I HATED LIVING IN MY HOUSE.
One day, after we’d each received our fair share of cookies, Less Big Brother wrenched my arm to snatch my share away, I screamed and cried, looking at Mother for help. But she just turned away and said sharply, “Why don’t you eat them faster? Because you keep them so long, you end up inviting trouble.”
After that, I ran from home whenever I had cookies, clutching them tightly until they were reduced to tiny fragments. I would squat down beside a dumpster on a dead end or lean against the wall of a stranger’s house to chew them. My favorite hiding place was under a bridge where I would listen to old, noisy cars wheezing by above me.
One freezing winter day, I was escaping to consume my cookies in peace when I came across a group of boys clustered under the bridge, in one of my usual snacking spots. A thin layer of ice floated on the water burbling underneath. The stream was named Crystal Waters and had once been famous for being clean and pure, but the waters now were pitch black with pollution. As I approached the boys and tried to make sense of their flurry of activity, I realized they were huddled around a crying naked baby, which had apparently been abandoned under the bridge, not an altogether uncommon occurrence at that time. The boys were stoning the crying infant to death.
I didn’t even know that I was horrified. I just observed, munching the crumbs, hearing the boys’ whoops and yells and the metallic drone of the cars on the bridge, wincing occasionally at the baby’s piercing cries. The attackers, children themselves, sounded like dogs yelping over a piece of meat, and I felt glad they weren’t interested in robbing me of my cookies.
Here I am surrounded by my older siblings. From left to right, Big Brother, Big Sister, me, a boy cousin, and Less Big Brother.
It occurred to me to imagine what the woman who dumped her baby must have been like. “An unmarried woman who gets pregnant will be scourged by the gods,” Grandmother always told me. I knew to disparage women who hung around with men before they got married. “If you are smart, you’ll be able to chase boys off,” Grandmother would say. “Boys leave smart girls alone. The best way to avoid nature’s punishment on a loose girl is not to try to look pretty.” I understood that if I went out with boys, I would get pregnant and have to throw my baby beside a frozen river, where he’d be stoned to death.
While I licked the last residue of cookie powder off of my palm, the baby’s nasal gasp made the same shooing, gurgling sound of a stream rushing into the hole of a sewer. A map of blood covered his face; his tiny penis, curled like a half moon over his pale groin, was the only zone untouched by the red.
“See his fucking pepper!” one of the boys shouted. “Seems like it’s still good, hee-hee-hee.”
“Let him take a piece of his pepper off for you!” another boy giggled. He was referring to a game older women played with little boys. First, the boys would pull their pants down and show off their “peppers,” then stroke their genitals with their hands and let the women kiss their palms to breathe in—that is, worship—the phallic energy transmitted through the contact.
“Yeah, yeah!” the other boys yelped.
“Wait,” a boy with a high-pitched voice shrilled, “we need a woman to do that kind of stuff! Men don’t do that!” Then, he turned around and looked at me with an ear-to-ear grin that made his eyes pucker, and all the boys stared at me, their eyes teeming with the sheen of malicious joy.
“I’d better drag her here,” a boy with an orange wool hat declared. “You know how women are. You have to push them to make them admit they want it.” He strode toward me through the gravel.
“Get her, yeah!!” The boys clapped their hands in glee. For a moment I was paralyzed with fear.
But I surprised myself by regaining control of my legs and running up the slope to the levee as fast as the wind. I didn’t know how close behind the boy was, but when I got on to the flat part of the levee, I could hear him turn back and holler something to the others. As a broad, busy street flashed up in front of me, they fell completely out of earshot. I squatted down on my feet, with my back on an electricity pole near the traffic lights, wiping the cold sweat of my palms on my pants. The soot from buses made my eyes itch, and closing them, I decided to wait until my heart stopped pounding.
A scene I had only vaguely remembered floated to the surface of my memory. It was the previous summer, and Mother’s elderly cousin, whom we called Big Aunt, had come by on her way home from the market where she sold fabric. “I just adore your little proof of manhood,” she’d told Less Big Brother. “Now that you’re nine years old, you must have a good size one. You ought to feel honored that I wish to enjoy a pepper game with you.” Big Aunt was laughing, her raucous voice loud enough to shake the walls of the room.
“If you don’t stop, I will kill you.” Less Big Brother was livid, his lips trembling with shame and his eyes aflame with anger.
