I’m talking to my cousin, the overachieving jock police detective living in the South Bay, over the telephone.

“Talk to me, Chris. How does the 800 block of East Saint James in San Jose sound?” I’m anxious. The sounds of someone winning a car on The Price Is Right play in the background.

He laughs. Apparently, my finding an apartment in Silicon Valley is funny to him. I rephrase my question.

“Okay, how about on a scale of one to ten... one being Walnut Creek, ten being hood Richmond with the bullets flying by my face.”

“Seven or eight.” There’s no pause. “Hope you speak Spanish fluently,” he adds. Police detectives are witty like that, apparently. “I would rather live in the bad part of Sunnyvale or Mountain View than any part of San Jose.” I thank him for being the bearer of low-rent bad news and hang up.

Finding housing shouldn’t be this difficult. I have a nerd job. And while it’s the standard “I just got out of college so pay me like I just got out of college” job, I’m not dancing around in a giant Chuck E. Cheese suit singing “Happy Birthday” to special needs kids. So I’m left with a housing lead given to me by… my mother.

“Ai-Ya! Ernie!” She gets off the phone, all excited. “I found a room for you to rent! See? Here, in the China Daily Journal! And it’s in Cupertino, where you work! For four hundred dollars!” She emphasizes the cost of rent by repeating the phrase “four hundred dollars” in English. She’s obviously very proud of herself; no white person would ever dare to put an apartment rental in an American newspaper.

And they’re Chinese, I think to myself. That’s all I need. Renting a room, living with another set of foster parents while I’m away from home. This has obviously happened before, while I was interning for another company. The million-dollar house in the Los Altos Hills was great until the nice Chinese couple acted like a webcam website without the webcam. “Ernie’s such a nice boy,” the homeowners gushed to my parents, adding a touch of concern over the telephone. “But once he gets home, he leaves the house and doesn’t come back until late! After midnight! On a Wednesday!” Imagine the look of horror on my parents' faces.

But for a rent of a third of what rent usually goes for in the area, it was an idea I wanted to check out. Hell, I’ll give up a couple of my civil liberties as a human if it means I’d be rolling in cash later. Sheesh... $400 a month? This offer is too good to be true.

The first sign that the offer is too good to be true is when the address given turns out to be a swank Chinese restaurant conveniently close to a Ranch 99. The hostess, an abnormally tall woman wearing a leopard skin dress and too much foundation, notices our confusion. “You must be here for the house,” she smiles, walking to the back of the room in stiletto heels and telling the restaurant owner that “the people are here” in a Beijing accent.

“I’m kinda busy,” the owner calls back in Mandarin. “Get Li to show them around.” Apparently, Li is the man with the wifebeater and the weathered face who doesn’t know how to smile, because he’s holding a set of house keys. He gives my mother a brief second of eye contact and walks out the door.

Mom, convinced that she will be the one to find me a place to live and save the day, starts small talk with Mister Li while walking to the “real” house. My mother is the queen of Chinese small talk, and the evidence shows that Li’s responses in his heavy Chinese accent become less curt and more relaxed. “China... Yaoling province... I have two little sisters also in the US... I work at the restaurant and two other jobs... Yeah, China has some good and bad points, but it’s home.”

We pass an elderly white man guarding his ‘66 Chevy, and Li opens the door to the house. I make a mental guess as to the first thing I will see. Will it be bamboo plants? Incense burning? Those cheesy Asian calendar girls advertising their soymilk? Li opens the door, and Mom and I peer in to see...

Sandals.

Fucking sandals. Littered everywhere in the hallway.

And then I take another look and realize that there’s organization behind the chaos. The sandals, in all shapes and sizes, are stacked together, but they gravitate towards one of the five doors in the hallway, each numbered with ACE Hardware labels.

It only hits me when I notice the distinct but not immediately familiar smell of the house. And then it really hits me when an elderly woman, holding a baby, peers out from room number five and smiles at me. There are whole fucking families in these rooms. All from Mainland China, I’ll bet. Most of them probably work at the Chinese restaurant. I lower my head in respect, almost an instinct from my two-week trip visiting relatives in Shanghai the summer before, and glance over at my mom. She knows something’s up, but she ain’t going to go out like that.

“So, which room is it?” she asks politely. Li opens up door number four. Kinda like a fucked up showcase on Let’s Make a Deal, except I won a beat-up mattress and a warped desk instead of a sports car or a donkey.

The substandard state of the room was obviously too much for Mama’s baby. “Thank you. We’ll definitely think about it.”

“Yes,” I say to Li, “Definitely.” I couldn’t look him in the eye for some reason.

The conversation during the walk back to the car was surprisingly (or not surprisingly) short. “You know,” Li says in the Beijing-accented Mandarin, “You can always move in for a couple of weeks and then move out when you see another apartment you like. It’ll save you some money.”

I look up and give him the sincerest Chinese I can muster, for someone who was born in America and learned all his Chinese from his parents and a 14-day trip to China. “I will definitely consider that,” I think I said to him.

My mother and I hopped in the car, and not saying much, endured the two-hour commute home. “You think they were illegal immigrants?” I ask somewhere on the northbound Interstate 280. Mom looks straight ahead and shrugs it off. Doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Ten minutes later, she says, “That place was dirty anyway.”

I’m still looking for a place to stay.

Whenever I go back to San Francisco now, it’s always the same thing: I spend a week with my friends, usually eating as much Asian food as I can possibly handle. Carnitas, too, usually in the form of burritos. For the most part, my home base will be in the Mission, where I lived for five years, with ventures into downtown to work at the local co-working spaces. Maybe I’ll be the very tourist I avoided as a local and walk along the waterfront or go to the Castro.

After that, I hop on the BART train to the end of the line, the suburbs in Fremont. I spent the second week visiting Mom in the room that Dad stayed in before he moved out, which has now become the computer room. Or in my case, the guest bedroom. It’s a twin mattress, the bed frame I had as a kid. The mattress is super firm, and it feels like a cot in the barracks, probably the most suitable sleeping environment for Dad. I usually lie to my mom and tell her that I just flew in. I’ve told the truth in the past — that I’m flying from Florida to California but seeing friends first — but she doesn’t take it too well.

Staying here has been fine, for the most part. One part of coming home is always the inevitable English or technology-based errand. Burn some CDs, make sure she wasn’t being convinced she was dying of cancer when she gets an English reminder about her mammogram. This time around, it was to “fix her TooYoo,” by which she meant, of course, making sure her YouTube works.

I upgrade Flash on her Safari browser.

What did you do? she asks in Chinese. Did you purchase something? They always want me to purchase something.

“No, I just installed Flash,” I say in English. She has no idea what I’m talking about, so she leaves the room, goes into the kitchen, and returns with a parfait glass filled with pineapple chunks. I salted them, she said. Kills the germs.

The most annoying thing is the lack of locks on the doors because of Angela. As a result, mom and her open the door at random times. Do you want some iced tea? Do you want some hot tea? How about some fruit? I cut up some fruit. Have you showered yet? Most of the time I brush her off: no, mom, I’m fine. Seriously. Mom, I’m okay. The times I eventually give in - sure mom, I’ll drink some water, okay, I’ll take a shower at night - I end up feeling guilty, like I’m enabling all of this to happen as a thirty-eight-year-old instead of an eight-year-old.

Angela comes into the room as well. “Is that your work computer?” she asks while I type this.

“Yeah.”

“Do you have friends and freedom?” she asks out of the blue.

“I guess I do.” I keep my eyes on the computer.

“I wish I did. I live in a straight jacket.” She leaves the room again.

Just a Thursday evening.

Right now on the local news, there is a live feed of the house of the local 13-year-old boy who won the National Spelling Bee. I wonder if the news crew is aware that the kid isn’t going to be at his house, since, you know, the spelling bee takes place in Washington DC, and not at his house.

This took top billing on the 11 o’clock news tonight, probably because it’s a slow news day and we don’t have any humpback whales slowly dying in our rivers this week.

I did get a chance to watch the live coverage on ABC, though - they had ESPN Commentators and those special segments they do with Olympic Athletes, except they replaced “athletes” with “11-year-old geeky boys with glasses and braces.” One segment in particular focused on blond-haired, blue-eyed Tia Thomas, the all-American girl with pigtails, who is athletic, unlike the other homeschoolers and Chinese and Indian overachievers. Shots of her playing the flute, skiing, and discussing Parkinson’s Disease over dinner. The producers had a plan for her, man. Pretty and smart, she was going to be America’s next sweetheart. Maybe even a walk-on role in a movie.

Then she spelled “zacate” wrong. Oops, her bad.

I would have live-blogged this - I mean, it’s two hours of live spelling, and thus, instant blogging zaniness, but for the most part, watching the majority of the spelling bee consisted of the following: Some random Asian kid is given the task to spell “bouleuterion.” Kid writes with his finger on the back of the piece of cardboard with his name on it, while an ESPN commentator reminds us that he’s not REALLY writing the word out, it’s just his finger. After we watch him do this for two minutes, the bell rings, meaning he’s spelled the word wrong, and, defeated, he walks to his parents and sits with them on stage. Neither parent consoles their child nor shows support.

“Holy crap,” I think to myself. “That kid is going to get the BEAT DOWN when he gets home.”

3:47 AM, Tropical Chinese Restaurant, Southeast Miami

I’d been ping-ponging between San Francisco and Miami for this long-distance relationship thing (because apparently I hate myself), and look—I’d made my peace with being the token Asian guy everywhere we went. You develop this sixth sense for it. The slight head-tilt when people register your face. The mental filing system clicking: Asian boyfriend, noted.

But then my boyfriend mentioned dim sum at Tropical Chinese, some spot in Southeast Miami, and I perked up like a golden retriever hearing the word “park.”

Dim sum. In Miami. Served by actual Chinese people speaking actual Chinese.

After months of trailing behind my Cuban boyfriend to hole-in-the-wall spots while everyone around me machine-guns Spanish at approximately seven thousand words per minute—and me standing there with my two years of “Lupita es alta” high school Spanish like some kind of linguistic toddler—I was ready to flip the entire script.

I had this whole fantasy worked out. I’d stand on one of those metal dim sum carts (structurally unsound, definitely a health code violation), arms raised like Rocky on those Philadelphia steps, flanked by the eleven-to-fifteen-year-old lady dim sum attendants in fighting stances, and I’d announce to my boyfriend: “That’s right, asshole! You’re in MY part of town now.”

(Yeah. I’m aware. I contain multitudes of pettiness.)

Here’s the thing, though, and this is important: I’m a dim sum fraud.

