She thought about it for a few minutes and said, “Just call me Tiny.”
On April 12, I read about Tiny’s childhood encounter with her cousin, who had sexually abused her for six years, on the microblog of a charity that promotes women’s freedom from sexual violence.
Through the charity, I contacted her.
1
Like all girls her age, 19-year-old Xiao Xiao loves sweets, loves to follow stars, is a heavy reliance on Weibo, and “recently aims to lose weight, so she eats less for dinner”.
Xiao Xiao comes from a single-parent family. It was because she was a girl that her father left home the year she was born, and by the time he came home again, he asked her mother for a divorce.
After her father left, her mother did not exactly take on the responsibility of raising her either. Since she had been working outside the home for a long time, she placed Tiny in her aunt’s home from the first grade. Tiny’s aunt also works outside the home and comes home once a week; she is also a single mother who divorced more than a decade ago because her husband cheated on her and raised her son alone – but unlike Tiny’s parents, her aunt’s contact with her ex-husband is not broken.
In the six years that Tiny lived with her aunt, her mother never paid her a penny for living expenses, and her aunt never gave her niece any good looks. The aunt often accused Tiny of being a “freeloader”, which Tiny could not refute and even felt guilty about.
At that time, her aunt was busy with work and rarely communicated with Tiny, so the only family member Tiny could talk to was her cousin. The cousin was 8 years older than Tiny and was the recognized king of the children in her neighborhood, so the neighbors were willing to let him take their children to play.
When she first arrived at her aunt’s house, Tiny trusted her cousin, even with a bit of reverence.
As the only boy in the family, cousin has been coddled by the entire extended family since he was a child, and every dish at the family banquet was served to cousin’s liking, “You may not quite understand, but in my hometown of Chaoshan, boys just get to enjoy the highest status. I started out respecting him and listening to him.”
During the day, my aunt was very strict with Tiny, and when she scolded, her mouth often said, “The XX children were beaten and went to Tsinghua; the XX children were never beaten and only went to junior college.” When Tiny went to college, her aunt would often take credit for “teaching” her a lesson: “It’s all because I beat you when you were little!”
Whenever she heard this, Tiny’s mind would go back to the time when her aunt beat her so hard that she couldn’t stand up and crawled all over the floor in pain. After each beating, the wounds were so hot and painful that she could only stand up to do her homework and had to sleep on her stomach.
But to my cousin, my aunt did not even mention the words “filial son under the rod”, she never chastised her son, instead, she did whatever she was asked.
The cousin is the key person who decides whether Tiny will be beaten or not – most of the time, the aunt knows her niece’s weekly performance through her son, and if the cousin praises Tiny a few times, Tiny’s day will be a little better, and if the cousin says Tiny is not good, then Tiny is waiting for a beating from the aunt.
The mother was indifferent to Tiny, but the mother-son relationship between the aunt and cousin was very cordial. Auntie came home every week and slept in the same bed with her adolescent cousin at night, and often asked Tiny to be closer and closer to him. If Tiny sat side-by-side with her cousin on the couch, her body was a little far away, and her aunt would ask her, “Sit closer to your cousin.” Even if Tiny moved a little to her cousin’s side, her aunt would still be displeased, “Go sit in your cousin’s arms, brother and sister, you have to be closer.”
In between interviews, I asked a researcher at the Center for Child Studies at Beijing Normal University, who wished to remain anonymous, for help in trying to understand more accurately the psychological state of Tiny after she had been hurt – “Generally in single-parent families, sometimes mothers place their missing emotions on their children. As a result, the attachment between mother and child is likely to be more intimate than in a normal family. The aunt’s demands on Tiny are more like a way to compensate for her son’s lack of companionship and to please him, but the motives are beyond the guesses of outsiders and only she knows.”
However, no matter what happened to Tiny behind closed doors at her aunt’s house over the years, outside, everyone still thinks she has a “good brother”: he is a good student in the eyes of the teachers, a good boy in the eyes of the neighborhood, and a handsome senior in the eyes of her classmates. Sometimes he would wait for her in front of her school, pick her up and take her home from school, sometimes he would take her bag over her shoulder, sometimes he would hand her a snack that he had already bought, in short, everything he did made her classmates envious: “Your brother is too good, right?
Only Tiny would tremble when she saw her cousin. “My elementary school was far from my aunt’s house, a half-hour walk, and I would later walk by myself.” She says, “I took that half hour as the happiest thing in those days because I could stay by myself.”
2
When she thinks back to her elementary school days, that “slimy” feeling comes back and wraps around her – dark, damp, and smelly – a depressing feeling that clung to her then tender body for six years and could not be washed away.
