You Are (Not) Your Father

Personal entanglements with Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0 Thrice Upon A Time. Alternatively, how to grow up.

I had told my mother that I did not want to see [my father] because I hated him. But this was not true. It was only that I had hated him and I wanted to hold on to this hatred. I did not want to look on him as a ruin: it was not a ruin I had hated. I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once the hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain. 

— James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son”

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Shinji begins in the movie where I always am: at the nadir. He could not stop destruction — and in fact may have even been responsible for it — and he could not achieve what others wanted from him. This character, historically, has been defined by his could-not’s — could not pilot the Eva, could not save his friends, could not let go of his suffocating ego enough to let others love him. He spends the first thirty minutes or so of Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0 in a near-catatonic state, traumatized into inaction. Wandering the newfound human settlement like an old ghost. Refusing to eat. There are people around him that yell at him for, again, always doing what Shinji does best: doing nothing. There are people around him that are kind and understanding about his plight, and attempt to resuscitate him in their own ways. Some attempts are more successful than others. Some just traumatize him again. I’ve watched this movie too many times to know how it goes, and I always begin in the same place.

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I come home again after nearly twelve years of running away. “Home” is not an exact word — I avoid my childhood home but it is far, on some lonely stretch of seaside suburb, and I am in its nearby city, suffering alone. I am trying to repair my relationship to — something. I am always trying to repair something. I carry within me the notion that everything is already broken. Love is difficult for me. If it comes too close, it burns me, so I keep it arm’s length. I wasn’t there the night Prometheus showed us all; I have never been able to set a fire without hurting myself. 

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Since the previous movie (Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo), Shinji Ikari¹ and the other Eva pilots have been stuck at fifteen-years-old. Other characters grow older, change noticeably, but for any of the children that have mind-melded with the giant robots bearing their mothers’ souls, they remain children. They cannot age. Asuka calls this a “curse.”

I express to my therapist the fear of being stuck at eleven-years-old in a thirty-something body — disappointed that after all these years, I still feel like that terrified little child trapped in the room of interminable suffering. I express the fear of becoming my mother, because I know that she is still a child inside, frozen at nine-years-old, and everything in her behavior belies that, from her acerbic impatience to her cloying need to be loved. To be honest, I can’t remember what my therapist said to me in response. My fixation on my fears is often so strong that it blots out everything else that I should know about myself. I couldn’t remember what they told me about how to grow up. 

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From Hideaki Anno: The Final Challenge of Evangelion, a making-of documentary of the last Evangelion movie: 

Fumihiko Tachiki, Gendo Ikari’s voice actor: “He’s a lonely man. You’ve embodied it, this time. I mean… he’s been calling his son weak and frail.” 

Anno: “But actually, he himself is the weak one.” 

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My mother is very proud of our ancestral lineage, and she has had, I suspect, a lifelong obsession with recapturing some of our family’s old mainland glory. I am less proud. I think about destruction, more often than not. Of sins and what I owe others. Growing up in American Christocracy will do that to a person, I guess — fire and brimstone cast into my brain without even having gone to a day of church. As a teenager I used to write stories about my guilt for being areligious, and to this day I joke that I have a strong affinity with lapsed Catholics. Anyway — it’s not just the borrowed Catholicism. I really only have my mother to compare myself to. I don't know how much of the terror she gave me is also something I inherited genetically. I am terrified of my blood. I think it’s poisoned, a bit. My people have colonized and my people have slaughtered. And now here I am on a continent where I belong to the colonizers and slaughterers. I wonder how much of this is in my blood. I wonder how many years it takes to flush out.

Something I do remember my therapist telling me is that I might have OCD, but only about moralism. About being a good person. I don't truly believe genetic inheritance defines you as a person, of course. I just think it has a chokehold on my psyche. My mother wasn’t religious but she might as well have been; sometimes when she disciplined me and accused me of lying, she’d point at the ceiling and scream, “God will know!” From that point onwards I adopted a discipline of self-surveillance. If I could not cleanse myself of wrongness, then I had to make up for it with my exterior actions. Two good deeds to balance out a single embodied sin. If Anubis ever weighs my heart, he will be the one who knows. 

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Everyone who knows Evangelion knows at least this one thing: that Shinji’s father only wants Shinji around to pilot the giant robot that might protect the whole of humanity from sure, imminent destruction. Otherwise, his son might as well be furniture. 

I share this with Shinji: the experience of being used as a “tool” to achieve some greater goal for your parents, a physical manifestation of deferred debt (I gave you life so you must give me what I want in return, even if it is an impossible desire). Being born not to be a person but as a means to an end. The feeling of being object-fied, made an object. We ride as a ghost in the machine in the corpses of our mothers. This body for many years was not mine — it was my mother’s, it was made from my mother, and my mother continues to make her own demands over what should be my sovereignty. HRT opens up new genetic possibilities and in a cruel twist of fate it opens up my mother’s; I see more and more of her in my face with each passing day. Or is it just this psychic delusion? I am now a little past the age she was when she gave birth to my sister. In less than four years, I'll meet her at the age she was when I was born. Harboring thirty years of unresolved pain, like a seaside cave that cannot be flushed of its sewage despite the best efforts of the tide, makes me realize: Oh. This is how one comes into madness. This is why they’re all a little bit crazy. Mothers, that is. 

