Violence—physical violence—simmered as an unstable agent in my family’s chemistry. Parents spanked and beat their kids. Siblings struck one another. Cousins punched cousins. Grandparents smacked their grandkids. Pillow fights turned into fistfights. Am I missing anything?
I had no reference for what was normal. Behavior that I now in adulthood recognize as excessive, I accepted wholesale as a child. My family’s thermodynamics were volatile and explosive, but this was our reality: violence and the threat of violence darkened the rosy tint of childhood.
Sometimes, violence settled disputes, and sometimes it splintered into more problems. It was how my family expressed their feelings of anger and disappointment and even love. They beat us because they cared for us because they loved us because they beat us.
Maybe you were the victim of violence. Maybe you were the perpetrator. Maybe you were just an innocent bystander. At some point in the Trần family, you would be all three. The troika.
Violence lashed Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to my childhood. The violence of Dostoevsky’s world is woven throughout Crime and Punishment, stitched into the very language of the novel’s narrative. In his tale about a desperate college student who murders two helpless women, Dostoevsky plunges his reader into a paranoid world where violence hangs thick in the air. The violence and assault of his raw imagery, feverish and unyielding, is indelible. This was a world I knew from experience, a world I had grown up in, a world where violence was potentially everywhere.
I was in Ông Bà Ngoại’s apartment, watching a rerun of Land of the Lost, when I heard my grandmother yelling at my uncle Thái (who was ten at the time). All kids take great interest in the woes of other children, so I immediately abandoned the world of Sleestaks and stop-motion dinosaurs to peer around the corner from the safety of the living room. My grandmother was berating Thái, whose nose was bleeding. His black hair, in an asymmetrical bowl cut, was yanked up and disheveled.
My grandmother was apoplectic, having amassed unstoppable momentum. “That bike was a gift! Why didn’t you take care of it?! Do you know how nice the Hookes were to give you that bike?! And now you lose it?!” The timbre of her voice peaked at a fervid pitch.
Wearing oversized rose-colored bifocals, Bà Ngoại, my grandmother, reigned as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the Trần family. At forty-seven years old, she had birthed ten kids over two decades, displaying a will and a uterus of iron. With her black hair in a bun, she powdered her face to lighten her already fair complexion, and her blush, which was actually lipstick rubbed in light circles on her cheeks, gave her a carnival visage. Every morning Bà Ngoại drew thin eyebrows on herself, penciling them slightly higher than her natural brow line. Her high brows gave her a look that—depending on the occasion—signaled alertness, alarm, or surprise. At that moment in her vexation, the high brows gave her an erumpent intensity. She was not looking for a judges’ decision. She was in the ring to knock someone out.
Bà Ngoại’s ire wasn’t the anger of personal damages but the anger of being shamed, a singular dishonor that she and my parents bore heavily. If our elders felt that we kids had done something to embarrass them or to cause them to lose face, our punishment was administered as if the entire town were watching and judging them as parents. Puritanical in its purity and unflinching in its deliverance. The severity of our punishment was commensurate to their own perception of their parenting. That is to say: the worse you were beaten or punished, the better they seemed to be as parents.
Thái tried to explain. “I didn’t lose it—some kids beat me up and took it! That’s not losing it!” He offered the explanation and—CRACK—Bà Ngoại slapped him across the face.
“DON’T INTERRUPT ME!” She punctuated her reminder with another savage blow. Thái’s already bloody face now bore the pale imprint of her hand reddening against his cheek. She continued with a withering dismantling of my uncle, who avoided eye contact for fear of another blow. Her every utterance struck the point about how it was an embarrassment to the family. Jolted by the hard slap that she meted out to my uncle Thái, I made an indelible mental note: do not ever interrupt Bà Ngoại unless I wanted to be slapped. She stormed out of the room, still the defending champion. Bà Ngoại. Undefeated record. Thái went outside to sit on the apartment steps.
Two of Thái’s older brothers, Chương (who was twenty-one) and Chí (who was eighteen) followed him. I slipped along behind them, abandoning Land of the Lost altogether. Real drama trumped fake drama. I knew better than to speak—that was the first rule of being one of the younger kids. Talking out of turn got you a punch in the shoulder or a blow across the back of the head.
