When Jun moves from Hong Kong to America, the only words she knows are hello, thank you , I don’t know , and toilet . Her new school feels foreign and terrifying.
But when she opens her lunchbox to find her favorite meals—like bao, dumplings, and bok choy—she realizes home isn’t so far away after all.
A person I know decided to push really hard for “no hitting the kids, at all”, and his wife agreed, although she’d been raised with Some Hitting and thought it was normal. And then she discovered that her child wasn’t afraid of her at all, and she could pull a hand back and the child would just giggle because that wasn’t a threat, and she suddenly realized that actually it had fucked her up so deeply that she couldn’t even see it.
Anyway, good job parenting.
Some people don’t realize just how much parental abuse affects someone. Even decades later, children or not. There’s so much psychological damage and emotional damage that is so hard to undo because you were hit and yelled at when you needed love and compassion. Fuck child abusers and good on those who break that pattern.
