Author: Mihaela Mateescu

Learning doesn’t stop once you finish high-school, college, or any other form of higher education. It doesn’t stop just because you cross across some stage, in outfits you pay hundreds of dollars for, to get a piece of paper nicely folded and wrapped with a bow. Just because you graduated something, it doesn’t mean learning stops and you don’t ever have to do any studying again. We learn until the very last breath we take. Every single experience, every person we meet, every instance of confusion, anger, exhilaration, every sigh and shrug of the shoulders, every trip we make, even if it’s the same one over and over again, everything is learning. You can look at the same thing every day and see something new every day.

You can watch a movie over and over, and notice new subtleties to the dialogue, new inflections in the actors’ voices, new objects in the setting, new light, new emotion, new everything. You can hear a song and hear new sounds every time you hear it again. You learn the lyrics by heart because you listen to it so much, but every time, EVERY TIME, you hear new emphasis on a different word in a line. And that’s learning. We learn from everything that happens to us, and around us. We learn from the way people look at us, differently depending on the situation. We learn from conversations we overhear and interpret and judge. We learn from children’s play, from their unusual ways of dancing sometimes, from their smiles and innocent but intensely hilarious comments. We learn in situations when we are the authority, and we are the ones expected to know everything and deliver it to others.

We learn so much about ourselves every day. But still, some individuals have forgotten that. And some choose to ignore it on purpose, under the mistaken assumption that if they hold any kind of authority over someone else, they don’t need to learn anything new anymore. That is a scary thought. I wish more people paid attention to everything they learn every day, no matter how insignificant that may seem. When you reach the point of not learning anymore, you stop evolving. The human race has to evolve even more, so as not to disappear without a trace when a major global catastrophe happens. Sadly, I see more and more people not learning anymore. It breaks my heart to see so many beautiful things ignored on a daily basis. It breaks my heart to know that people get to a point and then they think they don’t need to learn anything knew, because they already know it all. It is even sadder to me that I have to work and accept guidance from people like that. I refuse. I have to keep learning, and I have to keep evolving, for myself and those I consider my family, and for those I hope to help. I won’t ever stop learning. Neither should you. Because ignorance is NOT bliss. Ignorance is death.

At the risk of repeating myself, I have to start this story with the fact that my father was found guilty of treason against the communist regime and sentenced to prison. My father was a brave man, hard-working and daring, and a womanizer (by his own admission to me). I don’t think he deserved what happened to him, but there’s nothing I can do about it. There never was, other than to suffer the consequences of his actions with him.

My father hated oppression, he hated having to watch every word he said (people were known to disappear off the streets for things they said), he hated being controlled by two people with a fourth grade education (our dictators) and the clique they had around them. He hated having to participate in parades reminiscent of the Chinese ones (that’s where our dictator got the idea, after visiting China in the late 70’s), he hated being told what to think and feel, how to act, how to salute and bow his head, how to not be himself. And he hated all these things even more after he became a helmsman and started travelling to foreign countries where these things didn’t happen. My father had this defiant quality about him that came through in the way he looked at you, and talked, and smiled. I’m very much like my father in all these respects, and I would feel like a coward not saying what I think and feel when my father fought for this right, lost, and paid with his life. He’s not dead, if that’s what you think. What I mean is that his life and family were taken away, he was destroyed as a human being, literally reduced to skin and bones, and defeated. What kind of daughter would I be if I didn’t honor his legacy and fight for the right to speak your mind?

The way he silently protested, initially, was by smuggling goods into the country aboard his ship. He would bring home powdered milk (which was hidden in an oak wardrobe in my parents’ bedroom, so hidden that I had to sneak around and find it buried under piles of old clothes… the delight of the powder in my mouth is something I will never forget, as long as I live), chewing gum and soap (yes, that’s right, we didn’t have those), and cigarettes and whiskey to sell to other deprived individuals for almost nothing. I’m sure he brought other things that I probably don’t remember. He was caught in 1981 the first time, and sent to jail for 18 months, and his right to travel out of the country was revoked. After being released, he was able to go back to his ship, but only run it from one Romanian port to another up the coast. No more Africa and The Cape of Good Hope which he passed on the way to China before the Suez Canal was open, no more 9-month long voyages, no more the little bit of freedom he felt he had. He, the captain of the ship, and one other individual immediately decided to take things further and take their ship to Istanbul the first chance they got. After planning and informing families of what they would do, after making their peace with the consequences were they to get caught again, they did it. They put the crew to sleep, and changed the course to international waters, towards Turkey. They were two hours away from international waters when one of the crew members woke up, realized the ship was not going where it was supposed to, and sounded the alarm. In less than ten minutes, SWAT-like teams in helicopters descended upon the ship and took it over. My father hid in the galley and attempted suicide. He was found in a pool of blood, unconscious. While the other two people responsible were taken to the closest prison, literally put in a vehicle and taken there in an hour, my father was chained to a gurney and taken to the hospital to see if he would survive his self-inflicted wounds (he had used a butcher’s knife). After he woke up and was stabilized, he was taken to the same prison.