Thái wiped the blood from his nose, the imprint of his mother’s hand still pulsing on his left cheek, a ruddy reminder for us all of the matriarch and her unquestioned authority.
“What happened?” Chí comforted Thái.
“I was riding around the cemetery and some kids knocked me off my bike and took it. They told me to go back to my country.” I was bewildered by the details of his story. You could just take something from someone by hitting them? A complete stranger could just walk up to you, hit you, and take your bike? How did you get your bike back then?
The second part of Thái’s story was equally baffling. Go back to your country. What did that even mean? What country? The one we had lost? That made as much sense as telling us to run back inside a burning building because we weren’t welcome outside. The import of it, the insult of it, was lost on me, and selfishly, I was much more terrified of the first proposition: the bike stealing. Shameless theft without consequence was horrific to consider.
Chí and Chương Vietnamesed with each other quietly and then turned to Thái. “Let’s go look for your bike.”
“Really?” Thái straightened up.
“Yeah—Phúc, you stay here.” I didn’t argue with Chí, knowing my low place in the hierarchy. My three uncles headed off in the direction of the Molly Pitcher Cemetery, a block away, where Thái had been riding his bike. The cemetery’s stone-hewn wall was visible from the top of the apartment steps, so I stood, watching and waiting.
I pondered the idea of random strangers taking things from us. How could I protect myself from it? Did these people look a certain way? What distinguished the nefarious strangers from the benevolent ones? My thoughts did laps on the short track of kinderlogic as I looked past the parking lot toward the cemetery.
After half an hour, I saw my three uncles walking back from the cemetery, and as they got closer, I noted that Chí’s face was flush, Chương seemed disheveled, and Thái’s crimson nosebleed flashed red. They weren’t speaking to one another, and their sluggish pace suggested defeat. But as they got closer, instead their stride strengthened with an air of confidence—defiance even. It was not the limp of defeated boys.
I saw that Thái’s stolen bike was being pushed between Thái and Chương. They had taken it back from the other kids, their knuckles bloodied and faces mottled.
Violence had counterbalanced violence. Maybe violence could exact justice, and if it wasn’t justice, at least violence could recover what was lost. And even if winning wasn’t justice, it still felt better than losing. Maybe violence could make things right.
Lou perched at the kitchen table, drinking from a sippy cup. I seized the cup from him to drink some of his juice, a deprivation that immediately caused him to shriek.
“PHÚC! STOP IT! I’m trying to cook!” My mother stormed over, wrenched the sippy cup from my hands, and gave it back to Lou. “Leave him alone!” My mother. Twenty-eight years old, barely five feet tall, with long jet-black hair that cascaded to her waist, delicate features, fair complected, and large dark eyes that were emphasized by the striking frame of her hair. Her hands were hardly larger than mine, and her wedding band wobbled loose on her finger. Her eyes always had clouds of worry lingering at their edges regardless of whether she was laughing or crying, worry that I assume sprung from having a child at twenty-two, fleeing Sài Gòn at twenty-four, having another child at twenty-five after a difficult pregnancy, and receiving a cancer prognosis shortly thereafter.
Of course, I didn’t leave Lou alone. I grabbed the sippy cup and pinched him on the arm before running around the corner. It wasn’t even a matter of my wanting a drink now. I felt like pinching my little brother. I was shrieking and yelling as I ran around the apartment, when my mother marched around the corner and grabbed the cup again.
“I SAID STOP IT!” It was a game now. Game on. I could smell rice boiling over and charring on the stove. “Look what’s happening now!” she yelled as she noticed the rice pot clanking and clacking. My mother’s worst profanity was trời đất ơi—oh my heavens. I could hear her muttering trời đất ơi under her breath as I made a third attempt at pilfering Lou’s sippy cup.
I snatched the cup and sprinted to my bedroom. Victory. I could hear my brother crying again as I hid, giggling. The juice was all but gone, but I chewed on the hard plastic top, too busy to care or notice.
I didn’t even see the blow coming.
A burst of white flashed in my eyes like a camera bulb, and a dull burn seared the left side of my head, near my eye. My mother had rolled up a magazine, and with her improvised cudgel, she had struck me as hard as she could on the left side of my head. THWACK. “Give Lou back the cup! Trời đất ơi!” Her blow capitalized the seriousness of her demand. Game over. She snatched the cup from me, grousing while she stomped back to the kitchen to cook.
