The Exorcism of the Thirties

A decade of angry reflection

Photo by Zoe on Unsplash

When I was eleven or twelve, I took my mother to our apartment leasing office where I explained to an agent, in halting English, that our next door neighbors were having “sex too loud,” making “duck noises” that were disrupting my mother’s sleep. Her words, not mine. But one night when my father was away and I snuggled up next to her in his place, I heard them too and thought the description apt. I banged on the wall to make them stop. Mother giggled, and it made me feel good.

In middle school, my parents bought our first home in America, a brick house with a one-acre lot, where the quiet procession of a deer family outside the window could hush my sister and me into awed silence. One of the first things my father did after we moved in was erect an absurdly large golfer’s practice net in the backyard, against the protests of the family. Not long after that, I translated for him a letter filled with a lot of capital letters demanding that we take it down. We did, but the animals had already stopped coming, and I had developed the habit of tensing every time a neighbor passed by.

When I started my first job out of graduate school, my father texted me asking to borrow $40,000 for one of his obscure business ventures. I no longer remember what it was, only that it left me with the same sick feeling I…