In December 2012, the incidents surrounding my father’s eventual arrest made the front page of The New York Times. The federal government had conducted the largest crackdown on Chinese immigration since the 1980s and indicted 26 individuals, including eight attorneys, one of whom was my father. It was revealed that my father coached prospective Chinese immigrants on narratives they could use to seek asylum and had been paid by an immigration firm to authenticate fraudulent green card applications. As published by the US Attorney’s Office, my father “made up stories of persecution that often followed one of three fact patterns: (a) forced abortions performed pursuant to China’s family planning policy; (b) persecution based on the client’s belief in Christianity; or (c) political or ideological persecution, typically for membership in China’s Democratic Party or followers of Falun Gong.” According to the same document, since 2006, my father had submitted more than 500 asylum applications. The federal government had been secretly recording client sessions for years as part of what the prosecution referred to as “Operation Fiction Writer.”

I was 19 at the time and commuting to Rutgers from home. To get to class, I took the turnpike, parked in my assigned space far from College Ave., then crammed into a bus that knocked me around until it deposited me outside a drafty lecture hall. The campus was entirely utilitarian to service more than 50,000 students, over half of whom also commuted. The Rutgers bus system was only surpassed by the NJ Transit in scale. Years later, during an English faculty meeting for Rutgers, where I taught as an adjunct professor one semester, a tenured professor disparaged this fact. “This is not a real college experience,” she said. “They go back to their families at the end of the day.” She was an older white woman whose son—she found a way to tell us—was attending an Ivy. At first, I was incensed by how easily she could dismiss the cost of school and the realities of her own students behind their backs. It wasn’t until after the meeting though that I considered that the real reason she angered me was because she had articulated exactly my own misery as a student. I was double majoring in Psychology and English, intent to finish in three years at the top of my class, so that I could finally leave home, leave school as soon as possible, and start life (over) in earnest.

It was with a dogged bitterness that I gave everything to school. I nodded off behind the wheel after staying up late studying. Between classes, I lay down in my car, though I was too self-conscious to ever fully sleep. Seating areas were designed like waiting rooms with thick red vinyl material to endure the sheer volume of students. Students were sleeping everywhere, because they were also just passing through until they could finally go home, “back to their families” as that professor derided. So many of them were, also like me, the children of immigrants. I tried to save as much as I could and ate only a small snack that lasted me through the day. I attended school almost entirely on scholarship but because my parents didn’t give me any money, I waitressed some weeknights and on the weekends. During quiet moments, I memorized poetry that I transcribed onto pale green order pads or I worked through essays in my mind, trying to convince myself that I would have done this work anyway if I were home. It exhausts me today just thinking about how much I was always working. But I knew if I ever stopped, I’d confront how unhappy I was.

Since I was living at home, everything that happened to my family became the saturate of my life. One day, I came home from classes through the side door and my father came out of his office. We met in the kitchen. He didn’t say much, but he had the rigid look of someone staring down the barrel of a gun. There would be news coming out about him any day now, he said. He didn’t go into much detail, but he didn’t need to. I understood. There had been a feeling of falseness in the way that we had lived. It was always strained in our bare, large house, and it made sense that something would eventually snap. I only remember that he was wearing the wool sweater I had bought him months ago, because I felt its coarse hairs like burrs on my face. We must have hugged, which was unlike us.

I went to my bathroom upstairs and lay on the floor to cry. My long black hairs that I hadn’t yet swept up wrapped themselves around me. I never heard my father speak so softly. I thought it might be the first time that he appeared before me completely unadorned. The coldness of the tiles gradually seeped into my back and I felt a stinging sensation all over. My mother would be home soon. He still had to tell her. Eventually, she came in and I heard my father take that same walk across the house. He began to speak and I felt the dread of all that she would soon know. But more than anything, I felt entirely alone.

***

I thought that shortly after his indictment, our family’s life would fall apart at a warp speed, that every day in the period following would issue forth a blitzkrieg of bad and worse news. But it was the opposite, in fact. The news came out. And nothing happened. The investigation only continued. Each month, my father was called in to give testimony but, otherwise, he was paralyzed by shame and visibly frightened in a way I’d never seen him before.

