I had never seen such mutation, squalor, and revolting ugliness in one man. And at five years old, touring the radiant wonders of Beijing with my family—sensing the dark shadow against the silver fortress wall, I knew something was wrong, out of place, not belonging.  My mind told me not to look. But I couldn’t turn away, and with one glance, I soon crossed into the forbidden world that I had no right to observe with my childish, innocent mind.

I had stared, unable to comprehend what my eyes held before me. There, like a depravity of mold on a holy veil, was a figure slouched against the once silver stone wall, sitting in a filth that spread and spotted the surface around him like a sickly disease. Wrappers and soda cans littered the ground, and in its midst a pair of worn lace-up boots rested, far too big for the stumped legs that occupied them. My eyes traveled up as I passed over thin camouflaged pants and a torn leather jacket. Over short arms and scarred palms. Past the dark hairy chest matted with crumbs, and across the wart-spattered neck.

Its face—no. His face, I don’t remember well. His features were pale but hard, his eyes staring into space with a cold glaze, as if he refused to acknowledge the world around him. But that was not what I gaped at then, that was not what sent numbing shock through my little body.

On top of his emaciated body and ragged clothes, on top of his balding head, grew a huge, bloated lump. A gigantic, skin colored, freckle-spattered boil that seemed to push from his skull like another head striving for its own existence; it thrived, consuming his own scalp like a massive parasite. In some areas, lifeless white hairs poked out sporadically, and in others, sunspots checkered the pallid skin. Revolted, entranced, horrified was my child self. Was it filled like a blister? Would it pop and ooze putrid white liquid? Or would it bleed and gush out brain tissue?  --Were there extra bones beneath that skin? Would there develop a set of eyes? A nose? A mouth? Images mounted in my mind as I tried to explain this deformed, crippled blotch that hid in the shadows like a mystical creature from a dark fairytale.

Then his eyes turned, catching on mine.

A roaring fire of fury, loathing, and hatred radiated from the black abyss of his vision. The heat of his malice shot forth with its poison arrow, embedding deep in my heart, leaving my limbs paralyzed. Our eyes were locked in a time-stopping intensity, and the whole world held its breath as it watched the dark, broken creature seethe mercilessly at the human child, binding her body with his curse of malignity, suffocating her lungs with the heat of his rage.

And in his eyes, tying all of these emotions together was something my child-self was blind to, something it could never know. Only one who had truly lived in this world could identify it, only one who had truly died in this world could understand it:

Pain.

Raw. Excruciating. Pain.

I felt a hand--my mother’s--tug through the shock, pulling my mind out of the forbidden world and back into my own.

And the crippled man watched as my little girl self walked away.

But I could never, and will never, be able to walk away from the image of his disfigurement, or from the pain that festered inside his heart. No. Because it opened my eyes. And no matter how wretched or debased this world is, I will keep those eyes open.