bbq dinner

Matters of Betel and Areca

[This and the last entry were originally part of the same entry, with the focus originally being the subject of this entry. But then all the talk about queer sexuality got too extensive, so I decided to make it into a separate entry. This entry is a lot simpler.]

http://bbqdinner.blogspot.com/2011/02/matters-of-betel-and-areca.html

Well, there was still one more aspect of my identity I had to think about before going back to studying for my midterm. That Peggy McIntosh quote was just too thought-provoking. (“[W]hites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’”)

I dug through the archives of my old blog and found two entries, one I wrote in January 2006 and the other in February 2008. Reading them, I felt both embarrassed and accomplished, embarrassed because I was so fucking stupid back then, and accomplished because I had come such a long way since the last three years.

These were a few lines from my February 2008 entry that made me roll my eyes, “Chuck What?”:

“My goal is not to be ‘whiter’ or ‘less Asian;’ I’d just like to live my life without having to be associated with any kind of racial label that automatically defines my character and likes and dislikes.”

“Today was Tet, or the Lunar New Year, which Vietnamese and Chinese people happen to celebrate for some reason…Of course, to celebrate tet, I wore my special tet outfit: jeans, white shirt, white hoodie, and white shoes. I also emptied out the trash in my car.” [According to Vietnamese lore, wearing white and doing housekeeping on the day of Tet brings bad luck for the rest of the year.]

“I came home from work today to find rice and some wrapped shit (in other words: dinner) spread out on the living room table. There were six places set up, each for my dead ancestors. They got to eat first, and they spent a really long time eating. Hell, I think they were just chatting it up, making racist jokes. The food just sat there accumulating bacteria and digestive juices from flies. As though my parents’ unhygienic cooking methods aren’t enough.”

“I had McDonald’s tonight by the way. 2 cheeseburgers, both with Mac sauce and lettuce added = 1 Big Mac for $1.50 cheaper.”

“Well, I made sure that I was disrespectful as possible today, so does that mean bad luck for the next entire year? No. Because superstitions are just fucking superstitions (and Karma is crap). My only wish is that I could somehow top what I pulled off on tet two years ago (coming out lol). Maybe next tet.”

And these few lines were a few lines from my January 2006 entry about a formal engagement party that I went to for a cousin, “Out of Place”:

“This morning, my parents dragged me along to some kind of wedding. Wait, no, it wasn’t a wedding; it was a formal engagement. There’s still a wedding that I’ll to go to in the future, [fuck]. But anyways, I tend to not like weddings, especially Asian orthodox. Well, it’s really just Asian orthodox that pisses me off.”

“They [people conducting the wedding] only spoke Vietnamese. To me, it seriously just sounded like, ‘blarfgh jakllia adfdafdass smakcldkf crackerad dwidge garagh,’ and I spent my time watching the clock.”

“When all that crap was done, people sat down around the kitchen and started eating. I wasn’t going to eat because the food was all boring Asian shit, but my mom handed me a plate with rice piled over fried crap piled over more rice.”

“I just can’t stand it. My wedding will not be Asian Orthodox (but then again, nothing can really be orthodox if it’s homosexual). And at my wedding, I will serve elegant French food. And nobody at my wedding will be wearing those tight shiny Asian dresses.”

“I’m not ashamed to be Asian, and I don’t wish to be any other race.”

I used to hate that I was Vietnamese. I was ashamed of it. I didn’t admit it back then, but looking back in retrospect, I could say that I was lying to myself. Shit, I didn’t understand how I could possibly rationalize that I wasn’t ashamed to be Vietnamese back then. I attributed a lot of problems between me and my parents, mainly (what I perceived to be) their disapproval of me having a black friend and a Mexican friend, to some aspect of Vietnamese culture. I didn’t want to be Vietnamese. I just wanted to be “regular,” another human being whose ethnicity didn’t matter.

I was too culturally assimilated, back when I didn’t understand what that even meant. I thought rejecting my Vietnamese culture, language, and history meant making myself racially neutral, but I was really replacing it all with the “regular” culture, language and history. I was glad I came to realize that “regular” meant “white.” When I said I didn’t want an “Asian orthodox” wedding, just a regular wedding, I now knew that I meant a white wedding.

Tuxedos at a wedding? White. Elegant French food? White. Cheeseburgers from McDonald’s? White. Understanding English, not Vietnamese? White.

I’m going to get married, not because I’m a gay guy trying to be straighter in this heteronormative Western society, but because I’m a Vietnamese guy trying to maintain my Vietnamese heritage in this oppressive, white-dominated Western society. And it’s not just for my heritage; it’s for my parents too.

The wedding will thus be a Vietnamese wedding. And I don’t care if I’m marrying someone Filipino. He’s gonna wear that “tight shiny Asian dress” (áo dài), no exceptions, bitch.