Like, a complete and total phony. My first proper Hong Kong-style dim sum experience didn’t happen until college—COLLEGE—which in Asian terms is like admitting you didn’t learn to use chopsticks until you were legally allowed to vote. My parents aren’t from Hong Kong. They’re from China, via Taiwan, and Sunday mornings weren’t spent eating small plates of fried pork and shrimp and taro products in their infinite permutations.

No, they were spent at Chinese Baptist Church (yes, that exists, yes, it’s exactly as culturally confusing as it sounds), and any small plates we ordered at restaurants consisted of cold, pickled dishes to accompany a bowl of rice porridge. Comfort food, sure—but definitely not the fried pork goodness people crave for the same reason they beeline toward every deep-fried-everything booth at the State Fair, arteries screaming.

In college, I made up for lost time. Went to enough dim sum places to give myself gout. Learned to identify har gow versus siu mai with the fervor of someone compensating for eighteen years of jellied, pickled, cold stuff.

My boyfriend had eaten dim sum before—he’s not culturally sheltered or anything—but never properly in Miami. Never with the old ladies pushing carts around like they’re running a mobile restaurant empire, hawking their wares to seated customers with the aggressive salesmanship of carnival barkers.

Which made me, by default, the foremost expert on Chinese brunch. The Lone Ranger of dim sum. The guy who points and orders with confidence.

(Narrator voice: He was not confident.)

Eating at Tropical Chinese is basically like eating dim sum in San Francisco or Alhambra or Flushing, except for two major differences that immediately shattered my illusions:

1. Nobody shows up until after noon. (”Latinos eat late,” someone explained to me, waving a hand dismissively. “They’ll all show up at two, just watch.”)

2. Everyone speaks perfectly adequate English, because—and I cannot stress this enough—there are not a lot of Asians in Miami compared to California or New York. We’re like exotic birds down here. Rare sightings.

(Evidence: There’s a signed headshot on one wall of the restaurant. Some telenovela star I don’t recognize, salutations written in Spanish. I secretly hoped she’d addressed it to Los Chinos, but no. She used the actual restaurant name like a normal person.)

But here’s where my brain—my stupid, overachieving, people-pleasing brain—made a critical error: Even though everyone in the restaurant speaks workable English, I decided to flex with Mandarin. Partly out of respect. Partly to show my boyfriend how linguistically gangsta I am.

(Spoiler alert: I am not linguistically gangsta.)

And thus, my downfall. My Icarus moment, except instead of flying too close to the sun, I flew too close to a rice dumpling.

THE INCIDENT
(Mandarin in italics, because I’m fancy like that)

Me: I’ll have a zongzi.

Old Cart Lady: [squints at me like I just asked for a unicorn] What?

Me: You know. That. [points desperately at the rice wrapped in bamboo leaves, the international gesture of “please help me”]

Old Cart Lady: [with the energy of a disappointed grandmother] That’s nuo mi ji. Zongzi is only eaten holidays. YOU ORDER WRONG THING!

My Boyfriend: [barely containing his glee] Nice.

Me: [dying inside] Thanks.

She comes back fifteen minutes later. I can see her approaching our table. I know what’s coming. It’s like watching a car accident in slow motion.

Old Cart Lady: [grinning like she just won the lottery] You enjoying your zongzi? HA HA HA.

Me: [contemplating whether it’s possible to dissolve into the restaurant floor]

My Boyfriend: [absolutely delighted with my suffering]
Me: Don’t.
My Boyfriend: If you’d like…
Me: Don’t say it, I beg you.
My Boyfriend: If you’d like, I can speak to her in Spanish.

Me: Die. Just die. Get hit by one of those dim sum carts. Perish.

This is why I’m a bad Asian.

When I go to dim sum with friends—and god help me if I’m the only Asian guy at the table—I’m the caller. I’m the one pointing at dishes and ordering in Mandarin with fake confidence, never mind that 90 percent of the dim sum places in the Bay Area actually speak Cantonese. Never mind that the linguistic gulf between Mandarin and Cantonese is roughly equivalent to the difference between Spanish and Portuguese—similar roots, completely different execution.

Never mind that I’d be infinitely better off just asking in English whether pork or chicken is hiding inside those dumplings, like a normal person who isn’t trying to prove something to everyone at the table.

But I nod and smile and recommend dishes and basically just fake that shit, because as the Lone Asian at the Table™ (trademark pending), this is my duty. My burden. My cross to bear.

Even if—and this is the kicker—I know as much about authentic dim sum as that telenovela star knows when she signs autographs to Los Chinos.

Which is to say: absolutely fucking nothing.

(The zongzi was delicious, though. Even if it was technically nuo mi ji. Even if I’ll never live it down.)

(Like most posts, spoken Mandarin is in italics. And for this particular post, ALL CAPS means they’re not just yelling, but yelling in ENGLISH.)

• Ernie’s cell phone:   ring, ring.

• Ernie:   Ma.

• Mom:   My game broke.

• Ernie:  Your game broke?

• Mom:  Yes, the one you bought me a long time ago. BOY GAME.

• Ernie:   GAME BOY, Mom. It’s called a GAME BOY.

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(By the way, for people who haven’t really read my blog for an extended period of time: Mandarin is in italics.)

Mom, on the phone: Ernie, I want to come to your house and help clean up while you’re at work. How do I get into your condo gate?

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“So self,” you ask yourself. “I wonder how Ernie met his DJ guy that he’s exclusively dating right now.” And I would say something like, “It’s a really interesting story, but to make a long story short, we met on the Internet.”

To which you would say, “Uhm, you guys met on the Internet? That’s pretty, uhm, not interesting.”

And then I’d say, “Let me tell the whole story, buckeroo.”

A couple of months ago, I responded to an online personal ad. I e-mail him, and we exchange the typical introductory e-mails. So far, so good. “Do you have any photographs of yourself?” he asks. Sure, I do, and I send a photo as an attachment. Now, when I send a photograph to someone I meet on a personal ad, I usually get one of the following responses:

• “Oh, you’re Asian. Sorry, not interested.”

• “Oh, I’m attracted to Asians, but you’re too fat. Sorry, not interested.”

• “I AM REALLY INTO ASIANS THEY ARE SO SMOOTH. CAN YOU PLEASE COME OVER? MY WIFE WILL BE BACK IN 2 HRS!!!!!”

I imagined this guy would be no different. So imagine my shock when the guy responds with this:

“Hey, you look familiar. You didn’t graduate from El Cerrito High School in 1994, did you?”

Random tangent time, for all you video gamers out there: Does anyone out there play Metal Gear Solid? You know that moment where Solid Snake tries to sneak up on a guard, but if he fucks up and makes a sudden noise, a giant exclamation point pops up over the guard’s head, with that sound of sudden alarm?

That was me. I was the exclamation point guy.

Anyway, back to the story. We trade pictures and figure out that, yep, we went to the same high school, although we didn’t talk much. And hell no, we didn’t know the other person was gay. This, however, made for the world’s best first date conversation:

Mike: You know, we went to the same junior high, right?
Ernie: Sure.
Mike: You wrote in my yearbook, too. Shattered my dreams of becoming a baseball player.
Ernie: Bullshit.
Mike: Nope, I’m serious! You signed my yearbook in junior high. Take a look.

(Mike, out of nowhere, pulls out our JUNIOR HIGH YEARBOOK from 1989. 1989, for the love of god! Paula Abdul was gushing her love to an animated cat instead of wannabe male popstars half her age.)

Mike: (reading out of yearbook, in mocking tone) “Dear Mike! You actually think you’ll be playing for the Oakland A’s?! GET REAL!!!”
Ernie: …
Mike: Yep. And you drew a computer right next to your name. See?
Ernie: Foreshadowing. Fan-fucking-tastic.

So yeah. I scoured the internet for a possible boyfriend, and he ended up living ten minutes away from me. Life is weird like that.

I’m still on hiatus.

But in the meantime, it’s California election season, and I’ve been fairly disgusted with all of the negative campaigning that’s been going on in the gubernatorial race between Steve Westly and Phil Angelides. “Westly promised no negative campaigns!” “Angelides started it! And he’s corrupt!” “Westly is more corrupt!” “Angelides hosts MySpace orgies with thirteen-year-old girls!” “At least they’re girls!”

I’m so over it that it’s not even funny. Sure, I have my issues that are near and dear to my heart, but if someone asks me what political party I am, I just tell them I’m in the “Apathetic Asian.” Instead of a donkey or an elephant, our political mascot is a fucking report card littered with Straight A’s.

One political commercial that I HAVE taken notice of is John Chiang for State Controller. I have taken notice, of course, because the dude is Asian, and because his political commercials are totally awesome: John Chiang, talking to underage minority school children! John Chiang, looking at the scenic Marin headlines! John Chiang, slamming a law book SHUT! YEAH, SLAM that fucking law book shut, John Chiang!

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Working in an industry where job security isn’t a strong suit, I’ve been picking up some freelance work on the side.

Now, there are two types of web developers. There are web developers who attend conferences to create social software, speak at conferences on the advantages of web standards, and are an active voice in the fusion of technology and society. They almost always write books. Always.

The other type of web developer? They develop gay porn sites.

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Ten years ago, when I was staying at my parents for Christmas for the week, we were shuffling through trashy reality shows on cable and landed on the local late-night news station. There was a segment on the death of James Brown.

“I didn’t know the King of Atmospheric Pressure was black,” my older sister Angela says out loud.

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Editor's Note, 2025: Every time I think about the version of myself I used to be, I don’t think about breakups or awkward AIM chats or tech jobs I flamed out of—I think about the fat kid holding a glass of milk in a backyard in El Cerrito, California, paralyzed by the silent standoff between his parents.

I'm reposting this not because I've had some big “body journey” or because I'm suddenly reckoning with self-image — although, let's be real, some days I still turn 90 degrees in the mirror and flinch like I'm dodging a fucking sniper — I'm resurfacing it because it's always been one of those early pieces that felt like me. You know: emotional but funny, honest but ridiculous. Sad clown shit with a strong Asian-American flavor, like if Charlie Chaplin grew up eating congee and getting lectured about his posture.

The Milk Story (2013)

I was a chubby kid. This is a story about it.

If you were to take a photograph of my immediate family, which there wouldn’t be, because - you would see the following: my mom and dad looking like the standard elderly Asian parents of average weight. You would see this because my dad, who's in his 80s, is an ex-military dad with perfect posture and white silver fox hair and his impeccable dietary habits of savory oatmeal and cold tofu and bitter melon he’s had for the thirty or so years I’ve known him.

My mother, standing next to him in this imaginary picture, could hold her own, as well. At seventy-five, thanks to her two-mile walks around the local man-made lake by her house, as well as her stylist dying her hair jet black every six weeks.

Then your eyes would scan to my sister and me, looking like Asian blueberries.

