Four-Leaved Clovers

What hobbies have been passed down from your family? 

When I was six, I noticed my dad crouching over a patch of grass. Was he smoking? No, because he didn’t move away like he would when I approached him mid-smoke. I looked at his hand: a four-leaved clover. Peering at the green patch, I saw tons of clovers–most of them three-leaved–and realized he was searching for the special lucky charms. Before I knew it, I was squatting next to him, passionately partaking in the impromptu scavenger hunt. Soon after, it became a tradition of me and my dad to hunt for four-leaved clover (FLC) every weekend.

Together, we ventured through every corner of the green space in our apartment complex like partners on a mission. I loved spending time with Dad. My entire life, his presence had meant stability and calm–he reassured me and stayed with me whenever I was terrified; he did everything patiently and methodically; he never scolded, but spoke from genuine love. Picking clovers next to him, I felt those same qualities exuding from him as he unwaveringly surveyed the patch; on days when yields were low, I relied on him for inspiration to fight my own urges to give up. 

My dad pressed the clovers we collected under textbooks and laminated them into sheets that piled up on his bookshelf over the years. The pile stopped growing when I turned 8, when he flew over to America to settle on his new job while my mom and I stayed in Korea to join him a year and a half later. In those days, facetiming with him every month became something I looked forward to, and at times when I felt alienated living with my relatives’ family, I looked to our looming reunion as a source of solace. In February 2016, that day finally came. 

But the dad I found waiting for us at O’Hare Airport was different from the one I had parted from in Korea. He looked more exhausted and stressed–I noticed it in the way he walked and how he didn’t seem fully happy to see us. In our new apartment, I saw a different man, yelling at me for losing the TV remote or getting upset when I didn’t understand a math problem he was explaining. 

For years, I didn’t even bring up the four-leaved clovers; in fact, I had forgotten about them just as I started boxing up all the other connections we had shared and stacking them as a wall between us. I distanced myself from him, rarely going up to him to ask for help or confide personal struggles as I used to. I felt scared that he would suddenly burst into anger, and I partly resented his sudden shift. 

As a kid, I wasn’t really aware of what may have caused him to change. Gradually, the internal wall I had built against him melted into the general way I interacted with him: I rarely laughed next to him and kept all emotions to myself, relying on self-advice to navigate through academic stress.  

The ice only started to break around junior year, when I started opening up to him about mental health issues and my career prospects. To my surprise, he responded with sympathy and heartfelt advice–he told me about bits of his teenage years when he had gone through similar struggles and what had helped him overcome them. Slowly, through these little verbal exchanges on the ride home, we started to recover the bond we had lost. Though it’s still a work in progress, learning the context of my dad’s past life has helped me see him more as a person rather than a dad, reconciling the father I thought I had lost that day at O’Hare with the more distant, cold father I faced instead.  

As children, we are only exposed to select sides of our parents, and when we progressively feel that they have “changed”, it may sometimes be that we’re just seeing another side of them that previously weren’t visible to us. Lately, I’ve realized that my dad tends to tense up when under extreme pressure and rarely expresses his hardships outwardly–a part of him I wasn’t aware of as a 9-year-old. The pressure to uphold our family in America had caused Dad to respond in his natural way, focusing all his attention on assimilating and anchoring our family with little emotional and mental room for cordiality. Though I’ll probably never fully understand what happened to him in the one and a half years we had been away, putting myself in his shoes is how I try to make up for all the years of connection we have lost as a father and a daughter. And I hope that, at the end of this recovery, we will go picking FLCs again.