Which isn’t necessarily true – life is great, thanks for asking!

I think this blog — at this domain here anyway — has run its course. That’s not to say I’m not available on Twitter, Tumblr (hint), Flickr or a myriad of other social medium that end in the letter R; you’ll probably find more about my wacky adventures there, if you haven’t done so already. But until then, this weblog will remain in stasis for now.

On the train ride back home, I came to the following conclusion: Angela has chosen to interact in the space around her in her rules of reality. At some point, there was our side, the side of my family and of the television and the newspapers and the world around us, and on the other side, the safe comforting world of the voices in her head, her skitzophrenic reality of Jesus and Satan and Barbara Bush and Princess Diana all telling her the same thing at the same time. Being a sibling of someone mentally ill you grow up reading a shit-ton of material on people who have schizophrenia, and they all have this weird pattern of how they all feel like their “double agents” — like they have one foot in our world and one foot in their own, but they’ll be more than happy to stay in their world forever if you fuck it up for them enough.

Honestly, I think this is where we fucked it up for her: between the stress and the lousy home life and the unattainable expectations — and yes, from my lack of support as a sibling, because how the fuck was I supposed to act when someone breaks down when you’re a teenager? — she gave in. Not because she’s weak, but because she is human with a mental illness. Everyone in my family learned the hard way that while all the Zyprexia can take away the voices in her head, the medication can’t fix the fact that all this is all she has known, and will know.

And there it is. That “with proper treatment, your sister will be a normal person again” mantra my father spouted to me for thirty years? Bullshit. There’s nothing to fix. Plenty to control, perhaps, but nothing to fix. This is how my sister will be when my parents eventually pass, this is how my sister will be when I become her default guardian, even though I am ten years younger than her.

We’ve known that reality for a while, and we’re all dealing with the repercussions in our own ways: My father has started his new life, trips around the world with his girlfriend. My mother plays Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony at deafening levels, partly to drown out my sister, the C-SPAN she watches, and maybe her own loneliness. As for me, well, I’m writing this blog entry. But we’ll deal.

That said, if there was a God, He done fucked up this one bad. Or maybe we did. Or maybe everyone did.

Alone? Lonely? Something.

This quiet — the high pitch of the television, the hum of the laptop fan — it’s unsettling, because there’s always some sort of noise that goes on; the ADHD three year old throwing a tantrum, the lesbians at the corner bar, a bunch of douchebags going all “whoo” at some random passing taxi or truck. Maybe they’re all at home getting ready for Thanksgiving. Maybe that why I’m so unsettled. Or it can be the fact that Thanksgiving has always been kinda shitty for me.

(If this was an adapted screenplay, this is where the montage would begin: scenes of my sister throwing tantrums in various restaurants, scenes of my sister thinking that dinner has been poisoned by the devil, dumping it in the sink after being told to by the voice in her head named Jesus, scenes of my parents screaming at each other in front of a garage about Grandma somewhere in cookie cutter suburbia and getting stared down by the trashy Samoan neighbors across the street. A Chinese school Christmas pageant is in there too for some reason, but I think I’m just mixing up my traumatic childhood stories.)

And that leads me to tomorrow, I guess. In the morning, I get to drive to my cousins to have a Thanksgiving lunch with my dad’s side of the family. Dad’s girlfriend will be there; the one that he’s known for years because she’s the widow of his naval buddy, the one he went to Argentina and Brazil with shortly after my parents got divorced. The one who’s gotten him to soften up, unless he’s suddenly got the memo that if he yells at his children for thirty or so years, they probably won’t like him very much.

She’s nice. She speaks fluent English, and out of a mix of Chinese guilt and respect, I respond in Mandarin. What kind of fucked-up maternal alternative universe is that shit?

“It’s her, isn’t it?” asked my Mom in Chinese, inferring that her casual acquaintance over the past 40 or so years is my father’s new girlfriend. It is, but I keep my eyes glued to dinner, shoveling rice in my face. That’s my usual M.O. when I’m eating at Mom’s house: come in, eat dinner, listen to Angela talk crazy, chain-smoke on the drive home. “That’s fine. What makes him happy.” She pauses. “Your sister thinks she’s ugly, though, although I tell her that’s not a very nice thing to say.” My mom savors saying that last sentence.

