Agon

I’ve resisted for the most part letting ignorant questions get under my skin about the work that I do, but sometimes, I’m not as resilient as I should be. There’s something so deeply wrong about the fact that people continue to ask me what I’m supposed to do with an advanced degree in English. I’m tired of having to justify, to answer such questions, especially from friends who are in absolutely no position to be asking them in the first place. These are questions that are never thrown at people doing more “practical,” “profitable” lines of work. These are questions that do not merit an answer, especially when no answer is well-received.

What offends me most, however, is when people in my field assume that I, as a Chinese American, must be doing Asian American literature. That I, as a gay Chinese male, must somehow be doing a fusion of the two, or at least queer studies. That I, as a male, have no right or no expertise to be doing feminist studies. I still find it astounding that this is an issue, that identity = field of study arguments still circulate in supposedly liberal-minded intellectual spaces. I am not a race traitor for choosing to pursue 18th and 19th c. British literature, and I am not imposter masquerading in feminist studies or disability studies. This also does not mean that I am choosing ignorance or “colluding with my oppressor” by studying what I study. 

Really, enough is enough.

Le Pain Quotidien

I break
the hard of
the bread, 
and he lies
coarse
against me,
his salt-grey
grains, his
pockets full
of the levain
that lifts him;
butter pats or
the bread knife,
he falls away
in fleur-slices at
my mason’s
hands, hot
with firebrick 
and clay.

I sit quietly watching my friend whip herself into a frenzy over planning a mutual friend’s wedding. The napkins, the designer place settings, the vineyard venue, the invites in the right card stock. She’s throwing herself into this work as a test-run for her own future wedding, one that she secretly guesses might never come. She hears the tick and tock, but for now, she can only (over)work her way through it.

I think about how far I am from all of this, how distant I am mentally from this whole wedding marathon that everyone has begun running. Five engagements announced within this year, and I’m sitting here at a loss for the right congratulations. Don’t get me wrong: I’m incredibly happy for them. But I think about how many of them are in the midst of medical school or law school or working jobs just to make ends meet. I couldn’t imagine making a decision like that in those circumstances let alone at this age. I have this deep respect for their engagements as gestures of commitment. It’s just foreign to me as a concept.

I consider how I might end up giving speeches at some of these weddings. But behind what I will have written and rehearsed is the truth of my own fear. No, not in the queer activist sense in which I have some abstract theoretical allergy to the institution. I am not afraid of people getting married, nor am I afraid of someday getting married. I just have yet to see myself in any long-term relationship that places me in the right mental space to even contemplate marriage. What does it mean to love a man in a union that is supposed to last a lifetime? What does it mean to choose him or rather choose us over myself?

I talk to friends who can never see themselves in the confinement of marriage. Living in sin? Polyamory? I can’t help but wonder what it means then to be a one-man man.

Certainly, this could be my 23-year-old self speaking, and marriage is never a finality. But maybe I’m old-fashioned about it, about the way we throw around divorce like a stack of papers to sign. I’ve been the kind of man so far that hasn’t compromised, that hasn’t been flexible enough to accommodate a man who might have been the one worth marrying. If soulmates are not found but made, I’ve certainly been an obstacle to love-in-the-making. It took me until very recently to accept that I find remarkable ways to keep love out of my life, to resist being loved in the way that I deserve.

There’s that silly Tumblr quotation about the nature of being single. You’re single because you’re single. Plain and simple. The duration of the course is unknown, and the trajectory of the course is equally unknown. That is most certainly not plain and simple.

Good mother.

Aside from December caroling and drunken karaoke, I seldom sing. It was all I ever did when I was younger, and I owe Disney much of my childhood repertoire. My shining moment was getting an entire waiting room at the doctor’s office to pay me a dollar for singing. (Take-away lesson: vocal prostitution starts early, folks.)

Jokes aside, I make an effort every year to sing to my mother. We joke often that my voice isn’t nearly as pristine as it was before my balls dropped, but of course, we’re both referring to the fact that I lost most of my vocal range. This coupled with my worsening scoliosis meant singing was going to be out of the question.

But she still likes to play “name that tune” with me just so I can play her little boy for an hour or so. I always aim for the high notes, and whether or not I hit them, I know we’re playing a game together. There is nothing to lose but a little high-strung dignity and a few demons.

(First on the playlist.)

Trial by fire.

