Chapter 1: The Fall

“Tell the teachers if they ask that you fell,” my mom Vietnamesed at me as we left the house on that October morning of 1995. It was picture day at Rosita Preschool. I was wearing blue overalls and a white polo underneath. My hair was shaped in a weird flattop that had grown a bit long, giving it a disheveled look that still held the frame of the square cut.

The picture of that day shows a boy looking at the camera. Looking at the picture now, I can see my children’s reflections, especially my middle daughter. But where my middle child has wide grins and eyes that twinkle with another joke that she has up her sleeves, mine are dark and serious.

The boy is not smiling at the camera.

Why did my mom tell me to inform my teachers of a fall if they asked?

Let’s go back to the night before. My mother, brother, and I were downstairs in our three-bedroom apartment in Garden Grove. My father must have been working late at the grocery store that day because he wasn’t there.

My mother was watching a movie or TV series—most likely a Hong Kong TV series on VHS she had gotten from a local Vietnamese movie rental place.

My brother had drawn and cut out a pumpkin for Halloween. I was four years old and didn’t know how to draw a pumpkin, so I asked him if he could draw one for me.

He said no. I kept asking. I wanted a pumpkin cutout, too! 

My mom yelled at us to shut up. We were bothering her sacred screen time.

I kept asking my brother, and he kept saying no. I remember getting upset. Why couldn’t he draw me a stupid pumpkin?

Then, a sharp, violent scream came from my mom to tell us to shut up. I remember I was sitting across from my mom. The couch was in a bracket shape, with her at one end and me at the other. She picked up a large toy. I remember it being heavy, yellow and blue, and battery-operated. She hurled it, and my brother ducked out of the way. It slammed into my face, and I remember the violence of it but not the pain.

I remember screaming and crying while my mom got up and checked on my face. I don’t believe she apologized. But she did look a bit worried at how much worse it could have gone.

For my face.

The next day, my mom tried icing my lips so the swelling would go down. I winced away from her. She had hit me before—plenty of times. But never had the violence felt so out of control. I remember not trusting her in that moment—a feeling that only grew as I did.

If someone had asked me when I was growing up, and even until my early twenties, if my parents had been abusive, I would have hemmed and hawed.

“Well, it wasn’t great. But it could have been worse.”

“I don’t know if I would call it abusive.”

“I didn’t get beat up every day or anything.”

My brother, much later in life, would casually remark to me that we had an abusive childhood.

I rolled my eyes. My brother, being my brother. A divo. Our childhood was tough, sure. But it wasn’t abusive. Geez, man. Stop being so dramatic.

But his naming of it gave me pause. Was our childhood abusive?

In Genesis, when God created the world, he gave Adam a profound task: He was to name the animals. In so naming the animals, he exercised dominion over them. He exercised his authority, his power, his God-given right to be in charge.

It wasn’t until I began naming specifics that I stopped and realized—my childhood was full of abuse. 

What made me so resistant to naming it as abuse? It was subconscious, of course. I wasn’t actively resisting it. But looking back, I think the part of me that didn’t want to name it is the same part that looks at a picture of myself as a kid and hates him.

I had grown into a man—a man who was not vulnerable to the type of trauma that he had endured. To admit abuse was to admit I was once a sad, weak little boy who had no control over his environment. 

A boy who did not have dominion but was dominated.

A boy who did not have love, he was hated.

***

Smack! I felt the shock of the open-palmed blow on my five- or six-year-old face. A spoon was shoved into my mouth. I gagged, wanting to throw up the disgusting taste of rice mixed with alcohol—cơm rượu.

Smack! Another spoonful that made me gag. My dad had his shirt off, sitting in front of me, red as a beet. His veins popped from the sides of his temples as he insisted, I eat the alcoholic concoction.

Smack! Again, another spoonful.

He was so red it looked almost comical. Red from anger. Red, probably from the little bit of alcohol he had consumed.

It was one of the few times I could remember that my father actually hit me. Of the two of my parents, my father was the less violent. But there he was, angry because—now that I reflect on it as an adult—I was rejecting something that represented a part of himself to him. The homeland and culture he had lost.

In the Bible, God banishes them from the Garden after Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And immediately, we see violence play out. First, God kills a lion and uses that to clothe Adam and Eve.

Then, it plays out in the lives of Adam and Eve’s children—Cain and Abel. Cain kills Able in a fit of rage because God preferred Abel’s sacrifice and offering over Cain’s.

Violence was part and parcel of the fall.

My father was not usually violent.

That personality trait was distinctively my mother’s.

My mother is a fierce woman. She is stubborn, proud, angry, and oftentimes violent.

If someone cut her off on the freeway, she would be sure to flick them off—not with the middle finger alone, but with the middle finger put on top of the index finger—the meaty part of the middle touching the nail of the index—joining together to make almost an oval shape.

