Things My Father Taught Me

I saw that a friend was sharing something similar on WeChat, and it seemed like an especially good thing for me to do on Father’s Day, especially on this first Father’s Day without my father.

So… 6 things my father taught me:

Be Kind to Foreigners

Maybe it was because his Uncle Carl was a foreigner (from Syria? I’m not entirely sure), but my dad always had an interest in foreigners in the US, and made an effort to befriend them. My family has created a tradition of always inviting foreigners to our home for Thanksgiving, and it’s included people from Japan, China, India, and other places. I think it’s beautiful, and I’m sure that it’s contributed in no small part to my own life path.

Learn from Others

This ties into the last one. My dad always liked asking the foreigners he befriended all kinds of questions about their own culture and homeland. But it didn’t stop there… whenever he met someone that worked in an industry he was unfamiliar with, he had a ton of questions.

He also especially liked reading novels that taught him new things. He wasn’t above escape fiction (certainly not!), but he still wanted to be learning things, even if he didn’t often want to read a lot of nonfiction.

All that knowledge my father was building was not just for the purpose of personal hoarding (there’s another topic!); he loved sharing the interesting things he learned from people with others.

This, of course, tied in nicely to his profession as a librarian. I think one of the things that made him feel most complete was sharing knowledge with others, and helping to connect people to new sources of meaningful knowledge. This truly is a great thing, and now that my career is helping people get to the point where they can share information in Chinese, I’m carrying on this traditional in my own way. It’s a worthy life mission, for sure.

Humor is a Bridge

I know that “dad humor” is a thing, but I think few people made “dad humor” a personal badge of honor like my dad did. He took it to a new level. And once I got to be high school age, this was a huge source of embarrassment at times, but for all the times I found it embarrassing (and he didn’t amuse everyone with his cheesy jokes), there were many, many more examples of his making someone happy and getting a smile. And it was what people remembered about him. It did connect.

So of course I have my own sense of humor, but I also try to remember that my dad’s bold approach with humor got some good results.

Sci-fi is Cool

This one feels kind of minor compared to the other ones, but it’s an important connection we had, especially since my sisters never got too into sci-fi like I did.

As a teenager, of course I didn’t want to listen to my dad’s book recommendations. In fact, I realize now that in order to connect with me, he read the books I was reading (like the rather cringe-worthy Xanth series) because I wouldn’t read the books he thought were good. One of my regrets about that time was not getting into Asimov sooner. He was always a big Asimov fan, and recommended Asimov to me repeatedly. As an adult, I can really appreciate Asimov too… but it took me a while.

He Couldn’t Teach Me Everything

I didn’t learn everything from my dad, of course. On certain matters, such as faith, I feel like I learned a lot more from my mom. And that’s fine.

But there were certain things that I know he felt bad about not being able to teach me, even with my mom’s help. Financial management was one of those things. But he told me that he knew he didn’t do enough, and he really hoped I could do better than he did. I really appreciate this frankness.