I asked her, “Do you remember the very first scene?”
“Very clear, as if I have no other things in these 6 years of elementary school, only these.”
For the first grade entrance ceremony, you had to wear a white shirt with a plaid skirt. The skirt was beautiful, and the pleats spread out like waves as she walked, moving back and forth in the air. 7-year-old girl, her limbs were like new shoots, soft, white, and drenched in sunlight, reminding her of all things beautiful.
When she got home from school that day, no one was home, and Tiny didn’t know what to do, and her aunt didn’t allow her to watch TV, so she sat in the living room. The cousin also returned home, as usual, looked at her several times, did not say anything, went straight into his room.
The house was quiet, and the quiet was broken by the sound of my cousin pushing open the door to his room again. He approached Tiny step by step, followed by hugging her and ordering her to take off her clothes.
“I was really …… too young to know what it is to be male and female.”
At that time, Tiny had no sense of gender and did not think much about it, so she obediently and ignorantly took off her white shirt and plaid skirt on the living room sofa, and then her cousin’s hands started touching her body non-stop, she did not know what those touched parts meant, and even felt a little bored.
Then her cousin made more excessive demands on Tiny, and the young one, though blinded, knew in her heart that it was a bad thing and refused. So, for the first time, her cousin sexually assaulted her and followed her lead saying, “I’ve kissed you here, you have to kiss mine too.” Still trusting her cousin, she was thinking, “This thing brother did, I have to do it too.”
Hell then opened its entrance to Tiny. From the early autumn evening in her plaid dress, Little knew neither that the nightmare would be six years long, nor that it would affect her for many more years to come.
“Many details I don’t even want to remember anymore, it’s too scary.”
The process of sexual awareness from nothing to something seemed long, depressing and vague to Tiny, and it seemed to be all insightful in an instant.
At first, she only vaguely felt that what her cousin did to her should be done between men and women, between adults, and did not know whether it was good or bad. But her cousin repeatedly stressed to her that she should not tell anyone, and his furtive look and her own physical instincts made her realize that this seemed to be a bad thing, not to be seen.
It’s not that Xiao Xiao did not resist, her first resistance occurred in the third grade. At that time, children’s sexuality was beginning to emerge, and girls gathered in groups and whispered, “Girls don’t play with boys, they’re bad.” Teachers also began to warn appropriately, “Don’t get too close to boys.”
Tiny also punched and kicked her cousin for the first time when he violated her, but her arms and legs were quickly brought under control by her cousin. the 9-year-old’s tiny resistance only made him feel his authority was being challenged in the eyes of his almost-adult cousin.
The cousin huffed and scolded Tiny: “You still want to hit me? Are you as strong as I am?” With that, her cousin choked her so hard that she could not move. The weak Tiny could only obey her cousin’s orders and could not even give her an impatient look, otherwise she would have to suffer from this choking sensation again.
What Tiny didn’t expect was that this resistance would cause her to fall into an even deeper abyss. If the first time that cousin used violence on Tiny was just to control her hands and feet, but later, cousin seemed to get more pleasure in the violence, even if she no longer dared to resist, cousin’s violence never stopped, Tiny will be forced to kneel, will be choked, say some unpleasant words …… at first Tiny will cry, but the more she The more she wept, the more exhilarating her cousin would be, and the more violence she had just suffered would be repeated – and then Little learned to grit her teeth and hold back her tears.
All these years, the elders of the family continued to praise her cousin for being honest, smart and the pride of the family, while he methodically changed his clothes and animal skins between day and night. No one in the family knew that there were sets of pornographic comics hidden in the depths of the cousin’s bookcase, and no one would know that the cousin would force Tiny to read online pornography with him and force Tiny to read it to him.
When Xiao Xiao was in the fourth grade, a family gathering of relatives for dinner, we drink wine and talk in a lively atmosphere, cousin seemed to be in the elders’ pampering that day some forgetfulness, half-jokingly said to Xiao Xiao pretending to be fierce words.
But when Tiny heard his cousin’s words, his body reflexively flopped to the ground and knelt down, as it usually does when they are alone at his aunt’s house.
The elders looked at them strangely, not knowing what was happening between the “harmonious” siblings. My cousin was quick to explain that he had learned this from watching a lot of TV dramas, “Just that one, ‘The Return of the Pearl’!”
The cousin’s words were of course unconditionally believed by the adults, and the kneeling Tiny received another chastisement.
