Social media is the worst enabler for this kind of behavior. A provocative post on IG can transform a disgruntled employee into a martyr – tossing a match into the dumpster fire behind you can be framed as a noble deed. As I was drafting my resignation, an open letter from a former Anthropic employee was making the rounds online. “THE WORLD IS IN PERIL,” the letter proclaimed. He was quitting to save us from the robots! He declared that he was leaving tech behind to dedicate his time to writing poetry. Damn! I thought to myself. AI always takes my ideas!

I spent weeks ruminating over all the bold and outlandish ways I could flip a table when I left, but in the end I just stayed off the internet and milked my health insurance. I got an eye surgery I’ve been needing, which I thought would be a minor operation, but which instead left me nauseous and with a migraine for the next 2 weeks.

Your mom had to leave town for work, and I tried not to feel like a terrible parent for letting you marathon hours of Octonauts next to me while I melted into the couch with Advil and an eye patch. As you gawked at the screen and stuffed your face with grapes, you turned to me and said, “You’re Kwazii.”

L.A. was legit cold throughout most of February…like in the 50s, no joke. It was frigid enough for all the UGGS stomping around to actually seem weather-appropriate, and for tourists who had not checked the weather when packing to be easily spotted as they vigorously rubbed their tank-topped arms. This literal Ice Age, along with my cyclops era, would’ve allowed me to stay inside guilt-free, if it weren’t for your ass. To be a parent is to be part of an unending conversation about the evils of too-much-screentime and not-moving-your-body-enough. “Turn it off!” I’d catch myself randomly shouting like a madman. You and I both desperately had to go outside.

The normal winter heatwave finally returned on the last week of February, as my final few days as a Smithsonian curator counted down. To mark the occasion, I brought you along for a studio visit with Mojdeh Rezaeipour, an artist who I befriended at a Zoom event during the pandemic (a period before you were born, when we also had a good excuse to not leave the house). Mojdeh is a master of splicing the wonderment of childhood with the weight of social upheaval, showing how the two are interconnected. Her current body of work, Classroom Solidarities, features mixed-media recreations of scenes from school protests in Iran, beginning with the Jin Jiyan Azadi uprising of 2022.

At the outbreak of the protests, Mojdeh was house-bound in Maryland from having just given birth, and she stared at her phone while her home country went through yet another convulsion. She began reminiscing on her own experiences as a young student in Iran. She dug up her old schoolwork. How do we know when power has been exerted? a physics assignment asked. What do we mean by resistive force? How many different types of change can you think of?

Thinking about her newborn, and the world they would grow up in, she returned to the studio and has spent the past few years making art nonstop. Like so many artists I know, parenthood made her prolific.

In addition to being absolutely astounded by Mojdeh’s work, I was also excited because it was the first where I’d test my new commitment to being completely unapologetic about bringing you with me to studio visits. “I’ll have a coloring book for him!” Mojdeh texted. We arrived at a warehouse in the Arts District that’s exactly as how it would appear in anyone’s mind. There were potholes, walls covered in every inch with tags, and random giant plushes slumped on dumped furniture. Peak L.A.

“We have stray cats here!” she chirped when she greeted us. Auntie Mojdeh knew exactly the right things to say. I love visits with artist-parents because they always feel a bit like a fever dream. Conversations ricochet between principles of decolonial historiography to strategies for hiding vegetables in pancake batter. There’s something humbling and grounding about trying to hold a serious discussion about the state of youth protest movement, while an actual youth is running circles around you and shouting “WHAT ARE YOU DOING DADDY???” every time you try to say something deep.

I blame it on my eye meds that it took me a whole hour to realize you were restless because I had talked up an art studio visit, only to not present a single art supply. Mojdeh whipped out Prismacolors and graph paper, and you scurried atop an art crate to churn out drawings of helicopters, only taking breaks to play this new game you’ve been psyched about, called “tag.”

Two days later, I awoke for the first time in 13 years no longer employed as a public servant of the government. I opened my phone to discover that the U.S. had begun bombing Iran the night before.

Doomscrolling was even more painful than usual, because of my eye. In a bit of a daze, I drove you to Westwood and sat down at our favorite Persian spot. I pointed a map of Tehran on the wall, and explained that this is where Auntie Mojdeh is from. I thought about all the places I grew up learning about only as war foes. We scraped the plate clean.

Later that evening, I did what I often do during times of crisis – I turned to art. We ended up going to Frieze, which I acknowledge was kind of a weird choice given the circumstances. I lightweight detest art fairs – I prefer spaces where I can search for depth and reflection, but fairs are by nature all about spectacle and commercialism. I find myself wandering around seeking meaning, looking for a diamond in the rough, only to realize that I’m just browsing luxury goods like everyone else.

It’s for this reason I’ve avoided Frieze for years even though it takes place just a few blocks away from home. But now, as a free agent, I figured it was a better time than any to bite the bullet and embrace being “in the market.” Plus, it was different this time: I had you as my wingman.

I didn’t know what I was looking for when I entered the fair, but you did: animals and cars. I followed you as you wove through the crowds on your trike, stopping at works that inspired you to doodle into your notebook. We spent time fixated on pieces that I would’ve completely missed on my own. Immediately upon walking in, you gravitated toward the towering quilts of Yvonne Wells, where we spent a good half-hour.

I discovered the whimsical figures of Solange Pessoa and the charmingly understated sculptures of Hugh Hayden. I know it wasn’t just because of my surgery that I knew I was looking at things with new eyes. Truth be told, it’s the best time I’ve ever had at a fair.

My child, let me tell you a secret: I don’t know how to navigate this world any better than you do. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop feeling like I’m just learning the ropes. In some ways, your curiosity and openness is all that’s saving me from becoming enveloped by doubt. It feels like both the worst time and the only time to leave the semblance of stability I’ve been clinging onto for years. It’s eerily freeing to know that all we have is each other now. Maybe that’s all we need.

As a holdover, I thought it timely to mark tonight’s Lantern Festival (which falls on an auspicious Blood Moon) with this short piece I wrote two years ago when Datu was obsessed with one of his first words, “Moon.” Rereading it today, it reminds me of an era when time moved slower, when as new parents we clung on to his every new word – how we sought adventure from it, and how we marveled at the universe unfolding before his eyes.

Happy LNY!

This evening we took you to the Griffith Observatory for the first time. A couple of weeks ago you started noticing the moon, this orb in the sky that we’ve periodically pointed out to you throughout your life. When you were tiny, maybe even the first full moon that appeared in your life, I held you up to it and howled. A few months later you started repeating after me, “awoooooooooo…” I giggled at its cuteness and its novelty and then, like too many things from that time, I kind of forgot about it.

