We Can Go Home Again

Martina Liu ‘25

“Do you remember this photo?” He suddenly held his phone out to me in excitement, “I took it right in front of this fence!”

It was me in the photo, me 5 years old, me 14 years ago, me standing in the same spot as we are standing at this moment. He droned on and on about how the photo was shot, how I grabbed my mom’s parasol and sunglasses, how he put me on the stone in front of this fence, and how they still keep the dress I was wearing. Staring at the little girl with the big smile in the photo, I was in a trance.

It was in this city that I spent the happiest days in my memory. Every night, my dad would watch cartoons with me, cosplay Winnie the Pooh with me, and say “I love you” to me each night before bed. It all came to an abrupt end when we moved to a different city and I started settling down for school. He changed jobs from city to city, just never being able to come home every night. Sometimes he came back for a weekend, but more often than not—my superhero showed up less and less.

Probably because his appearances were so rare and precious, the whole family anticipated his every return as if he were a guest. Mom would cook exquisite dishes that she didn’t often make, no one would scold me for not getting good grades at school, and my dad would bring back gifts that I can show off everywhere. But it was also the guest-like way of spending time together, where he no longer knew what clubs I’d joined, how my mind had changed, and who my friends were. Of course, it was a waste of precious reunion time to talk about these.

One day he came home and never left again. He started cooking for us, picking me up from school, dissatisfied with my choice of major, and criticizing me for losing the tenderness “like a lamb” five year-old me had. Unemployment brought him back to our petty life, and we presented each other with characters that had long been changed after 14 years of separation. I became a belligerent debater, seizing every opportunity to contradict him, laughing at him for trying to boss me around when he clearly knew nothing about me. Even when he offered to take me back to the city I grew up in at 5, I turned him down instinctively because as people always say, “you can’t go home again”. The days of love and intimacy that we had, would never return. Can we ever reconcile? Are we just going to get further and further apart? Perhaps I WAS the one who was so eager to deny him. It was me who refused to give him a chance to get to know me again, like I didn’t even think I should get to know him again, too. I should have shown him more patience and curiosity, like an anthropologist encountering a different culture. I should have had more faith in him about his never-changing concern for me and his expectation of a father-daughter relationship.

We kept walking forward, and I halted suddenly. Why don’t I take another photo in front of that fence? Maybe we could start over, or maybe nothing had ever changed.