Every Day Anew

Pia Jee-Hae Baur

I dislike switching doctors, primarily because every time I have to recount my medical history, I have to decide how much I should lie. 

When I was a child, my mother would do this for me. She would say that the scar tissue in my brain was from when she accidentally dropped me as an infant. I uncovered the truth decades later, but for years, I parroted the story my mother had made up. It was only in 2018 that I, for the first time, told my new neurologist that my seizures were the result of abusive head trauma I suffered as a baby. 

I recounted as casually as I could that the perpetrator was my father, and then I plowed ahead and told her everything else in clinical detail: my hospitalizations, anticonvulsant drugs I had failed, surgical evaluations, losing my driver’s license, knocking myself unconscious in the shower, nearly dropping out of college. She began to tilt her head as I spoke, and by the time I was done, her ear was nearly touching her shoulder. 

“So, you didn’t grow up with your father,” she said. 

But I did. I grew up with the man who nearly killed me. 

 

 

The day after Christmas in 2014, when I was twenty-five, my father gave me his prison diary from when he was incarcerated in Germany for a year during my infancy. I was already at the front door, car keys in hand, when he called from upstairs, “Don’t leave yet.” 

He came back with a pocket-sized book titled Jeden Tag Neu. Translated from German, it means Every Day Anew. “You said you wanted to know more about what it was like,” he said. 

I don’t remember what goodbyes I said to either of my parents, but I remember driving north on Highway 280 and entering the fog that so defines the northern peninsula of the California Bay Area. When I got to my apartment, I placed the book in the inside pocket of a San Francisco Giants jacket I never wore because it wasn’t waterproof and pushed it to the back of my closet. 

 

On hot summer days, my sister and I used to hide out in the crawl space under our living room in our house in Redwood City, California. My sister and I were twelve and thirteen years old when we made it our haven. We laid down blankets to sit on and crafted with fiber, read books and comics, and napped. 

When we’d first moved into the house five years earlier, the crawl space was mostly empty except for the earthquake survival kit—ten gallons of water, a first aid kit, a tool box, and a tower of canned beans and tuna—plus a few cardboard boxes filled with miscellany. Long after my sister and I stopped playing there, the crawl space became populated with more and more useless scraps from our life upstairs. As it filled up, the clutter created towering shadows against the walls and created a sense of claustrophobia. We started calling it the Dungeon. 

The summer before my second year of college, my sister and I poked around the house for things I might want to bring to my apartment. My sister and I hadn’t been down in the Dungeon in years, but we were struck with nostalgia and pored over everything that looked vintage.

In the middle of an innocuous stack of file folders we found a shoebox filled with letters and newspaper clippings. One of them was about a 24-year-old German computer science student, his 26-year-old Korean wife, and their two young daughters, a toddler and a newborn. There we were: my family, unnamed but in print. According to the article, my father was arrested under suspicion of child and potential spousal abuse. The newborn was hospitalized in critical condition. 

Over a decade has passed since this discovery, and there is a hole in my memory surrounding it. I don’t remember why my sister and I chose not to confront our parents when we found the shoebox. What I remember is only a sense of disbelief. I told myself that the newspaper clippings did not give any names, so it wasn’t certain that it was about us. I brushed off the facts to suit the narrative I’d always had for our family.
I think that the magnitude of what the box revealed was too immense for either of us to grasp. On a subconscious level, I think I knew that to accept it as my new truth, I would have to tear down my lived reality up until that point. 

What would it mean for us if the truth was that I had nearly died at the hands of my father? What would it mean for us if we were the kind of family that buried dark secrets and paved over them with ugly lies? 

We didn’t talk about it again for years.

The year after my father gave me his prison diary, I moved apartments twice, taking it with me and finding a new hiding place for it each time. I realized during each of these times that it felt progressively heavier. This was true for nearly all of my possessions, and over time I’d learned to downsize, but this book was not something I could shed. I also realized that my father had taken it with him over the course of two decades each time our family had relocated. He had relieved himself of its weight by giving it to me.

The full title of the book was Every Day Anew: Thoughts and Prayers for the Whole Year. It was a daily devotional for 1988, authored by a Belgian theologian, with a different quote, aphorism, or philosophical quandary for each day—some related to Christianity, others not.

My father chronicled his thoughts and notated the pages of this book, making his diary a book-within-a-book. He didn’t write every day, and he almost never directly referenced his incarceration, but he was so open with his pain, his brokenness, and his self-loathing that I felt it viscerally through the page. Witnessing my father express sadness or remorse was so disarming that I failed at several attempts to read it. 

I decided that the only way I would be able to read the book would be as a documentarian. I imagined myself as a researcher, focused only on gathering the information dispensed through his writing. My father noted very few dates in the book: only his arrest, his trial, my parents’ wedding anniversary. He didn’t mark any of our birthdays, not mine or my sister’s, not my mother’s, not that of his parents or sisters. Not even his own. 