I hope I don’t forget this time. This most recent full moon, the first in this Year of the Dragon, you pointed up at it in all its bright glory and proclaimed, “Moooooooooooon!” Since then, you squeal with excitement at any sighting, in the sky or elsewhere. In books, on TV, on your clothes, in all of its phases from its fully circular form to when it’s so thin it resembles your fingernail. Once you even pointed at the swoosh on Mommy’s pants, “Mooooooon!” I hope you know that we love you like this too, in all of your moods, when you are feeling full, and new, and waning.

You ran through the halls of the Griffith Observatory with your index finger outstretched, pointing at every sphere and ordaining it a moon. Jupiter: Moon! Mars: Moon! Earth: Moooooon! Every once in awhile you’d come across the other celestial being whose name you’ve learned, when it is presented with its numerous points and edges: “Star.” Mooon, moooon, star, star.

Child, thank you for reminding us that life can be this simple, all in the universe either a moon or a star. Everything else merely a detail made utterly insignificant by the vastness of outer space. When we had to go, you kept asking for more, “more-more,” as you gazed out from the parking lot into the city scape, and the planes, and the satellites. “More-more,” you whimpered as I strapped you to the carseat. “More-more moon,” you wept, as I started the engine home, until you sank into sleep.

But don’t worry, my love. There is so much more. We are not leaving this place anytime soon. We just got here.

One scene in particular has stuck with me: We see Tad and Robert through the lens of a dashboard cam as they drive around LA. The two are discussing what it means to complete the film while Robert is still alive (it gets meta like that). The holidays are coming up, and Tad is torn about whether to bring the camera to what might be their last Thanksgiving together. “Part of me wants to just live in the moment,” he admits. “Do I cherish that and really enjoy it? Or do I kind of turn it into a production shoot?”

“You’ve gotta turn it into a production shoot,” says Robert, without hesitation. It’s a moment that reveals what distinguishes an artist from others: most people see art as a part of life; artists see art as life itself. In Robert’s world, everything is intertwined with filmmaking, even family time. Third Act is filled with scenes about the impression Robert’s filmmaking legacy left on Tad – but it’s complicated. Robert’s love for documentaries was so magnetic that it shaped Tad’s universe, eventually leading him to follow a similar path. But it’s also this love that set up every aspect of life for a potential audience.

Art is a jealous god that demands a full-bodied kind of attention, an attention that strains the very relationships that inspire the art into existence. There is a lineage of stories about people who were great artists but horrible parents – who brought joy to the masses at the cost of isolating their kin. Hayao Miyazaki was so obsessed with making films that connect with children that he neglected his own son. “Not that I was running away,” he once said, “but the result was the same.” He said that he should apologize, but it’s unclear if he ever has. Some die-hard fans have suggested that his affection for his family is encrypted into his films: like in Ponyo, through a captain at sea, via light signals, in morse code.

My child, there has been a guilt swelling within me for the past couple of months, ever since the last time I wrote for Going Pop eons ago. It was autumn then, and we were in New Mexico to tour Ways of Knowing, the film your mom and I have been working on since long before you were born. That morning we plopped you in front ofTotoro so we could catch up on our own stuff. For me, that meant taking the time to write a eulogy for D’Angelo. I sat at the table next to you, typing feverishly while the sound of The Messiah bled from my earbuds. From time to time, you would ask me to watch with you, to which I would respond, I can’t right now. After all, I was engaged in my original passion, the one I’ve carried through life’s countless writer’s blocks and dry spells, the one other artists asked how I would maintain once I became a parent. Still, the paradox never escaped me: I can’t spend time with you right now, I’m too busy writing about how much I cherish spending time with you.

Yet, for all the grief I give myself for not documenting enough of our precious moments, the truth is that I’ve become a memory hoarder like most other parents. There was never a time in your life when I wasn’t always all up in your face with a camera, snapping a dozen shots of you doing every benign thing. But it drives you crazy, and lately you’ve been boycotting photos, throwing your palms over your face whenever you see me whip out my phone. “No camera!” you shout. “But it’s for our future selves to remember,” I plead. You could give a fuck about our future selves.

At the age of three, the notion of time is still a mysterious thing to you. I observe as you try to make sense of the concreteness of what time is against the elasticity of how time feels. How can the five minutes that pass like a blip while playing at the park be the same five minutes that drag for an eternity while sitting in the carseat? You’ve been asking for things to happen now now now, something I don’t attribute to you being impatient, but your unfamiliarity with the concept of process. You ask to be in places now now now, and I explain that we can’t teleport. You want the muffins we just put in the oven now now now, and I explain that we can’t eat raw dough. I’ve become that buzzkill. You respond by asking instead for your favorite breakfast: a frozen waffle that’s still frozen. I digress.

You want things now now now because now now now is all you know. You’re too young to hold deep memories or foresee distant futures. You’re fully attuned to something that grown-ups find elusive: the present moment. Grown-ups go on 10-day silent retreats and expensive vacations in order to find it. But you, child, are locked in, immersed in whatever now you find yourself in, whether you like it or not. Most days, the only thing you ask of me is to sit in the living room and play toys with you, and I find it to be one of the most challenging things to sustain without my mind wandering off. “Dad!” you call, snapping me back to reality. “You’re an ambulance, remember?”

I’m no Robert Nakamura. I’ve been struggling to find the sweet spot he did: to simultaneously be a great artist and a great parent. But whenever I think I’m succeeding at one, I suspect I’m failing at the other. After that D’Angelo piece, I spent the rest of the year focusing on being as present with you as possible, and trying not to be too hard on myself for letting my self-imposed writing deadlines pass. You learned to point at a map and say “Navajoland,” where we hiked mountains that were once sucked dry by industry, and then rehabilitated by the people who’ve always called it home. You learned to say “Japan,” where we rode bullet trains to cities that withstood atomic bombings and where children today frolic around monuments for schools that were eviscerated 80 years ago. Through those months, I realized how unprepared I was to explain the concept of history to a toddler who was still figuring out what five minutes is. We shared joy and pain, experiences I had deep thoughts about, that could’ve made for great material.

But I didn’t write any of that shit down, and most of it is probably gone forever. And I’m learning that living in some moments without feeling the need to seize them is itself a practice, a discipline, an art.

