When I was about ten years old my father left Colorado for Korea, at nearly the same time as my mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s began. Now, after his retirement, my father has returned and taken up the mantle of caretaker. This is odd to me, because of my memories of the former him.
Some memories are seared into one’s consciousness. Fear does that. It took decades for the nightmares to stop. Even now, when I don’t block out thoughts of home, they return, as vividly as though I’d never left.
* * *
The father I first knew was the angry one. That man dragged my mother from my bed where she hid, to their shared bedroom next door. He seized her by three limbs, all at once, while the other dangled. I will never forget her helplessness—the way she knew that no matter how she resisted, she was lost. I watched as she slid down the sheets, away from me. I watched as he pulled her down the hall as one might a laundry bag.
She screamed in Korean, but those details I remember less. I lack that language, and so what I heard instead was her fear, and hurt, and vulnerability. Those emotions have their own pitch.
The Devil's Son - ParanormalCheck out the best interactive novels on Whispers: Interactive stories.
I’ve tried, as much as possible, to block out these kinds of memories. Yet they don’t fade.
I remember him beating my middle sister, three years older than me. There, he had her by the wrist, downstairs, again in the night. It was always at night. Always for some small perceived wrong, some perceived slight: my sister staying up and reading or watching TV rather than going to bed, most often. The screams are what I remember most. Though she was taller and heavier than him, even as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, or however old she was at the time, fear rendered her unable to resist.
In these instances, I can see the exact setting—the backdrop, the furniture, the cast of characters. I prefer not to. I remember the viciousness of his strokes, wooden, metal-reinforced ruler in hand. I remember his face, nearly animal in its contortions.
That he derived pleasure from hurting someone else, I have never been able to forgive. The forcefulness of his motions has always been linked, in my mind, to his forehand, which he used to practice in the air, sans racquet, over and over and over again, in my parents’ upstairs bedroom.
In the single short, stilted conversation I’ve had with my sister in the time since, she mentioned the bruises.
I remember running outside of the house, into the cool air of my cul-de-sac, on these sorts of occasions. My sister’s screams were high-pitched, those of an animal in distress. I could still hear the screams, outside, standing at the edge of the driveway. I can still hear them now. Colorado air is thin—there is little to disrupt sound’s transmission. We lived in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. I wondered why no one helped.
I hovered in the garage once, the morning after a particularly vicious incident. My mother opened the door. “You know what happened last night,” she said to me. “Be nice to your sister,” and then shut the door.
For a length of time, I resented my mother for absenting herself from any responsibility to protect us. I resented her for sleeping with me at night. I wanted to be left un-pestered, to be granted privacy. My small body functioned as a shield, or a reprieve. I myself didn’t seem to matter. She seemed to assume that if she were in my bed, he wouldn’t cross that line—he would leave her alone. I found her presence invasive. But I understood, too, that she was afraid for herself.
* * *
These are not moments I want to inhabit. Yet I can’t remove them from the narrative, as my father would prefer. These are moments that break the narrative.
In the first few weeks of each semester, I teach my students Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.” And yet as I harp on about the value of not reducing a person to one single story, I realize how hard that is to put into practice. Our minds want continuity.
Our visions of those closest to us are so shaped by the impact they’ve had on our lives, and so inseparable from that, that even if they themselves are paradoxical in their complexity, it’s easier to reduce. Especially in relation to certain subjects, like abuse.
Still, it’s the disruption of the pattern that can be so distracting. How does one capture a fair picture of a person, if the pieces don’t add up to what we expect? Yet it can be tormenting to try to occupy that gray space—in feeling and acknowledging so many contradictory things, all at once, and not knowing what to do with the pieces.
My father tried to protect those around him from whatever traumas he had undergone—suffering the sudden loss of his father as a child, growing up in poverty, as a result, during the Korean War—by not speaking of his past. This is what I assume, anyway. He didn’t allow himself to be known. Yet the effects were still clear. He became the trauma. Because of him, normal life seems too mundane—too lacking in adrenaline.
* * *
Over the years, I’ve confronted my father about the past. My family’s chronology, geographies, and medical histories are too complicated to plot on a single line. Time blurs. What doesn’t fade are his responses.
My father has tried telling me that it wasn’t as bad as I remember; that his outbursts didn’t happen that often, that memory is fallible.
He has tried to discredit me to myself. To tell me I am an unreliable narrator. His arguments change rapidly, in the style of someone who has a great deal to gain in denying.
He has told me other things, as well, that rather than serving his defense, disturb me more.
I remember where we were standing in the living room of my childhood home, in the most frank conversation he and I have had about the past. It is the only instance in which he has owned up and expressed regret.
With regard to my sister, he argued, “It wasn’t just one-way, you know. She hit me, too.”
When I responded angrily that she was a child, that she was trying to defend herself, he fell silent.
With regard to my mother, his defense was similar; that it wasn’t just him, that she escalated.
“Even if that’s true, it wasn’t an equal fight,” I told him. “You’re stronger than her. She’s smaller than you. What kind of man hits a woman?”
To which he said sadly, “How was I supposed to know better?”