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“Cuatro kilos, quinientos veinte.” I heard it so often in my childhood. That was one of my earliest identifiers: the story of my extra-sized, rare-in-the-sea-of-smaller-Peruvian-newborns birth weight. My father spouted it with pride, in any non-sequitur transition he could orchestrate.
4.520 kg. It is as if I had been assigned a serial number upon coming out into this world. I liked the way he would group the numbers. Why veinte? Why did you have to mention the thousandth decimal if it was just a zero? It just has a nice ring to it, I guess. A quick search on the Internet yields a conversion table that puts 4.520kg at 9lbs 15oz.
I think of the imposition of being almost 10 pounds – the imposition on my mother’s petite frame when it came time to giving birth – that early Tuesday morning – to such a hefty baby, the daughter of her big Argentine husband.
The day after I was born, my father stood in front of the large glass span separating the hospital corridor from the multiple cribs of newborns. We have all seen scenes like these in movies, especially old films – proud mothers and fathers lovingly beholding their children from afar. He said he was looking on as I slept, and he noticed a couple talking in low voices about me. They had been watching their baby boy when they noticed me in an adjacent crib. “Look at the size of that baby!” was the hushed exclamation. “She looks like she is about 6 months old.” It filled him with joy to have me confused for an older baby. They went on to deliberate for a while and came up with the scenario that the reason such a grown baby would be in the hospital again was because there was some illness as the cause. At this point, he could not stand the over-boiling pleasure any longer; he announced, with a measured and deliberate cadence: “That is my daughter, and she was born yesterday.” My father would tell that story, savoring all the details, and letting out a jovial, deep laughter.
To understand the angle, you have to try to put yourself in his big shoes. He was the King of the Hyperbole and oversized, over-puffed things were the domain in which he lived. He was the type of person that would announce with patriotic pride that Argentina was so great and had so much amazing beef that there were four cows per each citizen! The attributes he found to be noteworthy would have been lost on most of us.
I am his physiognomic carbon copy. His genes so strongly doused on me that you cannot even see any of my Chinese heritage – as you can in my three older siblings – because my face greets onlookers with his exactly almond-shaped and hazel-hued eyes. Then there is my sizable nose. I am basically a female mini, but not-so-mini version of him, and since, as I have heard around, noses keep growing throughout our lifetimes, mine is still well on its way to someday looking exactly like his.
There is a heavy burden of being loved by someone so troubled.
My father created for me a magical world filled with afternoon surprises with boxes of fresh meringues bought at the dainty and wonderful Swiss bakery in Lima and of bedtime installments of a fairy tale that he created on the spot each night. The main character he had crafted for me was a white horse named Nube Blanca. Nube Blanca would solve mysteries, cheering up everyone in his path. My father’s imagination would design spaces, from exotic lands to specific rooms, and suit up characters in a wonderful, ever-yielding wardrobe. You know the expression ‘(one’s) head is going to explode’? That is the actual feeling I would have when my dad would grace my multiple pleas with a 'yes' to telling me another episode of Nube Blanca’s tales.
But, my father could as masterfully create as destroy. It is like that scene in The Fountainhead when Gary Cooper – or I should say, Howard Roark – detonates the dynamite to disintegrate his architectural masterpiece. In his inner turmoil and struggles with his mental illness, I could watch my dad explode his world on a weekly basis. I have seen him turn on me, and turn on my siblings and mother, and I have even seen him turn on himself. I remember him thrown on the parquet floor, his spread fingers grasping in arcs over a wide pool of his own tears. His desolate words, “No somos nada. No somos nada....” We are nothing.
In his roulette wheel of grief and angst, it was just a matter of the who. Who would be the recipient that day, that moment, of the oppression and the abuse that he felt? Who would quiet the river of muck that was dormant and only kept at bay by his creativity?
My sister told me that I once grabbed a heavy, glass flower vase and stood squarely in front of him protecting her – she, six years my senior. He was about to hit her. I was only about 9 years old. I said with authority, “You will never hit my sister again!” She says that day shook him up. He retreated. She says, and I give anything for this to be true, that things got better after that.
So this is the person I have to reconcile in my memory. My father, who passed away when I was 23 years old, and who I will love forever, no matter what. Yes, there is a heavy burden to being the pride and joy of someone like him. There is much weight to being someone’s expectation. Please don’t make me into the put all your 4.520kg of eggs in one basket.
But maybe I served my purpose. Maybe we, his family, provided reprieve from the darkness – in the births and the birthdays and the bedtimes, but also in the instinctual, unafraid push back to the terror that roamed within him. There was a soul there that needed to be rescued, and sometimes because of Love, it was.