The month is January and the year is 2000. I’m in the 11th grade, and my CD wallet is an encyclopedia of the Soulquarians. The Bad Boy era is over, and my friends and I have traded our shiny suits for earth tones. We’ve become conscious – the softer-spoken but more expansive rough draft for woke. Suddenly, every room is dimly lit burgundy and thick with the musk of Nag Champa burning by the bundle. Everyone is wearing beanie caps. Spoken word is hella deep. Neo-soul is hella sexy. It is here where I come of age, beckoned by this croon, this howl.

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I follow the voice, a falsetto that swells into a bellow, and it leads toVoodoo – D’Angelo’s second album perched in the canon of my formidable years, a sonic universe also consisting of Things Fall Apart, Mama’s Gun, Aquemini, Lucy Pearl, and Black on Both Sides. It hits like puberty. The video for “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” where D’Angelo appears as nude as televisibly-admissible, makes BET Uncut look like Sesame Street. It instantly turns the girls at school into women, and immediately inspires me to start doing crunches.

Part of the Voodoo lore is that it emerged after an intense dry spell – a writer’s block that possessed the singer following the success of 1995’s Brown Sugar. For an artist in his early 20s, the five-year gap must’ve felt like an eternity. On hindsight, it’s an appropriate spacing between two masterpieces.

It's hard not to be superstitious about Voodoo, the album that simultaneously marks D’Angelo’s ascent and downfall. The record releases as an instant classic, breaking the sophomore curse so dramatically that people begin whispering about him as the Mavin Gaye reincarnate. On his album cover, he appears as an apparition – black, white, and shirtless, lined with serial numbers and handwritten scribbles, gazing at the camera like he is putting a hex on the anthropologist that seeks to make him a specimen. But that photo, along with the “Untitled” video, unintentionally and tragically turns him exactly into that – a specimen to look at, to gawk at, rather than to listen to. On tour, people begin interrupting his performances mid-wail, demanding that he “take it off.”

What a damned shame. Musically, Voodoo is a spellbinding work of art – a contortion of Black music’s timeline, invoking the ancestors and evoking the future. Its sparse drums, twinkling horns, and inebriating chords define the genre of neo-soul, only to snap it apart. The vocals wash over you like a mud bath. It’s rhythm, it’s blues, it’s funk, it’s Afrobeat, it’s dark magic.

Demons screaming in my ear
All my anger all my fear
If I holler let them hear
In this spinning sphere

Fuck the slice we want the pie
Why ask why till we fry
Watch us all stand in line
For a slice of the devil’s pie

If Brown Sugar made me like D’Angelo, and Voodoo made me love D’Angelo, then it was the liminal space after that which made me feel D’Angelo. He was absent but not, dropping in at just the right times in the form of features and lost tapes. I nursed my first breakup to “Be Here,” his slumpy duet with Raphael Saadiq. Four years later, felled by yet another broken heart, I surfaced from a late-night internet wormhole having discovered the demo version of “Africa.” I treasured my excavation, and inserted it into the playlist that quelled my restless mind to sleep throughout the summer of 2005. To this day, I can’t hear the intro without the back of my skull tingling. It is, and will probably always be, my favorite of his musical offerings.

A close second is his cover of Funkadelic’s “I’ll Stay,” from the late Roy Hargrove’s 2003 album, Hard Groove. This song oozes from the speaker. The texture of D’Angelo’s voice oscillates between silk and sandpaper. I heard it before its original, and it may have been my gateway drug to George Clinton – which is to say, I owe this track everything.

We didn’t hear much from D’Angelo after that. As the years progressed, he suffered from the ills of fame and recoiled from the public eye. Following a 2005 arrest, he surfaced online via a disheveled mugshot, and the internet was unkind (as it tends to be). According to the chatter, his greatest transgression wasn’t the DUI or the addictions, but the weight he gained. No matter that the music we knew him by foretold the temptation and grief and disillusion that now tormented him. His six-pack was of the past, so he might as well have been too.

The young folks who find Frank Ocean unbearably elusive don’t know the anguish of awaiting D’Angelo’s next album for a decade and a half. Eras came and went while we yearned for another slice of devil’s pie. The Bush administration and most of Obama’s. The War on Terror. The entire lifespan of Myspace. The slow death of MTV. Where the fuck was D’Angelo?

In 2007, Questlove leaked a demo of “Really Love” on an Australian radio show, and it quickly spread through Okayplayer message boards and the rest of the blog circuit. It was ectoplasm in the ear. The track was severely unmixed and laced with Quest’s vocal watermarks, but I put it on constant rotation anyway. Some of us remember how we cherished that mp3, how we wore it out, like the last voice message of a loved one who ghosted us. We waited seven whole years to hear it in polished form.

This is why it landed like a cosmic joke when, in the last breaths of 2014, D’Angelo dropped Black Messiah with a disclaimer that the release was “pushed up.” That fall, demonstrators flooded the streets of Ferguson, and then the rest of the country, in response to the killing of Michael Brown. The album cover featured no image of the singer, no bare chest with cut abs, just hands raised like they are reaching for the edge of a raft. There were no music videos. I listened front to back, anxious that I might wake up realizing it was all a fever dream. I pre-ordered the vinyl twice, as if I could take one with me to the afterlife.

This was the year I proposed. We slow-danced in our D.C. apartment to “Betray My Heart.”

Through the storm, through the rain
I’ll come running to ease your pain
Like the rails that cross the trains
Like the blood in your veins
I will never betray my heart

Child, why am I telling you all this, and what does it have to do with fatherhood? Maybe it’s my long-winded way of doing the most-dad-thing, which is to declare that whatever music of your day will be, it will surely pale in comparison to that of mine. That your father is a self-proclaimed music snob, which is why I’ve been willing to go to war against a 3-year-old over the car stereo – and why I felt so defeated when Spotify recently congratulated me for being the top listener of the Planes 2 soundtrack.

I can imagine myself one day sitting you down with Voodoo, and you looking at me like I’m trying to make you read Dickens. And then years later, you schooling me to D’Angelo, and how I’ll roll my eyes the way my parents did when I informed them that I had “discovered” Sade.

I know it’s a sign of aging when the musicians I grew up listening to start passing away in quicker succession. Since D’Angelo’s death, I’ve lurked his songs on Youtube and read the comments laid like roses at his feet. I haven’t been able to get through any of them without welling up in my eyes – a tear for my adolescence, and how he coaxed me away from top 40 to listen more deeply; a tear for how he was discarded for his allergy to the industry; a tear for the tenacity that empowered him to resurrect his career despite all that, during a time when we needed at least something to be right with the world.

As we put a legend to rest, I’m reminded that D’Angelo never wanted to be known for his body, but for his sound. If there’s any comfort in this moment, it’s knowing that this is how you’ll recognize him from now on – this sound, this croon, this howl.