Unlike my sister, who is overweight due to her medication, I've always enjoyed a little too much junk food, and chose to stay in a little too often. Fat shows in my face first, so the entire world knows if I’ve had a stressful month and ate my feelings or if it’s the weekend after Thanksgiving. As an eight-year-old, my mother knew I was chubbier than the other kids, but it wouldn’t stop her from feeding me. She told me I was a growing boy, and growing boys needed to eat. But I wondered if Mom saw me as one of those Ethiopian kids I saw on the television commercials, the ones all the pop stars are singing about, lying in the fetal position on the ground with bloated stomachs and flies buzzing around them.

And I was quick to point out to her things delicious to an Americanized eight-year-old kid, things like tater tots and bagel pizzas from a toaster oven. When we drove by McDonald's after church, I would always squeal out, “Hamburger, fries, and a Coke!” (my favorite meal). My dad would always furrow his brow.

“No, is sugar water,” he would say in English, passing it by. And my mom would always turn to me and wink at me, because I could always go with her later.

“Don’t forget to exercise!” my mom would tell me as she would put her hands on her hips and rock left and right, left and right. “One hundred times before you go to bed!” she would say to me, as if I could literally rock the weight away.

My father was a little more blunt, saying, “Listen to how you sound breathing,” and then he would imitate me as if my chest and lungs were made out of fat, trying to gasp for air as if he was trapped in an iron lung like one of those black and white photos from the fifties. I always assumed he was mocking me, and held my breath every time we were in the same room together, so he wouldn’t hear me breathe in and out.

The one time my parents tried to sign me up for anything physical was Chinese wushu classes taught by a man my parents had met in church. It was super clandestine, and we practiced in an abandoned schoolyard in Berkeley. After warming up and running laps, our instructor — a middle-aged Chinese man wearing a tissue-thin V-neck t-shirt and sweat pants—would begin his fighting routine, and only then did we realize what we were doing, because we only knew this as the American term, kung fu.

We halfheartedly tried to copy him. But we were all awkward kids, kids who loved cookies and Nintendo and were scared to sweat. But there we were, flailing our arms and legs, punching and kicking the air as homeless folk stared at us behind the chain-linked fences.

“Look at all those tiny fighting Buddhas,” I imagined them to say.

It didn’t last long. After practice each week, I marched to my parents and declared I would never be happy again; I was bogged down between piano lessons and weekend Chinese school, and thanks to them, I would die with a scowl on my face. By the fourth week, they agreed, if only to stop my nagging.

---

We were having a standard weekday breakfast of toast and scrambled eggs. There is a jar of mayonnaise, which is how I like my scrambled egg sandwiches in the morning, accompanied by a couple of strips of bacon, toast folded in half, and a side of milk tea with two tablespoons of brown sugar.

Mom just started using brown sugar in her milk tea, instead of regular table sugar. We all convinced ourselves that it was somehow healthier.

I heard them argue again. Even though Mandarin was the first language I was exposed to, it had all been undone thanks to English and a steady stream of elementary school and Sesame Street. But they were arguing, and I knew this because of the rhythms of the way they would shout at each other.

“You’re stuffing him like a pig!” Dad said. A pig on the table, with an apple in its mouth, just like the cartoons I used to watch, when the bad guy got too close to the TNT - up, up, up he went with a loud kaboom, and down he would land, all the dinner settings in place. That was me, I thought.

“But he needs that! He needs that to grow taller!” My mother responds in Mandarin.

And I knew then, even as a little kid, that this is where everything gets really bad. My dad yells and he screams and throws a bowl to the ground, and then it’s out of his system. But my mother is the exact opposite — non-confrontational but able to work herself into a frothy anger and unrelenting. She brings in other topics, like my dad’s mother and, most recently, his girlfriend. She’s the first one to take a chef’s knife to the bed he’s sleeping in the room over, or a broomstick to the hood of his running car, and when the police are called, my mom stands at the doorway, trying her best to wave them away. No officer. Nothing’s wrong.

“That’s fine,” she says. “You don’t want my son to eat? THEN HE WILL NOT EAT AT ALL!”

So, this is what I do next, which is what a fat kid does when his mother tells him he won’t be fed and is similar to what a regular kid does when his parents get into a screaming match over his eating habits: I burst into tears and run into the backyard, because I’m not quite sure where else to go.

Dad follows me into the backyard. He hands me the glass of nonfat milk that his mom poured at dinner, and then goes back into the house, standing behind the sliding door in the family room. He points to the glass I’m holding, half full. “Drink your milk,” he says to me in Chinese. “It’s for your health.”

I take both hands and bring the watery liquid up to my lips. That’s when I notice, in the corner of my eye, my mom looking back at me. She’s sitting in the bathroom, staring at me through the window, and she’s shaking her head. Don’t drink the milk, she seems to be telling me.

I glance right at my dad. Drink the milk.

I look back at my mom. Don’t drink the milk.

Drink the milk. Don’t drink the milk. Drink the milk. Don’t drink the milk.

I stayed there in the backyard, frozen, for what seemed to be hours in my eight-year-old mind, but it could have just been a couple of minutes, too. And I wish something dramatic could have happened for the sake of the story - I wish I could have fainted, and both of my parents would rush to my collapsed body at the same moment and realize the error of their ways, like the ending of the movie The Parent Trap, maybe. Or someone could have come in through the door in our backyard fence, pick me up like a football, and carry me away from all the fighting.

But what probably happened — and I say probably, because I don’t really remember, because it was thirty years ago — was that my dad probably got tired of waiting, probably left his post to go into the house. Perhaps because he was exhausted, or maybe the situation was just so pathetic. And Mom, sensing that Dad was no longer at his post, probably grew tired of watching me not drink any milk and disappeared from her position at the bathroom window. And I probably realized I was alone in a backyard, holding a glass of non-fat milk, and because I don’t remember at all, probably shuffled back in the house, sniffling on my shirt. And Mom would have probably told me it was time for me to eat, as she always did, and I would have pulled myself a chair and taken bites from my mayonnaise and egg sandwich, while she washed the dishes and Dad filled out checks from his office desk, the door shutting behind him.

---

When I visit my dad in California for lunch, every couple of times a year, whenever I’m back, he serves me carefully measured half-portions of pickled vegetables and tofu as punishment until I tell the voice in my head, "No, that is what his girlfriend cooks for him. This is how he’s going to live forever." As Dad tells me about the upcoming trips he’s about to take, I imagine my belly button pressing against my spine and hold my breath. I do this by instinct now, even though my weight is no longer a topic allowed at the dining table.

After lunch, I travel to my mom’s, where she prepares dinner. She spends the afternoon cooking a six-course meal of pork belly, steamed fish, vegetables, and bowls of white rice. She tells me to eat up, because it’s a special occasion, because I’m home, and it’s not like we’re going to McDonald's, and when am I going to have the chance to eat Chinese food in Miami? And as my sister is helping herself to another serving, I realize this is our childhood we’re living over again: two kids in our thirties and forties, being fed by our mom.

Weight fluctuates, I have learned. I had lost some weight living in San Francisco, through exercise and careful eating habits. Now that I live in a city with a car-centric culture and date someone with equally bad eating habits, I’ve sunk back to old habits, although I’m reminded this is a bad decision. Photos of friends from college taking before and after photos of themselves, shirtless, on P90X. Instead of inspiring me, it exhausts me. Stupid vanity. Stupid health.

Weight fluctuates, but the fat kid is still there inside. I see him when I'm not careful, when I look in the mirror, and I try to put on one of my old shirts, and I turn 90 degrees. And he’s still standing in the backyard holding his glass, and he’s looking around, for guidance, for a friend, for anyone at all, and he’s desperately trying to figure out if he should drink the milk or not.

Looking Back in 2025

Archive Setup: This was initially written in 2001, revised in 2012, and published on my blog shortly thereafter.

Blogs felt personal back then, like secret trapdoors you left open for strangers who might actually give a damn. I wasn't thinking about virality or shareability or "content" (god, even typing that word makes me feel dirty)—I was trying to write things down before they disappeared into the black hole of memory. This one stuck with me like that one friend who always shows up uninvited but somehow makes the party better.

Cultural/Emotional Analysis: Growing up, my body wasn't just my body—it was a proxy war between my parents’ ideologies about food and health and America; a chubby little DMZ they wouldn't stop fighting over, even decades later.

My mom, who grew up one of thirteen (or was it fourteen? honestly, the exact number changed depending on which relative was telling the story) in post-war Taiwan, knew what it meant to go hungry. Her instinct was to feed—to love through food, to show affection by making sure your bowl was never empty and your cheeks were never hollow. Food was safety. Food was survival. Food was “I love you” in a language that didn't require translation, because even when she was unimpressed with any gifts I gave her as a child, there was never any doubt she had ever stopped loving me.

My dad, an ex-military man with binders — actual fucking binders — full of clippings about health, longevity, cancers, and raw garlic, saw my weight as a threat. Not to my self-esteem — lol, he couldn't have cared less about that touchy-feely bullshit — but to my survival. And in some twisted, deeply ironic way, he was probably projecting his fears about his body turning against him. Which, as fate would have it, it eventually did—though not in the way he expected. Cancer never came for him; instead, it's Alzheimer's that's slowly stealing him away, one memory at a time. The man who obsessed over every health article, who could recite cholesterol numbers like all of his diversified investments, who probably believed he could think his way out of mortality—his mind was the thing that was betraying him.

If that's not the universe's idea of a cosmic joke, I don't know what is.

Then vs. Now: At the time, I thought this was a story about being fat. And in the most literal sense, sure—it is. But now I see it more as a story about being caught between two kinds of love: the kind that feeds you too much and the kind that critiques your breathing patterns.

I also realize I wasn't just frozen because of the milk (though that glass felt heavier than a fucking anvil in my tiny, chubby fingers). I was frozen because I didn't want to disappoint either of them. I wanted both of them to be proud of me, and I didn't know how to do that when their definitions of “good” were completely contradictory.

I still don’t, if I'm being honest. But I'm less haunted by it now—more like, occasionally visited by a ghost who's learned better manners.

Universal Takeaway: Most of us grow up with some version of the milk standoff—those childhood moments where you're asked to choose sides before you're old enough to understand the rules, let alone the consequences. And if you're Asian American (or just grew up in a house with intense food politics), you know how often love and nourishment get tangled up in guilt, shame, and performance anxiety.

I'm not here to teach a lesson or drop some profound wisdom; I'm barely qualified to teach someone how to use a coffee maker. I'm just here to say: If you were the fat kid, or the anxious kid, or the kid who tried to make both your parents happy and failed spectacularly—this one's for you.

We're all just holding glasses of non-fat milk, waiting for someone to tell us it's okay to put them down.

