Parent-Child Relationships Are Never So Simple

While watching a visitor-floof at home on his first visit and shouldn't be left unsupervised, I caught up on some reading. There was this short story by Han Ong, titled 'I Am Pizza Rat', published in The New Yorker on October 16, 2023.

The story traces the tense relationship between an Asian father and a son when they're in their twilight years. We have the fifty-one year old narrator and his seventy-six-year old father. The father had a fall, then a second, and he had a string of visits to the doctor and the physiotherapist. He had asked the narrator to return from New York City to San Mateo temporarily to care for him for sixteen weeks. The father would attend classes on how to fall naturally at the local community center, as well as continue with his weekly activities at card games and the local theatre production company.

The father would pay for the narrator's home rental in New York City while he was in San Mateo, and would also cover all board and lodging, and loan him the use of a well-maintained Datsun. Towards the end of the stipulated period, the narrator was getting ready to head home to New York City and get back into his life as a writer. Then the father had another fall at home by the kitchen sink. 

Among my father’s favorite Twitter accounts is the Dodo, which frequently follows the rehabilitation of life-mangled dogs and cats. I see no paradox in a man so comprehensively misanthropic making a show of his sentimentality over animals. Ohhing and oohing. Sometimes tearing up. He will often hold out the phone so that I can watch a new video, introducing it this way: I am that dog.

A pit bull chained to a fence twenty-­four hours a day: I am that dog.

A mother looking for her pups underneath a collapsed building: I am that dog.

The horrifying skin of a pit bull (why is it always a pit bull?) that has been abused with acid: I am that dog.

The very short videos always end on the upbeat of a new life, but my father never acknowledges that particular parallel—that he survived, despite having been beaten by his father. He has never succumbed to the perverted argument that the abuse was necessary, that it toughened him up for a tough world. He is a misanthrope who recognizes his misanthropy to be a deficit but knows that it is too late for him to correct it.

Another thing that goes unspoken: the beatdowns that I suffered at my father’s hands were a mere fraction of what he endured from his father. My grandfather apparently truly believed in the dictum “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” while my father, though a largely indifferent parent, was subject to occasional flares of temper that my rowdiness did not help. So I never say, “I am that dog.” It’s a testament to how lightly I got off.

Six months after the narrator returned to his life in New York City, his father had another a fall, caused by a stroke. A nurse service was engaged, and the narrator went back to hopping between San Mateo and New York. The father doesn't have long. All they wanted to do is to keep him stable till his time is up, and try to prevent a second stroke. It's also obvious that the narrator was just fulfilling his duty and obligations to the father. There isn't much sentimentality in there. 

I was wondering what the title of this story is about. I finally knew it towards the end of this story. The narrator had loaned his father his phone. That phone held a folder named 'Pizza Rat', and the father found it, and asked him what that folder was about. That was a 2015 thing in New York! Then I read an interview with the author Han Ong, who actually explained all about Pizza Rat and what it is to him. Ahhhhhh.

What I don’t say is that when Pizza Rat exits the frame he walks right into my imagination. He’s been living inside my phone as an avatar for a potential short story about hoarding for the bad times ahead.

Not everyone's relationship with our parents are ideal or rosy. Sure, we all have our own battles to fight. We need to be aware of not judging others quickly if they choose to distance themselves from parents who might have abused them in about a thousand different ways when they were children. 

The short story tells the lives and relationships of many of us and our parent(s). Difficult histories, middle ground, obligations and compromises. It's all of us at this stage in life. Ask ourselves how much do we care to be labeled as 'filial' by the numerous relatives we might have. Or if we simply do enough to answer to our own conscience. What would we choose? 

This little exchange earlier on in the story sums up the relationship between the narrator and his father. And perhaps also the circumstances for many of us too. 

Once more, I bring up my offer to stay past our original agreement, and again my father dismisses this idea. I cannot afford you, he says again. Is there a double meaning? Yes, I decide. After sixteen weeks, our companionability will begin to seep its poison.

You’re getting me for cheap, I say. I hope you know that.

I hope you’re saving up, he says.

I’m silent.

I know you only doing it for the money, my father tells me.

And when I don’t contradict him we both take pleasure in my mercenariness. My father warms to the idea that he’s raised me correctly.