“Are you…sad?” we’ll ask as your brows turn red, tears dribbling down your cheeks like an over-boiled pot. “Yesssssssss…” you’ll sob, your mouth the shape of a bent pipe.

“Are you…excited?” we’ll ask as you zigzag the playground like a tasmanian devil. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” you’ll shriek, drunk with adrenaline and sweat.

“Are you…mad?” we’ll ask as you stomp around the kitchen after your request for cake for breakfast is denied. “YEAH!” you’ll bellow, teetering on the verge of a tantrum.

My generation was raised by elder generations that were largely incapable and unwilling to discuss their feelings – especially with their children. Emotions had no place in the public – and in the private, well, that’s where you practiced behaving in the public. During my coming-of-age in the early 2000s, Dave Chappelle warned me about the consequences of keeping it too real.

During the first election I was old enough to vote, I witnessed Howard Dean’s presidential campaign go up in flames because he got excited and shrieked too loudly. Tom Cruise has spent his career leaping from canyons and helicopters, but everyone described him as the crazy guy who jumped on a couch because of love. The message was clear: Glee is unprofessional. Sorrow is unbecoming. Rage is punishable.

Now, it seems the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The mental health crisis among today’s youth has awakened everyone to the fact that bottling it up is actually not a great life skill. Emotional intelligence has been airdropped into the education system, taught alongside numbers and the alphabet. Now, all feelings are welcome, and they appear in the test as a multiple choice question.

But unlike digits of which there are ten, or letters of which there are 26, emotions come in multitudes. Emotions are complicated, and they are personal. The letter R is the same no matter who reads it, but happiness is different depending on who feels it. I watched with discomfort as you played a Sesame Street game that kept buzzing “ERRRR” whenever you poked at a muppet’s facial expression that didn’t match the word. “Hmm…he doesn’t seem happy…try again!” Elmo purred at you. But how do you learn about the feelings you can’t just put a finger on?

Now that I’ve cultivated the habit of sportscasting your emotions, I’m beginning to wonder if this was the wrong move all along. Some feelings can’t be identified immediately, and aren’t supposed to be. Some sit in the belly, collect in the shoulders, swirl in the mind before materializing on the face. Some lurk deep inside, subtly influencing our moods and actions in stealth mode. Maybe the problem isn’t that we don’t know how to name our feelings, but we don’t know how to feel them in the first place.

I should know all this. I fell in love with writing as a practice of excavating emotions that do not fit plainly into a singular word – emotions that must be processed through line breaks and metaphors in order to find some kind of tangible shape. I’ve spent many gloomy mornings paralyzed under my sheets, sorting through my vocabulary bank to diagnose my inexplicably heavy heart, and finding no words that suffice. I should understand that this early period of life before language is sacred. Your emotions are in the rawest state they will ever be – without their designated labels and the social contracts that police them.

Many of us like to believe that we subscribe to an “all emotions are healthy” philosophy, meanwhile retreating into our phones to gawk at the latest person who went viral for being cringe or unhinged. We debate about the role of empathy in our society – to what extent it belongs in politics, in the workplace, in how we raise our children. But how can we possibly begin to assume attunement with someone else’s emotions when we can’t even face our own?

Earlier this week, mom went to the hospital because of chest pains. “I’ll be back in a bit!” she chirped before heading out, as if she were just going to the store for milk. Throughout the afternoon, she was referred to different offices, nurses, and doctors, suspended in a clinical limbo of “probably fine, unless it’s serious.” I took you to the playground to keep you distracted, and if I’m being honest, to distract myself too. I sat with you, shoveling sand into buckets for sandcastles, trying to immerse myself in positive imaginary scenarios as opposed to grim ones. When we got home, you checked all the rooms and came back a little paler. “I want mommy to come back from the hospital now,” you whimpered. I shepherded you through your evening routines, suggesting that she might be back by the time we finish cleaning up your toys, then after your bath, then after dinner.

It turned dark outside, and mom still wasn’t home. A doctor suggested a CT scan, and maybe an overnight stay. I asked you to put your shoes on. “We’re going to visit mommy!” I squealed with unnecessary exuberance. Your slumped body was heavier than normal as I carried you to the waiting room. You usually get excited by the sight of ambulances, but as we walked by them you just stared at them. Mom and I greeted each other with voices pitched higher than normal. You stayed silent.

“Are you…worried?” she asked. You buried your head into my shoulder, only raising it to glance periodically at the nurses carting patients around in their stretchers. You were feeling something, too enveloped in it to respond. After awhile, we kissed mom goodbye and headed back to the car. You sulked softly as we crossed the street and I settled you back into the carseat.

“Can you put on a song and sit with me?” you asked – the first words you’d said since leaving the hospital. You looked out the window to let the moonlight reflect on your watery eyes. We stayed in the backseat and played slow jams until you nodded off, your mouth petrified in a frown.

I sat in the parking spot until mom was finally discharged a little past midnight. It turned out she did not have a disease or an ailment, but an overpowering swelling of anxiety from the state of life and the world. A false alarm, an early warning, and a sign of the times. The doctor advised she manage her stress and get more sleep, as if things said are just as easily done. “How are you feeling?” I asked, by reflex. We drove home quietly.

As I tucked you into bed, I wondered if a core memory had just been formed. I reflected on how I sometimes ask you to hold the things I haven’t myself grasped. About how much of growing up requires us to withstand moments of concern and uncertainty – to sit with the kinds of emotions that can consume us. I thought about how, when a thing is consuming me, the last thing on my mind is what to name it.

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That was for simpler times.

Lately, it has been difficult in a not-normal kind of way like: “Ahh! The president is accusing my workplace of brainwashing the country, and he’s threatening to shut it down unless it abandons its principles and bends to his will!!”

When I started writing this series, I intended to never discuss the institution where I work, but it has been hard to do that when it keeps ending up on the front page of the news. Every week, another one of our museums is embroiled in controversy. Executive orders fall left and right around us like anvils in Toon Town, simultaneously calling us lazy freeloaders and also cunning traitors, who have distorted history and science in ways that must be re-Americanized and made great again. As employees, we are told to “stay the course,” a course which seems to lead deeper and deeper into an abyss. We work at a place that symbolizes the nation’s well of knowledge, but if asked any of the questions about it that are dominating the national conversation, we’re supposed to play dumb. This is not what I signed up for.

