So my sister got married yesterday. I got all choked up when she was walking down the aisle, but I fixed that in time to do the second reading. Love is patient, love is kind, yadda yadda. And people only pointed out to me about a DOZEN TIMES that I was next and when are _you_ getting married, Dominic? I suppose I can forgive them for being clueless. I just watched this episode of CSI where this college kid has IM histories showing that he's in a serious sort of relationship with someone, and I just assumed it was some random chick (sorry Kathy), when it turns out it was a guy. Oh well, can't be on top of everything all the time.

Fr. John said he doesn't remember anyone ever using the house on rock gospel reading for a wedding. He gave a great homily, though. It reminds me of how good church can be, versus the mediocre-ness we get at holy name. Huh. I guess I'm a church elitist, too.

So the ceremony went really well, but the banquet had some problems. Lateness being the main thing. Note to self: it's best to assign lots of people to small, easily-managed tasks. If I knew better, I would have gotten someone specifically to distribute the chocolates (for example). There were too many things going on all at once to remember everything.

So dad's older sister is here for a couple days. I had hopes that maybe having his big sister here would shut him up, that he would listen to someone for a change. My hopes were shattered today. See, my dad believes there is only one correct way of looking at the world. There is no such thing as "discussion" in his world. The word exists, but it means talking until you decide you were wrong and agree with him, or not talking and listening to him tell you how wrong you were and how right he is, or some progression thereof.

The communists are evil in his mind. I do not deny that they are and/or were evil in real life, but in his mind they are unequivocally, legendarily evil. The exchange rate was 1,000 rmb to a dollar, one can assert. No, it was 10,000 to a dollar, he will insist--for half an hour. People were supposed to, and some did, receive their personal belongings back after the labor camps, one asserts. No, that is impossible, he will insist. And on and on.

It's easy to believe him when he's the only one talking. Surely he knows what he's talking about, he's lived it. But then you remember that he's equally insistent on things that you know are completely wrong. People were incarcerated on Angel Island for months, sometimes years. No, no, that is impossible, this is the United States, it couldn't have been more than a couple weeks. No, it's true, you insist. No! Who told you that? Leftists? You can't believe everything you hear, you know. Lies, they are lying. You tell him: it's historical fact! You can check the records. No! Wrong! Then you tell him nothing, because by then you've given up.

It happened with 姑媽, too. First day she gets here, he starts talking about his dead brother. He was stupid, he says. Not only was he stupid, he refused to listen and learn. I'm afraid my father's come to the same conclusion about my aunt, because she won't listen and learn from his One True Experience. I've been impressed by her performance, though. They've been yelling at, i mean with, each other on and off since lunchtime. Of course, she gets to leave on Wednesday.

I don't understand it. Is my father crazy? Will I have mental problems some day? Or is he just some kind of woman-hater? Or is it all simply the product of a traditional chinese education?

I can write about this here on the World Wide Web because these people will never ever read this blog, and even if they do, we're talking about events that happened 50+ years ago. Like my grandpa, who's dead, so naturally he can't refute anything that any of his chlidren say about him. My dad says that his dad's top priority was the welfare of his children--仁至義盡, as he put it. And the evidence for this? When he was in his second year of high school (高中), his father sent someone to him to urge him to skip school and go to Hong Kong. Similarly, he tried to arrange for my aunt to move off to the US. This meant that his father _knew_ about the forthcoming calamity that was to befall mainland china (the human-induced famine of the 60s) and tried to get his children out of harm's way. Whether or not his children listened to him was a different matter.

This, of course, tells me less about my grandfather (he was psychic?) than it does about what my father thinks about fatherhood. How much is he projecting from himself onto his own father? He's said to me on more than one occasion how hard he's tried to be a good father and make us do the Right Thing (things like owning our own businesses and investing money, but that's beside the point). I'm sure he actually believes he's tried with all his might and done all that he can to be a good father, but for me it falls short. It reminds me of when we read Story of the Stone in class and we talked about the traditional Confucian father (like Bao-yu's father), distant and strict and somehow vaguely in charge of the child's moral uprightness. Is that all it takes to be a model father? Give lots of lectures and then when they're grown up complain about how you bust your ass for a bunch of ungrateful little--

What really gets me is how his logic and arguments never apply to himself. A year or two ago, he came up with a new argument (which he probably read in the newspaper somewhere): one of the most harmful ideas in history is that of nationalism, or love of country. The Communists used it to destroy China, etc. But he seems completely oblivious to that _exact_ _same_ _thing_ happening in our own country. After the 9/11 attack, he stuck a (cheap) US flag out the window of his car. There's still a flag stuck into the alarm box on the front side of the house. Or he always complains about how people always go off on tangents during "discussions" with him, and then he'll spend five minutes telling you why you shouldn't compare apples and oranges and why such comparison is bad, illustrating by picking up actual examples of said fruits or other conveniently placed round objects and explaining in great detail that what you just did was take an apple (shows you his right hand) and compare it to an orange (shows you his left hand), which is certainly not something you should do.

So anyway, my point is... Not even my aunt can talk sense into him, which leads me to conclude that no one can. OK, I'm done now.