It took me a few tries to find my mother on Google in 2017. My difficulty stemmed from the fact that she had both a Chinese name and a Western name, and, although one or the other often sufficed, there had been occasions when she’d used them together in a kind of portmanteau, meant to account, I suppose, for all the parts of her history. Additionally, I didn’t know whether she and my father were still married or if adding “Ong” to my query would be counterproductive.

In 1988, when I was twenty, I left our home, in Los Angeles’s Koreatown—the neighborhood where my family had settled after arriving from the Philippines, a few years before—and it would be more or less accurate to say that I have not looked back. Cutting ties with every single member of my family was the best decision of my life. When I Googled my mother in 2017, I was not looking for a rapprochement or hoping to forgive her so that I could leave my formative griefs behind and finally graduate into adulthood. Although I was almost fifty, I was every bit as irresponsible as a child. I was living hand to mouth, barely clearing my low monthly margins. But, as a writer, I was interested in outcomes. I suddenly wondered what had happened to my mother, as if she were one of my characters. And, of course, I was counting on Google to answer the most important question: Was she still alive?

In my childhood, my father was a cheerful drunk—until he wasn’t. We children were a frequently fractious brood, sometimes gleefully so, sometimes savagely. And the burden of disciplining me, my brother, and my three sisters—although it seemed that I was the one most frequently made an example of—often fell to my mother. I could write a version of this essay in which I detail all my mother’s high crimes and misdemeanors, but it’s enough to say, for now, that she was a master of corporal punishment. Sometimes, as she carried out her frenzied rituals, she would wail, as if the belts and broom handles and rulers were in the hands of the other party. (The sickening recognition I felt when I read the stories in Alice Munro’s collection “The Beggar Maid,” in which the protagonist recalls being walloped by her father during a turbulent childhood, paradoxically made me want to keep reading, rather than stop.) I was not the only child in my Chinese Catholic community to be subjected to this disciplinary system, but I have often wondered if I was the only one to have answered it, in adulthood, with a steely self-expulsion. (Years later, when my first novel was published, I received, in care of my publisher, a letter from my family—no sender was identified, but the return address in California was a tipoff. I ripped it up at once, without opening the envelope, and left it in the trash can, a few feet away from my mailbox.)

My mother must have inherited her belief that sparing the rod would spoil the child from her own mother, who was, to my mind, the reigning gorgon of our family. (She immigrated to the U.S. a few years after we did and lived with my aunt and her family.) Almost nothing made her happy, but, if one of us children fell while capering, the most malicious half smile would creep onto her face, which, in old age, seemed brined in her thousand expressions and practices of hatefulness. Reader, I’m loath to admit it, but I often resemble my grandmother: I am a grouch, a grouser; children are not my favorite people. Life being a comedy, of course, you never escape even those folks whose skulls you have imaginatively crushed in your writing; their signature epithets and reflexive unkindness may suddenly erupt from inside your own skull.

Regarding my mother, Google eventually directed me to the website of an L.A. cemetery, where, in loving tribute to her memory, family photographs had been compiled for a video montage. My mother had died in 2014, at the age of seventy-eight—of what, the website didn’t say, although it might have been useful to have the medical information for my own future. It turned out that there was now a new generation; grandchildren sat on my parents’ laps and stood around them. There were also photographs from my own childhood. The images showed ordinary, dreary people. You would not have been able to tell that the boy in some of them had been beaten again and again, singled out for being mouthy and—that catchall designation—“disobedient.” Nor would you have been able to tell which of the adults had been the happy hitter, the person who would remain, even in death, the chief antagonist of this boy’s life. ♦