The day ended in chaos, but my mind did not. The news kept circling inside me and would not settle. There were things that needed to be said, urgently, and yet I felt almost unable to speak. The assault in Tangshan, the murder in Jinshan—both left me furious and raw. I felt consumed by anger and pain. I had almost no language for it.
May was not without good things. But some of what happened was so terrible that the good could not balance it. Something in me was damaged, and I am not sure it can be repaired.
What I am dealing with has two parts.
First, I am disgusted by my own lack of coherence. Until I can resolve that, I cannot forgive my own cowardice.
Second, I once thought I should say that something happened. But the truth is that I learned something. The facts were already there; the beliefs were already there. I simply had not seen them clearly. This is about my family, and about my father. He has given me precious emotional support before, but I no longer believe I can count on that in the same way. I cannot answer his calls. I struggle to reply to his messages. I can barely bear to hear his voice. I am afraid of him, and at the same time there is something vindictive in me. I want to make him feel the helplessness he gave me.
At the same time, I understand that his temperament, his views, his political and moral instincts, and the way he sees me and my choices were shaped by the time and place in which he lived. The longer a person remains inside an unfavorable environment, the deeper that environment settles into them, and the harder it becomes to change. My father and I are forty years apart. That is an enormous distance. It is long enough for history to make and remake a person several times over. The things in him that I reject, the things that hurt me, were also put there by society.
I know I ask too much of him. In fact, the emotional support he gave me may have made me ask even more. For twenty years, as father and daughter, I believed deeply in his love for me, in the bond between us, and in the strength—almost the stubbornness—of his devotion to family. I thought those things would be enough for him to stand with me against a certain set of values.
They were not.
I overestimated myself, and I underestimated convictions—how durable they are, how much power they have over people. He told me I had no home anymore, and that I should no longer regard them as my parents. For someone whose idea of family is so heavy, so absolute, that was a severe condemnation—for him to say and for me to hear. I completely lost control that day. He pointed out that he had never spoken harshly to me before, and that was true. The situation kept escalating.
I realized there was no one else who could help me, and because of that I could not really talk about it with anyone. After those two phone calls, my family and I never discussed the matter again. I gave way. I did not correct what had gone wrong. I simply went on living beside the incoherent version of myself, and that was how the incident ended. For the next few weeks, our family group chat returned to its usual routine: daily updates about meals, errands, ordinary life. Everything looked calm, as if nothing had happened. I hardly even replayed it in my own head.
But now I have to write about it, because it has continued to hurt. On the day those two brutal hate crimes happened, I finally said over dinner: I feel awful. Talking with female friends about the news, I slipped my own private misery into the conversation and let it hide there. It was an ugly way to speak. For a while I could not write any of this down. In an earlier monthly journal, I had written about the emotional support my parents gave me; then May arrived like storm clouds, and I overturned my own account of myself twice in a single month. At this point I no longer care whether that makes me look ridiculous.
I do not even care anymore about preserving the exact shape of what happened between me and my father. If there were any way to change the memory of what we said to each other that day, I would do it. I cannot bear it.
It was ten at night. I was walking along the roadside, with traffic passing by, and I said to him: Dad, I’m outside right now. It is the only time in my life I have ever threatened my family with my death. I was confused, collapsing, completely out of control. I had regressed to something childlike, imagining how much pain my death would cause them. It was immature, but it was also full of real feeling and real desperation. Now when I ask myself whether I truly wanted to die, the answer is no. What remains with me from that threat is not some grand symbolic meaning. It is guilt. I feel deeply guilty that I so seriously, so sincerely, wanted to hurt my family.
As for the conflict between my father and me, I do not think we were truly facing each other as enemies. The contradiction was not simply lodged between us. We were standing on the same side, both confronting a contradiction that society had forced onto us. Even as I write that, I am not entirely convinced. The damage society has done to him is no longer separate from him; it has become part of who he is. How can you draw a clean line through a person and say, this side is him, this side is what was done to him, and I stand only with one half? He is a whole person, just as I am a whole person. I cannot divide him. But I also cannot simply stand against him.
I am still struggling. This week he called twice. I watched the phone ring all the way through—twelve rings each time—until it stopped on its own. Since those two days, the only words he has spoken to me came while I was on a call with my mother and he took the phone from her for a moment to remind me of some trivial practical matter. I have to admit that broke my heart. It still does. I think of what he said and my eyes still burn. I am still angry. Still helpless.
The truth is that in the second phone call, the very next day, he apologized. Even on the night he said those things, he was divided against himself: telling me I no longer had a home, while also telling me to come home and talk with the family. But I cried uncontrollably and told him, What you said really hurt me. And I realized that much as I often resent this part of myself, I am just like him. I, too, have a sense of family so strong it becomes heavy. The loss of home—even a verbal loss, even only in words—was enough to make me hysterical with pain. I think he, too, must at some point have wanted me to suffer deeply, to feel his coldness and his resolve.
I am very sad. I want writing to rescue me, at least a little. But I can see myself using clumsy narrative tricks, trying again and again to arrange the story in a way that hurts less. This time I am not even fully honest.
I truly feel that I am cruel, and harsh. I am still punishing him for the pain he caused me. I still want him to hurt too. I want his pain to be close enough to mine that I do not have to bear an excessive amount of guilt alone. I cannot let go of what he said, because I know how much family means to him. And because I know that, I can forgive him even less for using family in that way—as a threat, as leverage, as a means to force me toward the choice he wanted. I cannot forgive that when the moment came, he did not choose me. He chose something he believed was greater, more correct, more legitimate. He will never understand that those things have nothing to do with us.
I still cannot get past it. Weeks have gone by, and the sky inside me is still heavy with unspent weather. I have had no energy for anything else. I keep revising what I write, trying out different versions of the story in hopes of finding one that lets me breathe more easily. I try to understand why he made the choice he made. A large part of me even believes he did not fully mean what he said—that it burst out because we were both too angry, too impulsive. But none of those explanations make me feel any better, because the things we say without thinking still belong to us. They reveal something.
The only interpretation that brings me a little relief is this: perhaps I did not lose to his convictions. Perhaps both of us lost to them.
He failed. He simply failed to overcome what decades of his era and his social environment built inside him. My anger is so intense because he did not win either. But if someone has never managed to win against those forces, what right do they have to blame someone else for failing too? I do not know.
I spent almost four hours writing this. I fell asleep while writing it, then continued the next afternoon. I am still heartbroken. I am still trying to make sense of what happened. Changing him is impossible. Forgiving him, letting it go—those are difficult in a different way. This period may become one of the darkest and most complicated stretches in our shared history. I keep finding reasons not to go home and face him. Still, I suspect that one day we will let this page turn in an unresolved, ambiguous way, because that is often where things between parents and children end up.
But I know something has changed. I can no longer trust him.
And it is easy to imagine the future: more choices I will make that he does not want me to make. Will I again be threatened with having my home taken away? Will there be a second time when, in his language, I am left with no father and no mother, a person who ought to walk into traffic and die?
I still need him. There is still so much emotional reliance here. But I do not trust him anymore.
I think I need to find another home for myself.