By Marissa Yuan

-After Chelsea Bieker

I see him when I look in the mirror, my father, the coach of my 5 a.m. 800-meter runs, who sacrificed to finance my education and once presented a twenty-five-slide PowerPoint on how to live my college life in the U.S. He carried a black-and-white photo of our family in his wallet. People say we look the same.  

He was the first in his village to go to college after China’s Culture Revolution. He brought honor to and redeemed his once politically shamed family. By his mid-thirties, he already made tenure and was named vice president, the youngest in his university’s history. I remember him waking up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, punching the air and yelling, “You can’t get me!” My mother once gave me a peek into his childhood: being hung up-side-down to the ceiling with a rope tied to his ankles while my grandfather beat him until he had broken all three broom sticks. Wrinkles cover my father’s face now, his temples all gray, sharp shoulder bones gathering under his shirt. At my wedding, he hugged me long and tight, with tears of joy and pride, though I had walked down the aisle by myself and never asked him for the honor. I freeze-frame this minute. It was the moment I want to see him in and remember. 

I love my father, and, for over thirty years, I believed he loved me too. But now I question what love means to him.  

Be brave, he taught me.  

I had to remember that lesson when I broke with him for my own sanity and survival. 

#

In January of my seventeenth year, snow smothered Shenyang, our town in northeast China. It was eight months before I escaped to go to college. Every day my parents argued outside my door, each yelling about how it was the other’s fault I turned out so worthless. My final exam score was worse than midterm’s; the National College Entrance Examination would occur in six months, and I was doomed to fail. Meanwhile, I ran a continuous fever. I thought about running outside and into the mud and ice mix of our paved path. I would do anything to not be me. 

That night, my father was watching the news in the living room. The reporter’s nails-on-a-chalkboard voice squeezed through the door crack into my room and stabbed my simmering forehead. Still dizzy, I stumbled out, grabbed the remote from the end table, and pressed a button. The news reporter vanished and a milk commercial with soothing music played.  

In my family, the remote remained under my father’s sole control. If my mother or I wanted to change the channel, we had to ask him. He never said yes, so we stopped bothering. When he worked late, my mother and I would watch a cartoon while eating dinner. But as soon as I saw the door lock turn from inside (he always unlocked the door by himself and never knocked), I’d know that the good time was over. He’d stomp in, kick off his shoes, and, without saying a word, switch the TV channel to news. My mother would bring his dinner, and I’d shove down my food and run to my room to pretend to study.  

Not this night. 

“Change the channel back,” my father said in his deep, authoritative voice. 

I held the remote in my hand, finger not pressing. In the darkness outside, the whipping wind pounded snow on the windows like a monster trying to break down the walls. 

“Did you hear me?” Same voice, but louder. 

This would not end well for me. “No.” 

My father bounced off the couch like a leopard and charged at me with lightning speed. With a shoulder thrust, he pushed me against the wall and punched me in the face. A quick left, right. Again, on my face, left, right. More. Blood burst out of my nose, rolled down my sweater and pants, and stained my white bunny slippers.  

Anger distorted my father’s face, his eyeballs bulging, blue veins standing on his temples.  

My mother, who was cooking dinner, ran out of the kitchen screaming and pulled my father backward by his left arm. He leaped forward toward me and stopped midway like a charging dog on a tight leash. 

“Go to your room!” she yelled at me. “You want to die?” She was right. He was ready to kill me. 

I didn’t move. After all these years of shivering at the thought of my father being angry, years of hearing my parents call me “loser material,” and years of my mother threatening to have my father beat me, I stood against the wall and looked my father in the eye. Go ahead. Kill me. 

My father threw more hooks, but with my mother dragging him backward with all her strength, he missed my face by half an inch. He swung his arms and roared. He might have thought he was a lion, but, to me, he looked like a squawking chicken flapping its wings. 

