American Dream.

My parents and I never had the kind of relationship that I always longed for. The Leave It to Beaver type. No, I was not blessed to be surrounded by such warm and comforting people. I was born into a stereotype.

You see, my father at one point in his life had decided that the military was the best career choice. And for a white guy growing up in a predominately black neighborhood in rural Texas, it was. He went from smuggling Mexicans across the border to shooting M-16s at targets in the desert. It was, as he says, the best days of his life.

Not too far into his career, he was stationed in South Korea. Like most men at the time, it was a good way to meet women who wanted to move to the ominous United States. To live the “American Dream”, rags to riches with a major focus on the riches. From what I’ve been told, this time in my father’s life was spent working hard and making new acquaintances. Learning as much Korean as he could to impress the ladies that he so innocently thought were interested in him for who he was and not what his rank was. He had a routine down where he would come back to the barracks from working in the city and pass-through a little restaurant to get dinner. The owner of the restaurant grew fond of him and soon introduced him to a nice Korean women who was very much interested in learning English. Or so the line goes. And there you have it, the politically correct version of how my parents met. The version that I briefly tell strangers and friends alike when they ask me, “What are you”?

The real story, is of course, not so perfectly packaged. My parents did meet in Korea and they were introduced by a women who was in charge of a restaurant. But what most people don’t know is that my mother was a “office woman” as she calls it. A woman who catered to the wealthy. Someone who makes sure that the men have a good time. This is, of course, all based on what my father has told me. I asked her once what she did before she married my father and she told me that she worked in an office for a while. That she was very good at typing and numbers. So, ok, she was an “office woman”, whatever that may translate to in modern times I’d prefer not to speculate.

My mother has never been someone to hold her tongue. She was a very brazen woman. Never afraid to tell me that I should “never marry someone like your Dad!” and that she had only married him because “American soldiers were rich!” or that she just really wanted to come to the U.S. to “live the American Dream.” Though she didn’t know many English words, she knew the right ones to put together to trigger something in my father. Whether it was for the pure manipulation factor of because she was bored, my mother knew how to make his blood boil.

And boil it did. My father could best be described as, bipolar. From happy memories of baking everything from brownies to pies to the surreal recollections of tears running down my face as I watched him wrap his fingers around my mother’s throat just tight enough to hear the air from her lungs gargling with the spit in her mouth until there wasn’t any noise at all.

I suppose we were doomed from the beginning. Two people from two completely different worlds coming together for two absolutely opposite reasons.

I used to pray that I was adopted. That I wasn’t really their blood. That somehow, through some miracle of God had occurred and my body was placed into the womb of someone that I didn’t belong to. But a birthmark that both my mother and myself have, ruin all hopes of belonging to another.

Don’t pity her, you don’t even know her. I’ll introduce more of her and my father later on.