The Joy Luck Club was the first and last movie we ever saw as an immediate family. I mean, it seemed like an obvious choice at the time — it’s 1993 and I’m a junior in high school, and holy shit, here’s a movie and it actually has people speaking Chinese in it. In Mandarin, with subtitles!  Which is perfect, because my mom doesn’t speak a lick of English, even though she’s been here since forever. Maybe I was expecting her to comprehend the Chinese parts so well that she would magically extrapolate the rest of the movie. I think I had assumed that my parents would instantly relate — or at the very least be entertained — by the people speaking Chinese on the screen.

Yeah, not so much.

The tales of immigration on the screen clearly did not resonate with our families tales. My parents came over here in the 1970s from Taiwan, enticed by America’s dream that with hard work you could live “the good life,” whatever that is. Prosperity, I think.  It’s always prosperity.

This is what I remember shortly after the movie: The house lights come up. I look over to my dad and he has a giant frown on his face. But he always has a frown on his face, so I look over to my mom. And she’s just shaking her head.  They cry too much in this movie, she says. And the pacing is too slow. And there’s my sister who has borrowed a kleenex from the four black women sitting behind us. She is sobbing. She would have her final, tragic mental break five or six years later, and there would be no dramatic close-up with melancholy erhu music. There would be no happy ending. (None that I’m aware of, anyway.)

And sometimes I wonder if my parents were somehow fortold what would happen — that their daughter would succumb to mental illness and their son would become an overweight homosexual with a penchant for putting his private life to share with the Internet — if they would perservere and stay in the United States, or if they would turn around and go right back to where they came from.

That’s a way to get a response from me; create a video that starts out with the line, “Asian men have a lot of diseases [and] small penises.”

Gimmicky way to start off a documentary aside, some interesting points are raised by this video: stereotypes of Gay Asian men exist – that they’re skinny, smooth, only date white guys and that they are effeminate and thus passive. The pod also asserts that non-Asians feel that the stereotypes of Asians are justified because that’s all they see when they walk around in the Castro on go on chat rooms.

Usually it’s easy to write my own personal opinions on the matter, but for this post I’m having a strangely difficult time on this one. Maybe it’s because I’m definitely not a gay Asian stereotype – I’m definitely NOT skinny, I can’t dress for shit (ask my friend Royce; he’ll tell you stories) and I don’t think I’m THAT effeminate (feel free to shoot me down if I assume wrong.) While fighting stereotypes sound like a noble thing, when you’re coming out of the closet you WANT to fit in somewhere, be in a tribe, look and act like everyone else as a way to not feel ostracized. I had huge self-esteem issues where I’ve felt like the only way I could ever find a boyfriend is if I were to somehow magically lose fifty pounds and dress in DKNY, because that’s the only thing I saw – horrible, but true. As a result, I hung out with the bear subculture for a while, but that didn’t make things any better – an experience with discrimination there is one of the reasons why I started 8Asians.

Now I’m a little older and I know that if someone is trying so hard to live up to a certain label that they’re not really worth my effort anyway. Dating is still a challenge but if someone is not into me, then their bad. Gaysians, what are your experiences?

Do you have an Asian American relative who has struggled with their mental health?

Have you yourself been confused or afraid in trying to find them help? Frustrated by the mental health system? Felt alone? Worried about what this means for your own future and that of your family?

My own mother has struggled with schizophrenia for a very long time, and I would love to talk with you and share stories. I am interested in hearing what challenges you faced, both emotionally and in finding care for your relative, and how you are dealing with them.

Please email me at rebecca[at]hyphenmagazine.com.

Best wishes,
Rebecca

To be honest, this was probably the first in-depth, face-to-face conversation I’ve ever had with another Asian person who’s had a close family member suffer from a mental illness. There’s a stigma with mental illness with Asian immigrants and Asian Americans – so much so, that when Rebecca told me about specific support groups that exist in San Francisco relating to mental illness support groups that communicate in both Chinese and English, my first thought was “why do they have the luxury of talking about their feelings? I had to figure this shit out all on their own.” Which, of course, is a horrible thing to think, but it’s true. I’m thirty years old, and the actions of my sister have shaped me into the person I am today, for better or for worse, and there’s not much that can really be done at this point, except vent about it to the Internet if she freaks out.

