her perfect pitch; she didn’t need to force me to learn the piano or the violin. I preferred my music lessons, orchestra, and ballet classes. I even dreamed of becoming a grand pianist. Whereas my dad cannot play a single scale—and he’s also quite tone deaf.
5
I grumbled about any extracurriculars that my dad wanted me to do. For two years, I participated in an all-girls Lego Robotics team overseen by my dad. Nothing brought me less joy than unpacking a thousand tiny Lego pieces and figuring out how to build a motor so that whatever we made could pick up a rock. My parents also clashed over my dad’s insistence on Kumon, which is every suburban Asian kid’s source of deepest loathing. I did arithmetic problem sets by hand, the calculations getting more complex with each turn of the gray paper worksheet. I was slogging through extra math for no purpose, just more work.
Besides Kumon, I took abacus lessons—courtesy of my dad. In what world, I thought, would I be required to pinch beads up and down to add numbers when I have a calculator? “It’ll help your brain think faster and more…efficient,” my dad told me.
So much of what I did as a child involved channeling my emotions through art and music. I just wanted to feel; I didn’t want to analyze. All of my dad’s endeavors—the Lego Robotics, the Kumon, the abacus—crammed me into a stifling box.
6
Yet when I was thirteen, I was unexpectedly forced to quit piano and violin after developing mysterious hand muscle injuries that doctors could not diagnose. Everything I had worked for, the hours spent on the keys and the strings—gone. Now I had to reassess my future.
As someone who’d already fallen so far as a failed musical talent, I believed that a well-respected alternate career would restore my place in society. Not with a job as a creative. Although writing stories was a beloved hobby of mine since childhood, it didn’t seem to be a viable career.
Perhaps my dad wanted me and my siblings to resemble him more so that we would be prepared for moments like this. We could still achieve lifelong stability, his meaning of success. My older brother followed in my dad’s footsteps the closest by getting a PhD in biomedical engineering. I felt like I had no choice but to conform as well and selected pharmacy as my future job. People always needed medicine; pharmacists were indispensable and intelligent. My dad heartily agreed with my pick. My younger sister, however, shrugged and announced that she would be a cellist or nothing. I envied her freedom to do what she loved.
I spoke to a pharmacist before attending college in Houston, Texas, asking if she recommended the career. “If you don’t mind talking to old ladies about their vagina cream, by all means,” she said. That did not reassure me. I spent a summer counting pills at her Walgreens, observing her gripe about complex medications and snobbish doctors. When I accumulated C’s and D’s on most of my freshman year general chemistry exams, then couldn’t see any damn bacterial cells through the microscope in biochemistry lab sophomore year—I wanted out. My major had changed three times before the spring of sophomore year rolled around: biochemistry, biology, then kinesiology.
7
As I pondered what I honestly desired to pursue, my mind drifted back to writing. Why had I never allowed myself the chance to try it? As a science major, I had been gasping for air, my throat constricted by the pressures to keep up with my peers and score passing grades. The thought of writing instantly calmed me. Strangely, it made me feel safer and more content, like I was sprawled in an armchair by a glowing fireplace. I believed that God had given me peace of mind, despite my uncertain path forward. Three days before the deadline to switch classes, I replaced my biochemistry labs with creative writing courses and declared English as my new major.
I braced myself to call my dad about it.
“You’ve already made up your mind,” he said. “I don’t think this is a good idea. You’re not supposed to just quit. You need to persevere. Don’t just give up when it gets hard.” He paused. “Why do you want to do this?”
“Because,” I said haltingly, “I feel like God is calling me to—”
“You cannot rely on feelings,” he interrupted. “They are deceiving. They don’t give you stability. You can’t just change your life when things get difficult.”
In his mind, writers made no money and died alone. To him, the idea of me rejecting a pentagon-shaped life for an amorphous future didn’t seem promising. I was like that child asking for a pony but not recognizing what that truly meant, not processing the idea step by step.