“He thinks he’s not a kid anymore,” Mother guffawed.
“If you’re not a kid anymore, all the more reason to show it to me,” Big Aunt persisted.
Less Big Brother’s face had turned purple from rage. Like an arrow, he darted out of the room and came back with an ax in his hand, its blade pointed toward Big Aunt. Mother let out a scream and clung to one of his legs to keep him from moving. “Get out of the room! Hurry!” she shouted to Big Aunt.
Big Aunt looked startled but did not budge. She cackled, “You let me taste your pepper a year ago. You’re only one year older and it’s no longer delicious?”
Less Big Brother tried to wrench his leg from Mother’s grip. Scared for my life, I opened the door to run out.
But Mother cried to me, “Hey, you, get his other leg! Grab it!”
“Grab his arms and take his ax away!” Big Aunt thundered. “He’s not getting out of here until I get a piece of his pepper.”
A sick feeling came over me. I wanted to stick a chunk of glass in her mouth. Instead, I swooped upon her and sank my teeth into her shoulder, trying to strangle her with my hands. Even her scream was coarse, I thought, and her fingers crude, entangled with mine on her neck.
“Drop the ax,” Mother pleaded with Less Big Brother. She was sweating, her head pushed against his back, her arms clenching his thighs. She didn’t move until Less Big Brother dropped his arm and lay the ax flat on the floor, panting.
“Take the ax back to the basement,” Mother ordered.
Picking up the ax, breathing loudly, Less Big Brother seemed like a crazy old man who had just committed a murder and was leaving the scene of the crime with the weapon tucked at his side.
“What a ferocious little bitch!” Big Aunt exclaimed, coughing, after I released my arms and teeth. “I can’t believe she’s only six. What do you feed her?”
“When I was pregnant with her, my stomach was twice as big as it should have been,” Mother said. “I felt so heavy that I had to eat twice as much kimchi as usual to keep myself awake, and all that spice and garlic got into her head to make her such a tenacious little bugger.”
“When my girls get pregnant, I’ll tell them to eat tons of kimchi. They’ll all have peppy little fighters like yours!” Big Aunt roared with laughter, then groaned. Mother unbuttoned her blouse, found my teeth marks on her shoulder, and glared at me. “I told you never to lay your hands on an adult.”
Mother seemed ready to strike me, but Big Aunt, to my surprise, growled at me with a touch of affection, “Get out of here before she beats the hell out of you. Don’t lose your spunk!”
“Are you okay, child?” A voice woke me from the reverie. A police officer was standing in front of me by the electricity pole.
“I’m fine.” I struggled to sound cheerful.
“Go home for dinner. Mommy’s waiting for her little girl.” He left, whistling.
I walked home like a zombie, my palms in a cold sweat, my nerves jangling. Less Big Brother’s ax, Big Aunt’s smirk, Mother’s hand raised to strike me, the river bank boys’ devilish grins, and the map of blood all over the baby’s body whirled in my mind like a gruesome kaleidoscope. There was no doubt in my mind that the boys had committed a perfect crime, but I was more disturbed by what would have happened to me had I not succeeded in running away. I pictured what the boys would have forced me into: In my imagination, I knelt on the pebbles, stroking the nearly dead boy’s “pepper” with my fingers. I kissed my fingers, breathing the phallic energy in deeply until I couldn’t anymore. The boys, human monsters, pressed my shoulders down, exhilarated, and I clenched my teeth. In my mind, I refused to give them the pleasure of beating a girl down to nothing.
A week later, I went back to the scene of the crime, the Crystal River, this time without cookies. I wanted to feel the nightmare all over again, to have it inscribed in my memory one more time. But the baby was gone, and the trail of blood I expected to see was not there. The ice in the river had melted into lacy layers, and the water was pitch black, as if it had swallowed everything that had happened there.
Where did they throw the baby out? I wondered. It was only then that all the questions assailed me. Should I have called the police? Could I have saved the baby? Why didn’t I run to tell people that they were killing him? Shouldn’t I have told someone so that they could have buried him somewhere?
As the guilt was starting to overwhelm me, I could almost hear Grandmother say, “It serves that mother right. Whores and trouble travel together. She deserved to see her baby stoned to death.” I imagined the face of a mad woman with disheveled hair in half-torn clothes looming over the dark river. Sex, which I only knew made babies, seemed to be an unspeakable crime. Curiosity and fear, spurred by ignorance, created the murky mystery surrounding the topic among the children of my generation.
