Do Ga Ni Tang Part Two

I realize that there is no Do Ga Ni Tang Part One, it's really Sul Long Tang revisited, but whatever; Sun Nong Dan has become a near weekly ritual; though not always the same day of the week.

Today I arrive at 10:30 just in time to get the breakfast special price. By the time I order, every other patron has left, and the waitress shuts off the music. This reinforces the idea that the music is designed more to be an irritant than to provide ambiance; they want you to eat and get out!

The relative silence suits me as I go through the ritual of tasting and flavoring my soup.. It's as if circumstances have all contrived to create my own little oasis. The universe revolves around me for a few seconds, before I renounce my narcissistic tendencies. I suppose everyone displays narcissistic behavior at times, but there are those who consistently reframe situations to make it about themselves in some way.

Narcissism perpetuates itself; narcissistic parents produce narcissistic children - kids get neglected when the parent makes everything about themselves and resort to the same behavior to get the attention they didn't receive as children. It's even more challenging because narcissists can't/won't be told anything - their narcissism won't allow them to accept an idea unless they believe it was their own idea to begin with.

I used to enjoy watching the sitcoms "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "Two and a Half Men". It took me a while to recognize that a common link was the narcissistic mother in the family and seeing the consequences of that in the behavior of their sons. I resonated with that even though my mother doesn't act like either of the mothers' characters in those shows and it took me a while to accept the idea that my mother's behavior fit the category of the behavior of narcissists n part because it was camouflaged by shame based values of Asian culture and in part because I then had to deal with the consequences of that behavior. In short, my mother defined being a good mother by doing certain things that she thought a good mother should do, which usually wasn't what I needed at the time. My not getting the attention I needed at the time prompted me to seek getting that attention elsewhere.

We all exhibit behavior like this at some level when we make it more about appeasing our own anxieties about a situation. I imagine that each of us has thought something along the lines of: "I couldn't forgive myself if I let you ________", the point being that we make it more about our sense of guilt instead of the other person's well being.

An irony I have found is that one can behave exactly the same way in certain situations but be motivated entirely by the joy to be found - and when everyone finds it, it does become about you - but not to the exclusion of everyone else. The bottom line, we still end up doing good sometimes even when the motives are less than pure.

Sul Long Tang Revisited

I haven't yet decided if this is going to become a weekly ritual, but I'm back at Sun Nong Dan for their breakfast special. Today I'm going with the Do Ga Ni Tang. Same milky-white broth, but with noodles and ox-knees. We're talking sizable chunks of tendon and all things gelatinous. I love the range of textures;  it can be cooked so that it dissolves on the tongue, it can be spongy,  it can be chewy, almost like an al dente pasta. It occurs to me that tendon covers the range of textures of  many western comfort foods: macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, yet many westerners find the idea of eating tendon just too odd for them. To each their own.

I consider the container of ground black pepper among the condiments. I normally use kimchi juice to spice up my soup but today I add a heaping spoonful of that pepper into my bowl, with only soup spoon full of kimchi juice, and I notice an appreciable depth to the sense of spiciness. It's a lot like the kind of sound you get from a nine foot grand piano.

The soup has come to the table still simmering in the bowl. As I retrieve bits of meat and tendon from my bowl and leave them in the small bowl of dipping sauce, it occurs to me that the dipping sauce is as much about cooling down the meat as it is a flavoring agent. Either way, I'm grateful.

There's been a general murmur of sorts from the other patrons that I've blocked out, but I suddenly note that I'm hearing the Mandarin dialect of Chinese being spoken. OK, I'm in the SGV; the Chinese demographic is being targeted by the new Japanese/Korean restaurants. I take a quick look around trying to identify the speakers, and I'm in for a surprise; the people speaking Mandarin are the staff - and they're speaking among themselves. As the person who's been waiting on my table passes by, I wave her down and I mention that I notice that she's been speaking in Mandarin. She seems surprised that I'm able to identify the Mandarin dialect and asks me if I speak Mandarin. After I tell her yes, she explains that the owners want the staff to be able to speak Mandarin since they get so many Chinese customers. This serves to support my supposition that the Chinese demographic *is* being targeted.

