#refugeeexperience

    Degraded; no other word can describe my father any better than that. When I was younger, I came home to the same image I did everyday; my father lying down on the couch we found on the side of a street. Although he did not work, he remained exhausted carrying his failures upon his shoulders. He convinced himself that he was no more than a boy. I constantly wondered why he laid with depression hovering over him, but I knew I didn’t have the courage to ask. For if I said one wrong word, his hands would then leave slap marks on my face and bruises on my arms and legs. My father abused his children and pondered his afflictions, but why? Because his dignity stayed behind in his homeland once he became a refugee during the Vietnam War.

    He painfully counted his “failures” day after day, after day. Horrid memories of the war influenced his thinking. He was only a child when the war took place, but the effects of it affected him. While he slept on the couch he twitched. He flinched. He yelled. His flinches and twitches came from nightmares of bombs being dropped every eight seconds and his yells came from fear, pain. He lied there on the couch as if he were already dead, pale and fragile. My father forced his eyelids to remain open so he could restrain from getting any agonizing flashbacks. He didn’t have the strength mentally nor physically to do much. And as my mother worked, he laid there, scarred by his ill-fated life.

    He came from a culture where it was a requirement that the man provide for his family. That the man be as strong as a rock, but that was all taken away from him once he stepped foot onto America. Coming to a place where everything was foreign to him, he had nothing. My mother soon found a job and was the main source of income. I will never forget the humiliation on his face when he would ask my siblings and I to translate a letter for him. The shame that covered his face when asked if he needed a translator for parent-teacher conferences, was apparent. He felt helpless, hopeless, humiliated. In his state of mind, he was no longer a man, only a burden. His only source of strength came from beating his children. In those few seconds when he would beat my siblings and me, I could see the hurt and the fear. But I could also see the power he felt with every strike to the face or every blow to the arm.

    As the war made him feel defenseless, he had to take my mother, my brother, and myself to a new world. He arrived to this world adding the stress of his incapability to support his family to the weight of his misfortunes. He never saw himself as a man again. This led him to finding power through abusing his own children, leading him to see himself as a failure. He was stripped of his dignity. And Job 30:15 puts the emotions of my father into words, stating, “Terrors overwhelm me; my dignity is driven away as by the wind, my safety vanishes like a cloud.”