To continue along the path of self-analysis that I started with on the last blog, I’ve decided to take a look at one of the most defining moments of my life. Originally, this blog was supposed to be about all the things that have caused me some sort of trauma, negative things that still stick out in my mind. The only problem with that is while there are a lot of little ones, they are so little and so insignificant, I feel it would do a disservice to mention them in the same breath as the one moment in my life that I replay over and over again. I’ve gone over this situation with therapists and friends before, but I don’t remember every just laying it out there like this, so I figured if I put it down, it might have some positive effect, or it may do nothing, but at least there’s something happening here.
The incident happened toward the end of 6th grade. After so many years, I don’t even remember the exact date anymore, I just remember it being some time in May of 1993. I was still 11 years old. I’ve tried several times to just forget it, but over time, I’ve found it healthier to just confront it. It wasn’t a particularly memorable day. The weather wasn’t extra nice or bad, the day leading up to what happened wasn’t interesting in any way. The things that I remember most are seeing my grandmother the morning of, and walking down the block and seeing the apartment I lived in during that time in full view… as a burnt out wreck. There were fire trucks everywhere, police cars, soot covered people, and that smell of burnt everything in the air.
Up until that point, I had been spending some time at a friends house, because it was a half day (if I remember correctly), and I didn’t head home until much later in the day because I was playing video games. I attempted several times to call home, but kept getting a busy signal. This was a time before call waiting was more or less included for free, so I thought that the phone might’ve been off the hook, as that had happened a few times before. I thought nothing of it, so I wasn’t really too worried. When I got home, and saw for myself what had happened, I honestly had no idea what to do. I looked around for someone I knew, and that ended up being the father of one of my friends who happened to work at the hospital near where I lived. He was standing outside, just sort of gaping at the building, and when I went up to him, I remember asking something along the lines of, “What happened? Oh crap, did anyone get my games out?”
Yeah… that’s what occurred to me to ask at that moment, whether or not anyone had saved my video games. My friend’s father just looked at me for a moment, and brought me over to my parents who were a little further down the block. My dad was covered in soot, wearing shorts, and suddenly the day just seemed colder. My mom pulled me aside and asked where I had been all this time, and when I told her, she actually seemed glad. She had said she knew it was a half day, and thought I might have been home at the time the fire had started. That’s the only time when it occurred to me, “Wait… no one was home right? Where’s grandma?” That’s when they told me that she had been caught in the fire, and that my dad had helped pull her out of the apartment through the window, the same window that not too long before had child safety bars put in, which would have made her escape that much more difficult.
I was sent to stay with my friend while everyone figured out what the next step was. I would later find out she was in the hospital with third degree burns over 80% of her body. My parents told me they were hopeful at first, because the burns weren’t around her chest or too much on her head, so they thought maybe she could pull out of it. They kept telling me that things would be alright. I attempted to see her at the hospital once, but when I got to the front desk, they told me that I wasn’t allowed in because I was so young, and they were worried it might frighten me, and that I might cause a disturbance. When I was told that, I was both a little upset and a little relieved. From what my parents had told me, they said that I might not recognize her because of the burns, and the treatments she had been through. So I sat in the car, waiting for about half an hour or so while my parents visited my grandmother.
About 3 weeks or so after the fire, someone called my friend’s parents, and told them that my grandmother had died. I remember I was eating a popsicle at the time, and I just sort of froze with it in my mouth. I walked to the bedroom, sat down on the bed behind my friend as he was playing Street Fighter II on the Super Nintendo, and just said “My grandma’s dead…” He looked at me for a second, a little sad, and then his mom came in the room and started talking to me about attending the funeral. That’s basically when I lost it, saying how much I didn’t want to go. I started thrashing around on the bed, crying, wailing, screaming at the top of my lungs that I didn’t want to go, that they couldn’t make me. I was told it was my responsibility to go because I was her grandson through my father’s line, and it’s important because of Chinese tradition. I wanted no part of it, I didn’t care, I just didn’t want to be there.
Eventually, my friend’s parents calmed me down, and I accepted that I had to be there. The funeral was surreal in some ways. I don’t remember much of it, because I more or less kept my head down, but what I remember most about it was the wailing of her friends. It was such a tragic death, because she had only came to the US to visit us from Vietnam for a little while, and no one ever thought something like this was possible. It scared me, and it saddened me, because of how terrible everyone sounded. I could hear the heartbreak in their voices.
