All in the Head

I separated the head from the body. It looked at me with glassy eyes, and I stared back. It opened its mouth one last time as if to ask me why I decapitated it. I murmured something about my father. Then I realized I was giving too much information; after all, it was dead. Quickly, I devoured the head. My notorious career began late one night when my father and I sat cross-legged on the floor.  ­Emptying the contents of my school bag, he inspected No. 2 pencils and third-grade textbooks, and found what he was looking for: Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, which I had borrowed from the library. â€Å"So!† he spat. â€Å"You have been reading behind my back? You think you are smart? You think you will go somewhere? You think you are better than your father?† I could see a vein in his forehead bulging with jealousy and hubris. My father had quit elementary school to work in the fields. Humbly, I bowed my head and looked at the photograph of Anne Frank on the book cover. She would have understood just how I felt: trapped, dependent, and hopeless  ­because my place in society was  ­dictated by someone else. My father reiterated that I was his daughter and the inheritor of his booth that sold rice and assorted beans in the marketplace. â€Å"Books are a waste of money; books poison the mind,† he said. â€Å"No. Don't worry about me, Anne Frank,† I assured her, â€Å"because I ate anchovy heads for dinner.† When I was a child, I developed a curious habit of eating only the heads of sautà ©ed anchovies. In the marketplace where my father worked, fishermen coaxed shoppers into buying dried anchovies. They boasted that eating anchovy heads would make me smarter. And smarter it made me. Until I started eating anchovy heads, I thought I needed my father's permission for my educational goals. As I grew, I thought up unconventional, creative ways to pursue higher education without being detected by a father who shadowed m y path. To teach myself the English language, I watched subtitled Hollywood movies. In life, unlike in my first American movie, â€Å"The Sound of Music,† I did not have Julie Andrews to teach and encourage me. I had to find my own way. When my father instructed me to put on some music, I played English pop songs, working on my pronunciation by singing duets with Frank Sinatra. â€Å"I faced it all, and I stood tall; and did it my way.† When my father did not allow any books in the house, I stopped by a bookstore every day on my way home from school. Ten pages at a time, I read Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. I still remember how my father guffawed during mealtimes to see me eating only the heads of anchovies. He thought I had senseless taste in food. But I kept my rea ­l purpose a secret. I created goals and dreams of my own. The day I started eating  ­anchovy heads, I became an epicurean of my acquired tastes for intellectual independence and self-rel iance. I was no longer a beggar at the table of  ­success.