But in general, our parents were not taught to take slow breaths when they were upset to calm themselves down. And many of our parents were not taught to spare the rod.
The way I remember it, the school entered into a state of anxious panic when grades were dispensed. You’d see kids here and there curled up in the fetal position in the hall, their heads between their knees, sometimes sitting still and sometimes with their shoulders shaking. You might see a girl with her face in her hands, all of her friends clustered around, rubbing her back. These were the kids who got the B-pluses or worse.
At a senior-year hotel party, the cops came. There were forty of us drinking a single bottle of Hpnotiq and smoking stolen cigarettes. When I heard their adult voices, I made a break for it and somehow slipped under the low bed. As the police decided what to do with us, the girls sitting on the mattress above me began to cry. One of them shout-whispered between sobs, “My mom’s going to send me back to Vietnam!”
And then there was the group of us that used to huddle near the portable classrooms at the back of the school. Out on the edge of the blacktop was a large, pale-yellow shipping container, and that’s where the sad kids hung out. Every day we would summon our smoldering angst and hurl a bit of our lunch at the container. We hoped that by the end of the year, it’d be a Jackson Pollock abstract masterpiece of chocolate milk, spaghetti sauce, and Mountain Dew stains. And then we played our favorite game: Who Had It Worse?
I remember one boy’s mother burned him with cigarette butts. Another’s locked him out of his bedroom and forced him to sleep on the couch because, she said, he was so worthless that he didn’t deserve his own space. My close friend’s mother chased her around the house slapping her and telling her she was nothing, and she once woke her daughter up by choking her. I talked about the welts on my legs, about how I’d curled into a ball when I was thrown down the stairs. We would debate the logistics of our abuse: Was it better to be whipped with something narrow like a cane or be hit by something large and solid? Was a welt more painful, long-term, than a bruise? Was it more demoralizing to be belittled or simply ignored?
My other close friend’s father once got so angry that he kicked down his bedroom door in the middle of the night. Just splintered it off its hinges. Then he attacked. My friend came to school with bruises all over his body the next day, and that was the only time I considered telling. I told him I was going to call the cops. I told him this wasn’t okay. He begged me not to.
“It’ll ruin my mother. She can’t divorce him,” he said. “Please, don’t. It’ll ruin our whole family.”
“But she can’t help you,” I told him. “I don’t care about protecting her. I care about protecting you.”
“Protecting her is protecting me,” he said.
I kept silent. Like all the rest of us, I didn’t tell.
Our parents knew what it was to be hungry. Our parents were refugees. There were pages of Nguyens in our yearbooks and a wave of Trans. Their parents remembered living in camps. Sometimes they spent all of their money as soon as they got it because they remembered what it was like to lose your life’s savings in a month, in a week, in a moment, when a dictator rises or a bomb falls.
Our parents were alone. Many of them had brothers or sisters or parents back home whom they rarely saw, and so they had to take care of their children without the support of the large families that many of the white kids had. Some of our parents were undocumented. Even though they should have felt power and safety in numbers—in our majority minority status—they never forgot they were guests here.
Our parents did not talk about loss. Sometimes, once in a long while, they might offhandedly mention soldiers or a violent father, but nobody ever said anything about what must have happened: abuse, sexual assault, the traumas of poverty and war. But even at a young age, without understanding what these things were, we sensed them as we kicked our way through the currents of our day. We could feel it looming somewhere, large and dark beneath everything: our parents’ pain.
So when the hands came, we offered our cheeks. We offered ourselves as conduits for their anguish because they had suffered so we wouldn’t, so we could watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat sugary cereal and go to college and trust the government and never go hungry. We excused all of it, absorbed the slaps and the burns and the canings and converted them into perfect report cards to wipe away our parents’ brutal pasts. We did the work, as they like to say now. We got into good colleges, got internships and postdocs, and eventually moved on to successful, rewarding careers in big cities that paid us enough money to buy high-end audio gear for our modernist apartments. We achieved the American Dream because we had no other choice.
* * *
—
For a long time, this was the story I remembered about my childhood. I told myself it was not worth dwelling on. It was what it was. It was the price you paid for growing up in the Valley of Heart’s Delight. My story was the same as everyone else’s story.
But now, I wasn’t so sure.
CHAPTER 24
I’m blasting “Work” by Jimmy Eat World on the 280 from SFO to San Jose—a tribute to the last version of myself to embark on this drive. I listened to this song every day on my way to high school—an anticipatory anthem to escape. Can we take a ride? Get out of this place while we still have time?
I allow myself a moment to feel pride for that teenage self, the way she harvested that emo-pop angst into a rocket that blasted her out of this goddamn town. Then I shiver a bit, wondering what she would think of me now, driving back of my own volition, still sporting blue hair and combat boots fifteen years later.
* * *
—
I’ve come back to San Jose to fact-check my abuse.
I’ve come back because ever since my diagnosis, I’ve been questioning the reliability of memory.