Chapter 27
The Truth
I went through the scenarios again and again, wondering what could have prevented Yush from making the decision that he did and what would have helped him resolve his insecurities and face his internal pain. I needed to understand how Yush had changed, and why, and what any of us could have done differently to save him. I knew that the answers to these questions could not bring Yush back to life, but maybe there was a lesson here that could help heal us. The best way to honor Yush’s legacy, to me, was to learn from the pain that had taken his brief life.
When I approached Papa to ask him about who Yush had become, he told me to read Yush’s essay. “What essay?” I asked.
“Yush wrote an anonymous essay about our family in a book,” Papa said. “If you really want to know the truth, read the essay. Then we can talk.”
This is the hardest part to write to you, Mummy. I have been delaying it and, to be honest, the words are almost as impossible to write as they are to speak. Words usually come to me on the page more readily than in speech, but in this case, that is not so. It is like the words are lodged deep inside me in cavities and I have to search for them and then excavate them, one by one. I might not be able to get them all out. As I write to you, I am gripping the pen so tightly that my hand is cramping, just as it did when I was a girl.
You loved Yush, but like me, I am not sure you liked the man he became, either. After his death, when the secret of Italy was finally revealed to me, you told me that he was mean to you. You nursed him to health, but he treated you like a servant. When you spoke of this, it reminded me of Papa. I was so sad to hear this, especially since your last memories of your son were not ones of joy but of more pain. I was surprised, though, when you told me that you had scolded him. You told him it was not okay for him to treat you like that. I was proud of you for standing up for yourself. You said that he felt bad. After that, he was more appreciative.
Papa had left a copy of the book, a men’s rights anthology, with Dadiji and Dadaji. He had told them to make sure to share it with Buaji. She had read Yush’s essay, but I didn’t want to, and I certainly did not want to hear Papa’s analysis. Eventually, though, I had to know if the essay held any answers about Yush’s death or about how Yush had changed.
In the essay, published posthumously, Yush had disavowed Buaji, criticized you, and empathized with Papa’s pain. Yush wrote that he used to feel bad for you when you cried, but now he saw the toll that your marriage had taken on his father as the sole provider and a short brown man rejected and emasculated by white America. He lamented a society that valued the emotional pain of women over the burden men had to provide for them. He complained that women were inferior in logical ability and that women in abusive relationships were not held accountable for their decision to stay, while the societal pressures upon the allegedly abusive men were overlooked and ignored. Yush wrote that he planned to “sever ties” with me and our extended family over our views.
Yush was dead. I could not argue with him, I could not debate with him, I could not help him. I was disturbed by what Yush had written, alarmed that Papa was unable to see how deeply troubled Yush was, and enraged that he was so eager to share something that threatened to permanently warp my memory of my brother. I wondered whether Papa made you read this essay, too. I can only imagine how awful it made you feel.
As I read the essay, I thought back to the loving handwritten letter that Yush had sent to Buaji after that traumatic autumn in Winnipeg, just four years prior. There was a line in it that haunts me still: Yush wrote that he was angry with Papa, but it was “hard to hate him more than I hate myself, because I have so much of him in me.”
Had Yush lived, I am not sure I would have gotten him back. It is very likely that the boy I lost to anger and resentment would have never returned to me. But I am sure, beyond a doubt, that the boy I loved did not have to become the man he became and, further still that it was our family’s turmoil and the pressure placed upon him to be exceptional that set Yush so far adrift.
If I was the image of failure, then Yush was the image of perfection. In a household where affection was doled out as reward and withdrawn as punishment—where care was dispensed by how successful one appeared to be and what image one projected into the world—Yush learned he must be exceptional to be worthy of love. Yush was forgetful and eccentric, but I don’t remember him ever making any mistakes or miscalculations when it came to achieving, and because he was naturally brilliant, his performance was operatic. But I wonder if he lived with a constant fear, a low hum underscoring everything, a nagging suspicion that if he just stopped or decided to step back, his life would fall apart and the people who said they loved him would no longer be there for him. All around him, he saw evidence of this: Papa leaving you stranded on the street for misreading a map; you and Papa cutting me off for talking back; Papa throwing me out of the house when I failed to say what he wanted to hear.
