“When you go to college, this car will most likely be yours, as long as you can find a place to keep it.”
Those were the words my dad said to me as we pulled the tarp off his old, rusty 1973 BMW 2 Series time capsule. Hearing those words as a 16-year-old sophomore just learning to drive moved me beyond belief . I could picture it all so clearly… moving to California and driving the best roads America had to offer with the windows down, the sea breeze in my hair, a beautiful girl in the passenger seat. This car obviously needed a lot of love and we were willing to put in every hour of work needed to get it back on the road in time for my big dream. So, did we make it? Well, since my third year of college, we are left with an empty piece of metal that is somehow even more worthless than what we started with, and a dream that fades far into obscurity.
Long before I knew the car, my father also had a dream. He moved to the United States from the Philippines after graduating college, and like many hard-working Asian immigrants, he knew what he wanted and how to work hard to get it. After working in finance for a few years, he was able to buy the car he always wanted: a 20-year-old, underpowered, dangerous compact 2-door coupe from Germany. Even by the standards of the late 1990s, the 1973 BMW 2002 wasn’t necessarily a fast car. But it was an enthusiast car, something that perfectly suited my father’s spirit.
One fateful day, he would drive that very car to the Seattle Opera House, where he would be unexpectedly reunited with his high school classmates.weetheart — my mother. It turned out that she happened to be in the musical he went to see. He always told the story like “this is the car I wooed mom with.” And it never lets him down—he drives 150 miles from Seattle to Vancouver to watch her again.
Spoiler alert: they got married. They had their first child, me, and found a place in the suburbs outside of Seattle. Things settled down a bit and the car started to sit… and sit… and sit.
It stood for almost 20 years as the centerpiece of our driveway and for as long as I can remember I have always used it as my personal playground. I would play hide and seek under it, use it as a climbing hall and try to peek inside. Eventually it became a concern of “Hey Dad, when are are we going to fix this?’
While the car sat over years ago, he lost the keys and to be honest, none of us were experts in repairing old cars. In short, we couldn’t do it alone. And that’s where Brian came in.
Brian was the typical crazy mechanic whose fingers were always covered in motor oil, who wore trucker hats and always had a cigarette in his mouth. It just so happened that his specialty was restoring vintage 2002 BMWs, so when my dad met him in 2018, we couldn’t have been more excited.
My dad and I are both lifelong gearheads, but neither of us really had any experience with rebuilding a car from scratch. Brian taught us everything we needed to know: how to use an angle grinder, how to pry an engine out of the engine bay, and how to use dry ice as a hack to remove old glue from metal. This guy knew every inch of this car and we knew we were in good hands.
For a moment I really looked at him in a way. He taught me how to get my hands dirty; he was always tough but wanted you to learn how to solve problems. My dad and I were so busy having fun on this father-son trip that we didn’t even notice the red flags.
It took about two years to realize that we had been lied to, that Brian had never intended to help us restore the car to its full former glory. After dropping off our engine at a shop in Seattle, we never heard back from it. We called him several times, but he never picked up. It all started to make sense – why it took us two years just to remove the interior trim, why he was so hesitant to teach us how to do anything other than remove parts of the car instead of installing new parts, and why he always looked a little restless when he worked with us.
About a year after all this, my dad called him from a new phone number and he picked up. My father immediately pounced on him. He screamed, cursed him. I was crazy too; my dream of driving down the California coast and picking up girls was starting to fade. I remember Brian just taking everything my dad yelled at him, “Yes.” “I know.” “…I’m sorry.” Whether he was truly sorry or not, we will never know because that was the last time we spoke to him. My father thinks he may be dead, and Brian’s parents, who my father worked with, lost touch with him until his death.
As for my dream, I like to say it’s just on hiatus. Dreams never die, they just get redirected. With the loss of the engine, my dad actually wants to consider converting the 2002 to an EV. I, on the other hand, say “you’ll have to wait until I’m dead before you turn this car into an EV.” Either way, the lesson I learned is that you can’t rely on other people. Now it’s somewhat up to me, and if I want to see my dream come true, I have to make it happen myself.