It was a strange reversal of the way he usually was—short-tempered, rageful. The garage door would go up one crank at a time, its low hum like a numbing of thought, and my heart would race like a soldier’s when the sergeant comes down the line. My father was always in a terrible mood and, hearing the garage door, I had to remember everything he disliked, which were so many things. The flick of a magazine page; the dragging of heels or shoes; the rustling of an aluminum bag; a parted mouth, which he said looked unintelligent. I couldn’t touch the walls or lean anything against them and, if I did—if I somehow forgot his rules—he would yell at my lack of care.

Once at dinner, he asked what was legally owed a woman who had tended to the home and raised her children after her marriage dissolved. As a child, I answered that the woman was entirely responsible for herself since the original arrangement had lapsed. My father pointed out the challenges of reentering the workforce and establishing financial independence. He was raised by a single mother, himself. I forget what my mother answered or if she did. She reminded me of the women my father represented, women with little means to leave a marriage let alone to sustain themselves if they ever did. The ability to think for herself had atrophied or it was never there.

My mother cooked every night anticipating my father’s return, muttering or sighing under her breath about how little she liked to cook. She told us how to eat the food she made so that it would last longer so she wouldn’t have to cook as much. “The first thing I do when I win the lottery, I’m hiring a chef and then a driver,” she said many times. Cooking and driving were the main two things that she did, and I took it to mean that she hated her life, and she imagined that it would take the meteoric force of the lottery to extricate her from suffering of her own design.

When my father finally came home, we ate silently as he described his cases. The aim was always to impress him, to tell a joke at the expense of one of the others at the table, to ask an insightful question about his work, or to share a meaningful reflection about school—anything, to avoid his ridicule for what you said, or how, or that you spoke. “You don’t know how stupid you sound,” a phrase he said to my brother Joseph who spoke as a child does with “likes” and “duhs” and “umms.” My brother’s front teeth folded in the center like the pages of a book and before his growth spurt he’d gained that soft weight of a young boy, as well as a curious mole on his chin that later disappeared. “You look like a hillbilly,” my father told him.

My mother left the table the moment she was finished eating even while the rest of us were still eating or talking to get ahead on the dishes. “Who else is going to do them?” she said miserably. Meanwhile, after dinner, my father stretched out in front of the television that he watched without sound until it was time for bed. They didn’t talk unless it was in passing about something that flashed on the television. Joseph and I studied in our rooms or watched television upstairs. I often wondered what my parents wanted from family life, since they did not engage with who we were unless it was to enforce complete obedience or during that rigid dinner hour. Almost every night was this exact way so that, even confined within the same house, we were not close. We would not speak to one another until the following evening, when it was time for dinner again.

***

Leading up to the hearing, my father was suspended from the practice of law. His life suddenly went quiet. He notified his existing clients and passed their cases on to other attorneys. Then he called his friends, some of whom never wanted to speak to him again, fearing the depths of his crime or that they might somehow contract our suffering by simply being near us. He stayed in the house for the better part of a year waiting for the date of his hearing, the day he equated with the end of purgatory, a date which kept getting delayed.

While my brother and I were in school and my mother was at work, my father read The Iliad and The Odyssey and the Bible because he was, in his mind, going through a tragedy of similar epic magnitude. He also didn’t want to be caught in the grocery store by one of the neighbors and have to make up a reason why he was home in the middle of the day. Where once he was volatile and prone to raising his voice, he now shrunk into himself and grew eerie. He wore the same gray sweatpants and hoodie each day. He didn’t shower. The collar yellowed from wear. If he could still be considered vicious, it was only because he was now the subject of his own contempt. He tried to feel useful and occupy himself by picking up small chores around the house. He scrubbed their bathroom or pulled crabgrass in the backyard near sunset. He swept the hollow house or indiscriminately boiled large pieces of vegetables and meats for dinner. Because he had never really cooked before, the food was watery and flavorless. With these new reversals in power, my mother developed a brazenness which manifested as open criticism of my father. She didn’t acknowledge his work around the house in ways he might have expected because, to her, these were acts of atonement, not generosity.

***

My father never seemed in a hurry and, I realize now, that his calmness was the product of careful engineering much like everything else. Even at home, he was posturing to us, his wife and children. He left for the city late and returned early for dinner. This was purely good sense, he said. The time he saved by avoiding rush hour, he could spend at home, enjoying the coffee and oatmeal my mother made him every morning. Work, he insisted, was not an end in and of itself but a means to prioritize our life together. Not enough attorneys understood the value of a private practice, how it afforded the opportunity to challenge one’s thinking and to control all aspects of its operation. Other lawyers were driven by professional climbing and tyrannized by corporate demands. He was always outwitting other people.

