At night, once my parents go to bed, I sneak out a video from this home library. I’ve preemptively oiled all the doors so they won’t squeak, and thank God we have a concrete-and-tile floor instead of creaky wood planks. I creep to the television in the living room. After wiping mold off the tapes, I feed one into our old VCR player. There’s a loud crunching noise as the tape goes in, and I cringe, convinced my parents will hear. After waiting a beat, I put the volume down to 1 percent, and with my ear pressed against the TV speaker, I look up to see the pictures.
Night after night my activities go unnoticed. I start to grow bolder. I sit a little further back; turn the volume up a notch higher. I stop looking over my shoulder at every squeak in the night and stay awake later and later. I’m watching Overboard with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell when I hear a noise that makes my heart stop. The living room door opens. I whip around, turning off the TV as I do, but it’s too late. Dad has caught me red-handed.
My body braces for the yelling, the slap, the Rod of God. I don’t know what will happen. It’s been years since I’d been disciplined by Dad, but the fear is just as fresh. Lying, begging for forgiveness, and running all flash through my mind, but each idea is immediately dismissed as futile. I stand stock-still and wait for my father to whip out his belt. Fourteen has never been too old to get a spanking in his house.
Instead, he sits on the couch and motions for me to sit beside him. Then, quietly, he asks me what I’m doing. Is this a trap? I wonder. “I wanted to see a movie,” I whisper.
He nods. “You know you’re not supposed to be sneaking movies at night, right?”
“Yes.” I nod, waiting for the blow, but he isn’t losing his temper. He must notice my terrified face, because he pats me on the leg and says, “I’m not going to punish you, but I don’t want you sneaking movies at night. You won’t have energy for your work tomorrow. Okay? Now off to bed.”
I stare in shock for a second before making my lucky escape. His patience strikes me harder than the Rod of God. I actually feel guilty instead of resentful, as I would have if he punished me.
The following day, he asks if I’ll get ice cream with him at the little Chinese corner store by the beach. I am surprised. The only time he’s ever taken me for ice cream was on a special occasion or when I’d “earned” it.
He doesn’t seem angry, but I’ve seen how fast that can change. I glance nervously at him from the corner of my eye as we walk.
He awkwardly tries to ask me about myself: “How are things going? How do you feel about being back? Is anything bothering you?” I stare at him incredulously.
“I really want to know,” he insists. Then he waits patiently for me to speak, instead of just preaching at me.
Who is this man?
“Not much,” I reply, unsure what he wants me to say.
He waits. “Well . . . ?”
I am touched, even though I’m too scared tell him the truth about things that might bother me—anger at Mom, a desire to date, missing my novels. I’ve learned through painful experience to keep quiet about anything that isn’t acceptable Family behavior, and that’s not going to change with a few heartfelt attempts at connection by my dad. But as we eat our ice cream, I slowly start to feel more comfortable talking with him. These outings become a regular occurrence—without anyone to report on them, Dad, like Mom, seems less concerned about the evils of white sugar now. Not like when he spanked Mary a hundred swats for stealing coins from Esther’s purse and buying candy.
Whatever the Family put him through in Japan has changed him. I’m seeing a third side of him. He is subdued. He speaks with me rather than just at me. This is the first time he’s ever asked me how I am and waited for me to gather my thoughts and speak. My father doesn’t say much about himself, but over time I gather the story in bits and pieces.
When my father left for Japan three years before, he had been so excited, thinking he was finally going to be allowed to see his father after being separated for ten years. When he’d tried to visit his father not long after my birth, Mama Maria denied him entry. She told him his visit was “unauthorized,” meaning he had not sought clearance in advance, and he was turned away. Dad was baffled; he had never needed permission to see his father in the past. Since then, all access to his father went through Mama Maria, and he hoped this invitation meant a thaw. But upon arriving in Tokyo, Dad discovered that this was not just a visit but a coup, and new leadership had been brought into Macau to take charge of things. Dad was held in isolation for six months in a small cottage on the HSC property and was given letters that people had written about him—mostly complaints about his leadership, that he was too dogmatic, self-righteous, dictatorial, strict, bad-tempered, a harsh disciplinarian, and didn’t listen to the opinions of others. That’s when it dawned on him that he had been invited to Japan for retraining. Worse, Grandpa was living in another house on the property, yet he was never allowed to approach him.
For two and a half long years, my father was completely cut off from us; he was never given the letters we sent him, and the ones he wrote to us were never delivered. He was so isolated he didn’t even know that we had been sent to Thailand or that we’d gone to the US. It wasn’t until the end of his stint in Japan after the Shepherds decided that he was sufficiently broken that he was finally allowed to see his father, who had since moved to a Family compound in the Philippines. It was perhaps due to their father’s ailing health that he and his sister, Aunt Faithy, were invited for a month-long visit.
Grandpa had long been a drinker. As God’s anointed prophet, he was not subject to the same rules as the rest of us. “Great men often have great faults,” he’d say of famous historical figures plagued by a vice. For Grandpa, it was alcohol, although he claimed he moderated his consumption. But during my father’s last visit with him, he’d observed that Grandpa’s drinking had become a full-on addiction, with Mama Maria rationing the amount of wine or sherry he could consume each day.
As they were shutting down the Farm anyway, the Asia Pacific leadership didn’t see any harm in my father taking his visa trip to Macau instead of South Korea, where they’d been sending him for the last two years. But once he was back at the Farm, he refused to budge. He wrote Grandpa to say he wasn’t going back to Japan. If Ruthie was willing, he wanted to try to put his family back together and live quietly at the Farm. Grandpa agreed, so he came to get us.
As the details of my father’s experience slip out, I pity him and, eventually, stop fearing him as much. Since being back at the Farm, he and I have begun to forge a new relationship. Once I would have been scared to death to call him “Dad”; such a casual address would have gotten me a slap for being flippant and disrespectful. Now he is no longer “sir” or “Father,” but “Dad.”
When we run horses in the ring, he gives me money to bring back ice-cream bars from the beach store. We even have date nights. On Friday nights, Dad takes us all out to a nice hotel and we order dessert.
I don’t know if my father has become disillusioned with the Family—he still always praises God, but I can tell his spirit has been broken. For the first time, I realize he is a human. I try looking at him with compassion and love, but not uncritically. He’s flawed and figuring things out, just like me.