Even now, when I thought I had come to terms with my reality, I find myself unable to defend myself a lot of the times and reduced to what has been the real detriment to my potential: fear. I’ve come a long way, but some habits just stay with you, regardless.

I can’t say I remember when it started; it just seemed like it was circa…forever. There was no real start to it and I still find it hard to envision an end to it.

It always starts with a pounding in my heart.

It comes with a tight, anxious feeling in the heart when you’re so consumed with fear that it paralyzes you. That’s how I was. All the time. It never starts with yelling really. Even though he’s unpredictably hostile, it does not begin with yelling. Instead, it comes with the pause; it’s a dead silence that cuts into you. He taunts me, because he knows that I grew up with the tendency to quickly jump to over analyzing everything I say and do. It’s his quietness that stops me because I am unsure as to whether or not I have made the wrong move. It’s as if every conversation with him is a survival game; if I make the wrong move, I invite him to beat me. In that moment, all I can hear is my heart.

Next, comes the quietly menacing question, followed by my skittish answer. He repeats it, letting me know that I better rephrase it or else I would get it. In a moment of panic, I repeat. I don’t rephrase. I stutter. And even though I know it is what sets him off, I also know he feeds on this. He feeds on the fear. He thrives on provoking. He finds power through domination.

If I don’t scramble to save my blunder, then comes the yelling.

And so it becomes a pounding in my head.

It’s always the same way: my head starts to hurt. It would turn out, as I would learn over the years, that it’s how I respond to stress. Yep. Stress. That thing that students get when finals roll around. Nope. I can’t say finals is what stresses me most in life. It also isn’t the pressure to do amazingly academically. In fact, I do just okay in school because all my life, pressure has mostly come from the ability to survive. Sounds dramatic? It was and still is. I lied and said I did well in school because it would give him one less reason to hurt me. He would spend hours tormenting me, interrogating me. He is neurotic. I’ve been threatened. I’ve been locked in a car and driven around for hours, getting beat on for little things…like sending out mail. I’ve been forced into a bathroom, threatened by a knife on the other side. And in this moment, where I need to think fastest on my feet, all that hear pounding transfers to my head, blurring my instincts. 

And it has often ended in an actual pounding.

There’s not much to say about this part. Cuts and bruises always go away. It’s the former two that really stuck with me. I’ve found the strength to fight back since then, several times. But even now, I get scared. My heart tightens. My head hurts. It’s really cut into my health, not just psychologically. I don’t know how to deal with my day to day life…without stress. Yes, without it. it’s become so integrated into my life that I do not know what it feels like to relax. I am always on my toes, expecting something to happen.

21 years and I finally realize this. I’m sure looking back at all of these memories don’t necessarily relieve stress, but a part of me hopes that if I can come to terms with them, then maybe I can move forward.

In Vietnamese, saying your stomach hurts could mean one of two things: 1) your stomach literally hurts or 2) you’re referring to the cringing feeling you get when you’ve spent too much financially.

Money is said to be the root of all evil and looking back on my childhood, my parents’ marriage, my siblings’ marriages, our relationships…actually in the case of ALL our issues, it truly has been.

It is money that is pinned in all of my memories. I’ve moved a total of 9 times before I started college and it was all because we simply could not afford rent. Mind you, that’s considering we lived off food stamps and Section 8 subsidized housing…and no, we still could not afford it. I’ve spent months eating just plain white rice, soy sauce, and whatever vegetables we could get at the market, because we didn’t have the time or money for much else. It’s not that we don’t celebrate Christmas; religion and culture aside, the tradition of buying gifts for each other stopped very early on. I stopped asking for anything because I knew that I wouldn’t get it. It wasn’t pessimistic; it was simply a reality that we lived in pessimistic circumstances.

Interlaced with a heavy reliance on the government to get by on basic needs, our family was weighed down by the stress, unhappiness, and neglect that the lack of financial stability caused us. It caused all of us to be clouded by the idea that money was indeed the only way to get even a slice of happiness that other families seemed to have. Every fight was about dad not paying rent. Or somebody running into bankruptcy, yet again. Or there was the shame of not being able to dress as nice as other people. Or being unable to eat something other than the leftovers from 2 weeks ago. Then there was shame that turned into anger that turned into a misfiring, all in a neatly chaotic domino effect. 

There was the yelling.

The hitting.

The crying.

The empty fridge. The stack of unpaid bills.The empty cases of beer. The unwashed dishes in the sink. The toilet that is somehow clogged again. The stench of old food in the trash. The random books or appliances that was thrown last night out of anger.

The broken electrical heater we had to alternate room by room. Or the lack of an air conditioner, replaced by useless fans that just blew more hot air, adding onto the everybody’s on-edge attitude.

And so when I was in the ER this past month or so, I thought about how I honestly didn’t want to go see a doctor or a specialist for the stomach pains I was getting because I didn’t want to tack on another kind of ‘stomach pain’: the issue of being able to pay. Silly.

