How to Hold a Contradiction
This is (hopefully) in style of memoir writing — my goal for this essay is to feel like it could be a part of a larger collection of essays. This personal essay was completed for WRIT-340: Advanced Writing for Editors, Writers, and Publishers in Spring 2026.
The essay uncovers the complicated aspects of my relationship with my father, and attempts to analyze the truths of my coming-of-age within the lens of immigration and family relationships.
The piece runs just over 5,200 words.
My father’s love can be measured in waiting.
He waited at kitchen tables, beside bowls of soup cooling into a skin, until my mother’s pharmacist shift ended. He waited in the stands of my swim meets, on the days he chose to come. He waited through my silences—the ones I held when he asked, again, why a math test had come back marked with an 89 instead of a 100—and when I finally answered, he met me sometimes with patience, mostly with a rage that made the air in our colonial-style house in Massachusetts feel electrically charged.
I used to think that waiting was the proof. The reheated soup, the table set twice, the man sitting in the kitchen at ten p.m. with the stove light on—these were the shapes love took in our house, because love was never spoken there. Love was logistical. It was rides to swim practice and late-night Staples runs for procrastinated projects. It was bags of candy bought from Costco after one mention in the kitchen. It was a husband clearing his wife’s windshield at six a.m. after a snowstorm so she could drive to the pharmacy in an already-warm car. It was waiting for someone to come home.
Then, the summer after my sophomore year of college, I learned my father had cheated on my mother. But this isn’t really about that. It is about everything I had to rearrange around it.
About one in four children in the United States lives with at least one immigrant parent—roughly 19 million kids, according to a 2024 Migration Policy Institute analysis. Researchers who study these households describe a paradox: closeness and distance occupying the same kitchen table, admiration and resentment passing each other in the hallway. I grew up in that paradox.
I did not really associate the paradox with any sort of name. But in our house, it had a sound, or a lack thereof. It sounded like silence.
My parents never fought loudly. They absorbed conflict and stored it in the same place they stored old immigration papers and faded photographs. In immigrant families, psychologists note, conflict is often buried to preserve stability. I grew up learning that instinct without realizing it. We didn’t hide things because we didn’t love each other; we hid them because we did.
My father’s silence could be peaceful, until it wasn’t. When it wasn’t, it happened fast—a sharp question about homework, a sudden anger at a glass left sweating on the marble countertop, the way a small mistake became proof of something larger: laziness, disrespect, failure. He broke the occasional dish. I can remember two instances of whole watermelons shattered, their red, wet juices and seeds running down the kitchen wall; my brother Adam had angered him somehow.
The fights, when they came, were nearly always over small things. A pair of shoes dropped haphazardly in the wrong corner of the entryway. A B-plus on a quiz Adam had forgotten to mention. The inciting object was never really the object; it was just permission.
Afterward, the house would go quiet. Not empty, exactly, but deprived of movement.
My older sister Sara had a way of sensing the shift before the rest of us, like she could feel the pressure change in a room. She would lower the volume on our shared iPad before our father even said anything. Adam, my twin brother, born two minutes after me, reacted differently. If our father’s footsteps grew heavier in the hallway, Adam would drift upstairs and shut his door, even though our father always barged in anyway. I stayed where I was. Being the favorite meant I was often the one expected to absorb his sour mood.
I learned early that fear is not always loud. Sometimes it looks like sitting very still at the dinner table, spoon poised mid-air, waiting for the tone of your father’s voice to decide whether the night will end in laughter or silence.
Sometimes, it looks like loving him anyway.
I was a daddy’s girl until I wasn’t.
I still have the photo of a five-year-old Julia donning a hot pink, sparkly T-shirt, “Daddy’s Girl” embroidered in sequins under a crown. My mother bought it. I wore it like an inheritance. Sara and Adam did not get matching shirts. By elementary school, the three of us had learned that our father was harder to read than the T-shirt suggested.
Until I was nine, my father used to sit beside me at the dinner table long after Sara and Adam had left for the living room, and spoon-feed me. It wasn’t that I couldn’t feed myself. Every night, I waited for him to perch on the oak kitchen stool next to me, and I asked question after question about his life in Vietnam. He spun fables where I was descended from Vietnam’s short-lived Ho dynasty, making me a long-lost princess. He told me how he made it through Thailand and Laos, how he learned English in Manila by memorizing children’s nursery rhymes, how he picked up culinary specialties from each country he passed through. He told me about meeting my mother in a chemistry class at UMass Boston—a class he was taking because he was bored, not because his information sciences degree required it. He told me about working in the same circles as the North End’s Italian mafia when he was a line cook helping put my mother through pharmacy school.
