And I finally speak to one beloved Asian teacher who cautions me: “Be careful when you use the word abusive. ‘Abusive’ can be very misleading. If you shout at somebody, you’re being abusive because you’re too loud, right? I wouldn’t use that word.”
At some point during each of these conversations, I feel bad about my line of questioning. All of these teachers got into this profession because they wanted to nurture children as best they can. They had welcomed me into their busy day, hoping for yet another heartwarming success story, and instead they got a bitter ghost hurling accusations and questioning how well they’d truly observed their students’ pain, interrogating the efficacy of their life’s purpose. Eventually, they all ask, “But you turned out okay, didn’t you?” So I put one of those confident smiles on my face and list my accomplishments, and with each progressive accolade, I can see the furrows in their brows melt away a bit more with relief.
But that night, I feel anything but accomplished. I lie awake in my cheap motel room, cursing my fragile mind. If I misremembered my community’s trauma, maybe I really was misremembering my own.
CHAPTER 25
The next morning, I drive toward my childhood home. The street I lived on is too wide, I think, acres and acres of space. It’s only when I park that I realize it’s because there are no other cars parked in the street. They are all safely housed in spacious garages. There are no people on this street, either. The houses are of varied architectural styles, with well-kept but individualistic gardens, so it feels suburban yet distinctive. Still, the lack of humans gives the street an eerie air.
There are so many details about this house that I never could have named but are intimately familiar. I could never have told you what the steps leading to our house were made of, but now that I rub the gray-and-white pebbles with my fingers, I have memories of making my Playmobil figurines dance down these steps and huddle in the grass.
I ring the doorbell. A small, older Vietnamese woman comes to the door and cracks it, eyeing me suspiciously. “Hi,” I say. “Um, I know it’s kind of weird, but this is the house I grew up in, and I was wondering if I could come inside and take a look?”
I don’t think she knows enough English to respond, but she knows enough to understand, and a bright smile spreads across her face. She throws open the door and opens her arms wide in welcome. The first thing I notice is the dark mahogany steps and floors. “Oh my God,” I say. “You took out the carpet.” This apparently is enough to confirm that I am a former inhabitant, because in an absurd act of trust, she leaves me to wander the house by myself and waddles to the kitchen to rejoin another elderly woman who is busy plucking the stems off vegetables from a gigantic plastic basket.
I know the layout of this house instinctively—I could never forget it—but being inside it is another thing entirely. The house’s irrational spaciousness stretches in all directions away from me, far too much room for three people. I have been confined by itty-bitty city apartments for many years now, but I feel my face get hot as I move from one room to another, an embarrassment of square footage.
It looks different, of course, full of someone else’s stuff and new curtains and a coat of white paint. The office is now a bedroom, my bedroom is now an office. But the bones are solid. The handles on the doors are the same.
I wanted this place to shock me with hidden memories, for the pebbles and the rooms and the railings on the staircase to transport me into clarifying tragedies. And memories do surface, but none of them are surprising. They’re the same old smooth stones that I’ve been rubbing in my pocket for years. Yes, this is where my mother cradled me that night when we thought my dad was going to kill us. Yes, this is the staircase she threw me down, and here is the staircase I slapped my father on, next to the penguins, and here is the den where I was beaten severely for it. Maybe if I spent an hour in each room, absorbing every angle, I would be transformed. But I know the nice old lady is waiting for me in her kitchen and I do not want to take advantage of her kindness, lingering too long, waiting for the specters to find me. Instead, I briefly stand in each room, making a note of whatever memory arises.
And then I walk into the backyard. There it is, the comforting hum of the pool filter, the gray cement bricks that wall a part of the pool off for a hot tub, the deck with the planter where we grew chilis, the lemon tree. A feeling comes over my whole body, and it takes a minute for me to register what exactly it is. With some level of wonder, I’m stunned by something unfamiliar: Nostalgia. Joy.
When I imagined this pool in my memory, I thought of it as the place where I almost drowned when I was four years old. The place where my mother forced me to do laps so my life would never be threatened in that way again. No matter how I flailed or kicked, there was always something wrong: “Straighten your legs. I said straight! Why are you so bad at this? Cup your hands. Straighten your back. Now you’ve straightened your back, you’re bending your legs!”
But now that I’m here, that memory is absent. That stressful feeling is gone. The sun keeps shining, the chlorine smells chemical-sweet, the lemon tree is fragrant and lovely. I can’t pick out a specific happy memory. I know we had pool noodles and I dove for quarters and my parents passed plates of food from the grill into the kitchen window, but none of those things feels particularly vivid or alive. I just have a feeling. I was happy here. That acknowledgment feels much sadder than any of the echoed memories of abuse.
The kind old lady gives me a businesslike nod as I thank her on my way out—I have certainly taken my time, despite trying my best to rush. After I leave, I go for a walk in the park just across the street from my house, a forty-acre, lawn-covered expanse filled with winding walking paths and tennis courts and play structures. The cement is inlaid with patterns of leaves. A girl films herself doing TikTok dances with multiple Hula-Hoops.
In the universe my teachers painted, this community suffers mainly from a parental overemphasis on mathematics and an overprotectiveness that limits exposure to teen drinking. In this universe, this community is a paragon of immigrant success, privilege, and happiness. It is a miraculous place, a place where immigrant trauma comes to disappear. It is a place where death and war and rape are vanished by good grades and white-collar jobs and clean, two-story homes with pools. And I think, Maybe it wasn’t so bad.
The teachers are right after all, I think. There are so many communities in this country—Black, Indigenous, undocumented, poor—truly ravaged by their trauma, suffering from hunger, addiction, and violence on a grand scale. Compared to that, maybe I was making mountains out of molehills. We’d had the resources. Weren’t they enough?
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