The first time I felt that there might be something wrong with my father was when I was eight-years-old, or probably nine-years-old, standing right outside of the three-story apartment building where we lived. The snowstorm of the night before was gone, bringing a brilliant morning of sunshine and cloudless sky. The wind had died down; the temperature was low; the sun was so bright that it hurt the eyes. We were living on the southern edge of the Mongolian steppe, not far from the famed Silk Road, very close to Yellow River and its tributary Fen River, which was said to be treacherous. It looked dry and flat and harmless. People could have a casual walk and vehicles could drive on the winter-hardened riverbed, but a little sun or a little change of temperature could convert it into a mud trap.
Here the climate was dry; snowstorms were rare. That was why our neighbors all came out to greet this rare event. Usually it was the father who brought his children out for impromptu snow sledding. We lived in an apartment building in the staff living quarter of a small rural college where my mother taught English. There was a natural slope right next to our area of four apartment buildings, and it was bustling with people, shrieking, with ice scraping sounds coming from the homemade sled of varied shape and size and material.
My mother had asked my father to take me out for sledding. Having watched the flurry of activities outside, she considered it imperative that we should make our appearance. “I sent my husband and daughter outside for sledding.” She had to have something like this to say to other women. Her strained relationship with my father made her ever more vigilant on keeping up the “normal family” façade.
My father and I came out of our apartment building and stood there watching our neighbors sledding back and forth, up and down, face flushed, nose red, gloves caked with ice and snow and dirt. My mother made sure I was well bundled up. She instilled in me the importance of keeping the body warm so that I would not get sick and become more of a burden to her than I already was.
My father and I stood there for almost ten minutes without saying one word to each other, or taking one step, or moving a muscle, or doing anything at all other than breathing and staring. I secretly wished to return home since I was afraid of meeting any of my schoolmates, who would definitely mock me on Monday at school. “You and your father stood there like idiots.” I could imagine them saying that. Actually nobody took notice of us. They were having so much fun. It seemed to be an accurate representation of my thoughts at the time—other people had all the fun while I was stuck in a hell hole of a family, without an exit.
I wanted to go home but I had already learned not to express my wishes since my parents were always busy with their everlasting fight with each other, with no attention left for me. It was pointless to say anything to them.
At length, my father cleared his throat and motioned for us to go back. It was a relief for me to get away from our embarrassing presence in the cheerful snowy landscape. We climbed the gloomy stairwell to the second floor where we lived. The door was opened; the happy noise of the outside world ended; the angry noise my mother made in the kitchen ringed in our ear. She had started to cook our lunch. She hated cooking, but had to do it every day. The aluminum pans, steel spatulas, bowls—steel bowls were very popular in our region—spoons, ceramic utensils clinked and clanked continuously, as if making loud protests. It was a wonder that none of them was seriously damaged after groaning under my mother’s daily abuse for years.
I’ve thought about this incident from time to time ever since. My father looked so detached and disconnected from everybody else who were normal and joyful. He was strange in his behavior. It was much later I pieced together my father’s childhood from the scarcely available material and understood the cruelty he had gone through as a kid and the narcissism he had developed for survival. His emotional disconnection with others made it difficult for him to connect with women around him and he was still single when he was thirty, which was considered a grand old age for marriage purposes at the time in our area. Then he met my mother who also had difficulty finding somebody. They had no other option but to marry each other, and started their “unhappily ever after” of constant bickering and arguing. They tried to outwit each other in ways big or small, sabotage each other’s wishes and pleasures, ridicule each other’s relatives, mock each other’s habits and accents, and do endless other petty injuries.
At middle school, when I opened a book with a chapter of “The Thirty-Six Stratagems” on politics and war, I felt a strange familiarity since my parents had used most of the strategies in their domestic warfare. And the last strategy, which is considered the best one when everything else fails, is to retreat or escape. That was my father’s favorite. Whenever there was the slightest opportunity or faintest excuse to go somewhere else, like a trip to a distant coal mine or a six-month project in a remote mountain area, he would go. Among his colleagues, my father was well-known for vying for such a chance. His colleagues would let him have it, knowing that for people like my father, marriage was the best when enjoyed from a distance.
(To Be Continued)
I am writing my growing-up experiences and I feel very relieved and happy while doing it. It is a kind of catharsis, venting, or an attempt to make sense of things that have puzzled me for so long. Under the normal facade, my family was quite mad. Nothing was really normal. Every conversation was a jostle for power; every word had a hidden purpose; every person was unloved and bitter.
This is just the beginning of this long story. I hope I can be adherent to some degrees of subtlety, which seems to be the unspoken rule of writing in English, which for a non-native speaker like me is a puzzle I can never solve.
Haoyan Do 