There was a public trial, in a room packed with people astounded by the daring acts of the three. All other crew members were considered accomplices (even the one who sounded the alarm), and their passports were taken away, as well as the right to ever work on a ship again. They were all charged with treason, plotting against the regime, and undermining national economy. None of this was a surprise, they all knew this would happen. The surprise was when our family friends were called to the stand. It turned out every single one of them was an informant for the secret police, recruited during my father’s first imprisonment. People we spent time with, whose children were my close friends, took the stand and talked about my father’s hate for the communists (talk about not trusting anyone anymore). All this was more of a formality. The captain of the ship was sentenced to death, and took in front of the execution squad twice before his punishment was reduced to life in prison a few weeks later.

This is where the dignity part of this story comes in. When the trial was over, but before the sentence for my father was passed, my mother was called to the judge’s chambers. He looked her up and down, and simply told her that she could provide sexual favors if she wanted my father’s sentence to be ‘lighter’. My mother, a 5 foot woman weighing 100 Lbs., with blond hair down to her waist, and blue eyes cold as ice, told him: “My husband made his bed and he must now sleep in it. I have two children to raise on my own. If you think I’ll destroy the last shred of dignity I have left, you’re wrong. And if you ever make this proposal again, I will bite your balls off and make you eat them”. She then turned around and left. My father was sentenced to 22 years in prison. This was in 1985. I was 7. The reason I’m quoting her words is because I wrote them down when she told me the story, much later. I had to write them down so that I would remember her courage as well. I never forgot it, and just like I honor my father by speaking up against injustice, I honor my mother by trying to be brave and never giving up when faced with adversity. I couldn’t do any less. If I did, her efforts would have all been in vain and I could never forgive myself if that was the case.

Initially, I wasn’t told what had happened, I was too young. After a while, realizing that no one was talking about when my father would come back home, I started asking questions. They remained unanswered until second grade, when I found out from a kid in my class that my father was in jail. It was during a childish argument with this kid, you know, the one where you say “I’m gonna get my brother to beat you up if you don’t leave me alone.” After he said he would get his brother to beat mine up, I yelled: “Well, my father is bigger than your brother, so he’ll take care of him”. To that, the child said: “Well, you can’t, cause your dad is a criminal and he’s in jail, you’ll never see him again”. Can you imagine the pain and confusion of an 8-year-old being told that at school, in the middle of the classroom, with 32 other children around and one teacher who didn’t dare say anything? I lived through it. I LIVED WITH IT, and still do.

I saw my father in jail once. The prison was 12 hours away from where we lived, and on the way there my mother was trying to tell me that he was in a hospital and that I would finally get to see him for a few minutes. We waited outside the prison, a monstrous building, with thick brick walls around it, with armed guards everywhere. We were all searched three times, by three different squads. We were ushered in through narrow, dark, moist hallways, towards a room with rows of glass booths. They only allowed two people to visit, so my brother waited outside so that I could go in. As we were waiting for for my father to appear, I looked around and realized that was not a hospital at all, and that the kid in my class was, in fact, right. I had hoped, oh, how I had hoped that it would be a hospital. I had been in a hospital myself, with tuberculosis, and I knew I had gotten to go back home when I was better. And then I saw him, coming through a small opening on the other side of the glass wall, dressed in a gray jumpsuit, chained from his neck to his feet, the way violent criminals are chained here in the States. He could barely shuffle his feet, he had to be supported by two guards because the chains were so heavy and he was so weak from beatings and hunger and sleeping on cement. I can’t remember if he smiled or not when he saw me, but I prefer to believe he did. I had missed him so much, and now he was there, in front of me, and I couldn’t touch him. And I couldn’t understand the chains, and why his eyes were sunken in like they were, and where his spirit had gone. He didn’t have it anymore, his eyes were dead looking at me. I don’t remember any of the conversation that took place between him and my mother. What I remember was thinking that I had lost my father forever. And I was right.

I think about all these things often. When I hear people bitching about how inconvenient things in their lives are, when I see people wasting their lives and living on social security because they’re too lazy to go to work, when I read about how jails are here in the States, with gyms, TV’s, education, and conjugal visits, when I read about serial killers on death row because they have the right to appeal after appeal after appeal, when I hear that people want to change Mark Twain’s works because they contain words like “nigger” and that’s offensive, when I hear that children are suspended from school for sexual harassment because they tried to hold a little girl’s hand, I think about my father and our broken spirits. And I want to fight even harder against things that shouldn’t happen in the first place. I will always fight. That is my legacy.