The black pepper that I added has settled at the bottom of bowl and that amount has not changed while the volume of soup is now less than half of the original, and the soup is now noticeably spicier, and I find myself perspiring quite freely and I ask the waitress for a few extra napkins. I choose to forego the remainder of the bowl and I ask for the check. I'm done in only forty five minutes today. But it's all good even though today is noticeably overcast compared to the week before.

Sul Long Tang

One of the things I love about living in Los Angeles is the level of cultural & ethnic diversity, particularly when it comes to food. I happen to live in the San Gabriel Valley, known for being home to what is arguably the most diverse selection of authentic regional Chinese cuisines outside of China. If you want good authentic Chinese cuisine, you drive to the SGV. Similarly, if you want good authentic Korean food, you typically drive to Koreatown (or to a small enclave in Orange County). That's changing for residents of the SGV, as both new Japanese and Korean restaurants have been moving/expanding into the SGV. And that's a good thing. Case in point, Sun Nong Dan opened two branches in the SGV. The mother ship in K-town is known for the Galbi Jim (rib stew) but also for their Sul Long Tang (ox bone soup). And they offer a $6.99 breakfast special from 7-10:30am every morning.

Sul Long Tang is comfort food; broth, milky white from hours of simmering ox/beef bones. It's a deceptively yet still deeply personal experience; each person seasons their bowl to taste, adding sea salt, scallions, pepper, and in some cases, kimchi. I place my order and am served rice, 2 types of kimchi and a dipping sauce flavored with slices of jalapeno and white onion. I have been told by a Korean friend that the dipping sauce is for the meat in the soup.

I might be the only person eating alone, prompting the waitress to seat me at a table while everyone else gets seated in one of the booths, but I submit that the lack of distraction allows me to enjoy my meal more fully than the rest. It's not a quiet place, but I'm able to shut that out and nibble on my kimchi and little bits of rice while I wait for my bowl of soup.








When my soup arrives, I slowly add salt from the bowl on the table, stirring and tasting until I find the balance that suits me. Ditto for the minced green onion also to be found in a bowl on the table. I eschew the ground black pepper for a few slices of the cabbage kimchi. I also slowly kimchi liquid to my soup until I reach my personal equilibrium of flavors. The slightly tangy, slightly sweet, slightly spicy sauce provides a nice foil to the soup, kimchi and rice. The rice; you are given a choice of white or brown (purple) rice, but asking for white rice would be like ordering your pastrami on a croissant - it might actually be good, but you just don't. The slightly nuttiness/sweetness of the brown rice adds more notes and overtones.  And because I am alone, I can devote my full attention to the symphony of flavors and textures. It's almost a surprise to discover that almost an hour has passed before I begin to contemplate the bottom of my bowl.

The colors outside look a little brighter and I feel more assured that today is going to be a good day. I am grateful that Sun Nong Dan has moved to the SGV.

Asian American Male Angst

“I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man.”

This line comes from David Henry Hwang's M Butterfly and that line rings true for many asian american males today. I penned lyrics for a blues song entitled: Asian American Actor

First I played a grocer
Cast as a lab tech
I hope to be a ninja
It's the only role that's left for

the Asian American actor.
I'm an Asian American actor.I'm an Asian American actor.and I'm singing the Asian American actor blues.
as an outlet for the observation that when it comes to American mainstream media those seem to be the only roles where you see asian-american males.

Then there's the huge imbalance in which hot asian women are cast as the love interest of white males while asian men often don't even get asian women, much less non-asian women. There's a network show that started this summer called Salvation. The ratings make it seem likely that the series won't survive, but I find it noteworthy that the show's plot includes an asian male (half, actually, but the son cast in the show is clearly full-blooded asian) in a sexual relationship with a major cast member (Jennifer Finnigan). It turns out that this male character has had a liason with at least one other female cast member (this one happens to be black). Personally, I kinda like the show, but I suspect that I'd still support the show just because of the fact that asian males are depicted as being capable of having relationships with (hot) non-asian women.

