*This was originally written at Think Out Loud Festival 2017. I was trying to find something to do when I sat there seeing people walking by the exhibition. Anyway, family is complicated.
There was one scene that really bugged me. I was always thinking about one of my uncles, who died a few years ago. Everyone in my father’s family knew that my uncle suffered from serious depression. He had to go to Kaoshiung, which was another city in southern Taiwan that was a bit far away from where he lived.
He had always been living in my grandfather’s house in Chiayi, a village surrounded by farms until now. People who lived there mainly became farmers or workers for the factories nearby. It was surely reasonable that people who didn’t want to do any of those jobs left there and did other things, like my father, aunts and another younger uncle. They all left, except him.
The only time people went back together was the Lunar New Year. To be honest, no one liked him. Me neither. He didn’t do anything besides watching TV in his bedroom. Whether it’s true or not, from my childhood memory, my mother usually complained about that. In a modern sense, my uncle was a bit nerdy, or, I could say shy and anti-social.
I never really talked to him, and the scene that haunted me was when my family gathered together and had a nice dinner as we usually did. My uncle stood from a distance with a complex look in his eyes. It was an awkward moment when everyone sat down and started to eat. He stood alone, and it seemed like he was wondering: ‘Why am I here?’ No one ever asked him, ‘What’s wrong?’ Instead, people asked him to sit down and grab some food.
I began to think of my uncle differently after I did some research on depression. It was said that people who were diagnosed with depression did not really have a reason to be unhappy, but people in my family did not agree with this view. They thought that the depressed uncle was trying to escape from his duty of being a responsible and reasonable adult. My father often picked up the phone call from him, and I usually heard father saying, ‘You think too much. Did you take your pill?’
I started to feel that annoying conversation could last forever when I repeated my complaint of college like over and over, and every time my parents’ conclusion was, ‘You think too much.’ This annoyed me and bugged me with the scene that my uncle stood alone outside of the family. I felt that his death was mysterious and symbolic. He died in his room when he tried to get out of his bed. He was found on the floor.
My aunt said that he was spoiled by my grandfather, who didn’t ask him to be independent. I didn’t know what grandfather thought of this comment. I guess his children didn’t tell him at all, since it sounded like complaints of his parenting. At least, my uncle did have a nice room near grandfather’s. The room was the biggest and equipped with TV before my younger uncle bought a TV and set it in another living room. He died before grandfather, and I didn’t attend the ceremony.
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