Stolen Innocence: When I was only nine, I learned how harsh the world can be

“I caught my first glimpse of the real world when I was nine years old. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and I was on our front porch shooting a basketball into a cardboard box when, suddenly, a voice asked, “Your mom home?”
I looked up to see four Asian men towering over me. One had a Domino’s Pizza cap; another, I remember, wore sandals. I thought they were friends of my parents. My mother was in the house with my two younger sisters and our one-year-old cousin, for whom she was baby-sitting. I called her.
The strangers didn’t wait to be invited in. One walked through the front door and into our house. Confused, I stood between the remaining men and the door, trying to block them. Then I heard my mother scream and felt the blood drain from my body.
One of the men shoved me through the door. Inside, they drew the curtains and cast the room in darkness.
I saw my mother. Tears streamed down her cheeks, onto a gloved hand clasped over her mouth. Pressed against her head was the silver barrel of a gun.
My mother pried her attacker’s hand lose, and struggled with the gun — screaming, sobbing, cutting her hand on the barrel as she tried to twist it away. But he was stronger, and another man was upon her. Her hands bled. Someone was pulling me away. They got her into a choke hold and dragged her, gasping for air, into a bedroom. I managed to free myself from the man tugging at me, and followed them to the door. There, I saw my mom crawl over the bed to a window. She opened it, and tried to scream for help, but produced only a muffled noise as a hand covered her mouth and hauled her down to the bed. She flailed her arms and legs with stifled shrieks, but it was hopeless. One of her attackers forced a knee into her neck and held down her hands. Through her tears, my mom saw me at the door, and screamed my name. One of the men took a blanket from the bed, covered, and pinned her down with it. Then, the door closed and I saw no more.

We heard my mom’s cries
They made me sit in a circle with my little sisters and our cousin while a man watched us. We listened to my mother’s frantic cries in the bedroom.
“Your mom will be OK,” said the man, “Be quiet… Don’t cry… Behave and they won’t do anything to her.”
I felt numb. One of them appeared from the kitchen with a butcher knife, and went into the bedroom . My sisters wailed louder. Their crying upset our cousin so much that my sisters had to hold him closely to calm him.
“Shhhh…shhhh,” said the man with us. I fell to my knees and begged him not to kill my mom, not to hurt her, to just leave us alone. I begged like a wretched creature for my mother’s life.
And, I noticed his face for the first time. It was half in shadow and damp with sweat, the face of a man a few years older than I am today.
His face had the look of someone who had given up on the world, who had given up on himself — a man who had given up on life. His eyes were so sad, so guilty, and ashamed; he said, “I’m sorry,” without speaking it. And, at that instant, I knew that he, too, was afraid.
In the bedroom, my mother moaned as if she were dying. My sisters hiccuped, unable to cry anymore. The young man nervously flipped through my sister’s picture book. I stared at his sandals and his toes. The other men walked in and out of the living room, searching. We listened as furniture was turned upside-down.
I glanced at the VCR clock. We couldn’t hear our mother anymore. Then, the bedroom door opened and the other three men emerged. The young man remained crouched on the living room floor with us. One of the other men opened the front door with a gloved hand, and walked out. The second followed. The third was about to leave, but stopped and made a step toward our tiny circle. The young man who had stayed with us, covered us like a bird defending its nest, and glared at the other. Their eyes locked. I shivered. There was neither sadness nor guilt on this one’s face. I saw nothing in his eyes. He left.
The young man said, “Go free your mom,” stood up, and was gone. They had stolen $2000 from us.
My mother sobbed quietly on the floor, her face pressed against the rug, her hands and feet tied with telephone wires. The butcher knife rested beside her. Her wrists bled from the tightly bound wires.
I lived the next few months in absolute terror. Every loud noise sounded like a gunshot. Every stranger that looked Asian, and even some that didn’t, I suspected. When two detectives brought me to the police station to look through a book of Asian criminals, I identified more than four. I didn’t go out except to buy groceries with my mom. I stopped riding my bike, racing, and playing handball and freeze-tag with the neighborhood kids. I stopped laughing and joking with my friends. Those four men took more than money from us, they stole a piece of my life.
A few days after that Saturday, summer vacation ended, and school began again. My mom made me go. I told no one about what happened.
One day, my father visited our school counselor, and she called my sisters and I into her office. We accomplished little.

I felt so alone
I sat alone a lot—thinking, saying nothing.
For a while, I avoided eye contact when speaking to my mother. My grandfather had died two months before the attack. I felt the crushing weight of what my mother endured, like the weight of a stranger suffocating you under a blanket.
When the fear finally began to lessen, slowly, something else replaced it. Anger. Anger toward the four men. Anger toward myself. I was angry because of what they did, angry because I let them do it.
Why didn’t I lock the door? Why didn’t I just stay inside to watch TV that day? What if my aunt had returned sooner to pick up my cousin? What if someone had heard the screams? I asked questions like these endlessly. One question, however, kept me awake at nights. What if they had pulled the trigger?
Soon, I learned how to stop these questions from bothering me; I buried the event so deeply within a part of the brain I didn’t use, it was as good as forgotten. In fact, I was so good at forgetting, I forgot what the intruders looked like.
But, although their features disappeared from my memory, I couldn’t erase something about the expressions on two of the men — one man’s dismay and sorrow, the other’s cold emptiness; nor could I forget how I lost an innocent trust in the world that shaped these faces.

* * * * *

I am sitting on my bed next to the window. It’s cold and windy; yet, there are kids playing outside. Next to me is a pile of mail from colleges. I have to read them sometime.
I think about how excited my friends are as college deadlines approach. Many plan to leave for the east coast. It would be cool, they say, to finally be on their own, to experience the world without their parents hassling them.
Outside, I can see the neighbor’s kids kicking around a soccer ball. We don’t have fences dividing the houses, so the kids often cross into our backyard. There’s a loud bump against the wall, and my window rattles. I open it, and shout, “Don’t kick the ball into the wall!”
I remember how I used to get the old lady next door angry by playing handball against her wall. It would be cool to do that for one more day.”

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