. . .

. . .
is what I hear in my house.
. . .
Silence.
. . .
I hear the rice pot set by my mother murmuring the words "Never go hungry". The smell permeates upstairs into my room where I sit glued to the monitor screen.
I hear my father's tool banging on the vocal chords underneath a decrepit car from one of his clients. It's cold and it's raining. It looks like he's alone at his shop today.
I hear my eldest brother scrambling through the refrigerator in the kitchen before eating 11 PM dinners by himself, standing up. His hands glued to the remote. His eyes glued to the television screen.
. . .
Silence.
. . . . . .

I come back. My room had changed. A constantly changing and rearranging museum. The order of how my books are stacked on my shelf near my closet against the radiant lime green wall have changed. I know my father had been going through my belongings. The silence had caused him to go through his son's belongings to decipher who is own son is. Who is his son? Who is this boy who he calls his?

I can imagine him flipping through the pages of my certificates, autobiographies, reflections, pictures mirroring what I had done in high school and been doing at Berkeley. My internships, my summer programs, my high school involvement, Key Club, graduation, Reach!, SASC, Let's Rise. Everything, not through spoken words, but through text and pictures. I can imagine him struggling to define his son through foreign words he had never seen before, through foreign people who had never seen or met before. Why is this? Because I've kept my home reality and outside reality separate. Silence.

Funny how I've been doing the same for my eldest brother. Dusty. I try to understand my brother by checking up on what kind of books he's been reading, movies he's been watching. I see it's always quite organized. Dusty still. I wonder who you are, Thanh. Silence.