Gay

[Part of Winter 2011 being my blog’s last season is writing some sort of conclusion to each of my blog’s five main story arcs: teaching, dancing, family, relationships, and “gay” (I never really came up with a better name for this story arc). Thirty-three entries and nearly two years later, here it is, the final entry on my attempts to understand and reconcile my sexuality.]

http://bbqdinner.blogspot.com/2011/02/gay.html

My schooling followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us.’” 

Week 5 meant midterms. I was sitting at my desk in my room, catching up on a bunch of different readings for a multicultural education midterm that I had the next day, when I read the above quote in “White: Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” written by Peggy McIntosh, founder of the National SEED (Seeking Education Equity and Diversity) Project on Inclusive Curriculum.

I immediately drew a parallel to gay rights, particular everyone’s favorite controversy: gay marriage. I wondered, was gay marriage an attempt to make gay people straighter? I concluded that, no, actual marriage itself wasn’t, but yes, the liberal gay marriage “agenda” was, mainly through what I thought was a heavily implied message of No-On-Prop-8 campaigns and the direct messages of individual supporters: “Gay people are normal people too and deserve every right just as much as straight people do!”

Gay people are normal too, but what’s normal? Let’s define it sociologically with regard to the United States. In the case of race, as McIntosh pointed out, it would be being white, which comes with living by Western culture, the dominant culture of this country. In the case of sexuality, it would be being straight. But being “straight” isn’t just about being attracted to the opposite sex; it is also about abiding by the appropriate heteronormative gender role. I’m also going to add that being “normal,” as applied to families, means living the long accepted model of a family: two parents and some kids (this family model is especially pushed by the gay marriage supporters, who like to photograph and show off two dads or two moms with their 2.5 happy children.)

A lot of gay people are fine with being normal. I realize that yes, it is easier if they could just be included. Some just want to make it in the heteronormative society that America is today, and that means conforming to society as much as possible.

But then there are others, others in the diverse LGBTQ community that, by the sociological definition of “normal,” are not normal. And they are proud of it. They don’t want to have to be normal or assimilated into heteronormative culture in order to be accepted by society and to get the rights they deserve.

There are those who reject heteronormativity, those who refuse to conform to their gender roles, the things considered “normal” in Western society. There are guys who wear make-up, guys who cross-dress but still identify as male, guys who will give you a z-snap with extra sass and strut away. (The latter might seem normal if you’re a fag hag who constantly hangs out with your gay friends, but I’ve only had nothing but straight guy friends for the last couple of years and I can affirm that “feminine” gay guys aren’t always considered normal or respectable.) And then there are those with “queer” families.

I recalled an article I read about a year ago, “Resist the Gay Marriage Agenda!” Sounds like some kind of conservative right-wing piece of propaganda shit, right? Well, I thought that it was shit—that was for sure. But it was actually written by “Queer Kids of Queer Parents” (QKQP), people that you’d expect to support gay marriage because they were gay (or “queer;” the word was still very vague to me), but they didn’t. I had very quickly dismissed the article because it was a bunch of sophist rhetoric, and being the logic-seeking left-brain guy (and proposition 8 opponent) I had always been, I didn’t let myself get convinced by artistically arranged words that some angry cocksucking kids painted.

Now, a year later, with more of an understanding and an open mind, I read the article again. I still thought it was shit because it argued one rhetorical fallacy after another, but I at least tried to pick out some of the points I understood (and the ones that were relevant to this entry). The writer mentioned untraditional family structures, such as families raised by three parents or by non-monogamous but and loving couples. These were the things that the writer had to say about them: “The queer families and communities we are proud to have been raised in are nothing like the ones transformed by marriage equality…We think long-term monogamous partnerships are valid and beautiful ways of structuring and experiencing family, but we don’t see them as any more inherently valuable or legitimate than the many other family structures.”

I had to admit, it was hard for me to stomach these examples of “queer families,” and I knew in the long run, I would adopt the normative model of a family for my own family. And I wasn’t going to deny anyone’s right to marry.

The problem is that when gay marriage supporters say, “Gay people deserve to marry because they are normal just like everyone else,” they probably don’t realize that they are leaving out a huge chunk of the LGBTQ community. These unaware supporters’ lives are still heavily socialized and defined by ingrained heteronormative gender roles and traditional family models, so when they’re confronted with members of the LGBTQ community who defy all these norms, they get uncomfortable. They don’t know anymore how to support their position on gay marriage. They’d rather pretend that controversial chunk of the community doesn’t exist.

To the queer families and those to say “fuck you” to gender roles, I’m choosing to stand in solidarity and to not pretend that you guys don’t exist in the LGBTQ community. I’m done insulting you guys, and I’m done standing back when my friends say anything along the lines of, “Gay guys are cool as long as they aren’t too ‘femmy.’” Why should gay people deserve equal rights and treatment? It’s not because they’re normal like all other people. It’s because all other people need to realize that their own societies are fucked up.