I tried to sift through everything my father had underlined, circled, or commented on, convinced that if I did, I’d understand why he did what he did. I filled a whole notebook trying to get inside his head, to match up dates. My father was arrested on June 9, 1989, when I was three weeks old, hospitalized with shaken baby syndrome after two days of not eating, sleeping, or crying. Because I was a minor, the state represented me and pressed charges against my father on my behalf. He was held in jail for a year while the state built a case against him, and then went to trial a year later. He received a sentence of three years in prison, was paroled on good behavior after six months, and remained on probation for another five years.

As soon as I was well enough to be discharged from the hospital, my mother took my sister and me to Seoul, where we lived with my grandparents while my mother struggled over whether to seek a divorce or reconcile with my father. As a child, I always wondered why my father was not present in any of the photos from the first two years of my life. 

I piece together things bit by bit, trying to understand how the echoes of those events fit into the memories that I have, but I struggle with memories because I’ve spent so long resisting the people and places that generated them.

There are two narratives of my father in my head. There is the man I don’t know—the man who hurt me, who scared me. And then there is my father—the man whose intelligence and creativity still awes me, the middle-aged man who playfully charms neighborhood children. But the man from the diary is desperate and contemptuous of himself. He circles quotes about sinning and remorse. He writes, “I deserve this punishment,” in so many different iterations. None of these men is the one I grew up with. 

 

My father was allowed only two books during his incarceration. One of them, Every Day Anew, he turned into his diary. I imagined that the other would have been a college textbook as he was still hoping to finish his master’s degree in computer science, a field of study he had dreamed of pursuing since he was a boy. Instead, it was a student workbook, Let’s Learn Korean, that he obtained from a radio station he listened to in jail. The station would send listeners a free book if they wrote in and he did so. That book he later gave to my sister when he visited her to meet his first grandchild. 

Books were important in my family—one of the first things my father did when we moved to the U.S. was to take my sister and me to the Carnegie Mellon Library, which was right around the corner from our new apartment in Pittsburgh. When we were children, my father always said our allowances were for buying toys and treats; he would always pay for books. We never did get much proper furniture in Pittsburgh, so we didn’t have bookshelves, but we did have stacks of books everywhere, pushed against the walls. 

My father had a habit of writing his name in all his books: all his Frank Herberts, Ken Folletts, Michael Crichtons. It struck me to see his name written in the diary the same way. But here, the writing looked much more self-conscious. Smaller, cramped, in a very tight corner of the page, as if he didn’t actually want to write his name, which would mean claiming ownership both of the book and what was in it.

 

After I moved away for college, my father learned to unicycle. The children who lived a few houses down from my parents noticed and started drawing in chalk in front of our garage. They drew a windy road for him to follow and wrote, “Yay! Unicycle finish line!” 

He took up the hobby like it was nothing unusual at all for a forty-nine-year-old man. He then got into mountain unicycles, strapping one to the back of his fixed-up BMW motorcycle and riding to open-space preserves to explore the trails. He rode his BMW down to Baja California Sur, and unicycled through the desert and along the shoreline. 

When I spoke with my sister in Germany, she told me about the random package she received in the mail: He’d shipped a unicycle from California to her apartment in Leipzig. “He doesn’t call for my birthday, but then he sends me a unicycle?” 

I, too, was given random presents. Years earlier, when my sister came to visit me in college, he’d sent along a remote-control toy helicopter for me. When I came home for the holidays, I found other toys and odd miscellany scattered throughout the house: Rubik’s cubes of varying shapes and sizes, balsa wood airplanes, and a growing collection of remote-control aircrafts. 

I was baffled by his propensity for play, which felt unusual for a middle-aged computer engineer. I wondered how he had played as a child. In a certain sense, children are the original engineers. They play by building things and build things to play with, all while trying to make sense of the world around them. My father seemed to be the antithesis of this. I’d never heard stories about him having a favorite toy or game. All the stories about my father’s youth revolved around how precocious he was, always immersed in projects, inventing useful contraptions and even building his own computer as a teenager. It was as if being young had constricted him, and adulthood gave him permission to live out a childhood he hadn’t experienced. 

 

Our first and only “family meeting” was when I was in second grade in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My father had just slammed my hand in the door that separated our dining room and kitchen and now he was crying. I was seven and bewildered. It seemed like an overreaction; there were so many other things he’d done that were worse and he hadn’t cried then. 

This was the only time I remember my mother pointing out to my father that it wasn’t okay to hurt someone else. Although my mother called it a family meeting, it was really about pointing out that my father targeted me. 

My father longed for my affection, I later realized, because he believed that if I would just hold his hand or hug him the way I did my mother, it might mean that our relationship was okay, that I’d forgiven him for events I have no memory of, that his time in prison was enough for amends. 

From birth to about two years of age, children build emotional intelligence by evaluating their surroundings as safe or dangerous, and the people around them as protectors or instigators. When I consider that he missed the first eighteen months of my life, I wonder if perhaps the problem was that I never had the time during my early childhood to evaluate him as someone safe or unsafe.  I didn’t attach feelings of safety or danger with my father. The fear I felt was tied to his unpredictability. 

I thought of that unpredictability when I came across a quote in his book about domestic violence. He circled and captioned it, “Never say never again!” And yet, the cycle would continue. 