“A girl who grows up without the protection she deserves and is exposed to an environment where no one believes her and she is isolated for a long time will lead her to choose to submit to seclusion and to keep weakening the experience from her subconscious mind. Violent sexual assault may make her afraid to resist, but it is the prolonged isolation that will eventually lead her to give up her resistance.” The researcher analyzed.
For six whole years, the tiny elementary school years were like a ruin, overgrown with debris. Later, she told me that she could only feel that freedom of getting a moment of respite when both her aunt and cousin were out of the house. She would lock herself into a closet or build a hermetically sealed fortress with pillows and quilts and wrap herself up tightly. Her body curled up in a tight ball, the world was dark when she closed her eyes, the four walls pressed against her, there would be no room for another person, and only then did she feel safe.
3
Mother is also an unspeakable presence for Tiny.
“Mom thinks I’m dragging her down.” Little said, “She once told me that when I was little, a very rich man liked her, but because of me, they both blew it off.”
After she began boarding at her aunt’s house, her mother became more distant from Little, seeing her only occasionally each year, without much conversation between mother and daughter, and without her mother’s interest in learning about her daughter’s life.
It’s not that Tiny didn’t mention to her mother what her cousin had done to her, but she never believed her.
After her first attempt to rebel against her cousin in third grade, Tiny also mentioned her situation to her mother for the first time after meeting her, but because it was difficult to talk about it, she only said the word “touch” to her mother – “My brother keeps touching me. .”
Her mother completely ignored these words.
The three years she spent at her aunt’s house had already given her an extremely inferior, sensitive, and people-pleasing personality: when she walked into a room, she would first observe the expressions of the people, judging whether they showed any dislike for her; she would restrain her words and actions, fearing that she would say something that would offend others, fearing that she would make them unhappy; she was afraid of being disliked by others, so she forced herself to be outgoing and cheerful, funny and seemingly generous and cheerful without any worries – but in private, when she was alone, she rarely smiled.
But her disguised good looks became a reason not to trust her in the eyes of her mother, who was not close to her: “She thought I was so cheerful, how could anything happen to me? She said that other people’s children could be fine, but there was absolutely no way I could be fine, and that what I said about being sexually abused by my cousin was just a way to seek attention.”
The small confession was not taken seriously by her mother, but instead, her aunt’s frequent bragging to her mother about how wonderful her cousin was made her mother more relaxed and slowly reduced the number of visits to her daughter, and eventually simply saw her only once a year.
The second time I mentioned my cousin to my mother was on the train home. That year, Tiny finally graduated from elementary school and was able to escape from the cage of her aunt’s house. She thought she would never see her cousin again, so she told her mother once again on the train what had happened to her over the years. This time, in order to make things clear, unlike three years ago, when she had made light of the situation, she prepared herself and carefully looked up the relevant vocabulary, using two very harsh and professional words: “molestation” and “sexual assault”.
The mother was shocked – not because of what had happened to her daughter in the past six years, but because she simply did not believe her daughter’s words – how could a child make up such a sensational lie in order to gain the attention of adults: “Did you Did you read something you shouldn’t have read? How can you slander your aunt and cousin like that? How good they are to you, they raised you for 6 years for nothing, and this is how you treat them?”
At first, Xiao Xiao argued, but then she was denied by her mother: “You’re a child, with no breasts and no ass, who would be interested in you?
“My mother never believed in pedophilia.” Little told me helplessly during the interview that on that day in the cramped sleeper car of the train, her mother scolded her at length, despite the presence of outsiders, and forced her to go back and apologize to her aunt.
After she got home and called her aunt to apologize, she began to wonder to herself: was it really all her fault?
She decided not to talk to her mother anymore, but only to carve every bit of suffering she had ever suffered physically into a real scar, engraved in her heart.
4
When she started junior high school, Tiny began to live with her mother. Later, her mother didn’t want to take her with her anymore and “left me with my dad”.
The father had rebuilt his family and had a son who had passed away. Tiny lived in her father’s house for a year, and she did not have an easy time that year, “staying up every night and going to school to sleep during the day” – staying up at night because the room she was in was unlocked, and there were two males in the house.
Because of the psychological shadows from her childhood, Tiny found that she began to fear not only strange males coming near her, but even her less familiar father unconsciously. She would stare every night, not daring to relax, sensitive, cranky, the slightest movement would trigger a violent reaction in her body.
One day, Tiny was really tired and fell asleep accidentally. When she woke up the next day, her stepmother said to her with special pleasure, “You know, yesterday your brother (father’s stepson) went to your room to cover you with a quilt ……”
Hearing this, little reflexes, immediately shivered and trembled more than, since then can not sleep at night.
