Chapter One- Family Ties
I was born and raised in a big city in China. I won't bother you with the impossible to pronounce names, so let's just say it was around the capital.
I was an only child in a middle class family. My mom was a university teacher and my dad was an accountant.
My grandma on my mom's side died a month after I was born due to cancer, so I never met her. My grandpa was a farmer and a hard worker; he also wasn't the conversational type. My grandpa owned a small farm in a rural town with my step-grandmother and her children from other marriages. My mom hated my step-grandmother's guts, and frankly, she had good reason to. The woman was a bitch and gold-digger. Due to that, we didn't visit much.
I also had and aunt and uncle who lived there, both my mom's siblings. I have little memory of my uncle, except that he has a genius son five years older than me. My aunt, a year younger than my mom, had a son a year older than me, (which I find weird, she also got married earlier) my aunt is tall and model like, also a great lady. She was a middle school dropout, however, and makes windows for a living.
I had more relatives on that side, but never met them before.
My dad's side is a little different.
Both my grandparents are alive and they used to adore me, along with my dad's older sister, my aunt, who was married and had a boy three years older than me, he didn't like me as much.
Every summer, I would visit the town they lived in, which was a LONG train ride away and get pampered. I would also get eaten alive by mutant mosquitoes.
My grandmother was a woman who paid great care in her 'face', this covers speaking, looks, the tidiness of your house, the way you carry yourself, etc. This is a huge factor in China.
My grandfather read, a lot, I get that from him. He also practiced Tai Chi, thank god, I didn't get that. He's fairly short, with surprisingly good hair for someone in his 60's. This strand of DNA passed to my dad and carried onto me.
My aunt, a year older than my dad, indulged me in truckloads of junk food and fancy clothes, two things that my mom didn't do much of.
Even as a child, I had the distinct feeling that my mother and the people on my dad's side didn't get along, I just didn't realize how bad it was. My reasoning was because everyone on my dad's side is Muslim, and my mom's side does eat pork, though not a lot.
Like I said, I was an only child, and no furry animals were allowed on my mom's carpet. Therefore I didn't get a lot of companionship as a kid. But my mom was always there for me. She was my confidant, my best friend, my rock.
I hated my dad, and I can safely say I still do.
Whenever I was 'disobedient', he would hit me. Once, when I was six, he locked me inside the house as he 'went for a stroll', leaving a six year old locked in a house by herself for an hour and half. It was my mom who found me, crying in a corner.
Childhood went quick. We had a magnificent apartment, with three floors, (fine, two and an attic) and a huge greenhouse my mom built that I spent days rearranging Lego in. My stadium sized room consisted of three pieces of furniture. A king sized bed, a bookshelf stacked with my favourites, which was roughly every fairy tale book ever written (yes, it's a big bookshelf) and a huge hardwood desk. A bay window out looked a rollerblading/exercising rink.
We had lived in houses before that one, but that house is the only one I remember.
Growing up, I switched billions of preschools. One that really stuck (and the only I can recall) was located in the city. I hated it. Every day, after the nap time, the teachers would make up fold our blankets the 'right way'. I, being five with an extremely short attention span, never could quite accomplish that feat. So when that happened, the creepy child care ladies would threaten to lock me in the room forever. No amount of crying could help that.
When my mom finally caught on, she pulled me out immediately.
I didn't have any preschool friends my age then, but someone I always did and always will remember is Dennis William Abbott. I don't remember how I first met him, but I sure remember how he left.
I'm getting ahead of myself again.
Dennis William Abbott was a friend of my mom's in her work place. He's Caucasian, with brown-ish hair and brown eyes, also tall, and good looking, for a guy in his 50's. That's how old he was when I first met him, at around six. He taught English, and didn't know a strand of Chinese. I spoke Chinese, and didn't know any English, yet we got along just fine.
He was my first best friend.
Every weekend my mom and I would visit him at his apartment, and he'd give me the same thing; a spoonful of maple syrup, which was a delicacy and probably made me fat. He made me feel special and spent time with me, like a father should've. Something I also remember vividly was the fact that he printed out the pictures I drew on Paint in color, and hang them over his table.
We were great friends, my mom, Dennis and I. We'd always walk out to restaurants and I'd order soup.
My biological father, on the other hand, despised me to the extreme. Something I still remember, five years later, was an incident when I was forced to eat disgusting eggs in the morning. Scrambled eggs. They honesty made me feel sick, and I would say so every morning, but no one listened to me. So I couldn't take it anymore, I hid it in my mouth and retched it on the stairs of the apartment. My father saw this, and began beating me with his shoe.
I went to school, crying, snotting, snivelling, and resembling a red nosed Rudolph. That was the moment that I'd decided that I'd hate him forever, and nothing anyone said or did could change my mind.