There was something so bootleg about my life in Hong Kong. I was often too self-conscious to invite friends over. Plus, my mother was suspicious of everyone not in our immediate family. I wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers or attend them, and this only cemented the feelings of otherness. Every kid knows the best bonding happens when you and a friend stay up late enough to get loopy. At school on Mondays, there were inside jokes that I knew better than to laugh at. I compensated by always having candy (and later, cigarettes) to share, but bribery made for only superficial cronies.
Everything about my family life seemed shabby, low-rent, and more “local Chinese” than the lives of my friends. I’d washed dishes and finished homework at my mom’s restaurant since forever. My friends’ dads all worked for massive corporations that you could ID from the logo’d flags that flew aboard their sleek, white yachts.
They all seemed to have corporate housing in the Midlevels—a sprawling collection of centrally located hilltop homes and tony apartments—complete with live-in maids who cooked elaborate meals whenever they wanted. I began stealing money from my mom’s till. I was an ineffective crook and kept getting caught, but it was worth it to keep up. They all had memberships at the football club and annual tickets to the Rugby Sevens. No matter how much I lolled at the club pool or how trashed I got at the tournament, I only ever felt like a guest.
In hindsight, all of this is ridiculous, since the Brits could hardly qualify as guests in Hong Kong. Guests don’t traffic opium from India to China to make drug addicts of everyone (at least not polite ones). Understandably, China was tired of having its silver stores exhausted by languid, tar-smoking zombies, so it asked England to quit it, then seized 20,000 chests of opium and attempted to block trade. At which point Britain’s then fuck-off navy took Canton, and Hong Kong was ceded with a whole bunch of other stuff in the Treaty of Nanking. Obviously, I’m paraphrasing.
Hong Kong means “Fragrant Harbor,” which is a riot since it doesn’t smell so great. Colonies are strange. And institutionally racist. One day when I was 12, in the British private school I attended, a popular senior boy named Simon (in secondary school, middle-schoolers and high-schoolers are lumped together in a terrifying morass) took the stage in assembly and said: “All the Pakis get to the back of the room. Now.” When a well-regarded kid says some crazy racist shit—in front of teachers, no less—some of you might wonder what’s going to happen. I didn’t. I knew. I knew that chinks were next and that gooks wouldn’t even get a separate category. I knew that bogans, kiwis, wogs, and paddys would likely come afterward. There were zero black kids, so I didn’t have to steel myself against the N-word. That same day, I learned that the derogatory term to describe the English was “limey.” (Really? That’s as bad as it gets? Your triumph over scurvy?)
As I’d suspected, the whole thing wound up being some sort of subversive bit of performance art about how racial slurs hurt (well, right). Except that it was all delivered with far too much relish. Had they begun with the English kids, they all would’ve dashed to the back hooting. Which is of course exactly what happened when they got to go last. I made a mental note of which side the mixed kids claimed, and judged them in my head if they voted white. But visuals like these helped reinforce my fetishistic confusion: that “English” equaled “popular.”
Had I held a British passport, maybe I’d have walked slowly and confidently to the front and not the back and called out the tidy (ultimately jingoistic) little experiment for its flaws. You see, ladies and germs, I’d have been legally English but visibly Korean. What now? It was baffling enough that the pop culture and fashion I knew best and loved most was from England. The shipping delays for magazines and CDs only added to the feeling that I’d earned them. The hunt, wait, and exorbitant tariffs only gave all of it that much more power, and the harder I searched, the more I ignored everything to do with Korea and, strangely, even the soft goods coming out of Hong Kong. I missed out on a lot of really good kung fu movies, the kind that really cool black rappers from Staten Island were obsessed with.
America is different. Especially the American South, and when we moved to Universal City, Texas, I became that much more exotic. I jettisoned the English accent since the teachers were as insufferable as the students, and everyone thought I was faking. There were a lot of requests to touch my hair, which hung—like some Vietnam vet’s fantasy—stick-straight and to the small of my back. They also thought Hong Kong was in Japan and somehow every nonwhite kid thought he got a pass to greet me with squinty eyes and “ching chong.” It was like Lindsay Lohan’s “Jambo,” when she walks up to a cafeteria table of black kids at her new school in Mean Girls, except that “jambo” is a word where “ching chong” very much isn’t. My brother was dealing with it too, but we had a tacit agreement to ignore each other. Later he confessed it felt more like a one-sided decision on my part. Eventually, I became popular and he didn’t. We didn’t speak through most of college.