I visited his office on different occasions growing up. Each time, even before the indictment, I had an increasing sense of apprehension about the calmness that pervaded his approach to work. His office, with its neat stacks of manila folders, matching ballpoint pens, and labeling stickers, reflected a state of meticulousness, which could only be achieved through an abundance of time.

Ever since he started his practice, he began each day by reading from a pocket-sized Bible that he kept in his office drawer that still had the star-shaped stickers inside the cover that I placed there as a toddler. He showed me them again when I visited as a teenager, perhaps to evidence our bond. He was rarely sentimental, though when he was, it was usually about some moment from the distant past, when all of the surrounding angers of that time had finally been smoothed over. I had applied those stickers unconsciously, yet he made it important. I was knowable in the present, yet he wasn’t interested. He preferred an imagination of me that was gone now.

“God always provides,” he was fond of saying and likely said on this visit, as well. There were so many versions of God in the Bible but it seemed that the version he preferred was the one who rained manna. “I’ve never had to advertise my business except once when I first opened. Every client that I’ve gotten since was through word of mouth.” Periodically he proudly smiled at me across the desk. Before I knew it, we walked across Broadway to get lunch at a Chinese restaurant where the waiters greeted him because he ate there almost every day. Later, he dropped off envelopes at the post office and got a haircut. No sooner had we gotten to the office, did he finish up with a document on his screen and turn back to the seemingly all-consuming task of organizing the items on his desk and we went home again. It didn’t seem like such a bad idea to put in an advertisement. He was far from busy. Though I’m sure it would have felt like a failure to my father who’d told the story all my life of how he’d never needed to, thanks to the grace of God.

My parents spent strangely and, in the end, it was arbitrary whether they splurged or penny-pinched, because the outcome was the same. They were always coming up short, always tense about how they would sustain the expansionist vision that had become God’s destiny for their lives. They operated within a private economy so that, for years, there were temporary paper blinds in the upstairs bedrooms until the day we put the house on the market and custom curtains in the dining and living room windows. In the grocery store, my mother noted the cost of peaches, while my father bought bottles of wine that eclipsed the bills for dinner, bottles, which, he alone would finish in a single sitting. My mother never bought clothes that were not on sale, yet her closet was filled with similarly patterned skirts and dresses from the mall. We paid a monthly fee to be members of the local country club, but only for the privilege of dining with them. Yet my mother and I got our haircuts together at a unisex salon, as not to require separate trips, then walked out with hair still wet to the Sears women’s room next door because she refused to pay for hot air.

***

When my mother learned the amount for which he committed this crime, she said, “That’s it?” She couldn’t believe that everything they’d built together was about to be ruined for something around an extra $50,000 a year.

They had these conversations in the kitchen, where they’d get louder and louder until all they feared consumed the house. Still, this remained an issue between the two of them. We could only ever listen. If I could have spoken, I would have said that we had been barreling toward retribution for some time.

***

My father must have always been keenly aware that we were living on borrowed time since, shortly before he served his sentence, he told me in a low voice that perhaps the reason he was short with us was because he knew this day would come when he would finally be exposed. He wanted me to know that what he did was not rooted in ideology, that he had not been moved by empathy for his Chinese clients. He had been consumed, instead, by greed. When he told me this, I could have laughed. Of course, I knew. Even now, he was not offering an apology. He was unburdening himself, ensuring that I could not later hurt him by accusing him of what he had already acknowledged. I didn’t know how to tell him that what he should have been apologizing for was everything else, for every other way that he had made everyone around him uneasy, even fearful. Here was confirmation of what I had suspected all along: that he had never truly been present in the ways that he had claimed. He had determined from the start that the family would be in service of his image, not the product of his love. I wondered what the future held for him. But I also knew that his fate was not mine, and there was a sense of remove from all of the panic that he and my mother felt for themselves.

