Monica’s Story

The War at Home

My earliest memories have a soundtrack: things breaking. Phones smashed against walls. A television screen shattering. What I would later, half-jokingly, call “WWE wrestling matches” in the living room. I was born on the outskirts of Tianjin — the seam between city and countryside — and my parents fought like people trying to destroy each other. They divorced and remarried several times, a tug-of-war neither could win nor walk away from. By the time I started elementary school, they finally separated for good.

After the divorce, my father built a new family within three months. Three months. I even had what you might call a unique life experience — I attended my own father’s wedding. It sounds like dark comedy now, but at the time I was just a small girl holding an adult’s hand, not quite understanding what any of it meant.

Years later, I learned that all of this left a mark deeper than I realized. To this day, when I see strangers arguing or fighting on the street, my hands start trembling and my heart races — an involuntary reflex, a kind of scar the body keeps even when the mind has moved on.

The Custody Nobody Wanted

Most divorce stories are about parents fighting over custody. In mine, the plot was reversed — neither of them wanted me.

Behind this was a tangle of debts and old grudges between my father and my mother’s relatives. I became a bargaining chip — a piece of leverage one side wielded to extract money or concessions from the other. Honestly, I was too young to understand the details. I just remember the feeling.

One day, both of my parents refused to take me. Neither would budge. They called a taxi — driven by my father’s cousin — and that car shuttled me back and forth all day long. From my maternal grandma’s house to my paternal grandma’s house. Then back again. And again. I spent the entire day in the back seat of that car, transported like a parcel that no address would accept.

It was very late when I finally arrived at my paternal grandma’s. She looked at me and said: “Stay for dinner, child. Your little face is all red from the cold.”

That was the first time — young as I was — that I clearly felt something I could name: I might be the pitiable one in this story. Years later, I read Tara Westover’s Educated and felt a sharp ache of recognition. My circumstances were not as extreme as hers, I knew that. But this habit of measuring your own suffering against someone worse off — this “lucky” kind of self-comfort — was a survival skill I learned very early.

In the end, I was left with my father. My mother believed this would be a way to maintain her connection with me — that if I lived with him, I would eventually come back to find her.

Stepmother

Living with my father meant living with his new wife. At first, we got along well. She made me breakfast, bought me things. Those few months — maybe only one or two — were the closest thing to “normal” I ever had in that house.

But the war between my birth mother and my father’s side escalated. Late-night phone calls full of screaming, and worse — things I will not describe here, because I still want to protect what dignity I can for the people involved.

The fallout landed squarely on me. My stepmother became convinced that I could never truly be loyal to their family, that my heart would always belong to my birth mother. And so they stopped allowing me to see her at all.

I remember one Chinese New Year. My stepmother had gone out to buy things. I was alone in the apartment. I picked up the landline phone and called my mother. The moment I heard her voice, I burst into tears.

I wasn’t complaining. I wasn’t reporting how hard my life was. I was just a child who missed her mom. I just wanted to hear her voice, to say I miss you. She said: it’s the New Year — let me come get you for a few days. I was overjoyed.

But my stepmother came home early. She discovered the phone call and my plan to visit.

She cut the phone cord. Then she took a pair of scissors, cut one of my shirts to shreds, and threw the pieces out of the fifth-floor window.

After that, visiting my birth mother became an act of betrayal. Today, as an adult who has lived her own messy life and understands that nothing is simple, I can see her side: the woman across from her was her enemy, and if I sided with the enemy, it erased whatever genuine feeling she might have offered me.

That is the kindest interpretation I have been able to find, after many years of trying. She was also a young woman then, also a first-time mother — to my half-brother who arrived later. People who are doing something for the first time will inevitably make mistakes. I have come to understand that.

My Father

I never knew what my father did for a living. In school, when teachers asked us to write down our parents’ occupations, other kids wrote police officer, doctor, factory worker. I never knew what to put. Then one day I saw a movie about gangsters, and something clicked — my father spent his time eating, drinking, and getting into fights with the same circle of men.

He was handsome when he was young. He only came to one parent-teacher meeting in my entire childhood, and I was so thrilled, so proud — even though he didn’t even know what grade I was in.