In college in Austin, I clocked the auburn-haired Asian kids who smoked Marlboro Light 100s and drove Mitsubishi 3000 GTs and Toyota Celicas with swooping, pearlized spoilers. They talked about AKs, were seemingly very good at pool, hailed mostly from Houston, and were decidedly cooler than church nerds or extracurricular-scholastic-group nerds. We didn’t interact much beyond the shade they’d throw as I walked by with my white boyfriend. “He’s half Mexican!” I wanted to tell them, but of course, that proved nothing.
The other Asian crews were part of the Greek system, and I was leery of them as well. I knew them only because the housing administration of the University of Texas at Austin automatically roomed you with an Asian kid in a larger suite of Asian kids, and my Chinese suitemates rushed for Asian Panhellenic sororities. My roommate was a gorgeous socialite from Taiwan who spoke little English and dated guys who bought her clothes. She wore only Armani. We all kept a healthy distance.
* * *
New York City is home to 67 percent of New York State’s Korean residents, which works out to about 103,335, according to the Asian American Federation Census stats for 2013. Sixty-seven percent of those Koreans live in Queens. It wasn’t until I moved to New York, on my own at 22, that I met a critical mass of cool Asian kids. Asian kids who liked what I liked (though, if I’m being honest, were far more well-adjusted).
When I started my first job in New York, as the editorial assistant of a graffiti magazine, one of our columnists was a Korean woman who was hilarious, beautiful, and the popular gossip reporter for the city’s number-one hip-hop radio station. I’d expected a chilly introduction, but she was excited that I was a female staff member and offered nothing but support and encouragement. (While I’d like to think I would have behaved similarly in her position, I’m not sure I would have.) I befriended two other Korean editors at rap magazines, and for the first time, white kids were minorities in the group for which I held the highest regard.
I met writers and artists who loved talking and joking about race. I was thrilled that they spoke of Koreans with precise derision. Turns out, bon mots about Korean rage don’t sting coming from a Haitian kid from Astoria, Queens, who has more Korean friends than I do. In loving my people, I am a late bloomer and feel horribly prodigal for it.
Twelve years later, in Los Angeles I sometimes find myself in a large group of mostly Asians, all of us solidly in our thirties, some of us with kids. A collective of purebreds, a whole bunch of hapas (half-breeds), and other races who spend considerable time with our kind. I love it so much. Afternoons, we descend upon a friend’s yard. A grill is fired up. There are no hot dogs. Instead, pounds upon pounds of pork and beef marinated in Korean flavorings, a rice cooker toted out by its handle, carne asada. A vat of kimchi appears, and Chinese roast pork buns, gently toasted in the oven, cut in half with scissors, and passed around by hand. We don’t give a shit that so many hands touch our food because we trust one another. Somehow we put down 10 bottles of tequila and everyone gets meat sweats. Tupperware is filled and distr
ibuted. The people with kids get first dibs. Children make me anxious, but for these people I slide into easy child care. I am Auntie Mary. The tiny Asians and I eat snacks and watch YouTube videos of friendly people opening presents or icing cakes. Common sense feels like a real thing and not something to be guessed at, and I think how my mother would be comfortable with my Asian friends even though most have tattoos and only some are lawyers and virtually none of them is Catholic. This makes me happy in an unalloyed way. I love us as a pack.
Does this happen to white people? When they’re just with other white people? Like, regular white people, not terrifying racist ones? Whenever I’ve entered a room where everyone is white, I feel suspicious. I never feel particularly in danger or anything; I’m just convinced I’ll have a lousy time. The crazy thing is, the white people I’ve polled in all-white rooms never even notice. Is this a boon or a curse? Can white people enjoy hanging out with only white people if they never even notice when an all-white assemblage happens? Are whites allowed to admit to liking it even if they did? Maybe they do and it’s great and they’re just not telling me. I hope so. I really want that for white people. Their food is a struggle.
