October 7, 2015

I was at my aunts apartment and looked out of the window to see a toddler and his father playing on the roof of another building. The father had a variety of tools with him, including one to rotate the metal girder perpendicular to the building so that it reached all the way to our side. This is when the child starts to cry as they’re being carried over a gap about 15 stories off the ground. I waved at the father and he waved back with a smile.

The crying got so loud that my mother came over to see what was going on. The child blurted out that he was being abused. “What is abuse?” my mother asked. “Isn’t it is what it is?” the child responded. There were some slips of English in his response which surprised me since the prospect of such a young child talking at all was already unexpected.* “Whenever I say a bad word, he gives me an apple and a knife!” he added. He continued how it was unreasonable to give conflicting responses to the same behaviors. “How thoughtful!” said my mom, citing how the child would need the knife to eat the apple.

–* This whole dialogue was in Mandarin / pure meaning (language-less, as far as I’m concerned)