TRIGGER WARNING: Abuse, PTSD triggers, sexual abuse, family dysfunction.
There are stories in here I had planned to take to my grave. But, I think, to restore my humanity, I need to expose my demons.
A sudden plunge in my health also shut me down for days. Originally, I had planned to post a blog a day. The past few days changed all that.
Then I realized I need a separate blog for my daily illness struggles. And these will now be my log entries. I reorganized all my past posts accordingly, but my real first log entry is here.
Chronologically, Log entries run in tandem with Essays.
I listened to Thom Yorke’s haunting Dawn Chorus when I wrote this.
Dear friends,
The irony of my mom’s second marriage is that she did it for me. To fix my emotions. But instead, the marriage worsened my dysregulation. It was, in fact, brutal. On everyone.
No one could have foreseen it.
After her divorce when I was five, my rage convinced my mother that I needed a good father. And she was right.
Then, my mother met my stepfather, who was visiting our church.
My stepfather couldn’t be more different than my father. He was infinitely patient. And he was pursuing a Ph.D. in behavioral psychology. The Lord sent this man to fix my son, my mom believed. And so, too, believed the man. So they married.
The marriage was a practical arrangement for meeting each others’ desperate domestic needs. She had a son who needed psychological rehabilitation. He was a widower with three children my age he couldn’t care for.
The contract was simple: my mom would work and raise all five kids. She would also support my stepfather’s education. In return, he would fix me. And he would take over supporting the family once he had his Ph.D. and license. If only love had also been part of this contract.
Unfortunately, nothing went as planned. Or agreed upon.
When my step-siblings immigrated from Korea into our tiny two-bedroom apartment in Astoria, it was great fun.
With five kids, it was cramped, but it was like an endless slumber party with friends my age. I loved it, and I quickly loved them.
But soon after, my stepfather drove to Michigan to study, our poverty thickened and poisoned everything, especially when we moved to Sunnyside, NY.
The Sunnyside apartment was a little bigger, but it was dark and dank with little sunlight. It had broken and rotted floorboards where vermin came and went. The walls had large open cracks, peeling paint, and mold. Just like 1980’s New York City itself, it was wretched. And we moved into it as is.
We had a nightmare roach infestation. They hid in our clothes and shoes and bit us. They went into our fridge and kept dying in our food. Flip on a light at night in any room, and dozens would scatter away. When we slept, they would crawl on our faces, in our noses, and ears. They hid in our clothes and bit us when we put the clothes on. During the summers, other bug colonies emerged through the broken floorboards.
Us three boys slept on one soiled full mattress on the floor. I don’t recall any odors, but it must have smelled like old urine. Not only because it had been used and had many stains, but because of my constant bedwetting.
We lived in squalor.
We never bought things. Not even the things other poor kids could buy.
For years, we never went out, never saw a movie, never went to McDonald’s, never had a device to listen to music on, and never went to a store. All we had were books, Legos, a TV, and things I had shoplifted. And the only things we went to were church things.
No matter how hard my mom worked, we were in a perpetual crisis of poverty and debt. Eventually, overworked and overstressed, she began losing her mind.
My parents fought incessantly. She screamed, he stonewalled. And in the process,I lost my mom as I watched her transform into an unrecognizable bitter creature in constant pain, illness, and anger.
My mom remained lost to me until I finally found her again, three decades later, in a nest of her tears and regret.
What happens in a nest of starving chicks? What happens when no food comes? When poverty strikes?
When poverty struck our nest, my mom broke a cardinal rule. She clearly sided on my brother’s and my behalf.
With her husband away studying, she redirected much—but not all—of her anger and resentment toward her stepchildren. My step-siblings took a terrible toll which bred more resentment.
It was a war along genetic lines. And everyone, save the youngest—my biological brother—fought in some way or another. My stepfather, to his credit, never fought back. He was extremely patient, but he was also incapable of solving these problems.
My mom would ask for a divorce. Then my stepfather would convene a family meeting and tell us all. Then our Stockholm Syndrome would collectively kick in. We would cry and apologize and plead to stay together, to stay a family. Every year, this ritual would repeat—for over a decade.
One day, when I was 8 or 9 years old, I went to my parents in tears. I had just been sexually abused. He said he would kill my parents if I told anyone. But I told anyway. I told my parents.
They laughed at me and dismissed it.
My siblings were there, too, in the living room. I don’t remember their reactions. I don’t remember what I felt, or how I felt.
But based on the changes in my interests there afterward, I can say that was the seminal point when evil took root inside me. People called me a monster, and rightfully so. I became cruel, dark, and evil.
Within a year, I was torturing and killing insects, then mice and birds, then cats. I wasn’t mad. I just enjoyed it. It was a hobby. Hurting things made me very happy. And this new interest sat beside my pre-existing destructive rage, all of it intact. It’s a miracle I turned out the way I did.