Distant family members would visit and coo over how much I looked like him. Con anh nhìn giống y mầy, they told my father. Your child looks exactly like you.
Being the favorite is its own kind of loneliness. It sounds like winning, until you realize it means you are the closest one to the fire, the first to get burned.
When my father was gentle with me, it felt like proof that tenderness existed inside him. I was the evidence his ire wasn’t the whole story. But when he was cruel to Adam, or when the house went cold after one of his outbursts, I carried an extra, complicated shame: the shame of being spared. I would sit in my room and listen to Adam’s footsteps downstairs, the way he shuffled like he was trying not to take up space, and I would feel traitorous.
Sara, older and braver than either of us, sometimes fought back. Their voices would travel up the wooden stairs while Adam and I paced the hallway, waiting for the shouting to soften. When it ended, Sara would emerge with bloodshot eyes and an almost defiant calm—a war not won, not lost, but some progress obtained.
Favoritism can feel like a prize right up until you notice how much vigilance it requires. His expectations landed on me with extra force. I watched his moods because I knew how quickly his love could curdle into disappointment. And I inherited him in public. The resemblance felt prophetic. I hated the parts of him in me that made other people flinch—the quick temper, the clipped sentences when I was hurt, the heavy quiet when I was angry. I worried I would become him.
And then, sometimes, I hoped I would.
Because he was brilliant. Because he loved learning for its own sake. Because he could walk into any bookstore and find something riveting in ten minutes. Because he believed, stubbornly and without irony, that education could change your life.
Swimming was the most honest language we shared.
In butterfly, your head rises and falls in strict intervals: breath, water, breath, water. Above the surface, there is noise—the cheering of the audience, arms slapping against the turbulent chlorinated waves, your father’s voice somewhere in the bleachers. Below it, there is muffling, suspension, the illusion of calm.
In butterfly, you do not get to decide when to breathe. The stroke decides for you. The body rises because it must, then disappears again.
My childhood moved like that too, in and out of sound. My father’s anger would rise and puncture the surface, then retreat. I think that is why I still associate love with the discipline of surfacing.
He loved that swimming had a number attached. That improvement could be measured in fractions of a second, that discipline produced evidence. We resented him for it. We resented being dragged to the pool almost every day, hair frosted over in winter, shoulders aching, fingers wrinkled and raw. Some afternoons, I would press my goggles harder into my face so the tears wouldn’t float out and betray me. Chlorine is good at hiding things.
The worst part wasn’t even practice; it was the meets. I never knew which days he would come. He had put us through so much practice—had driven us, had paid for the hefty club team membership three times over, had made us go in sickness or health—and yet, some days, he was in the bleachers and some days he wasn’t, and I could never tell why. I still don’t know if he was measuring our prowess or just thought we needed something to do.
What I do know is that I hated the moment I stepped onto the starting block and realized he had decided to watch. I hated the knowledge that he could see me—not just my speed, but my will. I hated losing in front of him.
Sometimes, he didn’t say anything afterward, which was worse than criticism. Other times, he would say one small thing—a comment about my turn, my kick, my lack of focus—and I would carry it for weeks.
I was a decent swimmer because he was hard on me. I still don’t know how to feel about that. Even now, when someone compliments my work ethic or my discipline, I think about the pool and my throat tightens.
The pressure was never limited to sports. A “bad” grade was any grade that fell below what he thought I was capable of, which was always higher than what I actually was. I could not come home with a sub-90 score without feeling suicidal. Even in high school, as I accumulated AP classes and leadership roles, a B felt catastrophic. I would cry before getting home, because I could already hear the conversation: the question that was never just a question, the disappointment that was never just about school.
When I was younger, I had temper tantrums when I didn’t get what I wanted. Later, that anger reorganized itself into something quieter and more dangerous: an intense disappointment about my own performance. I would hyperventilate in class over points lost on a test. Small failures brought thoughts about death, because he had conditioned me to believe a small failure was the beginning of a much larger one. I was taking after him.
Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the U.S. after 1975 reported significant trauma exposure, and studies of war survivors show elevated rates of PTSD and anxiety decades after resettlement. My father never talked about trauma. He talked about work. He talked about work in the language of endurance and self-fashioning—books and school and discipline, because those were the things he could control.