I was drawn to working in museums because I’ve always found them powerful places to tell stories. When I started the job over a decade ago, I was introduced to how deeply entrenched the institution that hired me is in America’s sense of tradition. These museums hold sacred family memories – not just through the objects they archive, but through the generations of Americans that make pilgrimages to witness them. I’ve heard people reminisce about how they brought their children to see the same vessels, fossils, and artifacts that their own parents showed them when they were young. Growing up in an immigrant family in California, I did not share in this experience, but at work I became passionate about helping more people like me feel like they could. I dedicated years to transforming the museums to show different kinds of artists, to highlight untold moments, and to carve new spaces. I fantasized about one day having kids and bringing them to these museums I’ve helped shape. “Look, kids, this is what dad does.”

By the time you were born, we had relocated to the West Coast and the pandemic had normalized remote work. My desk in D.C. was a dust field, my office computer bricked from the lack of software updates, and I had not stepped foot in any of the museums for almost three years. To you, “Dad has to go to work” has always simply meant me going upstairs and opening my laptop – a mystery box which, whenever you peek over, reveals a grid of strangers for me to talk to, or a sea of letters for me to type into, or a ton of open tabs from me to click through. I sometimes think about how I never really understood what my parents did when they left each day for work, and how I’ve somehow upheld that lineage of mystery without leaving the house.

When you were 9 months old, I brought you to Washington for the first time on a work trip. You were still basically a beanbag then, but I gleefully took you through the halls that I had typically only entered to run from one meeting to the next. With your eyes glazed over and mouth agape, I strolled you through taxidermic cheetahs and ornately-framed paintings. No, I hadn’t curated these particular exhibitions, but I was nonetheless excited to unearth for you the kind of work that was tethered to my identity before you were born. I reveled in being a tourist with you in my own workplace. At long last, I could partake in the American tradition I’d spent so long curating for others.

I’m not sure how much of this will matter by the time you’re old enough to remember things. Not to be dramatic, but I’m not even sure if these museums will be around – or if they are, if they’ll be recognizable. Maybe the things I describe having once helped bring into these buildings will sound like tall tales, hallucinations from your old man. I wonder if it will be up to the people to keep the memories of these museums alive, when it was always supposed to be the other way around.

Since the start of this year, much of my attention at work has been blanketed by anxiety about getting suddenly fired by a billionaire, having all of my accomplishments eviscerated from historical record for being too woke, or worse. Every day I come across commentary about how the work I’ve poured myself into has not contributed to American society, but instead eroded whatever those in power feel it is supposed to be. It has been tough to not start each morning with a dreadful sense that my days are numbered at a job a love, and perhaps the country I love.

Maybe this is how it all happens: a different kind of tradition – one many of us are forced into, and one we are familiar with. Dad used to be a doctor, Dad used to be a professor, Dad used to be a curator at renowned museums – until the rug was pulled from under us and it all became just about staying afloat. Will this world I’ve meticulously learned to navigate slip away, replaced by one I’ll need you to hand-hold me through by the time you grow up?

I’m beginning to recognize the reams of life that parents sojourn before their children are born, which are interpreted by the young as prologue. I’m starting to understand how past lives can be too complicated, or blurred, or painful to recollect. I imagine you one day coming home from school and asking me to “tell my story” for an oral history project. I’ll sit with arms crossed and lips pursed as you read from a worksheet about how to get your crusty millennial parents to open up. Some stories hurt to recall, not because we wish to keep them behind us, but because we regret we couldn’t bring them along.

While writing this, I scrolled through 13 years of my phone’s photos looking for a picture of me “working at work.” After all those years zigzagging across the National Mall from museum to museum, I hardly ever stopped to snap a shot of myself in front of the monumental buildings. Each day felt so mundane…what was I going to do, take a selfie of myself editing project proposals?

But now that I’m all the way across the country, standing on the edge, I find myself wishing I had at least a few more that could neatly represent this defining era of my life. I spent so much time archiving the world, fixating on the historically significant, I forgot to document the small moments: the ones never meant to make it into museums; that are supposed to be forgotten by history; that find their place in a single photo album for one family to cherish privately and tell tall tales about over the kitchen table. In the end, maybe those are the only traditions that actually matter.

But hey, raising a kid is expensive, and I’ll take all the freebies I can get. If airlines didn’t require you to have an assigned seat once you turned two, you’d be my lap infant until you graduated high school. When you were younger, I could whisk you virtually anywhere as my plus one. You were like a living, breathing buy-one-get-one-free coupon! At cafes, baristas would give you complementary babyccinos just to dote on you drinking out of a cup. But these days, they don’t even offer a smile while charging $4.50 for a splash of milk. Meanwhile, the number of museums, zoos, and play spaces that waive your admission are dwindling. Most of them, like Disneyland, only let children in without charge until they turn three – presumably because up until that point, they are drooling sacks of rocks that won’t remember anything anyway. But once a kid blows out those three candles, all those open doors revolve into $30/hour cover fees to shake out parents desperate for a few moments of distraction from a toddler who just unlocked the ability to nag.

Kids don’t carry ID, so these places rely on customers to observe the honor system, and to pay when their children become of age. They expect honesty, particularly from adults who are supposed to be setting an example for how not to lie. But the truth can have a price, and at the Happiest Place On Earth, that price is $281 per head on a peak day.

I’ve witnessed the Disneyland “hack” out in the wild, while preparing to enter with my legit baby. “But I’m four…” I once overheard a kid say, while his mom rehearsed Benjamin Buttoning him outside the gate. I’ve seen grown children stuffed into strollers with a blanket draped over them, their humongous feet dragging on the floor while their parents hurriedly shuffle them in. Once I even saw a ticket agent, in an act of solidarity, command a panicking parent, “Tell me she’s two. TELL ME SHE’S TWO!” I don’t think this is what Walt meant when he envisioned a place where we could pretend that we’re younger than we are.

We just celebrated your third birthday this past weekend, so now it’s my turn to have my honesty stress-tested by the Mouse. I already failed an early exam I hadn’t mentally prepared for, when we took you to see dinosaurs on your special day. “Uhhhh…two adults and one…b-b-b-baby, please…heh heh…,” I said all shifty-eyed to the ticket person, unable to convince myself to pay for a third ticket that would’ve been free just a few hours ago.

I’m already musing over which hustle I’ll use to sneak you into Disneyland one more time. Maybe I’ll circle the parking lot until you fall asleep in the car, tie a bonnet on your head, and stroll you in casually. That way, you won’t be conscious while your father stains his character. Maybe I’ll dig through the back of our pantry in hopes to find a remaining baby pouch that you can suckle on as I silently usher you through the entrance. Maybe I’ll smother my guilt by repeating to myself that my transgression is nothing compared to all the lies peddled by the Disney corporation. I mean, when I put it like that, I’m actually just reclaiming what’s mine – performing a noble deed, a rebuke of hyper-capitalism, sticking it to the true villains of the world. An Avenger, if you will.