Before I went back to studying for my midterm, I wanted to research one more thing, what it meant to be “queer.” I read the Wikipedia page and a few other pages, but I wasn’t too sure what to make of them. I just found a lot of wordy and conflicting definitions. I thought back to a dinner I had with Trung at Red Robin in Redondo Beach. It was August, last year, the same month that Proposition 8 was overturned. I taunted him about it because I knew that his beliefs about gay marriage aligned somewhat with those of the “Queer Kids of Queer Parents” (but he still supported gay marriage). And then I asked Trung what it meant to be queer, because I knew he identified as queer. I was taunting him again because I didn’t give a shit about what it meant to be queer, but he answered anyway, telling me, “It means whatever it means to you.”

Six months later, I knew what it meant to me. I knew that I was queer too.

—-

“Being gay was, as I had always known it to be, nothing more than some social implications and history all based around a dictionary definition: ‘Being attracted to members of the same sex.’ Sex, not gender. Same sex meant to me other people with the X and Y chromosome. On the other hand, the definition of being queer, as I understood it, meant absolute bullshit.”

- XY Attraction, June 15, 2010.

—-

“I just wanna punch all the cocksucking faggots in this world, right now. Life to them is nothing more than an excuse to be loud and obnoxious…The first three [letters of the acronym ‘LGBTIQQAP2S’] describe only the gender I’d like to do, while the rest is too different. What’s so similar between a guy who likes to fuck guys and a guy who wishes he had a vagina and boobies? Just because we’re all a sexual minority doesn’t mean we should all be grouped together…I wanna leave, separate myself from them…When I think of being gay, I only think of it in terms of all that I’ve lost, or will lose…I’ve learned that there are such things as uniquely gay experiences, but, they’re not brought on by a heteronormative society, they’re brought on by the male dicksucking community itself. That’s also where I see the parts of me that I don’t want to be.”

- Transcendence, December 20, 2009

Project Think Begins

http://bbqdinner.blogspot.com/2011/01/project-think-begins.html

“Remember me, Brian?” It was a Facebook message sitting in my inbox, sent by Timmy. The last time I had seen and talked to him was at the Breakthrough Summer 2010 celebration night, five months ago. Of course I remembered him. I remembered all my students. But what was I to say to him? I left Breakthrough. I ran, and I had gone too far to turn back.

Timmy’s Facebook message went unanswered.

“We’re in the really red building,” the director had told me. And there it was. I stood on the opposite end of it at the street intersection and waited for my signal in the crosswalk. Cars stopped in front of the building, and teenagers with backpacks stepped out. Others walked or rode their bikes from the opposite side of the street. We were all heading to the same place.

The Episcopal Church of St. Joseph stands at the corner of 2nd Street and Rose in downtown Santa Ana. Its exterior is layered with shingles colored a barnyard kind of red, reminiscent of the 1880s when it was built, long before its grassy meadows became cement sidewalks and concrete streets. The church has one tower capped by a steeple from which a white cross casts its shadow over, depending on the time of the day, a post office, a child daycare center, or a Burger King.

The church extends behind itself into a smaller brick building, which was constructed in 1955 to hold more offices and a large classroom. It is here in the basement of this building where the Abraham Teen Center makes its home. Funded by Project Think, the Abraham Teen Center is an after school program that opens its doors to middle school and high school students Monday through Friday, three to six in the evening.

I had never heard of Project Think until now, and I didn’t know how. I was a third year education minor at UCI in my fourth week of winter quarter now, yet word about Project Think never reached me until my Multicultural Education class that I was taking. This class required me to volunteer tutor with Project Think for at least twenty hours.

I followed the stairs outside on the sidewalk into the basement of the Abraham Teen Center. Inside, I walked down the hallway and turned left, ignoring two rooms along my way. At the end of the hall, I found the office, where I met the director, Gloria. She was busy talking to another student so she showed me to some middle school students who were apparently in charge of giving tours to new tutors or anyone who was interested in the place. They were all girls, and they were all very eager to help me out.

“So how old are you Brian?” A girl asked. “Are you single?” Her friends giggled in the background. I could already tell that they probably didn’t get a lot of young, male volunteer tutors. There were only two other male tutors in the middle school room, one who was, without a doubt, a gay drama major, and the other who was a veteran math teacher with shining white hair and a lazy eye.

The Abraham Teen Center has three rooms, including the director’s office, and a hallway that connects them all. The first and most prominent room is the “middle school” room, where, as its name suggests, the middle school students study. It also triples as the supply room, where students and tutors rummage through cabinets filled with basic school supplies, novels, and a mixture of both American and Spanish board games; the computer room, where students have six computers with Internet Connection to, as the tutors hope, do research and type essays; and the game room, where students sit on a fairly sizeable couch tucked away in the corner and play on a Wii.