DATING A GOOD MAN WORKS, BUT ONLY IF YOU’RE INTO THAT KIND OF THING
Don’t date a guy who works at the airport.
I did it for two and a half years, and it was a terrible idea all of the time. Think about it: His commute is to the airport. This is not a dude whose baseline disposition is all that great. Never mind that your schedules are always out of whack. Plus, as a bonus, he’ll tote a firearm in a holster that goes right next to a doohickey that measures levels of ambient radiation. If you can imagine, the constant risk of over-knowing worrisome things is no day in the park. Every time he got ready for work and clipped on an accessory, I’d go: “Don’t be a hero.” Which of course meant, “Please roll into a ball if someone goes berserk.” Which is kind of hard to do, what with a gun belt and all those gadgets.
Were you to say, “Well, it’s harder to be the guy who works at the airport than to be the girl dating the guy who works at the airport,” you’d be right. This isn’t a sympathy contest. We were both wrong to have a go at it. If you ask me, airport people are like actors: They should really only be dating their own. The life is too peculiar.
When I met the man who’d become my ex, he didn’t spend his nights and weekends waiting for drug smugglers to poop out cocaine-filled condoms no matter how long it took. He worked at the Board of Education in downtown Manhattan (far, far away from the airport) in a gray stone building with columns and an Alexander Calder sculpture inside. We were 27, the year was 2008, and the struggle was real: Wall Street had greedied itself past fucked, which ruined everything for everyone. I was the editor of a small magazine based in an up-and-coming, industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn and hadn’t ever hung out with anyone like him in New York. Most of my colleagues drank and drugged too much and went to offices only for special occasions. They were writers, editors, stylists, designers, photographers, artists, or DJs. They near-exclusively slept with one another, much to the chagrin of all of us, always.
Anyway, it was fall and I was four months out of a failed five-year relationship, so I went to a dive bar to see what was up. I was 100 percent game for anything. Provided “anything” meant a boyfriend I could latch onto for at least a year, preferably less than three. He was decently tall, with brown hair and brown eyes, and had grown up on Long Island. We’ll call him Alex, because I’ve never dated an Alex in real life. I had to ask my friend if he was cute. I don’t remember what she said.
Alex got my number, and instead of texting, he called, which is exotic enough to be appealing, and a week and a half later, I was going to meet him at a bar I’d never heard of. He told me which end of the train to alight from so I wouldn’t have to double-back a half-block. This detail plus the calling thing sold me. It’s like the time I was 19 and a guy told me to bring a book to the café so we wouldn’t have to prematurely lock eyes when he walked over to me. I dated that guy for five years, too.
Alex wore a long-sleeved shirt under a short-sleeved shirt, which was a layering technique I enjoyed but hadn’t seen since high school. We talked about movies adapted from comic books. When I got home I tried to find him on Facebook and couldn’t. I did locate a friend of his and discovered that exactly zero of our friends overlapped. No Venn diagram. Just two wholly separate circles hanging in space. It was a baby pigeon: something you never see in New York. I took it as the wrong kind of sign.
Here’s what happened: I loved my job and he hated his, so when a Customs and Border Protection job turned up, Alex applied. A federal gig sounded better than a city job because of things I knew from TV procedurals, and anyway, his career change felt like none of my business. Alex got the job. Training was a three-month affair that would begin the following spring. It was to be conducted in a place called FLETC (Federal Law Enforcement Training Campus) in Glynco, Georgia, the location of a former naval base and the portmanteau for Glynn County. FLETC trains 89 different government agencies and is really close to Brunswick. It’s the town where Brunswick stew comes from, unless you ask someone from Brunswick County, Virginia, who will fight you about it. I’ll remember this information forever just as sure as I will never set foot in Glynco ever again.