After the funeral was over, I continued to live apart from my family for some time. Until the end of 6th grade, which was about another month or so, I stayed with my friend in the Bronx. During this time, my family was staying in a hotel (which coincided with my staying at my friend’s), then they eventually got put into a temporary shelter while they found a new place to live. At that point, the shelter where they put us in was somewhere in the South Bronx, and it was in a sketchy neighborhood (to put it politely) so my parents decided to send me down to my uncle’s, and my brother to a different aunt’s place. I ended up moving in with my uncle down in Brooklyn, where I stayed with him, his wife, and their three kids. I was the oldest out of all of them, by about 8 years, but I think I ended up just being a burden to them. I remember feeling just so awkward down there, like I was only there because no one else would take me. I think they tried their best, but they already had three kids, and I just ended up being another mouth to feed and another kid to watch, so I’m not sure how enthused they were about that.
Eventually, when school started up, I was moved back with my brother. I was starting a nearby junior high, so it made sense for me to commute from there instead of Brooklyn. Eventually, during that year, after moving out of my aunt’s to a temporary room across the street from the school, we finally got our new apartment on the upper west side. This was before all of the current renovations, so it was still a bit sketchy, but nowhere near as bad as the place in the Bronx, and since it was on its way up, it turned out to be a great place to live.
Now, those were the circumstances surrounding the fire and the death of my grandmother. I think it took quite some time for all of the shock to settle in and really affect my brain. Over time, I started blaming myself for her death. Not too long before the fire, my grandmother had asked me whether or not I thought she should stay. She had been there for a month or two, and was thinking about staying to help my parents watch us. My mom had helped her settle in a bit, and got her some seamstress work, so she was contributing to the household, and seemed to genuinely enjoy spending time with her grandsons. I liked her, so I told her yeah, it’d be nice if she stayed longer. Because of that innocent statement, for the longest time, I felt as though I had contributed greatly to my grandmother’s death. I felt that if I had instead said no, she would have left and never been caught in the fire, and she would never have had to die. Looking at it from an adult’s point of view now, it seems ludicrous to think that I could have possibly thought it was my fault, but at that time, I could only think about what could have been. I tried to push past it, tried to ignore that thought wiggling around in the back of my head, but I always felt some great guilt for it.
As I got older, I went through some other things, which would eventually get me into therapy. I may tell that story sometime, but for now, it was in therapy where a couple of realizations came to light. You may have already realized what it might have been from reading an earlier passage. During much of the time after the fire, I had very little contact with my actual family. My therapist helped me to realize that for the longest time, I had felt abandoned by them, and that helped to explain the strange relationship that had come to form with my family for all the years after that. I was really distant from them, and especially from my extended family for quite some time up to that point. I never wanted to participate in anything, and I was routinely the only one who wasn’t at family gatherings. Up until that point, it had never occurred to me why those things had happened the way they did. Why was I apart from the rest of the family all that time?
Eventually, after some confrontations with family, and some explanations, I found out that it would have been harder on me at the time if I had stayed with them. They were dealing with all of the post-fire paperwork and various bureaucratic things, and would not have had much time to watch after me. There were some other things involved to, but since then, I’ve made my peace with everyone involved. However, despite having dealt with the trauma, it left some indelible marks on my being.
Primarily, I am now deathly paranoid when I can’t reach someone immediately. I always worry the worst has happened, and that I wasn’t there to somehow prevent it or to help. Secondly, I hold the people who are important to me much closer than I think is normal, because I’m always afraid of losing them. Third, I try my best to tell people how I really feel about them, because I never got the chance to tell my grandma how much I loved her, and to this day, I still regret not having that opportunity. I want to make sure I never take anyone for granted and not let them know.
There are some other things that are possibly related. I’m pretty risk adverse, which while it may not be directly related, since her death wasn’t caused by some stupid risk, is still a matter of preventing something bad from happening if I can. I’m also very blunt, which goes hand in hand with that whole “Don’t take people for granted thing” because I don’t want to miss the opportunity to say something that I feel needs to be said.
To this day, that moment still defines much of who I am. I feel as I’m more focused on what’s important because of it, but I still wish it had never happened. I often wonder what my grandmother would have thought of me had she the chance to see me grow up. I just hope she would be proud, and I hope she knows that even after all these years, I still miss her.
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