Tool to make myself, to unmake and make myself. Across time, I call myself various nouns: knife. Chisel. Blunted hammer. All with the distinct metal edge. I spit into the sink. I taste blood sometimes. I use the sharp end of a needle to carve into myself. What object will I be next time. 

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I ran away to a place once. I stayed for too long. My friends in New York like to tease me and say, “You’re such an L.A. person,” (because I refuse to use the term Angeleno) and I try to resist this assigned demonym but then there are times when I realize that the desert had penetrated its aridity deep into my bones and sanded away what existed all those years before. I tell new people, “I moved here from L.A.,” because the whole lineage of me is too complicated to explain, and because I do not want to admit that I spent the first fourteen years of my life locked inside my house on Long Island and learned very little about what it was like to be there, aside from what it felt like to wake up and go to school in a nightmare and come home and fall asleep in a nightmare. I don’t think I understand what it’s like to be changed by something. I do and I don’t. I do because I know I don’t exist unchanged and I have two tattoos and three piercings and I can still point to the scar on my knee made by a clumsy twelve-year-old colliding into hot summer asphalt. I couldn’t get all of the black chunks out of my wound and they must’ve dissolved into my bloodstream over time; I’m part roadwork for the perpetual wanderer. I don’t because I don’t remember what the original blueprint was like, what there existed to be changed. My mother and my sister tell me stories of myself and I don’t recognize the child they tell me about. I can, and I can’t. I am not so bifurcated that I don’t recognize him immediately, but I am in that all of my memories of him exist in the third-person. I am watching him run across the living room carpet to bedevil his grandparents, I am watching his sister push him down the stairs. His pencil case follows him and it spills its colorful guts into the abyssal depths. I am hovering above his shoulder like an invisible drone and I can’t touch him, I can’t do anything to change his circumstance. Ghost in the machine, a powerless god, capable only of witness. Shinji sits in the cockpit of his mother’s body and he can’t do anything but scream.  

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What they don’t tell you is that the most mind-bending part of HRT is having to experience puberty for a second time. In these chemical re-organizations it really does appear that the body hangs onto memories of what it once was. I now have the same ganglion cyst on the backside of my left hand that I did when I was sixteen, revived by the river of me recalling my ancient routes. I ask my doctor what it is, just to make sure it’s not actually a cancerous tumor. She takes my hand into hers and holds it close to her face. “Wow,” she says, “I have not seen one of these in a long time.” Me neither. I tell her that I used to have one as a teenager, and about my theory that my body, in remembering itself as pubescent, is reanimating the events that happened during my first adolescence, too. It makes her laugh. “Oh, Jonah,” she says, “talking to you has been the highlight of my day.” I think I forgot to tell her that trapped in the blockage of my hand is a curse, laying dormant. That I am afraid of what it holds onto. That adolescence is a door I want to remain unopened, because of all its “attendant ghosts.”²

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While Shinji is nearly catatonic, there is a whole society rebuilding itself and he almost misses it. His old childhood friends, now adults in their thirties with families and important roles in the community, take him around to see the settlement. Toji is a doctor now, he tells Shinji about the hardship of the early days, how he had to grow up fast, why he feels responsibility towards others. Kensuke visits his father’s grave: “I never thought my father, who survived the Near-Third Impact, would die just like that in an accident. I should’ve had talks with him, had some drinks, and listened to some of his gripes. Your father’s still alive, right? Even if you think it’d be useless, try talking to him. Or you’ll regret it.” 

If we understand Shinji to be a stand-in, a kind of teenage avatar, for Anno himself, then we can also understand that Shinji does not actually hate his father. In the making-of documentary, Anno says this about his father:

“My dad… He hated the world. The loss of his leg wasn’t his fault… He lost his leg because of another man’s mistake. Dad paid for that mistake with his leg. He was handicapped the rest of his life. He resented everything. He was angry about his fate. I suffered from his resentment, too. The robots I drew as a little kid always had limbs missing. I liked them broken. Limbs torn off. My preference for something broken is probably rooted in my dad’s missing leg. My dad symbolized something always missing in life. Maybe that’s why I feel that incompleteness is good. …It might explain my robot obsession, too. It lets me express my dad… I might want him to affirm him as he was.”

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The last time I went home to Long Island to see my parents, which was only a few months ago, they were completely different people. That, I think, is the cruel trick of time. They used to fight horribly. The rage boiled over and it used to burn everything in reaching distance. Name any soft, kind thing (Sundays, bedsheets, children) as collateral damage. Now my father will invite my mom’s endless nonsense yammering with his calm, silent nods, slicing off the best cuts of meat and putting them on her plate without a word. My mother used to tear into me; now she tells me, simply, that she misses me. I feel like I have been transposed into someone else’s story. I alone hold onto my solitary grief. My memories, still stinging, that only I remember. Left behind by the world. Unable to grow.

