To tear apart the stone walls that envelope my parents' house - isolated from its immediate neighbors, from the surrounding development, from the richly upper middle class American community whose heart in which it sits - is to reveal a boiling, fiery pot of bitterness, guilt, unspoken resentment, and a twisted love so strong that it fuels the most intimate hatred. There is pain in these walls, masked by a facade of feigned normalcy, covered by pointed humor about multiculturalism, but pain all the same.

It is the pain of negligence, of avoidance. Of too much implicit love and not enough spoken love, encouragement, and recognition. It is the private, torturous pain of a boy who recognized his own perceived ugliness at too young an age, and hid his secret self from the world until he turned to the very people who were meant to nurture and support and they saw him to be a monster, a deviation. It is the indulgent, self-destructive pain of the only girl, the spoiled princess who is yet marked to hate and scar her mind and body forever because she wasn't loved the way she needed. It is the escapist pain of the youngest who only ever yearned to flee a world in which he was never good enough and veil himself behind layers of materialism, anything to place an impenetrable divide between him and home.

Most of all, it is the pain of cultures - old world, new world, and the tricky in-between world in which no one speaks the same language, no one body governs, and olive branches are continually lost on the imparted because we are all so shriveled and shrouded in the calloused folds of our own hurt that we cannot allow penetration for the irreconcilable fear that we will be forever lost, our insides spilling out for each other to see in a way that is simultaneously premature and long overdue. It is the pain of two aged dreamers who have come too far to return but not quite far enough to belong, and they don't recognize the children who have sprung forth from their labor and their implicit love, because these children beg for the explicit, they plead for some acknowledgment that they are worth something, they are too much, they are selfish rather than selfless, they are foreigners.

Inside the walls of my parents' house, indictments fly, hearts break. Tears fall but only surreptitiously and only after our throats are raw and lungs are spent exchanging violences, and a man who was subjected to endless rites of discipline training in youth feels so much impatience and rage that he has never learned to properly channel that spoons buckle from the force at which they hit the floor. Chopsticks snap like brittle twigs. The innocent and helpless kitchen drawers, cabinet doors, dishwasher latch bear the brunt of his adrenaline. His wife has since retreated to the bedroom, a room whose furnishings and walls have perhaps seen the most private pain of all. The lone foreigner watches her father in his assault, his glasses slipping down his nose, ratty flannel shirt hanging open at the tails, and is frozen in place. Her body knows no other instinct but to damage itself now but for fear of acting on it she stands, immobile, brain numbed as guilt, regret, and finally surrender wave through her.

I surrender to these walls, and the invisible fortress that surrounds them. I am a foreigner in my own house and in the eyes of my parents, whom I love so fiercely that its magnitude escapes my conscious comprehension, whose approval I so doggedly crave that I resent them when I fail myself, who will never fully appreciate the words I long to dedicate to them because we speak wholly different languages. We have been taught to maintain a pretense of tranquility, of functionality on an outside face, to tuck away our secrets and lock them up so tightly in hopes that they will vanish into a vacuum no bigger than a speck - but these stone walls know the sutured truth. They speak louder than all of us can possibly scream, cry the saltiest of salt tears. I am the product of all they have encapsulated, and as long as I live here I will never conquer them.