The hardest truth – the one that I’m having trouble even telling myself – is that now that you’re three, you’re definitely no longer a baby. The baby-you has been so hard to let go of. Within your first few months, before I had even caught up on sleep, I learned I couldn’t call you a newborn anymore. Then you turned one, and I pretended I wasn’t listening when your doctor said you’ve crossed your infant stage. When you turned two, I convinced myself that I at least get to call you my baby as long as you’re still finding your steps, babbling, and pooping your pants (certified baby activities). But now you’re racing across narrow platforms, and negotiating how many vegetables you’ll eat in exchange for ice cream, and demanding privacy when you go to the toilet. The fact that I’m now supposed to purchase adult tickets for you to amusement parks is just pouring salt on the wound. It’s already a heavy toll to know that one day you will no longer kiss me good night on the lips, seek a hug from me when you’re scared, hold my hand to cross the street, or eventually need me at all for most things.

The last time I took you to Disneyland, we stood at the center of Tomorrowland and you were fixated on the signage for Star Tours. “I want to go there,” you said with confidence, pointing at the blinking neon outlines of space ships. “Let’s just try,” I said, knowing disappointment was imminent. We went to the ride entrance, where we were greeted by a sign that read, “You must be THIS TALL to ride.” This tall referred to 41 inches, at least a foot taller than you were. You gazed upward at the measuring stick like it was the top of a skyscraper. “Not quite there yet,” said the guy at the front, chuckling like he didn’t crush the spirits of toddlers dozens of times a day. Your eyes sank and began to tear up. “Carry me,” you whimpered, raising your hands above your head. I lifted you up, rested your head on my shoulder, and headed toward the carousel. In that moment, you must’ve wanted nothing more than to grow up already. I must’ve wanted nothing less.

There was a time when I reveled in being the kind of jetsetter who could land in a new place alone, and navigate by way of my whims. I’d look at a globe like a spinning bucket list, and view my long stretches at home as something to sever with a getaway. I learned to love travel while touring for poetry. Something about being invited to cross the country just to say things for an hour made me feel special, desired, almost famous – and other yearnings that I was a little bit too obsessed with throughout my early adulthood. The simple act of boarding a plane made me feel like I was an important person doing important things. I’d see parents wrangling their children at the gate and trying to shut up their squeals during the flight, and I’d feel overcome with a sense of liberation that I could just breeze through the airport and the rest of the world, without the baggage of dependents.

Today there are tons of kids on this flight, and they’re all shrieking at the top of their lungs. All their parents look exhausted. And I’m jealous of every single one of them. I miss you.

Before you were born, your mom and I both traveled constantly for our jobs, rendering our relationship a long-distance one, even though we lived together. At times we’d go weeks without seeing each other. We’d look at our calendars and highlight the rare weekends we could spend with each other at home. Most of the time, we were each other’s Carmen Sandiego, existing as blue dots on the other’s phone and syncing timezones to nab short Facetimes when we could. Sometimes we’d be like ships passing – she’d depart a few hours before I arrived, and I’d be greeted by evidence of her recent presence: a warm mug, a damp towel, a pillow still holding the imprint of her head. I got used to coming home to her dotted outline.

Every once in a while we’d manage to rendezvous somewhere random or I’d piggyback on her trips, but this hardly counted as traveling together. She would tend to her job duties while I wandered the city and ducked her co-workers, like the stowaway I was.

Around the time we got married, your mom had frequent work trips to Jamaica, while I curated an art show in Hawai‘i. We joked that we went on separate honeymoons, but we seriously ended up never having one. Instead, we’d keep leaving each other for beautiful places, come home to discuss how much we’d like to vacation there together, and then go our separate ways again. The last time mommy traveled overseas alone, it was to Paris in March 2020. A pandemic had seized Asia, and countries around the world were starting to ground flights. She got home just days before the entire world went on lockdown. We decided we never wanted to be so far apart, for so long, so often, again. We love travel, but love each other more.

As the pandemic subsided and it felt safe to fly again, we resolved to only go on trips if we could do it together. And then we struck the jackpot with you, a child who travels well. The first time we took you on a plane, we ended up stranded on the tarmac for two hours, and you just sat there, quietly gawking at the luggage carts. You’ve now joined us for over a dozen flights, and each time we land someone sitting near us coos over how calm you were. You often spot planes in the sky and tell us you want to go on one again soon. You might even love to travel more than I do. Which makes it all the more unbearable to do it without you.

I’ve made it a point to rarely travel without you – and when I do, to get home as quickly as I can. Still, these trips feel like small eternities. The flights ooze by excruciatingly, and throughout the nights I reach for you in an empty bed. I imagine returning to learn that you’ve grown a few inches taller, your voice has dropped, and you no longer remember who I am. I feel silly for thinking like this, and then remember that this was actually what it was like for my dad and his father. The family stories are scattered and full of plot holes, but I know that my grandpa left his wife and kids in Hong Kong for Mexico City, only coming home every seven years. I know that he worked at a restaurant with his own dad, who started new family and never returned to ours.

I picture my dad as a young boy growing up in a household of all women, and a father he only knew through the envelopes of money that arrived in the mail periodically. I picture the first time they met: my grandfather tanned to a shade impossible to achieve in Hong Kong, and smelling of the Western Hemisphere and cigarettes; my dad ducking behind his mom to hide from a stranger who smiled at him from photographs on the wall. I wonder if my grandpa missed his son, or even knew him enough to have anything to miss. I wonder if, on those long commutes across the world, and during the years away, he felt like an important person doing important things. I wonder if traveling alone was not the perky lifestyle I’ve relished – just what people did and still do to survive and feed their families. I wonder if there is anything more important than that.

Your mom tells me I should enjoy these times away – that they’re a healthy reset, a time for reflection. I look at the app I’ve used to track my trips for the past 15 years. It tells me I’ve flown over a million miles, and have been around the world over forty times. That’s a lot of time to reflect. I try to fit myself into the skin I was in when I had the travel bug, when I identified as a globetrotter, when I felt most in my element while somewhere foreign and thousands of miles from anyone I know. I think about all borders I’ve crossed, all the airports I’ve flown into, all the places I’ve experienced. And then I think about laying next to you in the park at home, looking up at the sky, and pointing at the clouds – and how that’s the only place I want to be.

