Truth Matters

I am huddled quietly in the room I share with my sister and my brother, all three of us adoptees from Korea. “She said she won’t spank you,” My sister and brother whispered. “You can just tell her you did it and none of us will get in trouble.” I was 4 maybe 5. My sister was 9 perhaps 10. Was she really that old? I don’t recall that. Someone had done something wrong. She; my mother was unhappy. She was always unhappy about something. I don’t recall what it was. I do know I had not done whatever it was. Someone would need to confess or all of us, was it three of us or six, would be spanked. I would do it. I would take the fall.

She, our mother said, “ If the person “fesses up” then they would not get spanked.” I have a picture of myself at that moment, a child of 5 standing brave, wanting to save us all, but with my shoulders curled in like a dog coming to its master. I remember saying, “Mom I did it.” I may have even said I was sorry. I may even have been proud of myself for being brave(something that would not be repeated for decades). That was when sorry was easy, rendered willingly, and meaningful. There was yelling and scolding and then I was spanked. I defended myself, saying “You said the person who “fessed up” would not be spanked.

“Yes, but you lied, and I hate lying,” she naturally retorted. The pain, the tears, my sibling’s laughter behind the door, all curdled together in a childhood rage that simmered long and deep.

Children’s stories are filled with great monsters and goblins because that is how we feel when we are young. Our fear, anger, and love too when it happens is deep and encompassing. I recall being swallowed by my emotions so much that they would lock me in their silence. As a language teacher of voluntarily mute children, I recognize the necessity and power of their silence. It is such a simple almost meaningless memory, but it stuck to me like the black and steel lid on my mother’s pressure cooker. Bubbling dangerously on a constantly heated stove, I rattled through my childhood occasionally steaming until the day in my senior year of college when I broke.

There would be many more incidences of mass accusations. In a family of six kids, there were so many suspects, so many “culprits”, but no one would ever confess. Is it any wonder that my mother loved mysteries and felt she was the best at reading clues? Going forward, I think we were smart enough to all be guilty.

Who was drinking all of Dad’s soda?

Who stole Mom’s gum?

If we all did it then the spanking would at least be just. If punishments regardless of truth always come out, why bother following the rules?

There were so many spankings. The fear of them and the anger were like a troll sitting just beyond my periphery a constant companion. The unjust punishments, the humiliation, always hurt more. There were a couple of mass spankings. When my mother weary from being the housewife disciplinarian had my father line us up and one by one spank us, oldest to youngest.

Justice was a language well learned in my childhood home, but always subject to the emotions and whims of a judge with absolute power over the truth. Her truth always mattered. Dissent, at least among the Asians was not an option. We obeyed, some less than others, and abided until we could leave and as adults search for our own truths as if that could be a relative thing.

For those of us raised in families where love and power were used as tools of abuse, it is not easy to dismiss our childhood selves. They haunt us like spectral glitches in a matrix. They constantly flicker and twitch. We feel the hunger of their insecurity and empathize with their longing for justice. As an adult and an artist, I was able to put my younger self in perspective though not without many trials. Meanness begets meanness without growth, and false idols of love become interchangeable when real models for love or happiness are non-existent.

Moving from the powerlessness of being an Asian adoptee in my family to being an Asian woman in American society was not so different. My family was a well-registered mirror for the society I would need to navigate. Nevertheless, I still had enough freedom to seek my truth, find my voice, and speak.

Often, the people who I wanted to hear me, did not care to listen. I am certain some chose not to believe what I was saying and looked down on me for saying it. At a recent artists’ gathering, apropos of one person saying on so many occasions how saintly my adoptive mother was for adopting three children, I said, “The first time I felt free was when my mother died.” Conversation ender. This required an explanation of course, so as not to come off as a sociopath to strangers. A long story cannot be told in a short time, a lived perspective cannot be digested all at once. Ah well, this is me. It can be chalked up as more fuel for my artistry.

For many years I just needed others to hear me perhaps to both mourn the loss of that girl I could not save and to free me from her ghost. Others did listen, heard me, felt me, and that was enough. Those others were and are friends and mentors who without judgment appreciate and rally me in my most imperfect struggles. As I fall in and out of patterns like constant eddying currents swirling around my feet my friends help me balance and when I fall, help lift me up. And when they call me with panic in their voices because sharks are swimming in their waters, I look forward to helping them. Together we feed the natural hunger before they become destructive or we cast a spell on the sharks and turn them into Coi with our laughter.

Whenever I relate a childhood story, my husband scoffs and tells me I am obsessed with the past. This is from a man who loves history. As if the narrative of our own lives doesn’t carry as much meaning or provide as much value as those of societies. You will understand why I don’t agree with him, and keep speaking anyway. Voicing the truth, speaking it, and hearing it matters. This is difficult when your truth can be as real to you as my mother’s was to her, as mine is to me. This is impossible in a disagreement when the end goal is not love.

My mother was correct, you shouldn’t lie, children need to be taught and lessons need to be learned. Delivery on the other hand is everything and the language of consequences versus punishment lives on the shores of love and fear respectively. As a teacher and a mother, I must always ask myself when I am confronted with a problem or opposition: what is your goal? And Is this the best strategy to achieve it?

Outside of my job and the fact that my husband is on Mars, the societal world has demonstrably changed. It would seem that fear and allegiance are the tools being used to isolate us and I feel myself being pushed into survival mode. I have lived in this truth before, but my recourse then was to run away, cut it out of my life and I was lucky enough to live long enough to watch its power wither away. Back when I was a child. I did not have strength. I did not have a voice, I did not have friends and I did not have children to fight for.

If this current administration represents your truth, if fear and allegiance are your tactics, just know this. I survived being a child in my mother’s house. I gave birth to two 9lb+ babies without any drugs, I survived getting hit by a truck and I am not leaving. I am also not alone. This is not a threat. I am just saying there will be consequences. This does not mean I am not afraid of you, I would not be foolish enough to feed Cerebus. But when, if, you are ready for love. And when you are ready to believe we, not just you and I, but all humans deserve that goal of love, then we can work together because I know deep down…you are a survivor too.

Originally published at http://notyourkitty.blog on September 2, 2019.