A year later, due to her overly anxious and sensitive personality, her father could not stand it and “threw me back to my mother. She was like an object without an owner, a hot potato, tossed around between parents who were supposed to be close to each other.
I asked her, “If you had to choose again, would you rather go to Daddy’s house or Mommy’s house?”
She quickly answered me, “Daddy’s house – even if I can’t sleep all the time, it’s better than being beaten by mommy. Even though Daddy’s care for me is limited, he said he would never hit me.”
Talking about her father, the tiny emotion seemed calm. Her father was neither good nor bad, and always paid support, “If I were to score, it would be 45, after all, he was absent from my life for a long time.” Too distant to say much to her father, but she believes he would have protected her if she had told him what happened to her. But she also said that she did not want to tell her father about her cousin now, she was afraid that he would be sad and blame himself if he found out, and she intended to never let him know.
When she returned to live with her mother, Tiny was still very depressed. When her mother was unhappy, she would throw her out of the house. Without a place to go, Tiny could only crouch in front of the house, staring at the air and waiting, waiting until her mother was not angry anymore, then carefully knocking on the door and begging her to let her in.
It was not uncommon to be beaten by her mother. For example, if she accidentally broke a cup during New Year’s Eve and forgot to say “peace in the year”, she would be beaten by her mother in front of everyone until she was on her knees begging for mercy. But every time after beating Little, the mother will hug her again and again apologize: “Mom was wrong, mom did not mean to.”
“Sometimes she would say she loved me, that she was just too busy making money and rarely cared about me, but I couldn’t feel the love.”
In Little’s memory, her mother hardly ever did anything that moved her. When Little was in junior high school, her mother traveled to Hong Kong and brought her back a box of cookies. She finished the cookies, and the box was carefully put away and kept until now. But such memories seem to be gone beyond that. Sometimes her mother treated her a little better, making her feel less hateful, and the next moment, she might be slapped back to reality by her mother.
“I’ll tell you a very funny thing: after I went to college, she asked me if I was in love, and I said yes. As a result, she actually told me not to have premarital sex – she didn’t know that her daughter had bled years ago, a lot, a lot.”
5
Little had thought that the six years of elementary school would slowly dissipate with time, and that when she grew up and had no more contact with her cousin, she would no longer be under his control.
But in high school, a phone call from her cousin made her realize that the incident never seemed to pass.
The day the tiny phone call came, the number had not been saved, picked up, the moment she heard her cousin’s voice, she began to reflexively, like a bad chill.
The cousin asked, “How have you been?”
She gritted her teeth and forced herself to answer, “Yes.”
When her cousin added her to WeChat, she happened to see her cousin share an article about child sexual abuse. He was also morally appealing for the safety of children, like a clean outsider, as if he hadn’t caused what happened to Xiao Xiao, as if he was really just a good brother who had been reunited for a long time.
At that moment, all the nightmares swept back, the damp, dark, sticky touch wrapped back around Little, strangling her, making her unable to breathe, hiding under the covers and breaking down and crying.
The first thing you need to do is to show the author the article that your cousin had forwarded in his circle of friends (photo by the author)
Last winter break, Tiny met her cousin again. The once good-looking cousin seemed to have become very mediocre: mediocre face, mediocre work, everything was mediocre. When he saw Tiny, he acted very happy and normal, and could not see that he was the person who had been violent to Tiny.
The irony is that what happened to Tiny is still not believed by her relatives. The cousin was so perfect in front of his relatives that even his relationship history was a clean mess – only one girlfriend, who was about to get married, and who looked about the same age as Tiny in the photo.
When we met, my cousin sized up Tiny from head to toe several times and complimented him, “You’re getting prettier, you’re a big girl.” But Tiny could no longer force herself to pretend to be close to him; every second she saw him made her sick.
The mother at the side spoke up: “Why are you not close to your brother anymore? Didn’t you two used to be very close? I remember when you were a kid, you accused your brother of kissing you.”
Xiao Xiao couldn’t say anything. The mother may not even remember, the first time Xiao Xiao said “touch”, the second time said “molestation” and “sexual assault”.
During the New Year period, there were many people in the house and not enough beds, so at night, my mother arranged for Tiny to sleep with her cousin. The company’s main goal was to get the company to the point where it could be used as a platform for the company’s business.
In the end, Tiny could not resist the adults and was forced to lie in the same bed with her cousin. The first time I saw the cousin, I didn’t close my eyes all night, clutching the blanket tightly, my body was tense, I didn’t dare to come out, I was always on guard, once my cousin had turned over, she was electrocuted to protect herself.
