AT ONCE FAMILIAR

When the headache begins, I don’t realize what’s happening. I think the pressure must be an allergy attack, a particularly severe congestion in my sinuses. I press my fingers against the left side of my face, feeling the bones around my eye socket. In the next moment I recall crying. The pain is so sharp, I lose language. I can’t ask for help, I can’t say what’s wrong with me. I can hardly breathe. And without the ability to string a sentence together, to soothe myself with words, I panic. It occurs to me that I must be dying. I take comfort in this certainty: the pain will end, because soon I will be dead.

That’s when I recognize the thing for what it is, though it’s never happened to me before. I’m not dying. This is a migraine. In that moment of realization, I’m seized by a constriction of time, and memory. And somehow: I am my father. I feel my mouth twisted into ugly contortions. Hot tears spill from my eyes. I see myself wearing my father’s face, at once familiar, and terrifying.

Ba suffered migraines: pian toutong, in Mandarin. The dreaded “one-sided headache.” I remember him clutching his skull, moaning, muttering; sometimes, he pounded the palm of his hand against his left temple, over and over again, as if the pain were an object he could dislodge by violent force.

My father lived under the constant threat of these attacks, and my mother and I did too. Ba was thirty-seven when we arrived from Taiwan to live with him in the US. He’d left Taiwan when I was two, to pursue a PhD in computer science. I was eight years old when Mom and I landed in Austin, Texas. Soon after his graduation, we headed for Missouri, where Ba was starting a job as an assistant professor at a state university.

We moved into a two-story townhouse in Warrensburg, Missouri. I started the third grade. For me, having a father around all the time was a brand new thing. I didn’t think of it then, of course, but having a wife and kid around, all the time, must have been a big change for my father too. Perhaps our sudden and constant presence in his life contributed to the frequency of his migraines. When they struck, I knew to stay out of his way.

Before I moved to the States, my father was a myth. A baritone voice through the telephone. When he arrived in Taipei each summer, Ba was tall beyond imagination, exceedingly handsome with a thick, beautiful head of wavy black hair. He only ever arrived in the dead of night, it seemed, wearing a maudlin smile, his button-down shirt open at the collar. I adored him with a desperate fascination.

I remember one of his summertime visits, Ba and I sitting alone in the living room of my grandparents’ apartment. He had the Taipei daily spread before him, and would occasionally read the stories out loud to me. There was an especially lurid item, about a woman who’d been violently murdered. She’d been stabbed more than thirty times.

Stand up, my father said.

I rose.

Did you hear what I just read?

Yes, Baba.

Come here, child.

Then, he made a game of acting out the murder. Using an open hand, flat and wide as a butcher knife, my father cut strokes on top of my head, and across my face, shoulders, chest, arms, and legs. Baba hacked at me gently, counting aloud as he pretended to slice me open, and I laughed each time he drove the blade into my body.

That afternoon, I wasn’t scared. My silly, brilliant father, visiting from overseas, was only playing a game. Later on, when violence became a normal expression of how he communicated, I learned to fear my father.

I don’t remember what I did to set him off the first time my father hit me. Standing at the top of the stairs in that townhouse in Missouri, he slapped me hard enough that I tumbled down to the landing. I sat there, stunned. My ears rang. Something wet trickled from my nose, and I touched a finger there. My bright red blood. Later, I overheard him placating my mother: She’s fine! I’ll take her to McDonald’s and buy her a Happy Meal.

The father I adored in his summertime visits to Taiwan disappeared. In his place I discovered someone impossible to please. I was always doing something wrong; the way I walked, or how I chewed my food, were reasons enough to cause my father’s face to suddenly cloud over in fury. Sometimes he roared; long, thundering lectures. Other times he simply shoved me to the ground and whipped me with whatever was handy: his black leather belt, a plastic coat hanger, the foam rubber house slipper which was also used for smashing roaches and daddy long-leg spiders.