After our call ended, it suddenly struck me that I lacked my dad’s full support for my future—a first for me. Discomfort itched my skin. Disappointment pulled my heart downward. Did he know better than me? Was he right, and I was indulging my impulsivity again? For all my music competitions and ballet performances, my dad had always stood at the front of the crowd, cheering me on. His camcorder had hours and hours of memory, of a proud father watching his child thrive. This time, his disapproval scraped long, painful gouges into me. He would have said nothing contrary if I had chosen music instead. My sister, in becoming a cellist, had the brawn and the ferocity to prevail. She’d gone by herself to an East Coast music boarding school and worked hard to get a spot at Juilliard for college. I think my dad respected her decision because he witnessed many years of her growth and understood a musician’s life, his eyes already opened by my mother’s own experience of studying choral conducting. He had faith in my sister’s talent. My writing talent, however, remained dubious. It was something I doubted myself, especially since I didn’t have the kind of disciplined training I received with music. I did not know if I was a good writer at all. But it was the only route I could think of taking. It would be failure not to try.
8
My dad still demanded that I keep my organic chemistry class, hoping that I would come to my senses. As a compromise, I agreed and studied for hours before the first exam. I met with a tutor and asked classmates for help. I played with plastic molecule models to bond hydrogen with carbon. When the professor announced the final grades for the first exam, she said, “If you got below sixty percent on this test—I don’t think you should be in this class.”
I looked at the score on my laptop. Fifty-eight percent. I’d never been more thrilled to fail a test.
No time was wasted to email my dad about my test score (including the professor’s advice) and tell him that I dropped the class. He never responded. I called my mother to wheedle out an answer.
“Did Dad say anything?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “He didn’t say anything.”
“So…what does that mean?” I pressed.
“It means he’s okay with your decision,” she said, sighing. “He doesn’t like it, but he’s not pushing back anymore. Go ahead and dream, my dear.”
9
While I now had the freedom to throw myself into writing, I wanted to show my dad that I could rise above as a writer, as ridiculous and irresponsible as this idea seemed. I secured an internship at Houston’s biggest newspaper and saw my byline in print. Since I particularly resonated with food writing, I interned at a well-known food magazine in town. A professor told me that my first personal essay was a good start. I pocketed the validation like tiny crumbs of hope. I tried writing voraciously—penning short stories of my own, blog posts, essays, and snippets for my school newspaper. As the months went on, I felt like I could talk about my work with my dad without his disapproval causing a scene. He asked about my progress, a sign that he accepted that my writing was here to stay. He told me that he was proud and kept copies of my articles at home. When I came back to Portland for a short stint twice a year, we drove to the local coffee shop to catch up, even as he pointed out that I bought too many lattes on campus.
For my next steps after graduation, I decided to sharpen the risk further. After the internships and mulling over my goals with writing, I learned that a friend was working on creative storytelling projects at a church in Austin. It would be a unique job, the first of its kind in the church, and they needed a writer. What higher purpose could there be than working for God? I thought.
No salary would be provided. I needed to fundraise tens of thousands of dollars over the summer, or else I would lose the opportunity. Earlier in the year, I had declined a journalism master’s program in Eugene, Oregon, so I was giving up any leftover stability and trusting in people’s goodwill to help me pay the bills. My mind refused to even contemplate the possibility of failure—that’s how convicted I was about this new direction.
10
When I called my dad about it, he sighed and said, “Melody, you’re not asking for my opinion. You’re just telling me what you plan to do.”
“No, I am asking for your opinion,” I replied. “I just don’t think you agree with me.” “Let me finish,” he said. “I don’t think it makes sense. Why not work at a stable job for a couple of years or go to graduate school, then do something like this? Why do you always have to jump in? Think first.”
I waved away my dad’s disagreement. Any reasonable doubt evaporated into mist, excitement for this challenge keeping me abuzz. I had made a drastic change before, and I could do it again. Listening to my dad, I thought, would speak failure into existence.
During the throes of fundraising, my mother told me that my dad was prepared to pay all of it if no one pledged financial aid.
“But I told him to not do that,” she continued. “I said, ‘Let her achieve this goal herself and realize her potential.’”
