Man This Is Tough

My Father Was a Good Man is a comic I wrote in 2023 that you can now read online or buy physically. Many of you may have seen it described as a horror story involving a wolf, but at its heart it's a story about domestic violence. I wanted to take a moment to speak about that more earnestly.

Many immigrant children grow up believing the abuse they experience at home is normal. Laughing off being hit with a shoe or beaten for poor grades as if it were simply part of life. This comic is about reckoning with those quiet, everyday horrors, and how sometimes the worst acts of violence come from those closest to us.

If you have ever struggled at home, I hope this work reaches you. I hope it lightens a memory you’ve carried alone for too long. I wrote this story about a specific time in my life when I was 16. I am 29 now, and with time and effort, things have turned out alright.

Stay safe out there,

STOP IT’S BEEN MONTHS. MONTHS!

take these tags, on somebody else's post (condolences pip)

the thing is. this is what i would call an inside thought. nobody would have known you didn't get it if you didn't tell them that. if you recognised that it was important but didn't have the headspace to process it, you can reblog without commentary for others, or to come back to later. or you can save it somewhere and wait until you DO have the capacity to read it over a few more times, ponder it, consider what it might mean, figure out how to understand it, and THEN reblog it

but no. rushing to reblog while it is still opaque. rushing to admit to ignorance rather than spend the time to achieve understanding. perhaps hoping that somebody will break it down for you more simply, though to my mind it was quite simply phrased in the first place. never stopping to take the time first

comprehension is not always instant! sometimes it takes a bit of time for something to percolate after you read it; sometimes you need to read it a few times; sometimes you realise you don't have the context for it and either go and get the context or accept that it's not for you right now

When the song does come (it is hauntingly beautiful, unlike any of our own songs), the pod is still many days away, but there are many preparations to make. We can't say we fully understand, but the river clan loves a party and this is as good an opportunity as any.

The youth collect crabs and clams from the marshes. The pod must think it so quaint, our simple local fare, but they always partake in the feast with great zeal, bringing their own contribution of squid and the fast muscular fish that live so far away beyond our shores.

The crones tut over the bride-to-be as they weave her wedding veil from the finest strands of river grass (never mind that the bride has been wed to her maiden from the sea every spring for going on twelve years now).

We all collect shells and arrange them around her wedding bower. She chooses the finest of them for her bridal exchange (a point of pride for the winning collector who may brag about it long into the winter).

When the day finally comes, the pod gathers out in the sea, cavorting in the waves and singing their strange songs. Their songs and ways are still strage to us, and our songs must be equally strange to them, but we reply in kind. We sing our wedding songs with inflections borrowed from their dialects and they do the same.

We wait at the mouth of the river and send forth the bride, bedecked in her veil and strings of river pearls and snail shell, radiant and beautiful as the first time they were wed.

The sea clan sends their own bride into the brackish. They are larger than us, fat and muscular, built for life in the open water. The daughter of the sea is something fierce to behold, scarred and powerful, but she always looks upon our daughter with the tenderest gaze.

The two meet alone while we watch from the edges of our waters. They exchange necklaces. Ours a single shell, theirs hundreds of beads, one for each day apart: abalone and shark teeth and red coral and all manner of thing from every corner of the world.

We take turns calling the words, ours and theirs, two ceremonies syncretized into something new and beautiful and unique. And then, vows renewed, river clan and sea clan become one. We are one family until moon and tide signal them to move on in their migration until the next spring.

We meet in the estuary, neither side fully comfortable in the halfway salinity, but we love our daughters, and they love each other. We exchange food and stories and music, our two clans, and we celebrate long into the night.

Because, yes, listening to a story and reading a story use mostly the same parts of the brain. Yes, listening to the audiobook counts as "having read" a book. Yes, oral storytelling has a long, glorious tradition and many cultures maintained their histories through oral history or oral + art history, having never developed a true written language, and their oral stories and histories are just as valid and rich as written literature.

We still can't call listening in the absence of reading "literacy."

The term literacy needs to stay restricted to the written word, to the ability to access and engage with written texts, because we need to be able to talk about illiteracy. We need to be able to identify when a society is failing to teach children to read, and if we start saying that listening to stories is literacy, we lose the ability to describe those systemic failures.

Blind folks have been knee-deep in this debate for a long time. Schools struggle to provide resources to teach students Braille and enforcing the teaching of Braille to low-vision and blind children is a constant uphill battle. A school tried to argue that one girl didn't need to learn Braille because she could read 96-point font. Go check what that is. The new prevalence of audiobooks and TTS is a huge threat to Braille literacy because it provides institutions with another excuse to not provide Braille education or Braille texts.

That matters. Braille-literate blind and low-vision people have a 90% employment rate. For those who don't know Braille, it's 30%. Braille literacy is linked to higher academic success in all fields.

Moving outside the world of Braille, literacy of any kind matters. Being able to read text has a massive impact on a person's ability to access information, education, and employment. Being able to talk about the inability to read text matters, because that's how we're able to hold systems accountable.