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Access provided by McGill University Libraries (14 Aug 2016 20:28 GMT)
WEIKE WANG
Conversations with My Father
He said the sky is not blue or white or gray. It is the color of one
septillion snowflakes falling to the ground. He said a septillion is one
followed by twenty-four zeros. More zeros than you could ever write
down in one sitting because you are an impatient child. An only child.
A singularity, as he would call me when he did not feel like saying my
full name.
He said things like how many corners does a table have if you cut
one off? I said three, but the answer was five. How stupid of me. And
he said this too, how stupid of you to say a number like three. Three
rhymes with trees, I said. And he shook his head. Three is for the
triangle, he said, which is the most stable shape you will ever know.
And what comes after three? Well, there’s four and five and six, I said.
And then? And then I didn’t know. I guessed infinity and he shook his
head again. How stupid of you, he said, infinity is not a number; it’s a
direction, like an arrow that never ends. He said, count things in your
free time so that you will never forget the sequence of more things
to come. Pens were things. Books were things. How many things? he
asked me. And I held up two, five, six fingers, meaning two hundred
fifty-six things I had just counted on my way home from pre k. And
what is two hundred fifty-six cut in half and chopped to quarters and
taken to the nth power? Nth? I asked. Meaning limit, this is a limit
problem, don’t you understand?
He said on my birthday, you are now four thousand fifteen days old.
He said, and on this birthday, you can have the natural log of that in
balloons. And if you can’t figure out what I mean, then you can’t have
balloons at all. He said at the dinner table, chew with periodicity or just
swallow it whole. He said in the mornings, pour me zero point six-six
cubic deciliters of 1 percent milk.
He said, multiply, divide, add, and then subtract, in that order
because that is the order of operations and the way anything gets done.
He said, sit down, be quiet, and let me show you how to do math. Here
is a square root, a rational root, a rational root with a square root, a
reciprocal, a conjugate, a complex conjugate that is a pain to solve.
Weike Wang 137 He said, here is an imaginary answer that does not exist until I write
down the letter i and then it does, right there on the page. He said, pay
attention because you’re not paying attention, you’re drifting. And he
was right, I wasn’t paying attention. I was drifting.
He said, if you learned math as fast as you read books, then
you might be a genius, but you’re not a genius, you’re a hole where
knowledge goes to sleep. He said, play with your dolls for no more than
half an hour, no more than fifteen minutes, no more than a second, a
millisecond, actually just put those dolls down and come here and let
me show you how to do math. Here is a formula, another formula,
a quadratic formula that you must memorize and know as well as
you know the national anthem of this country that is not my country
because your mother and I are immigrants, but you, you are not, so put
down those dolls and watch me do math. He said, here is a theorem.
Here is another theorem. And here is the simplest of all theorems that
has never been proven, unless you are a genius, which you are not. He
said, come here, my singularity, and let me show you how to do math.
And I said yes one thousand four hundred seventy times until I said
no, I hate math. I can’t stand it. And he said, quite calmly, you are no
child of mine.
He said on a mountaintop, I feel the pressure differential in my
veins. He said on an elevator, this is normal force at its best. He said at
a movie theater, I can’t understand anything, they’re talking too fast.
He said at a restaurant, this is not what I ordered. This has cheese in it.
Take it back. He said in the evenings, tell me the time. No, not like that.
Tell me the time in arcseconds per second or don’t tell me at all.
He said, sit down, be quiet, and let me show how to do physics.
Without physics, you will be ignorant of the world. You will be empty,
hollow, and unable to articulate why, for instance, a rocket flies through
the void your teachers call outer space. And why does a rocket fly in
space? he asked. I said I didn’t know. I didn’t even guess. How stupid
of me. And he said this too, how stupid of you to not even guess. Here
is why a rocket flies through space, and you must remember because
I’m not saying it again. He said, wire your old dollhouse and then you
will understand electricity. He said, wire this bathroom light and then
you will really understand electricity. Put the galvanometer here and
here and don’t shock yourself. See what happens when you don’t listen
to me? You’ve shocked yourself. Now stand up and try it again. Again.
138 Ploughshares
Again. Again. He said, when you push on a wall, the wall pushes back
on you. And for this reason, rockets fly through outer space. He said,
listen for the Doppler effect or you will never understand sound, and if
you never understand sound, then you will never understand melody
or harmony or the reason a violin is shaped the way that it is. He said,
come here, my singularity, and let me show you how real projectiles
fly. He said, here is a stone that you must skip eleven times, no more,
no less, you have to get your launch angle just right. I threw the stone
down. I said I wasn’t skipping anything. I was going two thousand
nine hundred seventy miles away. And he said quite calmly, you are
definitely no child of mine.
But still, he said things like do your taxes early. Pay your bills on
time. And don’t tip like a moron. Do the 18 percent in your head. He
said, don’t cheap out on your insurance. Think about your 401k. Think
about a high-interest savings account or don’t do either and be poor for
the rest of your life. Think about the children that you currently do not
have, because if they’re anything like you, they’ll want things that you
truly do not have. He said, come here, my singularity, and let me show
you how to plan. But I didn’t come. I stayed where I was, which was
still two thousand nine hundred seventy miles away. And for a while
we did not speak.
Until we did, thirty-seven point two years later when he and I were
both already old. He said, you have on exactly sixty-five fine pearls.
And to my husband, he said, you are very white and also a hundred
ninety-six centimeters tall.
Weike Wang 139