Another such memory has to do with the father. Here the narration
takes a turn to the abstract that may be said to mark the academic mind,
the mind that objectifies, removing to a distance in order to study a
thing. Still, on re-reading this passage, it appears to me that these
incidents had lingered mentally, like the impression of lights on one's
retina from the powerful flash of bulbs exploding just before one's
eyes, only lasting for decades, because of the oddly depersonalizing,
even impersonal nature of the violence witnessed. From the flash of the
light, the violence enacted, the mind is able to visualize both darkness
and light, as in this passage, the autobiographical author attempts to
understand the father as a lightning rod of abuse through the frames of
hate and love.
(The following excerpt is reprinted from Among the White Moon Faces, pages 31-34, with
permission from The Feminist Press.)
I remember one splendid Sunday morning when we four
children, Beng, Chien, Jen, and myself, clung to each other's shoulders,
and Beng hung on to Father's, who swam out to the horizon, unafraid that
the four of us might drop out of each other's grip into the salt waves.
Father was a strong swimmer. As a boy he had jumped off the bridge into
the Malacca River in weekend play, and his love of the sea blinded him
to the danger he was leading us through. The water rushed like a living
current over us; we were suspended above the drowning element by the
power of my father's body.
Were we seven, six, five, three? All four of us did not add up to my
father's years, although he was still a young man. Remembering his body,
I need to count to materialize it out of the myth of muscle and salt
water. A man of twenty-eight, lean, muscular, bearing on his shoulders
the exposed naked slippery bodies of four children, each destined to
grow larger than he, whose little fish bodies he could have so easily
shrugged off, dropped over the horizon's edge, to return unencumbered, a
free male. Instead I feel his calves kick, his arms arc and flash in a
flight through welcome space. His teeth gleam white, a father shark, as
he turns his handsome head, laughing at our squeals, taking pride in our
fearless faith.
Because my father loved his children, I have kept faith with him,
through the years of living with his pursuit of women, his gambling, and
his rages. The bond I sewed tight between my father and me was illicit.
In a Chinese family, perhaps in every family, daughters must be weary of
their love for their fathers. We are constrained as daughters; the ties
that strain us to our fathers are tense with those constraints. A vast
because fearfully crossable boundary must separate girl-child from male
parent. I wonder if all daughters suffer a revulsion about their
fathers' bodies, instinctively reacting to save themselves from
unacknowledged dangers.
As a child I adored my father's body. When I slept with my parents,
before even more children arrived to remove me to a newly purchased
iron-frame bunk bed, it was my father's body I reached out to touch when
I roused in the night. He was warm and solid; it made me happy to touch
his flesh lightly with my fingers, then drift back into sleep. So in
that serpent-like familial swim, with a brother gripping me around my
neck, clinging to another brother as he clung to another who clung to my
father's confident body, all of us children extruded from my father like
grown sperm, links in an unbreakable, undrownable chain, the meaning of
my father's life made manifest to him.
My father was so ordinary that his name appeared in his lifetime in
only those two pieces of paper testifying to his King Scout status and
his passing the Overseas Senior Cambridge Exams. After the age of
nineteen, he left the world of testimonials, of the seen and
acknowledged, and entered a world of breeding, of feeding hungry mouths,
of struggle and failure, small pleasures, and modest hopes. His life
remained undocumented, unrecorded, and therefore unvalued and unsaved. I
write to make my father's life useful. To do that, I have to explain my
love for him.
My father beat me on many occasions. Every time he slapped me, raised
the cane and cut me on my legs, my shoulders, my back so that the raised
welts were also deeply grooved and bloodied, I hated him. My eyes would
blank and hurt and in my ears I heard the chant, "I hate you, I hate
you."
That silent chant gave me an enormous sense of secret power. I never
begged him to stop beating me, never cried, although my throat burned
with stifled feeling, and my head spun from the violence of his slaps.
The rattan's whipping cuts were like knife-tongues of fire that licked
the flesh and stayed and stayed. I hated him as much for humiliating me
as for the pain. I felt public shame, for he beat me in front of anyone,
my brothers, the neighbors, visitors, and relatives. I never asked then
what drove him to these maddened episodes. I knew it wasn't me. He beat
me viciously once for dropping a spoon and breaking it; on another
occasion, when he thought a hawker had cheated me.