I've lived in southern California for almost 30 years, and the diversity makes this less of an issue on a day to day basis; the majority of the women I've dated have been non-asian, but I'm very aware that certain stereotypes remain embedded in the minds of mainstream America, and that awareness has made me hesitant when I could have been much more assertive.

Not Again

Someone ran into, well, backed into would be more accurate, my car last night. The car in front of me discovered too late that he had gotten into the left turn lane too late and backed up to try and change lanes, not knowing I was there. It's hard to see in the pic below, but there's divot in the middle of the front of my car, and it's now not possible to open my hood.


This is the second accident involving my car in 3 months. *sigh*

Ambivalence

I have spent most of the day (when I wasn't dozing off) watching youtube videos of Jacob Collier talk about music theory or listening to his arrangements. I have not been so excited about a topic for as long as I can remember. While I'm excited, there's also a degree of  "I could have been studying this for the last 15 years" that I need to work through.

Yesterday Was A Good Day.

I got complimented for my singing voice by a female sitting next to me at church.

I made the extra effort to go to a dance in Santa Monica in the early evening and got compliments from two of the women I met for the first time.

I got in a lot of fun dances while the band played, including one person I'd never met before. Got some more compliments on my music selection as well, But the best part of the night came at the end when someone came in and I danced about 7-8 slow dances in a row with her. She asked for some feedback on her partnering skills so I gave her some pointers on gathering her feet on weight shifts. We kept dancing until the place closed after 2am.

I'm trying to recall the last time I had that much positive interaction with so many different women in a single day.

Bedtime Story

This is a formative event from my past. I'm not sure why, but I feel driven to put it out there.

My parents came to the US from southern China via Hong Kong. After I was born, my mother took about two months of ESL classes before starting work as a seamstress.

My education about American culture and family life came through reading childen's books and watching TV shows such as Dennis the Menace. And one of the things that stuck in my mind was that children were told a bedtime story before going to bed.

I was somewhere between the ages of 6-8 when one night I asked my mother to read me a bedtime story. My mother had discontinued her schooling about the age of ten, and had only two months of ESL before beginning to work full time as a seamstress making parochial school uniforms, and I was too young to understand her hesitation. Eventually, she gave in and began to stumble her way through the story of the three little pigs. She was in tears by the time she finished, as was I. I never asked her to read me a story ever again,

There was a lot of shame in that event. My mother felt shame that she should couldn't even read her son a bedtime story, I felt shame that I had dared request something of my mother that would cost her so dearly. Enough so, that I sought to be self-sufficient so as not to request or need anything from my mother that would cost her again so dearly. And it now occurs to me that she sensed that, and her sense of shame prompted her to try and make up, which complicated the relationship between my mother and my older sister, who perceived that I was rarely disciplined, and if so, never as harshly as my sister was at my age. And I was trained at an early to be aware of how my needs cost other people. And *that* still influences my behavior and choices to this say.

Being A Secret Asian Man

This week it was announced that a network TV show set in Hawaii was losing two asian amercian actors because they were getting paid 15% less than the two caucasian stars. Kudos to them for giving up pretty lucrative gigs.

Of course, there's an irony in that a show set in Hawaii which is predominantly asian in terms of population now has no asians in the cast. More significantly, Kim's departure reduces the types of roles available to asian men in network TV back down to three (3):

- grocers who don't speak english;
- martial artists who seldom speak english;
- geeky lab tech/doctors who speak english with an accent;
while asian women get plenty of roles as babes who play the hot love interest of white guys.

It's fair to note that while asian immigrant men do typically fit the caricatures put forth by mainstream media, those caricatures do not represent a significant percentage of the asian male population, and because of mainstream perception and projection, we are not allowed to be who we are. We hide in plain sight. We are secret asian men.

gun violence

for the record, it saddens me when i hear of shooting incidents. but the bigger tragedy is people using incidents like these to promote their own personal agendas.

i am all for reducing gun violence, but let's use real numbers:

the ~30000 "gun related deaths per year" number that's bandied about is misleading, and here's why:

about 2/3's of that 30000 are SUICIDES. that brings the HOMICIDE rate down to around 10000.

of those HOMICIDES, about 80% are gang related.

that reduces the number of gun homicides in regular society down to around 2000, call it 3000.

that's only a fraction of the 10000 DUI deaths per year.

the point is that if it's just about safety, then addressing the problems with alcohol would actually produce more bang for the buck. and if you want to reduce homicides, address the issue of gang violence and i suggest researching the correlation between the violence and the drug trade.

