Despite the fact that I know what happened to me—that I’ve always known that what happened to me was awful—I keep applying a level of journalistic skepticism to my story as if it were a complete stranger’s. Over and over, I create excuses: Maybe EMDR is bunk, maybe the teachers are right, maybe some level of privilege erases abuse. But this narrative gives me a false sense of control. If it’s all my fault, then I can change it. I can fix it.
But from underneath these shreds of doubt, a new woman punches her way to the surface, someone who has read the data. This whole fucking narrative of all of these Asians settling gently into the American dream is bullshit. The facts just don’t add up. You have a community of immigrants and refugees who survived extreme violence—but they don’t believe in mental illness, don’t talk about trauma, don’t allow for feelings or failure, and everyone is just fucking fine? The worst angst here comes from not being able to make an essay sparkle? Come on.
I don’t take a final look at the ridiculous facade of my happy home. Instead, I turn the key in the ignition and head to Starbucks to talk to the person who is my last hope at validation.
CHAPTER 26
I’m early, so I buy a bottle of fizzy water and shred my cuticles. I haven’t seen Steve since high school, and the last conversation I remember having with him was in middle school. We were getting ready to board a bus for our school trip, and he’d made me a mix CD with Papa Roach and Staind on it—songs about being alone and nobody understanding.
I’m both relieved and jittery when he comes through the door, and we exchange an awkward handshake. I buy him an enormous coffee. He is much taller than I remember, and he’s filled out. His demeanor is not unfriendly, but it’s very cool—he doesn’t smile too widely, his movements are careful and restrained, one hand on his coffee, the other in his lap.
“So it’s been a while, huh?” I ask hammily. We exchange a brief history of our lives. He still lives here, has a girlfriend, has a great job in tech, still keeps in touch with a bunch of kids from high school. I try not to flinch when he lists off the name of a kid who called me a “nazi bitch” because I was a hard-ass in the newsroom.
“So I wanted to talk to you about high school and middle school,” I say. “It was really hard for me, because I was an unpopular loser and everything, and I wanted to ask you about your experience.”
“That’s funny. I don’t remember you being that unpopular. It seemed like you were…generally pretty well-liked, I guess. I was definitely a loser, though. But I’m sure part of it was my own problem. I didn’t exactly know how to communicate well with others.”
“Oh, really? How so?” I ask, and he pauses for a long time before he gives me this odd side-glance.
“Well, I don’t know if you knew this—you probably did—but I had a huge crush on you.”
“Woooow, I definitely didn’t know that!” I laugh asininely, overcompensating for my shock and horror. For the first time in a while, I feel lucky about the all-encompassing nature of talking about trauma so we can move on from the abomination of preteen hormones.
I tell Steve my practiced thirty-second version of the abuse and neglect I’d experienced in childhood; he expresses his condolences and says he didn’t know it was that bad for me. Then I tell him about the previous day, how all of our teachers at PHHS had not known that I, or practically anyone else, had been abused and how they said that our main concern was stress over getting As. “And I guess I just wanted to ask, is it true? I could have sworn that I knew so many other kids who were getting hit, too, and I just wanted to run a gut check by you—and I’m so sorry, of course, if I’m getting it wrong.”
Steve laughs bitterly. “Of course the teachers don’t know!” he says, incredulous. “Nobody’s going to tell the teachers what’s happening to them!” I sit up straighter.
“Yes. We were all getting our asses beat,” he spits. “Well, not all of us. But. I know a LOT of people who got their ass beat. Yes. Why do you think we were so stressed about getting all those As in the first place?”
“I KNOW, RIGHT?” I yell at him. “Thank you! That’s what I thought! Thank you!”
“Even the people who look so happy now and have great relationships with their parents on Facebook…they were all getting beat. There are varying degrees, obviously. I got fists and feather dusters. Other people got slippers, chopsticks, small stuff.”
Steve insists that our neighborhood had its fair share of rich kids, but not everyone’s life was cushy; we both remember playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater at our friends’ homes in trailer parks. He himself was a latchkey kid because his parents worked long hours in restaurants.
Steve doesn’t go into all the gory details, but he does tell me that his parents hit him a lot, often because of grades, especially math. We both got beaten by our parents after we received B-plus grades from the same eighth-grade math teacher. He says he felt anxious all the time, pressured to do well or face their wrath at home. They stopped beating him after he fought back one day when he was thirteen—when he got big enough to scare them. And then, like me, he started failing classes out of spite. His relationship with his parents is still strained sometimes, he says, and when his mom nags at him, he can fly completely off the handle and start screaming at her.
“It wasn’t just the Chinese kids. It was kids who were Vietnamese, Taiwanese, Korean…” He lists some names. I am surprised by many of them. One is a boy I had a crush on, a popular, brilliant boy who was well-dressed and aloof. Or maybe, I think now, shy. Or introverted because he was dealing with some very hard things.
“Thank you,” I keep saying to him. “Thank you, thank you. I knew I wasn’t crazy. Thank you.” I know we’re impossibly far apart—in life, in friendship, and otherwise. He has friends I hate. Our interaction in the coffee shop feels a little blasphemous, a secretive bubble that allows for honesty and plausible deniability. It makes me feel so very close to him.
And, Steve acknowledges, the repercussions from his abuse haven’t disappeared magically with time. “I think it’s why I work so hard all the time. I’ll take on other people’s work, I’ll do more than I should, because I have this need for acceptance. I need my boss to tell me that I did a good job or I’ll have this anxiety—this incompleteness, that no matter how hard I try, I can’t hit.”
We trade stories of feeling anxious and inferior at work, echoes of what our parents made us believe when we were small. I keep nodding vigorously at everything he says.
Then I say, “I’m surprised you’re still pretty tight with your parents. I hold so much resentment.”
Steve gives me that whole side-eye, time-to-drop-some-honesty look again. “Me and my mom have tense moments, but we’re much better now. Because…they didn’t leave.”
“Oh, yeah, that whole thing.”