Father's Influence

A tango song keeps following me around like a shadow, or like a little child that seems forever latched onto you wherever you go. There's no great significance to the lyrics; it's another sad love song and I don't really understand all of it (despite the cheesiness of the love songs, they are very poetic and the language quite profound). It's the melody, the rhythm, what the sound speaks to me. The voice, the violin. It's soothing but at the same time reminds me of the difficulty of trying to live a simple life in the torrents of life, and the name of the song, and its central theme, is "Torrente".

On my way to Grand Central, I thought about my Dad. Not because there is still some tension between us, just because my thought veered into his world as these thoughts are busy with the house. Yesterday evening I was a little tortured with the idea of having paid $8000 for coating the roof. I realized I had no idea if I overpaid. I was rushing so I didn't make enough effort to get other estimates. I did call other roofers but they never called me back. I told myself that since this guy is recommended by my sister's boyfriend, whom I trust, the recommendation was good enough. But then I started wondering how putting two coats of protection would cost nearly as much as painting the exterior of my house.

Of course, when I was having my house painted, I went through the same thing, wondering if I overpaid, if the guys were doing a good job, if I would ever know. I don't even live in the house so I can't see what the coating looks like. I can only confirm through my tenants that there were people on the roof, that it was now silver.

My distrust of people, my uncertainty of my landlordship of the big house with three groups of people, the unknown of the house, the housing market, are just a few factors that have started to cause a lot of anxiety in me.

But most of all, it has to do with my family. I've always known I felt resentful of my Mother who pushed me to owning a house. And I always knew that that resentment couldn't go far because overall it had been a good investment idea since, practically, I hadn't been paying rent for the past five years. It wasn't completely free since I had to pay for insurance and maintenance, and I put in an additional amount equivalent to rent in the monthly payment to lower the overall interest payment. Looking back, I think that additional payment was a good idea compared to the alternative of investing in the stock market because the latter had been performing rather poorly in the past five years.

So I could resent her for locking me now into this iron ball to which I am attached along I-95. Right now I also have to look for tenants to fill the first floor before the end of August. That adds to my anxiety greatly. But the resentment is balanced by a combination of gratefulness and guilt.

Guilt that I do appreciate the extra money, which I have used in traveling and in investing in the stock market. Guilt that I should complain about my lack of complete freedom while enjoying the extra money from the past five years.

All this is complicated, these feelings, many of which remains rather murky to me. But one interesting new idea I've started to explore is the role my Dad plays in all this. He never played a direct role. He never pushed me to buy a house. In fact, indirectly he had discouraged me by complaining for as long as he had been a property owner that he was a slave to the house they live in. He always considered himself a victim, a victim who was paying for the mortgage of the house but it was really under my Mother's name. He didn't care about all the reasons that pointed to his being a co-owner of the house. He just liked complaining about his fate. His complaints grew larger when repairs were required. He always said his biggest fear was plumbing problems. The unknown pipes of a house he never really understood. The small problem of a clogged toilet would be a cause for losing sleep.

His own experience as a homeowner contributed to my fear of being one and continuing to be one. But his influence is bigger than this. My Mother wants me to be like her, in the sense of the stereotypical merchant Chinese. Chinese people have a lot of stereotypes, but one that many people around the world know about is their entrepreneurial fervor. There is a Chinese restaurant in just about every village and city in the world. Laundromat? My mother's younger brother is like that. He is very business-minded, with a very Chinese style. He is always looking for an opportunity to make money, whether in cutting costs, buying properties both here and in China, or evading taxes. His elder sister wished her husband were like that. She couldn't accomplish the same goals because, I suppose, she's a woman, and there aren't enough opportunities here or back in China for her, or simply it had been planted in her head by tradition that she could not succeed. And she married to someone who had none of the desires she and her brother had.

My Dad doesn't care much for the stress of business, and so nothing of the business. Owning a house for himself (forget being a landlord) is already stressful enough. He wants things to be simple. He eats very cheaply, not because, as is the motive of my Mother, it cuts cost, but because he can't imagine any need for something more complicated. He is not a good cook in the sense that he doesn't want to explore options. He just wants some good, simple food in his body. I remember in China he never showed any interest in anything, but I was a kid. He never went to do something even slightly out of the ordinary. He went to teach, prepared his classes, slept, cooked for us, went to the market, and spent some time with us like by the river. He had grown up in a busy and crowded city, but before I was born he had moved to the laid-back world of a village that had just rice fields and all the little critters that inhabited them.