In the woozy wake of the blow, I held my head and wept on the bedroom floor until my mother barked at me for dinner. When I rounded the corner into the kitchen, I sniffled an apology, my chin and cheeks still dripping with tears.
She turned around and let out a sharp cry. “Trời đất ơi! Trời đất ơi!” I thought I was in trouble again and flinched, but she cupped my face and she herself began crying. She was crying? Her hands were covered in blood. A lot of blood—my blood. I didn’t know that I was bleeding.
The rolled-up magazine had split my temple, next to my left eye, and there gaped a large, two-inch gash. My mother sobbed. “I’m so sorry! Oh, Phúc, I’m so sorry!” I winced as she wiped a cold washcloth over the cut. Wiping. More wiping. Still more wiping.
Then some quick triage. A Band-Aid was applied to my head, brief and tender.
My father was still working second shift at the factory, so my mother and I shared our meal in silence as Lou babbled on. The side of my head pulsed under the Band-Aid.
Later that night, as she tucked me into bed, my mother inspected the gash once more and stroked my cheek. “I’m so sorry, Phúc. I’ll never hit you again. Never.”
It was, in fact, the last time that my mother ever struck me. The first time? The first time is lost in the fuzziness of a child’s recall and the blur of so many other assailants. As my mother now tells this story, the scar along my left eye is a constant reminder, an ever-present censure, of the lasting harm that a moment’s anger could inflict. She tells this story as her own cautionary tale.
But it’s not the scar, whose small crease is still visible decades later, that I remember the most. It’s her apology—the only apology that I ever received from someone for striking me.
The only apology ever.
Do kids know whether they’re rich or poor? Do rich kids know that they grow up without any wants or needs? That they get everything they desire? What about poor kids?
I can tell you that I knew we were poor early on. I knew that I was wearing discarded clothing that someone had donated to us. I knew what no meant when I asked for a two-dollar Han Solo action figure at the store—it meant we didn’t have enough money for it. Like the violence I lived in, our poverty had no context. Adults like to say that kids are resilient, and that’s true, but it’s because they don’t know anything different. Kids are kids, and their ignorance allows them to accept things as they are. That’s their resilience.
Bà Ngoại and I were at Willow Street Variety, a small, locally owned grocery store in town that carried a limited selection of produce. I had tagged along because the grocer had a spinning rack of comic books, which I perused while my grandmother basketed milk, sugar, and butter. By the comic books fluttered magazines, newspapers, and small cardboard boxes of trading cards. I chose to look at an issue of Captain America, skipping over the trading cards, which feted players whose names I didn’t know, excelling in games whose rules I didn’t understand.
But then, looking up from Captain America, I saw the unmistakable image of Darth Vader emblazoned on a waxy yellow Topps package among the trading cards. See ya later, Cap’n. The dark side is calling me. I picked up two packages and felt the rectangular silhouette of gum on the obverse side. I held them to my nose to inhale the powdery sweetness. Star Wars trading cards—surely we could afford them.
“Bà Ngoại, can we buy this?” It was twenty-five cents per pack.
“No, we can’t. We have just enough money to buy butter and cooking oil.” I didn’t realize that we were buying groceries with food stamps nor did I know what food stamps were.
“What about just one pack?” I begged, stunned that we didn’t have even twenty-five cents.
“No, put them back. We have to go home now.”
I walked back to the rack of mustachioed sports heroes, and as I approached the cards, I cast aside my caution and morality. I slid the two Star Wars packets into the waistband of my shorts. If I’d known the expression “fuck it” at that age, I would have said it. My magnetic love of Star Wars redirected my spinning moral compass, forcing the arrow to point toward Darth Vader. I continued to walk casually past the Topps display and met my grandmother at the counter where she was finishing her transaction.
“Are you ready to go, Phúc?”
“Yup!” We held hands on the walk home as I felt the waxy packets rubbing against my sides under my shorts. I harbored no remorse for the theft, looking forward only to opening up the cards as soon as I could.
When we got to my grandparents’ apartment, my grandmother went to the kitchen to make lunch. I sat behind the couch (because hiding behind the couch was the extent of my criminal master plan) and opened the trading cards. Grand Moff Tarkin! C-3PO! Sand People! I examined the cards and flipped them over. Some cards had trivia on the back, others were parts of a larger jigsaw puzzle, while others had behind-the-scenes details. I popped both pieces of trading-card gum into my mouth, chewing them into stiff, saccharine shards.