One of the burners on my stove yesterday caught fire, and for a moment, I thought I would see my 800 square feet go into flames. The bits and pieces I’ve gathered to make a home. The months it took for me to finally sleep in the dark by myself, the mental labor it took to accept that this is my life now among the books and paper cuts. The new carpeting, the new vanity mirror and sink after the recent flooding on my floor. All this labor.

I sat against the wall outside of my kitchen and just took breath after desperate breath for a good hour. We brush with death so frequently that it when it does appear, you’re at a loss as to how to greet it. How to say hello knowing that it might take you this time. Or take him from that class you took together. Or her from your favorite coffee shop you frequent. 

And this time, it would have been because I was negligent with the olive oil. As the pan caught fire, I could only think to keep hitting it over and over again until the fire was stamped out. The intensity of my anger, the courage I needed to find at the back of my throat.

I’m terribly afraid to die.

Notes for K.: Part II

*Someone asked me why I continue to tag things “confessional.” For me, the term has a long history in the Catholic tradition (Augustine?), especially in relation to sexuality, as well as in pop culture (I’m thinking of the incredible popularity of PostSecret, in which there needed to be government intervention because of the lurid confessions people were making.). It’s interesting to be playing with this genre in a space like Tumblr. What am I confessing and who am I confessing to? Is there something to be gained in this?

-

Pewter, about four pounds. And he tried to strike her. Repeatedly.

It’s in this way that I remember him. A second-grader who claimed he wanted to embrace his Nazi heritage. His conviction, his certainty.  It’s these details that unsettlingly linger despite our six-year friendship: what does not wash away like the street chalk on the blacktop.

Maybe it was his money. Or my money. I was wonderful at playing the expat brat, but at the same time, I felt this incredible impulse to needle myself into the tight-knit fabric of a Baptist suburbia. I wanted to let go of the city in me with its smoke that clogged my throat and all those empty apartments. What I wanted was submission (or is it admission?): to being painted at the football games, to eavesdropping on what the ladies laughed about after church. To tubing down the Chattahoochee and making the sweetest tea I could to sweat out in the sun.

I had a pride then. The part of me the asserted a self wherever it wanted, whenever it was least welcome. I was the first to “publish” a story in the second-grade writing workshop. I was the asshole that made friends with the teachers who marked me as that kid. That one who brought his food in the vacuum-sealed thermos. That one who got sent to the counselor for “maladjustment.”

He was there, and he watched it all unfold. Two egos in the same room, edging past one another uncomfortably. He liked watching me struggle, and he liked the feeling of being the hand of God intervening, plucking me from my little Hell into his salvation. Yet whenever we had to make decisions, he found such gratification in forcing my hand on the most trivial of things. Take the stairs instead of the elevator, hit the monkey bars instead of the slides. His way. The way.

It’s strange when an external voice fuses with your own self-critic. They learn each other’s syntax, tonality. The cohabitation of these authorities in the mind generate a certain kind of unruly chemistry. What is generated is monstrous, yet you love it in this perverted way. The forceful hand it wields, and the automated submission that assume before its authority… years of unlearning would come. But that is the labor of self-fashioning. The way that he worked on breaking me, the way he taught me to break down myself. “Ten different mirrors show you ten different faces.”

I started to believe him. That I belonged in the refuse along with the other people who would become dead to him. I’d soon begin to say it for him when he began to distance himself from me. At lunch, at recess. We waged war across rooms in absolute silence. I learned how to dialogue with myself, even if it was with the ghost of him as a placeholder. I stopped going to his house after I heard his mother send away the au pair that he had beaten. I feared for him. I feared for myself.

Though, much to my surprise, he too would do undergoing some reworking. He’d become one of the popular kids, and I think that’s more disturbing than anything else.

Notes for K.: Part I

K.’s psychotherapy involves a certain kind of agitation, a necessary provocation. For me, the problems have risen too many times to the surface, but what remains is what happens when the soup is boiled too many times. What bubbles up has been seen, re-seen, unseen, over-seen. K.’s acumen is precisely in her ability to agitate what has managed not to appear, what has truly refused to be brought to the surface. That which I don’t necessarily have the eyes to see. 

She makes me write. She indulges my habits and uses them for her manipulation, which in some twisted way, is for my therapy. So I trace and bring together the elements of a personal history again and again to when I began seeing myself as lesser, when I began projecting myself as forever inferior. The baby of the family who can never seem to grow up. The follower who will never lead.