My Mother didn't like that. She had often complained in front of him, in front of us, that he was a coward, lacking initiatives, lacking ambition. He didn't come to this country for a better life because he didn't imagine one. He came because that was what fate had required him to do. He gave up his idyllic life for a foreign one, his teaching job for a labor-intensive one in various grocery stores. I remember he had a stint in this grocery shop where he felt happy, and though I don't know all the reasons, I suspect one was related to the fact that the owner was like him, not very competitive, nice guy, unlike the cut-throats you find in most Chinese immigrant stores. Of course, that didn't last long; the cut-throats in the grocery store across the street soon shut down Dad's store.

I think I have much more his desire to be free, desire to be left alone, desire for simplicity, more of this trait than my Mother's trait of wanting to make money. In my every day life, I find myself often trying to be efficient, and I am thinking about making money much more often than most of my friends. Besides the India girl, I am the only one I know who actively invests in stocks. Most people who do investment really just dump their money in some money manager's lap and forget about it until their retire. I have full control over which stocks I invest, how much, and I read stock investment news nearly every week. I am not as diligent as many people who spend hours a week reading about the trends, philosophies, and economic news, and sharing ideas with other investors. But compared to my friends, I must look like some investment expert.

And I keep a tight budget, which also no one else I know, besides that India girl, has. So definitely I think about money a lot, and would like to think I am not obsessed but wise about money management. That part I am not sure if I learned from my Mother teaching us being cheap and money-pinching (she just had me walk with her to CVS just to understand where that dollar she thought she would get went). Or I learned it from surviving in New York. Or both.

But the important thing is it is becoming clear to me that my Dad exists in a bigger part. Looking back, I know I would have been equally happy, perhaps in a different way, if I didn't have that extra money. My Mother somehow believes, and somehow had convinced me, that life had been better off with that extra money. I, however, know that whatever I wanted from life, even if it cost a lot of money, I would have found a way to get it. But the reality is that what I wanted from life rarely required a lot of money. I could have still traveled as much as I did, just less money in the stock market. She didn't mention about the future, which is also important in this evaluation. When I do sell the house, and if I sell it for the price I want, or close, I will have a lot of money, more than I have ever saved in my life. Not extravagant, of course, but that is the point.

Just like my Dad, I don't need anything extravagant. I don't need to own anything when I know what I want can't be touched or seen or smelled. I appreciate more the lack of material objects.

But balancing an unknown future, an unknown future sales date, is the present annoyance and frustration with owning a house and taking care of its inhabitants. It would drive my Dad nuts. I am not good at managing people, and neither is he. When he was the manager of the bookstore where he still works he was being a bad manager, in the sense he did everything, didn't delegate any work because he didn't want to inconvenience his insubordinates. He let them go home early even if that meant he had to go home later. I sometimes think I care too much about my tenants. I am worried the slightest inconvenience caused them. I know most of my friends don't have very responsive landlords. One friend had that same leak in the kitchen for as long as she had lived there before leaving. Me, I scramble to find someone fix the roof, twice, totaling more than $9000. My personality doesn't fit a business person. I take risks, but in the stock market where there is nothing material, just numbers. I am not responsible for any human being, any structure.

To end this, I want to say that there is something good to say about an entrepreneurial spirit. It requires patience, faith in what you're doing, faith in reaching your goal, being open-minded, being active. My Dad was never ambitious, and I think even if you're not ambitious about making money, life needs to be full of ambition. One should not confuse desire for simplicity with a simple mind. Life should always be a journey and the traveler always taking risks for the simple goal of happiness. Unfortunately, I believe, sitting around doing nothing extraordinary at most makes you unaware of what deeper joy life offers. I don't know if owning a house gives me deeper joy than not owning one. But it certainly is a challenge for me to go through this dark valley full of worries and concerns and frustrations.