Personal Delivery
Every think piece like this one has to start by pointing out that we are living in truly divisive times, like any shmuck with any functioning vision couldn’t see that for themselves. America’s demons have come home to roost, apparently, the neoliberal experiment of the last forty years has seemingly come back belly up and the age of American empire seems to be entering its twilight hours. Things seem to be constantly on fire or prone to spontaneously combusting, and trying to muster the willpower—or the courage—to care about anything is incredibly difficult.
The news has become an abstraction of our daily lives and nothing feels real because of it. Wildfires in the Amazon or political corruption in the Labour Party are just headlines. “A 9/11 every day” for projected COVID-19 deaths feels like it’s being suffered by some other, distant America. The mass graves in New York or the nursing homes full of dead bodies aren’t real, they aren’t tangible in the way that my WholeFoods being closed due to a May Day Strike is, or the fact that moms on my community’s Facebook page are complaining about not being able to get their hair or nails done is. That’s part of a different America, but not mine.
My backyard is just fine; the grass is cut and I can’t see any snakes. The sky is blue and there are no signs of storm clouds for miles. The children play out in the streets and the old folks wear masks and maintain social distance. It is good here, and that is how I want it to be, forever and always.
But that is not the case elsewhere and I know that you know this. I know it is hard to see the fatalities as nothing more than numbers on a graph. I know these are infographics that are quickly glanced over, nothing more than a stark red line jutting up and down, painting jagged edges and mountains peaks against a white backdrop and an unassuming row latitude lines. I know that some of these graphs curve so sharply upward that the shift in pixels is nigh impossible to make out.
But I’m begging you to look closer. Notice how these electronic dots jut out, ever so slightly. I am selfishly asking you to add another thing to care about, to pile on another bit of emotional duress; to nudge over the existential dread you feel about climate change or the possibility of a Trump presidency, to push aside that sinking feeling in your stomach when you remember that our politicians took care of corporations first before they thought of their constituents; to rearrange the anger that warms your cheeks when you feel like America has failed to live up to its greatest promises: I have another cross for you to carry.
My father is a side character. He is part of the supporting cast, the token POC that helps out the protagonist in dire circumstances or the stereotypical FOB only there for comedic relief, broken English and all. My father is a complicated man and the Post Office has broken him. I am asking you to help me save it.
My dad came to America after the fall of Saigon, a handful of years after his own father was finally released from North Vietnamese “re-education camps” that sought to break his mind and his body. They came to America with only the clothes on their back and spoke no English. They made due working odd jobs, with my aunt and my dad working part-time at Tyson’s Corner right after getting out of school; my grandmother did odd jobs as a housekeeper while my grandfather worked two jobs for half a decade straight. My father would tell how they fought tooth and nail just to survive, how his father would come home at 11PM to kiss everyone goodnight, how he would try to steal a precious few hours of sleep before to went back to work with a refilled lunch box at 5AM.
In the same way that the news has become background noise, in the same way that it’s become an extension of reality TV, so too has my own family history. I’ve typed out these words so many times, trying to convey to scholarship committees and hiring boards that “hunger” was etched into my DNA two generations before I was even born, that every fiber of my being screamed for success and demanded nothing less than perfect. That tension is something that I’ve carried for all of my life and it’s something that’s defined our family. It is the glue that holds us together: I need to work.
Even now, I don’t think I can ever truly detail that level of… angst that comes with being an immigrant. I feel as though my back is constantly against a wall, and when I speak of my family history it feels like every muscle in my body is ready to explode. I’m sure that I gloss over a lot of things, like various traumas or other life altering events, but it’s hard to decide which things are important and which aren’t worth saving when you’ve lived your entire life in a burning house. I’m sure that my father feels this more acutely than I do, but fortunately for me he’s managed to distill enough concentrated anxiety and paranoia to last me a lifetime. These are his gifts to me: two generations worth of hopes and dreams and one (1) seemingly single opportunity for a better life. No pressure at all.