Hearing this made me falter for a step. My dad didn’t just disapprove—he outright didn’t think I could succeed. But as I look back at this moment, I understand now that I was wrong. My dad loved me deeply and cared if I was struggling. He was a father who would do anything for his child, no matter their clashing opinions, and desired the world for her. If I needed him, he would come sprinting around the corner.
One month before I started my new job at the church, I managed to surpass my funding goals. My dad never remarked on it, but I knew that he was proud of me. I could tell by how he flew to Houston and then drove three hours to Austin to help me move in, a beaming grin on his face. He strapped a plaid armchair, bought from Facebook Marketplace, in the car’s trunk and hauled it up to my apartment without complaint. He hid an emergency kit in the car for me. He bought me a massive sack of rice and complimented my new church’s Sunday service. During my two-year stint at the church, he read every blog post and story I published. He detoured to Austin whenever he traveled to visit my brother in Georgia. I think he acknowledged this time that my illogical, foolhardy plans had succeeded, that I was doing my best to stay faithful to the road set out before me, even if it meant blindly reaching out into the dark. Perhaps he began to recognize that the safe route isn’t always what people are called to.
11
Imagine my surprise when my mother told me that my dad took the greatest risk of his life just for her. For most of my dad’s childhood, his family in Hong Kong used to live in a one-story shack made of clay and metal. All seven of them slept in one room while the pigs huddled outside. My dad once fell into a river of pig shit. Life involved hard labor, endless pig feedings, and keeping up with schoolwork despite long hours at the farm. My dad woke up at three a.m. regularly to wash the vegetables that my grandma would sell at the morning market. They could not afford protein for dinner often—for his birthday one year, my dad received a single hardboiled egg. His parents eventually prospered enough to build a new home on the property, complete with an outhouse and an upstairs loft.
My dad sought a better life for himself, so he emigrated to Canada for university, and then to Austin, Texas for his master’s degree. He wanted to be a doctor and even got admitted into Hong Kong’s most prestigious medical school—their version of Harvard. He’d known my mother since they were teenagers; they started dating before he went to Texas. Yet my dad chose to stay in America and forfeit medical school so that he could support my mother when she started her doctorate in choral conducting. He could have fulfilled his dream, but he gave it up. I think about who he could have been and what could have possibly compelled him to leap off that cliff. It had to be for love. It had to be for the future family he felt called to serve.
12
Although my dad longed to become a doctor, he chose to be an electrical engineer—in a foreign country—for his wife and children. He was a farmer’s son who left home with an alarm clock and an umbrella, then came back years later with a wife, three children, and a three-story house in the suburbs. But he didn’t get to do medicine, the job he loved. He provided stability for my family at a great cost to himself. Family was the most precious treasure.
I experienced something similar when my partner Maxwell was in medical school back in Houston and I lived in Austin. My church had offered another full-time position, a place to grow my writing. Houston represented marriage and the opportunity to be with the one I loved; Austin represented growth for my writing career. I chose to move to my partner.
Once in Houston, Maxwell and I married within two years. Instead of writing and creating, I pushed pencils around so that we had a roof over our heads. Every day, I wore a headset and fielded phone calls as a customer service specialist for an office supply company. I consulted people about legal versus letter-size file folders. I learned how to use Excel and processed orders for heavy-duty toilet paper. This wasn’t the future I had envisioned for myself, and sometimes I wondered whether writing as a job was the only way to live a meaningful existence. Was I wrong to change my career for love? Friends from college worked in finance, law, and medicine, whereas my life’s trajectory felt rather inelegant in comparison.
But I was the provider, and it was something to be proud of. I was floating, not clawing for a foothold, not relying on anyone to financially support me. As I drove thirty minutes each way on my commute, I pondered whether my career was all that truly mattered. Wasn’t being with my partner every day a wonderful thing to cherish? If I hadn’t switched jobs, would I be able to take
13
care of myself and Maxwell? It dawned on me that my dad might have had these same questions for himself. We were more alike than I had thought—growing up, I learned, meant embracing sacrifice. I had to examine the fine print of living and could not exist in an airy world. There were bills to pay, oil changes to schedule, groceries to buy and make for dinner. Doctor appointments and co-pays to handle, treatment plans to say yes or no to by myself. Independence that I needed to curate without anyone’s help.
