Reading “A Child Called ‘It’” ^[1]

By Wayne Qian

[中文提要：本文介绍小说《一个被称作“它”的小孩》。笔者在第一次阅读此书时，以为这是一部虚构性小说。直到第二次阅读，才发现它是非虚构小说。作者戴夫  ∙  佩斯勒讲述的是他亲身经历的故事：5岁之前，他母亲一直平等地对待他和另外两个孩子。孩子们生活得非常幸福。但是从5岁他上小学一年级起，母亲忽然完全改变态度，用各种非人道的方法虐待他：从来不给他吃饱，有时接连3天甚至10天不给他吃任何东西。孩子只得在学校或超市偷食物，或者讨乞求生。打骂更是家常便饭。一次母亲竟把一把刀子扔到他的身上，使他流血不止，却还逼着他继续做家务事：洗碗、擦地板，或者给邻居除草，把赚来的一点儿钱交给母亲。

奇怪的是，孩子的父亲，一位救火队员，开始时还同情他，偷偷给他一点儿吃的，可后来却眼开眼闭，置若罔闻。这一切是怎么发生的呢？原来母亲是个酒鬼，父亲不少时候也是酒鬼。酗酒使母亲从天使变成魔鬼。直到11岁那年，孩子所在学校的护士发现问题的严重，报告校长，校长报告公安机关，这时才把孩子领走，送往受虐待儿童中心，使孩子得以健康成长。

戴夫  ∙  佩斯勒长大后参军当兵，在伊拉克服役。退伍后把自己的经历写成书。《一个被称作“它”的小孩》连续135个星期在《纽约时报》最畅销书榜上有名。作者现在经常在美国各地旅行，就美国虐待儿童的问题作演讲。

戴夫  ∙  佩斯勒的经历是美国加利福尼亚州历史上最严重的虐待儿童的事件之一。

令人难以置信的是，据本书“后记”，美国每5个孩子有一个受到虐待。可见问题之严重。本书使笔者认识到，酗酒是美国十分严重的一个社会问题。跟离婚一样，孩子是父母酗酒的最大牺牲品。]

When I finished reading the recorded book for the first time in about four hours, I had thought it was something created through the author’s pure imagination. And I could easily find what I considered illogical about the book: The mother in it turned from being an angel to being a monster almost overnight. She had been pouring love on her children, including the hero of the book. But all of a sudden, she was ill-treating him in all the ways she could think of, referring to the boy as “it”. I couldn’t understand the cause of the change of her attitude and of the sufferings of the boy.

On second reading, however, I came to realize that the book was a non-fiction where the author wrote from his own experience. It was a shocking realization that made me aware of two things at least. One is that I must never boast about my knowledge about the United States though I have been living in this country for nearly 10 years. There is much too much that is hidden from my eyes. Reading books (fiction and non-fiction), newspapers, and magazines, watching TV and movies, meeting American friends face to face, attending church services, etc, may enhance my knowledge of this country, but there is always something important that I don’t know, that escapes my notice, and that is hidden from my view.

The other thing I have come to be soberly aware of is how much harm alcoholism can do to a person, a family, and, indeed, to society in general. I have long known that many homeless people in this country are alcoholics who have destroyed their own lives through habitual over-drinking, that it is very difficult to help those people because any money we give them will be spent on alcohol almost immediately, and that the non-profit organization AA, which stands for Alcoholic Anonymous, has been doing a lot to help alcoholics in this country. But I never knew that children can be the victims to their parents’ alcoholism until I read Dave Pezler’s book. That’s exactly what happened to the parents of the boy in the book I read.

The boy’s father was a firefighter and his mother was a housewife who lived in Daly City near San Francisco, California. I have been to that city once because one of my cousins lives there with her family and I can sort of visualize the environment in which the boy grew up. The boy’s father was tall and strong and did a decent job. His duty as a firefighter kept him away from home often, but he loved his family, including the boy. Often during a holiday or a vacation, he would drive the family to tourist destinations the Bay Area around San Francisco abounds in, such as the Redwood Forest Park. ^[2] The family would have a good time, leaving everyone with beautiful memories.

