In 11th grade AP Language at Lassiter High School, we frequently exercised our diction muscles (a fancy term for deploying different vocabulary to bring more color to the page, instead of using words like “very” and “really”) through writing assignments.
What bothered me was that the teacher would give out As to people who would follow the assignment rubric perfectly, even though their writing moved no emotions.
People would write about their golden retrievers, or their family vacation to Destin, Florida, as if they had never experienced anything tragic in their young 17 years on planet Earth.
Maybe they hadn’t.
Meanwhile, I had demons rattling around in my mind.
And writing was, by far, the best way to exorcise them.
In truth, my family life at home was tearing to pieces. Circa 2017, mental health was still taboo, especially for Chinese and Indian immigrants to the US, and communicating emotions often turned into a violent affair.
My parents would often have such huge fights that life at home became terrifying. When my sister and I would get rides from our parents to school, we would never speak, scared stiff to disturb the storm raging in the driver’s mind. School was the escape.
And so when it was time to “Write an essay on an injustice you hate in this world,” the first thing I thought of was how my sister and I were growing up in a home that felt like WWIII day-in-and-day-out.
It was personal. It was raw. And to be honest, I wrote about how I had been abused in the home. I had no vocabulary for my emotions. I couldn’t tell you what I was feeling. All I could do was describe the events that were happening around me.
My dad leaving the home for days at a time, not answering his phone.
My parents sleeping in separate bedrooms for weeks on-end.
And feeling utterly alone in the midst of these confusing and challenging events.
After all, it seemed like everyone else’s parents were perfect, their families were perfect, and their navy blue Volvo C30’s were perfect.
The rawest essay I ever wrote in AP Language got a lukewarm response from my teacher, perhaps for multiple reasons, but the one reason that continues to stand out as a core memory was that it was “too disturbing.”
But the truth is,
Disturbing is good.
Disturbing is truth. Disturbing is the real effing deal. Disturbing is what makes real life stranger than fiction.
If you’re Asian-American, or Asian-Canadian, who grew up in the early 2000’s, you need to read this book.
Lucky for us, the mental health revolution picked up as we entered into our 20’s and 30’s, giving us an explanation for the confusion we experienced from our own parents and grandparents, many of them traumatized by the wars, starvation, and revolutions that occurred in most of the Asian nations in the last century.
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