This illustration of the elephant keychain is a continuation of the themes explored in my earlier three drawings on childhood sexual trauma. It depicts the period after the trauma, when I lived for a long time as if confined within a cage. The rest of the world felt distant and dreamlike. My grandfather, although already old at the time, was the only person I clung to to keep myself from sinking. We never openly discussed what had happened—partly because he didn’t know, and partly because silence was the unspoken norm in many East Asian families.
At the time, I was still very young and didn’t perceive anything unusual. I thought all grandfathers were like him—appreciating art, encouraging creativity, and helping children build their own worlds. Looking back after over a decade of psychological struggle, breakdown, and recovery, I’ve come to understand how deeply his quiet support shaped me. It is through revisiting these memories and creating independently that I found strength, healing, and the ability to survive again. Only then did I fully realize all that he had done for me.
So while this piece may seem gentler in tone, it emerges from the same root as the previous works—it tells a different story from the same history.
One of the many impacts of the abuse was how it changed the way I saw my parents, especially my mother. Even as a child, I sensed I couldn’t trust her—or my father—and chose silence over the risk of being dismissed or blamed.
This drawing is based on a vivid memory: a group of children mocking me, claiming my parents were pigs tricked into a scam. I stood there silently while they laughed, and even when I begged them not to, they told me, “Your mom’s happy—what would a kid know?”
That moment of helplessness stayed buried for years. It represents the silence that followed the abuse. Later, I created Searching for a Thousand Hands, where the mother figure appears as a clueless pig—I realized that was how I saw my own mother.
