Happy Birthday Dad (2024)

It’s my dad’s birthday today, just a few days after mine. Last year, I wrote a short piece about him, so I’m keeping up with the tradition.

My dad is the sole reason for my blog and Instagram empire. He’s the one who brought me and my siblings to max out his library card as kids, encouraged me to start a blog for my writing as a teenager who was afraid of what my classmates thought of me, suggested I apply to a creative writing program when applying for colleges. He still tells me with a straight face to just write a New York Times bestseller and quit my future job. He’s the one who thrifted my siblings and I’s books before we even knew what thrifting was, phoning us to see if we had the so-and-so A-Z Mystery book or a certain copy of The Magic Tree House when we were kids. "Yes, we have The White Wolf."

Sometimes at the dinner table, he’ll fondly recall his schoolboy days, reminiscing about how he was the chubby kid with glasses who read a lot. There was this one time in class that his teacher pulled up a photo of a forest, and he knew where it was. Everyone asked him, "How did you know that? It’s just a bunch of trees." And all he could say was, "I probably saw or read about it in a book." That’s the level of well-read I would like to be one day.

It was only until recently that I came to terms with the fact that my dad isn’t, in fact, right about everything. For so much of my life, my dad always knew what to do, what to say, the plan going forward. But parents are just human too. Sometimes, I feel jealous of girls with moms who are their best friends. I’m the child of immigrants, so it’s safe to say there’s a cultural, generational, even a language barrier between us at times. And this is still the case with my dad and I. However, we manage in our own way, and I can say he’s one of my good friends. It’s not perfect, but he’s the one I phone when I’m having an existential crisis in my apartment’s parking lot. And he’s the one I talk to about Catcher in the Rye and other literary topics. I’m still waiting on him to read The Picture of Dorian Gray so we can talk about it.

So, happy birthday to my dad, the one who has bestowed upon me his hobby of reading, his eccentricity, out-of-pocket humor, and more that I will likely never truly be able to grasp.

May 8, 2024