I fanned the cards out to look at them further, any guilt that I might have felt about stealing them being quickly detruded by my delight of having twenty-four trading cards. I would be the envy of my class, I thought as I looked over my booty.
The gum and salivation made me thirsty, and I went to the kitchen to get water.
My grandmother heard me chewing loudly. “What are you eating?” she asked, her high brows raised as high as they could go. Not good.
“What? Oh … uh, gum.” I could see things were going to end badly.
“Where did you get gum?!”
“From the, uh … the … uh…” Oh boy.
She barreled into the living room and saw the trading cards strewn across the floor behind the couch. I winced, their discovery heralded by yelling and screaming; I didn’t know most of the words she was saying in Vietnamese, a harbinger of worse things to come. Her high brows twitched. I remembered Uncle Thái, and I braced myself for her trademark right hook across the face.
“YOU STOLE THE CARDS?! YOU STOLE THEM?! DO YOU KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOU GET CAUGHT?! THEY’LL SEND US ALL BACK TO VIỆT NAM! THAT’S WHAT THEY WILL DO!”
This made no sense to me, so I started to speak. “For stealing trading cards? Really?” Apparently, I had forgotten the grave motto of not interrupting Bà Ngoại. My impudent retort hurled my grandmother over reason’s edge. She grabbed my ear in the sharp pincers of her index finger and thumb and pulled me into the kitchen, my whole body stuck in the tractor beam of her grip. We had stopped at the kitchen counter, and I heard the drawers clanging open and jangling shut until she released my ear.
“PUT OUT YOUR HANDS!” she demanded.
“What?”
“I SAID PUT OUT YOUR HANDS! IN FRONT OF YOU! PALMS DOWN!”
I didn’t want to get slapped in the face, so I complied. Hands out in front of me. Palms down. What was she going to … CRACK!
A blinding pain shot through my fingers and knuckles as my grandmother shrieked in Vietnamese, “ONE!” She struck my outstretched hands with the handle end of heavy garment scissors. I started screaming immediately in alarm and pain. (At least she held the scissors safely with the pointed end in her fist.)
“BE QUIET AND KEEP YOUR HANDS OUT! I’M COUNTING TO TEN!”
I put my hands behind myself, but she grabbed me by the ear again. “DO YOU WANT ME TO COUNT TO TWENTY?”
“Nooooo…” Tears cascading, hands slowly stretching out. My diminutive grandmother, high brows on high alert, scissors in hand, counted from two to ten, each number punctuated by a hard rap on my knuckles, which reddened and split. In between each number, she yelled variations of “THEY’LL SEND US ALL BACK TO VIỆT NAM IF THEY CATCH YOU!!!” It was a searing eternity until the number ten arrived, snapping with one last, hard rap on my bleeding knuckles, the scissors and the number clacking in a painful two-part harmony.
“Now go kneel in the corner.” Kneeling in the corner was Vietnamese time-out, and I had knelt in every corner of the apartment. You knelt on the floor with your hands crossed in front of yourself, facing inward in the corner, sometimes for minutes, sometimes closer to an hour. If, however, you were especially naughty or deserved a time-out deluxe, you would kneel on uncooked grains of rice. Yes—hard grains of rice. In the first few minutes of kneeling on them, the rice would feel sharp and uncomfortable, but after ten or fifteen minutes, they needled into your kneecaps, growing keener the longer you knelt. If you got kneeling-in-the-corner-on-rice, your knees would have tiny, painful divots in them for hours after.
My grandmother walked past the corner and threw a handful of rice on the floor just as I stepped into the angle. “KNEEL THERE UNTIL I TELL YOU TO GET UP.” I didn’t look at her, but I could sense how elevated her high brows were. Not a word from me.
I knelt, arms crossed, surreptitiously massaging my lacerated knuckles, which throbbed and distracted me from the rice that was boring into my bare knees. Maybe I was supposed to think about the morality of stealing, the crime of it. Maybe I was supposed to fear the punishment so much that I would never steal again. The truth, though, is that I ended up thinking about why we couldn’t spare twenty-five cents for the trading cards and how to avoid getting caught if or when I stole something again.
