There are a lot of things I want to write about and express that I keep bottling up between me and my sister. For the past few days I've had to deal more and more with my parents and it's been stressing me out. I am so tired of pretending like we're a normal family when we aren't. I have to keep a poker face when I hang out with my family here in Vietnam and they ask me about my parents.
When I was in 6th grade, my mom asked me to help her write her OkCupid profile, an online dating site, since I knew more English than her. For a short while she showed me the men she was trying to see as well as her chat logs. My dad was in and out of the hospital around this time. My therapist told me my mom is probably a narcissist. Some time in the future I found really questionable pictures on our family computer. I showed my parents the pictures and then left them alone to deal with it.
My sister and I were really skinny when we were younger and I think we developed eating disorders. My parents would frequently forget to feed us or give us money to buy lunch at school. Throughout elementary-school, middle-school and high-school I learned how to mooch off of other students, getting small bites from everyone's lunch. I remember most days at home, I would continuously check the snack cabinet, eating hot cheetos, or old Halloween candy even though it was 6 months after Halloween. As an adult, it has taken me a few years, listening to my body, until I actually knew what "hunger" and "thirst" was supposed to feel like.
I think my mom is a pathological liar. The most common example was when she would leave meat and rice uncovered outside for days. My sister and I kept note of how long the meat was outside. She microwaved it and serve it to us. The meat was often rancid and the rice was still hard. She would then tell us, "I just cooked it!" She even lies when she doesn't have to – any story she recalls, she would do more than just exaggerate. I cannot recall most of what she said because I learned to block most of the things she says. About 50% of what she tells me is not real. She recently told me, "All your aunts and uncles have been telling me to go home and that you are not healthy or safe in Vietnam. They've been urging me to tell you to go home." I asked my aunts and uncles here in Vietnam and they said, "I didn't say anything like that."
My mom can be one of the sweetest, charming, and cutest people you'll ever meet. As a child, when she loved me, I felt it. But she also flips unpredictably to the most uncaring, unsupportive, and hateful person. When I fell and bruised my head, I went up to her and asked her for help. She told me, "What the fuck am I supposed to about that? Do you want to go to the hospital?"
She is obsessed with the look of my sister's nose. She thinks my sister is ugly because my sister looks more like my dad, and she told me that she thinks my sister is "easy."
When I was around ten years old, she chased me and my sister around with a knife.
My parents were violent to us when we were kids. My dad used to make us sit in prayer position with our knees pressed into the carpet, which caused our knees to burn against the carpet. He graduated to taking belts and whipping us with the metal buckle. I remember hiding from him in the dark garage, under a table where we kept McDonald's happy meal toys. He slapped and punched me a lot. I remember a power shift happened in my house, the day I caught his fist.
My dad has been sick with a chronic illness since I was a kid. He has a rare kidney virus that has caused him to go through several surgeries. He's just been constantly on the verge of dying. I think people feel like I am uncaring about him but I've just had to balance the mix feelings of potentially losing my dad and also knowing he was the source of a lot of my pain.
My parents normalized violence in our house. My sister was the prime victim of all of this so she passed it onto me. When my sister and I fought, she would pull out chunks of my hair or she would throw large rocks at my head to make me bleed. When I was learning how to ride a bike, she repeatedly pushed me into a bush of thorny roses. My grandma was there to give me bandaids. Of course, when I got to the elementary school playground I would pass this violence onto other kids, often bullying them or punching them. It was easy for me to socialize and meet friends, but eventually they would realize my violent and maladaptive behaviors and not want to hang out with me anymore.
In 6th grade, I got in trouble for acting out in class. The teacher forced me to write a letter explaining myself and why I acted the way I did, and then get my parents to read and sign the letter. This was the first time I wrote about my depression, as a 6th grader. I gave it to my parents and they laughed and screamed. I recalled my mom yelling, "Are you crazy? You think you are crazy? Haha. You are not crazy. You are just stupid." My dad yelled, "My son is not crazy! You hear? My son is not crazy!" It was the first time I was being vulnerable to anyone. They crumpled the letter up and threw it in the trash.
In college, I attempted suicide by hanging myself with a MacBook charger in the closet. I got scared when my vision was blacking out from the asphyxiation, so I called the suicide hotline and went to a therapist for the first time. I reached out to my parents. I told my mom that I was depressed. We sat in the living room couch and she told me, "YOU are depressed? YOU deserve to be depressed? No. You know who should be depressed? I deserve to be depressed. Twenty years. Twenty long years I have been working. And I have to take care of your father too. So YOU get to be depressed? You are not depressed."
It took a long time but they finally believed me, years after. Last year my sister talked to me about her anxiety and depression. She then told me, "Mom told me that my depression is not as bad as your depression – that you are way more depressed than me." I was surprised and not surprised. She constantly compares my sister and I, always telling me that I am a good kid and blaming my sister for every mistake that I make.
I am ironically thankful for some of the trauma – it's made me a good programmer. There are so many times I wanted to escape my home and my parents that I became chronically online. I found a game development community that taught me how to code. My connection to coding has always been of a way to escape and to express myself. My parents constantly told me to get off the computer, and didn’t understand when I literally told them I was coding and not playing a game. The game development community was a source of support, love and care for me when my parents failed to provide that. I fucking hate it when people make assumptions on why I learned to code. I hate how some people think that coding is just robotic office worker corporate techie stuff.
There are only three times I've seen my mom cry. Not even during her father's funeral. The first time I saw her cry was when my cat died. The second time I saw her cry was when the Tesla dealership wouldn't give her the car she bought because of paperwork issues – it was going to be delayed a week. The third time she cried – we were sitting at the dinner table. She told me in English that she is a genius. "I am a genius. You see how far you've gotten? It's because of me. It's in the genetics. I must be a genius." I told her, "You weren't even there when I was growing up. I was raised by my aunt and uncle. I didn't learn how to code from you, I learned it because I was trying to escape you." She cried. I don't understand why, but she cried.
All of this is supposed to be in the past, but I am still so tired. I am tired of explaining myself to people. I am tired of being unable to express my own pain. I am so tired of my parents forgetting that this is how they treated me. I am tired of screaming and screaming all my life. Me and my sister were not born by mistakes, we were their fashion accessories of the 90’s. They had us by choice. I can understand the trauma of having to live through a way and to move to a new country, but I don’t think it removes the responsibility that my parents should have had when they decided to bring me and my sister into this world.