One of my love/hate relationships

There are some things I love and hate together, among those:
1. Spicy food and chocolates that cause acne
2. Handsome white men I’ve been media-washed to idolize, but whom I struggle to get past feeling bitter about in relationships and at work.
3. Asian men whom I have always wanted to get with, but none of them could take my strong personality, the one who could decided to stay with his girlfriend.
4. My parents
5. Work, as it allows me to live fabulously but empty on the inside.

Today, I’m going to elaborate on my love and hate relationship with white men, specifically at work.

Oh, white men, I don’t know how to describe them. And the fact that I just picked them as a writing topic almost symbolizes my own defeat. As I write about white men, I feel as if the weight of history is on my shoulders, screaming for me to say the things that lift us above reality and into the inspirational state of hillarequality. And I hear my mother’s Christian voice calling at me to stop hatin’.

I’m going to do neither, I am going to write about facts. And the fact of my life is that 90% of my bosses – from CEO to 4 levels down, are all white men. 99% of them are male.

My equal level co-workers are 90% white men – some are strangely distant to me, some are pretentiously nice, and one very nice white man I recently found out had an Asian wife.

My white male co-workers are more like me than most people on this globe – they are fine University educated, nerdy, linear-minded and hard-working with a liberal inclination.

But sometimes, actually, most of the times, I forget all of our similarities and feel as if we are worlds apart. And I want to scream for understanding.

Beyond my understanding of their drinking habits, wedding dates, summer cottages up in Maine and sports teams, they know very little about me. Truthfully, I don’t share, but really truthfully I tried to share once and their reaction is one of awkward uneasiness. So I stopped.

They don’t know that I am currently obsessed with a Chinese singer called Wang Leehom, they don’t know that after a particularly stressful day at work, I’d walk myself to Chinatown and get dried strawberries and plums as candies, they don’t know that I am sort of not talking to my father because his mother (they will never get it), and that sometimes I dream of visiting China just so I could feel completely relaxed (this will not go well with the Go USA sentiment at the office).

They probably suspect that I’m not like the other Asian girls at work – that I don’t date white guys, or that I don’t at all. I think some of them wonder if I’m a lesbian.

Normally this is where I write about how I am okay with this gap, how I am okay being a little strange and out of place and I am proud of it. But today I am going to write about how I really feel today, I can’t guarantee how I’ll feel tomorrow, but today I feel exhausted. I not only want to change my color but I want to change my gender – I want to be another white male and just taste, for once, the comfort of being able to dominate everywhere I walk. I am tired today. And I know that tomorrow I will realize how much I have and how imperfect everybody’s life is, but just today, I want to feel the guilty pleasure of imagining myself as a white man.

Immigration, explained

Immigration is never about today, always about tomorrow, an exercise in that thing some native-born Americans seem to have lost the knack for: deferred gratification.

Immigration is not so much a choice but an irreplaceable sacrifice. The move is too abrupt and final, and the new life is not only foreign, but painful. The new identity is an unwelcoming smack to the self-esteem, an irrevocable violation of basic human dignity. This is the immigrant identity, the one that is not American.

The melting pot is a myth. You never really melt. Instead, you raise American daughters and sons who grow up in your house but don’t share your idea of where home is.

Immigrants are the meanest, kindest, craziest and smartest people; the immigrant experience brings out the best but not before the worst in us.

Immigrant lives don’t reveal the love we have for one another despite tough times. On the contrary, they more often than not reveal the desperation we hold within us and the devastating consequence of us attacking and hurting each other to ease our own pain.

How does a father go home to love his child when he’s been handcuffed, held down, and humiliated in public for driving past a rich neighborhood and not speaking any English to explain why he’s there in the first place?

How does a mother go home to love her child when she’s been treated like a second-class citizen working under maniac bosses who don’t really think she deserves respect or attention?

And how does a child go home to love his parents when he doesn’t really know what life is all about but must navigate his life by himself and must help his parents navigate life’s most important milestones – immigration visit, court visit, social security visit, driver’s license visit, doctor visit, buying a meal, fixing a car, calling customer support, writing an email, understanding a letter, and arguing a dispute.

There is no security (translation: constant, never-ending fear) and no one to blame (translation: it must be our fault that we are in so much pain right now). But despite hardships, deep down there is love, love strong enough to die for, but the love is not easy, and not always expressed. We are too busy trying to survive.

Why do we immigrate? I couldn’t tell you.

Hipster Waster

A lot of people get lost in life because mainstream society doesn’t appeal to their tastes. The only alternative, some find, is to become a hipster.  I thought I was a hipster until I realized I can’t afford to be one.

Definition of a Hipster: One who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool. Note: it is no longer recommended that one use the term “cool”; a Hipster would instead say “deck.”

In college I disliked sororities and hanged out with people who are into art history, literary criticism and Bob Marley. Naturally, I thought I knew hipster.  Then I moved to Brooklyn and the meaning hipster jumped to a whole new level.  Like everything else in life, I find myself half-mesmorized and half-grossed out by the hipster scene. 

Hipsters are like white boys fom New Jersey: they love to rap and pretend they are gangsters from the hood.  Hipsters buy $30 t-shirts from American Apparel when the same shirt can be bought from Target for less than $9.99.  But hipsters will never be caught dead wearing something from Target.  Hipsters also wear cloth usually worn by manual laborers. But hipsters do not have the strength to lift anything heavy, because their body fat is usually less than 2%.

Hipsters consider themselves very open-minded.  But in reality they mock everything.  They think anyone with the slightest talent or reputation sucks, and they have an opinion (usually negative) on every subject.  Hipsters like to ”appropriate the culture in an ironic way.” In reality, hipsters have few nonwhite friends aside from the token few who grew up in predominately white neighborhoods anyways. Hipsters sometimes talk like they are Black or from a foreign country, that becomes especially annoying to people who are actually Black or from a foreign country. Hipsters sometimes tell racist jokes because they think it’s obvious that they are not racists and thus have the right to tell these jokes. But really, that makes them racists.  

Hipsters love black music, but many will not date a black person, especially a black girl (though they will never admit this, they just ”happen” to fall in love with someone else who “happen” to be white).   

Hipsters live in the trendiest parts of Brooklyn, but they never work or are willing to work for free.  They hate to admit that their hedge fund dad (or inheritance from grandmother) pays for everything.

But still I love hipsters, though I think they are privileged and misguided at times, and sometimes a bit conceited and foolish. But aren’t we all, compared to some child without education living in a war-torn nation?