For a long time, this was the story I told myself: that everything severe in him belonged to some larger design. Everything he committed against us, everything he committed for us, was all part of his devotion, however misshapen.
There is a particular way fathers, especially immigrant fathers, carry themselves that feels almost mythological when you are a child. They are translators of two worlds, archivists of histories you can’t remember, architects of futures you don’t yet understand.
My father was not just an immigrant. He was a boy who grew up during the Vietnam War, who watched neighbors disappear and cousins leave and never return. One day, he became one of those cousins. He was a teenager who carried his entire life in a satchel smaller than a suitcase. He was a man who worked double shifts in Boston kitchens so my mother could finish pharmacy school. He was a man who treated education like his own private religion.
And he was a father who sometimes yelled in ways that left dents you couldn’t see.
I did not understand, then, that he was trying to invent something he had never been given.
My father did not grow up with a father. His own died when my dad was seven or eight, killed fighting in the war. All my father has of him is a painted portrait, not even a photograph. The man in the portrait is younger than my father is now. He will always stay that way, frozen in oil paint with eyes that look past you. He wasn’t even forty.
When I was younger, I treated that portrait like a myth. I didn’t understand death as permanence; I saw it as distance. I knew my father’s father was “gone,” but the word didn’t land with weight. It was just a story subsumed within the larger narrative of Vietnam, war, leaving, arriving.
Only later did I realize what the portrait implied. How could my father be a father when he barely knew his own?
Psychologists call it intergenerational transmission of parenting—the idea that we learn how to parent from how we were parented. Children who grow up without a parent often have to construct their own idea of family from fragments: stories, portraits, rumors, imagination. Early parental loss shapes emotional regulation and attachment styles later in life, not as destiny but as contour, the way a riverbed shapes the water that flows through it.
My father did not inherit fatherhood. He assembled it.
He assembled it from fragments of men he admired, from teachers and bosses and uncles, from American movies and Vietnamese proverbs, from the strict discipline of a country at war and the endless optimism of a country that called itself free. He assembled it from fear, mostly—fear that we would fail, fear that we would be unsafe, fear that we would waste the life he had crossed oceans to build.
When he yelled, it sounded like anger. Sometimes, it was. Sometimes, it was terror in a language I couldn’t understand.
It does not excuse everything. But it explains something.
My mother is harder to write about, because for most of my life I knew her in fragments.
From elementary school through high school, I saw her mostly at the edges of the day—in the mornings before she left for work, or at night when she came home, her body still carrying twelve hours of standing, measuring, smiling, explaining. We spent time together only on the rare days she had off.
She had her own crossing. Her parents divorced when she was small. Her mother kept her three older brothers in South Vietnam; her father remarried a younger woman and took my mother to North Vietnam to start a new family, reminiscent of Cinderella and her stepmother. Eventually she was reunited with her mother and brothers as they immigrated to California. I learned all of this in pieces, not in one sitting, the way immigrant histories always seem to arrive.
I loved her, of course, but for most of my life I felt like I didn’t really know her. My father was the one who raised us in the day-to-day sense—the one who disciplined, monitored, shaped the rules of the house. My mother was the fun parent, the one we would laugh with, the one we went to when we were too frightened to tell our father about a bad grade.
I only began to know her differently after I graduated from high school and started working beside her as a pharmacy technician in the summers between college years. I was nineteen. She had been a pharmacist my whole life. It felt like too little, too late.
What I noticed was how competent she was, and how agreeable she remained even when that agreeability seemed to injure her most. When my father got mad at us, she would come home from work already exhausted and just agree with him, even when he was cruel—you’re as lazy and fat as your mother, he would say to Adam, even though my mother had worked endlessly. She knew it was easier to capitulate than to fight back when he was in one of those moods. She made it look like nothing.
I did not realize, then, what that costs a person.
The summer after my sophomore year at the University of Southern California, my siblings and I were visiting our cousins in Virginia.
We were sitting on the patio, all of us squeezed around a plastic folding table that had yellowed in the sun. My siblings were there. My cousin Quynh was there too.
Quynh is my technical cousin—my father’s niece, his older sister’s daughter—but she grew up with him as his first child, before Sara was born. She was the experiment. She knew what it was like to be raised by him.
We were comparing childhoods, the way adult children talk about their parents once they’re old enough to laugh about things that once made them cry. Curfews, report cards, sneaking out to parties. Quynh was nodding along, saying yes, he was strict, saying yes, it was hard. And then she said, suddenly, like she was remembering a grocery item she’d forgotten, “Your dad cheated on your mom.”