A fireball of anger grew inside my body, consuming me. Adrenaline rushed into my head, wiping out any pain. If I were that worthless, why not destroy me? I was never good enough, anyway. It could all be over soon, and I would be released from hating myself. 

He jerked his arm away from her and dealt me a full blow, his knuckles on my eye. 

My mother darted forward and pushed me to the side, then into my bedroom, slammed the door shut, and stood outside with her back pressed onto the door. 

“Enough!” she cried. 

11:45 that night. Blood and tears had dried on my face, and I couldn’t sleep. I crept out of my room. They had cleaned up the blood and left a table lamp on. The dim, yellow light cast a long shadow. To my right, at the end of the illuminated path, was the door to the kitchen.  

I imagined walking inside and grabbing a knife from the counter. The biggest and sharpest, of course. I’d slit my wrists. No. Better yet, my throat. My blood would burst onto the white walls before I fell. In the morning, my parents would find my body on the floor, cold and blue. They’d miss me. Regret everything.  

Or not. I was the shame of our family, unworthy of living. I didn’t deserve their tears. They were in their mid-forties, young enough to have another child. Maybe a boy, as they always wanted, after they lost the chance because of me (and China’s One-Child Policy). He’d make them proud in a way I never could. 

The grandfather clock in the living room struck and yanked me out of my fantasy. After the chimes, it returned to ticktocks. Wind whooshed outside, and cold air swept in between the window cracks. I shivered. The storm was at its peak, and the dark sky dumped snow all around.  

I had nowhere to go.  

I tiptoed back to my room, but the knives stayed on my mind.  

The cleaver, I decided. 

#

My mother called my father the ticking bomb. He’d explode anytime, anyplace, for any reason. But, for many years, to me, he wasn’t a grenade. He was my father, warm and playful in all the right ways. 

When I was a little girl, he used to walk in circles at home with me on his shoulders. He’d throw me high in the air and catch me. Or he’d hold me above his head and spin me like a plate until I screamed and laughed myself out of breath.  

He called me “the stinky child,” but it was a genuine term of endearment. The Chinese believe that if you call your child something bad, you could fool the demons away from taking her. Maybe so. But I think he was too shy to express his love for me. 

On Sundays, he’d take me to the park and ask me to choose two out of my three favorite rides. The Fighter Jets, the Spinning Cups, or the Prancing Unicorns. He said he couldn’t afford a third. It was my first experience of making tough decisions based on finances.  

After the rides, he’d take me to swing. Unlike other parents who set their children on the boards and pushed them forward, he showed me how to stand and swing. I hesitated at first. 

“Hands tight on the ropes,” he said. “Trust yourself and be brave.” 

I swung, forward and backward, until my body was parallel to the ground. I laughed when the wind brushed beside my ears and when my father cheered. No other kids dared to swing like that. The speed, the thrill. My father’s gift. 

Soon after I started elementary school, he changed. He seemed to be in a bad mood most of the time, eyebrows locked, face red. If I misplaced a pen, didn’t line up my slippers, or failed to finish my food at the table, he’d shout at me. His roars pierced my ears and burned my nerves.  

Before exams my mother would say to me, “You’d better listen to me and be in the top three. Or I’ll tell your father, and he’ll beat you.” She told me my father beat his dog to death when he was a little boy because my grandfather wouldn’t waste food on a dog during the famine and it was going to die anyway. She said that, right before my birth, my father volunteered to go to a business trip to impress work. He could’ve lost both of us if the doctor didn’t perform the emergency C-section, but we didn’t matter as much as his career to him. 

Were these stories true? I didn’t know, but I believed her, and they made me afraid. My father was a lion in the cage, and she held the key. Only she could keep him away, and all I had to do was to obey her. 

#

For years, my father carried a black-and-white photo with grungy edges in his wallet. In the photo, he’s sitting on a double bed in a cramped room, lifting the infant me above his head and laughing. My mother is next to him, laughing too. A soft hat droops on my forehead and a booger hangs from my nose. I look shocked.  