After the day at the Crystal River, I started to paint a house whenever I played with my pastels. It was a lovely red home covered with round green leaves growing from vines, and an egg-shaped fishpond, its beautifully carved granite stones displaying the owner’s immaculate taste. With rose bushes at one corner and golden-bell trees at another, the garden was filled with flowers of all sizes and tall, luxuriant bushes. In the front, a low wooden fence flanked both sides of the gate, behind which a gravel path led to the entrance, dividing a lush green lawn into a perfect symmetry.
Sometimes I painted the inside of the house. In a sunny room, a man and a woman were lying down together on a cotton mattress, and a dog was watching them attentively with its head cocked, waiting to be invited to sit between them. Through the windows of their rooms, the couple’s two children—both of them boys—watched squirrels slide on the electric wires in the back of the house. In the family, sex was sacred and good—completely the opposite of the sordid encounters that would create babies who deserved to be stoned to death. This couple made children whose eyes were so pure that they could suck in all the dirt out of the world. I painted the same house over and over again on cheap notebook paper, experimenting only with colors, never content.
But my house of sex—pure, clean sex—was brought to an abrupt end. One day when I came home from school, I found out that Big Brother had doodled on several pages in my notebook with his magic pen, letting the marks soak through my paintings and blot out the green leaves. The sight of “red tears” in the boys’ eyes made tears start to roll down my own cheeks. The debris of my twenty-nine masterpieces—months of my dreams of sacred sex—were scattered. Big Brother had destroyed them all. I knew he had made a mistake, thinking they were no more than my silly experiments. But he had not respected my privacy and I was angry. No matter how insignificant my work seemed to him, it was mine. I wanted to stick a knife into his throat, to see red tears sprouting out from his eyes, to let the boys witness their tears in his.
But Big Brother was the oldest son, and nobody dared to cross him. He was the one to whom Father was preparing to pass his family throne, and the one in whose kingdom the rest of us would thrive. His whims were as unavoidable as the air we breathed, and his actions—even the slightest slant of his eyes—were heeded as divine will. When he sneered, “She painted the same house over and over again. She has no imagination,” Less Big Brother chimed in, agreeing girls were stupid, and they giggled and chuckled as my face turning ashen with shame and anger.
I knew going to Mother to report Big Brother’s “crime” would be of less than no use. I could predict her scolding me, “Why didn’t you hide the notebook in a safe place?” I went to the outhouse and dropped all the paintings in it. The house of clean, pure sex was gone, mixing with mounds of human excrement. But I didn’t let go of my thoughts about sex.
Big Brother had a nearly mystical power over me. I was amazed by the glow of his eyes. They were the eyes of a warrior who, had he been born a thousand years before, would have united kingdoms and conquered nations. Envying him, I looked hard into the mirror, striving to imitate the expression of his eyes. My big, round eyes gave me the look of a scared rabbit, but after much work I produced his lancing gaze. I felt electrified, but nobody noticed me. This new ability was my secret, and with it I felt I could carry anything from a feather to a steel mountain.
Although he was often cruel to me, I would have defended Big Brother to the death. I once took on a neighbor girl to defend his honor; one day she and I were playing on the seesaw together when she saw him walking back from school. “Your brother looks like a yam,” she said.
“Yours looks like an eggplant,” I fired back.
“An eggplant? If mine looks like an eggplant, at least he doesn’t look rotten. But yours looks like a yam eaten by worms.”
“A rotten yam still has the color of living flesh, but an eggplant looks like a dead rat.” Then I leaped to my feet and ran toward my house, hearing her end of the seesaw thump down on the sand. She chased me and grabbed my ponytail, but I swung back and managed to drag her backward toward her house, with her hands on my hair. I pushed her against the wall, pinching her cheeks with my fingernails until the ribbon on my hair came off in her hands and she released her grip. Snatching the ribbon, I dashed to my house and closed the gate, looking back to stick my tongue out at her.
