{"id":317,"date":"2026-06-01T15:10:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T15:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=317"},"modified":"2026-06-01T15:10:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T15:10:07","slug":"the-antagonist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=317","title":{"rendered":"The Antagonist"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It took me a few tries to find my mother on Google in 2017. My difficulty stemmed from the fact that she had both a Chinese name and a Western name, and, although one or the other often sufficed, there had been occasions when she\u2019d used them together in a kind of portmanteau, meant to account, I suppose, for all the parts of her history. Additionally, I didn\u2019t know whether she and my father were still married or if adding \u201cOng\u201d to my query would be counterproductive.<\/p>\n

Read more Forward Into Foreignness<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1988, when I was twenty, I left our home, in Los Angeles\u2019s Koreatown\u2014the neighborhood where my family had settled after arriving from the Philippines, a few years before\u2014and it would be more or less accurate to say that I have not looked back. Cutting ties with every single member of my family was the best decision of my life. When I Googled my mother in 2017, I was not looking for a rapprochement or hoping to forgive her so that I could leave my formative griefs behind and finally graduate into adulthood. Although I was almost fifty, I was every bit as irresponsible as a child. I was living hand to mouth, barely clearing my low monthly margins. But, as a writer, I was interested in outcomes. I suddenly wondered what had happened to my mother, as if she were one of my characters. And, of course, I was counting on Google to answer the most important question: Was she still alive?<\/p>\n

In my childhood, my father was a cheerful drunk\u2014until he wasn\u2019t. We children were a frequently fractious brood, sometimes gleefully so, sometimes savagely. And the burden of disciplining me, my brother, and my three sisters\u2014although it seemed that I was the one most frequently made an example of\u2014often fell to my mother. I could write a version of this essay in which I detail all my mother\u2019s high crimes and misdemeanors, but it\u2019s enough to say, for now, that she was a master of corporal punishment. Sometimes, as she carried out her frenzied rituals, she would wail, as if the belts and broom handles and rulers were in the hands of the other party. (The sickening recognition I felt when I read the stories in Alice Munro\u2019s collection \u201cThe Beggar Maid,\u201d in which the protagonist recalls being walloped by her father during a turbulent childhood, paradoxically made me want to keep reading, rather than stop.) I was not the only child in my Chinese Catholic community to be subjected to this disciplinary system, but I have often wondered if I was the only one to have answered it, in adulthood, with a steely self-expulsion. (Years later, when my first novel was published, I received, in care of my publisher, a letter from my family\u2014no sender was identified, but the return address in California was a tipoff. I ripped it up at once, without opening the envelope, and left it in the trash can, a few feet away from my mailbox.)<\/p>\n

Read more Jamil Jan Kochai on Unmooring Memories<\/a><\/p>\n

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My mother must have inherited her belief that sparing the rod would spoil the child from her own mother, who was, to my mind, the reigning gorgon of our family. (She immigrated to the U.S. a few years after we did and lived with my aunt and her family.) Almost nothing made her happy, but, if one of us children fell while capering, the most malicious half smile would creep onto her face, which, in old age, seemed brined in her thousand expressions and practices of hatefulness. Reader, I\u2019m loath to admit it, but I often resemble my grandmother: I am a grouch, a grouser; children are not my favorite people. Life being a comedy, of course, you never escape even those folks whose skulls you have imaginatively crushed in your writing; their signature epithets and reflexive unkindness may suddenly erupt from inside your own skull.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Regarding my mother, Google eventually directed me to the website of an L.A. cemetery, where, in loving tribute to her memory, family photographs had been compiled for a video montage. My mother had died in 2014, at the age of seventy-eight\u2014of what, the website didn\u2019t say, although it might have been useful to have the medical information for my own future. It turned out that there was now a new generation; grandchildren sat on my parents\u2019 laps and stood around them. There were also photographs from my own childhood. The images showed ordinary, dreary people. You would not have been able to tell that the boy in some of them had been beaten again and again, singled out for being mouthy and\u2014that catchall designation\u2014\u201cdisobedient.\u201d Nor would you have been able to tell which of the adults had been the happy hitter, the person who would remain, even in death, the chief antagonist of this boy\u2019s life.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more The Tally<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Han Ong, the author of the novel \u201cFixer Chao,\u201d cut ties with his family when he was twenty. 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