父亲的逻辑 / The Logic of My Father
Between instruction and neglect, the mathematics of love and absence.
I grew up with a father made of contradictions — distant yet instructive, brilliant yet emotionally illiterate. To understand him, I have to begin before I existed.
I. The Third Son Who Wasn’t Wanted
My father was the third child in a military compound family — the son of a People’s Volunteer Army artillery regiment commander and a textile-worker mother whose body and life had already been exhausted by the first two sons.
And here is the part people don’t say aloud:
They didn’t want a third son. They wanted a girl. There were even discussions — real ones — about sending him to a relative to raise.
He knows this. He has carried that knowledge his entire life.
To be unwanted is a kind of violence. Not loud, but permanent.
From the beginning he was a contradiction: a child born into hierarchy but not cherished within it. Pampered with resources that came with the military compound, but starved of the affection that signals belonging.
The psychological formula is simple: children who were not wanted grow up believing they must earn their right to exist.
For my father, that “earning” took the shape of excellence, harshness, discipline, and a masculinity sharpened like a blade.
He has a naturally elegant, handsome face — almost too delicate for the hardened world he grew up in. I suspect part of his later brutality was a counterbalance to this beauty, an overcorrection to prove to the world (and to himself) that he was not fragile, not dispensable, not weak.
His entire adult persona — the steel voice, the sharp logic, the intolerance for softness — may be nothing more than the armour forged from that early wound of being the child no one wanted.
II. A Mind No One Knew How to Handle
Even without that early rejection, he was always “different.” Precocious, strange, cognitively ahead of his environment. In a household where no one had the education to understand him, his intelligence was both admired and alienating.
Tsinghua became his escape hatch. A clean severance from a family who didn’t know what to do with him. It didn’t elevate him — it isolated him.
To his brothers, he was never a source of pride. He was a disruption. Someone they respected in form but resented in essence.
I saw this dynamic play out as a child: my cousins being told to “go listen to your uncle’s advice,” while the adults carried a simmering discomfort they never admitted.
Even my grandmother’s words were laced with distance: “我儿子怎么赚了这么多钱，买了这么多东西？” The emphasis was on 他, not 我儿子.
I learned early that my father’s brilliance did not grow out of love, but out of lack.
III. A Modernist in a Country That Refused to Become Modern
My father speaks the language of globalisation — innovation, markets, system design.
His worldview aligns more with post–Cold War Western liberal modernity than with the uncertain, reorienting China he grew up in.
But beneath that intellectual clarity is something more tender: frustration.
He wanted to contribute to a country that no longer exists.
Many of his predictions about China’s political-economic direction turned out to be right — not as triumph, but as sorrow.
He never says it aloud, but he watches the retreat of Western firms and the contraction of private-sector oxygen like someone watching a bridge collapse he spent years insisting we should maintain.
History rhymes. Sometimes it repeats. Sometimes it refuses to learn.
He knows this too well.
IV. Instruction as Love; Harshness as Habit
My father loves through instruction because that is the only form of affection he was ever offered.
He critiques instead of comforts. He teaches instead of listens. He analyses instead of understands.
This used to feel cold, even cruel, until I understood the origin:
Unwanted children learn that tenderness is unsafe. Praise becomes suspicious. Softness feels like a trap.
So they love through competence — by preparing you for a world they assume will not be kind.
I inherited this, in modified form: the analytical mind, the structural thinking, the historical metaphors, the systems mapping.
But not the rigidity. Not the absolutism. Not the violence against the self.
His logic was built for survival. Mine is built for understanding.
That is our divergence — and our reconciliation.
V. The Part of Him That Lives in Me — and the Part I Refuse to Repeat
As a child, I thought I was nothing like him. As an adult, I see the symmetry more clearly.
The discipline. The ambition. The ability to walk alone. The refusal to be mediocre. The instinct to map systems rather than surrender to them.
All reflections of him.
But here is the part I chose differently:
He was forged by rejection. I am shaped by awareness.
He built armour. I am learning transparency.
He survived by hardening. I survive by naming.
Our story is not linear. But it is no longer incoherent.
This is how I understand him without becoming him. And this is how I end the repetition.