Illustration by Anderson X. Lee
Every space has its own logic of organization. Mine was built from piles—curated collections that made perfect sense to me, painstakingly laid out on my bedroom floor. Dirty clothing, sorted by its potential for future wear. Broken colored pencils waiting to be sharpened. Bright stones and fragments of glass, each with its own treasured story. These weren’t messes but carefully crafted categories that gave my childish world structure. In my chaos, everything had its place.
I learned early that this approach invites misunderstanding. Most people see disorder where I see intention. They perceive only a loss of control. And when those who seek control encounter something they cannot comprehend, conflict becomes inevitable.
My father embodied this conflict. His anger would erupt into a sudden storm, unpredictable and destructive. But his rage wasn’t aimless—it came from years of struggle. A member of the police force, he chose to leave Hong Kong in his twenties, believing he was escaping the binds of classism and corruption for equal opportunity. But what he found instead was fear, rejection, and a Canadian society that refused to make space for him. The English name he adopted didn’t open doors—it erased the man he once was. Rejection letters, job applications, and bills were the piles he knew, neatly folded and tucked away. He was a man who had learned to hide his inadequacies, and through his actions, demanded the same from his family. When the world refused him control, he turned to the one place he could take it: our home.
My room was a mess of piles when my father stormed in to pick a fight. I wasn’t there to stop him. In a fury, he swept my belongings into drawers and closets, erasing my universe. Not a single pile remained.
When I returned and saw what he had done, I matched his rage and followed his destructive lead. In defiance and grief, I gathered my belongings from the drawers and closet, stuffed them into a black plastic bag and discarded them as trash. If everything in my world could be destroyed so casually, then it must not have been worth caring for, to begin with.
I wondered if my father noticed how empty my room became after that. Maybe he did, and it reminded him of all his sacrifices. If he noticed, he never said anything. Silence was his only bulwark, holding back a tsunami.
After that violation, my piling became more subtle. Towels piled on my bedroom floor, a quiet rebellion that never failed to provoke my father’s disapproval. He’d spot one from the hallway, march into my room, and snatch it up without a word. His silence carried more weight than anything he could say, radiating fury I had come to expect.
Then came the moment everything changed between us. One evening, shortly after my eleventh birthday, my father came to say goodnight and spotted a towel piled behind my bedroom door. Half-asleep, I’d forgotten what was hidden there. In a flash of frustration, he picked up the towel by its corner. Neither of us was prepared for the yellow-packaged sanitary napkins that spilled out, tumbling to the floor and gathering in a small, damning pile.
We froze. My father’s face was unreadable, but his discomfort was unmistakable—the dawning realization of another situation he couldn’t control. He dropped the towel, as if covering my secret might erase it, and left the room without a word.
We never spoke of it, and he stopped coming to my room to say goodnight after that. What was there to say? I could never admit to my parents, especially my mother, that my period had come. Periods were complicated. They meant more household expenses and permanent change. Silence became my shield, just as it had always been his.
With no job to make money or allowance to spend, my only option was to steal. Thankfully, my mother always kept her womanly things in the same cupboard beneath her bathroom sink. I took them one or two at a time so she wouldn’t notice. I stretched the life cycle of each pad as long as I could, resorting to makeshift alternatives when supplies ran out. My ill-fitting cotton underwear, bought on discount and a size too big, hung loosely, threatening to let my shame slip out the bottom of my pant leg. I prayed for invisibility to a God I didn’t believe in.
I stopped running around the school playground and quit competitive sports soon after. I was constantly aware. Each month, when I felt sick, I’d feign happiness. It wasn’t cramps that made me ill—it was the fear of my secret being discovered. My body no longer felt like mine, and whenever it reminded me of its betrayal, I did the only thing that felt right: I collected the pieces of myself I once loved and threw them out with the trash.
In the absence of the girl I’d been, the woman I’d become continued to organize important things into piles—but now my collections were invisible. Grief, shame, self-condemnation, and myriad new emotions, each piled up and put away in its own hidden, quiet place. I told myself it was order, the only way to be strong.
My father is old now. When I sit with him decades later, he’s surrounded by piles. His own, this time. Like the child I once was, his every belonging has become precious and too difficult to part with, so he organizes his things into expanding, spilling heaps. Others may see disorder and a loss of control, but I know better. I see his invisible piles now, too—rejection, failure, and dreams he’d learned to leave behind. His silence was his way of telling the world he would not bend, even as it tried to break him. His anger was never about the piles, just as my defiance was never about rebellion. We were two people, each trying to bring order to a messy world—each in our own way, each silently hoping to be understood.
Donna Fung is an emerging Chinese-Canadian writer, Donna Fung crafts stories that explore human experiences in liminal spaces. As a repeat entrepreneur, she is dedicated to increasing the representation of women in Canada’s technology sector.