I get to visit mom and Angela shortly afterward. Gone are the days of turkey and Chinese food; now I take them out, one year to a fancy American restaurant where my mother heaped her portion of her Caesar Salad directly on my lobster bisque soup to the horror of the snooty white waiter, another year to a Muslim Chinese restaurant where Angela was tired of her “Missionary work,” her code name of spending hours walking up and down Berkeley conversing with the voices in her head. I had resigned myself to taking them to Hometown Buffet so we could stew in our pathos like all the other old people eating there on Thanksgiving, but my co-worker Shali convinced me to take them to classier restaurant, one that doesn’t serve green jello with a Cool Whip garnish. We’ll see how that goes. And in two days, well, in two days there will be less quiet discontent, less awkward situations that I have no control over.

But until then, it’s just me and the hum of a laptop. I just hope my mind will quiet down like everything else.

The first question is “if you were stranded on a deserted island, which one of your friends would you eat first?” According to Jen, it would be “Sean*, because he would have the perfect combination of protein and fat that it would be marbled, like fatty tuna sushi.”

The other is, of course, “how would you prepare for the oncoming zombie apocalypse?” (And if you must know: steal some no-refrigeration needed Nutrisystem dinners, destroy the wooden back patio stairway with a rusty axe, spend an extended period of time with my neighbor Laurie eating emergency rations and discussing who we could invite over for company [and as an emergency, as an option to eat later. See previous question.])

* Name changed because “Sean” is on Facebook and probably wouldn’t appreciate finding out via his activity feed that we would eat him.

Here’s the thing about San Francisco — there’s the Bay Area that you know and there’s the Bay Area that I grew up in. The Bay Area I grew up in didn’t have internet culture or crazy ass social media parties or Valleywag; it was blue-collar, more diverse and we watched Dominique di Prima rapping on Home Turf every morning on Channel 4 and all knew how to do the running man when Heavy D came on. Fuck, even the social pariahs like me knew how to do the running man. (I didn’t listen to “alternative rock” until I was a sophomore in college.) And that scene still exists, you just have to know where to look for it; the Bay Area is big enough for everyone to just barely tolerate each other.

I guess this is why I really like this food vlog — because first of all, they don’t call it a fucking vlog and second, these guys are like the people I ran with in college. Also, Style Beyond Compare; I remember they played on KMEL all the time growing up.

Hey, Ev! Do you remember seven years ago, in 2002, when I had my birthday party at Min Jung’s house and we were all high on ecstasy and then you guys swung by and you were all, “are you on drugs” and I was all “yeah, I’m totally twacked” and you were like “oh hey, so does it feel weird when I touch your arm like this?”

No? Nevermind, then. Oh hey! You’re on Oprah! Good job, man.

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.

“Hyphen”
Hyphen Magazine is a non-profit Asian American magazine. It's an artsy high-brow magazine about cultural and activist issues which I never, EVER read, even though I'm a regular subscriber. But it makes me feel like I'm supporting the Asian community. That makes me a shitty Asian, doesn't it?

“Real Simple”
Because I'm apparently a 40 year old woman. I don't subscribe to this magazine, so I secretly hide the mag behind a Wired to read this behind a Barnes & Noble. (That's right! When I was 16 it would have been a Playgirl, and now it's a Real Simple. God, I'm beyond lame.)

It seriously does not help that Cancun Taqueria in the Mission – one of the best burrito places in the Bay Area – is less than a block from my house.

If I've had a fairly terrible day, I have been known for getting a super carnitas burrito and then bring it to my neighbor Laurie's, slowly rocking back and forth while I talk about how terrible my day was.

We call them "stressitos." Stressitos are delicious with extra avacado and sour cream, I'm just saying.

One of the nice things about being the editor of a general interest website like 8Asians: I get to go in and make inappropriate image changes for the original writers to be mortified at. I’m particularly proud of this one: this started out as an image of a victim of a panda attack while he was trying to retrieve a dropped toy for his son.

This makes me a terrible person, doesn’t it?