Before she turned an alcoholic, the boy’s mother was a most loving and creative mom. Not only did she keep the home neat and beautiful, but she would come up with ways of teaching her kids about the animal world as well as the human world. On one occasion, she got the kids to sit down together to watch their pet cat giving birth to a litter of kittens. Imagine the excitement and spell-bound attention when the kids saw with their own eyes one kitten after another popping out of the cat while listening to their mom explaining the process.

All of a sudden, the mother of three turned herself into a monster when the boy was only 5 years old and in the first grade of an elementary school. For no reason at all, she denied him the daily food he deserved, often giving him only a few morsels of bread a day. It was not uncommon that three days went by without a taste of any food. Once it was ten days during the summer, when there was no school! The only thing that he could fill his stomach was water from the tap. He was so hungry that he had to steal from his schoolmates. When that was found and his mother learned about it, she beat him but continued to feed him little. He was then forced to use false names and beg from house to house. When that was reported to his mother by a woman who happened to know his mother, she punished him even more harshly, forcing ammonia down his throat or ramming soap into his mouth. What’s more, she threw a knife at him one day. It landed right into his belly with blood spewing out in profusion!

And all the while, the boy was made to sleep in the garage with newspapers to keep himself warm. Moreover, he was made to work like a slave of the family. He had to wash all the dishes, scrub the floor, and mow the lawn in the neighborhood to bring money to his mother. She simply took pleasure in punishing him. She would give him a plate of food, ordered him to finish it in two minutes, but before he had a chance to take a bite, snatched the plate away. To tell the truth, while I was reading this kind of things, I could hardly continue: How can a mother treat her own child in so inhuman a way? It’s incredible. Now I know alcoholism can turn a human being inhuman, making him or her doing things normally considered impossible.

You may wonder what the father’s attitude was toward all this. Well, for one thing, he was an alcoholic, too. At the beginning, he sympathized with the boy and tried to help him. He offered him something to eat stealthily while comforting him with warm words. But in the end the boy’s mother would find out and quarrel with him. “He is a bad boy,” she would say. “You’re undermining my authority in disciplining him.” As the boy found out again and again, his father always lost out and his mother always ended in complete control of everything in her home. While at the beginning the boy considered his father his protector, he came to see that he was no match for his mother. That, again, is something I cannot accept: in my mind, an American firefighter, who has to fight not just fire, but flood, hurricane, earthquake, or any other emergency, is strong-willed and won’t buckle under pressure, including family pressure. But what a good-for-nothing the boy’s father was.

Time and again, the boy wished himself dead. “A just God doesn’t exist for me,” he told himself. “Faith and hope are just letters with no meaning.” Still, without his knowing it, God was helping him: he maintained a strong desire to survive, believing that justice would prevail in the end. Even when he was stabbed by his mother, he kept at his job in the kitchen and the restroom, washing and scrubbing until he swooned with bleeding. On several occasions, he beat his mother at her own game, outwitting her and winning enough time for survival. “I’m not going to give the bitch the pleasure of seeing me give in to her,” he told himself repeatedly.

The boy’s suffering went on and on until he was 11 years old. A school nurse, unlike some teachers who showed spotty attention and sympathy accompanied by no action, developed a big interest in investigating his case. The boy was not a dumb student at all: once he won a competition by producing a fancy name for the school newspaper. But he was almost always smelly and in rags. And anytime he appeared at school, he had bruises on his body. The boy didn’t want to “betray” his mother and gave excuses for bruises. But the experienced nurse would tell the boy that he had been using the same old excuse. Finally, he managed to get the boy to tell the whole truth. She jotted down what he had said, and then reported to the principal, who called the police department. The boy’s suffering came to an end when a police officer came to school and took the boy to a center for battered children.

 The boy, whose name is Dave Pelzer, grew into a fine man. He joined the army and fought in Iraq. Back in the country, he has been actively involved in educating people about child abuse in this country. According to the epilogue of the book, one in every five children in the US is abused, a number that is much too high for me to accept. Can so many children be abused? If they are, I don’t see them. But at any rate, Dave Pelzer has written three books out of his own experience. And he travels round the country, giving talks on child abuse. Through publications and public appearance, he is now recognized as one of the nation’s most effective and respected speakers about child abuse. His, after all, is one of the most severe child abuse cases in California history. His book appeared on the New York Times best-seller list for 135 weeks and was also nominated fro the Pulitzer Prize.