Family Square Part I

After listening to Rand list the dysfunctionalities of her family, I couldn't help but think of my own. Several weeks ago, Mike Ryan asked me a question about the breakdown of the nuclear family as the result of polygamy. While I don't have any anecdotes of polygamy to offer, despite spending 3 years in Utah, I have plenty to say about the breakup of a nuclear family.

Let's just take my family, the only family I know and a family I often feel I do not know at all. I have to say that I never had a nuclear family: My dad left for the US before I was born. My mom left when I was barely one year old. It was not until I has two years old that my "family" met together for the first time.

Given these fractured beginnings, I suppose my family is surprisingly functional. Yes, for more than half a decade we functioned as any normal Asian family would: exclusively in the Chinese community. Despite this self-imposed segregation, we staked out our lives and I went off to elementary school. The second "breakup" was when my dad moved to Boston on his own for a job opportunity while my mom and I stayed back in Connecticut. I only remember this year and a half in fuzzy details; if it frayed our family ties, I didn't notice it then.

The real breakdown of my family came as I entered junior high. I suppose that such strains in the family are unavoidable with the existence of a budding adolescent in the house, but this was compounded by the birth of my brother and my grandparents' second arrival from China. Used to the reigning freedom of a single child often left alone at home, I viewed both of these intrusions with a great measure of hostility. Once, I was the crowning top of a family triangle, now I was relegated to the lowliest corner of a hexagon.

I was never an attention-seeking child, but I felt at once neglected and overobserved during that period. The neglect as all ears were attuned to the piercing screams of my brother; the overobservation as the number of eyes in my house just doubled.