My Father, Bàba, in Proverbs

Remembering our roots

Jen Soong
Gay Mag
Published in
16 min readMar 30, 2020

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Illustration by Carmen Johns

1.

人不可忘本。
One should not forget one’s roots.

My father, Bàba 爸爸, is an electrical engineer by training, a precise man who wore neatly pressed suits and silk ties to work for thirty years at a phone company. He taught me, an only child, to be careful and methodical. Read manuals first and always…

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Jen Soong
Gay Mag

NorCal writer. Tin House and VONA alum. Published in WaPo, The Audacity, Witness. Memoir-in-progress reckoning with migration and myth. www.jensoong.com