my father. sometimes i'm not sure. my sister and i differ over our perceptions of him. but humans are complex, they contain multitudes. it's possible he was both good and bad. like all of us. in balance.

after all, he was a republican. he voted for reagan, for pete wilson. he subscribed to American Spectator and the National Review and Commentary - all of these formed my nest of reading material for several years growing up. until i got to high school, and discovered Marx and socialism. we used to argue about it, over dinner. he made me so mad sometimes. but he was a real conservative, in that he believed in fiscal responsibility and less government interference in people's lives. he didn't have anything against gays, for example. he would have said, let people marry whom they chose, the government shouldn't waste any money on regulating that. he was staunchly atheist, although he joked about choosing to follow Islam because you got the most prophets.

after he died, i remember going through some of his papers. his novels, half-finished, were entertaining and shockingly similar to what *i* was writing, too. his articles. his catalogue notes. and, best of all, a treasure trove of his letters.

in one of them i clearly remember a passage which is the reason i think of him as a good man. this was written to his friend James Cahill, who later went on to become professor of Art History (his specialty being chinese ink paintings) at U.C. Berkeley. Uncle Jim, we called him. Uncle Jim had given us back some of my father's letters, letters he'd written to Jim during the Korean War.

my dad wrote: "Some of the men here have names for the Koreans, like 'gook', which to my mind is analogous to an epiteth for Negros which is so horrible I cannot bring myself to write it down."

i quote from memory, as those papers are lost now, in the fire that burned down the house i grew up in. but that passage made such an impression on me when i read it. i love my father for that.

i wish, of course, that he had lived. i feel cheated out of the rest of his story and his personality, which i never got to know or understand as an adult. all i have left are these echoes of conversations, memories of scraps of paper, a photograph or two. who were you? what did you dream about? i know almost nothing about his childhood, his father and mother, his early adulthood. as a child and a teenager i was too self-involved. i remember only a dry sense of humor, sometimes a severity of demeanor, a patrician aesthetic. a snob. maddening politics with which i could never agree. but also, a man with a sense of justice, fairness, and decency, even in the most indecent of times.

i love you, papa. and i miss you still.