Damn you and your filial piety
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Lianhuachi Park in Beijing |
For parents who love him more than anyone else on earth, they sure had a funny way of showing it to Sun Liang.
They began intensely monitoring Sun at age 5 when he started painting and calligraphy, lashing him with a leather belt whenever he failed to meet their exalted expectations.
"Life is only meaningful for those who achieve real success!" they shouted at Sun, and "You're screwed if you can't stand out from the common herd!" whenever he failed to ace an exam.
As Sun grew older, the emotional battles escalated through cruel accusation and crueler counter-accusation, threatening each other's lives and sometimes even engaging in all-out fistfights.
They sat silent through every Chinese New Year 's Eve gala on State-run television while a miserable Sun mourned another year without lucky money.
Sun eventually grew big enough to smash every window in his parents' home and tried to commit suicide five times so far.
By rebelling against his parents' misguided tough love, Sun believes he fell into a trap of his own making, like "a snake eating its own tail."
He stopped eating regular meals, went to bed at random times and hurt himself as much as them. He refused to join the Communist Party and even celebrated his parents' divorce in 1998.
The next year he happily left for a Beijing university 3,800 kilometers from his hometown of Urumqi, capital city of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Blackmailing his father into mortgaging their family home with another suicide threat, he lost 80,000 yuan ($11,764) on the futures market in 2009.
"No matter how hard I try to rid myself of the damage they did to me, the devil's still lurking," said 28-year-old Sun.
"If I can't achieve anything with my life, it probably all boils down to my messed-up family."
Sun considered himself the world's unluckiest man until he joined the "anti-parents" group on social networking website Douban.com on August 19.
He found peers who had suffered even more traumatic childhood experiences: domestic abuse, bullying, intimidation, generation gap issues, excessive parental dominance, improper education and incest, according to the group's records.
Established on January 18, 2008, the bloc attracted more than 30,000 registered Internet users that either explicitly accuse their parents or share a curiosity about the issue.
"More than 50 percent of members were born in the 1980s while our denounced parents were born in the 1950s or 1960s," said Sun, his 54-year-old mother a teacher in a State-owned enterprise and his father, 56, an electrician in a property management company.
"We represent two iconic generations in modern Chinese history.
"Yes, some views are sharp, aggressive and radical … but the Internet is the last resort for lost souls like me who never had any other choice but to be wounded by deviant parents."
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