The table went deathly silent. Even the cicadas seemed to stop.
We asked questions immediately, like children inquiring about a ghost story. Did Mommy know? Yes. Did she care? Not really. When did it stop? About a month. He stopped seeing the woman without much fanfare. It was brushed away. Life continued.
The story landed like something both gargantuan and strangely miniscule. No screaming, no divorce, no dramatic confrontation. Just a secret folded quietly into the history of our family.
We kept asking the same questions, in different forms. Why? Why would he do that? And Quynh’s answer was the same to each of us: No one in this world really knows your dad.
I don’t remember the rest of dinner. I remember nodding like I understood. I remember sharing a room with Quynh’s eldest daughter that night and staring at the ceiling until the shapes of the fan blades blurred into one.
For the rest of the summer, I thought about it constantly.
I thought about how much I respected my father, how much I loved him. I thought about the way he had crossed an ocean with nothing. I thought about how, during the early days of the pandemic, he stayed behind alone in our slate-gray Massachusetts house to take care of his nephew, my other cousin, while sending my siblings and I to Quynh’s in Virginia to be safe. I thought about the 2013 Boston Marathon, about him pulling us through the crowd with one around us, about how he insisted we go to swim practice later that day because normalcy was safety.
I thought about the portrait of his father.
And I could not understand how he could cheat on my mother.
Psychologists who study families say that children’s understanding of their parents can shift sharply when they learn about infidelity—not because the event itself defines the parent, but because it disrupts the moral narrative the child has built around them, a rupture in narrative identity. You suddenly have to rewrite the story of someone you thought you knew.
That summer, I rewrote my father a hundred times.
In some versions, he was a hypocrite. In others, he was weak. In some, he was lonely. In some, he was simply human.
The worst part was not that the old memories disappeared. It was that they remained intact while meaning something different. The soup still cooled on the stove—but now I wondered if there had been a night when my mother laid in their shared bed, wondering where he was. He still waited for my mother to come home. He still cooked dinner and told me stories about his upbringing. He still looked at me as if I were the child most likely to understand him. The facts stayed where they were. It was my reading of them that changed.
Even the stories he had told me at the dinner table felt altered. I had once heard them as proof of his resourcefulness, his charisma, the sheer force of personality that had carried him across continents and into our lives. He used to tell me he was the most popular boy in school because he knew everyone, was helpful to everyone. Now I wonder if he treated those people the way he treated my siblings if we said something stupid in his opinion, did something wrong in his opinion. I began to notice his instinct in turning a life into a story polished enough to survive scrutiny. I do not know if that is fair to him. I only know it became impossible not to wonder.
And my mother, who had been a fixture I did not fully see, came suddenly into focus. The agreeability that had bothered me when I worked beside her was no longer just a personality trait. It was the texture of someone who had absorbed a great deal and decided not to make it the loudest thing about her. She still does not know that I know. Even now, I do not know whether that silence insulates her or preserves the shape of the old wound.
I wanted to ask my father about the affair. I still haven’t.
Our relationship has always been built on a strange foundation of trust—the kind where you know someone would drive hundreds of miles for you at three in the morning, would give you their last dollar, would fight anyone who hurt you, and yet you would never hand them your diary. I love him. I trust him with my safety, my future, my education. I do not trust him with the softest parts of me.
He knows the measurable parts of my life: the classes, the deadlines, the internships, the law-school plans, the fact of my constant tiredness because I am always doing something.
He does not know the rest.
He does not know that I am gay. I figured it out in 2020, a few months into the pandemic, after reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo in my childhood bedroom—the same room I used to disappear into when his temper filled the downstairs. Reading was the first reliable place I could go when he was on a tirade. It became, eventually, the place I learned things about myself I could not learn anywhere else. It is not that I think my father would react badly. It is that the subject has never existed between us. We have never talked about love or dating in that way. I do not know how to begin.
He found out I started taking antidepressants last summer. He had driven Adam and I to our last pediatrician appointment—we were twenty, aging out—and the intake form asked the usual questions, and the doctor barely probed before I broke down completely. Earlier that summer, I had a brief mental lapse where I convinced myself I had killed our family dog. I had taken her on a walk; she had a heart attack a few hours later; I was depressed for a month believing I was the reason she died. The doctor signed the Prozac prescription request swiftly. When my dad picked us up from the office, he asked me what had taken so long. I responded, “I asked for antidepressants.” He shook his head once. We have never discussed it since.