-

My grandmother handed me her usual hundred-dollar bill over dim sum the other day. The ritual is painfully predictable. As she quickly finishes her food with twenty minutes of sitting down, she rifles through her purse for the crispest bill she can find. She folds it again and slips it under the table into my hand. This initiates the obligatory back-and-forth with the money from her hand to mine, from my hand back to hers. The magic number is usually three of these exchanges, but when the gesture finishes, I am to take that money and pocket it into my wallet for safe-keeping. 

I decided to break the rules this time by simply refusing to take the money. She feigns anger, and I decide to take it seriously. “I don’t need your money.” She takes this personally, as if I’ve somehow undermined her authority that apparently comes from handing out hundreds. She’s persistent about her generosity, especially in a public place like the dim sum house, where the waiters and the people at the nearby tables know her and our family name. 

“I’m proud of you, BB.” 

Yes, she calls me “BB.” The Cantonese aberration of the word “baby.” Twenty-two and not a single meeting goes by without her calling me “baby.” 

“Well, that’s good enough, 婆婆.

She shakes her head as if I’m not getting it. The worst part is that I do. I understand her so clearly.

“No, don’t you know I love you?”

 ”Yes, but it doesn’t have to be in the form of money.”

The next line breaks me.

“But that’s the only way 婆婆 knows how.”

And that was it: the truth behind a ninety-year old woman who cannot hold a glass to her lips without shaking. This is the woman who parades my name around Chinatown because I’m the good grandson. I speak enough Chinese to play these verbal games with her. I’ve been that A-student. All because the ladies tell her what good blood we have. How blessed we are as a line.

But the reverse is perhaps why I became this self-berating perfectionist. I think to myself that, as the youngest male on both sides of the family, I will never be respected. If I were to fail out of school or break the mold, I’d be dead to her. I’m only as good as the news I bring her. And god knows it cannot be the news of my happiness. About the man I may love, about the literary studies I pursue. It is what superficially ends up on report cards, what adorns with laurels the family name.

So she loves me the only way she knows how. That is when anger becomes pity. How two generations may never bridge a gap, and how I will be at her funeral mourning the love we never could share because it is beyond her. Beyond what can be done after an arranged marriage, decades of abuse, and the obsession with family power. A dowager who will never love her name or herself.

Of Custom

At ten, I asked under
my breath if ghosts
carried loose change 
in their pockets
because I doubted
that Uncle would receive
a single cent of the
thousands we were burning
to him from the hilltop,
where he asked
to be buried in the skies
like the Tibetans
had taught him
over tea.

I saw the way he arced
alongside the lines
of smoke into the
heavens lined thick
with joss paper —
this palace would be
his and his alone:
gorged with emptiness,
yet cleansed of those
painted jezebels and
irreverent sons that
refuse to bear his
last name.

He tells me at twenty-three that I cannot be expected to love as he does, to want what he is supposed to want. Fascinating is how the rearrangement of two numbers can generate a gulf between two people wide enough to render them untranslatable to one another. The decade hangs in the middle. There is no common ground, and I’m left to contain myself.

-

One of my cohortmates calls me a few days ago to ask if i wanted a babysitting gig. My first instinct was to dodge the offer. I know nothing about children, and all I can imagine is accident after accident that could happen within the hours I’d be responsible for a child. 

I’m aware I can’t take care of things / well aware of what being careless brings… / it’s why I’m so afraid to raise a kid.

I sing these lyrics to myself, and I know what he means. I am in the years of selfishness, the years when late nights and mixed drinks fool me into thinking that life really does revolve around me. 

I fear because I do not yet know how to love. At least not a child. A man, maybe, but all the fire I’ve swallowed to throw myself with brazenness into the fold perhaps needs its time to flicker.

Fortune favors the brave, and I wonder if it’s at all true in the end.

For J.W.

The dogfish is meant to calm the nerves
just how the burning cloves used to keep 
my chest in order if not in a closeted 
disarray when I saw Jack be nimble and quick
from the third story of the lake house onto 
the bed of a moving truck:
the sound of his submission, the
force of a genuflection breaking the bloated 
peace in my ear now crawling back to the jazz shuffle
we used to fumble with in his two-car garage 
webbed with sweat, broken curfews, and that old Jalopy.
The music career of three boys who thought they
had found God hanging above a poplar headboard
is as short as the distance between the frets.
Yet I know Jack is among the leaves, 
kissing our foreheads and the bier upon which 
we once laid each of our hands, and where we
left him singing in a head voice that 
we who lamely linger may hear.