Seesaw

There's a weekly blues jam on Monday nights that I've begun attending. I've sung and played bass there, but mainly, I go to listen, hope to get a few dances in, even though it's rare that there's any experienced dancers there. There's a couple who've danced at Joe's on Sundays. They mainly dance together but I've gotten a few fun dances in with... I don't know her name!... who is not only a great follow, but shares a similar level of musicality.This couple were already seated at the bar - the guy - whose name I also don't remember, is learning how to play blues harmonica - when I showed up at the jam this week, and when she saw me, she smiled and waved.

That made my week and I've spent some time pondering that. The short version is that it's an example of shame being healed in community. But it also occurs to me that this person (whose name I don't even know) knows me at a level most people don't; not only has she experienced ME as a dance partner, it was as a peer. During one dance I anticipated a pause in the music and initiated a figure to reflect what was happening in the music - we both hit the figure but there was no pause in the music! We both heard the crescendo, the triplet rhythm in the percussion, etc. and we both agreed that the music was wrong! We laughed and we kept dancing.

Then later this week, I had an experience that was at the other end of the spectrum. Someone I was dancing with did something that I've been conditioned to interpret as a complete lack of respect. I suppose I need to accept some responsibility for how things turned out. The other person involved has stated that following well is not a big priority for them, and I have refrained from stating my perspective on it. I can't explain that choice fully but at some level, I sense baggage from a recent divorce and the situation screams "MINEFIELD!!!!!" and I choose to tread lightly and carefully. But this choice ended up making it harder for me since I'm somehow the bad guy for not cutting her slack when I'm already compensating more that I usually would for someone with whom I'm asking to dance more than once a night. The grief I feel is compounded because the other person involved is a member of my church, and is the one of the few people I know from church who shows any interest in dancing; I feel much more in community in my dance/music circles than in my church.

Playboy Jazz Festival

I attended the Playboy Jazz Festival this past weekend. There was some great acts on stage. I'm just surprised that I didn't get a secondhand case of the munchies given how much marijuana was smoked the entire day.

Shame

I have struggled with shame all of my life, though it wasn't until my 30's that I was able to identify and define it. I personally define shame as the belief that there's something innately or inherently wrong with you, that in some way you fail to measure up to some arbitrary standard. This is different from feeling guilt which is the result of having done something.  Guilt comes from doing, shame comes from just being.

While I've made huge strides in learning how to be less hard on myself in the past ten years, it's become apparent to me that I still have a very deep fundamental sense of shame. Someone did a study into the neuroscience behind how we experience shame and how we respond to it and explains it as follows:

"When we experience shame, it interrupts the parasympathetic drive system, which runs our rational thinking, empathy, and positive social engagement. Instead, shame says “no” in a way that activates the sympathetic drive—the flight or fight system—of a person’s brain."

And I've responded in both ways - at times I've behaved in an antagonistic/abrasive way, but more often than not, I tend to withdraw, even when I go out, I set up boundaries that keep people at arm's length. But there's more:

"Shame also activates circuits in the right hemisphere and temporal lobes, which are the parts of the brain that help us perceive emotion. We experience shame most powerfully in glances, tones, and body language rather than through literal words. 
Conversely, shame can make it difficult for me to move. I turn inward and away from other people, disintegrating myself from them. Our brains help us sense, feel, and interact with other people. When shame strikes, these systems literally go offline, and they are quite difficult to get back online."

Definitely been there and done that.

The lie I believe about myself is typically refuted just about every time I choose to engage with other people and just be myself, yet I still hesitate to put myself out there.

The point of this is that the typical response to shame - resulting in our distancing ourselves even more away from those around us - also prevents us from healing our shame by entering into a healthy affirming community. So it's not just about recognizing our own shame, but also recognizing our response to it, and choosing to behave differently.