At school, the scene played out regularly during passing period: the stampede of students zigzagging across the courtyard is suddenly interrupted by two breaking out in a shoving match. Someone gets smacked. Both are stunned for a split second before they transform their arms into colliding windmills. They tear at each other’s Old Navy Performance Fleeces while their backpacks flail violently from their shoulders against the weight of the textbooks inside. A bunch of the other kids immediately circle around and shout “Fight! Fight! Fight!” as if they’ve been practicing to be extras on Saved By the BeIl.

I was never one of the kids that circled. Instead, I’d slow down my pace just enough to lock my eyes on the action while the rest of my body made sure I wasn’t late for algebra. I’d spend classtime pretending that I was absorbing the Fibonacci sequence, while my mind was spiraling over what would happen if I ended up in the equation I had just witnessed. I imagined clocking someone in the jaw, getting jabbed in the ribs, kicking my Airwalks against a pair of baggy jeans hoping to locate a shin to bruise. Will I hit hard? CAN I hit hard?? Will it be painful??? Will I bleed???? Will they escalate and get their older cousins to jump me after school????? Will they find out where I live and go after my little brother???????? Will my whole family die???????????????? I’d daydream about Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day” playing at my funeral, and then the bell would ring.

Avoiding conflict meant getting used to being called soft. By high school, whenever I confessed to never having fought, other guys would say, “Whaaaaat?” and shake their heads as if I had just told them I wasn’t potty trained yet. Even the girls talked about fights like they were impending; some wore only clip-on earrings and grew their nails long just to stay ready. Decades later, I still wonder if I’ve managed to evade physical confrontation because I chose peace or fear.

While your mom was pregnant with you, one of the words our doula incorporated into our vocabulary was “tender.” It was a decent catch-all for the emotions that arose in a household of changing circumstances, relationship dynamics, and hormones. Both of us consider ourselves pretty open to our emotions. But somehow, expressing them with words like “angry,” “scared,” and “sad” felt more clunky and difficult than opting for a term I had previously only used to describe a braised meat.

“Tender” lingered into the postpartum period, and more recently, we’ve deposited it into your word bank too. “Are you feeling tender?” we’ll ask, when you’re engulfed in tears and snot, but not quite sure why. “Uh huhhhhhhh…” you’ll respond, and bury your scrunched face into one of our shoulders.

Your yeh-yeh was never the type of dad to tell me not to cry. Instead, he would regularly tell me it’s okay to, while hardly ever doing so himself (probably because his dad told him not to). To be told by someone who doesn’t cry that it’s okay to cry, is like someone ordering dessert, and then saying, “I’m good, but you go ahead.”

Even in this age of upended gender norms, crying among men is still discussed as something that should be “normalized,” which by definition indicates that if you’re a man who does it, you’re not normal. “Men cry too,” a typical man might say in his most courageous Linkedin post, evoking the image of a guy wearing a waxed beard and a flannel shirt keeling on one knee, with a single trail of tears streaming down each eye, which he wipes with an American flag.

I, on the other hand, still cry like I just got lost at Ross. Your mom will sometimes have to lead me by the hand to lay down like I’m an old lady who’s been in the sun for too long. I’ve cried in front of you quite a few times already, bawling in my palms while you stare blankly from your train set. “Are you sad?” “Daddy’s feeling tender,” your mom will say, patting my limp hand. I’ll think about the kids in school who called me soft, and picture them as sages.

I’ve been writing this on a Saturday afternoon at a pub in Silver Lake. Your mom just texted me, “Hey, US just bombed Iran.” Another fight breaks out. Another circle forms, chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” I’m not a kid anymore, but now I’m raising one. I’m spiraling again. Will it be painful?

The Zen priest angel Kyodo williams says that facing today’s tumultuous world requires “a willingness to be flexible, open, soft-bellied” to the complexity of humans, including those who do us harm. In the face of all those who abuse power with brute force, she argues that cultivating extreme empathy and tenderness is the true show of strength. I have never seen myself as an alpha-male, jock-type dude, but I still struggle to align this lesson with my understanding of who I’m supposed to be. To be tough, unwavering, and indignant are not qualities I’ve held to my notion of manhood, but it’s certainly how I’ve been trained to be an activist. We are supposed to fuck the system fiercely, not softly. We fight war and oppression in hopes for peace – but ultimately, we are still fighting.

How do I teach you empathy in a time when the center of power seems like a moshing sausage-fest? World leaders boast about their readiness to push buttons and grab pussies. We have lowered the bar from world peace to limited ceasefire. Elon Musk shows up at the Oval Office with a black eye, and explains that he told his own son to hit him as hard as he can. When I read about that, I glanced over at you stacking your Duplos, and tried to imagine telling you to do that to me. What lesson would you derive by standing in front of the man who raised you, who taught you how to make banana pancakes and read you In the Night Kitchen for bedtime…and striking him in the face as hard as you can? Brute force. These men…they long to be kings, but all they know is how to dethrone.

I’ve read the thinkpieces and listened to the podcasts about how boys today are in crisis. I sometimes recall the conversation where I first learned the term “toxic masculinity” – with a woman who, when I asked what aspects of masculinity are toxic, responded, “all of it.” I witness the manosphere burrow into the adolescent male collective consciousness, and try to remind myself that these things ebb and flow. I watch culture play out like a game of double-dutch, and pray you don’t get entangled when you jump in.

I love the sense of care you have cultivated for the world. I love that your favorite way to play with your action figures is to dress them in band-aids. I love that, whenever a fire truck drives passes with its wailing sirens, you react by saying, “I hope everybody’s okay…” I want to preserve your gentle nature while preparing you for a harsh world. I want you to discover a strength deeper than a show of force. I wish you the courage to be soft, and to not let hard times harden you.

I’ve been thinking about a clip I saw the other day, of a man in Tehran playing a violin while the buildings in his city were being bombed around him. I think about his decision to take to the streets by picking up his instrument and serenading his neighborhood. I think about all the people who were seeking a show of strength, and found it that night in his tenderness.

We visited your grandparents in Filipinotown last week. As they offered you baby bananas and sugared crackers, KTLA blared in the background with reports of ICE raids at the Home Depot down the street and the clashes between the National Guard and protesters. When they started showing footage of a reporter getting shot by a rubber bullet, I threw my palm over your eyes and asked your Lolo to change the channel. “He isn’t ready to see this yet,” I blurted out, as if there’s a point when looming martial law becomes age-appropriate. The truth is, I wasn’t ready to explain it to you. I wasn’t ready to see a part of your innocence die.

