The Story of Yi, Part 1.

This story was ignored by the people whose jobs it was to notice.

Yi was three years old when she took a blow to the face – the belt buckle was sharp, hard, and brought down with such viciousness that the resulting bruise would never fade. The blood vessels had been burst, damaged beyond repair, and her vision through her right eye was never quite the same.

Had she not been living in a one-bedroom apartment with a brother and sister – which one was her biological parent, she would never find out – perhaps someone would have taken her into custody. Her aunt, or mother, was primarily charged with her care, and the resentment was prominent in her treatment of the child.

It was tense, and Yi learned to take in the atmosphere before she even learned to read or right. A drug deal that had gone south meant that a flogging was unavoidable; her father, or uncle, favoured fists and open-handed smacks, while the woman liked to have something in hand that could cut Yi’s child-soft flesh.

She had to sleep on the living room couch, and her clothes were heaped in a corner. She had to be quick, when dressing herself; there was no privacy, and the doors were very rarely locked, for business reasons. People sometimes walked right in when she was half-undressed, hardly announcing their presence, and Yi would inadvertently alert every apartment down the hall that they had visitors with a surprised shriek.

The two adults didn’t bring in much income, and had they cared, they would have found out that Yi could have been enrolled in school for free. As it was, they took it upon themselves to teach her the skills they decided were most valuable.

She knew her math well. Monetary values were important; milligrams to grams, and the delicate chemical balance of those measurements, were important too. Yi’s reading came along more slowly; she only really needed to recognize the basic characters that formed client names.

Once she was old enough – the adults decided that age was ten years old – they included other aspects to her home-schooling. Where the tendons on a human body are, and where they can be slashed to incapacitate. How deeply to cut, to keep someone from bleeding out. A dead man couldn’t pay, the man cautioned. A living one could go to the police, the woman warned.

That would incite screaming matches between the two, but on a few things, they agreed. The police were not there to serve and protect. They would not protect Yi; the law was a selfish construct, and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ fell firmly within shades of grey that the selfish brutes of the police force refused to understand. They were small-minded, sometimes cruel.

Right meant protecting family from jail. Family meant love, no matter how they screamed, how they hit her…

And love was always right. Survival was always right.