I am dreading facing up to this. My sense of shame makes me want to be alone, but now I know I must become very intentional about NOT being alone. And there are people waiting for me to deal with this and overcome this adversity. That might be even more frightening to contemplate.

Asian and yet not Asian.

It's Memorial day and a holiday, which prompted my going out for dim sum at a popular restaurant in the SGV (San Gabriel Valley, home to the most diverse collection of different regional Chinese cuisines outside China) .

Despite my ethnic heritage and my familiarity with the cuisine, every time I go, I feel a sense of dis-ease; despite my sharing an ethnic heritage with all the restaurant staff and a vast majority of the patrons, it's still like visiting another country and I often observe what goes on around me not unlike an anthropologist observing a native culture.

I can hear Cantonese being spoken by everyone around me, though it's not possible to make out any single conversation. I imagine that there are a series of mating calls going on in how the ladies pushing the carts call out the items on their carts to the people sitting at the tables as they pass by.  I observe the plumage of various individual... specimens. Women clutching "Guccci" bags (with three "C"s), men sporting watches bearing the name "ROLLEXX".

For all that, even though I make these observations with more than a little bemusement, I am aware that I am the Klingon in the room. And this contributes to my sense of shame - which is VERY asian.

Cultural Appropriation

There's a place up in Portland called Kook's Burritos. Public pressure has prompted them to close because in a featured article, they admitted the recipe for their tortillas was essentially purloined from natives of the city of Puerto Nuevo in Mexico, est. pop; of 135 in 2010.

While I'm naturally sympathetic to the idea of minority ethnic cultures somehow being assimilated,  I have to categorize this particular protest as a result of the professionally indignant, and leave it at that.

Being Intentional

We're still on the subject of rewriting our book covers, but this is about being intentional about getting the new cover seen by the people who need to see it. I made a point of telling a musician friend about my ebook on music theory. He reviewed it and now he wants to use it as a reference for his students. The point is that you can't just wait to be discovered. At the same time, one shouldn't expect to do a complete makeover over night, though I suppose that if you're capable of that, go for it, definitely do not let my baggage get in your way.

Part of my personal inertia comes from lessons I was taught in church from the Scriptures; one such lesson is the story of a young leader in the New Testament named Timothy. Timothy was chosen by Paul the apostle to become a respected leader. Timothy didn't lobby for the opportunity, Paul heard good things about Timothy and Paul did his own due diligence, traveling to various places and getting other people's opinions about Timothy before approaching Timothy and offering Timothy the chance to join Paul.  I still believe that that is the Biblical approach to identifying leadership. But it's not an effective approach to marketing one's self.  It's further complicated by a principle instilled in me (again from the Scriptures) about how we should endeavor to do good deeds without making any attempt to bring attention to them. Of course, I violate this principle every time I point out my scar and tell people how I got it. Hey, I'm human. Then there's the values (albeit sometimes conflicting) I inherited from my asian heritage in how it's wrong to stand out (although it's seemingly OK to be bragged about by a proud parent).

The point is that it's not about my specific challenges per se, but the process of identifying what they are and reconciling them to what needs to be done to put yourself out there in a healthy & natural way. For me, I see a large part of it as reminding myself that as I put myself out there, it's not my only goal; there is no one more interesting than someone who wants to learn more about you, and I am out there as much to learn about everyone about me, and connect the dots where it makes sense to put the right people together. The folks who only want to talk about themselves and are not interested in discovering who I am, it's going to be OK to move on and prioritize my time accordingly.

Rewriting The Book Cover

My previous post was about how we judge people based on the images they present of themselves and how much more complicated it is when we recognize that we as people typically present an image that is not representative of themselves.  It's relatively simple to understand when people are motivated to get others to think the best of them. The flip side of the coin isn't so easy to understand. Going into detail concerning the motivations of that deserves its own post; suffice it to say that many of us have been programmed to think less highly of ourselves than we ought in a way that prompts us to diminish the image of ourselves instead of thinking of others more highly. We write our book covers in a way that prompts people to leave us on the shelf even if we're the only book on the shelf at the time.