Whenever Papa turned on me and you followed suit, Yush was put into the position of peacemaker. The youngest person in the family took on the responsibility of keeping his family together. It only further instilled this pressure to always be perfect, to never mess up, because now three other people relied on him to get along and to function. Yush had to always remain calm and detached in the volatile situations of our household. In crises, he had to lead us all to resolution. What an unfair burden.
At home, Yush and I had both absorbed a casual sexism that was reinforced by the world outside. But, of course, as a woman, this affected me differently than Yush. The double standards that I eventually felt as constraints, Yush experienced as power. As the war between you and Papa intensified, Yush saw himself in Papa’s struggles, and I saw myself in yours. But I reduced you to helpless victim and demonized Papa as a monster because I could not face the pain of realizing that some part of you chose to stay with a man who mistreated you. I think Yush eventually saw Papa as the victim and you as weak because he could not face the pain of realizing that the father who cared for him also psychologically tormented his mother. Each of us yelled at the other for vilifying the parent we empathized with so deeply. We had difficulty accepting the “both/and” of the situation: that you have both been victimized and you have agency; that Papa both loves you and hurts you in profound ways.
I think that when you went back to Papa despite how he’d treated you, Yush’s emotions ate up his insides like acid. To make sense of your decision, one that defied the 1–0 binary of how people are supposed to behave, Yush concluded that women cry abuse for sympathy, because if they were truly abused, they would leave; that they complain but ultimately stay because of the material comforts they enjoy and rely on from a man. I think that he could not separate your personhood from the role you played, because he could not separate his own personhood from the role he felt pressured to play. He strove to meet the expectations of those who relied on him and mistook this performance as his identity.
Then I—the person who had always been there for Yush, the person who had always supported him—withdrew from him, too. I think that Papa’s anger toward his own sister baited Yush’s rising resentment toward me, rage uniting estranged father and son as they became even more isolated from everyone else who cared about them.
I have been afraid of asking you what you think, about whether you believe that they are justified in their anger toward the women in their lives.
We had each been raised to believe that every unknown could be resolved through willpower and intellect, a message reinforced by America’s rigid conception of who we are supposed to be. The truth is, society doesn’t raise people to aspire to be kind or compassionate or happy. It pressures adults to achieve and accomplish. It teaches people that what matters more than their character or how they treat others or how they feel about themselves is how much money they can hoard, who they know, how famous they can get, and how much power they wield over others. Emotions have no basis in this framework. They are a nuisance, a hindrance, a distraction, a weakness.
I wonder, then, if success became a reminder to Yush that even when he followed the rules, even when he achieved, he was still somehow less-than and he was still not happy. I think that when he achieved such success, he sank deeper into feelings of self-hatred, and assuming that more success would relieve him of this pain, he sought to attain more. He drank poison, believing it was medicine. I wonder if you ever sensed, as I did, that this obsession with achievement had led us astray—or if, like Yush, you drank the poison, trusting it to be the cure.
As an Indian American boy, Yush learned to carve out a path to belonging that was similar to Papa’s, acquiring power and respect by learning the rules of masculinity and compensating for the racialized feminization of Asianness by projecting toughness and stoicism. But I watched this oppressive idea of manliness constrain Yush like a straitjacket. What Yush saw as parallels between him and Papa, I saw as pressures upon men whom the world reduced in similar ways. They were both brilliant in the way capitalism rewards, but as people, they were hardly alike. Yet how do you distinguish between your true self and a persona when you’ve spent your life becoming what others expect you to be?
I had originally believed that the pain of Yush’s death would compel Papa to reach out to the people who loved him the most. I thought that the weight of our love for Yush would be stronger than our resentments toward one another. But now I understand that coming together in shared grief is a choice, not an inevitability. Unless we choose to face it, grief folds us inward and pushes us deep into our own pockets of suffering, intensifying our pain and further isolating us from those we love. There is no hack, no quick fix, no step-by-step solution to navigate grief. We only have ourselves, and one another, to make it through.
Papa had referred to Yush’s essay as “the truth” about our family. I have doubted so much about myself. I have doubted who I am. I have doubted my own perceptions of reality. I have doubted that I am worthy of love. I have doubted my right for agency and the right to control my own body and my right to feel pleasure. But one of the only things in life I have never doubted, Mummy, is this: The love Yush and I shared was real, and it is the memory of Yush’s love that guides me still. There is nothing that anyone else can ever say or do that will make me question that love now.