The small understand that in this home, her scars may be repeatedly torn.
A few days before her cousin’s return, Tiny heard from her cousin that she had been in the same situation as herself. Before Tiny stayed at her aunt’s house, her cousin had also boarded at her aunt’s house and was sexually abused by her cousin. Years later, when she confided in her mother about her childhood, her cousin’s mother was furious and went to her aunt specifically to discuss the situation.
After that night, Tiny, as an adult, brings up the old story to her mother for the third time, her last attempt and the only thing she has left to look forward to from her mother. The mother was indeed taken aback, believing what had happened to her cousin, but still questioning her: “Did you see your brother do that to your sister and lie to me like that?”
The mother’s words, like a bullet, easily shattered Tiny’s feigned peace of mind.
“This is the last straw that broke the camel’s back, I’m afraid I’ll never get better.” I’m afraid I’ll never get better,” Little wrote in a submission to a charity.
“Do you really think your mom doesn’t believe you at all?” I asked.
“I think she may have believed a little, but weighing her sister and her daughter, her sister was obviously more important to her. She values family ties and loves to save face, and she’s very grateful to her aunt for raising me for six years. Maybe what happened to me is less important in the face of all that.”
The researcher analyzed, “The root cause of the tragedy also lies with the parents. If the parents were willing to teach attentively and help their cousin establish a correct value; if the parents were willing to listen to Tiny and care about her physical and mental safety; if any of the parents in this case were willing to pay attention to the relationship between sex and children, the tragedy would not have happened.”
“The parents are the biggest accomplices in the whole thing.”
6
Before contacting Tiny, I was worried that she would be too closed off, making it difficult to interview her. When I reached out to her, Tiny displayed a particularly strong desire to talk.
Tiny said to me, “I have to say it, I’ll die if I keep it in. I’m afraid that if I don’t tell others and keep this matter inside myself, one day I will forget about it because of time, and it will really become a non-event. I want to tell others, so that others with me to remember.”
During the interview, Tiny mentioned more than once: “Thank you for believing in me.” She was in an environment where there was never anyone she could talk to. After many denials and reprimands from her mother, she chose to keep quiet. The longer she remained silent, the more blurred her perception of herself would become, and she would even doubt whether these painful experiences were real, and repeatedly struggle with the question of whether she was responsible and at fault for the “sexual abuse.
But as her story unfolds, the impact of her childhood encounters on her character is omnipresent. “People habitually think that having experienced sexual abuse makes them abnormal. But in fact, people are resilient and self-repairing, and behaving normally is exactly what happens. And often it’s only when they’re dealing with something emotionally related that problems can arise.” The researcher told me.
For example, Tiny has yet to hold hands with her boyfriend after falling in love with him this year.
Tiny has always struggled with her ingratiating personality. She would smile reflexively when talking to her classmates, but when they turned their heads, she would immediately become expressionless. Friends who saw the change in her expression thought she was too deep-rooted and frightening, and she could only pale in her own defense: “I’m really not ……”
A particularly close friend in high school used to invite Tiny to his home for dinner. But the atmosphere at her friend’s house was too harmonious, and her parents were as respectful as each other, and they were particularly concerned about their daughter. Such scenes made her unable to resist the jealousy that led to the friendship eventually did not continue. She now feels guilty about her friend, but when she looks at other people’s happy families and thinks about her own lack of a home, she feels like a pinch.
After talking about what happened to her, Tiny still needs to go back to her life, continue to read and study, and talk to her friends. In her world, no one knows what she is going through, and most of the time, she doesn’t seem to have a single worry.
Talking about the future, she said with great certainty, “I will definitely leave here, I want to be independent sooner.”
But the past is all but irreparable.
Later, Tiny once showed me a small paragraph of her diary.
“If I could, and I mean if.
I wish I could have a normal childhood.
I want my mom and dad to come home from work and ask me about my school day.
I would also like to have my own room where I could put my favorite wallpaper and posters on the walls of my room.
I wish I had my own drawer with all the cute stuff I should have had growing up.
I wish I had someone to care, someone to love and someone to ask about my mental state when I was 3, 4, 5 and into my teens.
But now it’s too late to make up for it, and they don’t even know it needs to be made up.
Only I, through this messy but feverish life, was able to comfort my constant fears and insecurities.
It’s too bad my life started when I entered college at 18. How many 18s do you have, and how many 18s do I have?”
Towards the end of the chat, Tiny asked me, “Will a lot of adults read this that you wrote?”
I said, “Of course they will.”
As if relieved, Tiny said, “It would be great for them to see it.”
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