Love is still, used as, a SORRY EXCUSE for hurting their, young children here! Translated…
In a machinery accident, she’d, lost her middle finger, knowing it would be rude, but I still, can’t take my eyes off of her hand. My connection with her isn’t just on the surfaces, not only were we related by marriage in the same village of the same ancestral graves, we’d also worked together for more than ten days, as coworkers———we were both the “eight hundred strong” after the Morakot Typhoon from 2009 (with the temp wages of $800 per day), and I was too unrealizing, that all these years, I’d not noted how her hand was, handicapped.
Perhaps, it’s how I’d been, troubled by the deterioration of my joints, that’s what gotten me interested in other people’s, hands? Or, maybe, due to her missing middle finger, that’s tied to the thrilling nightmares of her, childhood, that tangled itself up like an unmanageable ball of, yarn, getting pulled from the origin, and started, unfolding, making her recall the bloody pasts.
The two boys who lost their fingers, shared the similar life experiences; the ones who’d hurt them were their, fathers, who’d both selected the most hurtful ways to, damage their, children. Of the hands, the thumb on the right hand was bent out of shape, completely deformed, into a “sixth finger”, bent like a pincher, and gotten laughed about a whole, lot, and he’d always, cried too hard about it, and, his father couldn’t stand his complaints anymore, and took a knife and just, cut the finger, off, while Chuang was a kleptomaniac, and he wouldn’t change nor listen to the words of advice, and his father got angered, and took that knife, cut off that last segment of his left pinky, as a reminder to him, to NEVER to steal again.
And it was told, that after both were sent to the hospitals, they got operated on by the surgeons again, because the bones, the tendons, the blood vessels, the nerves in the severed off fingers needed to get fixed up. If the surgeons just amputated the fingers off, it may affect the functioning of their, other fingers. To the point of causing the joints to loosen down, or the tissues to become necrotic.
illustration from UDN.com
The neighbors who grew up with them, for a very long time, lived under both of their, thrilling, childhood, experiences, because the adults all used the threats of “if you don’t behave, I will tell so-and-so’s father to chop your fingers off too”, to threaten their young into behaving, not knowing, how it’d, damaged the young children’s mind, that they’d begun, lying, to evade getting punished, so the children started, locking up all of their, unimportant feelings, to block out the shock, to the point of, being, suppressed.
It’d been four, to five decades, the already distant memories are now, forcing me, to empathize what the man who’d cut his own young son’s fingers off was feeling at the time.
When I was younger, I’d thought that the father of the “boy with six fingers” loved him, while Chuang’s father had, hated him.
And now, as I’d become a father too, I’d, started, reexamining the past, and it seemed, that I can see, underneath the teeth-gritting, the ferocious looking means of his father, there’s that helplessness from how he can’t, make his son act right! It’s just, that the parents’ “I’m doing this out of love”, their body languages made the children feel rejected, their children felt hurt, and, started wondering, if they were, adopted or, picked up from the outside garbage dumps.
Like a lot of parenting books had, the children who don’t grow up in trust, as adults, they will have difficulties trusting themselves, and others too, and so, there’s no chance of her/him, forming a secure, attachment, which will severely impact the intimacy. This sort of a childhood environment, is the forefront of the developments of borderline personality, posttraumatic stress disorder, and schizophrenia.
“Sister-in-law, I’d checked out your book!”, the words of my relatives, brought me out of those, memories, I’d nodded flustered, and thanked my relative, swallowed back in my curiosity that rose up to my throat, and, as I left the library, the thoughts still, circled around, those memories of the fingers that were, severed, off.
And so, these are AWFUL cases of how the adults hurt their own young, and, it’s not entirely the adults’ fault, for they’d been, raised using these similar sorts of, violent means, and, the kid who’d gotten his fingers chopped off by punishment, his father was at wit’s end, to turn his son back onto the right path, while the other man who’d chopped the deformity off of his young son’s hand, just wanted to make him normal, either way, these two men didn’t do it right by their own young, even IF the intentions were originally loving, it still don’t make what they both did, right!
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