One day, on my 8th birthday, I got home to lots of excitement and my mom and dad happily shouting, “Go see! Nube Blanca is in the backyard! Nube Blanca is in the backyard!” My child’s heart raced as I ran to see the….horse? I turned the corner and stopped just short of the grass, my shoes barely gripped a sudden halt on the terrazzo patio. There in the middle of the green yard was a perfect, white bunny with a fat, orange satin ribbon adorning his neck. It could have been an awkward moment, but even at 8, I understood the feasibility and logistics of keeping a horse in the middle of this suburb of Lima. Yes, a bunny was more our speed.
I loved that rabbit so much, even to the point of realizing months later, that the coastal climate wasn’t warm enough for him to thrive and that I would have to say goodbye to him one afternoon as he made his way to the Andean town of Huaraz, where my grandmother had her small farm. Nube Blanca became the patriarch of many, many descendants, some of which my grandma sent back to Lima to serve as fancy dinner fare. Let’s just say, that didn’t go over very well with me. In my childhood dramatics, I remember running out of the kitchen, calling Hila, our nanny/second-mother and cook, a murderer. Yikes. Never having lived with the farm philosophy, this was my early introduction to the struggle of what is a pet and what is food? Then there was the time that I went to visit my grandma and there was a brand new grouping of bunnies just born. I played with those little white cotton balls for so many hours, carefully carrying them to my room and placing them over the bedspreads. That night no one could sleep for the itching, because the sweet white tufts of cuteness carried with them a generous supply of fleas that were now roaming all over the beds in my grandma’s house!
Nube Blanca’s shield – the horse my father conjured up for me during pajama-clad nights and then the bunny that sweetened my childhood days – was a light that kept on strong for many years to come.
Something miraculous happened in my childhood. The one soul that embodied the pain and suffering in our family’s midst was the one that gave me the devices to be strong and feel wonder outside and beyond the things that I would experience because of him. He gifted me the antidote against the dark sides of his psyche.
My dad once told me to look up at the sky and recognize Las Tres Marias, the legendary constellation feature I now know is Orion’s Belt. He said, “Wherever you are, whenever you look up in the night sky and see Las Tres Marias, know I will be there watching over you, to protect you.” He managed somehow to shelter me with light – in the moments that he could muster clarity – so that I could endure anything.
El Día Que Me Quieras - performed by Carlos Gardel and Rosita Moreno
(scene from the film El Día Que Me Quieras, 1935)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDvppm3ivjU
4.520 kg. It is as if I had been assigned a serial number upon coming out into this world. I liked the way he would group the numbers. Why veinte? Why did you have to mention the thousandth decimal if it was just a zero? It just has a nice ring to it, I guess. A quick search on the Internet yields a conversion table that puts 4.520kg at 9lbs 15oz.
I think of the imposition of being almost 10 pounds – the imposition on my mother’s petite frame when it came time to giving birth – that early Tuesday morning – to such a hefty baby, the daughter of her big Argentine husband.
The day after I was born, my father stood in front of the large glass span separating the hospital corridor from the multiple cribs of newborns. We have all seen scenes like these in movies, especially old films – proud mothers and fathers lovingly beholding their children from afar. He said he was looking on as I slept, and he noticed a couple talking in low voices about me. They had been watching their baby boy when they noticed me in an adjacent crib. “Look at the size of that baby!” was the hushed exclamation. “She looks like she is about 6 months old.” It filled him with joy to have me confused for an older baby. They went on to deliberate for a while and came up with the scenario that the reason such a grown baby would be in the hospital again was because there was some illness as the cause. At this point, he could not stand the over-boiling pleasure any longer; he announced, with a measured and deliberate cadence: “That is my daughter, and she was born yesterday.” My father would tell that story, savoring all the details, and letting out a jovial, deep laughter.
To understand the angle, you have to try to put yourself in his big shoes. He was the King of the Hyperbole and oversized, over-puffed things were the domain in which he lived. He was the type of person that would announce with patriotic pride that Argentina was so great and had so much amazing beef that there were four cows per each citizen! The attributes he found to be noteworthy would have been lost on most of us.
I am his physiognomic carbon copy. His genes so strongly doused on me that you cannot even see any of my Chinese heritage – as you can in my three older siblings – because my face greets onlookers with his exactly almond-shaped and hazel-hued eyes. Then there is my sizable nose. I am basically a female mini, but not-so-mini version of him, and since, as I have heard around, noses keep growing throughout our lifetimes, mine is still well on its way to someday looking exactly like his.
There is a heavy burden of being loved by someone so troubled.