He does not know how often I am afraid. He does not know the shape of my anger, or the small humiliations that keep me awake at night. To my friends, I look happy-go-lucky. They ask if I ever get embarrassed. The truth is I feel humiliation deeply: the way I came across at a dinner months ago, a sentence I wish I had phrased differently in class, an awkward run-in at USC Village. I rephrase sentences in my head because I am scared of sounding stupid. He does not know how much of my ambition is love for him and how much is fear of disappointing him.
Family psychologists call this selective disclosure. Children of immigrants share practical achievements with their parents while hiding emotional struggles, not out of deceit but out of protection—protecting themselves from misunderstanding, protecting their parents from worry. Many of my successes are things I can list for him like the bullet points on my resume. Few of my fears have ever been verbalized.
He knows the outline of my life. He does not know the footnotes.
I wrote about him in my personal statement for law school—about how he used to sit beside me at the dinner table and answer every question I had, even the ridiculous ones. I wrote about how curiosity was the inheritance he gave me, even when everything else about our relationship was complicated. It was hard to verbalize the complications in three double-spaced pages. It is hard to verbalize them now. I love him. I am also afraid of him. I have been working on those two sentences for years.
I never showed him the personal statement. I don’t think I ever will.
Last summer, following the patio dinner, I started noticing my father’s love in smaller, stranger places.
I thought about the month Quynh described, the way it ended without drama, as if my family had signed a non-disclosure agreement to never discuss the matter. I thought about how my mother “didn’t care,” or at least didn’t show it—how that could mean anything: endurance, exhaustion, a choice to preserve the young life they had built together, the way immigrant families preserve everything by swallowing, without complaint, what may destroy them.
I thought about what happened after. My father bought my mother flowers on every holiday and her birthday and their anniversary, even on holidays we did not observe, anything that gave him an excuse. He prepped her coffee and breakfast and lunch every morning before work. After big snowstorms, he woke at six to clear the driveway and warm her car so she could leave for the pharmacy in a heated vehicle. Every night, dinner waited. Every night, the table was set.
I do not know if those acts began before the affair or after. I have never asked. I am not sure I want to know. Either way, they are real. They happened, and they still do.
Devotion and damage can live in the same person. Sometimes in the same hour.
My father is harder to know than anyone I have ever loved. Quynh said that herself, on the patio: No one in this world really knows your dad. Not Sara, not Adam, not my mother, maybe not even him.
But I am learning, slowly, that loving someone means you may never understand them completely.
I do not know if I understand him better now than I did before that night in Virginia. I understand him differently. I understand him the way you understand a story you have read twice—knowing it ends does not erase the first reading, but it does change how you process the early chapters. I notice his silences differently. I notice the moments when he is performing a self he has worked very hard to construct, and I notice the moments when something underneath it breaks through. I cannot say this is more knowledge. It is, at a minimum, more attention.
I don’t call home as much as I should. My parents hear from me every two or three weeks. When I call from L.A. late at night, he asks what I’m working on. I tell him about my articles, my classes. He asks if I’ve eaten, if I’m sleeping enough, if I’m saving money. We talk for ten minutes. We hang up.
Sometimes he sends me op-eds criticizing Donald Trump at two a.m., with no explanation, just links. Maybe that is his way of telling me he loves me.
There are a thousand things I could say to him that I never will. I could ask him about the portrait. I could ask him about the war. I could ask him about that month, nearly two decades ago, when he was someone I do not recognize. I do not. We talk about vegetables and sleep and which airline is cheapest to fly home for the summer.
I think about the way he waited for my mother to come home every night. I think about the way he sat beside me for hours feeding me dinner. I think about the way he believed education could save us. I think about swimming—how the same water that kept me afloat also exhausted me, how the same stroke, his favorite stroke, was the one I was best at and taught me endurance.
I am still assembling my understanding of him, piece by piece, deciding which stories to keep and which ones to forgive.
Sometimes, after I hang up on my father, I find myself sitting in my apartment bedroom the way he used to sit in our kitchen—waiting.
Not for him to confess, and not for him to explain. Just waiting in the hope that one day, I will be able to hold the whole story of him—the myth and the man, the tenderness and the betrayal, the boy who lost his father and the father who hurt mine—without having to cut it into pieces to survive it.
Love, I’m learning, is not the absence of contradiction.
It is the choice to live inside it.