This new mindset had already crept up on me after chronic illness forced me to reexamine my priorities. Much of the pain had been exacerbated during my time in Austin when I was alone and living with limited means. To my own shock, I began yearning for something surer, more mundane. Creativity and passion for my career didn’t always mean happiness and fulfillment, I realized. There was merit in working a routine job that settled expenses and enabled me to figure out my health. I could not live in a dream state anymore; I was spending more time bedridden. It was a first for me, not caring about my life’s calling at all. I just needed to survive.
I willed myself to brave each day step by step. I wasn’t concerned with getting promoted or making my mark on the world through my writing. I just wanted a day where pain was a distant memory—the ability to go out with friends, take a shower, eat without worrying about a subsequent flare-up. At last, doctors told me that my chronic health issues stemmed from endometriosis, a disease where tissue similar to the uterine lining forms lesions outside of the uterus. It was like a cancer that had no cure. I also finally learned that the constant muscle aches in my hands came from fibromyalgia—a condition where unexplained musculoskeletal pain permeates throughout the body. My world had tilted onto its side, and I was flinging myself in different directions trying to make it upright again.
14
With bigger issues at stake, meeting basic needs kept me preoccupied. I recognized the impact that worldly things like health insurance and monetary savings—which I used to scoff at—had on my literal well-being, and I was afraid of becoming unmoored. To my wry surprise, I admitted to myself that I truly was my father’s daughter.
It was a gamble for my dad to give up medical school in his mid-twenties and stay in a foreign country for my mother, but he knew how to transform his turbulent circumstances into steadiness. His electrical engineering expertise meant that he always had a job. Financial freedom brought him immense satisfaction, a luxury he never forgot. And now, I was the same age as him when he made that choice, and I agreed that such a life wasn’t so bad.
When my dad visited me in Houston after I’d moved back, we ate vegetarian food (“For rabbits,” my dad commented) and I confessed something I never expected to. “Dad, I know now what I want.” I leaned towards him. “Good health insurance.” I ticked off a finger.
“Yup!” my dad interjected, nodding his head.
“A job that pays the bills.”
“Yup!”
“And savings. I just don’t want to worry anymore.” I ticked off more fingers and watched my dad try to hide a smile by looking at his plate.
“I’m so proud that you’ve realized this,” he replied. “I’m so glad. You’re thinking of your future, and I see your wisdom.” I could tell that my dad felt like he could finally relax, knowing I had learned to secure my future. I was building a foundation so that I could rest easy later. He and I were viewing life through the same telescope—only magnifying our feet on the ground, not the shooting stars above.
15
I remember childhood days when my dad would take me clamming at the Oregon Coast, right when the light of dawn made the ocean water twinkle. I would splash out into the murmuring waves, my swimming shoes squelching in the frigid sand. By the time we crammed our buckets full of huge, muscular clams, the tide came up to my chest and my dad, a true hero, carried me on his back while lugging the pails of clams at the same time. It always struck me how quickly, yet quietly, the tide grew taller. And how my dad behaved like the tide was no match for him. He calmly walked through the waves, step by step.
I like to think that my dad and I opened each other’s eyes in our own discerning ways. He taught me how to live with more order, step by step. I taught him that choosing your passion, perhaps a futile dream, is not wasted time. Maybe there is a way for these two things—stability and passion—to work in harmony. I am my father’s daughter, but I am also more than that.
Even now, I still pray for a time when I can dream with abandon again. A meaningful life takes many forms, unique to every person. For me, it may take more time, more attempts, and more failure, but looking ahead is all that matters. It’s necessary to wade through the seaweed and the tide. When the water recedes, I’ll see the faded imprints of my footsteps creating a steady
path. Step by step, moving forward, onto solid land.
Follow and Connect with Melody Yip
Author Bio
Melody Yip is a Cantonese-American writer who lives in Los Angeles with her husband. She used to work in the start-up world and has transitioned now to working on her first book—a coming-of-age memoir—as part of her dream to become a published author.
Socials
Instagram: @canto_endo_author
Substack: https://melodyyip.substack.com/
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