My mother hosted dinners for my father’s colleagues and their wives. He applied for tenure, and was denied. More migraines. There was talk of opening up a Chinese restaurant. I turned nine. I turned ten. I was learning, fast, to read and write and speak in English. I learned to roller skate. To trick-or-treat. My father quit his academic job, found another as a computer programmer in the private sector. We moved to California when I was eleven. By then I stayed out of my father’s path not only when he had migraines. I avoided him altogether, as much as I could, to minimize the opportunities for him to find fault with me.

The last time my father hit me in a fit of violent rage—the very last time—I was fifteen or sixteen. We lived in a three-bedroom ranch style house in the suburbs southeast of Los Angeles, bordering Orange County. I’d grown accustomed to living with my father’s anger as a normal part of my life. To survive at home, I made myself as small as possible, as to be nearly invisible. Of course he could, and did, barge into my room when the mood struck. Your father wants to talk to you, he would say.

I’d listen to him, staring at one spot on the ground. Sometimes he ranted about his hard-earned money drained by the cousin who lived with us, and by me, who was so stupid, useless, and ungrateful; after another blowout with my mother, he’d vent about how much he hated her and felt trapped by his life with her, a selfish and small-minded woman who undermined his every move. A constant refrain: You owe your lives to me. You’re nothing without me.

That Saturday morning, Mom announced that we were having our family portrait taken at a photography studio. She worked as a secretary at a wholesale furniture store, and she’d won the package at the annual Christmas raffle. I washed my face, brushed my hair, and dressed in a black sweater and blue jeans. When Ba saw what I was wearing, his face clouded over.

Are you mentally retarded? he said, and sent me back to my room.

He wanted me to put on a dress, something which translated an image of an upstanding young woman. I sat on my bed, doing nothing. Eventually Mom came in to check on me. I imagined the framed portrait hanging in the house, glossy and permanent, and I told her I wasn’t going to have my picture taken with them. My teenager’s reasoning, strung on self-righteous anger, was convinced that participating in a staged family photograph would make me complicit in a lie about who we really were.

Mom sighed, and left my room. Then, Ba barreled in. He wrenched me to my feet and dragged me into the living room. Kneel, he snarled.

I sank to my knees, facing the wall. From the corners of my eyes, I watched him throw open the hall closet door and rummage inside. He found what he was looking for: the long wooden handle of the broomstick. I braced myself for the lashing. The broomstick made a sick, whooshing sound in the air before landing against my back. My father paced the living room between hitting me, at turns muttering underneath his breath and shouting into the ceiling. I began crying softly, making sniveling sounds, my nose dripping snot. My knees burned from kneeling the stiff berber carpet. After twenty, I lost count of how many times the stick came down.

We never made it to the photography studio. Later that night, I rattled fifty tabs of Aspirin out of a bottle, and I swallowed them two at a time with a glass of water. I’d convinced myself I wanted to die. I laid down to bed. I thought: I’ll fall asleep, and I won’t wake up. I’ll float away on a dream. Outside of my room I heard laughter blurting from the Mandarin variety show my father was watching.

A few hours later, I startled awake.

It didn’t work. I was still alive.

The house was dark. I shuffled to my parents’ bedroom, stood in their doorway.

Mom? I called out softly.

A bedside lamp flickered on. She blinked at me. My father’s body, curled next to her, didn’t move.

I have to go to the hospital, I said. In a small voice, I told her about the Aspirin.

Ba stirred next to her. He lifted his head. Fifty? he said. Why not a hundred?

He made an exasperated sound, and then turned over in the bed.

Mom drove me to the hospital. The ride was silent, the streets empty at this hour in our placid little town. In the emergency room I’m assigned to a bed, hooked up to a machine that monitors my vitals. A nurse gives me a bottle of ipecac to drink, meant to induce vomiting. It’s cloying sweet and granular, and I can hardly down half the bottle. In a firm voice, the nurse insisted that I had to finish the entire thing. The alternative, she said, was that she would thread a tube through my nose and throat, and pump out my stomach. You don’t want me to do that, she said. It will be very uncomfortable for you.