The high school room, for the high school kids, is no where near as well equipped. It’s got the tables and chairs for tutoring, and if students need some binder paper or a book or some time with the Wii, they just head to the middle school room. From 3 to 3:40, the students arrive, mingle, play video games on the Wii, watch videos on YouTube, or eat the snacks provided by the center, snacks that range from pretzel sticks to bread rolls and pesto dip and miscellaneous pastries left over from special weekend events at the church. From 3:40 to 5:30 is the strictly-but-not-really enforced quiet time. Students catch up or stay on track by finishing their daily homework assignments and studying for tests, or they get ahead by, in the case that they claim they don’t have any homework that day, fill out science or math worksheets printed from the Internet. The last thirty minutes are for clean-up and free time.

In my Project Think application I had asked to work with high school students, so Gloria assigned me to the high school room. In here I answered to Elena, the high school “program leader.” (Only program leaders get paid, and they have to be at the center every day from opening to closing). She called the attention of the high school students, and they looked up from their homework (and some, from the cell phones not-so-discreetly hidden in their laps).

“Attention everyone, we have a new tutor! His name is Brian, and he’s going to be here…”

“Mondays and Wednesdays, and possibly some Fridays.” I said.

“Thank you. Would you like to say something about yourself?”

I smiled and looked out at the students sitting at their desks, which aligned to form a wide U. They were all definitely Latino (and I would later glance at the complete roster and see that one hundred percent of the students at the Abraham Teen Center were in fact, Latino).

“So, like Elena said, my name’s Brian. I’m a third-year-student at UCI, and my major is Literary Journalism. It’s basically fancy journalism. And uh, my dream career is being a high school English teacher, so if you guys have questions about your English homework—”

“Aw what? English?” A student with a backwards New Era fitted cap sat forward in his seat. “So you get shit like grammar?”

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Another Level

http://bbqdinner.blogspot.com/2011/01/another-level.html

Weed? Yeah, I’ve done it. Four times. Never gotten high, or maybe I did. I dunno. The last time I did it—ahh yes, one of my nights with Jerick during winter break, three weeks ago—I probably should’ve gotten high. We were in that car of his outside a damn In-N-Out hotboxing away. I don’t even know how many hits I took. We just passed that pipe back and forth, among me, him, and his two friends. I’d blow out some clouds, and his friends would be like, “Daaang tha’ was a good one!” I figured, okay, this is it. I’m finally going to get high.

All that really happened was I bought In-N-Out: two cheeseburgers and a side of fries. And a banana split at Denny’s. You’d think that I got the munchies from being high, but I was hungry before I smoked. And what I ate sounded like something I’d eat on any regular night. The only difference I felt was that I was maybe a little wobbly on my feet. But I was also pretty tired. I dunno. I managed to rationalize away every possible hint of being high.

But maybe I really was high. It’s was my fourth time—I had to have started doing it right by then. I’m just one of the rare few who don’t get crazy trips like other people. My tolerance for weed probably makes up for my lack of tolerance for alcohol. So, I don’t see the problem with taking a few hits tonight. The leftover potato salad from the potluck can wait for me in the kitchen. I’m in the bedroom with three others from my PD dance family right now, and I’d like to join in on a good time. That Gatorade bong contraption you got is pretty weird though. A Gatorade bottle, a pen tube, and a bowl made of foil; it couldn’t get any more ghetto than this. But whatever, I’m down.

We pass it around. I nervously anticipate each time. I’m a little excited, but mostly anxious. Am I going to get a good hit this time? When exactly do I take my thumb off this little hole? When do I stop lighting the bowl? Fuck I’m such a noob. It’s slightly embarrassing. Oh, but thanks Gerald, you’re going to light the bowl and place your own thumb on the hole for me. You’ll take care of all the complicated stuff; just place my lips over the opening and suck. Sounds like something I can do. And soon enough you guys are now all saying, “Daaang tha’ was a good one!” I’m sucking and looking down and I can kinda see the ashy white smoke filling up the Gatorade bottle. Sometimes it gets so opaque and sometimes the smoke rushes so forcefully down my throat that it burns. Billows of smoke shoot out of my nose while puffs escape my mouth when I cough and cough some more. Shit, my throat. Fuck, that was what I was nervous about. The first time I smoked it burned my throat so bad that it was sore for the next few days, and it later developed into a cold.

The burning this time doesn’t last too long however. I dunno what I’ve been doing differently this time around but I guess I’m learning. Soon enough I’m taking hits again, and now you guys are all telling me that fuuuuck, I’m going to get hella high. Yeah, sure. I smile and nod. I’m not feeling anything yet. This is probably just going to end up like all the other times I’ve smoked.

And, then, well, it uh—this is different. It hit me. Whoa. This, this must be it. High. I’m high. Slow, why is everything slow now. Wait, wow. Turning my head—feels like, shit. Takes a lot of energy. Feels like a dumbbell. All over my body, holding me down. This must be it. I’m high. Words. Are you guys saying something? Yeah, I hear you. Am I high, you ask? That’s a question. I look at them. Then I look past them. I’m looking at the wall now. I look at them again. I’m high. Yes, I nod yes. Oh fuck. How’d this, well, okay. I know how. But how did this happen? My other four times getting high—they were nothing. This time now is something—wow.

