Lessons from My Father, Who Hung The Shen Yun Posters

My father would wake me each morning before the sun broke the horizon. In the dark, I would find my day’s clothes. I would walk softly down the stairs as to not wake my mother or sisters.

My father and I sat at a small table in the kitchen and hung our heads in prayer. Over my father’s whispers, I could hear stalks of tall grass touching softly in the wind. We would eat in silence.

When our plates were clean, we left our family home. We would not return until dark.

During the day our Lord gave us, our fellow countrymen fought and died to keep free, my father and I would go from sandwich shop to sandwich shop, and hang Shen Yun posters.

When I became old enough for school, I was old enough to hang Shen Yun posters, and hanging Shen Yun posters is all I have ever known. My hands grew hard and sticky from paper cuts and bits of tape. Every night my mother would rub lotion on my father’s raw stretch marks from reaching towards the tops of store windows. His low, man-style cries would shake our Christian home.

There would be days that ran too long for a body to take. During those days, I would turn to my father helming the wheel of his old Chevy pickup and ask, “Why?”

“Why do we hang Shen Yun posters?”

My father’s eyes would grow soft and wet. They would narrow and set to the road ahead. After pushing down the lump in his throat, he would speak.

“Not every family can strike oil or sell barley to Budweiser. And we ain’t never been much for computers. But my father, and his father before him knew hanging Shen Yun posters. And what you know is how you live.”

We made no money hanging Shen Yun posters. Every morning we ate pieces of the FedEx box the Shen Yun posters came in, and drank pee-pee from our own weiners. What we did not eat of the FedEx box we gave to my mother and sisters.

Just like the man assembling a car for a wage that could never afford him one, my father never saw Shen Yun. And neither will I. But like my father, Shen Yun posters is what I know. And like my father, I will drag my broken body up the stairs of our family home to wake my son, so he can hang Shen Yun posters.

In the quiet of our prayers and the tranquility of our pee-pee drink time, he will embed himself in the roots of his family’s purpose: that he is to rise each morning, and hang Shen Yun posters.