At dinners with their colleagues and friends, he’d show the photo to everyone at the table with a smile. “That’s what she used to look like.” 

Everyone would go, “Aww . . .how cute!” 

“Not anymore,” my mother said. “Look at her. Too old and big.” When people gave me compliments, no matter what kind, she always slapped them away. 

If my father downed too much booze, he would grab the karaoke mic. Instead of singing a popular love song, he’d recite poems, the blood-boiling ones by Chinese ancient warriors and heroes. His favorite was “The River All Red,” by Yue Fei, a general from the Song dynasty. 

My eyes towards the sky, I heaved long sighs.  

Do not idle, for youth will grow old in regrets.

His face red with an Asian glow, eyes closed in concentration, and voice deep and full of strength. He didn’t care about the crowd. His soul had connected with Yue Fei, and Yue Fei’s spirit filled his body. He became Yue Fei. 

The crowd cheered. We all wanted to be him, part of something large, answering to the calling of history.  

Some joked that, in that moment, nobody existed to my father, including his family in the black-and-white photo in the wallet that he tucked back into his pants. I didn’t think so. I knew he loved my mother and me, the way Yue Fei loved his family and country. 

True, he never actually said it. Love was not a word we tossed around, not between parents and children, husbands and wives, siblings, or friends. Love is to be implied, assumed, and understood. You shouldn’t mention it casually, because, if you did, you’d be disrespecting its sacredness. But I believed that deep in his heart, he did. And why wouldn’t he? Parents love their children, and children love their parents. This is how families work, isn’t it?  

In school, they taught us “The Old Birds and The Little Bird.” The old birds fed the little bird worms and taught it to fly. After the little bird grew strong, it fed worms back to the old birds. We were the birds. 

#

My father carried an air of authority rooted in intimidation. When he walked into a room, everyone followed him with their eyes. Some held their breath. When he spoke, everyone listened. As a university vice president, he yelled at his direct subordinates, professors, until they ran out of his office crying. He scream-matched with a street vendor one day because the guy’s noodle cart blocked his way. 

His students loved him. They gathered in our living room on Saturday evenings and listened to his lectures, oohing and aahing. Chemistry, history, economics, politics, social science, poetry—they wanted to hear anything he had to say.  

I held the door open for the students after one of those lectures. Wrapping a scarf around her neck, one with pink cheeks said, “Your father is so handsome and charming.” Then she ran out into the darkness. I enjoyed hearing people say he was good-looking because they also said I was a carbon copy of him—same eyes, lips, and cheekbones. My mother said I was just as stubborn, too. Somehow it made me happy, to look like him and act like him. I wanted to be him. If that meant being stubborn, so be it. 

#

In my youth, I not only loved, but I admired my father, my role model. Not because he earned his Ph.D., which only a small fraction of the population in China did at the time, or because before he graduated, he had already published more academic papers than most others did in their lifetime. He was simply perfect in everything he did. He washed the dishes until they shone like crystals; he hand-carved marble stamps with self-designed calligraphy; he rose at 5 a.m. to run tracks and play tennis, a trendy western sport few had the opportunity to learn.  

What touched my soul the most was my father’s integrity. As vice president of a university, many of the wealthy wanted their children to attend just because he was in an influential position. Many tried to bribe him, but he never caved. I often overheard arguments between my parents in their room after certain guests’ visits.  

“Why didn’t you take Wang’s offer?” my mother asked. 

“I can’t give him what he wants.” 

“You could.” 

“It’s against the rules.” 

“Nobody would know.” 

“I would.” 

“Anybody in your position would’ve taken it!” 

“Not me.” 

“Why don’t you think about our daughter? Her education. College. We can use some help.” 

After a pause, my father would say, “We’ll make it without Wang’s offer.” 

Then they’d go silent for the night and not talk for days. 

