Shoes

I have completed the last step in my wardrobe plan, since I have decided to not abandon the graphic tees.  I have bought a pair of grown up shoes.  Plain mary janes, no heel, in teal leather.  They may take a few weeks to arrive.  I should not have spent the money, not right now, but I did.  I am going to be a grown up.  You'll see.

Thank You Pork Bun

It's true that there is more than this. I am cherry picking my data. I am also from the incredible racket that mah jong tiles make when they are all crashing into each other at once. I am from barbecue pork buns and rice with soy sauce, so much of it that these days I can't stand it anymore. These days I eat rice with butter and salt and pepper. I am from red pocket money instead of gift wrapped boxes, yucky moon cakes in autumn, my Chinese grandmother's birthday party with little old Chinese ladies singing karaoke Chinese opera, the memory still makes me shudder. I am from the stone lions in front of our house that I tried to get my friends to steal, but no one ever did and now it's my father's house that they are in front of, sad bewildered stone lions, too heavy to move so why bother?

There was one Chinese person in my life, one voice compared to the multitude of people who I talked to every day, who I befriended and loved, who I listened to, who I read or saw on TV or who sang me to sleep at night on my tape player, one voice against the juggernaut that is the culture I have lived in for 32 years, and that one voice didn't even try. She never tried to make me Chinese; she assumed it was a failure from the start. She has never said, you are like me. She has never said, this is also part of who you are.

I am familiar with parts of America that other Americans feel lost in, or rather I am so used to that feeling of being lost that I don't notice it anymore. Hey look, a street with no signs I can read. Hey look, smells I can't identify, and sounds I can't decipher. It's old hat to me. And that makes me different from other Americans. It makes me Other. But it doesn't make me Chinese. It makes me an American woman with an estranged Chinese mother. My friend's boyfriend who taught in China for three years is just as used to being around Chinese things, is more used to them, than I am. I am used to Chinatown. I'm not used to China. I've never had to live among Chinese people, never had to follow their customs from day to day. I just go shopping, buy some knick knacks, eat a pound of barbecue pork, and then go home.

I am aware that I am different. But my difference is so much more than this that it all gets mixed up in my head. I am not the All-American-Girl, but it's not just my face. I never had the right clothes or the right hair and I never saw the right movies, and that is something I got from both of my parents. I read books instead of having sleepovers. I was fat and bad at sports and good at school. I kissed Joanna in the hallways. I wore chain mail and corsets to school. I didn't believe in God. I am not-straight, not-white, not-male, and not-Christian in a hetero-normative, anglo-normative, male-normative, Christ-normative country. I am used to not having any role models who look like me. I am used to strangers coming up to me at work and asking if they can take my portrait because they're doing a school project about race. I am used to people having expectations for me, because of the way I look or who my mother is, and I'm used to them being disappointed when I fail to meet those expectations. When people came to my house, they expected exotic. My mother cooked spaghetti.

I'm half-Chinese-American, which is not the same as white-American. None of my friends speak Chinese, but I'm the only one who feels guilty about it. They all like barbecue pork buns, but they don't remember summers spent sitting in my mother's office reading fantasy novels every day for two weeks in the summer, and going downstairs to the Chinese supermarket to buy fried rice and barbecue pork for lunch and fighting over who gets the last piece. It always comes down to barbecue pork.

Short Girl Photography

Week 6, part 2: delight

I love my new tattoo.

I love it so much. I keep admiring it in the mirror during dance class. Whenever there's a free moment, I am looking at myself.

Which is weird.

I am not unaccustomed to self-admiration. I admire many things that I am or do. But I'm not used to admiring the way I look in a mirror. I look in the mirror and aim for yeah, okay. Sometimes, I manage to achieve better than before. Taking delight in my appearance, even this one small part of my appearance, is a strange and new experience.

What I Mean

It's all the little things that we never notice until they change, the assumptions we don't realize we're making.  How far apart we stand from each other, how loudly we speak, the way we hold a spoon, what we find attractive, what we find strange, what we find comforting, the temperature of our drinks, how we expect others to behave, what we consider rude, the speed we walk, or talk, our relationship with time.  The baseline by which we compare everything to. 

When I say that a faculty member is a close talker, which makes me moderately uncomfortable every time we have a conversation, I mean that he stands closer than most Americans do.  When I say that Midwesterners are sometimes passive aggressive, I mean in comparison to Californians.  If I am describing someone to you, and he is white, I will say "he has short hair."  If I am describing someone to you, and he is Asian, I will say, "he is Asian, and has short hair."  I didn't live in a town where everyone's parents were strangely lax, I lived in a house where my mother was strangely strict.  My baseline for all my expectations was not my own household, it was everyone else's.

I am from pink stucco outdoor shopping malls, and open school plans, I am from He-Man and X-Men and Smurfs and My Little Pony and Strawberry Shortcake.  I am from minivans and after school classes.  I am from picnics with my grandparents on Memorial Day and the 4th of July, and turkey and pie on Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I am from "jello salad" and spaghetti and hamburgers.  I am from Girl Scout Camp songs and two horrible seasons of soccer.  I am from learning the sign language for "Let There Be Peace on Earth," and "All Good Gifts."  I am from Christian Youth Theater and high school drama.  I am from Rogers and Hammerstein, and "Alternative rock" radio, and thinking that Tori Amos was the only one who understood me.  I am from my first concert at fifteen and my first road trip at nineteen.  I am from dirty clapping rhymes and porn hidden in the bathroom of my dad's machine shop.  I am from running barefoot from the bus stop to my house, and then, finally, setting my burnt feet in the pool in the backyard.  I am from a green velvet off the shoulder dress that was shorter in front than it was in back, that I wore to Prom my sophomore year and then to morP my junior year because I was totally getting into irony.  I am from the cool kids doing a performance of "The Wrong Stuff" at our D.A.R.E. graduation to the tune of New Kids on the Block.  I am from The Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley Twins and Anne McCaffery and Piers Anthony.  And this is only the beginning of what I mean.