Rewriting our book covers is hard, but it might be the easiest step in the process. First, one has to be able to recognize the pattern exists. This might be the hardest part; the pattern can be quite obvious, but the typical response is denial and rationalization because no one wants to acknowledge what is to them a painful truth. The tragedy is that the 'truth' one's been trained to believe about themselves is in fact a lie. The process that prompted belief in this lie may not have been motivated by malice, but the result is the same. I used to make fun of people that were in what was to me obvious denial, but I've come to respect how it takes a lot of strength and courage to come to grips with things like these.

If you're still tracking with me, great. Speaking as someone who's come to recognize how I've believed certain things about myself that are in fact not true, I'm looking at certain patterns I've repeated in my life, and one of these things is discovering how I've written my metaphorical book cover and how I've used it to keep a lot of people at arm's length.

My book cover as I see it has relatively little reference to my musical background. This reflects a couple of lies I've believed:

1) I'm not a 'legit' musician because I somehow lacked the appropriate pedigree;
2) It's good to have musical ability, but it's somehow not appropriate to enjoy it

to the point that I've struggled with a lot of repressed anger over not expressing that aspect of who I am.

This is the part of my book cover I'm working to rewrite at this time;  I've written an ebook on music theory, and I've started offering music instruction, and I'm slowly creating a niche for myself working with younger students. It's already starting to pay off; a lot of the music world knows me as a dancer, but as I was speaking with a band member during a break, he asked about my musical background and I mentioned that I first started with violin and that I was giving music lessons. It turned out that he has two kids and he's looking for an instructor for them.

I guess the point is that rewriting the cover also requires putting yourself out there with the new cover so people can see it.

Book Covers

The maxim: Don't judge a book by its cover just seems so trite. But there's a reason why it's a maxim. I got reminded of this recently. It's easy to categorize people mentally based on appearances, especially when you deal with a certain segment of the society over a period of time.  But I got reminded recently that appearances can be deceiving.

Dinners in the park are for most part a pretty orderly affair; sometimes there are people waiting at the curb, and they help me carry stuff from the car.  Everyone tends to let the ladies and/or disabled folks, when there are any, go first.  One week while I was still setting up, someone came up to our tables, cut through the line, and began poking through the stuff asking what was for dinner. The person happened to be male, probably about 6'2", about 300 lbs, with unkempt hair and a scraggly beard.  Everybody kinda got out of his way, and I got the impression that they were familiar with him. The first impressions that went through my mind were along the lines of how everyone was clearly intimidated by his size & his brusque manner and my first instinct was to categorize him as a bully.  I told him politely that dinner that night would salad, rice and whatever main dish we happened to be serving that night, but we were still geting ready. We'd start serving shortly and if he got in line, I'd make sure that there'd be enough left for him to get a full plate.    I was pleasantly surprised when he responded. "oh. ok." and he went to the end of the line.  This person, who I will call "C", has come back most weeks.  While he's clearly a bit rough around the edges when it comes to social skills and boundaries, I've sensed no malice.

The lesson got reinforced yesterday morning. There's a man who sits at a street corner you have to pass by if you take a certain freeway exit in Pasadena. This street corner is blocks away from any sort of building or available parking; you have to make a deliberate choice to walk there and sit there. He usually has a pit bull chained to a fence. A lot of people occupy corners like that, usually sporting a sign stating that they need help. Yesterday as I was pulling up to that corner, I happened to make eye contact, and I said "Sorry." He promptly responded "Did I ask you for anything?" to which I replied, "No. But we made eye contact, and I wanted to make sure you knew that I saw you." He then said "I just like to spend a lot of time here." Then he wished me a good day, and I did likewise before I drove off.

I could stop here and have a nice trite blog post. However, there's a flip side; the book covers we write for ourselves, consciously and sub-consciously. It seems to me that we'd all benefit from a third party review of ourselves and the image we try to craft for ourselves. Some folks probably stretch the truth. Others find seeming modest ways of emphasizing things they're proud of: a current TV show features a character who was called out for using the phrase "I went to school outside Boston"  as a disingenuous way of announcing the fact that he went to Harvard. That comes with the territory when you have an ego.

