My first-grade school teacher told my mother that I couldn’t speak English fluently enough to advance to the second grade. It really embarrased my mother. So that summer my mother beat my ass more than usual as she tutored me on the basics of English to make sure that I never made her lose face like that again.

Years later, in Savannah, Georgia, I had an older white woman show up to my front door after school one day and ask me if she could come in. My mother and father wasn’t home from work yet. I remember the woman seemed nice enough, so I let her in. I sat my little ass back in front of the boob tube and ate on some junk food, probably a Twinkie or some Red Hots, while she had a look around the apartment. My mother came home and found this woman noising around her living room and was p fucking ohed off, for I had ignored my parent’s talk about allowing strangers inside when they weren’t home. My mother didn’t let on that she was angry with me in front of the woman after she had found out who the woman was. Child protective services (I’m thinking Amnesty Internation for some reason). The school had called them on my mother. I remember that I had an affectionate, attentive, young, black school teacher who had gotten down on her knees directly in front of me to see why I was limping in her class. She lifted my pant leg and saw a ladder of white bandages up the side of my calf. She lifted the other pant leg and saw the same thing. Under the bandages were cuts made from a see-through ruler my mother had used on me. My school teacher asked me who had done it and I told her happily my mother had without understanding the consequences of my actions. I’m still not certain if this school teacher called CPS on my mother or someone else had. Inside our home, the woman from CPS told my mother, a petite Korean, who spoke like she worked at an Asian massage parlor, that in America she wasn’t allowed to whoop on me however she liked. And, she was going to have to punish me for bad behavior differently going foward. I guess the CPS lady gave my mother some slack because our apartment was immaculate. Damn beds had been made like we lived in a hotel. The CPS lady may have assumed it was a cultural conflict my mother had while raising a son in a different country from her native homeland. Someone who was so organized and clean, surely they couldn’t be a child abuser is what I figured the CPS lady thought of my mother. The first time I misbehaved after that conversation my mother had had with the woman from CPS, I was locked in my bedroom and fed only a bowl of rice. But like any productive Vietmanese POW camp, mental torture just isn’t as fun without some bamboo sticks across a prisoner’s back, so like a relapsed drug addict, my mother returned to the broomsticks and extension cords. I desparatly love my momma, but as a first-generation American, she was no joke as a parent.

The beatings I endured the summer after my first year in grade school took root because at some point one of my school teachers, I believe the same one who saw the bandaged cuts on my leg, sent me to a higher grade for a part of the school day. So one of the grade schools that I attended thought of me as was somewhat gifted. I don’t remember much about about those classes except that on St. Patrick’s day I got pinched really hard by a bunch older kids because I hadn’t worn green clothing even though I had a piece of green cloth safety pinned to me. It was ruthless. It seemed to be an opportunity for them to bully me back me into my place where they thought I belonged. Straight up, I didn’t like being isolated from my friends in my regular class who had asked me what the older kids down the hallway were doing. My happiness meant more to me as a child than my mom’s pride in my advanced education. I think I continued to do well in school until I got old enough to successfully hide my school work from my mom, so I could have more time to play with my friends. Now, here I am, a former funniest freshman of my high school yearbook and dumb as cauliflower at English and Math. This is what I’m left doing. Teaching myself how to write grammatcally correct at an age when I should be teaching a kid of my own how to read and write properly.