Gerald, what? What about him. I don’t hear his voice. You guys say what? Oh, Gerald. He’s spacing out too. I turn—oh god, dumbbells. I’m moving them again. I turn my head, and I look at him, Gerald. He’s sitting on the other bed. He’s staring at the wall, the one to my right. He’s staring. Straight ahead, pretty much. Blank look. And now what? You guys, you’re leaving? Leaving me here, with Gerald, just us two. Ok. Not gonna nod—just saving my energy.

Gerald, it’s just us. Us two alone now. We lie down. Separate beds. The ceiling—it’s never been, I dunno, so interesting. Actually, no. It’s not interesting. But, fuck, can’t stop staring at it. I’m fixated. Corner of my eye, you pick up something. What is that? What are you doing? I turn my head—sooo slowly. I know what you’re doing. But, whatever. I ask you, what is that? What are you doing?

Checking Tumblr. Oh you’re checking Tumblr. Lemme tell you something, something ‘bout Tumblr. You ready? You ready to hear? I have lots—oh god—things to say about Tumblr, and blogging, just blogging really. Things, crazy things, to say about them, I have a lot. Ready? O.K.

I’ve been blogging ever since the eighth grade which was like nearly eight whole fucking years ago and I started like any other blogger but I’m telling you the things I blog about now are fucking ridiculous and fucking crazy and I know every one says that and that everyone likes to claim that their blogs are so fucking unique but trust me they are all really the same but unlike them I can guarantee you that my blog is indeed the most unique blog ever a personal blog in which you actually get some insight into my life and I know every says that they write their own unique insights on their life on their blogs but no they actually just blog a bunch of generic posts about really basic ideas on really general shit like the things they write are some really crappy sparknotes while what I write is the actual novel

which means that yes my blogs are really long and one of the common things my friends will tell me is why can’t I ever just get to the point in my blogs but trust me everything I include in a blog has a point whether it’s there to set the scene give some characterization set the tone contribute to the theme or whatever but most Internet readers are just looking for the plot because everything else is too complicated for them but really they should be able to understand because this is stuff they learn in school but the problem is that kids nowadays think that whatever they learn in school they don’t need to apply outside and so a lot of people pretty much everyone misses all the universal themes and the point of what it is that I try to do

so now you wanna read my blog and well that’s something that I’m cool with but when my friends ask to read my blog I need to screen them which is something I don’t do for strangers that stumble upon it but that’s okay because they’re strangers but when my friends read my blog I need to make sure that they understand it and don’t misinterpret anything so what I’m going to do now it gives you a little test a little diagram that illustrates one of the main themes of my blogs and you just tell me what you think it means so give me a sticky note and a pencil…ok here tell me what this diagram means to you

you don’t know oh but you take that back because you think it actually means that the truth makes up both emotion and logic and well I think that’s kinda close but not quite so I’ll let you ponder that for a while because I’m really hungry now and there’s some leftover potato salad that I haven’t tried yet so let’s go get some.

Lead shoes. Must’ve been wearing them. Really though, I was wearing black socks. But lead shoes, felt like I was walking with them. Earth’s rotation speed—what is that? Thousand miles a second? An hour? An hour. Feels like I’m falling behind, not moving along, not anymore. Excuse my exaggeration there. Seriously though.

And seriously though, I dunno how I got here, here in the kitchen. But this potato salad; it’s bomb. But really though, I always like potato salad. Uh oh I’m rationalizing again. Maybe I’m not high.

Oh hi Caleb =] You’re in the kitchen, god, you’re such a cutie. No, I’m not going to tell you that. You don’t know I think that but you are such a cutie. =] Am I high, you ask? =] Man, you make me laugh. Nooo I’m not. My potato salad, is it fucking amazing, you ask? =] It’s average. Just average? =] Fuck, wait, no, =] Why am I smiling so much? =] Don’t laugh at me Caleb! =] I’m not high! =] I’m just smiling a lot— =] fuck why am I smiling? Oh my god =], I’m a smiler. Fuck no. =] Smiling is like, =] one of my least favorite things to do. Alright, here’s my blank face: =] Am I still smiling, Caleb? Fuck, yes I am. This is embarrassing. =]

Whatever, grin on my face, grin off my face, this potato salad—it’s pretty bomb =] It’s on a whole ‘nother level.

The Fashion Island Dining Hierarchy

http://bbqdinner.blogspot.com/2011/01/fashion-island-dining-hierarchy.html

(Continued from “Fashion Island”)

My Literature of Inequity teacher asked the class if anyone wanted to share the short story they wrote about their observations at Fashion Island the other day. No one raised their hand. I waited, and still no hands. I decided to raise mine.

