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When I was about ten years old my father left Colorado for Korea, at nearly the saan Now, after his retirement, my father has returned and taken up the mantle of caretaker This is odd to me, because of my memories of the former him

Some memories are seared into one’s consciousness Fear does that It took decades for the nighthts of hoh I’d never left

The father I first kneas the angry one That ed my mother from my bed where she hid, to their shared bedroom next door He seized her by three liet her helplessness—the way she knew that no matter how she resisted, she was lost I watched as she slid down the sheets, away froht a laundry bag

She screamed in Korean, but those details I ree, and so what I heard instead was her fear, and hurt, and vulnerability Those emotions have their own pitch

I’ve tried, as much as possible, to block out these kinds of memories Yet they don’t fade

I re my middle sister, three years older than ain in the night It was always at night Always for soht: oing to bed, h she was taller and heavier than him, even as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, or however old she was at the time, fear rendered her unable to resist

In these instances, I can see the exact setting—the backdrop, the furniture, the cast of characters I prefer not to I remember the viciousness of his strokes, wooden, metal-reinforced ruler in hand I remember his face, nearly animal in its contortions

That he derived pleasure froive The forcefulness of his motions has always been linked, in my mind, to his forehand, which he used to practice in the air, sans racquet, over and over and over again, in my parents’ upstairs bedroom

In the single short, stilted conversation I’ve had with my sister in the time since, she mentioned the bruises

I re outside of the house, into the cool air of my cul-de-sac, on these sorts of occasions My sister’s screah-pitched, those of an animal in distress I could still hear the screae of the driveway I can still hear them now Colorado air is thin—there is little to disrupt sound’s transhborhood I wondered why no one helped

I hovered in the garage once, theafter a particularly vicious incident My ht,” she said to me “Be nice to your sister,” and then shut the door

For a length of ti herself from any responsibility to protect us I resented her for sleeping with ranted privacy My small body functioned as a shield, or a reprieve I myself didn’t seem to matter She seemed to assume that if she were in my bed, he wouldn’t cross that line—he would leave her alone I found her presence invasive But I understood, too, that she was afraid for herself

These are not moments I want to inhabit Yet I can’t remove them from the narrative, as my father would prefer These are moments that break the narrative

In the first feeeks of each seozi Adichie’s TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story” And yet as I harp on about the value of not reducing a person to one single story, I realize how hard that is to put into practice Our minds want continuity