We should have broken up sooner. We were plainly mismatched and we hated each other’s friends. Mine were rude and his were boring. Letting the coupling peter out would’ve been a blip. But the impending distance and time apart only served to hasten my commitment and deepen my fondness. This is precisely my flavor of crazy. It’s like he was going to war! Except not at all, though I may have rewatched the Kate Beckinsale classic Pearl Harbor once or twice. I visited him, in May. I rented a car in Jacksonville, Florida, and had to be cleared through security to get onto campus. Processing me took a couple extra steps because I’m not naturalized. “Naturalized” is the weirdest concept, if you think about it. The brass asked me why I hadn’t upgraded from a green card to citizenship despite having lived in America for years, and it felt like a pop quiz that I knew I would fail. The stew was good, though. It had bits of corn in it.
The chow hall was also solid. He introduced me to the table of recruits he normally had lunch with—a group of four guys with 16 broiled chicken breasts between them. They introduced themselves by name and where they came from. It reminded me of a war movie where only one of them lives. I wasn’t confident I was dating the one who’d survive and couldn’t tell if that made him more or less attractive. There was a small bar on the grounds. I drank four glasses of Jameson and leaned in to gossip about who was fucking who, but Alex didn’t want to play. A better game was figuring out what to buy at the FLETC gift store. I bought two shot glasses with the Homeland Security seal on them because I found them thrilling and scary. It seemed the type of present you’d give someone as a warning. Or the online avatar of a very specific someone prone to leaving incendiary comments on a first-person-shooter message board. There was even IRS memorabilia, like mouse pads and (LOL) wallets. When I came home, my friends thought I was out of my mind.
Lest there be any confusion, I was definitely out of my mind. But not any more than I usually am about this sort of thing. I’m one of those despicably weak-willed people with codependency issues who are always in a relationship. I’ve had a boyfriend since I was 13. I waltz into people’s lives and dig in my heels. It’s a terrible, irrevocable launch sequence activated whenever I meet a guy who is perfectly nice and not entirely malformed who makes it known that he likes me first. I’ll 86 a bad apple in a heartbeat, but if he’s kind, I’ll hang out. It rarely has to do with whether I like them or not. I’ll date them and date them until something in my head snaps and I have to go. Usually this happens overnight. I’ve never given a particular shit about marriage or babies, so when I’m done, it’s a clean break. I never invest so much that I can’t get out. Coping mechanisms vary.
The point of Alex was to cleanse the p
revious guy from my system. This is both unflattering and true. I’d met my ex within two months of moving to New York from Texas. We were together from the time I was 22 to the time I was 27, and he was the love of my life. He was also my boss. We were the same age and knew better but only in theory. He’d grown up in New York and was funny, smart, cute, and exactly as ambitious as I was but further along, and by the time we broke up, I realized I knew only his New York. I was a plus-one to a lot of special things, and then wasn’t. It’s embarrassing to be un-plus-oned.
In the end, he got the apartment. He got our favorite restaurants and all our friends (they were his in the first place). Life hack: Don’t fuck your boss. Unless being tyrannized by every aspect of your life from professional to personal and coming out of it unable to shake the stink of someone else is your thing. I learned a lot fast, and we remain friends, but we’d collaborated so much that I couldn’t remember which part of what ideas belonged to me. His imprimatur on my origin story muddied my merits. At least, that’s how I felt for a long time.
I shrank. I counted and recounted fingers and toes and went dark. I focused on a new work project—the launch of my very own magazine—and quietly had drinks with strangers in unpopular bars. One month I dated a construction worker with good books and then a corporate lawyer turned banker who cross-examined our breakup after four dates. He had a ludicrously expensive white sectional sofa, which I took as a sure sign that he was a murderer. I smeared ketchup on it the first time I visited. It felt odious and lowbrow. Then, Alex came along. He was easy. He loved ketchup.
When Alex returned from training he moved to Woodside, Queens, and we continued to date. We went away as much as possible so we could get to know each other in concentrated spurts, away from Woodside, Queens. His schedule and borough posed challenges because I lived in Brooklyn and preferred to stay there, but we made it work. And there were perks. Once, on a flight back from Costa Rica, we sailed past customs, which, at the time, years before the Global Entry preclearance program, felt pretty cool.
Oh, Never Mind (Kindle Single) Page 3