Then there are folks who go the other direction, o keep people at arm's length,  typically to minimize the pain/fear of rejection.  I know that I do this. I know I need to look at this, but this means I have to revisit unpleasant memories. Frankly, this terrifies me.

Progress?

I moved a while back, and I was back in my old neighborhood and I noticed that a local hardware store had closed. The place had been open for decades and had become my go-to spot to find the obscure nut/bolt/whatever I needed to replace/fix something that needed attention. The prices were higher, but it was worth it to walk in knowing that in five minutes I'd be walking back out with exactly what I needed vs. searching through the various franchised hardware chain stores hoping to find an employee who could point me to the right aisle only to discover that they didn't carry the obscure diameter/length/fitting a half hour later.

I love the convenience of online shopping, etc. but I lament that something of value is being lost, and when the last local hardware store closes it'll be gone forever.

Winning

I have a few favorite TV shows: Breaking Bad, Spooks (MI-5), Wiseguy, Life, Homicide (and its cable successor) The Wire, and 24. I was watching the end of season eight of "24". last night and even though I know he's a fictional character, I got caught up in the emotion and I found myself thinking something along the lines of: "after all he does, this is his reward; he doesn't get to win."

I suddenly realized that the sadness I was feeling for myself. Deep down, I still have a belief about myself that I don't get to 'win', whatever that means. And that belief is self-fulfilling. The reality is that I've identified a tendency towards self-sabotage a long time ago. I just didn't understand how deep the roots are for this and how it still affects me.  The way I see it, I have short/long term goals:

- I need to be able to identify when that is affecting my thinking and decision making processes.

- Figure out where it comes from and retrain myself to think differently.

This is not going to be fun, but it needs to be done.

Facebook

I'm trying to remember what life was like before Facebook, and I'm having problems doing so.  I've come to recognize that allowing Facebook to infiltrate this much of my everyday life is becoming a very BAD THING.

Don't get me wrong; the instant messaging system is very useful, especially now that technology supports mobile apps on one's cell phone (though I've resisted the trend to upgrage to a phone that supports that),  as is the events function which I use to schedule weekly luns. I intend to continue to use those features. 

I used to skim my news feed to get information about friends in my network. I've come to do this less and less, as the content not only became more political, it became rather personal. In short, Facebook has become a shaming tool where certain types of people are using it to promote their opinions and exercising the act or threat of exclusion to gain acceptance for that view. It's a level of bullying that would be labelled as deplorable if those tactics were used against the people actually doing this kind of stuff.

I often consider posting an opposing point of view, but I choose not to make the mistake of equating intellectual with intelligent; ideology has nothing to do with facts, it has everything to do with how they feel about certain things. The result is that people nowadays are not rational beings as much as they are rationalizing beings. And the more untenable the position, the greater the rationalization.

Stuff Happens

Yesterday afternoon, I was heading home after having lunch with some friends,  stopped at a four way intersection when I was rear-ended by someone driving a pickup truck.

My first thought was: "oh. great." and I made an immediate right turn looking for a place where both of us could park legally and handle the niceties. To my surprise, the truck immediately went straight through the intersection and sped off, followed by another car. I had the room to do a quick U-turn and began to follow, hoping to get close enough just to get the license plate. However, the truck made a few risky maneuvers that I was unwilling to try and duplicate and I got stuck in neighborhood traffic.

The blue car following the truck was similarly left behind, but the driver called out to me: "I'm on 911.". It turns out that the truck had also hit them, and they were following the truck when the truck rear-ended my car. FYI, 911 called from a cell phone goes to Caliornia Highway Patrol, so if you happen to call 911, it helps to be able to identify exactly where you are, or better yet, know exactly which police force has jurisdiction so you can advise 911 who to contact and save a few seconds.

The local police quickly showed up, took our statements, let us know that the vehicle had been stopped and the driver apprehended. I was given the name of the apprehending officer as well as a case number to use to follow up.