“Only rich, old, white people shop at Fashion Island,” I read. “This is something that I knew since my first visit here two years ago, and being back here today I can see that nothing’s changed. However, today I want to know what lies beneath this outdoor mall’s fancily extravagant exterior, so I travel over to the side of the mall with all the big name chain restaurant hoping to locate some dumpsters. I end up finding an open garage entrance to a service corridor facing the parking lot, guarded by nothing more than a measly sign that reads, ‘Authorized Personnel Only.’ Not the most welcoming invite, but I head inside anyway.

“Nothing really interests me until I turn a corner and glance down at the hallway before me. It stretches long and narrow, and the walls are an eerie white, lit by fluorescent lights that glow an equally eerie white. The occasional ‘hazardous wastes’ or ‘no smoking sign’ hangs up on the walls. A web of pipes runs under the ceiling, and it concerns me that some are a little red with rust. An ominous elevator stands coldly at the end of the hallway, so I make my way toward it, steadily and nervously, as though I were trying to avoid trip wires lining the floor. I carefully pull out my cell phone to snap a few photos of my surroundings. Unsure about the presence of security cameras, and knowing that taking pictures inside malls is often against mall regulations, I try to make it look like I’m just using my phone to read text messages or whatever; it’s just that sometimes I like to angle my phone up toward the ceiling or to the sides when I read my text messages. Any minute I expect to be stopped by mall security and to find myself at the police station waiting on my journalism teacher to arrive and verify that I was out on an assignment. I replay in my mind an incident three years ago when cops stopped my friends (one black, one Mexican) and me on the way down to the ground floor after we spent an entire hour talking on top floor of a mall parking structure. They ran our ID’s, patted us down for weed and guns and they asked us if we were carrying any rocket launchers. None of us wore backpacks or bags; I didn’t know how we could possibly conceal rocket launchers.

“If a cop stops me now at Fashion Island, I’d be accused of being a terrorist, roaming the internal structures of the mall and taking pictures on my camera phone so I could report back to my terrorist cell and plan out where to plant bombs. Suddenly the doors of the elevator open as I’m just reaching the halfway point, and out come two fat Mexican men rolling a cart of trash. Their faces are dark and dirty, and their white baggy coveralls are blotted with patches of dirt and dust and smeared with stains of food. Caps sporting The Cheesecake Factory logo rest on their heads. I don’t think it hurts to once again mention that they are fat. I wonder if they will stop me as they roll down the hallway in my direction with their cart, but they just roll right on, muttering in Spanish. There’s nothing at the end of the hallway except for a few dumpsters, as expected, so I snap a few more photos and quickly walk out before anyone could arrest me. I decide on a cleaner, less risky change of environment and head upstairs.

“I stroll inside Cheesecake Factory very casually for some observing. When a seating host asks me if I need help, I just tell her that I’m here to look at the cheesecakes on display. She lets me know to let her know if I need any assistance and then leaves me alone. When she’s busy helping other guests, I turn around to conduct a quick survey of The Cheesecake Factory staff. I squint through the dim warm-tinted lighting to see that most of the servers, bartenders, and hosts are white women, and most are thin and in shape. And even then, the occasional slightly chubby server has the full-volume hair and the bubbly personality to make up for it. Everyone wears a button-up dress shirt and pair of dress pants that both emanate a bright white, a white that stood out brilliantly from the restaurant’s mahogany wood finishing on the cushioned booths and the sand-colored marble walls. No one here looks like they ever had to haul trash bags down Fashion Island’s shady service corridors. I also noted that, here on a Tuesday night, the clientele were white and adult-aged, with some being old enough that I could spot the shadows in their wrinkles from where I stood. White and old—the only ones who could afford to dine out at the Cheesecake Factory on a random day in the middle of the week.

“At this point, after looking at all the cheesecakes, I feel a little hungry. Having no more than five dollars to spend, I travel across Fashion Island and head down to the food court, hidden away at the bottom floor of the only indoor part of the mall. Here I find an assortment of fast food restaurants that I can actually afford. I buy myself a chili cheddar cheese dog from Fatburger and sit at a table in front of it. Notably, the workers at Fatburger, just like all the ones at the other fast food restaurants, are brown-skinned Latinos. They speak with a Spanish accent, and they wear baggy black dress shirts, black pants, black caps, and a red apron. Glancing around in the food court, I can see that it’s pretty empty. Only five other tables are occupied. Sitting a few tables away, a white family is having a family night out. Cokes and fries for everyone, cheeseburgers for mom and dad, and hot dogs for their daughter and son, who looked to be nine and four years old, respectively. They all eat in silence, and, except for the four-year-old son who constantly turns his head to every corner of the food court, everyone maintains strict eye contract with the bites they leave in their food as they hold it a few inches from their mouths. Occasionally the mom and dad will stop chewing and open their mouths to say a sentence or two to each other.

