When do you ready the story, you just only write 300words summary and point all viewThanks so much
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When my father was a boy, his mother hung him.
Enter Tondo, a Manila slum, and stand in the kitchen of his
childhood home. Look up. The crusty knot is still there, tied around
the light fixture.
I imagine my father, Totoy, at ten. He hasn’t graduated yet to long
pants and shoes; his shorts and T-shirt are faded and soft from the
wear of three older brothers.
Totoy has done something to make his mother angrier than she’s
ever been. And now, Totoy balances on a stack of vegetable crates,
his neck connected to the ceiling. He’s wearing one rubber slipper,
and after slapping him on the ears, his mother has tucked the other
slipper under the bowtie of her apron. If Totoy becomes dizzy and
loses balance, or if Inang kicks the crates away, he might save
himself by curling his fingers around the rope and pulling against
the noose as if it were the mouth on a drawstring bag.
But his mother plants his palms to his hips and she looks up at him.
She doesn’t say a word, but Totoy hears, “Don’t try to save yourself.
Don’t you dare.”
He moves only his eyes and from this height, he notices his mother
is balding. Her gray hair is loosely bunned and there are triangles of
white flesh between the comb tracks. Her body is thick and
intimidating, fleshy roll layered onto fat, souvenirs from eleven
pregnancies. Totoy is number seven.
When she’s angry, she makes noise and breaks things and stares
until you look away. One by one, Totoy’s siblings return from school
and work, take a step into the kitchen, and right back out without a
word.
With a pestle, she pounds garlic in the mortar bowl. She raises the
butcher knife to her shoulder and chops heads from fish. She’ll fry
the bodies for dinner and save the heads and tails for soup the next
day.
What does Totoy think as he stands there watching his mother
prepare dinner? Does he believe he will taste that dinner? Perhaps
his mother will remove the crates and watch him suffocate and kick
until the knot is as tight as it will go; allow his siblings to play
tetherball with his body; or keep him tied there, hanging from the
kitchen.
His siblings are hiding, staying far away from the kitchen. Even if
his father could be found—perhaps he is playing pool in a
neighborhood bar or perhaps he is earning money by taking a
passenger from the market to their home on the sidecar of his
tricycle—Totoy’s father wouldn’t save him. Mother knows best, and
she tells him, “I’m doing this because you’re my son. You need to
learn right from wrong.”
Totoy doesn’t know this yet: he will survive. Fifteen years later, he
will have me, a daughter. But he will never forgive his mother, and
half a century later, he won’t attend her funeral. Totoy will try his
best not to abuse his children. But he’s his mother’s son. He will.
Grace Talusan immigrated from the Philippines as a child. She
teaches writing at Tufts University and Grub Street Writers.
…
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