As for me, I had a minor headache I attribute to muscle spasms since it went away after a shot of Glenlivet. This morning, my neck is stiff, and I'm trying not to attribute every ache and pain I now seem to be experiencing to it, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried about it affecting my health going forward. The car is more or less OK, but I'm going to need to replace the right rear light assembly as well as get the truck lock fixed. It was bent such that my key came out crooked when I tried to unlock the trunk. My mechanic was able to jimmy the trunk open, which I guess is a good thing, but now my trunk doesn't lock, which isn't a great thing when you drive a convertible and the trunk is the only secure place to store stuff.

I'm now trying to figure out how to respond to all this. I guess the first thing to do is find out more about the driver of the truck. More on this as things progress.

No Angry Asian Man

The truth of the matter is that I feel like I've come to terms with being who I am, whatever that is. I'm not somehow driven by a pervading sense of injustice somehow hoping to right any and all wrongs suffered by asian men as a consequence of racism, what have you. Everyone has hurts and grievance and to some degree we're all broken. So I'm comfortable putting my thoughts out there and not overly concerned with growing a readership, and hopefully most importantly, not driven by a need to be right or even the need to be heard as I have come to believe that those needs tend to complicate any sort of dialogue concerning racism. Essentially, I speak not to air grievances.

It's been my experience that airing grievances gets attached to injustice, which in turn get attached to identifying who/what to blame, which in turn leads to restitution. And each step along the way is filled with pitfalls that provoke defensive responses.

Ultimately, the goal is to share what it was, and how well or poorly I responded to it, and hoping for understanding. I'm sure along the way I'll state something in a way that's going to prompt some sort of defensive response, so I'll apologize for that up front.

Being A Secret Asian Man

What's the point of identifying the musings of a secret asian man without trying to define what it is to be a secret asian man?

The term started as a joke as a name for a (very) small business venture into the social dance arena (DJ-ing and organizing monthly dances), and even led to the development of a logo

and even T-shirts to help advertise our brand (I still have hopes of marketing these some day).

Eventually I elected to associate the brand with my own personal experience living in the US being an asian male. The experience is uniquely my own; I do not claim to speak for anyone else. Even so, I expect that many asian males will have experiences that mirror my own and many will also have shared experiences with other asian males with which I will not be familiar.

For me, being a secret asian man is a lot like being a spy - operating in plain sight but with the general populace being oblivious to who I really am, instead, projecting on me the stereotype that is continually reinforced by the mainstream media. My personal experience includes having been cast in a few movies and TV shows because of my background as a ballroom dancer, but for the most part, parts for asian men seem to limited to: 1) grocers who don't speak english; 2) martial artists; 3) geeky or effeminate lab tech/doctors; My last gig was in a scene where the punch line is an older asian man grabbing the behind of a young caucasian woman, drawing on the image of the yellow peril that came about during WWII.

Our secret mission: to change these perceptions or overtly or covertly as needed. And this blog will explore that, but I reserve the right to tangent off in various directions as circumstances dictate.

The impetus for starting this blog comes from a FB post referring to something called "the Asian American Experience". My first thought was that the motives/goals were noble, but there is "no one size fits all" way of describing it.

I happen to be Chinese, with parents originally from southern China, and I spent my formative years in an all white suburb of Cleveland OH and moved to southern California in my late 20's. I happen to know a therapist who works exclusively with asians. He happens to be Nisei born and raised in the (San Fernando) valley. He once made an observation I found intriguing: that within 5 minutes, he could identify where within the southland any Nisei had been born and raised, whether it was in the valley, near J-town, in the south bay, etc. The point that is that just within LA there are readily identifiable distinct Nisei sub cultures. And his first observation about me: "...an asian from the midwest... you are unlike any other asians i know..."

And that's something I'd consider a unique experience: I belong to an ethnic group that consists of toisan (specifc chinese dialect) chinese who were born and raised in a midwestern suburb with little to no ethnic culture outside the home. And even though I moved to LA hoping to connect with others of Asian heritage, my friends are predominantly non-Asian. In particular, I have few asian friends - unless they came from similar experiences having grown up in largely caucasian settings. OTOH, I have acquaintances here in LA who are American born, but are what I'd categorize as being completely Chinese in attitude and outlook.

Don't get me wrong, it's helpful to understand the generalities, but there are probably just as many exceptions as there are generalities.