***

Visitors often remarked on the emptiness of our house. “Clean, clean, clean,” my mother would say, admiring its bareness. Before my parents put the house on the market, they hired a painter who told my mother that it was a miracle there were no marks for all the years we lived there. Later, my mother proudly told this story over and over as though she had passed a test, that the walls were her soul and both were found to be without blemish. Yet, I took him to mean that they were as white, as sterile, as the day we had moved in because there were not the usual signs of life. After all that carefulness, in the end, he didn’t come for touch-ups but to add color and warmth.

My parents purchased their first lot in Monroe Township when I was in the third grade. We had lived in North Brunswick for the last seven years, but it had become overcrowded, they said, with new Indians who didn’t invest in landscaping and Filipinos who hung their laundry in the yard. Even though my parents were Taiwanese immigrants, they wanted to create as much distance between themselves and the less assimilated as possible. At the time they bought into the town, Monroe was still largely cornfields. Many of the residents graduated from the local high school and never left. Each weekend, they drove me and my brother half an hour away to observe the progress on the house. We waited for them in the parking lot outside the sales office set up in a trailer. To pass the time, we cracked the windows and took turns sitting in the driver’s seat playing with the automatic chairs and adjusting the radio until we eventually tired of that and fell asleep. Hours passed this way, yet none made my brother and me closer. There was the usual teasing but no adult to bring us back together when it was all over. Years after this, people often ask if I am an only child, since I never talk about Joseph. I sometimes forget, myself, that I have a brother, and I wonder if he forgets about me too. I have to superimpose him onto my memories, such was the intensity of my disassociation from our reality and from each other by extension.

When my parents left the sales office, my father slowly drove us around the neighborhood to observe the changes in the other builder models. All my mother could talk about were aspects of their house, how her selection of plot, brick, and shutter color were better than the rest. In middle school, my parents bought a larger house on the other side of the same town with the same builder and the process restarted. Each weekend, they paid a trip to the lot and marveled at what was to come. “God has been good to us,” my father said. I brought my studies with me, as I did nearly everywhere, and I finished what I could by writing on my lap. School became a fixation because it gave me a sense of purpose. It was something I could control, something I could develop in confinement. Knowing things legitimized me in a way. While my classmates were allowed to do things that I could not, I could at least know things that they did not. “You work too hard,” my mother said almost every night just before bed when she came to my door. It was the only time I saw her face without makeup, the only time she spoke softly to me. “The brain’s no good without the body.” She meant it sincerely, yet this was one of the most irksome things she ever told me. What could I do with my body, I wanted to know, when she kept me inside with her always. Now the freedoms I found in the mind, she wanted to curtail too.

Our parents didn’t demand anything except our constant presence so that we could serve as witnesses to their life. From the car, I watched my parents disappear inside the scaffolding of their home. They didn’t turn back. Joseph and I were like the house—first imagined then possessed, under their complete dominion. They believed that, by keeping us constantly together under one roof, we were not only physically close, but emotionally, and that we would remain close forever. Once or twice, breaking from his usual concessions my father said, “It’s not natural, Nan. They’re growing, they need their own friends.” Though, of course, this changed nothing about my mother’s perspective and he didn’t insist. Maybe she intuited the nature of children leaving—that when they left, they left for good—since she said, “They’ll have their whole lives to do what they want.” And so every day, I returned to the same room. The same quiet. The incontrovertible fact that the years of our childhood were hers and our life, a conceptual point in the future, was ours, if ever we reached it.

The torture of waiting for my father’s sentencing was that we all could not move on. Every day was the same fact over and over again: that my father would eventually be arrested. But at what point, for how long, at what cost, remained uncertain. What also went during this time was any sense of security we might have gotten from each other. We retreated even further into our private spaces. My mother took to weeping. She would cook and weep, clean and weep. She was confused and let down and no good with words. My brother and I hardly spoke either, especially during this time, but in his low voice, he said it best: “It was a relief, what came out about Dad.” We wouldn’t have to go on pretending.

Around this time, I started dating someone who came in one night to the restaurant where I was waitressing. He didn’t read the news or any books, and he still lived at home while he was searching for a job. He said he just graduated college and was taking a break, though it turned out later he had never finished college and faked his own graduation. It didn’t matter, none of it mattered back then. He was playful and we would drink with some of his friends who still lived around the area. I drank like I imagined people did when they were 13, which was until I vomited, each time without the memory of ever having gotten sick before.