In my final year of elementary school, I won admittance to a private middle school. Their admission rate was less than one percent, and many of their students received invitations to attend the nation’s best universities at fifteen. For two years, I had been studying day and night for their admission. The catch: they charged a hefty tuition. 

My parents debated for days. I wanted to go but I couldn’t blame them if they couldn’t pay. The school’s entrance fee alone was a quarter of our savings. 

The night when the money was due, my father walked into my bedroom. From the way his hair sat on his head in a trendy shape of a hard shell, I could tell he had visited the salon, which was an expensive celebration reserved for special occasions. 

“We paid,” he said, eyes sparkling. “We always will, for your education and future. We’ll eat less and save more. Your mother and me, of course. You need the nutrition.” 

By eating less, he meant eating cheaper, even cheaper than they already were. I did not think that was possible. At the wet market, my parents would rush in right before closing and snatch the vendors’ last bit of meat and vegetables. The lonely, heavily discounted, forgotten pieces that lay in the corner of the baskets after everyone else’s picking. Bruised, ugly, maybe slightly rotten, but otherwise with the same nutrition. My father always brought his own hand-scale. “Those shady vendors. They’d cheat you in a heartbeat.” 

After my father left, my eyes filled up. I swore that I’d ace all my courses in school, find a good job in the future, and feed my parents all they wanted to eat. The pretty items, full priced. I’d buy a big house and bring them to live with me. I would be the good little bird.  

#

“Was my father mad at my grandfather for beating him?” I asked my mother one day before my father came home. 

“Of course not,” she said. “He was a tough boy, a good son. Good sons and daughters don’t get mad at their parents. Their parents gave them life. Your father is not cruel, just bad tempered. Forgive his one flaw. His approach may be rough, but his intention is good. Beating is discipline, good for you. I would beat you, too, if I had to. Haven’t you heard the saying ‘Beating is affection and scolding a sign of love?’ You don’t see us beat other children, do you? They aren’t ours, and we don’t love them.” 

My mother taught me beating was a family matter and all their coworkers and friends beat their children at home. She said the Chinese immigrants in the U.S. did too. Their children wore long-sleeved shirts and pants so their American teachers, who wouldn’t understand, couldn’t see their wounds. How sweet were these kids.  

Many years later, I finally gathered myself to survey my Chinese friends. One said her parents slapped her hands occasionally. Another’s father once pinched her underarm fat, where she’d feel the least pain, and apologized the next day. A third said her father grabbed her by her sweater and tore her sleeve, then never touched her again. And I knew their parents loved them. 

When I turned fourteen, my mother told me that, since I was growing into a woman, my father could no longer beat me. I began to look forward to womanhood. It would bring new troubles, I heard, but the fear of violence was not one of them. Except . . . 

“Did my grandfather beat my grandmother?” I asked her. 

“In a small village like theirs, every man beat his wife.” 

“Has Father beaten you?” 

“Of course not.” 

“Would he?” 

She sighed. “That is my concern. In college, once I forgot to wash a beaker and contaminated the system that we had spent hours building. Your father grabbed my collars and yelled at my face. He was that close to hitting me. I pushed him off and stopped talking to him. After he begged me for two weeks, I told him that if he ever hit me, I’d leave immediately. He respected me after that. Now look. We’ve been married for over ten years. As a woman, you must stand your ground.” 

I nodded, proud of her courage. We were in this together, or so I thought. She had done her part to manage him and protect me, and I must do mine. I’d be a big girl. 

#

It is true my father never laid a finger on my mother. Just words. Lots of them.  

Soft, sentimental, and emotional when he was being easy on her. Irrational, muddy mind, and empty headed if not so easy. At moments of high tension, like when they discussed chemistry, their common field, he’d yell and call her know-nothing chemist, worthless engineer, and brainless thinker. She never said anything back. 

