by Kim Fu
Mother picked me up by my armpits. She could barely lift me; my head hovered above hers, my feet dragged on the ground. She held me at arm’s length like a bag of garbage. She carried me into their bedroom and dropped me hard into a chair.
Father came in behind us. He leaned on the wall by the door. Mother opened her mouth and a long stream of invective came out in a language I barely recognized, a language of hard, short sounds, a language of pain. My father put his hand on her shoulder to stop her. She wasn’t supposed to speak to us in Cantonese. Our English would come out wrong, he’d insisted. Like theirs.
Deprived of that weapon, she used the only other one she had: she slapped me in the face. For a moment, no one moved, as if the sound of her palm cracking against my cheek needed time to echo. Mother walked out. The door hung open.
I met my father’s gaze. He stayed leaning on the wall across from me, his expression inscrutable. Slowly, deliberately, he straightened up. He was smiling. He didn’t speak for a long time, just smiled. I felt his approval like a warm glow.
He said, “Bonnie is moving into Helen’s room. You get your own room, son.”
My father loved me.
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About the Author
Kim Fu is the author of the novel For Today I Am a Boy, which won the Edmund White Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Lambda Literary Award, and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Fu is also the author of the poetry collection How Festive the Ambulance. She lives in Seattle.
kim-fu.com
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