As a kid, I used to hate when my parents did this. Back then I wondered, what makes me so different that I’m not allowed to witness what everyone else can? As I found myself repeating history with my own child, I felt what my parents must’ve – like I was tossing a glass of water at a wildfire. To raise a young child is to be in a constant battle over whether to expose you to this world or to shelter you from it. 

You’ve been asking a lot of questions lately – a window to how your view of your surroundings is rapidly becoming more complex. Why are these flowers red, and those flowers purple? How does that squirrel run up the tree like that?

These are the easy questions, at least compared to the ones you’ve been asking the past few days: Why are there so many sirens? Why is that policeman pushing people? Why is mommy crying? 

I, like many parents, have been guilty of lying in order to preserve your innocence. The lie is usually not very sophisticated – I’ll say something like “I don’t know…” and drift off like I’m investigating in my mind when really I’m hoping you’ll get distracted by a random sound and forget. Maybe my lie is more of a half-truth – I often do know the answer, I just don’t know how to frame it in a way that doesn’t erode your impression of the universe as the welcoming, wondrous, loving place that I’ve spent your toddlerhood curating.

A child’s “innocence” is often defined by a shielding from the harsher, more vicious contours of life and society; to be innocent is to be in a state of unfettered belief that no harm is ever coming to you and your loved ones; to be innocent is to be in a blissful bubble. But when does innocence become obliviousness? Which birthday marks the turning point when you are no longer innocent, but complicit?

And what about the other kids your age who have seen things nobody could block their eyes from? Those who have watched their parents vanish and their homes get ransacked, who have experienced the inside of a cage – are they no longer innocent? What, then, are they guilty of? I spent your early childhood sanitizing everything around you – your toys, your furniture, your baby bottles. But now you are encountering the kinds of toxic things in this world that I can’t cleanse for you, as much as I yearn to.

The first time we took you to a demonstration, it was in October 2023 when you were barely walking and I could count your words on my fingers. We were on a family vacation in Porto when bombs began falling on Gaza. In a foreign town square half a world away from home, speakers spoke and hecklers heckled in languages we didn’t understand, but felt we needed to hear. We made sure you were snug in your mom’s wrap while I looked around for shady characters and alleyways we could run through in case shit went down. Later, we pointed to Palestine on a globe. We let you hear voice memos from our friends who were getting ready to move out of the West Bank, the only place their kids had ever known. We held you tight.

This past week, after some deliberation, your mom and I decided it was time to take you to another demonstration. But this time, you weren’t a baby staring blankly from a wrap. You can now locate LA on a map, can sense when the energy in a room is tense, and understand the power of the word no. “We’re going to support some kids whose mommies and daddies aren’t allowed to go home,” I explained, feeling like my years in ethnic studies and grassroots organizing had completely turned to goo in my mouth. You curved your eyebrows in a look of determination you learned from your favorite cartoon, grabbed your Totoro bag full of toy tools, and shouted, “They need our help…let’s roll!”  

Some might argue that this is the kind of experience that threatens a toddler’s innocence. We live in a time of cognitive dissonance, where parents are expected to enroll their two-year-olds in a Spanish immersion program, but God forbid you talk to them about America’s obsession with building walls to shut out the rest of world. It’s not like we expect you to understand geopolitics or immigration law, but we know you understand separation anxiety and what it means to badly want to go home. You may look back at that experience as just another playdate where we met up with friends, took a walk to the city center, and made signs with markers. But we know one day you will learn about this history – the people who suffered, those who tried to do something about it, and those who let it happen while hiding behind their disclaimers. When you ask us whether we showed up for the moment, we will assure you that we did.

Todays’ question for the people:

What are effective ways you’ve introduced young people to complex social topics?

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Three years later, there’s so much I take for granted. I even get irritated by your laughter sometimes (especially when you’re bellyflopping onto me from a piece of furniture you weren’t supposed to climb). I’ve gotten used to your presence. I’ve become obsessed with your future. I’ve grown weary that our past will fade away.

Remember when you used to lay your entire body on my chest while I counted your breaths? The hours oozed by like honey down the side of its jar. We savored each moment, didn’t we? But things move so much faster these days. I look at you and I see a timelapse. I feel like I’m always trying to get you to the next thing, the next place, the next level. I’ve been so focused on your development, but maybe I’m the one who’s changed. 

When I ask other, more seasoned parents about their first weeks, months, and years, they shrug and say, “I don’t even remember that anymore.” One said, “I must’ve wiped it from my mind.” I shudder to imagine all our treasured moments finding this fate. That hike where you chased a flock of seagulls trying to feed them daisy petals. Wiped. How you switch your syllables, calling watermelon “waterlemon” and toothpaste “pootaste.” Wiped. The way you imitate a cat when you’re feeling cuddly, and meow while burying your face into my armpit until you fall into a slumber. All of it, wiped. 

This hypercapitalistic world beckons me to turn fatherhood into a bigger project than it already is. The internet is teeming with blogs, podcasts, and dadfluencers eager to show me how to package this experience into something that can be branded, project-managed, marketed, and monetized. As an artist, I was already speaking of my practice in the language of parenthood long before you came around: calling my projects my “babies,” cultivating a “body” of work, hoping its impact will be “generational.” I began my creative journey as a teenage spoken word poet, scribbling my anxieties and excitements, and reciting them onstage as a form of self-discovery. I used my art to come to terms with who I was as a young man, an Asian American, a person trying to contribute to a rapid world. I learned to harness my most personal insights into 3-minute performance pieces, receive scores for them at competitions, market them for gigs and tours, publish them in books and records. I’ve made a career out of hustling my life experiences.

When you were born, I was so resistant to doing that with our new relationship that I muzzled myself for the first few months, refusing to write, and to simply be. But I can now tell you that I cannot be if I’m not creating. I can also tell you that, despite the gigabyes of photos and videos my phone has accumulated, I still wonder where all our moments have gone. I’ve wrestled with whether to spend time capturing a moment at the expense of missing another. When I finally have time to duck out and write, all I can think about is how much I want to be with you. Child, you are my inspiration, and you are my distraction.

When you turned two, I scrounged around my files, google docs, texts-to-self, and other places where I had managed to jot down a handful of snapshots of early life with you. I printed them for around 50 copies of a zine that I passed along to friends. I had reached peak dad – and also a new peak as a writer.

I don’t have any parenting tips for anyone. I don’t know what writing about this experience more regularly will lead to – if you’ll come across it when you’re older, and if you’ll find it moving or cringe. I don’t know if I’ll find it moving or cringe. I just know that I’m a better person when I’m writing, and I want to be that better person for you.

Todays’ question for the people:

What do you do to preserve your cherished memories?

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