The Vietnamese feminine counterpart to America’s favorite masculine symbol.

Both crude. Both said f*** you.

One time, as my mom worked as a grocery store clerk, someone said something that pissed her off. She got so angry she told the guy she would kill him. She dragged him out of the store, broke a bottle, and lunged at him. He ran.

I can almost imagine my mom putting her two fingers together. F*** you!

Another time, her eldest brother said something to her that belittled both her and my dad. My mom got so angry she grabbed a kitchen knife and chased him out of her parents’ house in Garden Grove—the home that her eldest brother lived at for free—and down the street, swearing that she would gut him if she caught him.

That violence was fine by me, as far as it went. In some ways, her violence contrasted my dad’s normally cool, almost passive role in my life.

My father worked a full-time job until he was laid off in 2010. But of the two, my mom worked more hours and was out of the home more often. My father played the inverse of my mother’s dominant, masculine role. He dropped us off at school, picked us up after work, cooked, cleaned, and folded our laundry. My mother would berate him, scream at him, and emasculate him whenever she got angry.

And he never raised a hand, rarely even raised his voice at her, except for a few rare occasions when her tantrums became more than he could bear. Even then, it was restrained.

Her anger, her outbursts of violence, was a masculine force that made me feel like we weren’t a bunch of middle fingers over index fingers.

But that violence was often turned towards us.

***

A bottle of fish sauce, the ubiquitous seasoning of choice in the Tran home, whizzed by my head and cracked against the wall behind me. Oh crap. I got up as my mom reached for a knife that was sitting on the table. Are you kidding me right now? 

My dad and sister were both sitting at the kitchen table, but they did nothing. My mom rounded the table and lunged at me with the knife, but I was already running down the hall. I could hear her come after me, Vietnamese profanity shooting out of her mouth like bullets. I slammed my bedroom door and locked it. She banged on the door.

I had seen her chase people with knives many times. I knew two things to be true.

The first was that if I didn’t get out of her way, she would stab me.

The second was that if I stayed out of her way long enough, she wouldn’t try to stab me later.

I just needed to disappear for a while.

What was my crime?

My crime was that I had suggested staying home from a cruise my sister had planned for that summer. I would rather stay home, hang out with friends, and maybe catch up on some video games.

My brother wasn’t going with us. Why did I have to?

That had triggered a violence I hadn’t expected. Without a word, she picked up the fish sauce bottle and hurled it at me.

I can’t say this was a common occurrence. But it was common enough that it wasn’t necessarily surprising.

Just terrifying.

One can experience dozens of near-death experiences and still feel those moments as terrifying. That was me as a kid. 

But if I were honest, that wasn’t the most challenging part of growing up in my home. Yes, the beatings and flying bottles sucked. I did not like to be chased with a knife. I hated kneeling on jackfruit for hours until my knees were raw. None of those things were conducive to a safe environment. 

The most challenging part of growing up in my home was the fact that my mother was the aggressor. It was my mother who screamed at me most often, who hurled insults at me without reservation, who hit me sometimes with very little provocation.

My dad fulfilled the domestic role. In many ways, he simply went through the motions, as exhausting as those motions were. After long hours of work, he still needed to find time and energy to cook us meals, help us with our homework, give us baths, and get us into bed. There were seasons when I was young when my mom worked three jobs and left home before I woke up and came home well after I was asleep—all seven days a week, for months.

Yes, he sometimes forgot to pick me up from school, leaving a seven- or eight-year-old me to walk to my grandparents’ house after class after waiting a few hours. Yes, he often left us home alone because it was summer and he had work. I learned quickly at a very young age how to fry my eggs, make instant noodles, and keep myself alive.

But in many ways, he fulfilled the domestic role in our lives. He just never fulfilled a maternal role.

That role was also left to my mother, the one who was the violent one of the two.

The contradiction was lost on me, but its effects were felt nonetheless.

One of the common motifs in the Bible is the Father’s love for His Son. God is Father, and He is Father to the Son. The Son, in turn, is the Son to the Father. This filial, Father-Son love accents all of Scripture.

We are brought into the love of the Father for the Son because we are united to the Son. The Father knew us from the foundation of the world and chose us in Christ to be heirs through His Son.

There is very little talk of a mother’s love, and I suppose I have always been fine with that. Many people I know struggle with poor examples of fathers in their lives, and so the idea of God as Father is difficult to grasp.

In many ways, my father failed me. But as passive as he was, it wasn’t difficult to superimpose God’s image of a perfect Father over him. Erase him out of my psychological makeup completely.

My mother, though? My mother’s violence was relentless. But she was also the one who would give us kisses, something my father certainly never did. She was also the one who would try to cuddle us just as likely as she would try to smack us upside the head.

That maternal love, mixed with her raging nature, was not the only violence I endured from her, though. Her “love” was never unconditional. It was often psychologically manipulative and emotionally demanding.

