Cognizance

"You look so much like your father!'

Ugh. Please, lady. Stop. I do not look like my father. At all. 

I remember when I was in middle school, newly pubescent and angry, my political and social ideologies still in those nascent stages of indignant ignorance with the dew of virgin childhood still fresh on me. I was a reformer! A fighter for the liberal causes of equality and justice! A proud and unapologetic atheist! I imagined myself to be part of some advanced, intellectual society that my parents were too old-fashioned, too incapable of joining. This internal pugnacity birthed a kind of war between my father and I that always existed in the household, a result not only of our completely differing views on whatever, but also our striking similarities in personality.

I suppose there has always been a sort of unspoken competition between my father and I. We are both so very alike, but any similarities that exist are only manifest to me now. My father came to America as a medical student. He had served in a residency in Korea for a while, but after his arrival in America, he had to learn English and relearn his dusty medical textbooks in order to take the USMLE. I remember myself as a five-year-old, sitting beside stacks of physiology and pathology textbooks, whose laminated covers were titled with acronyms and foreign words I could barely comprehend as I perfected my blooming skills in drawing. I suppose, in that way, we were--are--both students of the West. 

However, we were the angry students of the West. I grew up loving America, relishing in it, staunchly ready to defend the country I flourished in. My father, however, came to despise certain elements of it. Thus, our household, occupied with two pugnacious debaters, would go to war over aspects of this society that I loved and he hated. 

We argued over organized religion and the existence of a higher power and American social programs and racism and finding one's cultural identity and loads of other stuff I can't even recall and probably had no right to be debating on. 

Now, as Manning put it, I am no longer a "rebel in the household, trying to impress him with my education or my view on religion", no longer fighting a dictatorial enemy that never really existed to begin with. I wish I could take back all the hurtful words I flung at my him, all those oddly tense nights filled with a silence that would break any father's heart.

I've come to accept the stark differences that we share. Or perhaps my attitude has not yet fully developed into acceptance because whenever he makes some comment that I completely disagree with, I fall into a state of resignation, but that fire, that justice! that used to occupy my psyche is gone. Now, when people say that I look so much like my father, I'm happy. I'm proud, and I'll look back at my dad and sheepishly chuckle at those nights when I'd be screaming into a mirror, an older, wiser, more foreign, male version of myself. 

Mea culpa.