#2022mauivisit

[etirabys]

sister, with joy: We made reservations for mom and dad to golf for the next three days, so we're free to do our own thing those afternoons.

me, a person who is not incidentally paying for half of those golf excursions: Why, pray tell, do we pay all this money to see each other and then pay even more money to get away from each other?

sister: It's like having children. It costs you greatly to have them, and then it costs more to fob them off on other people.

me: ...I find that weirdly compelling for an answer that does not have actual explanatory power.

[etirabys]

maui night 1, a hastily trimmed journal post

My parents, my sister and husband and their baby, I, and the giant are in Maui for the next six nights. We all landed at 1pm local time. ...

My sister, I, and the giant are paying for the whole trip. It's a birthday gift for my father, who hit a culturally significant round number age. He does not respect my marriage to the giant because I did not ask for permission or introduce them before deciding to marrying him (this is not for my complete lack of trying), because we are living with housemates (this strikes him as highly disreputable), and because we did not have a wedding (we plan to, but we don’t have a wedding planning bone between us). It seemed wise to propitiate him. The reason we're not all going to Korea for my dad's birthday is that he's been eliding that I'm married to his relatives and acquaintances and doesn't want awkwardness from either inviting him or not inviting him to the birthday event. (When I cheerfully suggested that the giant not come, he reacted with indignation that I didn't care enough about my marriage OR my family.) Hawaii was the compromise. ...

My BIL, after a lot of despair over the disappointing state of the airbnb, offered to take the worst room (which has a pullout bed, and no AC), and I didn't disagree. My dad went outside to the patio to look at the absolutely gorgeous view of Maui's northern coast to – it turned out – sulk. After an hour he called me out to ask me what I was going to do about the room situation, as one half of the trip's hosting pair. I immediately offered to go to a hotel with the giant so that everyone could have a nice room, and my dad blew up at me. He said that if we were going to a hotel, he would book a hotel as well. (I gotta say, this still doesn't make sense to me as a threat.) I guessed it was important to him that the family be kept together in one lodging space, and stared off into that gorgeous cloud-brindled horizon, anger mixing with distant pity.

Dad said with aggrieved sacrifice that he would take the worst room but regarded it as an insult that he had to do so. When I said that my BIL had decided to take it, got angry at me for inflicting the room on the parents of a small child. He then finally said that he wanted me to have offered to take the worst room. (The giant and I have gotten good bedrooms in two previous trips to Korea and Chicago – by host arrangement, not of our asking. I agree this should be kept in mind.) I said, in some amazement, that we would have offered, but as stated at the beginning of our conversation, the giant doesn't fit in the pullout bed. This seemed to bounce off of him. I got somewhat angry at being pressured to agree to a room where my husband would sleep cramped. He's ten inches taller than the next tallest person in the party.

I left the conversation and went upstairs, where my BIL – who had not had a full meal the entire day while traveling with a baby – was having a quiet meltdown. My dad had been at him as well. "Your dad is so," he said. Clearly, being the parent of a small child had not been enough to insulate him from my dad's temper about the lodgings. (My BIL and I had co-booked it.) "I'm sorry, but he's such a..."

He was having a worse day than I was. I felt for him. Made the sympathetic mouth noises, tried and failed to get him to shut himself in a room and decompress for 15m while we watched the kid.

Outcome: The giant and I ended up taking the worst room for dad-propitiating purposes. Experimented around with positions; his sleep won’t be great but it’s not awful. Would have saved us some conversational torment if we'd figured that out earlier.

Incidentally, the reason my mom and my sister have not featured in the story yet is that they were at urgent care, where they discovered that my mom's persistent cough is bronchitis. She probably got it from the baby a week ago. When they arrived, my mom insisted on cooking, declining with horror when my BIL suggested ordering pizza. She coughed on the meat until I made her put on a mask (feeling hopeless about this whole not-getting-bronchitis thing, and the keeping-her-out-of-restaurants-for-public-health thing), and ran around trying to find the trunk with the bag of rice in it. The bag, it turns out, burst open in transit.

I realized mid-cooking that the rice was going to slowly spread around the house, riding on soles, and the best time to clean it up was ASAP. In a fugue of grim emotional exhaustion, I went and started scooping it out of the suitcase and gathering it up from the floor. My mom gave me a container to put it in, because she doesn't want to waste the rice.

I put my foot down when she wanted to put the grains from the floor (which isn't the cleanest floor) into the container. "The rice will get washed," she insisted. When I'm not enraged by it, I'm pleasantly intrigued by having a mother who will buy four-digit-price-tag handbags and also hates to waste THIRTY GRAMS OF RICE THAT SPILLED ON THE FLOOR.

"No," I said. "I'm not going to eat this."

"It'll become clean when I wash it."

Also, steamed for an extended period of time. I considered the question grimly. Then I took a tack that I've somehow never taken before with her. "Look, this is a really small matter. Why should we argue about this? Can't you just give me what I'm asking for?"

Hesitation. A smile. A smile?

"Please?" I said.

She relinquished the dusty rice.

[etirabys]

FAMILY VACATION DISASTER: my dad is being a colossal cunt but not in a funny way I can blog about

[etirabys]

Out with my family in a shopping center in Maui, my eyes alighted upon

𝓪 𝓱𝓸𝓻𝓻𝓸𝓻

in the Louis Vuitton store:

Here’s something that’s changed between the ages of 18 and 28: my younger self would have looked at it for a second, gone “seems bad”, and moved on. My current self was practically crawling over the glass in delight. The sheer ugliness of this thing was lighting up my starved pleasure centers.

It costs six thousand dollars.

[etirabys]

Liking for my baby niece trickled in slowly, and love isn't there, but the desire to devour her was immediate – to know every particular of her life, to witness every important moment of anguish and triumph, to alongside-think every half hidden fleeting thought as she unfolds through life.