The truth was, Big Brother’s face did look a bit like a yam, but by the wisdom of Korean physiognomy—already familiar to me, as young as I was—he had fine and auspicious features. His face was long, with a broad, sloping forehead and a narrow but round chin, his lean cheeks unmarked by hollow lines. His lips were just the right thinness, not so thin as to damage his masculine energy, but showing he was neither too talkative nor, like thick-lipped people, too reticent. His brows were straight, the ends curving down almost imperceptibly. This indicated he would be a productive man with plenty of novel ideas and inspiring thoughts, all of which he would pursue with a single-minded zeal. The downturn at the ends showed he would be able to accommodate the wills of others, and would make himself into an honest, modest overachiever. I worshipped his face, and thinking about it reminded me of what mattered the most—I had a role model to follow in my family.
But to Big Brother, I was the same old stupid girl. I was too slow to catch his quick tongue, too dull to grasp the meanings of his witty jokes, too selfish to give my share of the cookies to Less Big Brother. To make it worse, I was ugly to him, and being ugly was the most heinous crime a girl could commit. Once, when he was angry that I had accidentally broken some of the new crayons Mother had bought him, he grabbed my neck and pushed me into the wall of his room. He thundered, “You tried them without my permission! A plain-looking girl like you should at least be polite!”
But I was loyal to him. Praying I would be blessed with just a fraction of his excellence, I set my attention on books, hoping the printed letters would creep into my brain. With half his brilliance, my teachers would give me rave reviews and I would enjoy the privilege of some of the fresh vegetables and meat reserved for Big Brother.
Big Brother possessed a steadfast mind, sound judgment, and a reservoir of knowledge astonishing for a boy of fourteen. How natural it was, I thought, for Mother and Father to show preferential treatment for him over Less Big Brother. Undoubtedly, Less Big Brother was as bright as his older brother, but he was bereft of one critical attribute: the discipline to accomplish what he was set out to do. Routinely, he had to be ordered to finish his homework. “Look at your brother,” Mother or Father would chide. “He doesn’t have to be told to do his homework. Why can’t you be like him?”
Less Big Brother in his daily behavior reinforced the preferential love culturally destined for Big Brother, the oldest son. “I couldn’t help it,” Mother recalled years later. “When your uncles and aunts gave the boys little bills, your Big Brother kept them in his pocket for weeks. He wanted to save them until he would need extra money for school. But your Less Big Brother spent them right away. He bought worthless things like little colorful marbles in a painted metal box because he liked to hear the sound of them rolling. Sometimes he would even buy ice cream cones for his buddies, so that he could enjoy the taste of being a hero for a while.”
Whatever their differences, my two brothers were inseparably linked together in my mind, provoking the same spectrum of emotions: fear, adoration, jealousy, resentment. They were buddies, members of the superior gender and bearers of my parents’ hopes and expectations. Sharing the same language and aspirations for the future, my brothers were of one mind, comprising a phalanx that filled me with awe. Although Big Brother scolded his little brother for being wasteful and negligent, he nevertheless made it clear that he was fond of him. Less Big Brother always lowered his tail in front of Big Brother, which demonstrated their almost instinctual kinship toward each other. No wonder I do not remember Big Brother ever defending me from Less Big Brother’s cruelty. According to Big Brother, I was willfully disobedient and reckless.
Still, his every word seemed to me to have the ring of divine truth. Even when he was being entirely irrational, he sounded right to me, and I feared being one of those women of whom he staunchly disapproved. To this day, I vividly recall a conversation I overheard when I was about thirteen years old. Big Brother came back from school and declared to Less Big Brother his loathing of the girl who had sat next to him on the bus. “She looked like a mashed potato,” he grumbled, lowering the corner of his mouth with disgust.
“I heard an ugly girl has bad karma,” Less Big Brother chimed in. “If a man does horrible things in this life, he is born as an ugly girl in his next life because being ugly and being a girl are the worst combination one can ever endure.”
“What about pretty, dumb girls?”
“They were professional liars in their previous lives,” Less Big Brother said, confident in his knowledge. “In this life, they don’t have the brains to lie.”
Big Brother chuckled. “How were pretty, smart ones?”
“They were the ones who put honesty above everything else. They make good-looking, intelligent children. I hope you get one of them as a wife.”
“But I don’t want a short, pretty, smart girl. I prefer a tall, smart, pretty girl.”
“You’ll get one who was so virtuous in her previous life that she is everything a man wants. She’ll be tall, smart, and pretty, I promise.”
“But to be dedicated to a man, she shouldn’t be too strong.” Big Brother turned serious. “I need a woman who’ll want things for her man, who believes my business is her business.”
“If she’s that smart, she’ll be able to manage your affairs. She’ll be independent, but devoted to you exclusively.”