When I was around thirteen, he came home one day with a long gash beside his right eye — someone had smashed a beer bottle in half and driven the jagged edge into his face during a fight. A lot of people might think a scar like that has a certain swagger to it, a rough-and-tumble charisma. But to a child, it was not cool. It was blood. It was fear. It was the image of a grown man walking through the door with his face torn open.

He was like a child who never grew up.

My upbringing was unusual in ways that are hard to explain. I didn’t have a key to the apartment, so after school I would go to wherever my father and his friends were having dinner and eat with them, then do my homework in the private room next door. At those banquets, some of the “uncles” would bring young women — barely twenty, sitting casually on their laps. I later learned they were university students being kept as mistresses. I imagine each of them had her own difficult circumstances, her own unspeakable reasons for choosing that path.

I witnessed violent confrontations more than once. At least two or three times, fists flew and I — a child — was the one who called the police. Trembling, afraid, begging the officers to come quickly. One time, when my father and stepmother fought, I dialed 120 — the emergency medical number.

I knelt on the floor countless times, pleading with my drunk father to stop smashing things, stop screaming. A glass cup hurled into the television screen. My laptop snapped in half down the middle. He was a bomb that could detonate at any moment. And I learned the detonator’s pattern early: alcohol.

He was caught between me and my stepmother, and I believe the pressure was real. But the situation he found himself in was, in many ways, the result of his own choices — remarrying within three months, and then failing to be the father I needed when the cracks appeared.

You might ask: after all of this, why couldn’t I simply hate him? Why not a clean, uncomplicated hundred percent? I think if it had been a hundred percent, things would have been easier. Pure hatred is at least tidy. But there were always these small, stubborn moments I could not harden myself against: he gave me my life. And in his own clumsy way, he did try — like giving me more pocket money than I ever needed, as though cash were a language for the things he could not say.

Living Like a Cockroach

For years, I shuttled between my paternal grandmother’s house and the apartment — two, maybe three years spent mostly at grandma’s. I was heartbroken: why couldn’t I just go home? But I also told myself: going back meant facing that environment, and that might be worse.

For as long as I can remember, I never once ate breakfast at home. Every school day, I went through the entire morning on an empty stomach, then ate the school lunch. Because nobody would be awake when I got up to leave. Each morning I would tiptoe around the apartment, gathering my things, while everyone else slept.

In middle school, I tested into Nankai — a school over ten kilometers away. I was living at grandma’s house then. I remember one morning it had snowed heavily, the sky dark and heavy. I walked through the snow alone — crunching with every step — to catch the first bus.

I sometimes think about my half-brother. By sixth grade, his parents were looking after his every need — they even bought him a smartphone. When I was in sixth grade, I washed my own laundry. No one made me breakfast. I would creep out of bed, brush my teeth in silence, and walk to school hungry.

I learned to take care of myself early. I taught myself to cook, and eventually found peace in it — a rare pocket of quiet where no one could disturb me.

One Chinese New Year, around the second day of the holiday, my father and stepmother went back to the countryside. Because things between us were tense, they didn’t take me along. They just left me in the apartment, alone. At first I was thrilled — finally, freedom. But after a few days of solitude, a very specific kind of loneliness rolled in, the kind only a child knows.

I had no right to ask for anything. Not a new backpack. Not a single thing. I had to live like a cockroach — finding ways to keep myself alive, making myself as invisible as possible.

I experienced so many of these moments — forced to face solitude far too young. And so I started dating early, because I was desperate for love. One boy in my class rode the bus home with me every day — two buses, the whole way — and I suddenly realized: so this is what it feels like when someone stays. Girls who grow up starved for love fall easily into that trap.

During those years I carried a distorted belief: that their fighting was somehow my fault. That if I could be more careful, more invisible, more like air — maybe things would be okay. In hindsight, living like that was more exhausting than any job I’ve ever had. The sensitivity I carry today was planted in that soil.

The One Under the Lamp

But fate always leaves a crack. I got into university. Our village had not produced a college student in years, but somehow, I made it through. To this day, I am grateful that fate, looking into all those rooms and all those lives, happened to choose the one where a girl sat under a desk lamp, stubbornly believing that maybe — maybe — she could find a way out.

