Hi Kids,
I just came across an oldie that I haven't heard since teenage years. It's like finding an old friend. It still sounds so good. Check the lyrics too if you have time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Dad
While I grew up loving much of the music my dad listens to, I can't say that I'm a fan of this particular ditty. But I can see why the refrain, "It's true, good timin' brought me to you" speaks to my dad. He has always said that it was precisely timing that brought him and my mother together. Dad's visa was expiring, and he had yet to secure a steady job. Meanwhile, his mother was dying in Hong Kong, so he knew that he had to leave the US and risk not being able to come back. The prospect of having to live in Hong Kong, a place he had always hated, terrified him. Through family, he met my mother, who had a green card. After a 3 month courtship, they got married in Reno. He went to Hong Kong, saw his mother's passing, and then returned 3 months later to begin his new life. My father likes to say that he met my mother just at the right time, and that saved him from a life of misery.
My mother doesn't talk much about how she met and married my dad. But the pieces I've gathered of her side of the story make their courtship an utterly unromantic one. She had never wanted to come to the US or get married. To this day, she says that the happiest year of her life was when her ailing parents had been sent to the US by her sisters, leaving her alone to live as she pleased. Immigrating was very traumatic for her. A shy and sensitive person to begin with, she never could get over her inability to speak English and adapt to American culture, which she regarded as hostile. I don't know if she left behind a love in Taiwan. My aunt says she cried herself to sleep every night for a year. By the time she met my father, her life was confined to taking care of her parents, a duty she never complained about but must have also longed to escape. My dad, a graduate of UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, looked like someone who could provide for her. With encouragement from her family (who probably worried about what other prospects a 30-year-old woman with little educational capital would have in a strange country), she agreed to marry my father. I've long known that their marriage was based more on security than love or romance. When I ask my mom what prompted her to get married, she says, "It was timing."
I often think about how much of my own life has been indebted to timing and countless factors beyond my control. The fact that my parents could settle in an area that they would not have been able to afford were they starting their life now, the fact that I went to college at a time when tuition was still affordable, the fact that my job opened up just at the time I was finishing my degree, the fact that interest rates were low at the time I bought my first home... All these things led me to where I am now, and they all have to do with timing.
When it comes to matters of the heart, however, I've never given timing much thought. I've had relationships end because I discovered that the person wasn't right for me. My own stupidity, rather than timing, led to those heartaches. Recently, however, I fell in love with a very good man who, due to what could be called "bad timing," had a harder time figuring out where I fit in his life. I may never find out if we could be very good together if timing were better, or if he would have turned out to be the wrong person for me regardless of the timing. Should either be true, I suppose I can try to find consolation in telling myself that the right person at the wrong time is still the wrong person.
But that's not satisfying either, especially when I think about my parents' marriage. I would never want to emulate it-- The differences in their temperaments, habits, and upbringings, would suggest that they were always wrong for each other. But in spite of the tensions in their relationship, they've managed to build a life together for 35 years and raise me and my brother, who both turned out as well adjusted and independent people, in a loving and healthy environment. I would stack up my parents' commitment to each other against any other couple that got together in more romantic circumstances. And while I would want more romance and affection than what appears to exist in their marriage, I have also come to appreciate more and more the loyalty, fortitude, and constancy that sustains their relationship and, in turn, our family.
So is it so much timing that determined their staying power, or the choices they made in the face of timing? After all, my parents could have each submitted to the troubles facing them-- Dad could have returned to Hong Kong and stayed there, and mom could have decided to return to Taiwan after her parents died. And at all the points of trouble during their marriage (the financial crisis of these past few years being one), either one of them could have made the decision to call it quits. Not necessarily for any better or worse, the course of my family history could have been entirely different had timing prompted them to make different choices. I would like to think that choosing to bear things together is, in itself, love.
So perhaps timing isn't a matter of "good" or "bad," but of how one decides to take advantage of it. After all, the person who's willing to stand by you at the worst time in your life could also be the best person to share it with. Maybe that's the upside of the rather depressing circumstances that brought my parents together. I suppose, when the time is right, I'll find a partner in life who will stand by me during good times and bad.
So I wish a Happy Valentine's Day to Mama and Papa Fung, who are always teaching me life lessons whether they mean to or not.
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