Vault Entry 1:
Two Conversations at this year’s SFPride

Published date: June 29th, 2006

Conversation #1:

(Cut to a car full of gays passing by the rather infamous Becks Travel Lodge)

Brian: Oh, look.  Beck's Travel Lodge.  Or as I like to call it, "WHORES R US." Hugh, Brian's partner: Uhm, hon, didn't we stay there for a weekend a while ago?
Jason: Oooh, so maybe it should be called "WHORES R U."
Ernie:  Ding!  Ten points.

Conversation #2:

Jason: Oh look, it's the parade float from Wells Fargo.
Ernie:  Hey, that float seems familiar... wait a minute… DUDE, THEY TOTALLY RECYCLED THAT FLOAT FROM THE CHINESE NEW YEAR’S PARADE.
Jason: Shut up.
Ernie: No, they absolutely did.  Those are the golden horses from the Year of the Horse!  All they did was add a giant inflatable rainbow at the end of it!
Brian: They probably had a ten-thousand-dollar budget for the Chinese New Year's parade and, like, twelve dollars for gay pride.

My hope is that they march in the St. Patrick's day parade with that same float, but they keep the gold horses, the inflatable rainbow, and add little green shamrocked bowler hats to those horsey heads.

Oh, and an open apology if you were in the gay Google contingent and you heard booing, or at least, loud yawning noises somewhere around 7th and Market.  Most likely it was coming from me or one of my gay co-workers - we were trying to be catty, but honestly, we're just jealous that Yahoo! didn't march in the parade.

And a part of me was secretly hoping that one of you would turn around, throw up Google gang hand signs. We would retort in kind, of course, and then we'd go into a dance-off like in the movie You Got Served or one of those West Side Story-like dance routines; CNN or Valleywag would pick up news of a fantastically gay nerd rumble, blood and pulled hair and pink feather boas and slide rules flying in the air.

If it's any consolation, you guys are seem young and pretty and are probably dating each other, while I have folks with Yahoo! IDs like xxx_lumberjack_4u asking me why his Yahoo! Mail doesn't work.1 

That is all.

Vault Entry 2:
Support the deaf circuit queen association of Northern California

Published date: May 5th, 2005

The scene: My two gay coworkers and I are discussing the possible formation of a Yahoo! GLBT group, with its first formal meeting scheduled for the next day.

Sean: Are you going to go?
Ernie: I'll go if you go. What's it about?
Jason: Recruiting and marketing, probably. It'd be a chance to be in the gay pride parade, I suppose.
Sean: How would a Yahoo! float look at a gay pride parade, anyway? Ernie: Who knows? Hopefully, they would place it somewhere ironic, between the Schmirnoff float and Daddy's Bar. I wonder...

(Cut to gay pride parade coverage on KRON 4. Insert generic footage of circuit boys covered in gold glitter dancing badly to house music here.)

Drag queen host of Pride Parade, whose name escapes me2: (reading from script) That was DCQANC, the Deaf Circuit Queen Association of Northern California, simultaneously dancing and signing the lyrics to Madison Avenue's club hit, Don't Call Me Baby. What do you think, Jan Wahl?
Jan Wahl: I HAVE A FUNNY HAT.
Host: *sigh* Next up, we have, oh. Tech behemoth3 Yahoo!.

(cut to 25 gray cubicles with purple and yellow trim on a flatbed truck, slowly moving at two miles per hour.)

Crowd: …
Spectator #1: Uh, is anyone even on this float?
Spectator #2: I… I think they’re in their cubicles ohMYGOD are they wearing HEADPHONES?

Voice from flatbed truck, most likely mine: FOR FUCKS SAKE, IS THERE A WI-FI ACCESS POINT ANYWHERE ON THIS FUCKING PARADE ROUTE

Vault Entry 3:
Y! Gay

Published date: June 9th, 2006

Yahoo! Celebrates Gay & Lesbian Pride. Or, as I like to call it informally around the office, Y!Gay. And yes, it's exactly what you think it is - a gay portal site from Yahoo! (Although with all the World of Warcraft I've been playing, when I think "gay portal," I imagine Hearthstoning into the Castro, for some reason.)

I was one of the engineers on this project, where I was on what is called an all-gay, all-volunteer tiger team.

This is the part where I would make a clawing gesture and make the gayest growling sound you've ever heard, but I figured I don't have much dignity left to lose.

This was my first experience actually working on a team where everyone was gay. It's pretty much exactly what I expected:

Gay Male Project Manager: (Wrapping things up) Okay, we're almost done - thanks for all the hard work, everyone, and thanks for having this meeting during lunch.
Everyone else: No problem.

(Gay PM leaves the room. Everyone else pauses.)

Gay Design Manager: Oh no, she did NOT call for a lunch meeting and bring her Niçoise salad in while we were sitting in a room, totally starving. Ernie: Oh, but she TOTALLY DID.
Gay Web Developer: Rawr!

You'll notice how, for better or worse, I ended up being featured as a featured gay blogger on the Yahoo! Pride micro-site. Some of you might be assuming that I volunteered for it. Well, I guess I technically did.

Technically.

Gay PM: So… we need a gay blogger.
Everyone else: (looks directly at me)
Ernie: What? You know, you guys are gay, too.4
Gay DM: But we haven't been in the Advocate.
Gay PM: And we know with 100% certainty you won’t post X-rated photos of yourself in the blog.
Ernie: …
Everyone else: …

Ernie: FINE. I’LL DO IT.

We may be updating the featured blog on the Pride microsite to make it more of a group weblog. You know, something that's actually useful. We'll see.5

In high school, my Mom purchased a statue of a frog the size of a toaster.

Hollow and ceramic, it was painted in gold with fake ornate details in red and green, especially around its eyes. Bits of paint were beginning to chip off a little bit. There is a coin in the frog's mouth, the type of coin you see in Chinatown with the square holes and the Chinese characters. But you wouldn't know that at first glance and would assume it was something on par with something my mother would buy, tacky and expensive looking. If you sat me down and asked me to tell you everything I know about feng shui, even now, this is what I could explain to you: it has something to do with the flow of qi.  

I don't exactly know what qi is. It has something to do with energy, I think: it's the "chi" in tai chi, and it's what Bruce Lee sprouted about before he kicked the shit out of Kareem Abdul Jabbar. And from there, I know that if you place things in a room a certain way, you get a lot of qi and then suddenly have a ton of good luck and fortune and happiness, as if gold coins were to rain from the sky if you put a plate of oranges or a ceramic statue of a deer in the center of a room.

That's all I got.  

My Mom had a casual interest in feng shui - enough for her to understand the basic concepts: She knew, for example, that having a stairway facing the opening of the house produced bad qi. Standing in the entryway to our cookie-cutter tract home, she would look up the stairway into the hallway to all of our bedrooms, back down to the front door next to her, and click her tongue; she realized all her fortune could spill out of the house. Not good, I could see her thinking to herself.  

I noticed the frog sitting on the coffee table in the living room, coming home from high school. I picked up the frog and noticed how heavy it was for a hollow ceramic figure. Picking up the statue also revealed a hundred or so quarters and half-dollars underneath the statue, now just lying on the coffee table. That was a good day's worth of arcade games at the local Silverball Arcade.  

"Don't you dare," my mother barked at me in Chinese. This is weird because she doesn't usually yell at me about stuff, so I knew this was a big deal. Up to this point, I had just assumed the frog was just a part of the house decor, like the crystalline deer or the replica oriental vases bought at a Chinese discount store for nineteen dollars, or the calligraphy scrolls on the wall that I had assumed were some sayings of an ancient Chinese philosopher, but was actually just John 3:16, the universal bible verse of God so loving the world. The quarters underneath the frog brought some curiosity, but it was something I didn't question.  

When my sister Angela noticed the frog statue in the house, she stood there staring at it with suspicion, her face becoming ashen as she crinkled her brow.  

"Why do we have this in the house, Mom?"  

"It's a frog," my Mom told her in Chinese, pointing out the obvious. She switched to English to emphasize her point. "Is lucky."  

"Well, I don't like it." She keeps her distance as if the frog will come to life and jump on her face.  

Our entire family was Christian, technically. My paternal grandmother converted to Christianity decades before I was born, and we all grew up Asian Baptist. (The Asian Baptist church, by the way, has all the fire and brimstone of a Southern Baptist church, without any of that fun singing and dancing.)

Nainai has been gone far too long to ask her any questions about our family and religion; my dad and uncles went through the motions. But it was my sister who took Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Savior at the age of fourteen, whose bookshelves were lined with tapes of Amy Grant, Sandi Patti and bibles and prayer tracts and, later, conservative magazines from James Dobson and Focus on the Family. I am suddenly reminded of the Sunday morning Chinese Church as a kid, where Ina laoshi is sticking paper biblical cut-outs against a felt background of a mountaintop as she tells us the story of Aaron, Moses' brother, who had made the golden statue in the calf and had worshipped it, and the disappointment by both Moses when he came down from the mountain after receiving his commandments, shattering his commandments, telling everyone around him about the upcoming wrath of God.  

"Well if you don't like it," my Mom said to her in Chinese, "you don't have to live in this house."  

Angela frowned, went back to her room, and closed the door behind her.  

It's sort of ironic that here in Miami, where people use me as a go-to resource for "Asian stuff," I have to turn to Google to find an About.com page about feng shui. There, a pleasant-looking blonde stock model named Rodika is telling me about the proper term for what was sitting in the middle of my living room growing up: money frogs. "Traditionally, the money frog is placed somewhere close to the front entrance," Rodika writes. "The important thing to consider is that you do not want the money frog to face the entrance, but rather look inside the house."  

I imagine my sister coming down the stairs throughout the day: leaving the house, going to the kitchen to get a class of water, and each time, the frog facing her direction as Angela descends the stairs.  

"Come, my child." Says the frog. The frog drops the coin he holds in his mouth as he speaks to her. "Follow me, and we will bring much fortune and prosperity onto this household."  

"We will not bear witness to idols in his house," Angela says defiantly.

"Aaaah," the frog says, the corners of its mouth upturned into a sly little smile. "But your family already has."  

A week passed, and Angela and I drove around Berkeley, wanting to get out of the house because Mom and Dad were fighting again. We parked at the Berkeley Marina and started walking on the pier, surrounded by the occasional homeless person and the occasional guy with a lawn chair and a fishing pole. That's when she told me.  

"I prayed and asked Jesus for His guidance about the frog," she said.  

"Okay."  

"I threw it away."  

"Threw it away? Where?"  

She points to the pier nearby. "There."  

I turned to look at the pier, with the cold, choppy waters from the bay underneath and looked back at her. For what it's worth, I had never really considered the money frog as an idol, more a bad luck charm, like the cursed tiki the kids from the Brady Brady bunch found in Hawaii.

