social discomfort and powerlessness taken out on us

So Chris actually hit the nail on the head when he said that my father had low self-esteem. He was actually very self-conscious, embarrassed about his accent, uncomfortable around people (something he also later admitted in a 2000 letter to my husband), and felt pretty powerless. I later came to realize myself that this is why he took pleasure in beating up on us, both physically and verbally. He especially liked to berate my mother, in the meanest of ways. I hated that I couldn't stand up for her. If she said something that made him feel stupid, like that it would look bad if people saw him playing too physically with us, or that he shouldn't walk around in his underwear in front of his daughters, he would call her a communist, and keep bringing up how when she arrived in this country, and he went to pick her up at the airport, her face was so oily and she looked like trash with her ragged suitcases. This is too hard to explain - I just know that he had a sense of not belonging , maybe because of the difference in culture. But anytime he felt uncomfortable, like in social situations, he would try to be the big man by putting us down or threatening us. I'm sure it must have looked really bad to other people. 

 He did like to single me out a lot, for some reason. I would happily take it, though, since it was much harder on my sister. Once, we were at the beach with my uncle and cousins. This was the uncle he hated. My cousins, sister, and I were about to go into the water and he said "[My name]! You'd better watch what you do. Your behavior in a group is totally different. You do stupid things." He just wanted to say something rude to show my uncle and cousins that he was the big powerful man and that we had to be subservient to him. It was just weird, and really embarrassed me, but that's what he wanted. It was so embarrassing when he met my husband and his family. I wasn't there (and [Husband] sure wasn't happy about me leaving him alone for that!). My father felt very uncomfortable about it and hated being there. He was very sullen and rude the whole time, just like he was at my wedding (another quite humiliating episode.) [Husband] told me that after lunch (at his parents' house), he rudely gave his plate to my mother and ordered her to take it away. Later on, they were talking about sweets, and [Husband] told me that he said that some people could eat sweets, but some people were just too fat, like [me], and shouldn't be eating them. It made him feel good to be able to insult me like that. 

 At my wedding, which Lisa told me that he was really dreading going to (and which I was dreading him coming to), he was angry the whole time. He wouldn't talk to anyone, and just walked around with a very angry expression on his face. When the priest said that we were married, [Husband’s] parents joyfully came and hugged me (and then went and started hugging their close friends, since they were so looking forward to that moment). My mother uncomfortably came over to hug [Husband] (uncomfortably because she knew that my father was going to be mad about it). Everybody was looking and waiting for my father to go hug [Husband], or at least shake hands with him. My mother kind of gently motioned for him to go over, and he just shot her a very dirty look and flung his hand at her, like "shut up and go away." Everyone kind of gasped and raised their eyebrows like "WTF?" I just wanted to die at that moment. 

 My father was very angry about the wedding also because my uncle was kind of hosting the event. (We could not have a big Indian wedding in Roswell. I would liked to have done a civil ceremony and avoided the situation altogether, but for social reasons, I could not. He was secretly happy that I was getting married and had called all his friends and told them. My in-laws had caught on that there was some weirdness, but didn't know the extent of it. Being normal people, they expected us to have an actual ceremonious wedding.) My uncle is a psychiatrist, and besides having comfort around people for this reason, is actually just a nice, easygoing, social guy. I'm sure this made my father despise him even more. When the issue of venue for my wedding was being discussed, my father said that there would be no way he would do it in Richmond, where my uncle lived, and that he didn't want my uncle to have anything to do with my wedding. 

When my mother's mother called early one morning to discuss something about the wedding, he told my mother to tell her that widows can't come to weddings. (This is actually a horrible Indian custom - the ostracizing of widows and considering their presence at social events to be inauspicious. However, I'm sure he would not have said this about his own mother, or any other widow for that matter.) I just found that to be an incredibly mean thing to say. And it happened during that 1995 turning point depression, when I was sadder than I had ever been in my whole life, and suicidal.