I kinda laughed off the suggestion on attending one of the support sessions – the weblog is my therapy, I joked, and I’m a little worried that the meetings will be a little “Ya Ya Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”-ish, but I might give it a go and see if there’s anything useful for me. We’ll see.

(Some people might wonder how I might be okay with this photo when I posted a tirade about Mister Wong just a week ago. Easy: context. I know Kevin, I like Kevin, we can make fun of each other. It also helps that, honestly, the photograph is throughly hilarious.)

Yeeeeeah. Wow.

I mean, being an engineer in the web industry, I’m sure it has some of the standard features that make a social bookmarking portal interesting and relevant, but seriously, who were the branding and advertising geniuses that came up with this one? I mean sure, it’s based in Germany, which is practically a whole world away. Maybe people aren’t as sensitive to political correctness as they are here in North America. But seriously, one of their web badges has the slogan “ping pong, king kong, Mister Wong.” Which I, of course, interpret as “ching chong, Mister Wong” and get INCREDIBLY FUCKING ANGRY. It’s like the Ask Jeeves butler and Uncle Ben had a illegitimate Asian coolie son.

I mean, Christ, his face is on soccer jerseys. SOCCER JERSEYS.

And just when you think I couldn’t get anymore WTF’ed – Mister Wong has a Chinese version of their site. Seriously. Now, I’ll fully admit to being the naive American here – maybe my cultural American bias is slanted and that people from mainland Chinese won’t be completely horrified to see a caricature of someone their ethnicity touting the virtues of the social web. Hell, you have Wang Lan of the Chinese support team on the front page. “It’s okay to use this page,” she seems to beckon. “I’m Chinese too, you see?”

Since I don’t speak German and there is just an intro English page, maybe there’s a story on how the site came up with its name and branding and someone can help out. Mister Wong had better been based on a real person and saved twenty burning orphanages in Stuttgart, because otherwise, I’m calling foul.

(Cross-posted from 8 Asians. Thanks for the heads-up, MJ.)

(You know what I mean when I say “a pack of gays,” right? Like, the group of 5-12 gay men that you see during Halloween or the Gay Pride parade and they have matching costumes or outfits? And half of them are drunk or high or breaking up with each other on their cellphones, and they’re all catty and shit so you turn to your friend to mention that the gay Power Rangers are coming, yet you have that slight pang of wanting just to fit in, if only for a little bit? No? Not at all? Never mind, then.)

As a result of trying to find this gay place to belong, I ended up being involved in the bear sub-culture. I wasn’t necessarily searching for it – I had one friend into the scene, and as a result, I would hang out with his friends, go to the same parties if they were going out, and so on. I’ve become pretty close to a couple of them, but to most people, I’m sure I was just “the token Asian boy, hanging out with the bears.” Fuck it, they don’t know any better. And so what if I’m at a party everyone is drunk or high or making out in the backyard and I feel like the only one not partnered off? Oh well, good times or good stories, I suppose.

So when people told me that I should get a profile on the local classified website bear411.com, saying I would be able to find someone relatively quickly to at least hang out with, I thought, “eh, whatever.” When my application wasn’t accepted the first time, I really thought nothing of it – maybe they’re just behind with their e-mail response times. Then it happened a second time. When it happened a third time, I got pretty irate, but it’s not really my thing to make a big deal about shit like that and maybe he’s just busy or something, and what can I do anyway, since it’s a private site?

It was only after reading the recent backlash against bear411 and reading this post by another gay Asian man who’s had difficulties getting on the same site that, oh shit, there really might BE some discrimination and the guy that runs this site seems to be a general assclown who dream of a perfect gay community are only the ones that he finds sexually attractive. Which is especially ironic since the bear subculture is a result of mainstream gay subculture being unwelcome to them. Ironically, the webmaster of bear411.com has a response for all the flack he’s received so far, but he doesn’t discuss his tendencies to discriminate.

Incidentally, I still feel out of place in the gay community – I’m finding that as far as gay friends are concerned, I’d rather have a fewer amount of very close gay friends than a larger amount of people I know super casually. And if I don’t have another boyfriend until I’m 37, well then, fuck it. Chalk that up to being older and wiser, I guess.

