Lesson #1: You Are Who You Are.
2000:
Death, Taxes, Republican GloryHoles, Race Relations
For whatever reason, I was raised in an environment where racial discrimination was largely a non-issue.... As in, I never got beaten, harassed, insulted (maliciously) for being a darker shade of something. Growing up as a First Generation Taiwanese American in the San Francisco Bay Area was complicated in different ways. For one, I never felt any sense of connection to the Asian youth community when I came of age. All the Asian kids I ever ran into, particularly in Suck-A-Con Valley, were these pompous rich kids who all dressed super preppy, drove "rice rockets", and listened to two things: Rap and R&B. Oh! Sorry wait. I forgot J Pop and K Pop. This is of course a gross exaggeration, but for the purposes of creating fringe contrasts, my blog will focus on the groups that made me feel the most ostracized.
[by the way, race is a thing in this entry, so if you don't have the stomach for it I'd strap in or move on.]
I always felt out of step, being middle class but not "upper" middle class enough with these other kids.
So I went the other way. I decided to fit in with "the rest". I went to punk shows, did half-assed ollies on a skateboard I didn't own, watched movies that weren't just full of hip hop and martial arts stars, and I hung out with an enormous range of people of all races and colors, although my friends, even to this day, are largely white.
One day, while at lunch somewhere in high school, someone made a pretty racist (albeit slightly funny) Asian joke. To which I tersely said "HEY", and pointed at myself.
"Whatever Jon, you're basically white."
Whether or not that was racist (it kind of was, in retrospect)... His point was that I had so seamlessly fit in with "white" culture that people had forgotten what color I was. At the time I remember taking that as a compliment. I had drawn the EPITAPH RECORDS® logo on enough surfaces, quoted Simpsons and Jay + Silent Bob, and re-enacted Jackass enough times to fool these guys into thinking I was one of them! Huzzah!!! I would NEVER be caught dead as one of those Polo Sport Ralph Lauren dip shits hangin out in their Honda Accords with the 40" spoilers!
It wasn't until I started dating a Chinese American girl that I became ACUTELY aware of the color of my skin. She, too, was playing the "I'm white enough to not be Asian" game. It was rare to see two "Twinkies®" (Bananas®, WhiteWashed®) dating each other back then. It still kind of is now, probably. I wouldn't know. She hit me square in the face with my race.... a 1st Gen HK girl who was stuck in the 'burbs of Sunnyvale, telling me, another Asian guy, that he will never be good enough for her based solely on the grounds that he did not, and WILL NEVER, look like Brad Pitt, or Colin Farell, or Freddie Prinze Junior, or Matt Damon, or whoever the fuck other white guys were big at the time.
She dumped me on the grounds of "not being white", despite "having all the qualities of a white guy". Who could blame her, really? You watch Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You and Never Been Kissed and Sixteen Candles 100 times each of COURSE you're going to want a tall dopey blue eyed white guy to go to prom with!! Of COURSE you would want an "All American" high school experience!
What happened after that was pretty tragic. As a natural and definitely unfair reaction, I swore off Asian women altogether for years. I mean YEARS. A projection of self loathing, self hatred and roiling in something I was born into, something I could not ever change, no matter how hard I tried. Some people out there are just always running away from something.
Imagine trying to run away from the color of your own skin for 10 years.
Brad
San Francisco, 2011
Brad grew up in Los Angeles to a Purple Heart Navy pilot father and a stern Jewish mother. He came out to his parents immediately after his oldest sister came out also, and in an era where homosexuality was considered an abomination by just about everyone everywhere, Adam's parents were surprisingly open minded and supportive. It probably helped that his youngest brother carried the gene pool forward and took in a wife, but I digress.
Brad was a happy, healthy, strapping young gay man living a happy, healthy strapping gay lifestyle. Throughout the 80's and 90's, he did just about everything with everybody. So he says, at least.
And then one day, he woke up (and went to the doctor and got a blood test) to find that he was HIV+. He was devastated at first. Oh no, he thought initially, his world was coming to an end life as he knew it was over. He, like so many during the height of the AIDS crisis, was now stuck with this bug, uncurable and draconian in nature. It had almost taken on this mythical slant to it.