“As I reach the end of my chili cheddar cheese hot dog, I muse on the Fashion Island dining hierarchy that I observed today. In the top tier, I found beautiful, young, thin white people who work upstairs in fine-dining restaurants as servers, bartenders, hosts, basically anyone who has to interact with the customers, who were white, old, but still classy. In the bottom tier, I found Mexicans hidden away doing dirty work in the service corridors or working in fast food restaurants. Their customers: middle class parents who avoid awkward conversation with their kids by stuffing them with crispy thin-cut fries and distracting them with the sights and sounds of Fashion Island, minimally enjoyed from the bottom basement floor in the most obscure and most quiet part of the mall (a part that I didn’t even know existed until after my first few visits here). Somewhere a few thousand yards away from the food court, two business partners or a couple celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary clink their wine glasses together over a seven-dollar slice of cheesecake.”

I laid my paper on my desk and looked up at my teacher. She asked if anyone had any comments.

The first was from a white chick. “Did you actually ask the people that you thought were white if they were actually white?”

I saw where this was going. “No,” I answered.

My teacher, who was Japanese, joined in. “You can’t just assume that people who look white are white. That might raise some ethical issues in your reporting.”

Newport Beach is more than ninety percent white. I think there’s a good chance that people who look white at Fashion Island are indeed white. I didn’t think of this response until after class, unfortunately.

“Plus, I’ve seen some Asian parents with their kids shop at Fashion Island before. It’s not just only white people,” my teacher added.

“Well,” I said, “the very first sentence of my story is intentionally an overstatement.” But I knew she was kinda right. I probably should’ve qualified my “facts” more by writing, “most were white,” instead of, “all were white.”

“One more thing, Brian.”

“Yeah?”

“I sense some spite in your story’s tone. Is there a reason to that?”

I shrugged. “I guess it came out this way.” But I really did know the reason. I just didn’t know how to put it into words yet.

Fashion Island

http://bbqdinner.blogspot.com/2011/01/fashion-island.html

Nearly two years ago, an eighth grade Breakthrough student of mine, who was Latino, told me about how his dad once took him to Valley Fair mall, a high-end shopping mall in Saratoga. Saratoga is a prominently white city that neighbors San Jose on its west side. His dad cautioned him on going there, but my student insisted. Once he walked inside, he felt so nervous and uncomfortable around “all the white people” that he had to ask his dad to take him somewhere else, to Eastridge Mall. Eastridge lies in east side San Jose, where Latinos make up a larger percentage of the population than any other races.

All the times going to Valley Fair during my high school years, I never noticed the race of the different shoppers—I considered myself “colorblind”—and I wondered that if I ever did notice race, if I could ever see race the way a thirteen-year-old saw it, what would that say about me?

2011 just began, as did winter quarter at UCI, and during the second week of January, my literary journalism class, “Literature of Inequity,” held class at Fashion Island Mall for an “in-class” assignment. The assignment was, as expected by the title of the class, to report on some form of inequity at the mall. I immediately knew what I wanted to report on: race.

Fashion Island Mall is a high-end mall in Newport Beach, a small beachside city (as the name suggests) of around 86,000 people, a number that is relatively small to Irvine’s population of around 218,000. With three different Bloomingdale’s stores, an abundance of French cafés that try to outsell each other on overpriced crème brulées, or designer stores that sell you hundred-dollar polos, it’s more high-end than Valley Fair. Even Valley Fair has American Eagle, PacSun, Aéropostale, and all those stores for preppy teens or skater kids, but Fashion Island—nope, none of that. It’s too classy. It’s too white.

More than ninety percent of Newport Beach’s population is white, and the shoppers at Fashion Island reflect this percentage. On any given day, the busiest time is lunch hour, where you can find mostly white men in dress shirts and ties conducting business over pastas, sandwiches and salads. The mall closes at 9 PM on weekdays, and strangely, 7 PM on Saturdays, and 6 PM on Sundays. Maybe it’s no surprise; Newport Beach is a quiet town. If you walk around neighborhoods at night you’ll realize that you can’t see because you can’t find any streetlamps. Residents sleep early in Newport Beach.

Fashion Island stands at the top of a hill that rises about 160 feet above sea level, but the roads from there all slope downhill to the beach, which lies south a mile away. On a clear day, if you walk from the center of the mall toward the southwest parking lot, past the British boutique store, past the world-class jewelry store, and past the Macy’s and its bakery, you’re faced with a view of the ocean. Go at sunset, and you’ll wish that you had a camera on you. The ocean peaks over the dark silhouette of houses and palm trees, and it disappears into a haze of purple and pink at the horizon. The sky retains its blue color, but the horizon’s pink glow gradually overtakes it.

While wandering through the mall and jotting down my observations in my spiral-bound notebook, I realized that this view was the only thing I could appreciate about Fashion Island. Everything else that I didn’t appreciate I wrote in my notebook. My final story was probably going to piss off the white students in my literary journalism class.

