Why I Tried to Save My Father, My Dictator

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/opinion/undocumented-immigrant-father.html

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My father, an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador, used to take me to water parks every summer back when he could drive. He did it because commercials for water parks were featured prominently on local television and they depicted children acting carefree and wild and I was not carefree or wild and it weighed on him, so he insisted I try.

I did not know how to swim. He tried to teach me but I was terrified of the water. My father is prone to anger and so he is not a good teacher. When he made me practice long division at home and I got answers wrong, he’d rip up the pages about an inch from my face while telling me I was stupid. He took that approach to swimming lessons, and after a few minutes, he’d usually just storm off and my mother would tell me to ignore him.

My fear of water and inability to swim did not stop my father from taking me to water parks. He liked for us to go on the rides with long, dark tubes that twisted into crazy loops at high speed and then spat you out into a pool. Those rides had long lines, and the entire way up I would have a pit in my stomach and I pleaded with him not to make me go. He insisted it would be fun, the whole point was my having fun. He’d go first, then wait at the bottom.

At the top of the ride, when I was standing barefoot on a warm wooden landing and there was a dark tunnel in front of me filled with a fast current of water rushing into the pitch black, the people who worked at the ride would ask me if I was OK going down. But I didn’t want to face my father if I gave up, so I lay down in the tube, crossed my arms, counted to three, and pushed myself down. And I remember the next moment of awareness, which is being spit into a pool, and sinking.

I always sank. I knew I could stand, but my body was leaden and I fell at the wrong angle. And my father always reached down and brought me to air, my long black hair stuck to my face. I was never underwater long enough to come up gasping for air, but I can still feel the taste of chlorine in my lungs. I miss the taste of chlorinated pool water.

And I miss this dynamic, of my father putting me in a manufactured scene of crisis in which I would feel helpless but at the same time be perfectly safe. I felt like I was going to die, but I would not die. I think the lesson was: He was my father, and he was God. As long as I would panic and sink, and he could save me, he would always have that place.

This is the seminal memory of my childhood, the one I return to these days as I have the recurring thought my father will die in this pandemic, which follows a panic I’ve had since I was a teenager that he was going to die in a hate crime, stabbed coming home from work, robbed of $10 in cash and his fake leather wallet, or pushed off the subway platform. Once you see your father as vulnerable, you don’t forget it. So you remember the taste of chlorine and the breath your father gifted you as he lifted you out of the water every summer as a child.

The night my father started dying in 2002, I greeted him in the doorway after he came home from work, to give him a kiss hello and ask for his blessing. I was 13. He collapsed onto me to cry into my neck. My father the dictator, heaving full-throated sobs. He handed me a letter saying that New York State had suspended driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants as part of a post-Sept. 11 national security measure. My father had just lost his job as a taxi driver. He had also lost his only official form of ID.

After my father lost his job as a taxi driver, he found a job as a deliveryman at a restaurant down in the financial district. In the mornings, my father would deliver breakfast to offices in the area. A blueberry muffin and black coffee; two cranberry scones and three coffees, two cream, one sugar. Because the deliveries were so small, sometimes he didn’t get a tip. Sometimes he was told to keep the change — a quarter.

My father has been working in restaurants for almost 20 years and he is usually the oldest person in the kitchen. Out of respect, the younger guys all call him Don. After 15 years working at one place, he had an affair with a co-worker and my family found out. My mother asked him to find somewhere else to work so he went to a Latinx job agency. By then he was in his 50s and aging out of manual labor.

From the job agency, my dad started texting me blurry cellphone pictures with messages like this:

Further proof that we’re not a burden.

Who says you’re a burden? I responded.

It’s hard to see men like that not get jobs. We’re invisible because of the circumstances that force us to be here at the agency … old age … illness … It’s too much to think about.

I hope they have children who can take care of them, I replied.

But what I meant to say is: I hope they have a child like me. Since my first book advance a few years ago, I’ve been able to pay my parents’ bills here and there, sometimes on the phone, my credit card in hand, talking to the person sent to disconnect their gas or electricity. Now that both of them are out of work because of the coronavirus and I have prohibited my aging father from seeking dangerous gig work like deliveries or cleaning, I provide for both of them, hemorrhaging every dollar I’ve ever saved. I talk to both of them every day to keep their spirits high. I am a professional undocumented immigrant’s daughter.

I never learned to swim. The farthest I had ever ventured into the ocean was to my knees, screaming the whole while. But by last summer, our roles had so profoundly reversed and his self-esteem was so low that I wondered if I could give that back to him, this ability to save me. I invited him to come spend an afternoon at the beach in the middle of July precisely with the purpose of teaching me how to swim.

We went to Lighthouse Point on Long Island Sound, not far from downtown New Haven, Conn. I like this beach because there are always black and brown families fishing or building sand castles there, proudly being alive, and there is just something about the ocean air perfuming dark bodies that makes me want to live another day.

My father told me the first step was being able to stand in deep water. Your legs have to be apart just so, and you use your arms to stabilize yourself. He asked me to shift my weight from foot to foot as if I was on a bumpy subway ride. He grabbed my hand and we went deeper into the ocean until the water was up to my chest, the deepest I had ever gone. “Next, you float,” he told me. He grabbed my hands and asked me to go on my stomach, extend my legs as far as they would go, and kick. He assured me he would not let go.

I held on to his hands so tightly I am sure I bruised them. He did not let go. But I did not float. “Your body is determined to sink,” my father announced as he tried to hold me up by the stomach. Both of us realized at the same time that this was a true thing about me, and we tried to change it until finally our limbs gave out and we returned to shore.

My mom was on a beach blanket, her back to the sun. She didn’t turn around to look at my father and he didn’t look at her. Now that I think of it, they didn’t speak to each other at all that day except for when they awkwardly waded into the water together and stood some space apart, looking like two dead fish in the ocean together, stagnant but afloat.

A couple of months after that outing, I asked my father to leave our home in Queens because his relationship with my mother, after 30 years — 29 of which had been spent in America, together and illegally — had become toxic. He left home one night while my mother and younger brother were at church.

Shortly before I asked him to leave, my father had told my brother: “I am tired of living just for you and your sister. It is my turn to be happy now.”

He had handled it the wrong way, totaled some people’s lives in his wake, but he was right. It was his turn to be happy.

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the author of “The Undocumented Americans,” from which this essay is adapted.

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