Looking back, I’m still relying on the government (thanks for school!). But! I’m living somewhere stable (ish). I have food to eat, which although the menu doesn’t change, it sure beats bean porridge for 2 weeks (blegh).

Seeing money wear my family down scares me; I want to be able to comfortably consume, and not be consumed by it. I still struggle knowing how to balance out needs and wants, not in the sense that I blindly indulge, but merely that a lot of the times I tend to allocate needs as optional. But this just helps me realize that I have yet something else to improve on.

Circa ‘96

I was six.

It’s all fuzzy, but this much I know…that it happened and I do remember.

He was tall, but when you’re in the first grade, everybody is tall. He had light brown hair, big brown eyes, and a smile that got all the ladies gushing that night. I thought he was silly. He was fun.

Heineken, Corona, Bud Light. Cigarette butts, ashes. A pile of shoes outside the screen door. There was food everywhere on the table, half eaten, some with pools of beer spilled in them.

Per usual, I was the only one my age there which meant there weren’t any toys to keep me entertained. It started to smell like bad breath and old food downstairs, so I thought I’d go explore upstairs. I didn’t know where mom was, so I left without asking permission anyway.

The carpet was warm. The sheets smelled like my sister. I left the lights off and crawled under them.

Someone came up the stairs, so I pulled the covers off. I got tangled in my hair, so I sloppily brushed it out of my eye and peeked out the door I had left open.

There was a silhouette at the door. He was looking for the bathroom and asked me where it was. I shrugged.

He came inside and sat at the edge of the bed and looked at me, smiling.

“What are you doing?”

I shrugged again.

He scooted closer, and I could smell his breath. It smelled like cheap beer and boiled crab.

“Are you cold?”

I shook my head. He was warm though, so I let him put his arm around me.

“Here let me help you.”

He got clumsily got under the covers. I patiently and obediently waited.

His hands were big and callused. His face was really close to mine and I could see the outline of his jaw in the dim lighting that was coming from outside. He was breathing heavily. I turned my head so I didn’t have to breathe it in.

He pulled me closer to him and for a moment, I felt safe. It was like my brother whenever he came home to watch TV or teach me how to play Nintendo. He’d keep me warm too.

I felt his other hand run over my legs. That’s weird..

He slid his hand under my shirt and I could feel it on my tummy. He ran it back down again, onto my legs and for a while it lingered on my knee. I pulled away a little. My brother never got that cozy.

He held me steadfast. He ran his hands in the same motion, back and forth, back and forth..but it got caught at the bottom of my shorts. He paused.

He was positioned awkwardly, with his face close to and on the same level mine. His knees were bent up, his back curved, facing towards me. He moved his face near the nape of my neck and put his hand between my legs, the other one still wrapped around me. 

“Are you warm?”

He inched his hand up. 

“You’re so warm.”

He inched it up some more, pulling me closer.

“Mmmm.”

He slid it all the way up.

Circa ‘06

I was in my sister’s kitchen, cutting mangos for the table. Her condo was full of people, drinking, eating, flirting, yelling. It was a pretty routine thing for her to have these drinking get togethers. In many ways, I think the partying never stopped because she had married young, dropped out of school, and was having too much fun to distinguish responsibility and play. Not that it’s terrible to intertwine the two…but when it’s about 1am on a Wednesday and you have work the next day and your kids have school…yes, it is careless.

I was 16 and even I knew this.

I was starting to understand that not everything was black and white in terms of right and wrong; but I was also starting to realize what was definitely wrong.

I saw him again that night. It had been 10 years. He was my sister’s friend, her now husband’s best friend. I had somehow avoided him at her wedding 8 years earlier.

He wasn’t as charming or good looking as I remembered. His characteristics were distinct though: he was the only mixed race person.

I didn’t remember much at the time, while I was in the kitchen. I think it was a suppressed memory.

He walked toward me, holding a bottle of beer.

There was something about him that made me uneasy, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

I looked at his crooked smile and his tousled hair.

He slid behind me to get to the fridge. I ignored him, still cutting the mangos, desperately wondering what it was that was bothering me. I felt his arm brush me.

I shuddered…and froze.

I glanced sideways.

He had stopped digging for beer in the freezer. He took a sip of his beer and was calmly, but intensely looking at me.

He breathed out. I breathed in.

He smiled again.

In broken English, he said, “I didn’t recognize you. You’re all grown up!”

He winked and continued digging.

And like a wave, it all came back to me.

The smile. The accent. The way he looked at me. The smell of his cologne and breath. His side profile in full lighting. His touch.

I realized what happened. I remembered.

I had scrambled out of bed that night to answer my mom calling my name from downstairs. I had run away from him into her arms. I ran away from him for 10 years.

I remember.