[etirabys]

My sister has been hiring local babysitters to watch my niece, and all three have been blonde women.

You know what's weird? I'm almost totally comfortable being the only Asian person in room full of white people (if they're programmers / bookish, anyway), but I get tense when I'm with my family and we meet a white person. There's more of an intertribal contact feeling. I’m antsy, conscious of my expressions and body, and more polite than usual. My family can be the kind of Asian family that makes people go >:| about Asian tourists.

A Hannah Arendt quote that drifted to mind as I typed the above is something like, “If you are attacked as a Jew (even if you don’t really identify as one) you can only defend yourself as a Jew”. I can’t articulate the connection to my liking, and maybe there isn’t a strong one, but it feels relevant.

[etirabys]

I would describe myself as the best version of someone who is the combination of the worst parts of both of my parents

[etirabys]

maui night 3

No amusing drama to report today. I snorkeled with the giant, moved onto my fourth Stephen King book in four days, and had a three course meal at an amazing restaurant where I kept drifting away from reality. I've been spending so much time reading fiction that I feel like a kid again. I'm half in another world.

My parents are wealthy, and I'm indefinitely unemployed. Occasionally I wonder how these things will collide near the end of their lives. Just once, my dad tried to use the potential inheritance as the carrot to get me to do something that I didn't want to do, and I told him he wouldn't get me that way. It was true, in part because I discovered it was true and in part because I willed it to be true. He was hurt by this, although I was trying to communicate something complicatedly loving – that I wasn't holding up my end of our frayed relationship for the money. I think there's a good chance I won't see any inheritance, and when I simulate that, there's an amputated stump where an emotional reaction might reside. I imagine my sister calling me and saying "they left it all to me" or "they left it all to the church" and I just shrug, blank. Who knows if that'll be how I feel if it really happens. Greed is a potent transformative force.

My parents were poor in different ways in a poor country, and one thing I have never doubted in my comfortable life is that money matters. I found lucrative employment out of college, and then disappointed myself by not taking the common-in-my-social-circle pledge to donate 10% of my income to the charities estimated to decrease the most suffering per dollar. I increasingly needed Ritalin to defend myself from indifference to all tasks, and Ritalin increasingly made me sick. I told myself I'd take the pledge if my employment felt stable. It never did, so I never have.

I know I'm not giving back what I should. There's a moral dislocation in me because I don't donate, an alarm that has not stopped going off in a room down the hallway. But I'm more selfish and afraid than I am moral. I check my bank account and recalculate years of runway. I anticipate catastrophic medical bills, divorce, having severely disabled children. I'm afraid of losing luxuries I'm accustomed to – buying e-books without pausing to think about it, getting to be the chill guy who says "don't worry about it" when people break my stuff, traveling, takeout.

This is an odd little pyramid of priorities. I care more about having money than I care about satisfying one of my more persistent imperatives to be a good person. But apparently, more than either of those things, I care about having an emotionally authentic relationship with my parents. This absolutely amazes me, because the emotionally authentic relationship I have with them is dogshit. I draw boundaries they think are ridiculous and guard them like a rabid animal, I don't make a strong effort to hide my contempt or amusement when they do something that elicits it, and I share almost nothing about my interior life with them.

What exactly am I trying to do here? I value money and I'm not shy to myself about it. Why not be nicer and hope for payoff? Why this spectacular irrationality? One answer is that it threatens my independence. I want them to have no say over my important life decisions. The other answer is that I'm not a daughter that makes them happy to have, but using them would not just make me a displeasing one – it would make me a bad one.

(The answer to 'why not just be nice for its own sake?' is that I hate them and don't want to be nice. During the occasional interactions that get nasty, these days, I keep my cool largely because I'm buoyed by the hope that this might be the fight that's bad enough to justify breaking off the relationship for good.)

I'm bleakly amused at the ranking that falls out of my revealed preference:

not being nice to people I hate > filial piety > material greed > morality

[etirabys]

For my flight back home I can either read Stephen King’s

The Outsiders, which I believe will be actually good because @raginrayguns recommended it and I trust his taste

End of Watch, which is the third book in a trilogy whose second book was the worst Stephen King book I’ve ever read and whose first doesn’t recommend itself on any axis except “fantastic incest murder scene”. (Well, okay, a fat guy in his sixties who thought his life was over meets someone and has great sex before she dies in an explosion, I thought that was lovely.)

...and I have to face up to the fact that my pick is the latter, and I am going to read a book whose sole appeal is “maybe the murderer who was sexually obsessed with his mom whom he accidentally strychnined dead will get more fucked up”. It cheers me up like nothing else, what can I say.

I also bought Master and Commander because I’ve been meaning to get into the Aubrey/Maturin thing, but it turns out I’m not in the mood for a jolly guy at sea. Feel free to pitch me on the series if you’re a fan, it’s sufficiently out of my readerly wheelhouse that I might have trouble getting reading momentum otherwise.

[etirabys]

My niece burbles almost-words. It's like watching a whale crest close to the surface, on the verge of an explosive breakthrough.

[etirabys]

kind of ashamed at how much of a fiction gremlin I’ve been on this family trip; part of me was hoping I’d retreat into intellectual solitude and read more about Chinese history. but no, grisly incest murders are way shinier and therefore better suited to cheering me up at the dinner table

[etirabys]

Someone messaged me with genuine sympathy/horror about my parents, and I want to quickly caveat that

as someone coping with stress by blogging about the funniest and most ridiculous interactions, of course I will give an unrepresentative view of things

I tend to become very combative around my family and am terrible at censoring myself when someone is saying something I think is very stupid; I become sarcastic, and also unwisely honest when asked “do you even want to be here” questions