My mother kept a book of Chinese horoscopes that detailed the personality traits of the twelve zodiac signs, the elements that govern them, and the relationships between them. She told me about dream interpretation, palm readings, auspicious symbols, and all the Korean superstitions she grew up with I read her book over and over as a child and still know parts of it by heart. 

I’m an earth snake, which is good, my mother said. Earth is usually in harmony with both wood and water. My mother is a water rabbit and my father a wood dragon. Water, my mother’s element, represents the withdrawal of life during winter, so signifies stillness and conservation. My father’s element, wood, is associated with spring and new beginnings. Wood looks for light, for growth, for higher consciousness. It is strong and pliant. 

The book gave the rabbit-dragon union two out of four hearts, with the comment, “Your differences will either unite you or divide you.” My mother said she took it as a fairly accurate overview of their marriage.  

 

Around the same time he took up unicycling, my father started volunteering on a community farm in Sunnyvale, a town about forty minutes south of my parents’ home. The plot of land is in the middle of a suburban neighborhood, next to an elementary school where the playing fields are always green, even during the drought when California was on the verge of fining residents for watering their lawns. 

I’ve visited it only once, but my father would spend most of his Saturdays there. In a surprising moment of candor, my father later told me that the six months he served in prison after his trial were one of the best times of his life because he was allowed to work on a farm on furlough days. 

I imagine the joy in working the ground, especially if someone does it not out of need, but because of the freedom to. Planting, watering, harvesting. Dirt underneath fingernails. He said it was the first time he started to feel happy again. 

After my father’s parole period ended, we left Germany and moved to Pittsburgh, where my father took a research position at Carnegie Mellon University. Shortly after we arrived, my mother flew to Seoul to be with her dying father, and my sister and I—ages seven and eight—were left alone with our father for almost two weeks. We were both surprised to learn that he could cook—our mother was always the cook in our family, made all the meals, washed laundry, ran our household. But he made our school lunches and packed them in the same bento-type boxes our mother always used. My sister’s was red with a cartoon cat, while mine was blue with a frog. Both had a clever compartment on the lid that slid open to hold utensils in matching colors. 

I came home from school on the last day before Easter vacation and put my empty lunchbox on the kitchen counter, when I noticed something inside the utensil compartment. I slid it open and saw that my father had tucked two Hershey’s minis next to the fork and spoon. My mother never packed us chocolate. My sister had eaten hers at lunch, but I hadn’t found mine. 

Sometimes my sister and I visited our father at work. It must have been in 1993 or 1994 that his computer lab got its first digital camera. My mother took us there and we spent an entire day learning how to take pictures. The images are grainy and discolored, but they are probably my favorite pictures ever. 

In one photo, my father is sitting on his office chair with me on one knee, my sister on the other, our hair pinned up with colorful scrunchies and hair clips. I look mischievous, my sister looks hyped with energy, and we’re all laughing. My father is peeking at the lens over the tops of our heads, so his mouth isn’t visible, but he is smiling all the way to his eyes. He is wearing a short-sleeved button-up shirt with wide vertical stripes that I recognize from other photos, but looking at it now, it has a distinct impression, reminiscent of a prison jumpsuit. 

 I once asked my neurologist why she chose to specialize in epilepsy. She smiled beatifically as her eyes looked far away. “Because the brain is where we live,” she said. This same neurologist also told me that aside from falling on the side of highly unlikely statistics, my case of epilepsy is perfectly ordinary. 

I have scar tissue in my left temporal and occipital lobes from where my father injured my brain. I was young enough that surrounding neurons took over the cognitive functions of the damaged brain cells. I turned out normal, so normal that my parents were able to pretend nothing had ever happened. A thought often repeated by my father was that my epilepsy had come out of nowhere, and it might disappear as suddenly as it came, even when imaging tests and EEGs consistently identified the scar tissue as the culprit of all my epileptic episodes. 

In 2024, I was referred to a new neurologist and found myself looking through my family history again and picking up my father’s diary for the first time in years. I’d read it all the way through only once, then stowed it away in various places. I’ve moved more than a dozen times, taking it with me across three different states, but never brought myself to reread it. 

As I was unpacking from my most recent move, it occurred to me that there was an irony to the idea of starting every day anew. If I were trying to exercise compassion by reading my father’s thoughts to understand him, does that mean I should give him a blank slate, a figurative new day? And isn’t that what I’d already been doing every time we pretended that nothing had happened? 

It is easier to love people when love is not prescribed. It would be easier to love my father if he weren’t my father. If I could love him the way we love all those who enter our lives and imprint on us because we allow them, it would all be much simpler. 

I want so badly to be one of those neighborhood kids. I want to be the kid who is fascinated by the man who unicycles to work. I want to be the neighbor impressed by the man who farms a plot of land in the South Bay and gives away his extra zucchini and sunchokes. I want to be the colleague who admires the man who takes things apart in his garage just so he can understand all the moving parts. I want to be the next-door teen awed by the man who rides down to Mexico whenever he feels like it.

I want to be anyone to him but his daughter.