At sixteen, Less Big Brother had clearly thought this through. “You know my name is that of a famous emperor during the Tang Dynasty in ancient China who had two hundred wives. Since I share his name, I’m entitled to at least twenty wives. But the law prohibits it, so I’ll have scores of girlfriends before I get married.”
“What kinds of girls?”
“Pretty and dumb, ugly and intelligent, pretty and smart. There will be a spectrum. For the sake of diversity, I will have fat ones as well as gangly ones, and I won’t mind pudgy or athletic ones once in a while. I’ll have them all. And when I’m thirty-five, I’ll marry a twenty-four-year-old virgin who has never held a man’s hand.” His face glowed with prospective joy.
I overheard this conversation as a teenager, but since the time I was in grade school I had caught numerous exchanges between Big Brother and Less Big Brother about the “sins” of ugly girls. As a child, I was pained. Neither smart nor pretty, I would have to work hard to do as well as smart girls, and be especially sweet to make up for my lack of beauty. My bad karma, I silently feared, would bring my family and me bad luck, and I would have to pay for all the crimes I had committed in my previous life. In tears, I recalled Grandmother’s rueful theory of her own past life. “I was doomed to have a tragic life,” she told me, “because in my previous life I was a warrior who raped hundreds of innocent women wherever I went.”
I knew that clothes from costly department stores and long, well-nourished hair would help me to look better. But Father didn’t make enough money to feed his children, never mind clothe them fashionably, and Mother was too overworked to pay attention to my appearance. Even as a third grader, I sensed that Father, a high school teacher, was without money or prestige, and I was slightly ashamed of his occupation. Even though Mother was constantly supportive and encouraging, I could see he wasn’t nearly as illustrious as she presented him to be.
I lived with the fact that I was poor. Every afternoon, I felt sorry for myself as I watched my classmates enjoy fashionable dime jelly candies after lunch, chatting amongst themselves in a cliquish manner. The candy came in a small plastic can the size of my thumb, and I could tell how delicious it was. Watching them greedily dig their tiny spoons into the cans made me salivate. To avoid the sight, I left the classroom to roam around the block surrounding the school, counting my steps one by one, five hundred paces every lunch hour. I convinced myself the cute little plastic can was a trifle that only silly girls indulged in, that I was beyond such foolish luxuries. Being strong enough to feel proud of one’s poverty was a virtue, I thought, and anything other than oxygen and three meals a day meant absolutely nothing to me. “Those poor girls,” I muttered. “They don’t know how to deny themselves sweets. They’re going to have rotten teeth.”
I feared being reminded how poor we were more than anything else. I tried to stop thinking about the undersized pants I had to wear because Mother couldn’t afford to buy me a new pair, or about the TV we didn’t have and the embarrassment I felt when I couldn’t participate in my classmates’ discussions of the most popular shows. I remembered Father once said with a sigh, “If we had more money, we could treat boys and girls equally. We could buy the girls what they want.” I could clearly connect our poverty with what had made Big Brother so angry when I touched his stationery: he knew it would be a long time before Mother could buy him another set of pencils if he broke them. She bought him things she couldn’t buy me because she didn’t have the money for both of us.
Because my family lived in a middle-class neighborhood, we were sent to middle-class schools that were also attended by rich people’s children. These children boasted their parents’ money with brand-name clothing and shoes, with fancy snacks and stationery that made them envied by everyone. I knew I wasn’t one of them, but I convinced myself that I was. I was from a family of fallen nobility, and I wanted to prove it to myself as well as to them. I deserved to wear new and different pants every day, to watch TV on a giant screen, to eat the choicest items on a king’s table, and to have my hair curled at a beauty shop. How it tortured me to be told I couldn’t be who I thought I was! It was this dissonance that nearly killed me.
At the same time, we weren’t extraordinary in our poverty. Although there were some rich children, most of my classmates, just like me, carried roasted locusts and pieces of boiled potato and cabbage, doused only in the cheapest sauces, in their lunch pails. Sharing our lunch in a circle, we would laugh, listening to the sound of our teeth cracking the wiry locust wings. But I was hurt inside, believing I was entitled to the expensive ham and chicken the rich few girls ate. I felt so poor.