Those years were suffocating, but under that lamp I held on to a kind of defiant faith: that the door might open, if I just kept pushing.

Once I arrived at university, I quickly realized that graduate school was almost certainly out of reach. Not because I didn’t want it, but because reality was too heavy. For someone in my position, going straight to work after my bachelor’s degree was the only realistic choice. So from freshman year, I threw myself into internships — partly to earn my own tuition, and partly out of fear. I was afraid that on graduation day I would still not know what I was good at, what I liked, or what I could rely on to survive. I didn’t have the luxury of trial and error, so I entered the working world as early as I could, trying to read the shape of my own future before it arrived.

Those years were not easy. To save on rent, I lived in terrible rooms. One was infested with cockroaches — large, brown ones inside my toothbrush cup, inside my pillowcase. I would flinch with disgust and then tell myself: just hold on a little longer, just a little more.

During one visit home from college, my birth mother and stepmother were in a legal dispute over a piece of land in the village. I said to my father: don’t make this uglier than it needs to be — just follow the law. My stepmother stepped in. The confrontation escalated. And then she hit me.

I froze. In that instant, every wound from every year flashed through my mind — every morning I went hungry, every night I knelt on the floor begging someone to stop, every holiday I spent alone, every piece of clothing thrown from a window. It all crashed into that single moment.

I broke. I screamed that I hated her. That I hated all of them. That I wished everyone would just disappear. I said things I will not repeat here.

And then I left. I cut off contact with my father’s family entirely — no visits during holidays, no phone calls, nothing. I vanished from their lives completely.

A Thin Bond

One evening, I was out drinking with friends. Tipsy and restless, I wandered into a small fortune-telling shop on the roadside — the kind that mainly sells flour but whose owner reads fates on the side. He looked at me and said:

“You should go home and see your father. The bond between you two has grown very thin. Perhaps in the next life, you will have a deeper one.”

I didn’t understand. Of course our bond is thin, I thought. We haven’t spoken in years. We cut each other off. That is literally what “thin” means.

Only later did I realize he was hinting at something else entirely — that I should say goodbye while I still could.

But I kept waiting. I kept telling myself there would be a right moment — a future day when I would be strong enough, successful enough, healed enough to face him. I would say: I forgive you. Or even: you don’t need to worry about me anymore. I might even make you proud.

I kept postponing. I kept waiting for “the right time.”

Winter, 2020

Five years had passed. Five years without going home. Five years without a single word to my father.

It was just before the Lantern Festival. I had returned to Beijing to start the new year’s work and was at home cooking with my boyfriend when my uncle called. He said I needed to come back to Tianjin immediately — my father had fallen critically ill, and I should hurry if I wanted to see him one last time.

My father was forty-nine years old. I had never imagined that a forty-nine-year-old could leave this suddenly. I had always assumed there would be time — time to reconcile, time to show him I was okay, time to let him stop worrying.

There was no time.

I rushed back and saw, for the first time in five years, my family — my half-brother, my grandmother, and my father lying on a hospital bed. My brother was in sixth grade now, taller, almost unrecognizable. The moment he saw me, he blurted out jiejie — big sister — and my tears would not stop.

Because I worked at a medical company’s headquarters, I had enough clinical knowledge to understand what the nurse was telling me: the prognosis was very poor. Surgery was not recommended — even if they operated, the odds of him surviving it were slim. But without surgery, he would face repeated emergency resuscitations — tracheotomy, aggressive CPR that would likely break his ribs.

She was, in so many words, asking me to decide whether to let him go.

After long discussions with my uncles, we chose not to put him through any more pain. We let him go.

The day he was placed in his casket, I looked at his face one last time. The scar was still there — still that long — but now it sat on a face that had grown old. I remembered the blood. I remembered the fear. And I remembered, too, the pocket money, and the one parent-teacher meeting, and the way he tried, in his own broken language, to be something resembling a father.

If my hatred had been a clean hundred percent, perhaps the grief would have been simpler. But it was not. It never was.

When it came to his house, his car, and whatever else he left behind, I took nothing. My brother and his mother still had a life ahead of them and would need it far more than I would.