Chapter 1

This chapter’s contents will not be based on a first person account. You can probably guess why. If you can’t then grab a friend who can speak English better than you and have them explain it to you. Though I am Chinese Canadian I am not writing this book in Chinese. This is because I grew up Canadian and can’t really speak Chinese well anymore. Maybe that tells you a little about me. I have grown pretty far from my roots. 

Speaking of roots, let’s begin there. 

Around 1964, my mom and dad were born. They both had decent families initially and a decent childhood. They grew up together in the same neighborhood and were best friends at the beginning of their life. It’s probably why they decided to start dating when they got older. But things would spiral quickly.

The year my mom turned 16 and my dad turned 15, my dad and his brother got kicked out of their house. He was a bad boy. A delinquent who kept skipping school to hang out with his brother and their gang of bad influences. The details on what they actually did are hazy but it had something to do with drugs. My paternal grandmother who had tolerated them for as long as she could kicked them out one day and told them to never return. After that incident, details became, once again, very hazy. I wish I could tell you more about how this played out but unfortunately, no one in my family would tell me the truth, probably because they also didn’t know. 

What I do know is this. Despite being kicked out and having nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat, my dad and uncle decided to keep living life close to my paternal grandparents. I don’t know what they ate or how they survived without a roof over their heads, but it must have been bad because some time later, they weren’t allowed into school anymore either. I have a theory for this part that I pieced myself together that makes more sense than any story my family was able to weave. I think this could have been because all parents needed to pay a fee for their kids to attend school at that time in China. The other explanation was that there was more criminal activity involved. It may have been that my dad and uncle got connected with some crimes on school grounds but this will be one of those unsolved mysteries I suppose. 

After being banned from school, my dad would sneak into classes to continue his education. But these are his words, not mine. This part didn’t make sense to me. What kind of 15-18 year old connected with gangs and forsaken by their family would try and continue to attend a school that did not allow them to be there? I suspect that it was likely he wanted to hang around girls around his age. My mom included. However, it came to be. It worked out. My mom eventually started hanging out with this lowlife and even grew to love him. Whatever that word meant to her. 

Her love was not always reciprocated. It seems my dad had other things in mind. Usually other women. Actually, a lot of other women. A consistent finding I seem to see when asking anyone on my mom’s family side is that my dad loved all women and stayed loyal to no one. Dad never told me that and this was all information obtained from my mom’s family so take it with a grain of salt. I can’t imagine how the relationship went, in truth, but I can imagine how hard things like this can be on my mom. Regardless of how they got around it or dealt with it. When highschool graduation came, my dad had fully dropped out and my mom had graduated with honors. From here, my mom’s family was wealthy enough to send my mom out to university for her to get higher education and off she went. My dad decided to enlist in the army. 

When they had completed their schooling and military service, they met up again. This time, they chose to stay and reside at my mom’s university apartment. It was a basement suite of a large apartment complex that had a gutter window bringing in a small amount of light. I have very early life memories of this location from the few visits I had when I was young but I’d never really gotten to know this location well.

It was an okay time from what I gathered. My mom was pursuing her master’s degree (or the Chinese University equivalent) and my dad was going around looking for manual labor jobs to earn some money. Things were going steady. As they got more and more comfortable with the way things were working out, they decided in 1988 to elope. 

Things were not as happy as they seemed though. During this time, my dad was still sleeping around. He would do this countless times even as they had gotten engaged. I don’t think he was hiding it that much either. On some level, I feel like my mom knew. Also, since traditional Chinese marriages are not one of those events you do by yourself back in 1988, my family, mom and dad’s side, probably also knew. This meant that it was likely that everyone knew. Yet no one said anything about this. No one did anything meaningful. No one had the thought of telling my mom to leave my dad. Or rather, no one tried to tell my mom this fact loud enough. 

Looking back, I don’t think my mom was a romantic. She has never had any traits of romantic ideals in my entire life of knowing her. I think if anything, she is a cynic. I think I got my cynicism from her because to be honest, I don’t think my dad was smart enough to be cynical about the world. Being the cynic she is, she started formulating a plan. She needed something to tie my dad down. Something to leash him to her forever. Something that would bastardize him if he didn’t stay with her and be loyal to her from now on. 

In 1994. I was born.