The Sixteen-Year-Old with Scissors in Toronto: Cutting My Father in Half

The Kitchen on Dundas Street

In 1994, I was sixteen, full of toxic adolescent rage and humiliated by our poverty. My father ran a tiny convenience store in Toronto's Chinatown, working from 6:00 AM until 11:00 PM seven days a week. He spoke broken English, never came to my school hockey games, and had yellowed fingernails from unpacking crates of cabbage.

After a vicious argument where he refused to buy me a pair of seventy-dollar designer sneakers, I stormed into the living room. On the credenza sat our only formal family portrait taken in Hong Kong before we emigrated.

I pulled the picture from its brass frame, grabbed my mother’s heavy tailor shears, and cut the photograph straight down the center—severing his body from mine and my mother’s. I tossed his side of the photograph into the kitchen wastebasket and slammed my bedroom door.

The Hospital Room in 2024

Thirty years passed. I became a partner in a downtown law firm, bought a home in the suburbs, and drifted into the polite, distant estrangement that immigrant sons often inflict upon their aging parents. We spoke on New Year’s Day and his birthday; five-minute phone calls full of weather updates.

In April 2024, he suffered a severe stroke and was admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital. When the palliative team informed us that he had less than forty-eight hours, my sister and I went to his small apartment above the store to collect his insurance paperwork and clean clothes.

In the top drawer of his nightstand, beneath an old leather belt and a bank savings passbook, sat a worn, brown plastic wallet. I opened the clear billfold.

The Cellophane Tape

There, tucked behind his Canadian citizenship card, was the half of the photograph I had cut with scissors thirty years ago. He had fished it out of the kitchen trash bin in 1994.

The jagged scissor edge had been carefully smoothed down. Across the back, in his shaky blue ballpoint calligraphy, he had written in Cantonese: *'My son Daniel. Born in Kowloon. May he become a great scholar.'*

He had carried my scissor cut in his breast pocket next to his heart for three decades. He knew I had cut him out, and his response was to carry me closer.

I fell to my knees in that dusty bedroom, clutching that faded half of a photograph, sobbing so hard my throat tasted like copper. I rushed back to the hospital, held his warm, calloused hand against my cheek, and whispered the apology I should have spoken thirty years earlier.

He didn't open his eyes, but his thumb squeezed mine twice. Forgiveness is not a rational contract; it is the miraculous grace of someone loving you past your cruelty. Solas Haven holds my star for you, Ba. I am so sorry.