My mother is almost a completely different person now, and nowhere is that more obvious than in her face, morphed by age. I can’t actually recall what she currently looks like. The mother in my mind is always the forty-something woman who towered monstrously over my child-body and bent me into a tool that couldn’t even work in the way that it was designed. In reality, I am taller than her nowadays, a combination of my growth on testosterone and her own shrinking stature. She thinks, and has always thought, that I look more like my father. I am possibly the only person in my family who thinks my mother and I are anything alike. Gregarious but sometimes over-talkative, possessing an unfortunate vanity about our looks and a penchant for entertaining others with story. Above all, it is because we share that same dangerous attribute: “brokenness.” That something that keeps us at the edge of “normative” society, from understanding anyone who exists in “wholeness.” All of our broken edge, like a jagged knife, that we drag across the world again and again, in desperation to make a mark. 

Shinji will grow up, though. He wants to stop running, and to take on responsibility for others. When he faces his father, finally, after years of avoiding the conversation, they clash against the shifting, simulated backdrop of old battlefields. Tokyo 3. Misato’s apartment. My computer screen, through which I once found so much solace I confused it for real life. I don’t think I have his bravery, quite yet. I still don’t want to talk to my mother about anything, she makes it so difficult for me. Across fiction I invent conversations with her; I too build arenas, stages, film sets, in which we can clash, argue, or finally resolve our old conflicts. Again and again she arrives in my writing unsummoned. Sometimes she arrives as herself. Often not — more often than not, she becomes a version of herself that is also mixed through with myself. Shinji discovers, through his father’s memories, that they are actually quite alike. That they both felt unloved by their parents, feared rejection from others, and wanted to be alone, feeling that a self-imposed loneliness would preclude the rejection. I don’t think that I am actually that different at all. 

The movie credits roll, and “One Last Kiss” makes me cry. I’ll have to start watching from the beginning again. In Anno’s original proposal for the Evangelion series, he describes the story like this: “Humans are isolated creatures who fear death. They will follow the crowd and abandon their own will. This is the story of a youth who acquires great power and makes a brave decision.”

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Sometimes people change. One of my favorite things that I’ve ever been told by a friend is that sometimes, time will reveal new dimensions, new rooms, in a relationship that you never thought were possible or available to you before. It’s such a loving way to view your relationships; it leaves space for trust. But you have to be an active participant, of course. You have to be willing to take the one and often difficult step forward. After I talk to my therapist, I call my sister, too, about my fear of remaining a child forever. She is no longer the little girl who threw me down the stairs and hasn’t been for a long time. “I think you have a hard time forgiving yourself sometimes,” she says. “I think you get so fixated on trying to change yourself and become a totally different person that you can’t accept your past. But your past, it’s part of your story. It’s part of who you are.”

I have to wonder if, to others, her words will come off as harsh. To me, though, they are undeniably her, such a typical display of how her mind works, how she problem-solves her own life. Moreover, I can hardly believe that, in my confused tangle of words that I babbled at her in one desperate breath, she parted the clouds and read aloud the truth. What I have attempted to say over and over in numerous pages, across this whole essay, she nailed squarely in a few sentences. A tool of calculated accuracy. And, simply, I kind of marvel at the fact that someone on this planet loves me so much to know me this intimately. 

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Anno, one last time: “One expects perfection but gets something broken. That’s why it’s fascinating. My idea of ‘fascinating’ is a little warped.” 

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I have yet to grow up. There is a whole society out here reorganizing itself (for better or for worse) and I am almost missing it. I used to write everything about healing and recovering the self from trauma — my trade, my bread and butter — but now, I am not so sure about anything I've ever said. I used to think that I was coming close to an answer — or an approximation of an answer, some “cardial nugget”³ to hold onto, for proof of a unified truth. Now, I do not think that the answers I’m looking for can ever be divined. Even for someone like me, who enjoys the liminality and uncertainty of life, this revelation displeases me. I ask my therapist, “Am I going to feel this way forever?” They do not mince words with me: “Probably. That’s one of the unfortunate realities of being human. But what you can do is…” I do not remember what they say next.

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There are a lot of people on this Earth who want me alive, and I don’t exactly understand why yet, but I don’t think I want to go to sleep quite yet. Mari Mari Mari, Mari the Illustrious, my Mari Makinami, takes me by the hand and pulls me up the stairs, back up up up to the surface. We’re back in my hometown-not-my-hometown-but-close-enough. Bryant Park. The library. Those several streets in Flushing I spent every Sunday in childhood. We rumble around in our adult bodies but suddenly we do feel so free, like children. I call my best friend of seventeen years and I tell her about the time I felt most loved by her, and I marvel that I am able to say this to her at all. Once upon a time I would have most certainly kept it to myself, or missed noticing that moment at all. I am in wonder that I have known anyone for seventeen years, and that I have known myself for longer. One day, I’m sure, none of this will matter to anyone anymore. But not yet. 

1. For consistency, this essay uses the Western name order convention for Japanese names, with given name preceding the family name.

2. This essay cannibalizes old phrases of mine, which I think is fitting given the theme of stasis/recurrence. I’ve set this in quotes to denote its borrowed feature, though the piece it originates from is so old (and possibly private) that I can’t remember which one it is.

3. Borrowed from this piece.