“from [my mother] I had learned that fearlessness. I haven’t been in a pool in years but, once, my abilities had made a difference. It was the year before I went
away to NMS; I had saved another’s life.”

The content of this quote surprised me in that his mother has had such a positive impact on him in his childhood and he attests to that which makes the change to their relationship that began before his father’s death and took an abrupt turn all the more surprising. To some extent, I think he might have blamed and resented his mother, the German, for his experiences of discrimination and ill-treatment, particularly the one where he was beaten by the instructor. What she had taught him, German and swimming, became what made him distinct from others, and seeking to escape this, he forgot those abilities. To him, his dad must’ve represented the part of himself that conformed to everyone else and his mom represented the part that ostracized him which might have been why he tried to emulate his dad, picking his side in conflicts and getting angry at his mother on his behalf. If interpreted this way, I wonder, then what was the nature of his relationship with his grandmother.