Except our tiki just caused our family to fight a lot.  

"Mom's going to be pretty mad about that," I said.  

"'Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' It's in the Ten Commandments."  

"And the quarters?"  

"In the water." She looked calm.  

It was the first major time I had seen my sister go against my parents while not having her schizophrenic episodes. What about the Chinese commandment of respecting your elders? What about the family commandment of "Don't make your parents angry?" I had absolutely revered my parents up to this point, and to see Angela going against that made my muscles tense up, my heart drop to my stomach, and my breathing become shallow. I continued sitting in her car, in her tiny gray 1986 Colt, and I imagined I was riding in the passenger seat, barreling straight into the eye of a hurricane.  

This week, my boyfriend asked me what I was writing about, and I explained the concept of feng shui, furniture rearranging, and tiny statues of animals sitting on mountains of fake gold coins.  

He looks at me as if I carefully explained the concept of a stop sign. "Yeah, of course. My dad had that."  

"Had what?" I ask.  

"Money frogs," he says." Money frogs, fu signs, stuff rearranged in lucky corners."  

"Wasn't your family Christian?" I ask.  

"Wasn't yours? Besides, we needed all the luck we can get. Fabio's Mom was huge into feng shui too, and they're Brazilian."  

"Huh."  

"Yeah. She had the frog in their living room, too. We always tried to steal the coins from the frog's mouth."  

I'm one of seven Asian Americans in Miami, and my boyfriend knows more about this stuff than I do. Whatever magical powers I felt I had are now completely gone.  

"I think more people know about this stuff than you think."  

Suddenly, this gaudy painted plastic animal was no longer a mystical object or a cursed talisman that caused my mother and my sister to fight but a common household object that Brazilian families in South Florida had lying around in their living rooms. Not only do I feel stupid for not knowing what a money frog is, but I am strangely unlucky for having a family that would have a complete meltdown over one. No one else dumps the money frogs of their parents into any large bodies of water.  

My sister shows up at the evening youth services nearly two to three hours early. A bunch of teenage Christians are singing praise songs in front of two guys with a guitar and an overhead projector, songs about how "bananas and mangoes were sweet, but nothing touches the sweet love of God." My sister shows up at the door and asks one of the kids jumping around to ask for me to come outside and talk to her.  

When I meet her outside, she suggests that one of the youth advisors give me a ride home; the later I get home, the better. She tells me that she and Mom got in a fight, and she is just going to drive around for a while before she goes home.

She shows no emotion while she tells me this.  

A youth advisor drives me thirty minutes home in the opposite direction. After I tell him what has happened, he takes my hands in his, and we bow our heads. He prays for my mother, my sister, and me for comfort and protection before we exit the car.  

When I get home, the house is dark except for one light in the landing area. Unsurprisingly, the money frog is gone, and the house is cleaner than usual. The light under Angela's door is dark.  

The next morning, coming down the stairs, Mom served me a scrambled egg breakfast between two pieces of toast. It's when she puts down the jar of mayonnaise and the container of pork floss that I notice her black eye. She talks to me normally as if nothing happened; it's just another Monday, but this time, Mom has a shiner. I kiss her on the cheek, the other cheek that isn't swollen, and I hurry to catch the bus to get to school.  

Mom took down all the feng shui symbology in her house, as far as I'm aware. She was relieved when the family moved from El Sobrante to a small house in Fremont after I moved away from college - mostly because the family would move to a suburb with more Taiwanese immigrants, but partly because the house number they were moving to had more 8s - a number meaning "fortune," and less 4s - a Chinese homonym with the character of "death." But gone are the money frogs or any sort of tiny animal figurines that had any additional connotation that they could be anything except for tiny animal figures.  

It wasn't until years later that my mother would really understand the concept of my sister's mental illness. "Ernie," she would say to me in Chinese, with my father right behind her. "I finally understand now. Your sister is sick!" And I would nod, silently wondering what on earth Mom thought her daughter was going through when we would all hear the one-way conversations in the silence when she was alone in the bedroom.  

But when Angela threw the figure out into the water, I'm not sure how much of it was due to the mental illness that would eventually consume her in a couple of years. Maybe she was cornered and felt trapped when faced with conflict. In this case, the conflict was the golden frog sitting in the house, a direct affront to her love of Jesus Christ. When we are presented with conflict, we are all reduced to our basic primal instincts, where we either run away and avoid the situation or stand our ground.

For me, I run. I instinctively put on headphones to drown out unnecessary interactions and prevent arguments and street confrontations. I dodge conflict and then sit in my bed at night, seething in my anger, unable to fall asleep. I sit in a therapist's chair, listening to him talk about the fine line between aggressiveness and assertiveness.

I stare back, unable to comprehend the notion.  

But Angela, even now that she's heavily medicated and her thoughts are muddled - when she feels threatened, whether by well-intentioned family members or faced with three black teenage girls who call her a fat bitch on the bus from Fremont to Berkeley, she stands her ground. Because at the end of the day, it's the one thing I respect the most out of my sister, even though it's something I would never be able to tell her. She's the one that gets in our faces and screams no, over and over again. She's the one that punches the first girl in the face while the other two come at her from the back, pulling her to the ground by her hair and kicking her in the face. She's the one with the bruised face as she gets a police escort home to my horrified mother, a grin from ear to ear.  

She's the one who hurls the idols into the bay.

NOTE: This piece was originally posted in October 2020 but was taken down due to the case's active status at the time. I've since re-uploaded it as a creative writing exercise. While based on real events, some dialogues have been fictionalized for narrative purposes.

You will steel yourself up.

You will steel yourself up.

What does that sentence even mean? You say it enough times, and it doesn't even make sense anymore. Why are you steeling yourself up? Why can't one just steel themselves?

Your now ex-boyfriend was able to find your sister's name on the Inmate Locator page pretty quickly. "You had to choose the phonetic search option," he says. There is a checkbox on the bottom left. The policeman on duty spelled her name wrong."

Of course, they did. They always do. S before H, U before I, forget the G, and add letters that don't even make sense to a Chinese name. You remember seeing that phonetic option, but no one would even bother trying to phonetically spell your name as "HSIUNG," so you didn't even bother trying.

You look at the screen. It takes some time to translate the abbreviations and shorthand into something you can comprehend, and your mind jumps to how this data was entered: some officer typing in his terminal in one hand, McDonald's coffee in the other. That's how they do it in Florida, anyway. It's been so long that you no longer remember how they would do it in the Bay Area. Maybe they use Siri or Alexa.

A couple of days ago, you witnessed your sister in court. COVID has made everything virtual, which means that even though the courtroom is in California, you can now log onto the Alameda County Courtroom's video platform of choice, BlueJeans. The only other place you used BlueJeans was when you were doing a Fellowship with Code for America a couple of years ago, and you wonder if it's the go-to platform for government-related stuff.

Not that any of it matters, of course.

Kareem will send you a draft to go over. It's a carefully drafted email forwarded to the Alameda County Deputy District Attorney and the Public Defender, chronicling your sister's mental illness. A bullet-pointed, unordered list of things you've written about countless times over the past twenty-five years.

There are a couple of new bullet points on that list, though.

• The uninvited move home last year, when the people at her boarding and care facility told her she was moving home “because they were trying to kill her.”

• Her refusal to get medication and the laughing and screaming fits that have caused your mother to lock herself in her room.

• The offhand comments from your mother that Angela has also struck your father, but can’t really tell you many details past that now that his dementia has gotten pretty bad.

• There was also “the first one,” which resulted in nothing because your mother called 611, not 911, and when the police came over, Angela was what they called "non-presenting" — she can hide it if she needs to. So your mom tells you that the police share a laugh with Angela — a fucking laugh, for fucks sake.

• Your mother stops trusting all American police officers. Naturally.

But Mom calls 911 this time around. And when the cops come, there are lacerations. The skin was broken; she drew blood. While Mom is taken to the hospital, they ask if Angela is willing to come along to seek a psychiatric evaluation.

"No," I imagine her saying softly. She mouths the word the first time, as if she's silently assuring the others she won't go down quietly.

So they arrest her.

And that's why you're watching your sister getting indicted on a webcam, you guess.

Your friend Ted, your raving friend from the post-college days that you may still associate with perfectly coiffed hair and plastic angel wings, helped with some of the key phrases to use now that he's a social worker. “Persistent and severe mental abuse.” “Diversion mental health programs.”

Ted and Kareem have both helped a ton. Since COVID, your day mostly consists of looking into a webcam, energy level eleven, and shouting like someone from a Disney Teen movie about JavaScript closures for ten hours a day. In between moments of boundless enthusiasm, you are trying to write an updated curriculum about React hooks. A survey gets sent to all students on Friday evening, ranking you and the other instructors on a scale of 1 to 10, and then the Director of Operations tells you everything you did wrong the next Monday.

Repeat until you burn out.

Angela's trial is on a webcam. This should be no different, you think to yourself. All I have to do is stare into another fucking camera while I wear this sport jacket and explain to a judge how my sister isn't fit to reenter society.

Hours before the hearing, your overactive imagination kicks in: You imagine seeing your shackled sister in the corner of a webcam, an orange jumpsuit in an isolated room, the kind you see on late-night documentaries about prisons. In your mind, she is looking into the courtroom camera -- looking at you -- and screaming at you at the top of her lungs while you sentence her to death: You're a liar, Ernie. You're so full of shit, Ernie. Ernie, you're a Judas. Do you know what that means? You didn't love the Lord like I did, and you deserve to die, you faggot.

You snap out of your daydream the second she says the word "faggot." She would never say that. Would she?

Would you, 姐?

The actual trial is nothing that dramatic; it's more everything cliched about awkward Zoom calls but in a court of law. A judge is handling the arraignments of 50 to 100 cases at once; clerks and lawyers shuffle papers around while mispronouncing every last name in existence wrong every which way possible.

When you see your sister ninety minutes in, she is sitting with the police officer in the holding cell, her big glasses and matted gray hair framed against her COVID mask. Her jumpsuit is navy blue, not orange, with the words “SANTA RITA JAIL” splayed in giant Impact font.

The District Attorney asks for bail; it's set at $70,000. The Public Defender doesn't fight it. The judge is about to go to the next case when your partner is about to speak up. The DA jumps in. “Your Honor, we have some family members who would like to make a statement regarding the defendant. Would you like them to give testimony?”

The judge doesn't bother looking up. "Not necessary," he says. By the time you wrinkle your forehead in confusion, it's over.

You didn't even have to turn on the camera.

Obviously, the calls to Mom have started again. They are still about everything and nothing at all.

