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.