“Oh, so you only care about your Dad? You don’t care about me? This family would be ruined if I died,” she yells, her voice quivering as it rises to the occasion, a growing wave itching to smash whatever is foolish enough to stand in its way.
I am the fool, and I fight to keep my voice level, a straight ocean horizon. But I am also her daughter, and whatever she has gushing through her red-hot veins, I also possess—in equal if not greater quantities. So when she continually cuts me off as I try to explain that the only reason I brought up Dad’s health—Dad, a seventy-four-year-old life-long smoker—is that she doesn’t seem to care about her own health anymore, I fight no longer to keep my calm but to barrel into her with all I’ve got, and as I hurl my open palm into my desk and it makes a resounding pop and my palm glows red-hot just like her veins, I shout in a voice foreign to me, a hoarse growl both feral and desperate, violent and merciless, “YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT YOURSELF ANYMORE—AND YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ME!”
I hang up on her—my Mom, who refuses to be inoculated yet hopes to return to work. My Mom, who wonders if she can wrangle the religious exemption to ride in her favor. My Mom, whose mother tongue is Mandarin and who asks me for help drafting an excuse in English because she thinks that I successfully weaseled my way out of my school’s vaccination requirement with a religious excuse.
She doesn’t know I’ve been fully vaccinated since April—that is, for the past six months. She doesn’t understand why I won’t help her, why I don’t support her returning to work unvaccinated. She can’t seem to comprehend that she could either catch Covid and potentially die, or catch Covid and potentially die and also infect my Dad who would also potentially die.
“Don’t be silly,” she says through the phone, “There’s medicine out there that can cure it. I’m not scared of catching covid.” She boasts so loudly that she can’t hear my repeated explanations that you cannot obtain hydroxychloroquine without a prescription, that no doctor will use it on a covid patient. I know she’s there—I know her brain is functioning—but I wonder if I’m talking to a wall, an obstinate slab of concrete intent on self-destruction.
“Your Dad fully supports me! He’s been doing research all day for me. You need to help me. If you don’t help me now, I’ll never ask for your help again.”
“I just don’t support it, so I won’t help you do it. You keep saying you’ll be fine because you’re not at high risk, but what about Dad?”
“Oh, so you only care about your Dad? You don’t care about me?”
Oh, Mom, I am past caring about you or your feelings. I am trying to save your goddamn life.
“Honey, please call me back when you have some time to talk,” my Dad pleads in Mandarin in a voicemail the next morning.
He tells me Mom left for somewhere this morning in a foul mood, complaining that nobody in this house ever helps her and how she wants to leave this family to live on her own.
“What happened between you guys?” he asks.
I tell him how I used him only as leverage to try and convince Mom because she seemed to think she was impervious to covid, how I refused to help her draft the excuse.
He tells me he doesn’t believe that all the world’s leaders are conspiring to kill everyone with the vaccine, nor does he believe all the vaccinated will die within three to five years. He believes that the vaccination lowers your odds of being hospitalized, and he trusts that it is helpful.
“So can you get the vaccine, Dad? Can you just get it secretly and not tell her?”
“No. I can’t do that to her; it would be the ultimate act of betrayal. Your Mom already feels alone in all of this.”
Well maybe she should be on the right side of history then and use some fucking common sense.
“What about me, though? What if both of you guys die because of this?”
Silence, for one heavy, splitting second.
“If she jumped into the river, I would jump in after her.”
He knows as well as I do how transcendent her will is—how once she’s made up her mind, she will believe it until she dies, and then she will carry that belief with her into the afterlife so that she can brandish it in the next life. And I know he’s tried in his own, gentle, way to tell her that the water is too fast, the current too strong—that she will perish if she jumps.
I can’t tell if I want to wallop them both over the head with an anvil for being so senseless, for letting their feelings rather than logic guide their actions, or if I want to cry over my Dad’s devotion to his wife.
I just hope they can swim.