My dad most likely has undiagnosed ADHD. He’s probably also depressed, though he’s been going to counseling for it. My dad is not a perfect man. He’s hurt me deeply, as I have hurt him. He is most concerned with the well-being of his family, placing them above all else. He constantly seeks out work to do, always nagging when others try to rest, always concerned with what must be done next.
He has taught me to be meticulous in everything I do. He has ingrained in me that same foreboding sense of anxiety that suffocates him whenever I do not answer his calls, the same sort of angst that comes from worrying about making rent while juggling schoolwork and learning a new language, all at once. He has taught me to fear the sound of the garage door opening, that the rumbling from the basement means that I need to put away my video games now and that I need to rush downstairs to help bring up his things.
I am taller than him now, but only by a few inches. The same grizzled hands that used to hold my tiny frame feel tired and afraid when I hug him; his skin is rough and dry, and I can always feel his callouses whenever he rubs my back. He constantly smells of sweat, his hair always slicked back or parted right down the middle, depending on what he’s been doing that day. He wears a tan almost year round, his skin the color of soy sauce in the dog days of summer; he is darker than most Vietnamese, almost to the point of being confused for being Filipino.
He wears two knee sleeves and an ankle brace whenever he goes to work. He is barely 50, but has already had reconstructive surgery on one knee. He limps often, wincing as he does; he does his best to muffle his pain, to mask the involuntary scrunching of his deeply tanned face, but I can see it: he taught me to pay attention to every little detail.
Every day he comes home to listen to Lester Holt talk about death and grim realities on our TV. He speaks crudely whenever the President talks of reopening the country, cursing at him as if the reporters and members of the administration can hear him. He sighs softly whenever my mother excitedly tells us “If we do this, we’ll finally get our money. We just need Brandon to fill out this form and we can finally get our check.”
My mother has been unemployed for about two months now. She spends her days watching Korean dramas and cutting me plates of fruit unprovoked. At night, she lays out on a massaging bed her sister bought for her while my father watches his B-List action movies, laughing loudly whenever there is a particularly big explosion.
My father dropped out of school in order to work. The way the story goes, he was in the middle of a math test when an administrator came in and asked to talk to him, told him that his dad was in the ER, something about stomach ulcers. He says his teacher said he’d fail if he left now, to which he responded “That’s okay.”
My dad left community college one day and found himself wearing in a full suit and tie and drenched in sweat another day, waiting to be interviewed by a USPS branch in Fairfax. He claims that the interviewer was so impressed to his “commitment to professionalism”—“It was, like, ninety degrees that day, con”—that he was shortly hired thereafter. He has given the USPS thirty some years of his life.
They have taken his body, his peace of mind, and his family away from him. I grew up running errands on Sundays, because that was the only day that my dad could go shopping, his only day off. I grew up feeling guilty when I wished for snow days, waking up up with shamefaced pleasure when the driveway was already shoveled whenever it did snow. I grew up largely alone, raised by the internet and telling myself that every good grade I brought home was a penance for what my parents put themselves through.
The relationship I have with my father is complicated. He was—is? Still?—one of my earliest heroes and the unflinching architect of my trauma. He has shaped me into the man I am today, for better and for worse. He sent me off to college with a postal carrier’s salary. He and mother shudder when I put my essays and research into Google Translate, and they nod and exclaim appreciatively at all the right places when they see how long each paper is and how many three-syllable words it has.
My dad came to America in 1986 with nothing but the clothes on his back and a pathetic grasp of English. Nearly everyone in his high school bullied him and most of his friends from then have better, high paying jobs than him. He often tells me this when he’s pushing me to “go into computers and be a cyber.” In many ways, he is a simple man who was fortunate enough to carve out his piece of the American Dream, pie crust and all. In many ways, he is aggressively an immigrant, comically mispronouncing words and telling me “Stop trying to be like those white kids” whenever I pushed for more freedoms.
My dad is a Postal Carrier, and I am asking you to think about him when you see the news talk about the USPS.