A Fresher Start

Reblogging my last real entry, because I think you guys need a reminder that I blog about something more than just angry rants about stupid things I find on tumblr, and because today, the unfinished, barely started Winter 2011 season is finally getting started again.

thestoryofbbqdinner:

http://bbqdinner.blogspot.com/2011/01/fresher-start.html

[Looks like i’ll be backdating these entries too if i wanna get my Winter 2011 entries in by the end of winter. Let’s go, final season.]

Hundreds packed the dance floor. White v-necks glowed and sweaty foreheads glimmered underneath the black light and through the haze of perspiration and body heat, a haze in which everyone moved together like a single blur as the stereos pumped out the pulsing bass of techno remixes to mainstream songs. They bounced up and down, rocked side to side, and thrust forward and back. I slumped over the railing and watched from the second floor, alternating my attention between tracking any piece of eye candy and completely spacing out. Someone took an opening on the rail next to me, and I recognized him again, but not soon enough to dodge him cupping his hands over my ear and yelling into it. “Com’n, just give me one kiss!”

I winced. Even my ear could smell the alcohol in his breath. I backed away a step, dragging my arms along the railing, and I turned my head at him. “I said no earlier and the answer’s not going to change. So, no.” I forced a crooked smile because I didn’t wanna seem too bitchy.

“Just one!”

“No.”

“You haven’t found anyone to kiss at midnight yet, and you got like thirty minutes left. You think you’ll find your New Years kiss at this rate?”

“No.”

“Well, if you wanna, I’ll still be up here in thirty minutes.”

“Thanks Shaun.”

I decided I wanted some fresh air, so I squeezed, ducked, and pushed my way down the stairs, through the bar, and outside onto the patio. But I was stupid to think I could get fresh air outside here. Cigarette smoke invaded my lungs as soon as I stepped out the door. It wasn’t as loud out here, but it was cold, just a little, and still crowded. I didn’t realize that the back of my shirt was soaked with sweat until I felt it cooling my skin, chilling my back while the cigarette smoke warmed my front and my sides.

I found Walden congregating in a circle with his teammates. I joined them for about five minutes, and then they all left except for Walden to go dance on the main floor. We managed to pull aside a few chairs by the fence and sat on their edges. I pulled out my cell phone to glance at the time and put it away again. 11:40.

“Shaun’s bugging me about reenacting two thirds of the Halloween threesome,” I told him.

We laughed it off and continued a more casual conversation.

“So how was your Christmas trip back up to NorCal?” Walden asked me.

Not bad. There was, however, that one thing that sorta just defined my entire NorCal visit, but I danced around the subject first using the conventional, “It was fine,” “Got to spend time with my family,” “Got some money,” “Did some shopping and eating,” “The usual.” But Walden knew there was more to my one-week visit back up North, so I finally told him all about it: My holiday hook-up.

“Five days before Christmas, it started like any other regular hook-up, the only immediate striking difference being that he, Jerick, was by far the cutest. Dark skin Filipino? Check. Clean face? Check. Height-weight proportionate? Check. And a sleeve tattoo—bonus points times a hundred. After the sex was over, we just sat there on my bed in the dark, talking about dancing. And then, well, I asked him if he was hungry. He was, so I had him take us to my favorite Vietnamese banh mi sandwich shop in San Jose. Since he didn’t live too far away, he took me back to his place afterward, and we cuddled on his bed and watched This Christmas, which was a really terrible movie. It was basically a two-hour long Chris Brown music video, but what mattered was the cuddling. And the kissing. And just being in his arms. And then we fucked again. Later we went back to my place, where he spent the night. And it went on like that for the next few days, culminating on Christmas Eve.

Read More

Re: This stupid Morgan Freeman thing going around. Seriously though, do people really think racism will end by not talking about it?

offbeatorbit:

We live in a racist society. 

WE LIVE IN A RACIST SOCIETY. 

Our society is built and maintained by the preservation of racial hierarchy.  I’m not going to pretend like I have a solution for eradicating racism but pretending race isn’t an issue and just not talking about it isn’t going to prevent racism.  If anything it’ll maintain racism because that sort of mentality is coupled with disregarding the effect that race and racism has on people.  When you ignore the effects of racism or act like it’s not a big deal and has no bearing on things that ARE racist/racial despite your delusions to the contrary, it just makes victims of racism feel worse.

This is just like when people say they’re “colorblind” (“I DON’T SEE COLOR.  IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU’RE BLACK, GREEN, PURPLE, OR ORANGE!” etc) under the false guise that this mentality is helpful.  IT’S NOT.  It’s actually pretty fucked up and privileged as hell to say that you don’t see color (and that usually leads to urging others INCLUDING PEOPLE OF COLOR to see things in a similar light).  You’re effectively erasing and trivializing legitimate concerns from victims of racial intolerance/ignorance and it only makes these victims feel even more isolated and helpless.

Seriously, tumblr, stop and think for a fucking second.

stumbled upon this three-week old post. i think this adds more to my post explaining why morgan freeman is stupid, along with some 60,000 tumblr and 3000 youtube users.