My father created for me a magical world filled with afternoon surprises with boxes of fresh meringues bought at the dainty and wonderful Swiss bakery in Lima and of bedtime installments of a fairy tale that he created on the spot each night. The main character he had crafted for me was a white horse named Nube Blanca. Nube Blanca would solve mysteries, cheering up everyone in his path. My father’s imagination would design spaces, from exotic lands to specific rooms, and suit up characters in a wonderful, ever-yielding wardrobe. You know the expression ‘(one’s) head is going to explode’? That is the actual feeling I would have when my dad would grace my multiple pleas with a 'yes' to telling me another episode of Nube Blanca’s tales.
But, my father could as masterfully create as destroy. It is like that scene in The Fountainhead when Gary Cooper – or I should say, Howard Roark – detonates the dynamite to disintegrate his architectural masterpiece. In his inner turmoil and struggles with his mental illness, I could watch my dad explode his world on a weekly basis. I have seen him turn on me, and turn on my siblings and mother, and I have even seen him turn on himself. I remember him thrown on the parquet floor, his spread fingers grasping in arcs over a wide pool of his own tears. His desolate words, “No somos nada. No somos nada....” We are nothing.
In his roulette wheel of grief and angst, it was just a matter of the who. Who would be the recipient that day, that moment, of the oppression and the abuse that he felt? Who would quiet the river of muck that was dormant and only kept at bay by his creativity?
My sister told me that I once grabbed a heavy, glass flower vase and stood squarely in front of him protecting her – she, six years my senior. He was about to hit her. I was only about 9 years old. I said with authority, “You will never hit my sister again!” She says that day shook him up. He retreated. She says, and I give anything for this to be true, that things got better after that.
So this is the person I have to reconcile in my memory. My father, who passed away when I was 23 years old, and who I will love forever, no matter what. Yes, there is a heavy burden to being the pride and joy of someone like him. There is much weight to being someone’s expectation. Please don’t make me into the put all your 4.520kg of eggs in one basket.
But maybe I served my purpose. Maybe we, his family, provided reprieve from the darkness – in the births and the birthdays and the bedtimes, but also in the instinctual, unafraid push back to the terror that roamed within him. There was a soul there that needed to be rescued, and sometimes because of Love, it was.
One day, on my 8th birthday, I got home to lots of excitement and my mom and dad happily shouting, “Go see! Nube Blanca is in the backyard! Nube Blanca is in the backyard!” My child’s heart raced as I ran to see the….horse? I turned the corner and stopped just short of the grass, my shoes barely gripped a sudden halt on the terrazzo patio. There in the middle of the green yard was a perfect, white bunny with a fat, orange satin ribbon adorning his neck. It could have been an awkward moment, but even at 8, I understood the feasibility and logistics of keeping a horse in the middle of this suburb of Lima. Yes, a bunny was more our speed.
I loved that rabbit so much, even to the point of realizing months later, that the coastal climate wasn’t warm enough for him to thrive and that I would have to say goodbye to him one afternoon as he made his way to the Andean town of Huaraz, where my grandmother had her small farm. Nube Blanca became the patriarch of many, many descendants, some of which my grandma sent back to Lima to serve as fancy dinner fare. Let’s just say, that didn’t go over very well with me. In my childhood dramatics, I remember running out of the kitchen, calling Hila, our nanny/second-mother and cook, a murderer. Yikes. Never having lived with the farm philosophy, this was my early introduction to the struggle of what is a pet and what is food? Then there was the time that I went to visit my grandma and there was a brand new grouping of bunnies just born. I played with those little white cotton balls for so many hours, carefully carrying them to my room and placing them over the bedspreads. That night no one could sleep for the itching, because the sweet white tufts of cuteness carried with them a generous supply of fleas that were now roaming all over the beds in my grandma’s house!
Nube Blanca’s shield – the horse my father conjured up for me during pajama-clad nights and then the bunny that sweetened my childhood days – was a light that kept on strong for many years to come.
Something miraculous happened in my childhood. The one soul that embodied the pain and suffering in our family’s midst was the one that gave me the devices to be strong and feel wonder outside and beyond the things that I would experience because of him. He gifted me the antidote against the dark sides of his psyche.
My dad once told me to look up at the sky and recognize Las Tres Marias, the legendary constellation feature I now know is Orion’s Belt. He said, “Wherever you are, whenever you look up in the night sky and see Las Tres Marias, know I will be there watching over you, to protect you.” He managed somehow to shelter me with light – in the moments that he could muster clarity – so that I could endure anything.
El Día Que Me Quieras - performed by Carlos Gardel and Rosita Moreno
(scene from the film El Día Que Me Quieras, 1935)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDvppm3ivjU