If I doubted whether we were poor, I knew it now, beaten sore by the reality of it. I didn’t think about the abstractions of crime and punishment. I thought about the concrete realities of cause and effect: I got caught, and I got punished. I stole cards because we didn’t have the money to buy the cards. I had asked to buy something often enough to know that the answer was always no. Poverty—was that the crime?
Poverty is no crime—Dostoevsky writes this phrase twice in Crime and Punishment. Crime is a symptom of poverty; poverty is the real evil. I’d like to think that our poverty was what precipitated my crime. Maybe it did, but maybe it was the feeble morality of a six-year-old—because what six-year-old can do the right thing when faced with Star Wars trading cards?
I knelt for an hour in the corner, grains of rice stabbing into my knees, knuckles bloodied, wishing that we had had the money to buy the trading cards. I didn’t hate Bà Ngoại and I didn’t hate being caught for stealing. I hated the crime of being poor.
Tim, Helen, Lorie, and my cousins Ann and Tiên gathered with me, spellbound in a circle. Speechless. Awestruck. Lou came running to see what all the excitement was about.
In the middle of our assembly, a majestic black crow stood, its left wing hanging open and limp. The rest of its sleek sylph-like body sharply contrasted the jagged angle of its broken wing, and its stray feathers, jutting out like black claws, scraped on the pavement. The crow cawed intermittently, keeping us at bay as though this mob of small humans intended to kill it. In fact, we were delighted to see such a large bird up close. Amid cries of what should we do? and give it some room and don’t scare it, we kept the crow penned in as it hopped around in an elliptical orbit. After a few minutes, it wearied, sat motionless, and squawked weakly.
My cousin Tiên suggested that she get her dad, Chú Hữu, and we all agreed that this was a good idea. Tiên’s dad could help the crow, and they lived just four doors down from us in the Colonial Square complex. Chú Hữu. Small, sinewy, muscular. Always with a joke and jaunty step, a smile as wide as his teeth were irregular, a glint in his eye, and a plan for something better. If we made a snow fort, he made it bigger. If we were riding bikes, he’d show us how to power-slide. Chú Hữu took everything to the next level.
He came outside, his flip-flops clapping as he padded over to the scene with a wide smile and a cocksure stride, Tiên bouncing alongside him. More neighborhood kids had come out, and a few other kids who had passed by stopped to admire the crow. “What’s going on over here?” He rubbed his forearms as if he were about to wrench something loose.
“The crow’s hurt. Look at its wing!” Different kids called out various ideas, a geyser of the good, the bad, and the ridiculous. Take it to the doctor’s! Someone get a bandage! Let’s take it inside—we can keep it as a pet! None of us thought past our initial suggestions. The crow was hurt, and we wanted to help it, wanted to do something—something seemed better than nothing.
Walking slowly toward it, Chú Hữu sidled through our perimeter. He bent himself at the waist, and the crow, which now cawed and croaked more loudly, hopped around but remained corralled by us kids, who stood fast. Chú Hữu made a soothing shush as he knelt even lower—and closer—to the crow. It stopped flapping and made a few small croaks as he picked it up gingerly. In the hands of an adult, the crow seemed even more magnificent and mysterious. Its body stretched the length of Chú’s forearm, striking a regal profile with its deep black and purple against his white tank top. It hardly struggled as it was cradled in his arms.
Shssssssssssssh. Shsssssssssssssh. It settled with his soothing susurrations.
Lou was particularly agitated. “What’s he going to do with the bird?”
“He’ll help it—don’t worry. Maybe he’ll take it to the doctor?” I assured Lou even as I privately questioned my own confidence in Chú Hữu.
Chú gently held the crow out in front of him and tipped it lovingly from side to side, eyeing it. Was the other wing broken? Was it just the left wing? How could he fix it? We had seen Chú repair all things mechanical, and we believed that he would find a way to do the same for the crow. The tenderness with which he cradled it affirmed our hopes.
“He’s definitely going to help it!” we chattered to one another.