The only time I felt private shame when he beat me was the first
time. A five-year-old stay-at-home, I was fascinated by my older
brothers' sophistication, the news they brought home each day from
school. They said different words, played different games, and owned
large shiny books with photographs and drawings and stories in them. I
felt my chest tighten with the desire to possess what was in their
mouths and heads. My brothers shared a secret joke that galvanized them
with mirth. I stood outside the circle of two and spied. They whispered,
pretending not to see me. They formed circles with the thumb and first
finger of their right hands, a secret sign that haloed them as partners
and insiders. It was an understanding that they shared, and they slyly
glanced at me to see if I had caught it from them, then yelled, "Go
away!"
I ran outside into the evening air with their secret. I was elated,
for I understood the sign, I knew how to form that circle and how to
penetrate it. I ran to my father who was just closing up the shop. He
was moving yet another wooden plank into its grooved position,
completing the wooden wall that shut the shop each night and transformed
it into a home. There was no one else for me to play with; I tugged at
his arm and showed him the secret I had just mastered.
But his face reddened. His eyes took on the crazed glower, only this
time, for the first time, it was directed at me. I was horrified, but it
was too late. He put the plank against the wall, went inside, dragging
me with him, and caned me. I do not remember how many times the feather
duster descended. Perhaps, because it was the first time, the switch
came down from only three cuts, perhaps it was more. After that evening
I knew I could not count on my father's love.
Later, as I approached ten and eleven, I understood the meaning of
the sign, and the memory of his rage shamed me. The shame is
unspeakable. I am covered with confusion. Did I, five years old, know
the power of the sign? What secret was I breaking open as I tugged at
his arm, smiling? Why am I still ashamed? Am I ashamed by his
uncontrolled use of power over my small female body, his displaced,
repressed fears? Or by my child's desire for him, the man whom I had
approached as my playmate, my partner, with whom I wanted to share the
secret of the circle?
When my father beat me for the first time, the horror that filled me
as I sobbed through that evening was not simple horror at pain, the
sting of the rattan switch on my buttocks. It was also the horror at the
knowledge of the break, that he had forcibly set me aside from himself,
asserting a presence so alien that it could turn the lithe pliable rod
on my flesh and cut me. My father became a fearful stranger to me then;
as he gripped my arm, cursing in the growing darkness, and brought the
rattan down on me, he appeared simultaneously to melt away, to lose his
familiar contours, and to harden, to loom as a featureless man to whom
my screams and tears signified nothing. My lifelong sense of the evening
as the hour of abandonment, when one looks out into the world and it
overcome by one's aloneness, begins with the beating.
And the shame. For I understood clearly that it was what I had done
that had changed this man from father to monster. Something in my desire
for him, that tug on his arm, the sharing of a sign, had toppled
something in him. His rage was inexplicable otherwise. The shame was
like a hot stone I had swallowed, different from the pain of the caning.
It was inside my body, it went bruising, slowly, down my chest, and
settled in my stomach. For days after, I felt slow, draggy, as if the
stone were weighing me down. The buoyancy of the five-year-old girl
looking up into her father's eyes as she showed him the sign she has
just learned from her brothers never returned. I can mark that moment as
the consciousness of another self, a sullen within, hating the father
who beat me.
Hate does not explain love, but it sharpens love, in as much as it
gives us the power to see the fragilities of the object of our hate.
From the moment my father beat me, I became aware of his weakness rather
than of his power. While I feared the pain of his canings, I never came
to fear him; instead I came to acknowledge the depth of my responses and
the interiority of my feelings. His blows drove me inwards into misery
that cannot be spoken. I felt the power of my unhappiness, and therefore
the power of my personhood. I learned to love my father again because I
pitied him, and I pitied him because he gave me the power to hate
him.
In this passage, again I would argue that the growth of the poet's
mind is being more than covertly suggested in lines such as "That silent
chant gave me a sense of enormous power"; "[T]he evening as the hour of
abandonment, when one looks out into the world and is overcome by one's
aloneness." In "The Prelude," Wordsworth traces the growth of the poet's
mind to the introjection of an external power into the still-pliant
imagination of the boy who steals a boat and finds himself stalked by
the magnificent shapes of the natural world. I suggest this afternoon
that in my memoir I was tracing the early development of interior
consciousness in response to exterior violence, the growth of such
interiority being inseparable from the growing operations of the
imagination.
