16. Chapter Sixteen #3
My father was a poison. Everything he touched turned sick.
His family, his marriage, his friendships, even the house itself felt diseased, the walls yellowed from cigarette smoke and splashed with stains.
Later, as I got older, I’d hear from other kids who had fathers like mine.
Some of them would say things like he wasn’t always like that or when he’s sober he’s actually okay or sometimes he takes me fishing and it’s good then.
They had these fragments of the person their father could be when the drink wasn’t in him.
Little pieces of gold mixed in with the garbage that they could hold up and say, see, he’s not all bad.
I didn’t have any of those. Not a single memory of my father being kind to me.
Not one afternoon of fishing. Not one game of catch.
Not one word of praise or encouragement or love.
The only good things I’d ever heard about the man came from Uncle’s mouth, Seyeon’s father.
Uncle, who had been more of a father to me than my own ever was.
Kind and steady and gentle, who ruffled my hair the same way he ruffled Seyeon’s, who put extra rice in my bowl and kept me at his table as long as he could each night, who once knelt down in front of me when I was nine years old and said, “You’re a good kid, Ryowoon-ah. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
Uncle told me stories about my father when they were young.
Running through these same streets, swimming in the same harbor, getting into trouble the same way Seyeon and I did.
In Uncle’s stories my father laughed. My father played.
My father was someone worth knowing. I had to believe those stories were true, had to believe there was some good buried in him somewhere, because Uncle loved him.
Uncle, who was the best man I ever knew, wouldn’t waste his heart on someone with nothing in them. There had to be something.
And then Uncle was gone. The only person in the world who ever saw anything worth seeing in Cha Sungkyu.
Dead because my father couldn’t stay sober long enough to do his job.
Couldn’t stay alert long enough to notice the machine malfunctioning beside him.
Uncle saw it. Uncle pulled my father clear. Uncle didn’t make it out.
The drinking got worse after that. Of course it did.
Grief and guilt and self-loathing piled on top of all the other poison already in him and it turned him into a monster, something beyond the angry drunk I’d grown up with.
Something hollow-eyed and reckless and so consumed by his own misery that he couldn’t see anyone else’s.
Home was no different from hell. A place of constant fear and pain, where the air itself felt thick with dread, where I learned to read every creak of the floorboards, every shift of weight in the next room, guessing whether the footsteps coming down the hall were steady or staggering.
Sober or drunk. Safe or not safe. Though safe was never really an option.
Some nights I slept in alleyways. Curled behind the dumpster outside the market, or under one of the vendor stalls after they’d been locked up for the night, the metal shutters blocking the wind but not the cold. Anywhere. Anywhere but inside those walls.
Then my mother left.
She disappeared one morning. Just gone. Her things still in the house. No note. No goodbye. No look back over her shoulder at the son she was leaving behind.
I couldn’t blame her. I couldn’t even be upset, really. Because I understood. God, I understood. If I could have run, I would have run too. I would’ve crawled through broken glass and barbed wire to get out of that house and I wouldn’t have looked back either.
But without her there wasn’t a buffer anymore.
No one to absorb the first wave of his rage before it got to me.
No one to answer the door and smile for the police and assure them we were fine.
My father’s behavior, unfiltered now, bled out past the walls of our house where people who weren’t my terrified mother could see it.
At school the teachers noticed. My friends, who already knew but had the decency never to say it outright, watched me with harder, angrier eyes.
Mrs. Nam threatened to burn my father’s house down at least three times that fall.
People who interacted with me outside my father’s influence saw and they said things, made calls.
The police came again when I was fourteen, and this time my mother wasn’t there to assure them everything was fine.
But it didn’t change anything. Because one of the officers who showed up was a man named Kwon, someone who’d gone to school with my father.
Who drank at the same bar. Who played the same card games.
Officer Kwon and his partner sat in our living room while my father, freshly sobered up just enough to string sentences together, assured them it was a misunderstanding.
Family disagreement. The boy’s got a mouth on him, you know how kids are these days, no respect.
Officer Kwon pulled me aside. Into the kitchen, away from my father, as if the six feet of distance made this a private conversation.
I stood there with both my eyes blackened, blood still trickling from one nostril, a welt rising on my forearm where my father had grabbed me hard enough to leave fingerprints.
Officer Kwon crouched down so we were eye level. He had a kind face. Patient eyes. The sort of expression adults put on when they want you to feel like they’re on your side.
“Your father’s not a bad man, Ryowoon-ah,” he said gently. Almost fatherly. “He’s just going through a hard time. You know that, right? That kind of thing changes a man. He’s troubled. He doesn’t mean to hurt you.”
I stared at him. Blood in my mouth. Ribs aching.
“You should try to be more obedient,” Officer Kwon continued, still gentle, still kind, still crouched down with patient eyes.
“Listen to your father. Don’t talk back so much.
Don’t give him reasons to get upset. I’m sure he doesn’t mean it.
He loves you. He just doesn’t know how to show it right now. ”
I never had much faith in the police after that.
The years kept turning. My father kept drinking.
I kept surviving, if you could call it that.
And then there was Nuri. My dog. My only companion at home who loved me without conditions or complications or violence.
Who wagged her tail when I came through the gate and pressed her warm body against mine when I sat beside her doghouse and buried my face in her fur and tried to stop shaking.
The last bright spot. The one living being in that house that brought me joy.
My father took that from me too.
I sometimes wondered, as I got older and the bruises healed slower and the nights got longer and the emptiness yawned wider, if it would ever end in anything but one or both of us dying.
What hope did I have for the future anyway?
Where was I going? What was I building? Maybe this was just my fate, written into my blood before I was born.
My mother told me once, when I was little.
Before everything got as bad as it got, back when she still talked to me, still tried to explain the world in ways a child could understand.
She said my great grandfather had been a prisoner of war.
Captured during the occupation and held for years in a camp where the Japanese soldiers did things to him she couldn’t describe to a boy my age.
She said when he came back he was broken inside.
Paranoid. Violent. Couldn’t sleep without screaming.
Couldn’t be touched without lashing out.
He passed that brokenness down to his son, who passed it down to my grandfather, who passed it down to my father.
A legacy of trauma. Grandfather to father to son to son. That’s what ran in my blood. Not money, not land, not a college fund tucked away in a bank account. Just pain, handing itself down through the generations, each one too damaged to stop the cycle before passing it along.