8 Asians is a collaborative blog of eight different people of Asian decent. We’ll be posting about whatever Asian issues are currently relevant in our lives, whether it be pop culture or current events or politics. Think “The View,” with Star Jones and Rosie O’Donnell and that chick from Survivor. Now, replace them all with Asian-Americans and Asian-Canadians. Yeah.

My role in this weblog is one part editor, one part blogger, one part casting director because I’m trying to cast a bunch of different writers. Some of the writers are relatively familiar, while others are first-time bloggers. That’s on purpose. Admittedly, the blog is pretty rough both in terms of design and process, and I’m doing this in my free time when I’m not working at the start-up, but it’s something to pass the time, I suppose. (And, if you’re a writer interested in writing about Asian-American issues that might want to be on the blog at a later time, let me know.)

Writing this list was surprisingly difficult – there’s been a lot of trivial stuff about my life I’ve already blogged about over the past five years but have since gone off-line. And while 90% of my life is an open book, what is there left to share to all of the Internet, knowing that friends, co-workers and family members will be reading this as well? Needless to say, here we go:

1. I come from a military family. To anyone who’s ever met me or seen a photograph of me in person, this seems like the most ridiculous concept ever, but it’s true. My paternal grandfather fought under Chiang Kai-Shek, fought the Communists but lost, retreating to Taiwan. My father served in the ROC navy before our family immigrated to the United States some time during the early 70’s.
2. I wanted to be an actor in high school. I was really into it Freshman year; I was in the high school improvisation troupe, my first (and last) play was as De Pinna in our high school version of You Can’t Take It With You. Shortly after that play, my father decided I needed to take more computer courses, pulled me out of all my extra-curricular classes related to performing and made me take a junior college course in Pascal, not that I’m bitter or anything. (Some trivia: also in that play was a senior named Adam Sessler. Thirteen years later, he’s now the host of a little TV show called X-Play. And me? I’m writing this blog entry. Such is my life.)
3. If you already knew this fact, consider yourself an old-school LYD reader: Blogs got big around the same time as Survivor, so I used to do blog versions of popular reality game shows, where the winners would win real money. SurvivorBlog was the first game I did, and I also did a version of The Mole called PuppetMaster, which got profiled in Entertainment Weekly. (More trivia: SixApart’s Mena Trott had applied as a contestant for PuppetMaster, but didn’t make the cut. I’m still kicking myself in the ass over that one.) I would LOVE to do another blog game some day, but knowing how blog-savvy people are nowadays this would be a logistical nightmare.
4. Most American universities seem to have an abundance of a cappella groups. UC Davis didn’t have such a group. Me and three other guys DID, however, create a horrible R&B group called Unrealized Potential, where I would play the piano and harmonize. Think “Boyz II Men,” except really, really not good – I think we spent more time making sure our matching vests matched, rather than making sure we could actually hit the notes. We ended up singing “On Bended Knee” and Jodeci’s “Lately” at a dorm talent show, where we were promptly laughed off the stage. I think we did, anyway. I have a tendency to block things out from memory.
5. Now that I think about it, I guess most people don’t know I used to play the piano. Like all Asian kids, piano lessons were forced upon me when I was four years old; I took classical piano lessons until Junior High school, and then “rebelled” in my piano playing by playing jazz piano and accompanying a church choir in high school. A part of me wishes I still kept up with the piano – I haven’t sat down at a piano bench in years – but I can still read sheet music, albeit awkwardly.

I’ll update this blog post soon as to who I’ll tag. God, I’m so late on this. Hopefully they get the memo.

1. Joe.My.God.
2. Ariel Meadow Stallings
3. Glenda Bautista

Yes, the meme says to tag five people. I’m a rebel.

It should also be mentioned that Jason gave me this AWESOME shirt, which says “Chinese is not my mother tongue.” Considering that this is written in Simplified Chinese (used in Mainland China) as opposed to Traditional Chinese (used in Taiwan and Hong Kong), I’m sure this will be a hit with my extended family. Especially the ones that fought under Chiang Kai-shek.

Well, this will probably make me an outcast at Christmas again. Meh, I’ll deal with it.