She cooked all the meals while he read the newspaper. He didn’t thank her because cooking was her job, and she couldn’t even get that right. According to him, her dishes were too salty, too bland, too dry, too overly done, or too ugly. On holiday and social gatherings, he showed off his cooking. He’d present his favorite dishes and announce: “The skilled cooks leave opportunities for the inferior ones to practice on unimportant days.” But my mother knew more dishes than he did and worked with less inspiring ingredients. 

Sometimes they’d pick me up together from school on bicycles. With me on the back holding tight onto his seat, my father would ride twice as fast as my mother could. Long after we had lost sight of her, he’d pull to the sidewalk, smoke a cigarette, and wait. When she finally caught up, huffing and puffing, he’d scold her about how unfit she was.  

In my father’s mind, he was nature’s most marvelous creature. Dragon blood ran in his veins. He told others I was smart, for I had his genes, though I was an inferior version, since my mother had polluted the gene pool. 

“He respects me,” she told me when I was fifteen. “I stand my ground, and I bring home bread, just like he does.” 

But I did not even have that source of respect. I made no money and, she said, consumed their resources. 

#

I’m a full-grown woman now, and my husband doesn’t beat me. No punching, slapping, shoulder thrusting, or kicking. Never has he yelled at me or called me a dumbass, a fake science major, wired wrong with CPU problems, or an incompetent fraud. My husband thanks me for my every little effort in the kitchen, and says all my dishes are unbelievably, insanely delicious. He makes breakfasts on the weekends and kisses me and hugs me every morning before we leave home. He tells me he loves me. 

“Why didn’t you wind up with another abuser in your adulthood?” my therapist asked me. “How did I escape violence? How did I break the cycle?” 

My closest answer: I had had enough. 

#

My mind often goes back to the night when my father hit my face like a punching bag. It was the stormiest winter I can ever remember. Through the sky-to-earth white-out, over the whipping wind, my father’s raging, red face prevails in front of my eyes, and his ground-shaking roars blow in my ears.  

The day after the beating was the start of my winter break. During that week, I could only see through one eye. Black and blue patches covered my face. My upper lip pressed into my teeth, and flesh caught between them like cement poured over bricks. I peeled off my lip and ripped the membrane inside, leaving pink pieces stuck between teeth. Blood dripped on my tongue, then down my throat. At the table, soy sauce burned the cuts like needles piercing my gum. Part of my lip grew back onto the pieces between teeth, so I ripped it open again. 

One morning, after my father left, my mother came to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. 

“Do you know how sad your father was after beating you?” she said. “He stayed up until three a.m., smoking. He kept mumbling, ‘She’ll never forgive me.’” 

Tears ran out of my one eye. 

“This was your fault,” she said. “If you studied harder and earned better grades, he wouldn’t be so mad. You hurt him. You forced him to do something he didn’t want to do. Apologize to your father. Admit your fault. You shouldn’t have taken the remote, either.” 

With my blurred vision, I could barely recognize her, my dear mother, who rose at five a.m. to cook me breakfast, who tucked me in every night with a kiss on my forehead, who rode a bicycle for an hour after work every day in the snow to make me dinner. She was so devoted. Of course, fault was always mine. 

Then I remembered. When I was eight and my father was pursing his Ph.D. in another city, I once snuck money out of my mother’s purse to buy candies. After she found out, she locked us both in the bedroom and ordered me to take off my pants. 

“Be quiet.” She kept her voice low. “We don’t want to disturb the neighbors.” 

She swung her arm and whipped the handle of a broom on my behind. I did not make a sound. While at it, she kept repeating, “I’d rather break your legs and serve you in bed for life than let you bring me shame.” 

She cried afterward. “I’m more hurt than you are. But you forced me. This is the only way you’ll remember.” 

I couldn’t sit for the following three days, but she was more hurt than I was. 

She was not my protector. She never had been. 