Guilt added to my anger. Didn’t Mother have to give up her share for the boys because there wasn’t enough? Didn’t Grandmother tell me she hadn’t tasted a single grape all summer because they were too expensive for us? And yet, a year after that summer day when my wish for a boy’s portion of grapes had driven me from my house, I would not eat them. I threw out my portion of shriveled grapes even though they were my favorite fruit. This summer, I drifted along the Taegu streets with neither grapes in my hands nor fear in my heart. I was reducing my body to thin air, so I could go anywhere I wanted to go.
As my appetite disappeared, so did the temptation to move my chopsticks over the holy DMZ on the dinner table. I realized that I had not eaten anything all day, but I felt no appetite. I was going to turn into a piece of wind, a stream of white smoke that didn’t need pretty clothes and jelly candies. I was going to surpass Mother and Grandmother in self-denial and become in the history of my family a woman as remarkable as my great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother. To keep myself barely alive in the tiger’s stomach, I picked at whatever fruit was placed on the table, so long as it wasn’t grapes.
“Child, you look sick. Ask your mother to take you to a doctor,” my neighbors started to say. It wasn’t strange that they noticed how thin and pale I was before Mother, to whom I was invisible. She was too busy worrying that the heat might make my brothers sweat away weight. After trying in vain to tell her about my tiger’s stomach, I closed my mouth.
Father, too, was rotting in his own tiger’s stomach, a vortex of struggling to feed his family while railing against political persecution and the failures of his government. In 1964, I was only a third grader, and I couldn’t understand all the stresses on him. Together, the Three Men of the Family talked about evil men like Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee, and the Yankee bastards who supported them. They also talked about good men like Yuh Un Hyung and Kim Ku, patriots who, until they were assassinated or disappeared, did everything in their power to keep the disease of corruption from spreading. Father compared these men in terms of their capacity for either great good or extraordinary evil. I listened to him talk about the tyranny of Syngman Rhee’s successor, Park Chung Hee, although many of Father’s words were beyond my comprehension. Father encouraged his sons to support the same friends and condemn the same enemies identified by the passionate North Korean woman on the radio, and I felt the impulse to stand up and announce my agreement. As he explained to them why Korea was divided, who were responsible, and how North and South Korea could be reunified, I wanted to comfort him.
Some of the things the Three Men of the Family discussed were personal. Mother’s brother and sister were in North Korea, and my parents had been waiting for almost ten years for the moment they would see them again over the demolished DMZ. Occasionally, Mother shed tears when Father mentioned her siblings’ names. My uncle and aunt’s escape to North Korea was a closely guarded family secret. Another secret I was to keep to myself was that Father had been involved in some kind of political movement with my uncle. If it became public knowledge, it would get him into some serious trouble. Without anyone telling me, I learned I was to remain silent about what I heard. Everyone in the family was carrying their own personal pain; they were all writhing in a tiger’s stomach.
In this picture, I am flanked by a male relative and a female relative, whose father was killed by Syngman Rhee’s police.
None of them, however, had the claws to cut the stomach into pieces and get out. The more wrath Father unloaded on his boys, the more helpless they seemed, and the longer his rituals of denouncement lasted, the shorter their tempers became. When Less Big Brother hit me in the head because I refused to hand him one of my apples, when Big Brother humiliated me in front of the entire family by calling me a “dog head,” they were acting out the victimization and frustration they felt toward the villains abhorred by Father. Being a third grader, I couldn’t understand why I had to become an object of their revenge. The reasons they gave me—that I was stupid, ugly, greedy, spoiled, disobedient, and rebellious—I tried to accept, but I knew that I didn’t deserve that much punishment.
Twenty-six years would pass before I could figure out the details of Father’s life, and understand the extent of my brothers’ rage. At thirty-five, I finally learned the historical context of their secret conferences over the North Korean radio, and that they had every right to condemn those whom they condemned. The crimes of the right-wing dictators who seized and perpetuated their hegemony through terrorist-style operations—and the crimes of the Americans who led and orchestrated the conspiracy of these dictators—became as clear to me as the shape of a tree in the sun. Because he had once expressed his opposition to the tyrants, Father was buried for the rest of his life, stuck with a job far below his qualifications. At the peak of his youth, his resume was smeared with a black mark, and he was systematically excluded from career opportunities. If allowed to pursue his talents, he would have risen to be the chancellor of a university. But he found himself a high school teacher, underpaid, underappreciated, and surrounded by colleagues and students who couldn’t relate to him.
