A Taste of Home

My dad once told me, “The greatest regret of my life is coming to the US.”

  He spoke while tossing frozen chunks of fruit and tapping his secret ingredient, a dollop of avocado, into a blender. When he handed me a chilled cup of the creamy smoothie, I savored my first mouthful and thought back to our summer trip to Taiwan, when the two of us visited a building that housed a family I had only ever heard stories of. It was my dad’s childhood home – an unremarkable hole in the wall tucked between apartments that groaned with age. Raindrops splattered onto the hot asphalt where we stood, its vapor acidifying the scent of Taipei’s smog and burning my nose. My dad held up his phone and nudged me to stand under the tropical canopy blanketing the house, where it was dry. My seventeen-year-old self rolled my eyes and walked over, forcing a smile for his photo.

  Then, I heard a voice. 

“你们是谁?” Who are you two? 

I turned. Standing at the doorway was the house's current inhabitant with his eyebrow raised. My dad replied, “I’m visiting my childhood home for the first time since leaving for America.” Before we knew it, we were whisked inside, and the other occupants of the house invited us onto comfy seats, offering us hot water. As the Taiwanese hosts surrounded us with smiles and crinkled eyes, I struggled to comprehend the Taipei dialect that soon infused the air around me. Through the chatter, my dad exchanged stories of childhood street vendors who sold icy drinks on sweltering summers, and the pavement outside his school that he rubbed his palms on until calluses formed, to numb the sting of his teacher’s ruler. After thirty years of cultural and language barriers starving him of ever feeling like he belonged, I saw my dad’s frown lines finally soften. Encased in the comforting memories of his past, it seemed like he was finally home.

The next day, with the nostalgic warmth of his childhood home still fresh, I followed my dad as he made a beeline for Taiwan’s Army Academy. I wiped beads of sweat off my forehead and squinted my eyes, trying to decipher the proud golden Chinese characters: 陆军专科学校, that hung over the gate and concrete wall that separated the city from the military base. My dad took a photo and said, “The gate looks just how I remember.” I realized we were standing in the same backdrop of a framed photo that sat by my dad’s home computer: a photo of his twenty-year-old self wearing his lieutenant's uniform. Hearing our noise, two guards appeared from inside and probed us. My dad boasted, “I served as an officer here, and used to command soldiers like you.” He took a proud step towards the gate, and asked, “Can I come inside?” The guards stood motionless and silent, glancing sideways at each other. Hearing no response, my dad repeated his request, and added,

“You know you used to salute me, right?” 

The guards just shook their heads and marched off. My dad, not thinking much of it, shrugged and asked me to take his photo outside the gate. I held my phone up. Through the screen, the guards’ backs shrunk to dots, and the gray walls towered over my dad’s helpless figure: an agonizing separation between him and the proudest fragment of his past.

Upon hearing the slurp of my dad finishing his smoothie, I transported myself back home to the kitchen. He licked his straw and smiled, saying, “This is why I want to go back to Taiwan. I want to spend my life selling homemade smoothies as a street vendor.” I didn’t respond. Stabbing my straw into a lone piece of mango in my cup, the image of the apathetic guards brushing my dad aside seared into my mind like hot iron. I started to wonder if he is only chasing an illusion: the illusion of a life lived by a man who never existed — a fragile life, one planted by the past, nourished by nostalgia, with which its innocent existence is threatened by reality’s trampling.