Now, in the wake of another beating, I cleared my throat. “I will not apologize. Whatever I did wrong, I have overpaid.” 

After a long, silent moment, she shook her head, sighed, and walked to the door. Next to it, she turned around. “If someone visits us and asks what happened to your face, say a volleyball hit you. Nobody should know about this.” 

Nobody did. I stayed at home, mostly in my room, for the entire winter break. My mother cancelled all my “bonus” classes and small group study sessions. She never took me to the hospital to check on my eye or to determine if I had a concussion. 

My eye eventually opened again with no vision damage. The blue and black patches faded away from my face. I could smell fine, too. Lucky me. 

#

Years later, after I moved to the US and started my career, my parents visited me. One night, when my father was taking a cigarette break in the backyard, my mother and I watched TV. In the show, a police officer arrested a man for beating his wife. 

“In the U.S., they’d arrest a father for beating his children, too,” I said. 

“These Americans. Wives tell on their husbands, and children throw their parents under the bus,” she said. 

But then, I had seen the other side. And I had had enough. “If my father beats me again, I will call the police.” 

“What? And have him arrested?” 

“Yes.” 

“Why? He wouldn’t really hurt you. You can take it.” 

Through the window, in the backyard, my father’s burning cigarette blinked red in the dark. He was in his mid-fifties but still athletic, and I was in my mid-twenties. A beating was still physically possible. But in Brazilian Jiujitsu classes, he was my imaginary enemy. I had practiced numerous times in my head how to fight back at him. 

“I can take it,” I said. “But I choose not to.” 

“You’d rather have him in jail?” She sat up from the couch, fingers gripping the edge of the cushion. “That’s your father!” 

“I will not be beaten again.” 

Her eyes turned red, and tears rushed down her cheeks. She buried her face in her palm. “You . . .you . . .not an understanding child. He’s your father!” 

#

Twelve years later, my parents and I no longer talk. No Happy New Year, no Happy Birthdays. Our last phone conversation was meant to discuss their trip to visit me, but developed into his body-shaking, ear-drum-blowing yelling frenzy.  

Finally, I said, “Father, if you continue to yell, we’ll have to talk another time.” 

He hung up, like he always did when he was mad.  

Then my mother said, in an email, that I hurt my father and should apologize. Because, of course, it was always my fault. 

My father’s words rang in my ears. “Trust yourself and be brave.”  

I proposed a principle: no violence in the family, physical or verbal. I would not be beaten again, simple as that. If my father reserved the right to be violent or didn’t respect me, he could not have me. I had my husband’s full support in this, but I wanted to get it all out so I could be free, free of guilt, free from the what-ifs.  

They rejected. Agreeing to my no-violence principle would be equivalent to bending his knee to me, which he’d never do.  

We haven’t talked since. 

When will we speak or see each other again? At his deathbed? Tomb? 

In countless, sleepless nights, the thought of my parents weighs on my chest. On the dark ceiling above my bed, I see their faces. I am a bad daughter. I live in a house in the U.S., and I don’t bring them out of their small condo in China to live with me. I’m the little bird who grew strong but doesn’t feed worms back to the old birds. 

I love my father, the father who taught me to be brave, the father who blew out my eye. But does he love me? I believe he has given me as close to it as he was able to comprehend. I hope every so often that he, like me, thinks of the happy moments we shared, however far and few between.  

When I look into the mirror, he’s right there, staring back at me. I like seeing the good part of him in me, but not the bad. I know he beats because he was beaten, that he may believe he was acting for my own good.  

Violence, this learned behavior, a generational disease.  

It dies with me. 

---

Marissa Yuan is a Chinese, first-generation immigrant and a non-native English speaker. She lives in Houston, TX with her husband and four fur babies. She works as a trader in the financial industry and writes in her free time for passion. One of her stories is a winner of Stories That Need to Be Told contest. Her other work can be found in Ocotillo Review and Galaxy’s Edge.