He started walking away with the crow, and our circle parted for him and the bird as we fell in line behind them. He led the way, holding it in front of his body, both hands extended. The ensemble painted a peculiar scene: a diminutive Vietnamese man in flip-flops and cutoff jeans walking slowly up a grassy hill, holding a shadowy crow in his hands, while a dozen kids paraded slowly behind him, excitedly calling out different remedies. It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Our optimism floated in the air around us as we promenaded behind him. A few kids were trying to name it. Humanize it. Empathize with it. His name is Mr. Feathers!
We followed Chú to the dumpsters of the apartment complex.
“Why are we at the dumpsters?” Lou wondered aloud. The dumpsters were closed in by weathered stockade fencing, marking off a square area that hid six large metal garbage bins.
Chú Hữu, silent other than the soft clapping of his flip-flops, stepped up to the dumpster area and asked one of us to open the gate. Tim, still my best friend in the neighborhood, hurried over and clacked it open.
We stood around the yawning gate in a wide half circle, wondering how Chú Hữu was going to fix the crow in the dumpsters. Maybe the dumpster was a quieter place for the crow? Maybe it would feel less agitated with fewer people around? It definitely seemed less agitated.
Chú Hữu lowered the crow over the edge of the nearest green dumpster. It flapped its right wing as it slid down. I could see the quick goodbyes of a black wing, and I saw nothing more. Its squawks and caws echoed from the bottom, and we could all hear the rustling of trash as the crow hopped from bag to bag.
Among the semicircle, we stopped talking and looked on, mute with curiosity. None of us knew how to help a crow, and we wouldn’t have chosen the dumpster as a place to do it, but what did we know? Nothing, apparently. What did we expect? Something, apparently.
Chú Hữu picked up a yard-long metal pipe, about two inches in diameter, that was propped up against the dumpster, detritus from a plumbing repair job in one of the apartment units.
The edge of the dumpster was as high as his shoulders, so he stood on his tiptoes to leverage his arms over the edge, his flip-flops drawn away from his heels. His hands gripped the top of the pipe, holding it vertically over his head as though he were operating a giant invisible butter churn. His arms formed a sharp triangle over his shoulders. Someone shushed the chatter in the back.
Stillness. What did we expect?
Chú Hữu stabbed the pipe straight down as hard as he could, and we heard the popping of garbage bags as the pipe pounded the bottom of the dumpster. Why was he popping the garbage bags? BANG! BANG! BANG! Muffled in the banging and popping, a gurgling squawk was heard. The smell of putrid garbage and rot circulated, making some kids cover their noses and gag.
A few kids cried out in surprise at the first blows. “Oh no! No!” Chú Hữu raised his arms up and down several more times, whacking around the dumpster, knifing downward left and right. BANG! BANG! BANG! His toes shifted and his triceps flexed as he sidled quickly along the edge of the dumpster, shifting one way, then sliding another way along the edge. I saw by his movements that the crow was trying to dodge the pipe. We heard the crow, still thrashing atop the bags. BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
The squawking stopped after the third series of blows. The last caw sounded distant and wet.
He dropped the pipe in the bottom of the dumpster, and it clanged a hollow, final peal. He closed the gate, wiped his hands on his cutoff shorts, and plodded down the hill toward the parking lot, silent. In his wake, half of the kids were crying because of what they saw, and the other half still were trying to figure out what they had just seen. I was in the latter, lingering behind.
Some kids ran home in tears as others stood around, bewildered. No one wanted to play tag or kickball, not after what we had witnessed. Our afternoon had spiraled from our idealistic pipe dream of saving the crow to its blunt bludgeoning in the dumpster. We were the witnesses to the murder. Powerless to stop it. Victims of the spectacle.
I meandered with Lou down the hill. What had I expected?
Chú Hữu had done what he thought was the right thing, and in his estimation, killing the crow was the kindest act he could bestow upon it. Clapping his hands together, wiping off the grit of the pipe, he went inside his apartment. The door clicked shut. He’d killed the crow with the banal ease of taking out the trash.
As I got to the parking lot of our complex, I saw Bà Ngoại coming over for a visit. She waved to me and Lou, her high brows in good spirits. She smiled and called for us to come over, hugging us both. Her perfume wafted the scent of peonies. My knuckles were still healing from the scissors.
Bà Ngoại, my grandmother. Gentle one moment, violent in the next. Violence was sometimes kindness. Sometimes it was love. Sometimes it was rage. But it was everywhere, always.