In 5th grade, I had a classmate named Thanh.
Thanh had been left behind a few times and was a giant. I was third-smallest in class so he was easily twice my height.
Thanh was troubled and was often sent to the principal’s office for violence.
One day, when we were by ourselves at recess, Thanh confided in me that babies were so cute that he wanted to break and crush them in his hands. He wanted to kill them.
I’ll never forget that moment. Because I knew exactly how he felt. I giggled and replied, “Yeah, me, too!”
We brainstormed how we could find some babies to secretly “play” with, without getting caught. Eventually, we gave up on the idea.
I was on the precipice.
Looking back, I was incredibly lucky. A cat—as horrible as it was—was the full and final extent that my psychopathy would walk up to before retreating from the precipice.
Thankfully, years later, I would seek and struggle to reclaim the humanity I had lost in childhood.
This was hard to write. Not only because I’m still under tremendous physical pain from my illness [more on that here], but also because these are verboten memories. They were never meant to be shared—even privately. And publicly, they risk hurting people I love.
This was the fear I wrestled with for days.
But despite the risks, I realized that sharing, on balance, would still be net good. So I chose to share.
There are still lost parts of me I need to redeem. Lost parts I need to find. Parts that can make me fully human.
For a decade now I’ve been disassembling and dismantling my personality. I’ve been untangling the twisted and knotted wiring of my psyche. And I’ve been rebuilding from scratch. It’s been painstakingly slow. But, however slow, there’s progress.
The progress was possible only because of the avalanches of love and acceptance that swept away my demons. First, they swept in from others. Then, I modeled them toward myself. And finally, to others.
Now I can say that miracles can sprout even from cruelty and trauma. I’ll explain in future posts.
Sadly, I can’t say the same for my stepfamily. The internecine dysfunction still haunts us today. And now we are but splinters of a past wood.
But in hindsight, it was so obvious, so inevitable…
Our family’s cursed future had its roots not just in my mom’s childhood, but in my stepfather’s as well.
During the Korean War, when he was a child, my stepfather’s own father was whisked away in the middle of the night. He was taken, along with other villagers, and quickly executed. Their crime? Suspicion of being a communist sympathizer.
Their bodies were dumped into an unmarked mass grave. For decades their deaths were lost and forgotten.
That trauma lodged itself in my stepfather like a jagged dagger. The dagger was never removed. Instead, thick scar tissue healed around it.
Years later, he drew the blade out, reopening that wound. Then he used it to cut a path toward justice.
It was a path back to his own father, but away from us, his family.
It took my stepfather thirteen years to get his Ph.D. Thirteen years of education debts and not working.
During that time, my mom worked incessantly doing janitorial work, babysitting, sales jobs, multi-level marketing work, and physical labor. Whatever she could get.
Unfortunately, once he had his Ph.D., he couldn’t find work with it. Instead, he took on odd, temporary, low-paid jobs. Maybe he didn’t try hard enough. We’ll never know. But we all agree: he devoted the rest of his life to correcting his father’s wrongful death in a dramatic, public way.
One day, while my father was showing me his recently published book on the topic, he asked me, “Do you know why I got my Ph.D.?”
“No,” I replied.
“Because I knew that once I became a doctor, people would believe me about the massacre.”
His admission bothered me, but I didn’t understand why, nor did I really care. So I tried to brush it off, not knowing its full significance.
Ultimately, with his vast research, his book, and his lecture tours, he accomplished his mission: he brought the Cheju village massacre to public scrutiny and account. But the only income his Ph.D. garnered him was a few thousand dollars in book-sale royalties. My emotional issues were still bad. My mom was still working extremely hard.
My mom felt gypped, to say the least.
This added more fuel, again, to the fights. Fights between the parents, between the children, between parents and children. In our home, demons and ulterior motives pulled everyone’s strings like puppets. Everything was fake. Everything was rotten.
In 2013, my stepfather passed away after a long battle with cancer. Since then, our family (mother and five children) is no more. Given our decades of broken promises, internecine warfare, and toxic secrets, it’s no surprise. But it’s such a shame. And so sad.
Considering the blood sweat and tears poured into keeping a young family together—Stockholm syndrome and all—it’s sad when a family inexorably splinters apart. Sometimes, there is just too much pain accumulated and too little time. A threshold is crossed. And everyone is too busy and too bitter.
Today, my younger sister and my mom are my surviving family. But ever since our splintering, I’ve viewed my mother’s re-marriage as a mistake. A curse. Not with anger, but with a sigh.
What could have been of my mom, my lost brother, and I had we been each others’ sole concerns? What happens to a nest with fewer mouths to feed?
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