***

One of the few nice things my mother did for me was on one of my birthdays. I think I was turning five. My mother hadn’t seen me for many weeks at this point, having to work multiple jobs to keep food on our table and the roof of our apartment over our heads.

When I woke up, there she was—my mother—with a pink donut box. She handed it to me and told me it was for my birthday—my birthday!

For most of my life, we didn’t really celebrate my birthday. My mom would often tell me that I should be celebrating her on my birthday because she was the one who gave me life. I suppose the logic made sense, but I didn’t like it. Plus, my birthday was so close to Mother’s Day that it was often what we celebrated in place of my birthday.

But that year, one of the few years we celebrated my birthday, my mother handed me the little pink box. I opened it and found a few bundles of wrapping paper. I unwrapped each of them slowly, and my heart leaped.

Inside were clay figurines painted by hand.

Sa Ngộ Tịnh (Sha Wujing/Sandy).

Trư Bát Giới (Zhu Bajie/Pigsy).

Đường Tăng (Tang Sanzang) sitting astride Bạch Mã (the White Horse, who was also the Dragon Prince).

And best of all? Tôn Ngộ Không—the Monkey King—holding his magical staff.

They were the main characters from my favorite TV series, Tây Du Ký. Journey to the West.

This? This was exactly what I wanted!

“Thank you, Mom!” I said, overwhelmed by the gift.

“I was shopping for new clothes at the Asian Garden Mall,” my mom said. But I gave up buying new clothes to buy you these figurines.”

I don’t remember what I said to her. I just knew that deep inside me, those words turned sour. I supposed no one would understand unless they knew my mother.

But those words? They were par for the course.

I remember she said she needed to leave for work, and I cried. I cried because I didn’t want my mom to leave again. But I also cried because what was supposed to be an innocent act of giving her son toys for his birthday was laden with emotional and psychological shame and guilt.

My mom, I was to believe, didn’t have new clothes because I was such a nuisance.

It was my birthday that made my mom go to work wearing old clothes instead of new ones.

So, I sat on the tan carpeted steps of our apartment, crying as my mother closed the door behind her. Crying, even as I clung onto the toy figures of Chinese folktale characters I would bring to bed with me that night, nestling their cold, hard edges against my tiny body. For comfort. For security.

Tôn Ngộ Không had seventy-two magical powers. He wouldn’t leave. He could protect me. Right?

Eventually, those figurines would chip, crack, and break. From dust they came, and dust they returned. Even Tôn Ngộ Không, who cheated death in his early years, couldn’t help but crack under the reality I lived in.

I sat alone on those steps, tears rolling down my eyes. Feeling abandoned at five.

Feeling abandoned because that’s what my parents did. Abandon me.

***

On the first day of preschool, I had no idea what it meant. No one talked to me about it, and no one told me that I would be left there.

I was simply taken to the playground by my ông ngoại (maternal grandfather). He pushed me on the swing and I remember just enjoying that for a moment before slowly, I stopped. I turned around, and he was gone. Just gone. I ran to the chain link fence to see him walking away.

Where is he going? What is happening?

“Ông ngoại! Ông ngoại!” I screamed. He didn’t respond; he just got into his car and left me there. I thought I was being abandoned. In many ways, I probably already was.

I barely knew English.

Another time, I remember transitioning to first grade. Kindergarten had always been half a day at Morningside Elementary School. We got picked up after lunch. No one explained to me that first grade was a full day.

I remember standing there, hands on the chain-link fence after lunch, tardy for a class I didn’t know I had, wondering where are my parents? Did they finally abandon me for good?

I would eventually take solace in being left alone. I didn’t want my mom to be with me and yell or hit me. I didn’t want my dad to nag about my grades or what a disappointment I was. I didn’t want them to say another joke about my weight, another comment about my eyes, another insult about my supposed lack of intelligence.

At a young age, I learned that to be left alone was peace. I could control my environment.

And so, I loved being left alone, even as it was probably illegal for my parents to have left me. The empty house—save my brother who, mercifully, often left me to my own devices—was often a tranquil, almost meditative space that was otherwise punctuated by incessant abuse: physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual.

I didn’t know that even when my father and mother abandoned me—not literally, but in every way that counted—I was never truly alone.

I wouldn’t discover the words until years later, but they echo what that five-year-old boy longed to hear without knowing it.

The Psalmist wrote what was not yet true for me then:

10  For my father and my mother have forsaken me,

but the Lord will take me in.

           11  Teach me your way, O Lord,

and lead me on a level path

because of my enemies.

           12  Give me not up to the will of my adversaries;

for false witnesses have risen against me,

and they breathe out violence.

           13  I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord

in the land of the living!

           14  Wait for the Lord;

be strong, and let your heart take courage;

wait for the Lord!

- Psalm 27:10-14