Renaissance Man

On temporary walls, raccoons and the work I never learned to do

He glided across the teak with balletic grace, steel wool singing against the wood as he moved from square to square. A master craftsman making impossibility look effortless. I attempted to mimic his movements. By the tenth square, my shirt was soaked. By the thirtieth, my clothes clung like a second skin. The apartment contained 140 square meters of flooring and there were only three of us. We needed to cover about a third of a square meter per minute. At my pace, we’d be here well past midnight.

— Chapter 22 - Please Let Me Clean

My first apartment after college took years off my life.

New York City has a thriving industry of temporary wall companies. It’s the only way fresh college graduates can afford to live there. With a handful of these partitions, that $4,000 apartment with 1 bedroom magically transforms into 4 windowless jail cells the width of your own wingspan. Definite health violations. In your early 20s though, capping your rent at $1,000 a month is worth a year or two in life expectancy.

But even putting up fake walls is expensive. When my roommates figured out the cost, they asked if my father could help out. He evaluated the situation and found a solution that could at least provide us some air circulation. We bought the materials at Home Depot and as we were lugging them into the building, our super, a man who would fit right in as an extra in a pirate movie, came out of nowhere, yelling at us to stop with words like “insurance” and “bonded” and “liability.” Unfortunately, we never got to build our own walls.

As long as I’ve been alive, my father’s always been handy. Even though he was a surgeon, my friends jokingly refer to him as a Renaissance Man because he always has some random skill that proves relevant to the problem at hand. To provide jobs to his sister and her husband, he decided to buy a house, and convert it into an assisted care living center that they could help run. One day I asked him how it was going and he told me that there was an ant problem in the backyard.

Before I could ask about an exterminator, he continued, “So I bought chickens.”

“Chickens?” I questioned.

“To eat the ants. I bought them on Amazon. And I built a coop for them.”

A few weeks later, I asked him how the chickens were faring.

“Not good,” he said. “Two were killed by raccoons. I had a fence up, but they dropped in from the trees above. I think I fixed the problem though.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Do you know what raccoons like to eat more than chickens?”

“Um, no.”

“Peanut butter! I caught the raccoon!”

“Wait but what did you do with it?”

“Oh that was another problem. I called animal control and they wanted nothing to do with it, so I put it in the trunk and drove to a public golf course about an hour away and released it there.”

My father is not afraid to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty. Growing up, he was always tinkering with this or that; building, installing, renovating. The first time I really remember seeing it at scale was when he built a house for his incoming siblings from China.

I, on the other hand, never had this proclivity. My father would often invite me to help out around the house or yard. But I was never good with a hammer and not particularly adept with my fingers. During these fix-it sessions, my interest generally waned to the point he would let me leave before any job was complete. Oftentimes, my absence was acceptable because of my parents’ heavy emphasis on academics. Though I could see in his eyes, that slight tinge of disappointment that I wasn’t built exactly in his mold. And quietly, I hoped my father wouldn’t ask me to help because it is easier to hide shame when it doesn’t see the light of day.

When I bought my own house though, I regretted not volunteering to help out with every single project my father ever did. For there are few times in life when you feel completely and utterly powerless, at the whims of the gods, but I can certify that undergoing a home renovation is one of them. You are completely reliant on contractors who rarely meet deadlines and are consistently over budget. And how do you even know what an appropriate cost is to start with? How do you know that the problem with the load-bearing wall is what they say it is? But you can’t get too mad, because if the crew walks, no other builder will want to step in their place because of “insurance” and “bonds” and “liability.”

Thank goodness for my father. For he went to the site every day. Befriended the subcontractors. Took pictures and receipts and found ways to push things along. We still had major challenges, but without him it would have been much much worse. When the renovation was near complete, however, we found our first floor, completely wrecked because the workers did not properly protect it.

“We have to re-sand this,” my father said.

“How much?” I asked, money always the begrudging solution.

“We can do it ourselves.”

So we went to Home Depot and rented a sander and bought coating for the floors. We moved the furniture out of the way and took turns operating the sander, working our way through the house. Halfway through, he stopped and smiled at me.

“You know in Hong Kong, I had to do the same thing when I was just trying to make money to come here. But instead of this machine, I had to strap steel wool to the bottom of my feet. It was so painful. I was so bad at it and it took an entire day just to get one room done. Now we can do the entire floor in under a couple hours!”

I had always known my father picked up a bunch of skills from all the odds and ends he did in Hong Kong to survive, but prior to this moment, I never knew what exactly those odds and ends were. My father believed he could fix anything because once upon a time he had to.

We completed the sanding, then applied the coats together over the next week. We let the polyurethane dry in one room so we could move all the furniture there before moving to the next.

Finally when it all set, I took a picture of what we had just finished together.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed, you can find past posts that reveal a bit more about our journey crafting this memoir here:

1. The Story Behind the Story: on memory, inheritance, and becoming the keeper of a life

2. The Toad that Ate Swan Meat: on family artifacts, improbable inheritance, and proof

3. The Book I Couldn’t Read: on language, shame, and finally reading my father

4. One Hundred Pages: on punishment, preparation, and finding the work waiting for me

5. Impossible Choices: on family, protection, and the cost of survival

6. The Art of the Cut: on West Coast Swing, learning when to break the rules and deleting my father’s ex-girlfriends

7. The Island That Wasn’t There: on carry-on luggage, photobooks, and stories that outlast evidence

8. Could You Survive on That Island: on cruises, 40 years of tragedy and the parenting paradox

9. Two Different Races: on reality TV, Confucianism and naming the unnamed

10. Blessed: on broken bones, death threats and irrational belief

11. Don’t Be Scared: on keeping secrets, basketball and the chapter that came to be

12. Kan Kan: on chicken coops, dormitories and the stranger that connected them

13. Long Distance: on hurricanes, peeing in bathtubs and unanswered letters