Xavier’s abuse by his father

Xavier’s abuse by his father is presented as both punishment for an unrecognized learning disability and a long-term assault on his sense of his own abilities. His father treats dyslexia as an excuse rather than a real difficulty, while Xavier grows up without the instruction and support that might have helped him learn. The consequences extend beyond school: Xavier comes to believe the judgment made against him, and his account reveals how family authority and educational neglect reinforce one another.

Dyslexia and the refusal of support

When Ever sees Xavier’s workbook, its fragile pages are crowded with attempts to copy Chinese characters and their English translations. The written errors she encounters include “Bibent” for “didn’t” and “Pensel” for “pencil.” The notebook makes his difficulty concrete: it is not an abstract explanation offered after the fact, but a visible record of the work he has struggled to do.

Xavier tells Ever that his father calls dyslexia an excuse and dismisses it as a Western preoccupation with psychology, insisting that Chinese children do not have it. The refusal is more than a difference of opinion about a diagnosis. It leaves Xavier’s learning needs unnamed and unsupported, while allowing his difficulties to be interpreted as stupidity or failure.

Ever answers by describing the very different support her sister Pearl received. Pearl’s father tutored her, she had a special education teacher through elementary school, and she uses accommodations and voice-dictation software. Reading musical notation is difficult for her, so she relies on her ear; despite the challenge, she is at the top of her class. The contrast shows that dyslexia does not dictate a single educational outcome: support and adaptation shape what a student can do. When Ever tells Xavier that Pearl is dyslexic, his surprised response opens a moment in which his experience is recognized rather than dismissed.

Punishment and family loss

Xavier recalls having a tutor in Taiwan when he was younger. The tutor was extremely old, he says, and told his father that Xavier could not learn. His father’s response was not to seek a better approach: Xavier remembers him saying that he should have beaten him harder to beat the dyslexia out of him. The account connects physical punishment directly to the family’s belief that Xavier’s difficulty was a defect of effort or character that force could correct.

Xavier adds that his mother used to try to stop his father. When Ever asks about the change in tense, he tells her that his mother died when he was twelve. The brief exchange establishes both that she had intervened and that the person who tried to protect him was no longer there. The narrative does not supply further details about her death or the abuse, but Xavier’s words make her absence a significant part of the conditions under which he grew up.

Educational neglect and lasting judgment

Xavier’s father later set him up in an apartment in Manhattan while remaining in Taipei. Xavier had an educational consultant, but his teachers assumed that he could not read because English was his second language. The explanation misidentified the problem, and the consultant did not bring the support Xavier needed. Xavier says that he learned to cover up his difficulty; money could buy ways through middle and high school without resolving it.

The failure came to a head when his father visited the previous March and discovered that Xavier had not applied to college. Xavier says he saw no point in applying. His father fired the consultant, and Xavier stopped attending finals; he did not graduate. The sequence traces consequences rather than treating the lack of a diploma as an isolated setback: difficulty left unaddressed helped produce concealment, disengagement, and an eventual break with formal schooling.

Afterward, Xavier’s father gave him a new set of trophies and called him a disgrace to nine generations. The word “trophies” carries a bitter double meaning in the scene: Xavier’s father presents the objects as trophies, while the narration identifies them as bruises. The exchange ties inherited family honor to the punishment Xavier has endured, turning the language of achievement into another means of condemnation.

Internalized shame and recognition

Ever recognizes that the judgment has taken hold in Xavier. Though he speaks with sardonic distance, the message has penetrated so deeply that he believes it about himself. His account therefore reveals more than his father’s conduct: it shows how repeated dismissal can make an imposed verdict feel like an inner truth.

Xavier’s disclosure also prompts Ever to remember that her own mother once hit her legs with chopsticks during childhood spelling drills. Ever cannot remember what she had done, and the occasional punishment left no scars, but the shame remained. The memory does not equate their experiences; it connects them through a specific residue of discipline and humiliation, and helps explain why Ever responds to Xavier’s story with recognition rather than treating it as a distant problem.

The contrast with Pearl’s educational support makes Xavier’s history especially legible. Pearl’s accommodations and strategies acknowledge the reality of dyslexia, while Xavier’s father denies it and interprets difficulty as disgrace. Ever’s act of listening and her account of Pearl offer a counter to that family judgment: they do not erase Xavier’s past, but they establish that his reading difficulty is not proof that he is stupid or incapable.