When It First All Went Pete Tong (For Me)
During pandemic lockdowns, I became deeply dissatisfied along woke-ish lines, with aspects of modern life involving being unseen or invisible as an Asian man, not being able to physically preserve the safety of our parents and wives and children.
To be completely honest, I had been totally fine for 40 plus years in America, telling myself the magic phrase "But I was born here"1 would provide an escape hatch for any situation that might encroach.
The imaginary script goes:
Random White Or Black Person: Go back to China!
My Model Minority Face: But I was born here
RWOBP: Oh! your English is so good
MMMF: Yeah I grew up here, how about them Knicks2 etc.
And I had a trump card in my back packet too: "Me family Taiwan, not China. If you anti China, so I too! Haha, friend."
Then I heard stories of Japanese and Korean dudes, resigning themselves before leaving the house that "We are all Chinamen." (And not in the nice way that I would have said it.)
A young father got attacked in front of his wife and kid in a stroller, on the Hernshead Rocks in Central Park, where my kid had played happily and freely, in one of our last remaining refuges from disease and fear in pre-vaccine urban home living.
During our weekly college classmate Zoom calls, 100% of my friends shared stories of their parents having incidents of racial yelling or spitting or being chased. Every parent had lived in America for 40+ years, all over the United States, mostly in communities where they were not isolated or alone.
My uncle is a 6'1" Chinese American, ex-U.S. Army doctor with a square head and a military buzzcut, who practiced medicine in a small, all-white community for 40+ years. And my cousin is a tall, skinny Asian kid with frat bro hair and clothes. Basically, he grew up in an environment to produce the kind of Asian food eater who only likes chow mein and kung pao chicken. And probably boba.
I worried about my aunt, a feisty 5'2" Asian grandma3 who for sure would talk back to any racist. Calling him names while quoting Bible verses and casting out demons in the name of Jesus.
It's been more than 5 years, and I still think about this time in our country's history at least twice a month.
Generally with gratitude, as I look at my crypto, because this experience pushed me to being way more open about exits from society.
We pulled up a map and drew a circle around NYC with a radius of one day's drive. Where could we go? Would it be safe for our young family, during a global pandemic with the kinds of people who choose to live in the mountains of New Hampshire or Vermont? Or would they eat us if they had to...We heard about groups of Russian Jews who bought entire villages in the Poconos...
That kind of thinking was good for bitcoin price.
My fear five years ago seems not so different from the experience of a black teenager who grew up around the same time as me. Going to school with a knife for protection. Learning to be invisible as needed. Steeling up to be menacing as needed.
I assume that brown people (Muslims, Sikhs) in America after 9/11 can see echoes in our experiences. And now Hispanics with ICE raids.
I think none of this is American, but all of this is very American.
Maybe I had to experience this fear, in order to develop a deeper kind of empathy. My God, I thought it was deep enough already!
I heard Ta-Nehisi Coates say this recently, in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, and the wave of firings for expressing unpopular opinions about Kirk's saintliness and godliness. Coates stated a perspective which I still don't quite know how to deal with: These are the best white people we have ever had. The most woke, the least racist, the most open-minded.
must be said with just the right intonation. It doesn't work otherwise lol↩
risky to bring up Linsanity! Kobe had to put down Jeremy Lin mentally when they played together on the Lakers. Carmelo showed himself to be a b*tch *ss p*ssy. I can't listen to Melo's 7PM in Brooklyn podcast. I fw the Club 520 boys who all give props to Jeremy, from Jeff to Mook to the guys who never made it to the league↩
when I was younger, I used to hate shopping for groceries in NY Chinatown. Those tiny mean old ladies would take one look at me, and accidentally bump or elbow my ribs while my hands were full of glass bottles and loose vegetables↩