I learned a lot from just living with him. I asked him if he ever felt suicidal.
"All the time, back then. I cried rivers worth of tears. But at the end of the day, why cry over spilled milk? It's a part of me now. It's who I am, even when a cure comes around and I get to exit that stage of my life." It gave me a very brief moment of reflection on my own struggles with identity and with feeling "trapped" by things that were beyond my control: Race, Age, the Economic crash, etc.
He wore his status with an ownership that was humbling and inspiring at the same time. I mean, of course, when he wasn't being a total pain in the ass about leaving dishes in the sink and whatnot. But he carried on in his life, living his days the best he could, the happiest he could be. Partners and lovers came and went; I am sure there is a brotherhood of solidarity out there for stuff like that.
2016:
Soft Patches, Steeples And Lost Shephards
Portland, OR
"You know, Jon, I often feel like I was a lousy mother to you."
Ever since I moved in with my folks to finish the book, my mother and I have been having some very wistful and super fucking intense conversations about our past nuclear family history. She and Dad became Christians when they were in grad school. Imagine that, right? Two college educated, extremely hard working and intelligent adults, successfully proselytized by some dopey blue eyed kid jockeying a burger patty Bible in some college town in Taiwan.
"Well, you were and are definitely not a lousy mother. I've been around long enough in the dregs of reality to know that there are some really fucking shitty parents out there. And you definitely do not qualify as a lousy mother. Not even close."
"I just sincerely regret all the things that happened to you in your experiences with Christianity. Half of the things you told me about I did not even know. I wish I could have helped you."
"Look, I get it. You guys grew up in Cold War Era Taiwan, when poverty and famine were probably a bad dream away from becoming reality at any given moment... you had Chiang Kai Shak running a leaking ship that was slowly being plugged up, and electricity and running water were considered luxury items.
And gee, guess what? All those old idols you used to worship just weren't cutting it for you. So when someone offers you a new Brand of spiritual detergent, of course you would buy into it 100%."
There are some really fucked up things that have happened to me in my experiences with Christianity that I cannot really share at this point in time with anybody in the general public. Don't worry I didn't get touched by a priest. But I've seen enough hypocrisy from just about every corner that a church has to offer for me to just look at the proverbial Kool-Aid® and realize that it's been cut with piss.
My mom knows that I had been in therapy for the last year, and that I was able to resolve a lot of those anger and rage issues, most of which were largely rooted in Christianity. Even still to this day, she will go into spats of profuse apologizing to me, for "screwing up" really bad.
I always just tell her the same thing, that I forgive her, and that even though there is a giant hole where my spiritual identity once stood, that I am content with letting that giant vacancy stand for a little bit longer before I even attempt at filling it with anything else. If anything, I will tell her on those occasions, I am grateful. Because of my experiences in religion, I simply do not feel the need to fill some gap or void, because it has largely been closed off. Imagine a summer lake that is celebrated as a childhood vacation spot, suddenly polluted by the local Coca Cola® plant, and condemned forever with diabetic fish and radioactive time travelling bears. Free story idea, go ahead and steal it.
And that's just it. Religion is a giant identity medallion for some. It certainly was (and definitely still is) for my parents. I would go so far as to say that in my youth, my parents were not really parents.
They were Christians who happened to be parents.
They saw everything through that filter and it was largely irrelevant to many of the psychological problems that were slowly brewing within both me and my brother from childhood to adolescence. Anger, rage, depression, these things that were very clearly problems Tim and I had that neither of my parents ever wanted to actually address with actual help... PHYSIOLOGICAL problems, part of our inevitable traits relating to brain chemistry and physical health, put to the wayside because Church and God And Jesus and the Holy Spirit were sufficient enough solutions, via lots of prayer and group Bible studies.
As it currently applies to my life nowadays, Adam was a salient checkpoint. He became a segue into some very important identity and emotional ownership exercises that would I would come to learn further down the line. These lessons are starting to come full circle, particularly in constant unearthing and realization excavations conducted with my parents.
I have made some decisions in my career that are now yielding consequences I need to own. It's one thing to act on a feeling, or jump when an impulse tells you to jump. But it is accepting where you land and where to go next is what is key.