I often explain to peo­ple that Karaoke to the Chinese is like drink­ing to the British. We don’t pour pints at our par­ties, we sing. It’s part of the cul­ture. The Chinese-Canadian dream is a Toyota in every dri­ve­way and a Karaoke machine in every house.

My dad was no excep­tion. Like all his hob­bies, he took Karaoke seri­ously. He had singing lessons from a famous teacher. Sometimes, he would record him­self and lis­ten to the tapes to ana­lyze his singing when dri­ving me to school. We would never talk on those hour-long rides, I would only hear him singing, some­times along with his recorded voice, some­times prac­tic­ing the parts that he didn’t have quite right.

When I was young, about seven, I would sing one of the English songs from his col­lec­tion. I couldn’t tell you why. Karaoke didn’t par­tic­u­larly inter­est me. Maybe it was a way for me to be a part of his life. He had noth­ing to do with me otherwise.

My par­ents must have believed I was good. At a Christmas party they hosted soon after, they pressed me to sing that song, the only one I knew, for the guests. It was The Greatest Love of All, made famous by Whitney Houston. You know, the one that goes:

I believe that chil­dren are the future
Teach them well, and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they pos­sess inside
Give them a sense of pride

The irony didn’t hit me until I was old enough to know what irony meant.

At seven, I was par­a­lyt­i­cally shy and inhib­ited. I didn’t want to sing in this room filled with tall, strange people.

It upset them, so they threat­ened to throw out my sticker collection.

Collecting stick­ers was the big thing at my ele­men­tary school. Adolescent favour wasn’t deter­mined by some­thing is triv­ial as who could run the fastest, but by whether or not you had the oh-so-rare Root Beer scratch-n-sniff, clev­erly shaped like a frosty mug, or the fuzzy lion that felt like you were pet­ting the king of the jun­gle when you ran your fin­gers over him. I kept my stick­ers in a big yellow-beige book with rain­bow stripes, and it was my pride on the playground.

So I called their bluff. As young as I was, I under­stood that the money spent on those stick­ers was theirs. They wouldn’t just throw it all away.

Then I watched as they tossed my yellow-beige sticker book in the black garbage bag where every­one emp­tied their plates. It was in front of all the guests, but no one said a thing.

I pre­tended not to care. I climbed the stairs to my room with my chest out. Then I spent the week­end crying.

We never spoke about it again.

Years later, I remem­ber my dad open­ing the trunk of the Honda, and under­neath the car­pet­ing was my book of stick­ers. That heavy, yellow-beige book, with rain­bow stripes. They were too cheap to actu­ally throw it out, but too stub­born to go back on their threat.

I wish I could say that it was an iso­lated inci­dent, but it wasn’t.

My rela­tion­ship with my par­ents, my mom espe­cially, was typ­i­fied by this sort of cruel puppeteering.

Pat once told me that he didn’t under­stand just how over­bear­ing she was until he met her at my grad­u­a­tion, my uni­ver­sity grad­u­a­tion, when she harassed me about wear­ing my new glasses, my blue hooded jacket, try­ing to dress me like a doll. I was never impor­tant or nec­es­sary to them. I was the fam­ily pet, the acces­sory dog.

Nowadays, when I meet some­one new, the con­ver­sa­tion invari­ably drifts to the sub­ject of where I was born (believ­ing it to be some Asiatic coun­try) and where my par­ents are. My answers are always the same: Toronto, and I don’t know. I stopped talk­ing to my mom, and my dad doesn’t care enough to call.

Most peo­ple have a knee-jerk reac­tion. They tell me that my mom is still my mom, believ­ing that all par­ents inno­cently do the wrong things every now and then.

Then I tell them this story or any of the other mil­lion like it (if it’s an emo­tional day or week or month, I swal­low the lump in my throat), and they imme­di­ately under­stand why I cut her out of my life like a can­cer­ous lump. They become defend­ers of my deci­sion when we meet some­one else and the two inevitable ques­tions are asked again.

Even though I’ve washed my hands of my par­ents, the men­tal abuse still haunts me.

I still have self-esteem issues with my diminu­tive size because they would always tell me, “Eat more. No one’s going to date you if you’re so skinny. Girls don’t like guys who are small. Girls like guys who are big.” Even though it’s been years since I’ve heard them, their words still ring in my ears.

I’ve tried to for­get it all, but a bit­ter hatred still lies in my heart like a stone. I don’t cry at tragic roman­tic movies, I cry at the scene when a father tells his son that he loves him. I could go on and on about what they’ve done. I’m still car­ry­ing around this emo­tional bag­gage, doing things like the Gerry Project to fix the dam­age they’ve done to my self-confidence. The truth is that I wish none of this affected me the way it does.

My mom is an empty shell of a woman now. A divor­cée in her fifties with­out hus­band or kin, and noth­ing to live for but her tele­vi­sion and her tabloids. I can’t help but think that she got what she deserved. Every day I expect a call, telling me that she’s killed her­self by over­dos­ing on sleep­ing pills and red wine. As for my dad, who knows what or how he’s doing.

Memories of my abu­sive par­ents and child­hood drive me to be a bet­ter per­son. Now I know what exactly not to do with my kids. My par­ents never encour­aged me or took an inter­est in my life. They’ve done noth­ing to make me who I am.

I owe them noth­ing, but the knowl­edge of what never to be or become.