My parents said if I ever didn’t come home for the night, that I should plan to move out. I never failed to come home, but I drove drunk from this boyfriend’s house, instead, and high a couple of times, the snow falling away from my windshield like the opening crawl in Star Wars. I opened my car door to puke on the side of the road, felt better, and drove the rest of the way through pitch darkness for some of it, feeling content but mostly tired and worried again about what I would meet when I got home. No one ever used the front door to our house. It was right under my parents’ room, anyway, so I had to open the garage door, which made the lurching sound that used to make me fear my father’s arrival. I would press the button so that the door lifted just a foot off the ground, crawl through, then shut it again. Sometimes, my parents would be up, just one lamp on in the family room, waiting for me. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” my mother would say, not about any particular behavior, but coming home so late. Or my father talking to my mother about me, “She always prioritizes her friends.” But I had listened to them. I had followed the rules that they had established. They were using the same lines they had used since I was young, which had, for many years, made me feel the shame they had intended me to feel. But now, I wondered what was so wrong with feeling happy? Why was it selfish or immoral to indulge? They were incapable of connecting with other people, but I was not. Now my father was the fraud. And my mother had put her life entirely in his hands. It was because of my own insistence on working as hard as I did, even going against my mother’s advisement not to over-extend myself, that I had a life independent of theirs, which was now in ruins.

***

Despite all the ways that I felt bitter toward them, they were still suffering. As part of my father’s appeal to the judge who would determine his sentencing, he gathered letters from individuals who could vouch for his character. He asked my uncle, his brother-in-law and a longtime partner of an insurance law firm in San Francisco. They rarely spoke. He asked the pastor of our church, to which my parents had given tens of thousands of dollars in offerings over the years. Finally, he asked me. Our relationship was so strained that he could not ask me in person, perhaps because he knew that he did not deserve a letter from me, but as likely, because he could not face me. He emailed me from his home office downstairs to my bedroom upstairs. He didn’t have the decency to ask me in person, but he did have the audacity to ask this favor. In the letter, I wrote what he needed, which was that he was always there. I omitted all the rest, including the grievances I had about him as a father, which I had to tell myself was different from what I thought about the crime that he committed.

On Wednesdays, when my mother rehearsed with the church choir, my father often fell asleep under the diffuse glow of the reading lamp with a book left open on his stomach. He never used to read books and he wouldn’t again after this period in his life, even after things settled down and he had the time. When my mother was gone, he forgave himself long enough to rest. Sleeping, the weight of his head fell forward and the tension in his face dissolved.

One day, I came home from classes midday. The light was thin and cast long shadows across the halls. The house was cold and silent. I called for him. I knew he was home but there was no answer. I called again, and when there was still no answer, I set down my things and started running into different rooms looking for him, as if he were soon going to be swallowed up in the silence of the space. Finally, I found him, sitting in the guest room, in a lean patch of light that fell across the floor. He spoke very softly, which was against his nature: “I couldn’t get warm,” he said. I got on my knees and I held my father.

***

My father had a drawn-out way of telling a joke. His stories were remarkably abrasive. He often laughed alone, irrespective of his listener’s tolerance or the occasion. Of those who did not find him very funny, he was quick to call them uptight or pseudointellectual. The jokes hovered mostly around innocent word play until they ramped up without warning to pointed observations about real people, often a nearby person, so caustic that they sometimes caught you off-guard. You could find yourself unwilfully laughing, as I sometimes did. Of his client who became paraplegic after he fell into an elevator shaft, the doors opening, but the elevator having never come: He was shafted by fate, my father joked. He was sometimes very funny because he delighted in people’s peculiarities and I hoped this meant that he was privately thinking about the individuals more intimately than he otherwise let on, that he was not simply aloof and cruel about those who served both as his fodder and his audience, but that he viewed what he did as lifting people from the banality of simply being. My mother was not witty and she was, particularly around this time, not taken to laughing. At some point each night, she sat at the counter and noted the money coming in and out down to the penny in a wire-bound notebook. She worried out loud about their finances. My father stood behind her and gently shook her by the shoulders, coaxing her to lighten up. “Knock it off,” she said. Their only income now came from her job shelving dusty books at Princeton University Library. She was becoming aware that my father had orchestrated the very situation about which he tried to console her. His attempts felt like their own form of cruelty, like captor soothing captive.