“Who talked to you today this time, Ma?” Your phone is on speaker, so Kareem can hear it, but never mind that the conversation is in Chinese.

“Some person. They spoke Mandarin to me, so that was nice.”

“Mm. I need you to give me the names and organizations of those you've talked with,” you say to her.

“I didn't get their name. They spoke too fast, and they gave me a card.”

Kareem is looking over from the kitchen. You shake your head, and he frowns. “How do you spell it, Mom?”

“ELL. OH. DEE. PEE.”

"Ma, that doesn't even make sense."

She starts shouting numbers at you in Chinese before you realize the numbers belong to a phone call. You've since learned to Google the phone number your mother gives you. It turns out this one is a website for a legal elder assistance program in Oakland—a SOCIAL WORKER, she says, in English. Well, technically, no, but you're too tired to argue. You’ve been too tired to do anything, honestly, and besides, she's the one with lacerations, after all.

There's a pause on the phone.

"Have you bought it yet," she asks?

"Bought what, Mom?"

"The dryer has stopped working. I've been hanging the clothes on a clothesline, and it hurts my back when I dry them."

"Kay, Mom, you'll get the drier." You hang up the phone.

You stare at the phone.

You don't tell her about the court date.

You don't tell her that your sister will, most likely, declare herself innocent, that this will most likely become a full-blown trial with a jury.

You don't tell her that you'll most likely fly to California soon to help her testify against her daughter and help set up more interpreters. You'll probably testify as well. You'll look at her in the eye and tell a judge, unflinching, that your mother feels physically unsafe, so long as your sister is a free person. You will steel yourself up, enough for both you and your mother. You will steel yourself up, you say.

You will steel yourself up. You will repeat this over and over again until you convince yourself of the words you say out loud. You will steel yourself up.

Part 1: Re-introduction

Ernie: Hey, JavaScript.

JavaScript: Oh. It’s you.

E: Yeah. So it’s been a while.

JS: Oh. It has.

E: I’m sorry I’ve been away so long. You know how it goes; it’s just been super busy the past couple of years. Being a low-level manager at all of that.

JS: Whatever. Do you have a question or…?

E: Anyway, I’ve been hitting some roadblocks getting promoted as an Engineering Lead or a Project Manager because everyone wants more experience. So I want to get reacquainted with you. Because… I’m applying for front-end roles again.

JS: (chuckles) Yeah? And how is that going?

E: Yeah, so, uh, it turns out that front-end jobs aren’t what they were like three or four years ago. I can’t even build a static page anymore because apparently that requires JavaScript.

JS: Duh. How did you do it before?

E: Uh, with HTML? And CSS?

JS: Well, that’s pedestrian. You’re telling me you haven’t used any JS frameworks?

E: I mean, I learned backbone a couple of years ago. And Angular.

JS: Angular 1? Or Angular 2, where Google invited everyone to Salt Lake City for a conference and told everyone they were rewriting everything over again, all from scratch, so the year or two you spent building things was completely obsolete?

E: (sigh) Angular 1. I was at that conference.

JS: Oh, you sweet summer child. In the time you were away, trying to talk about your “feelings,” I’ve met someone. Their name is React, and they’re now required for 85% of the jobs that now exist in the market.

E: But I don’t know React.

JS: Hrrm. You shouldn’t have spent those three years teaching millennials how to set SMART goals then.

React: Hey. I’m from Facebook. Haven’t I seen you somewhere?

E: Yeah. I interviewed with Facebook four years ago. Some nineteen-year-old interviewed me over video chat and I got a rejection email, like, twenty minutes after.

React: Damn shame. You missed out on the free Segway rides between buildings.

JS: Listen, all you have to do to ever have a tech job again is to learn this completely new JavaScript library. No big deal. It’s not like your identity isn’t completely centered around web development or anything.

E: It kinda is.

JS: Well then. Get to studying, pork chop.

Part 2: Sometime later

E: (looking through React docs) What is this JSX nonsense? Like, HTML as javascript fragments? And since when has it been okay to inline CSS inside of Javascript?

JS: Since React said so.

React: Facebook offers free mango lassis in our cafeteria.

Part 3: More time passes

E: This is insane. There are, like, two ways to write components. Half the docs on Google write them one way, the other half write them the other way. So which version do I learn?

JS: lol I dunno. Both?

E: For fuck’s sake.

React: Did you know Facebook offers an egg freezing policy? Because having a baby should never be on a product roadmap.

Part 4: Sometime after that

E: Hold on. You there, JavaScript; your syntax has completely changed too. Did… did you get a makeover?

JS: Oh, ES6? This little thing? Do you love it?

E: I mean, I guess the ASCII arrows look good on you, I just… I knew you as someone else. I can still code with the old version of you, right?

JS: You could, in theory. But.

E: “But?”

JS: I mean, think about it. You’re doing coding interviews. People are going to be looking at your code. You could code the old way and you wouldn’t be incorrect. But you don’t want people thinking you’re outdated, do you?

E: …

JS: Do you know who’s outdated? COBOL programmers. Do you know who was a COBOL programmer? Michael Douglas in the 1993 action thriller, Falling Down.

E: Michael Douglas isn’t a COBOL programmer. That was a role. He was acting.

JS: Suicide by cop. That’s how he dies.

E: Dude.

JS: (loud whisper) You’re gonna lose your shit and a cop is gonna kill you.

Part 5: And some time after that

E: I think I’m getting the hang of you, React.

JS: Sweet. Now, look on the horizon.

E: What?

JS: Just look.

E: I don’t see OH JESUS, IS THAT A BLACK HOLE?

JS: It sure is. It’s called Redux. It’s a state manager. You get to learn 150 new terms and a whole bunch of boilerplate to match. It’s a rabbit hole. Or, you know, something a little more than a rabbit hole.

E: (screams as he’s sucked into the void) HOW DO NEW DEVELOPERS GET THIS?!

JS and React, in unison: They’re all half your age.

E: Oh.

FIN

This weekend, my partner and I went shopping for a new bed frame. We might not be starving college students, but we’re certainly not fancy Brickelistas with money to spend. After looking at $1,200 beds at West Elm and CB2, we started looking for more practical options.

We drive somewhere – north? West? It all turns into one generic four-lane highway when you’re sitting as a passenger, and we start our search at Rooms To Go.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” I say as we navigate around a 50-year-old blonde Argentine woman wearing a baseball cap and a “NO SHAME IN MY GAME” tank top, conversing loudly with a sales agent.

Kareem takes a breath. “There’s also… El Dorado.”

Up to this point, I’ve seen the big box store from the freeway. It’s mostly in the context of, “Oh. Yeah, my mom bought her furniture from El Dorado.” Being Chinese, I try to relate my hardest to what a Cuban family's living room would look like: a 1970s couch, a display case with polished brass to house a bunch of crystalline animal figures with fake bullhorns, and the husk of a mid-90s television.

“Why the hell not,” I say. “What’s it like?”

As someone not originally from Miami and here for the first time, let me tell you: El Dorado is not a furniture store; it’s an experience. I don’t know if it’s a furniture-buying experience, but it’s something, and I’m going to spend the next couple of paragraphs doing my best to explain all of its magic and wonder.

The other big box furniture store everyone knows is IKEA. They both take up multiple city blocks, are both conveniently situated off of freeways for maximum visibility, and are both designed so that if you go with your significant other, one will want to spend the afternoon browsing every little thing, and the other will just want to get the lamp and leave, goddamnit.

But unlike IKEA, where the Swedes give you a guided path of carefully manicured showrooms, El Dorado offers the furnishings version of a Las Vegas buffet – not the fancy buffet with the $125 brunches, but the buffet where an old man has a plate of ribs in front of him while he plays video poker, drags on his cigarette, and breathes from his oxygen tank.

We are greeted at what initially looks like a receptionist desk next to a metal statue of a horse; I’m assuming because of the Don Quixote reference, trying to find El Dorado’s city of lost gold on his steed.

But instead of finding lost gold, it’s finding furniture at fabulous prices. Again, totally never grew up here, but my imagination immediately jumps to the potential commercial: some Cuban dude from the 80s in a fake mustache jumping off a fake horse.

“After seeing this Pink velour end table for only $499, you’ll think you will be Dreaming the Impossible Dream(TM)!”

Beyond the landing area, customers walk down a hallway lined with streetlights. Each side is partitioned into quarters, each with its theme. It reminds me of Disneyland’s Main Street, except each general store opens to a prop set from Cocaine Cowboys.

A man previously sitting in a chair gets up and walks towards us. “Hola…” his eyes flicker in my direction, and his Americano radar blips. “I am Humberto,” he says in English, “and I’d love to help you with anything.”

I’m not used to all of these assertive greetings while buying furniture. When I was fresh out of college and needed furniture in California, Dad would get leads from his Taiwanese naval buddies. He would make me drive out to a nondescript warehouse to look at prop furniture, the stylish but uncomfortable sofas you see when you walk into a new condo for sale. They have stylish but generic furniture there, so you can see how the property looks with some semblance of living inside.

“We’re just looking around,” we say to him. We, because it’s at the same time, albeit in two deliveries. Kareem says something in Spanish to the effect of “We’ll talk to you if we need any deals, alright?” Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

There are many, many parts to this place. The first section is what I assume greets any new person to El Dorado Furniture: an all-peach showroom with bedazzled fucking everything – bedazzled white vanity, bedazzled white scallop headboard made from actual white scallops — the Mandelbrot Fractal of Miami beds —  and a bedside lamp that may have doubled as a disco ball or a chandelier.1

This photo doesn’t do it justice because I didn’t walk in thinking, “This place is so ridiculous I’m going to sit down and write about it,” and wasn’t fully prepared, so you’ll have to go with me here:

Like IKEA, sections were divided into showrooms so you could walk through them and see how this furniture would fit into your everyday life. It’s just that in El Dorado, everyday life would probably involve less cooking or sleeping or chores and more doing a mountain of cocaine while embezzling funds from a developing country.

We pass by a hallway that goes to their warehouse. It, naturally, looks like this:

See that mirror on the left, next to the round mirror? That’s an “infinity mirror.” I’m pretty sure they have these in children’s museums. For only $700, you can install one in your bathroom, look in it, and contemplate your life choices. I tell Kareem this.

“Let’s move on,” he says.

Oh, look, “Office Dot Com!”

I think I understand where they’re going with this, so I won’t tell them that redirects to Microsoft. We step in, and there is a sea of office desks – not the ones with the crappy fake wood plastic covers, but the ones that are maroon and aqua and have that shiny vinyl coating, as if all the women from all those Patrick Nagel paintings had cashed their modeling checks and started a data entry business.

Yes, I know they sell this children’s bed and 95 percent of the other furniture in this store at other stores across the country.

