creep
Ga Jeh was no fan of our mother’s fashion sense, the leopard-skin leggings, the gold platform shoes. “With those boots,” my sister once said, “Mom looks like a hooker.” My sister wasn’t into jewelry, didn’t wear boots or the color red (the red Honda Civic—yep, my mom’s choice), and if my sister wore any makeup, it was hardly noticeable. But you didn’t need anything flashy to attract the gaze of a man. One time we were at a restaurant, and a Chinese guy at the table next to us kept staring at my sister’s breasts like they were the grand prize. The guy was with his whole family. I leaned over to his table and told his son, who was around my age, in his twenties, “Hey, your dad’s staring at my sister’s breasts. Tell him to stop. It’s creepy.” I could’ve told his wife, but forcing his son to shame him promised a special kind of dishonor.
prayers
Girls left behind in China are often targets of sexual violence. In Guangdong Province, home of my mother’s ancestral village, ninety percent of sexual assault victims in some regions are girls who have been left behind. “Many of these tragedies might have been prevented had they been living with their parents,” an NGO report claims.
For my sister, it was the opposite. Her father was her tragedy. Bah Ba’s decision to leave might’ve been received by Ga Jeh as an answer to her prayers. She was the only one of us still attending church.
You lie in bed dreading that turn of the knob. You know he will enter but not when. When he does, you don’t know what he will do, when he will stop, if he will go further this time. You pretend to be asleep, like you always do. You don’t want to see him this way. You don’t want to see yourself this way. For you to open your eyes, to face what is happening, would deny you your ability to deny.
Your mother returns the next day bearing a gift: a Disneyland T-shirt. She shows you a photo taken at night of her and her pal Mickey Mouse. You go in your room, shut the door, get on your knees, recite the Lord’s Prayer, and beg your Father for an end. One day, He delivers. Bah Ba must move. Faith is restored.
I’m not religious. I don’t believe in miracles. The way I see it, or the way I’d like to see it, is that my father accepted the job in Minnesota to stop himself from turning that knob, that something was operating inside Bah Ba, perhaps at a subconscious level, to remove himself from that apartment. He was a boogeyman who caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.
Bah Ba would return every year, but his visits into my sister’s room stopped.
I can’t credit my father though. His trips to Cali never coincided with my mother’s vacations. She had to stick around for the meeting with the housing authority—Bah Ba was never left alone with us again. Whether my father was a changed man or a predator thwarted by circumstances, I’ll never know.
A set of overdue questions: Why do I attempt to reclaim some small measure of humanity for my father? This was the man who abused everyone in my family. Why is it, any nugget of information, real or speculative, that I can uncover which complicates Bah Ba, humanizes him, why do these discoveries (imaginations) make me feel victorious? Why am I obsessed with reminding you that the Devil was a fallen angel?
trust
I was sixteen and on punishment. I’d gotten arrested for having a backpack full of spray cans on a bus, and just my luck, the next day, my history teacher called my mother and told her he hadn’t seen me in weeks. She showed up to the next class to check on me. I saw her through the little window of the class door. It was a new semester, and she didn’t want the same old crap, like the time I stayed out till three in the morning while she had no idea where I was. That was the night I was at the Ghost Yard. While I was running around in the abandoned lot, my mother had gone up to Rob’s apartment in search of me, pounding on their door, waking Rob and his mother up. Poor Rob had two moms badger him about my whereabouts, but he honestly had no idea where I was either. He’d retired from writing, was trying to clean up his act, wanted me to do the same, which only made it more difficult for me to put down my marker. I was tired of following in his footsteps.
When I finally got home that night, I went straight to the bathroom. I had ink all over my fingers. My mom was trying to chide me through the door. I told her I’d fallen asleep at a friend’s house. I jumped in the shower. I used her shower brush to scrub off the ink from underneath my fingernails. When I turned off the shower, she was still yammering away.
Now, I was supposed to come home straight after school, but on this day, I came home two hours late. She got in my face about it. “Why can’t you just trust me?” I said. “I told you I’ll do better this semester.”
“Trust you?” She made “trust” sound like the foulest word in English. She
