Dad Terrorized Us, But We Were Trapped in a Foreign Country

On the plight of immigrants, family secrets, and the evil patriarchy.

*Trigger Warning: This article discusses domestic violence. Please engage in self-care as you read this article.

I was a good daughter.

My father made sure of that. He beat me and my sisters to submission, a trait he learned from his dad.

I didn’t dare go against him, unlike my younger sister, who did.

Once, dad beat her with a belt, leaving her bruised from hip to ankle, forcing her to wear long pants during P.E. at school. I thought the school would suspect domestic assault, but nothing happened.

Another time, I was teaching English to a neighborhood kid. As we came out of the room to the lobby, dad was dragging mom on the floor by her hair. My student, visibly scared, scurried toward the front door and never returned.

My dad was a landmine that could explode any second. It was a family secret. My two sisters, my mom, and I didn’t tell anyone.

The plight of immigrants

My dad was a Nepali diplomat in Japan, which meant he had legal immunity from local lawsuits and prosecution.

Even then, I threatened dad I’d call the police.

But I loved him too much. He was my dad, after all. Did I really want him to end up in prison? Would we have to return to Nepal? It’d be all my fault and I’d be trapped with a dad hellbent on punishing me.

I wish my mom had reported him, though. But then, it’s common for Southeast Asian immigrant women not to report domestic violence.

The dominant reasons are “social stigma, rigid gender roles, marriage obligations, expected silence, loss of social support after migration, and limited knowledge about available resources…”

Additionally, my mom grew up in Nepal, a patriarchal society, where men still believe “they need to demonstrate manhood within marriage through physical discipline to ‘correct’ their wife’s behavior.”

And men are respected in Nepal to the point where sex-selective abortions of girl fetuses still exist and women are subjected to physical violence for giving birth to a daughter.

So my mom had been socially conditioned to submit to men who have been in control for countless generations.

Dad’s dad was feared till his dying day at 92. His brothers were angry people, too. Thank god we didn’t have a brother — he would’ve been prone to hitting women, too.

I’ve heard worse stories, far worse than ours.

My mom told me that my dad’s younger brother once kicked his wife out of the house when she complained about his drinking problem. She was naked, having just taken a shower. She ran to the neighbor’s house and begged them for clothes.

Then she traveled three hours to stay with her mom. But she was forced to go back when her family convinced her it was her duty as a wife to go back.

It sounds absurd, but maintaining a good reputation at home and in the community is big in Southeast Asia. My mom did the same. Outside of home, she was cheery, talkative, and full of laughter. But at home, her eyes lost their sparkle and she hardly smiled.

She prayed to the Hindu god Shiva, destroyer of darkness, whose picture hung in our living room. She thought the life given to you now was your fate, your karma. I know now it was her coping mechanism.

What was she to do? Divorce dad and let all her sacrifice be in vain? No one divorced in Nepal at the time. If you did, you were cast aside. But the men? They remarried and lived a stigma-free life.

Besides, she had three teenage daughters growing up in Japan.

She told me decades later that she encouraged me to leave Japan and go to the US for college so I could get away from dad.

The family secret

I think, in a way, mom felt it was her fault.

Maybe during their honeymoon phase — assuming they had such a time — they completed each other, but as long as I can remember, mom was the match that lit the fuse to dad’s dynamite.

He blamed her for our bad grades, wearing makeup, shaving our legs — which he categorized as rebellion.

But, believe it or not, he loved my mom. I could tell by the way he pulled her hand to give a peck on her cheek or helped with household chores.

But mom hardly reciprocated his affection, at least not in front of us, and I’m sure that fueled his rage.

Funny how he didn’t see that treating his wife like shit wasn’t going to make her want to be affectionate.

Outside of home, we were #familygoals. In public, people complimented our family. Dad had us learn a traditional Nepali dance from a renowned Bollywood choreographer. We performed at embassy parties, cultural events, and weddings.

His face beamed with pride. He lived vicariously through us as his dad forbade music or singing in the house.

There was equally a loving side to him. Dad encouraged my aspirations to become a journalist. He helped me land an opinion column in The Japan Times when I was just a teenager.

He was also a natural comedian. I don’t know how many times I pulled his finger, knowing his fart was just around the corner.

I couldn’t wrap my head around how a loving person like him could turn into a monster in seconds.

As an adult, I found out that’s called cognitive dissonance, defined as “an uncomfortable state of mind when someone has contradictory values, attitudes, or perspectives about the same thing.”

That’s why it’s so difficult for me to recognize that what we had in our family was domestic violence.

When dad retired, all three of his daughters were studying in the states or married. My parents went back to Nepal and I thought the abuse had stopped — that’s how naïve I was.

One summer, I visited them in Nepal. We were having dinner. My dad snapped at my mom for some reason.

Mom stomped to the cupboard, opened a shelf, and raised her hand to show a lock of hair. “Your dad did this to me today. Look!” She sobbed, pointing to a bald spot on her head.

Dad got up and raised his cane. I told mom to go upstairs as my dad cried out, “You stupid woman, you filthy, stupid woman! ”

I didn’t dare leave the house after that. I had to ensure dad wouldn’t hit mom ever again.

The emails mom had sent me while I was living in the US, saying everything was okay had been a façade. Dad’s old age hadn’t stopped him from abusing mom all these years.

The evil patriarchy

I moved to Nepal immediately afterward to protect my mom from dad. I felt guilty that all these years, it was still happening.

I still despise my dad for terrorizing my mom and beating my younger sister so badly that she once tried to jump off our third-floor apartment.

What I can’t accept is that he was a bad man.

Decades later, I gathered the courage to ask him why he hit us. He replied, “My father hit me. I thought I was doing the right thing (by hitting you)”.

I could empathize with that. My dad grew up poor with five brothers and three sisters. His parents had nine kids to feed.

Dad told me about how his dad would discipline him by having him stand on one leg and if the other foot touched the floor, he’d get beaten with a paddle.

His tone wasn’t sad, though.

He said that light-heartedly as if his dad’s beating was why he managed to get an academic scholarship for graduate study to an Ivy League in New York — something so rare at the time, it was a story in the newspaper.

I guess he strongly believed what he was doing was right.

A few years later, after I moved to Nepal, dad got frontal-temporal dementia.

Soon after, mom died from pancreatic cancer and I was left alone with dad, who couldn’t hit anymore. How unfair that mom had to die before dad, but mom would’ve thought that was karma, too.

They say his kind of dementia changes your personality, but in dad’s case, it didn’t. He was still as stubborn and determined to walk with his walker and quick to anger when he didn’t like something or someone.

He had female nurses caring for him, but they quit one after another because they couldn’t take his “destructive temper.” Then I found a male attendant. Dad hardly yelled at him — his deep-seated sexism was that strong.

I have a 4-year-old son now. I couldn’t fathom even slapping him on the cheek. Is that because I’m a woman?

Growing up in a household with domestic violence, shouldn’t I be prone to hitting my son?

After dad died, I had to sell my parent's house. As I was cleaning the attic, I found a book called How to Control Your Anger. The pages were full of underlines and notes by dad.

My eyes welled up. I had no idea he was trying.

It made me wonder, was dad a victim of a patriarchal society, too?

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