for day 3 of @chowderweek: future (kinda?); builds off of this (sorry this is kinda rough)
thank you so much to @chrisfranklinchow and my mom haha for helping me figure out some chinese names!!! glossary for some canto (just family member titles) & notes on each of the chows’ chinese names under the cut!
The first thing Chris learns about Dad in their musty basement surrounded by dusty boxes is that Dad has not thrown anything out in atleast thirty years.
The second thing Chris learns about Dad on that hot August afternoon the summer before his last year at Samwell is that Dad has signed a lot of checks in his lifetime, some at least ten years before Chris was even born, and that he’s kept them all this time. Chris knows that Dad kept them all because Chris has two piles of them sitting by his feet to go through to confirm they can be shredded before he can give them to Kay, who’s manning their really old paper shredder, which has two years on Kay, making Chris older than it by just one measly year.
The third thing Chris learns about Dad while he’s being made to help Dad finally clean out everything for the first time in his fifty-odd years of existence for Lunar New Year—even though he won’t even be home for it because he’ll be at Samwell, but does that matter? No. Not to Mom, and especially not to a smug, delighted Kay—is that Dad has apparently been writing in the small, blocky way Chris has never been able to emulate since at least high school, which is when Dad immigrated here from Hong Kong. For someone like Chris, whose handwriting varies on a day-to-day basis, that is just amazing, especially because Dad didn’t start using English so heavily until he got here, because it means that Dad has been writing like this for forty years.
The fourth thing Chris learns—well, despite feeling alienated from Chinese culture, and all the guilt that comes with that, four will always be the unluckiest, most cursed number on the planet, so there is no fourth thing.
The fifth thing Chris learns about Dad while he scans each of the shark-themed (looks like Dad’s predilection for sharks as the hockey team and the animal is genetic) checks for anything related to Liberty Mutual to save is, well, he’s not sure. The moment feels significant though, even if he’s not sure why he’s still smoothing his fingers over this one check and hasn’t moved on to the next. Ignoring the steadfast humming of the paper shredder that Kay’s enthusiastically feeding paper to, he runs his thumb over the check again, feeling the indentations most likely made by the Bic ballpoint pen that’s always in Dad’s front shirt pocket.
1. “It was always you: your unutterable name, this growl in my throat.” - erika meitner, copia
2. “I need your teeth in me, slow and vicious, to tell me my armor is just skin, bones, only bones.” - jamaal may, the big book of exit strategies
3. “i know no love without teeth & have the scars to remember” - josé olivarez, i wake in a field of wolves with the moon
4. “and always, there is hunger / I will admit that I do not know if I should hold you or eat you.” - derold ernest sligh, occupation
5. “after we have caught love we start eating it to the bone.” - marge piercy, a key to common lethal fungi
6. “I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow.” - hélène cixous, the love of the wolf
7. “I have sharp teeth inside my mouth, / inside my dark red lips, / And lacquer slickly hides the claws / In my red fingertips. / So I conceal my armoury. / Yours is all on view. / You think you are possessing me - / But I’ve got my teeth in you.” - angela carter, unicorn
8. “I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it – to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once.” - haruki murakami, norwegian wood
9. “But I am not yet sure how to sever the love from the lover without occasioning some degree of carnage.” - maggie nelson, bluets
10. “I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart;” - jorge luis borges, in a deserted streetcorner
“we were lovers in a past life” trope but the current incarnations are enemy-to-lovers trope. when.
To be clear. I don’t want “our past love ended in betrayal and anger and now we hate each other.” I want “we died in love and in each other’s arms” but the current incarnations do NOT remember and they ARE trying their best to End the other one and these new sudden flashbacks to lovingly holding each other’s hands is EXTREMELY UPSETTING