My mother begged me to finish the jar of ipecac. She stood by and watched while I swallowed it down.

Why do you do this? she asked. Why do you hurt yourself like this?

Don’t you already know? I wanted to say, but didn’t.

Soon after, I threw up black sludge into a yellow kidney-shaped dish.  I managed to fall asleep. In the morning, the doctor told Mom and me that a counselor was coming down to speak with me before I could be discharged.

I don’t remember if they examined my body for cuts and bruises, but I didn’t tell the white counselor about my father hitting me. I hated him, more than I hated anything or anyone, but I didn’t want to be taken away from my family.

I stayed home from school that day. The next morning, I chose a long-sleeved shirt to hide the needle holes in my arms surrounded by soft blooms of purple and blue from the IV, the places where they pricked me to draw blood. At school, my friends asked why I’d been absent, and I told them I had a cold, but that I was better now.

To this day, my parents and I have never spoken about this night. Sometimes I wonder if either one of them remembers it. I’d achieved the result I wanted, I suppose, albeit one that I hadn’t realized I was after because I’d never even considered its possibility: that my father would stop hitting me. After that night, he never raised a hand to me again.

I haven’t spoken to my father for many years now. I see him, occasionally, and we are civil, but we don’t have a relationship. Ever since I left home for college, nearly twenty years ago, neither one of us has made an effort to stay in touch. Months, if not years, go by without communication.

Somewhere in my twenties, my father moved to Taipei. I figure my parents are separated, though not legally, but what confuses me is that he still comes around once in a while, stays with my mother for weeks at a time. She lives in the same house in southern California where I grew up. The nature of their relationship is something else we’ve never talked about. How things are now is perhaps not unlike the visitation schedule they kept up when Ba was a grad student in the US and Mom and I lived in Taiwan, except my parents have switched locations now. What binds them? Some combination of history, complacence, money. These are speculations. It’s impossible for me, their only child, to see them clearly. I have no one to corroborate my memories, challenge my judgments.

Perhaps some women hold fear of turning into their mothers as they age; for me, it’s my father. I look just like him. I have his wide forehead and prominent brow bone, the same high cheekbones and permanently downturned, frowning mouth. The maudlin expression I remember him wearing, when he visited me as a child in Taiwan, is the one that greets me in the mirror on certain days now.

And I’ve inherited his migraines, it turns out.

After my first migraine, I went looking for something—someone—to blame for this awful pain. I found an easy target in my father. It’s his fault I’m saddled with these ungodly headaches. His faulty genes I’ve inherited.

This isn’t the first time I’ve attributed something going wrong in my life to my father’s pathology. My quickness to anger? All because of Ba. It seemed to me, when I was a child, that my father had found a home in his rage, that he was most comfortable there than anywhere else. I’m fearful that it’s the same for me, now that I’m an adult. But then I think, no, that’s not true. When my anger dissipates, I’m left with hurt. Outside of anger’s grip, I can see that it works only as a sort of mask, a way of hiding some harder, inviolable truth of one’s heart. As an adult, I know now that an expression of anger always signals something else. It must give way to some other, more complicated emotion.

I don’t know what my Ba’s anger hid. Depression, perhaps, undiagnosed and untreated. The stress of being a first-generation immigrant, striving for some version of the American dream—education, assimilation, economic success—and falling short, in some way, now that he’s back living in Taiwan. I think of those times he barged into my room when I was a teenager, how I resented his lectures and rants. I got very good at simply tuning him out. Much later, it dawned on me that my father had no friends, no place to dump his grievances, other than onto his daughter. It makes me sad for him now.

Recovering in bed from the migraine, I feel exhausted, as if I’d been physically exerting myself for a long time, though for hours I’ve only been lying in the dark, reminding myself to breathe. A familiar sorrow surfaces, anew. I’ve tried to forget my father, all those years we shared. The memories shift, linger. I can’t tell you all I’ve lost. He remains, still.

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Jean Chen Ho lives in Los Angeles. She’s a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California.