When Lin receives the letter from her family, she tosses it aside and doesn’t see: her father as a teenage boy, having just lost both his parents, who, like hundred others in his village, were swept in yet another coup d’état of the warlords. When they saw that war was as insatiable and cyclical as the swarm of locusts storming through their farm each spring, their heads finally dropped under the firing guns, punctuated by a long, weary sigh.
So when her father found his refuge in a traveling army, he saw that it was his only way out. He did everything he could to rise through the ranks. He’d volunteer for any kind of work: he scrubbed greasy pots, scurried twenty miles each day for supplies, then carried on with the night’s patrol without even so much as a yawn. His youth and can-do-attitude quickly caught the attention of his captain and led him to real missions. With a couple of dangerous bombing attacks under his belt, a letter of recommendation in his pocket, and a handful of enemy or civilian lives buried in his conscience, he retreated to the military academy under hundreds of eyes burning with jealousy. Upon graduation, he was promoted to officer, which was the bare minimum to earn him an admission ticket to the social gatherings where perfumes donned by upper-class woman overpowered any residue of sulfur in his cap, he would see that he had finally escaped far enough from the war, and he would never have to participate in another combat.
When Lin never reads the letter from her family, she also doesn’t see: the sylphlike descend of her mother into her life as a debutante, the breeze she carried that night gliding over the dance floor ruffling the feathers of young officers. After the initial encounter, his courting began with a disorienting fervor, fueled as much by the necessity of holding on to her as his sinew would to bones, as by the promise of grandiosity from crushing fellow pursuers and claiming what was rightfully his. Although he was neither the most impressive in charm nor rank, and certainly not in possession, her mother gave her hand in marriage for he was soon to be stationed overseas and she craved for any opportunity to soar beyond the square sky of her family’s boxed yard.
They would proceed to bear two daughters, both born overseas, and a baby boy who died at two in his mother’s arms. Their eldest child was meek as a lamb, and it wasn’t until Lin that the family met their real challenge. Head-strong and feisty as her father, their relationship was like a game of seesaw, moments of sunshine were just warning signs before tipping into the next storm. They always had a rocky relationship until the rift finally teared the family apart: when she planned to join the opposing political party, he berated that her idealism was built on a city of sand and that she would only squander what he had painstakingly built for her, while she sneered that his belief would follow the first whiff of a winner and that he would sell his belief for scrap. By the time the letter arrives in Lin’s hand, her father has already vowed to disown her on several family gatherings, and she hasn’t spoken to them for nearly a year.
So when Lin never reads the letter from her family, she doesn’t see the foreboding from the sudden change in attitude of a proud man, she doesn’t see that her family is begging her to come back so they could all flee with their political party before they shut down the border, she doesn’t see that at the price of independence is an artificial yet definitive severance with her family, she doesn’t see that two decades will pass when she tosses the letter aside.
Stranger Under My Skin 