In turning inward, my mother must have been startled by her absence of resolve. She hadn’t shored up any words that could inform her of her own predicament. She had never needed to, never believed that she one day might. She had my father’s language. Now, he proved unreliable and would be leaving her, if only temporarily, and my mother’s understanding of how to relate to the world disappeared. She had never even lived alone before. She went straight from her parents’ home to my father’s family home. She had never experienced the languid pleasure of choosing how to spend her own time; she had never felt the twin fears and thrills of adventure; she had never overextended herself in the way she had always cautioned me against. She had no idea that time could pass by one’s own volition, only the demands of others. In my mother’s mind, her life repeatedly conspired against her. She navigated mirrored planes, often unsure what was her reality and if it mattered that she kept moving or stayed still, as her grief and confusion seemed never to abate but only to multiply. She continued to hang close to my father and, depending on the day and her resolve, this decision felt like loyalty, love, anger, or cowardice.

***

My grandmother stayed with us for some time while my father waited for his sentencing. Ama, my grandmother, was solely preoccupied with my father, her only son. She pressed her eyes shut and prayed for her son at the kitchen table with outstretched hands. She told my brother and me to be more sensitive to our father. She didn’t understand why we seemed so cold toward him, though that was how we had always lived. A man at her church had recently hanged himself in his garage because he’d lost his savings, she said. When my mother overheard, she came loudly down the stairs. The weight around her midriff seemed external to her, as though she was just carrying it around. “What about me?” she shouted. It embarrassed me, how visibly she was falling apart, that she would think to beg for sympathy and not for mercy.

In her room, Ama spent hours taking pictures on her phone of all the photographs she’d kept in albums for 50 years. She removed the photos from the sleeve, ripped them up with her arthritic hands, and threw them away. When she worked in Libya as a nurse, one of the few things she bought for herself was a camera to capture her travels to show my father and his sister whom she left behind in Taiwan. In one, she stood solidly outside the hospital where she worked in her white uniform and cap with socks that came halfway up her shins. The ground was barren and rocky. The landscape looked more like a ruin than a government building. In another, she examined fruit being sold in stands with arms crossed behind her back. Her hair was tucked underneath a kerchief tied under her chin. She wore an A-line floral dress with clogs. A throng of Libyan children rushed behind her. She was fearless and independent, ahead of her time. Now those memories felt pointless, because all her work had been undone and she, her son—they—had no future and no past worth looking back on. The photos would only exist as blurs on her phone.

***

In my last year of college, a few times a week, we cleaned the house and occasionally cleared it for a couple of hours for showings. Selling the house allowed my father to pay off his attorney’s fees and his fine, money which he otherwise would not have had. Eventually, I graduated summa cum laude with the double major in three years as I planned. My essay on futurity in The Sound and the Fury won the English faculty prize for best undergraduate literary essay. You could nominate yourself for these department awards by dropping your essay into a mail slot in a locked office. You could apply for as many as you liked, so I wrote about my family during this time and submitted it under fiction and nonfiction and fit it into the slot along with the essay on Faulkner. I heard all the papers fall to the floor. There was nothing set out to collect them. I imagined someone having to step over them coming in and brushing off the detritus. I received two more awards for the same story and attended the ceremony alone because I couldn’t tell my parents how I won. I read in a dark room I had never been in before. My thesis advisor attended. She had wiry hair and wore a lumpy suit jacket with a long skirt. I felt embarrassed that she had come, I didn’t think I deserved that kindness.

***

Flannery O’Connor says there are two ways that people become writers. One because they want to tell stories purely from their imagination and another because something happens to them that brings them to writing. This was an unusual period in my life. All the words that I had, all the years honing the techniques of writing essayistically and even speaking vigilantly around that dinner table suddenly found a new vessel in this creative form. I had always wanted to be a writer but only found the page in this moment because there was no way to express my anger with my father, my mother, even my grandmother, who were each consumed in their private worlds and would not listen. We were no longer bound by an illusion of closeness, and I hadn’t realized just how much so until, even seeing how low my father got, a perverse feeling came over me. A satisfaction that, finally, a force even greater than my father would put him in his place, not only for his crime but for the great pride he took in himself and lorded over us, his children. Still, it was only through Operation Fiction Writer that I had become a fiction writer, myself, out of necessity, and let go of everything that had so long made their unhappiness my own.