Personal Project Part 2

Part Two


Do I start this by talking about my childhood? I don’t even remember it enough to want to look back on it, truth be told. Even the first memories I have of it are that of my alcoholic father beating me with whatever he had in his hand whether it was a vacuum pipe, wiring, or a glass that he just happened to have in his hand. The fact is, one of the first memories of my father is him slamming a glass door in my face while five year old me is taking a shit. I remember screaming and crying and him freaking out. He was freaking out because he was afraid of how my mom was going to react to it.


Outside that, I don’t remember much. I remember my dad got me into playing Counter Strike and the Medal of Honor games on the playstation two, I know my mom hated the fact that I played violent video games and that “those games would enable me to become a school shooter”.


Whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.


Most of my childhood was basically my dad and his family inflicting fear on me, the oldest and my two little brothers. One would be too young to care, and the other… Truth be told, he was and still is too stupid to know what he’s been through. Being low functioning autistic, his memory is shot to shit half the time, he talks to himself, and has no sense of bearing when it comes to being around other people. But my parents, thinking that it couldn’t be fixed never really bothered to try and fix that shit with him.


It was about me, the supposed genius of the family. The kid who wanted to be a Marine biologist that read about dolphins(I fucking hate the things now and want nothing to do with them). I was as childish as kids got, having plushies, and trying to just make the best of it. But I was always held to the Asian standard of success. I failed a test at one point and ended up getting my dad’s playstation two across the face for my trouble which I thought was actually normal. What are you supposed to think? That it isn’t? I was grown up to believe that it was what parents did to their kids.


Stripped ‘em down naked, made them get on their knees, raise their arms out. God forbid your arm got tired, because then he’d just hit you with the metal side of the belt, his fists, or whatever the hell happened to be in his hand.


At eight years old, I’d have my first run in with death. Heart attack.


Wasn’t anything my dad did.


I just remember eating food and my heart feeling like it was going to pop out of my heart. I started feeling tired and I remember wanting to sleep. My dad made me go to school because he claimed that I’d simply been faking being sick. After I’d been in school for an hour, possibly two I’d been sent to the school nurse with what appeared to be high blood pressure. At the time, I’d never had soda outside of special occasions, drank mainly water, and was in general a healthy kid outside of growing up on greasy ass Filipino food.


Mom comes in and picks me up and I remember going to the hospital where my pulse wouldn’t stop spiking. I remember being in the hospital. The retarded ass nurse kept missing my arm with the vein in it and it got so bad to where they had to staple the IV into my arm between taking blood samples in my arm.


Given the hospital didn’t have a pediatric wing, they had to transfer me about an hour away to Loma Linda in San Bernardino.


Everything went as well you may have expected it to. They loaded me onto an ambulance. Halfway through the ride, my chest started feeling heavy. I thought I fell asleep in the ambulance, the last thing I remember seeing being the shocked face of the EMT as I did.


I woke up and my dad was fighting with the paramedics over whether or not I was faking a heart attack to them, how I was a healthy kid, and all this other shit. I did end up getting looked at by a child abuse doctor. I never gave my dad up because my family told me I’d never see my family again and would be one of the “abandoned kids that no one would adopt at an orphanage”.


The one question that strikes me to this day is, “How could I have been so stupid? How did I let any of this happen?”


After a few days, they let me go and a few of my mom’s coworkers got me orca and dolphin plushies to help with the fact I’d been in the hospital for nearly two weeks. I actually used them as pillows and they were comfy to have around, truth be told.


Then, as with many things, my dad in a fit of rage seeing my grades ripped the heads off of them because he was mad and drunk.


That still fucks with me to this day.


If this is the part where you think that my mom divorces my dad and everything is happily ever after, you’re sorely mistaken. My life is a tragicomedy with enough Crossed style grim dark to where you start to wonder where this shit starts getting better.


I’d be given heart surgery around the time of Michael Jackson’s death, and would die on the table one more time. Given I didn’t have any palpitations or heart complications after, I guess you could say the damn thing was successful. My dad’s side of the family tried to open a business during the recession during all this and managed to get his side and my side of the family about half a million dollars in debt and around this time, the abuse managed to get worse.


Sometimes I wish I could fucking kill this prick.


While the adults had dinner, I remember 11-year old me being stripped naked and beaten while the others talked about sending me to the Philippines to “become a hard worker and really appreciate America”. Being disappointed, my dad’s family started to disconnect from mine, and one day my dad would just leave, and told me that I’d grow up to be a failure in life.


Middle school would roll around and I found myself being one of the many edgy teenagers around.  My dad’s brothers, my uncles would take turns beating me when I was in middle school. My uncle would compare his kids to me, and my dad would take his frustrations out on us. Specifically, me because he knew I was conscious and not retarded enough to know what was going on.


Except, I was actually fucked up; not, “I’m so fucked up because my dad goes to work a lot” but “I’m fucked up because one day, my shoved my head into a full tub of water and put his .45 in my mouth to tell me how angry he was with me and how much of a failure I was.” It was those things that I thought were normal in western culture, things that I just had to accept. My teachers would note that I was constantly depressed, withdrawn, and bored with what I had been given. My grades had been slipping because I had spent more of my time either sitting in a library writing or being on the Dead Frontier forums where I’d learned not just things about myself but about people that would later become my friends to this day. Around this time, I’d start writing about Donovan Paulsen, a made up character to offset the level of shit that I’d seen and dealt with.


This would be a defining moment from what I could gather as I found myself in a new world.