That was the easy part

It's easy to define with negatives.  It's easy to say what something is not.  This is just the beginning.  What I want to do is talk about what is.  What it means, to me.  Coming up next.

Me and Neil Stephenson

I have many flaws, but "quick to anger" is seldom among them.  It usually takes me a few days before I look back at something and think, "hey, that pisses me off."  And by the time I've worked up some good ol' righteous indignation, it's far too late to do anything with it besides posture grandly in front of my bedroom mirror.

So, when faced with the idea that I might not be culturally American, that my foreign-ness outweighed any sense of belonging I might have here, my immediate and total fury was more than I knew what to do with. I am unaccustomed to fury. I simmer, I don't explode. I gesticulated. I yelled. At everyone. I was going to make Angry T-Shirts, in case someone happened to look at me during a non-yelling moment, they would know I WAS MAD.

Looking back at this, I realize that, in 32 years, no one has ever questioned this. Especially not me.

There are lots of aspects of self-identity that I have questioned, debated with myself, with others, and eventually resolved, for the present time at least, into a reasoned answer. I have questioned my sexuality, my political beliefs, my social allegiances, and while I've never doubted my femininity, I have tried many times, unsuccessfully, to explain why it is so. I know that I am a woman, and it bothers me that I don't know why I know it. I have questioned my Chinese-ness many times. But never the opposite.

You know how there are patchwork-quilt-Americans and melting-pot-Americans? My father is a melting-pot American. The point was not to stitch together differences so that those differences complimented each other, the point was to melt it all together and dissolve the differences. I knew I was American because my father told me so, proudly. I knew I was American because my mother told me so, sadly. My American-ness was one of a thousand things about me that disappointed my mother. Sometimes it felt as if my American-ness was the root of every one of those thousand things that disappointed my mother, that if I were Chinese, I might be her daughter for real, I might deserve to be her daughter. But I wasn't. I didn't.

In my family, the family that I know, we are short, busty, with broad shoulders and smaller hips. I look like my grandmother, like my Aunt L., like my cousin C. I have moles, and freckles. I have broad, flat, feet. I look nothing like a bird.

I wasn't even as Chinese as the other Chinese-Americans. The kids at school with Chinese parents, who, like me, grew up on pink stucco and palm trees and surfers and hamburgers and french fries and Saturday morning cartoons, their parents made them learn Chinese. They spoke the language, they knew how to use chopsticks, and no one ever looked at them with embarrassed curiosity and asked what are you? Perhaps people asked if they were Korean or Japanese or Taiwanese. But it was the specifics that were up for questioning. People looking at me didn't know where to start.

As an adult, I can look back at my relationship with my mother and realize that she was offended by everyone and everything, and that no amount of cultural similarity could have saved our relationship. But at the time, I thought that if only I could be her Chinese daughter, I might be able to make her happy. But all my memories of interacting with Chinese people, or Chinese things, are memories of being different, of not belonging.

I remember that I went to China, once, and discovered that there were no forks at the restaurant. Being very hungry, and unable to use chopsticks, I kept the two wooden pieces attached at the top, and used them like tweezers, pulling them apart and letting them snap together around a piece of food. Sometimes I would just try to stab at things, and spear them on the blunt wooden tips.

I remember sitting at a table filled with Chinese people while my mother talked in Chinese. I couldn't understand a word of it, but every once and a while, I heard my name. My mother gestured towards me, and then everyone laughed. And then they talked some more. I looked down at my bowl and ate my rice with a fork.

I remember the first time I had dim sum without my mother. I had brought friends, who all looked at me expectantly, to lead them with my extensive knowledge and experience. I felt like a fraud.

I like to tell people the story of my mother tapping on the table at restaurants. I only knew this because my father once teased her for doing it at an Italian restaurant. I would tell people the story of the Chinese emperor who disguised himself as a commoner and was waiting on his servant. The servant could not properly bow to his emperor without giving away the disguise, so he made a bowing gesture with his hand. I know this story, because I read it in a cyberpunk novel. The story about demons and straight lines came from the same book. Sometimes it feels as if I have learned more of my "heritage" from white men writing science fiction than I ever learned from my mother.

And it is because I have always doubted my Chinese-ness that I have never questioned my American-ness.  Because it was always presented as a kind of zero-sum game.  My American-ness is to blame, it took up all the room and left no space for anything else.  It is all I have.

little things

I think it's funny that, being the source of my scarring, it's that e e cummings poem that ended up meaning so much, since I don't actually agree with it.  I think that feeling vs. syntax is a false dichotomy, and while feeling and communicating are not the same act, the pursuit of one doesn't mean the abandonment of the other.  And I think it's awfully silly for e e cummings, who made a career out of playing with syntax, punctuation, and language in order to better express concepts and emotions, to mock other people for doing the same.  Although, it is a beautiful poem.  There is that.

Also, further data:

(And I swear that this time, really, I mean it, I will not spend the weekend undoing this, I will stick to my damn diet, I will stop adding M&Ms to my lunches, I will I swear I will this time.)