But seriously, in 2017, we live in America, and practically everything you eat, use, and consume is produced in a factory in Shenzhen.

What this is all actually about is the curation.

“Look,” El Dorado Furniture says to you, “doesn’t your eight-year-old want to be like Mommy and Daddy when they grow up and sit on the 836 East by the airport, screaming things at a family of seven packed into a compact car because they were three inches from sideswiping you? DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM(TM).”

We don’t find a bed frame that fits our style. We spend some time looking at patio furniture because it looks the most modern in the store, but that’s like convincing yourself you can dunk a basketball because you’re an average-sized person at a conference full of little people.

On our way out, an unassuming display case – literally the most modest thing in the entire freaking store – gets my attention because it’s full of mementos and articles. There, it talks about how it’s a family-run business, how a furniture-making family escaped from Cuba, opened a store in Little Havana at a time when Miami wasn’t even Latin, opened more stores, and celebrated its 50th anniversary. They boasted how proud they were that it was still a family-run business. That’s kinda cool, I think.

And there’s a moment of clarity: the section of the pink and the bedazzled, the vanity with, literally, a flashing neon light used as trim – it’s ostentatious, sure. But it’s also the American Dream.

The American dream, where you can flee a country like Cuba, put in sweat equity, and succeed in a new country, just like the owners of the store did. And once you receive the fruits of your labor, you can provide for your family, send money back home, and buy an ottoman with the face of a tiger on it with the leftovers. Owning a family furniture store the size of a small British village is the ultimate act of defiance to a Communist government.

El Dorado is, basically, the most Miami thing that Miami has ever Miami’ed in Miami.

“Where are we going to get our bed, though?” I ask Kareem as we walk to the car.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Let’s look on Craigslist.”

“Not just ADD?” I blurt out. I was hoping for something a little milder, I guess.

“No,” Doctor Quesada says. He has a calm manner and looks up from his laptop as he talks to me with a softness to his voice, and he kind of reminds me of a slightly effeminate Latin Casey Kasem. “You do this thing with your fingers when you’re idle. I don’t even think you notice it. This stretching, wiggling thing.”

Kareem has told me the same thing. I picked it up once while watching a K-Pop video, and the girls did a complex tutting choreography with their fingers and hands which looked neat. Was I doing that throughout the day? A thirty-eight-year-old man probably shouldn’t be doing that, should he?

I tuck my hands between my legs and the couch I’m sitting on and suck in my stomach by instinct.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, should it? Concentration has always been an issue for me my entire life. I only remember things like appointments or where my keys are by being neurotic about where everything is at all times, Google Calendars and web applications that send notes to myself after six hours, one week, three months. Contact this group, write a document to send, set up an appointment for next Wednesday. Check my appointments to make sure I haven’t forgotten them again and again. Coping mechanisms, I am told, and I’ve certainly heard that term my entire life.

In college, I barely graduated above the minimum GPA necessary. I wrote off my terrible study habits due to the co-ed community service fraternity I joined and the lack of interest from Dad ticking the “Computer Science and Engineering Major” checkbox in my college application. But that was every Asian American growing up, and we all assumed that the only way for me to keep up with everyone else was with more studying on my part and more yelling and discipline on theirs.

But still. Anything with the word hyperactivity makes it sound like I’m a seven-year-old pretending he’s a tractor-trailer on a playground. As a kid, I remember marching into the living room, turning it to channel two, and acting out every single dancer from Solid Gold in front of my parents and his naval buddy friends. That’s just being a kid, right?

“We’ll give you Vyvanse, thirty milligrams,” he says while he scribbles notes on a green branded Post-It Note and hands it to me.

Growing up I played a little game with myself: if I could live a perfectly normal life by 29 — that was the age Angela had her most severe schizophrenic episode, the one that caused her to break from society completely — I would be okay, and any faulty genetics I had running in my DNA wouldn’t betray me. When my thirtieth birthday rolled around and I didn’t hear Jesus or Satan’s voice in my head like my sister did, I belted Living on a Prayer at a San Francisco karaoke bar full of my friends, silently thinking to myself this is it I have nothing to worry about anymore all the while coming down from all the drugs I took the day before because I didn’t want to feel that awful emptiness like I always did, not on my thirtieth birthday, no sir.

I’m thirty-eight now. Well played, fate.

“We’ll have you take it for thirty days. It’s a lower dosage than usual, but we’ll have you ramp up to see how you feel about it. Who else in your family has it?”

That last fucking sentence. “Excuse me?”

“Who else in your family has it?” Doctor Quesada repeats. “Because, you know, it’s genetic.”

“I’m not sure,” I say.

But that is a lie, because I have ideas.

The only family I’ve ever really known or grown up with is on my dad’s side. We all spent Thanksgiving and Christmas together as children, and all the cousins grew up to be normal adults; for the most part, Chris and Grace are the attractive, popular cousins, and Bernie and Darren are the smart ones.

Angela and I were always the freaks: The crazy daughter, the gay son.

In contrast, I met my maternal grandfather once, in Taiwan, when I was ten — he looked like one of those old men you see in illustrated children's books about Chinese folk tales, with their wrinkles and their wizened eyes — I don’t remember much past that. There’s a photo of me where I’m holding a live shrimp at what I’m assuming was his shrimp farm in Kaohsiung, one part grinning to the camera and one part terror because most of my experience with shrimp up to that point was in the frozen foods aisle at Safeway, pink masses of seafood protein jammed inside a sealable plastic bag.

His wife was not there and was never brought up. Inevitably, as curious as kids would get, I would ask Dad why I’d never met Grandma before — usually in the parking lot or on a car ride, somewhere where Mom wasn’t around. And he would start getting mad and would talk faster and louder — all in Chinese, using words I couldn’t understand, getting angrier and angrier as the minutes passed by. When he realized I couldn’t understand anything he was saying, he would sigh and tap his temple with his finger. “Sick.” There would be constant retells of this, sometimes on my end, but mostly on his, when he was mad at Mom for whatever reason.

In later years, he would pair this with an additional story: that my maternal grandfather — the old man at the shrimp farm — asked my father to marry his youngest daughter.

“Like, an arranged marriage?” I asked. Dad’s dad had an arranged marriage as well. Grandma was wife number two, and she hated the other wives. I had to report on it in my World War II class.

Dad paused. “Suggested.”

And then finally, in high school, he would add another caveat, that final straw making me avoid the topic as much as I could: your grandmother — on your mother’s side, he emphasized — was the reason why Angela was sick. I imagined a faceless Chinese woman in a qipao, poisoning my family tree, and as an angsty teenager wanting to get the fuck out of dodge as quickly as possible, I didn’t know whether I hated these people I didn’t know more or my dad for telling me all of this.

It's four forty-five in the morning and I'm lying in bed at the Aloft a budget hotel room in a strip mall minutes from the San Antonio Airport gray carpet corporate art on walls reminds me of that office job in 2018 no it was 2017 second day in town for work but my third day taking the full dosage of this pill this pill this amphetamine.

Am I going to sleep tonight ever again? I'm learning really quickly the primary side effect of Vyvanse is insomnia. Why wouldn't it be insomnia? It's a fucking amphetamine like the stuff they give fighter pilots to stay awake for bombing the japanese during world war two or college students during finals week or—the word amphetamine triggers something in me—a flash of that night in the end up patio and — nope don’t go there right now.

Sighing makes me feel a little better so I try to close my eyes take a deep breath what was supposed to be a meditation technique turns into a mental audit: Where are you? (hotel room San Antonio work trip) How are you feeling right this second? (wired anxious racing) Who would I call if this got worse? (Kareem maybe but it's 2AM in Miami) Is my heartbeat supposed to be this fast?

Am I high? No it doesn't feel like that I'm just really fucking awake like someone replaced my blood with espresso and my thoughts with hummingbirds and I need to go to work in an hour fuck. I catch myself saying that out loud into the darkness of the room and I sit up in the bed out of frustration I've been lying in this bed for a couple of hours now body tired but mind racing whirring clicking through tabs like browser windows I can't close.

The ceiling has a pattern I hadn't noticed before or maybe I'm just now really seeing it for the first time like that thing they say about how we don't really SEE anything we just process shortcuts of the world around us unless we truly focus and—is that normal or is this medication making me notice everything?

Six-fifteen a.m. I've calculated I've been awake for nearly 24 hours Internet search ADHD forums people talking about routines and dosage someone's wife takes it every morning when she wakes up at 6 a.m. so the effects can gently subside throughout the whole day. "Refreshed" she says in the post which convinces me more than it should that it's a perfectly acceptable thing to do which is obviously ridiculous because she's a complete stranger on the internet and what works for her might not—but I need sleep and maybe just maybe—

"Maybe that's what I need," I think through a fog of exhaustion and poor judgment. "My body just needs to reset, that's all," like I'm talking about restarting a glitchy phone and not altering my brain chemistry even further.

Unlike the forty minutes it usually takes (forty-three minutes yesterday, thirty-eight minutes the day before that I'm tracking the onset because that's what you're supposed to do right?) it takes what feels like twenty minutes before I notice something: jolt like touching an electric fence the most alert I've been over the past week like switching from standard definition to 4K and suddenly this hotel room is too small too confining too—Wrong move, champ. My body starts to shake and I have a sudden and urgent need to move to walk this energy off to—

(on with sweatpants t-shirt the shoes by the door headphones why am I grabbing headphones?)

Elevator down to the lobby softly playing four-to-the-floor deep house music the kind they play in the lounges in South Beach too loud too much but I can't take the headphones off now because I'm already past the reception desk girl looking up from her phone for just a second our eyes meet or do they? sliding glass doors WHOOOOSH Texas dawn air humid heavy like wet wool against my skin.

My mother has only told me the following facts about my maternal grandmother: she liked to paint and gambled too much, so she would tell me, "You shouldn’t gamble when you grow up."

That’s all I got.

Mom has no anecdotes about her mother’s quirks or terrible habits. Dad would usually drop hints when he got upset at her, which was often: “Do you know that no one knows when your mother’s birthday is? Her brothers and sisters had to fill in her gift certificate for her.”

I have no reason to believe he would be lying. I imagine my maternal grandmother, a beautiful, young, rich Chinese woman from one of those period movies like Raise the Red Lantern, lying in a fetal position on a bed, smoking opium and abandoning her children.

The day I graduated from college, my parents drove up from the Bay Area. When I answered the door to my apartment in my cap and gown, I discovered they had brought in a pretty girl Taiwanese my age—a cousin I was meeting for the very first time. I did my best to be polite, making small talk in my broken Mandarin. If I had any warning, I may have presented a list of questions about mom’s side of the family or learned how to say the sentences better.

“Have you ever met our grandmother?” I asked.

