Listen, watch and learn   
By Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

Three fathers, three languages — Korean, English and German. How my fathers were silent, worked and danced were gifts that showed me the way.

I do not have my birth father’s name nor have I met him. Or perhaps he held me during the first few days of my life before someone took me to the orphanage’s gate for someone else to find. Instead of memory, I have my father’s silence and all the documented names for it. Father’s name: no records. Father’s whereabouts: unknown. Yet this silence is not a loss. Instead, it taught me how to listen, how to perceive him in me. I could return to that part of myself that he gave me — his hands in my hands, his face in mine — not to name it, for surely I will be wrong, but rather to dwell in it. In my father’s silence, I can hear my heart beating, his heart in my heart. For a writer of poetry, this is the first rhythm of which all others are variations.

The hands of my adoptive father, Danny Dobbs, are callused from his job in the steel mill furnace, operating the strand carrying beams to the cooling unit. Coming home, he would sit in his blue recliner, open the tobacco can, pack the pipe, and suck the flame until the cherry glowed. Watching my father smoke, I could see small cuts on his arms, the grafted skin on his left ankle that wrapped around his entire leg, and to me, his body proved that only love worked this hard. He never complained. While completing my dissertation, I suffered through back pain, insomnia, and neck cramps, but remembering my father’s body, I felt humbled and persevered. If love showed in my father’s work, then it might also show in mine.

And love also showed in how my father-in-law, Uwe Liess, danced to The Specials with me at my wedding to Stefan, his son. Sixty-eight years old, my father, twists at the waist, waves his hands in the air, and smiles at me, rocking back and forth. His black patent leather shoes and tuxedo buttons wink. “I have a new daughter,” he said when he hugged me after the wedding ceremony held at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. A new daughter and a new wife, I spin around while he takes hold of my waist. We whirl together laughing, my white tea-length skirt bouncing. His eyes are bright through his wire-rimmed glasses, and his trimmed white beard accentuates the same jaw that my husband has. I see Stefan clap, and he takes my hand while my father stands to the side as my husband dips me back then kisses me.

In my heart, my fathers are all together — silent, at work and dancing — and, as their daughter, I am listening. I am persevering. I am learning how to dance with all of them and to love.