My father never spends money without purpose. If a selfless father purchases extra pastries for his daughter’s enjoyment, buys instruments to gift his daughter the wonders of music, encourages his daughter to earn decent grades so she can achieve her dream job, or pays his daughter’s tuition for the fun of attending a prestigious school, then my father is not a selfless father. Rather, my father lives with a selfish investment in the cultural expectation of filial piety. 

Before high school, I attended Carmel Valley Middle School—a campus littered with scabs of gum stuck to the cement grounds; where kids throw pencils at the ceiling, cheering whenever one punctures the styrofoam, or where kids, tucked in black beanies, oversized sweatshirts, and ripped jeans, swap bags of meth behind the history buildings. My new high school includes two security guards at the front and the back, a stretch of quad-patched evergreen at all corners, and history classrooms with shiny lockers lining the outside and a tint of wisdom reflecting off the alphabetized textbooks on the back bookshelf. My father finances every cent of this upgrade, for he retaliated to complaints about school lunch by slamming his chopsticks against his porcelain bowl one dinner. 

“Why don’t you stop complaining,” he says in Mandarin, “you already use so much money!”

“What I eat for lunch should not be your business!”

“How? Everything you eat comes out of my pockets!”

I lose this argument. Everything comes out of my father’s pockets: the fifteen-year-old wooden desk my elbows lean on, the seat cushion I sit on, and the electricity bill that powers two reused light bulbs above my head. I evade the truth that I should never complain whilst draining my father’s bank account, so I stretch my arm over the dinner table for two bunches of my mother’s roast eggplants, dropping the slices into my bowl of rice, raising a sizzling piece to my mouth. As the eggplant stings my tongue, my father leans forward and says: “Five dollars!”

“For the eggplant?”

“Yes.”

“And how would I pay you?”

“In the future.”

A five-dollar bill drifts to the top of a lofty mountain bulging with dollar bills. I become a speck of sand shadowed by the heap of money: the fees of expensive piano lessons from a Russian teacher that owns three cats, six birds, and who only drinks sparkling water; the cost of the best figure skates in the city, with boots of pure leather and blades so sharp one can trim fingernails with them; tuition for the best private high school in San Diego county. This mountain of money represents the debt I am in to my father, yet I will not pay him back with coins, dollars, and checks. Filial piety does not demand money, but dedication in the form of future love, labor, and time.

My grandmother once told me: 粒粒皆辛苦—you must finish all the rice in your bowl since each grain comes from a farmer’s hard labor. I would lick my porcelain bowls shiny to honor those fields of men, knees drenched in the brown water that leaked from Yangtze River to their rice fields, those men wearing scratchy hay hats which turned their faces red, cursed with hands strained by calluses. My father resembles one of those farmers—one that demands compensation for each bead of sweat that trickles down his spine.

In August of 2019, my father increased my debt to an amount I can not pay off even if I steamed him pork dumplings every night, spent Sundays playing basketball with him at the gym, and visited him every winter break during college.

“Why did you change jobs? Isn’t OPPO very strict? Won’t you be working too much?”

“How else will I pay for your school tuition?” my father responds in Mandarin.

A tethered chain clenches around my father’s ankle, burdening him with project meetings that drone on from noon to six in the evening, lunch at the nearby shopping mall that serves cold noodles which taste like rotten corn, and white hairs. He would cram in his office until the crippling age of sixty—his brittle fingertips tapping at a keyboard, back crooked so that his shoulders slump forward even when he walks—if it meant securing enough money for me to finish my education.

I picture my father signing the new work contract, a paper nailed in front of him by a Chinese man in a crisp black suit at a wooden desk with a fortune cat figurine wagging its paw back and forth on the edge of it. Please sign here if Chenxi Wang, age 47, consents to this business contract. I see my father scratch his right ear as he calculates whether the longer hours will allow him to pick me up from figure skating practice, and he thinks I can cut into my break times and Perhaps I will receive a couple goodnight kisses for that, so he grasps the pen, tilting it at an angle, signing the paper. I can even imagine the pen, a leather black one with a twisty top. I watch the jumbled letters of my father’s name bleed through the piece of paper, imprisoning him, seizing a part of him I must restore.

My father preys on this debt when I run late to school. I chug the milk in my glass cup, scramble across the kitchen for tin foil, slice the foil, wrap my bagel into a messy clump whilst heading for the door, and throw myself into the car. My father glares back.

“You didn’t finish your breakfast again?” he says with a snarl after each Mandarin word.

“I am not that hungry.”

His wrinkles pinch into a thinking expression, his mind probing for stories about his scrappy childhood in Qingdao where he had nothing more than a dirt field for exercise, or accounts of his college life in Nanjing, where he lived off of steamed buns a tiny vendor next to his dorm would sell every evening at six—he scouts for a story that will discipline me to finish my breakfast bagels.

“When I was younger, I was poor. No food, no money. We had bread once or twice a year. I was unlike you, given bread but won’t eat it.”

I see my father dribbling a rubber ball patched with scraps of his old jean leggings, sewn on to cover spots where the ball had torn. My grandmother shouts from a short distance away, and the dirt-swathed, rubber-ball-booting boy scurries through the door of his house, his short black hair poking in different directions. He halts, hypnotized by a slice of bread on the table. He thinks, Gosh, but my birthday is not until three months, and I see his grubby fingers reaching, his mouth gaping, the bread shredded into smaller pieces. The crumbs fall at his feet, leaving none to wrap for later.

Culture assures this shabby little boy–and my father right now–that he will live and eat well. Thousands of Chinese customs concerning mannerisms, dialogue, and beliefs gear my father. He removes his shoes before entering the house. He greets his friends with “Have you eaten yet?” He sneaks bags of sunflower seeds into baseball stadiums. He once rejected four as a jersey number since it sounds like death in Chinese. Another time he revealed to my sister that his rib cage appears sharper than normal because people with the surname Wang have edgier bones. He once found a dish of mother’s duck so flavorful that he drank two cups of Tsingtao beer and offered a thunderous burp, which my mother noted as “a compliment for her flawlessly-Nan-Jing dish.”

Culture dictates that the Chinese daughter must repay her father. I’ll do it, too. I will care about whether the place my father lives snows, to ensure that the stairs never become too slippery, and I will check for a recreational gym nearby so he can shoot hoops on weekends; I will find an 85 Degrees cafe so he can buy his favorite butter buns. I will ship him boxes of vitamins, fish oil pills, and Nature Made diabetes health packs. I will visit every winter break to accompany him and my mother, perhaps to chat about my pursuits in university: whether my new skating coach choreographed a classical or modern program, if I have time to learn Christmas tunes on my guitar, if the nearby Chinese restaurants serve Nanjing duck as well sliced and salted as my mother’s, how well my hand-me-down rice cooker works; I will call my father through WeChat every Chinese New Year, each day of those two weeks, to ask if he braised or steamed the fish that year and how many fifties he slipped in to the red packets. As a final ode to our culture, I will message my father every evening with “粒粒皆辛苦,” reminding him to finish each grain of rice during dinner.

– Katelyn Wang

Author’s Note: This piece explores my personal relationship with my father, coupled with reflections on the cultural expectation of filial piety. I traverse the deep complexities of sacrifice, love, and culture to grasp how a Chinese daughter could possibly repay her father.