Not only that, I hated how she’d dragged me down with her. Dad didn’t love me because he didn’t love her. I tried my best to draw a clear line between us: sneering at her countrified habits, correcting her whenever she used the wrong word, mocking her peasant taste. I thought this would please Dad, but I never got a hug from him, let alone a kiss. Some mornings, I’d look at his stubble and imagine how it would feel to be pressed against his cheek. He never made me laugh or cry. No emotions passed between us. We never played games, it never occurred to him that I might have liked to, just as Grandpa had never thought that about him. They both treated children like adults; the concept of childhood didn’t exist in their world.

Dad sometimes traveled for business, but never brought me and Mom. The farthest we ever got was to my other grandma’s house in the countryside. He didn’t bring me to the playground or to the movies. Our one family outing was to see the lanterns on the last day of the New Year, but I was so short, all I got to see was other people’s legs. Unlike the other dads, mine didn’t lift me above his head so I could grab at the colored streamers trailing from each lantern with riddles written on them. Nor did he pluck me a stick of candied hawthorn. He didn’t know a single one of my friends’ names, had no idea how good my compositions were, and loathed math problems about chickens and rabbits sharing a hutch.

It was as if he’d decided early on that I existed in a different sphere, like a goldfish in a bowl whose owner never bothered pressing his face against the glass. I might have been no more than an ornament in his life. Our only contact was when I got my allowance. I liked asking him for money—he was much more generous than Mom. She liked me asking him too, because then it didn’t have to come out of her housekeeping. I’d tell him exactly what I planned to buy: a hardcover diary with a heart-shaped lock made to look like ancient bronze, available in dark or light blue, but I’d pick dark because I preferred the night sky; a box of thirty-six color pencils, the sort that blurred when you ran a wet brush over them, great for twilit clouds and misty forests; a box of liqueur chocolates, which I planned to devour with my best friend in class, because she’d shared hers with me. As I described these objects, I felt I was describing a part of myself, as if that could help him get to know me a little better. Perhaps that would make him like me. They were sold out of dark-blue diaries so I ended up getting a light-blue one. I left it on our coffee table for quite a few days, and though Dad would have seen it every time he picked up his newspaper, he never once said: I thought you were getting a dark-blue one?