By Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
Three fathers, three languages — Korean, English and German. How my fathers were silent, worked and danced were gifts that showed me the way.
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I do not have my birth father’s name nor have I met him. Or perhaps he held me during the first few days of my life before someone took me to the orphanage’s gate for someone else to find. Instead of memory, I have my father’s silence and all the documented names for it. Father’s name: no records. Father’s whereabouts: unknown. Yet this silence is not a loss. Instead, it taught me how to listen, how to perceive him in me. I could return to that part of myself that he gave me — his hands in my hands, his face in mine — not to name it, for surely I will be wrong, but rather to dwell in it. In my father’s silence, I can hear my heart beating, his heart in my heart. For a writer of poetry, this is the first rhythm of which all others are variations.
The hands of my adoptive father, Danny Dobbs, are callused from his job in the steel mill furnace, operating the strand carrying beams to the cooling unit. Coming home, he would sit in his blue recliner, open the tobacco can, pack the pipe, and suck the flame until the cherry glowed. Watching my father smoke, I could see small cuts on his arms, the grafted skin on his left ankle that wrapped around his entire leg, and to me, his body proved that only love worked this hard. He never complained. While completing my dissertation, I suffered through back pain, insomnia, and neck cramps, but remembering my father’s body, I felt humbled and persevered. If love showed in my father’s work, then it might also show in mine.
And love also showed in how my father-in-law, Uwe Liess, danced to The Specials with me at my wedding to Stefan, his son. Sixty-eight years old, my father, twists at the waist, waves his hands in the air, and smiles at me, rocking back and forth. His black patent leather shoes and tuxedo buttons wink. “I have a new daughter,” he said when he hugged me after the wedding ceremony held at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. A new daughter and a new wife, I spin around while he takes hold of my waist. We whirl together laughing, my white tea-length skirt bouncing. His eyes are bright through his wire-rimmed glasses, and his trimmed white beard accentuates the same jaw that my husband has. I see Stefan clap, and he takes my hand while my father stands to the side as my husband dips me back then kisses me.
In my heart, my fathers are all together — silent, at work and dancing — and, as their daughter, I am listening. I am persevering. I am learning how to dance with all of them and to love.
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Ask Why
By Paula Yoo
It was a typical Sunday night for my dad and I, going over my math homework.
I was in the fourth grade and prided myself on being a math whiz, just like my dad. Math was easy. All I had to do was memorize formulas.
The surface area of a rectangle? A=bxh.
Area of a circle? A=πr2
Volume of a cylinder? V=πr2h
But things got tricky when my dad decided I had done enough memorizing. It was time to understand the reasons behind the formulas, he told me.
He started with the formula for the area of a triangle. A=1/2bh. He drew rectangles and squares on my notebook and asked me to find the triangle.
I’d draw a dotted line, splitting the corners to create the hidden triangle. “Good,” my dad said. “So what’s the height of that triangle?”
Suddenly, the sight of all those triangles scribbled across my notebook overwhelmed me. I panicked. I couldn’t see its height. I had no idea what my dad was talking about. Besides, what was the big deal? “All I need is the formula,” I complained. “I don’t need to know why the formula works.”
And thus began the infamous Battle Over the Height of the Triangle that would make me hate math, especially geometry, forever. I hated that my dad was so stubborn. I hated that he would not let me leave until I found the height of every single triangle he had sketched. Who cares? I thought, trying not to cry. WHO CARES ABOUT THESE STUPID TRIANGLES?
I finally faked it, nodding my head while my dad explained the reasons behind A=1/2bh, pretending that I understood every word. But all I really understood were two things:
1. I hated triangles.
2. I hated the look of disappointment in my father’s eyes as he realized I would never be an engineer.
Of course, looking back, my dad wasn’t disappointed. Frustrated? Sure. But that night, I felt this incredible pressure to be extra good at math in order to avoid what I mistakenly interpreted as disappointment in my dad’s eyes.
Over the years, the Battle Over the Height of the Triangle soon led to the Conflict of Absolute Values in the seventh grade and finally to the horrific Civil War of Common Derivatives and Integrals during my senior year of high school.
Words were my salvation as I saw my math grades plummet while my English grades skyrocketed. (This is also known as an “inverse relationship” where one variable decreases as another increases. See? At least I remember SOMETHING from my math days …)
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I became a writer instead of an engineer. But I never could have become a successful writer without my father’s help. Even though he never had to tutor me in English or help me write an essay, my dad’s stubborn insistence that I understand the WHY behind the math formulas spilled into my writing. I questioned every book that I read. I wondered WHY the author chose his or her words to describe a character or place or theme. I never took anything for granted with my own writing — every phrase, every word was parsed down to the letter, because once I knew the reason behind every single little detail, the bigger picture would emerge.
Just like those mysterious triangles hidden inside the squares and rectangles my dad had drawn, their heights rising far beyond what my naked eye could see. Even though my dad was not a writer, I now realize how creative he was, how he was able to see beyond the boundaries set by these lines.