Her face darkened. “Yes.” A longer pause, as if she was trying to figure out what to say. “She didn’t like girls very much.”

I nodded and changed the subject. In the ending of Raise the Red Lantern—spoiler alert—the beautiful, rich young Chinese woman goes crazy, walking around her giant palace completely catatonic. Sometimes, I imagine my maternal grandmother like that, too.

Strip mall parking lot empty but lights still on at the—past the tire shop crossing the street into darkness but there's an illuminated Starbucks with a single employee behind counter she looks up briefly our eyes maybe connect I think it's too dark outside I'm a shadow moving past streetlights every two or three blocks everything around me shades of deep blues purples navy like the sweater Mom gave me last Christmas that I never wear hints of sunrise coming but not for a couple of hours you're going to be tired for a couple of hours for a couple of days maybe forever?

But I keep walking past a closed IHOP (reminds me of college when we'd eat there after studying—were we actually studying or just pretending to?) past the multiplex with movie posters for films I meant to see but never did. I'll be okay I need to be okay there's a meeting at 9 and I need to present those analytics that I still haven't—

Another light in the distance brighter than the others, sign for a diner or something and like a moth to a flame (such a cliché my creative writing professor would have hated that) I head towards it without thinking about direction or time or where exactly I am in this city I barely know. I imagine how a State Trooper would see this: some short, fat Asian guy in sweatpants power-walking through an industrial zone at dawn suspicious probably on something which technically I am but it's prescribed and my heart is hammering now I can almost taste anxiety at the back of my throat copper penny metallic like blood or fear.

I’ve had friends ask why I haven’t gone on a quest to find more information about my Mom’s side of the family. They point out that it would be great writing material, and that would be true. Are they like the one aunt I met in Hong Kong, who was polite but didn’t strike up much of a conversation, or like my mom’s younger brother, who overstayed his welcome until they were shouted out of the house? Do they call their sons and daughters every afternoon and talk about nothing for twenty minutes? Are there other cousins out there with your face?

One is the communication issue: I’m an American, albeit one who speaks broken Mandarin to his mom because that’s how we communicate. I can say that my dinner was delicious, that we went to an Italian restaurant, or that it’s very hot and muggy in Florida right now.

What’s Chinese for “I’m visiting you in Taiwan to learn if our family has a history of mental illness?”

Two, Mom hasn’t really brought up the subject of family, so I haven’t either. A couple of years ago, right after the divorce, she was ready to visit Taiwan for a month or two to visit relatives before a frantic phone call in the middle of the night two or three days before she was supposed to board her plane.

“Ernie, I need you to help me call the airlines and ask how to give refunds. I’ve decided to cancel the trip.”

“Why?”

There’s a noticeable pause on the other end. “I don’t want to inconvenience them.”

I would ask if she could stay at a hotel, knowing the answer was no, staying at a hotel when you’re visiting family is sacrilege. Offering to stay at a hotel to a Chinese family member is the equivalent of calling them and letting them know that they are terrible hosts and, thusly, horrendous people. I tried it with my mom last week when I offered to stay at a hotel while visiting her in California. It didn’t go too well.

Just as a mom does not contact her family, very little of my family has contacted my mom, save for a crazy uncle who showed up in our living room that quickly scurried off when Angela threatened to kill him. I wonder why they haven’t, and I wonder what they say about us. Do they know we exist?

If they know, do they think we’re crazy?

What if they’re right?

Just need to walk some more work off this whatever this is medication side effect panic attack existential crisis genetic time bomb I don't know I don't—

Dad's voice suddenly in my head: “You know why she's like that, don't you” talking about Mom, about Angela, about mental illness threading through our family tree like a poison vine. Are there others? Cousins in Taiwan I've never met with the same wiring, same chemical imbalances, same—

(truck roars past too close warm air displacement pushes against me)

I stop. Where am I? How long have I been walking?

My t-shirt is damp with sweat yet I'm cold my fingers tingling. I've been walking and walking and walking and I think the shaking is subsiding a little bit now but hard to tell because now I'm just tired so tired but wired a contradiction a paradox a—

How do I feel?

Alert hyper-alert super-fucking-alert I can feel my heart beating through the headphones I'm wearing (playing nothing I realize just now I've been wearing a pair of headphones without listening to music or a podcast for how long? an hour?) My face is damp sweat and it's about to rain the summer storms in San Antonio can be just as intense as the storms in Miami like the one where we lost power for three days and the food in the fridge—OH MY GOD DUDE FOCUS.

Where am I?

Standing on the side of a dirt road somewhere in rural San Antonio houses and fences warehouses the brightly lit sign is actually a taqueria open early for truckers and night-shifters with their cups of coffee and breakfast tacos. It's an oasis warm reds and oranges inside concrete drizzling rain semis whooshing by. I should go in but this isn't my world and I'm not hungry the thought of food makes me—

Why have I been walking?

My mind blanks—complete emptiness—then the laser focus part of the medication kicks in again replacing my need to reach a far-away taqueria with a different objective: retrace your steps get back to the hotel shower meeting prep slides analytics.

"I'll be okay," I try to convince myself out loud and a voice pops in my head: you will, you know. everything will be fine. For a brief terrifying second I panic because voices are how it started for Angela—she'd hear things whispers instructions—but no this is just my own internal monologue isn't it? It has to be. I accept the message being delivered to me: I'll be OK, everything will be fine.

I turn around and start walking back away from the lights and people but towards where I need to be need to shower need to look normal need to be professional need to be at work in an hour or two and the other remote co-workers will ask how I am in the lobby and I will say fine I will say I had a tough time sleeping but otherwise it's okay we will all climb into a rental car and drive to the office together and no one will know that I've been walking for miles in the dark because I couldn't handle the medication that's supposed to make me normal.

I will be OK. Everything will be fine. I will be OK. Everything will be fine. I will be OK. Everything will be fine.

(But what if I'm not?)

I’m restoring 20 years of archives. Paid subscribers get full access to the stories that built Little Yellow Different.

The scarf was made from silk. It had blue flowers on it.

“No.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Mom asked in Chinese. “Blue is a color, for boys.”

“Mom, no.” In English. “A thousand times no.”

“Wah, THOUSAND NO,” Mom mocked. She balled up the fabric and stuffed it in my inside jacket pocket anyway. “Not a gift.”

“Not a gift,” I repeated. We stopped exchanging gifts the year Mom knocked over the two Christmas trees in a fit of rage, another argument with Dad about Grandma. They were artificial trees anyway, and they would have stayed up until Chinese New Year otherwise.

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A couple of weeks ago1, I was having dinner with some co-workers, and I referred to the place where I grew up: El Cerrito, California.

Co-worker: El Cerrito? As in, El Cerrito High?
Ernie: Yeah. Class of 1994.
Co-worker: Whoa! Class of 1996! I don't think we knew each other back then.
Ernie: Nope. Well, you don't remember "the seagull guy," right? That was me.
Co-worker: The seagull who? No.
Ernie: Cool. So anyway, I...
Co-worker: Wait. I do remember. I've heard stories about you.

1994. It's kinda hard to believe that I graduated from high school ten years ago. Like, remember the episodes of Saved By the Bell where everyone talks about how their ten-year reunions? Then, in a dramatic fantasy sequence, there they are, the same 17-year-olds wearing "old clothes" and fake mustaches, talking about their fantasy jobs and their imaginary children.

And then one of them took all her clothes off to star in the movie Showgirls. But I digress.

So there I am in my salad bowl haircut. It's not enough that I have the salad bowl haircut, of course. I also have a green baseball jacket that my mother brought back from Taiwan. The soft inside liner, which protects me from the wind, is my favorite jacket. Instead of a team logo, it had a giant lettering: "1993."

Do you know how uncool it is to wear a 1993 jacket in 1994?

But there I am anyway, with a green jacket and bad haircut, and I'm sitting on the baseball field at lunch with some classmates. I wouldn’t necessarily call them friends — they would start talking shit the second I walked away and spoke openly about poker nights and weekend hangouts I wasn't invited to — but they tolerated me having lunch around them.

I had a crush on one of the guys in the group, Scott.2 He and I were in a bunch of classes together. He wasn't necessarily hot or anything; it was more of the simple fact that he didn't make fun of me as much as the other guys did. That and he lived within a 10-minute drive from me since it took half an hour to get to school each day.3 He was funny, too.

How do you get a closeted high school boy to like you? Be nice to him, that's how.

(passes in the halls)
Ernie: Hey. Happy Birthday.
Scott: Thanks, man. I don't think I ever told you it was my birthday today.
Ernie: Yeah, you did. A couple of months back.
Scott: Cool. You're the only one who remembered.
Ernie: Oh yeah? No problem.

(looks down, walks away)

You're probably wondering why I bring up the story of an awkward crush I had in high school out of nowhere. Why? Because they were there when all of this happened.

"They" being him, sitting across from me, and 10 of his closest friends.

"It" being, of course, a group of 50 to 100 seagulls.

And “happened” is that these seagulls decided to shit on my head.

Like, directly on my head, running down on my forehead, starting to go between my eyebrows before I took the paper bag that my dad used to hold sandwiches from the meat leftover from dinner and wiped it across my salad-bowl-accented forehead. Everyone is laughing. The people eating lunch, the stoners getting high by the bleachers, the cholos hanging by the gym.

And Scott. He was laughing, too. At me, not with me.

Seagulls, I fucking swear to God. Seagulls in the Bay Area are commonplace: rats with wings flying from the marinas to baseball-diamond-sized fields of pizza crusts and candy wrappers, free to take a shit wherever they want. And there they were, probably giving each other seagull high-fives with their goofy ass white wings afterward.

Fuck. It's brown. Isn't seagull shit supposed to be white? Fuck.

It's night now, and I'm supposed to be doing my calculus homework, but I've been in the shower for an hour, washing my hair for the fifth time, convinced that I haven't gotten all the bird shit out of my hair. I'm convinced that my dad thinks I'm masturbating.

I convince myself, for a brief second, that no one will remember this at school the next day.

It became a legend. Of course, it became a legend.

James Lee drew a fairly realistic picture of “the” seagull on my binder. Others wrote catty remarks when we got our yearbooks at the end of the year and made seagull noises as I walked across the stage for graduation practice.

“I'm going to get the fuck away from here,” I thought to myself. “I'm going to move to Boston where there are seasons, and the school buildings are made from brick and not brutalist concrete, and go to college there, and I'll change, and I'll never have to talk to these motherfuckers again in my entire life.”

And what happens? I date someone from my high school.4 We celebrated our first anniversary last Thursday, and next year, we’ll all meet at the Berkeley Marina for our ten-year reunion.5

The faster you run, the more likely it catches up to you.

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