I thought I would have more by now.

I thought there would be children, a wife, a home.

A novel on the shelves; a screenplay in production; an award decorating a mantel – evidence of my existence. My success as a human being measured in achievement and accolades.

“The Paris Review… yeah, that’s not an easy nut to crack, dude,” said Chuck.

“You don’t think I can do it?” I quietly demanded.

“Chill, man. I’m just saying that it’s not easy to get published in that magazine.”

Easy. No. I never aimed for easy. I always aimed higher and farther than I had a right to.  I never aimed center-mass. I always took the headshot.

So here I am, strolling over towards the deep-end of middle-age, with nothing to show for my life except a decent job and a lot of debt. That’s not all I have. There is more.

Calibrating between success and failure – at least according to the generation that raised me – my life is the empty deli-container that zeros-out the scale.

I have not fucked two women at once. I do not own an exotic car. I have no season tickets. I don’t have my own table at a trendy bistro. Rolex, Alienware, Cuban Cigars, Astin Martin, Armani – these are things that exist only in catalogs and James Bond movies.

I have Target and Kohl’s. I have Chinese take-out and cereal. I have Blockbuster and itunes.

I have not rocketed to the top of my field. I have not made a killing on the market. I don’t have an investment portfolio. I don’t have a broker.

I have a job. I have the respect of my co-workers.

I don’t have a Masters. I don’t speak Farsi.

I know smart people. I know people without pretense or guile.

I don’t have a second home. I don’t have time-share

I have a 1 1/2 bedroom attic apartment that’s drafty in winter and broasty in the summer.

I don’t have a published novel. I never got in The Paris Review.

I designed a few book jackets. I have a blog. I write every day. My friends think I’m a good writer.

So how does my life measure up?

There’s Metric and English, Kelvin and Fahrenheit – do the conversions and they all add up to the same thing. But it takes more centimeters than inches to make a foot, more Kelvins than Fahrenheits to make something boil.

How many acquaintances equal a true friend? How many trophy wives add up to a once-in-a-lifetime connection? How much does sanity cost?

How do you measure 43 years of life without a calendar?

David Mamet wrote, “In an all-out prize fight, when one guy’s left standing, that’s how you know who won.”

The thing is, everyone’s still standing.

I’m just standing over here.

But that wasn’t me. I didn’t know who I was – what teenager does – but I knew I wasn’t an illustrator, I wasn’t a painter, I wasn’t an artist. I was something else, something yet defined, but I held on to this accidental identity because that’s how people saw me.

I wanted people to see me. As an immigrant, as an Asian man, as a human, I wanted people to see me.

There’s a French film, The Return of Martin Guerre (later remade into a Richard Gere and Jody Foster vehicle called Sommersby), about a man who assumes the identity of a dead soldier. He does this for his survival at first, but later because he doesn’t want to stop being this man. He had made good friends, fallen in love and been accepted into a community of warm and genuine people – all because they thought he was this other man, this Martin Guerre. What would they do if they discovered the truth?

That was me. I had assumed the identity of an illustrator, a visual artist, and people had accepted me for it. And I didn’t want it to end. I had become Martin Guerre.

At the end of the film, Arnaud de Tihl (his real name) has to reveal to his wife – Martin’s wife – that he is not Martin. Much to his shock and relief, she tells him that she had known all along.

For the first half of my life I didn’t have the courage to not be Martin Guerre, not to be the guy who could draw.

Why else would these people be my friends? Why else would this beautiful woman want to sleep with me? Why else would my parents be proud of me?

Something happened to me today, something amazing, something I have to digest before I can write about it. But at the end of it, at the end of this day, as I sit at a friend’s keyboard and type this, I can finally say: I am not Martin Guerre.

Would the two heroes team up to fight a common enemy? Would they be at odds with each other at first, and then team up in the end, as they have done so many times during their published adventures?

If I were in charge of this project, who would direct this movie? Definitely not Tim Burton, definitely not Brett Ratner – or Brian Singer, Sam Ramie or any of the other directors who have taken on superhero flicks. No offense to Chris Nolan, but the film I had in mind needed someone… else.

I discussed all of this with my friend, Chuck. On his couch, on a Saturday night, we appointed ourselves Executive Producers to this imaginary project and came up with this:

Every incarnation of a Superman movie has attempted to give the audience a taste of what it might be like to be Superman. Some have done it more successfully than others, but it has been done. Both of us eliminated this as a possible approach to the character. Our reasoning? Superman is a god, we can’t identify with him. We should see him in this movie only as a blur, a streak, an inhuman force that can be barely comprehended. Instead of trying to get across the visceral dimensions of being Superman, this film would focus instead on the experience of living in a world in which Superman exists.

Now we come to Batman. We can identify with this hero. He was never exposed to radiation, he is not from another world, he is a man, a human being like the rest of us. We decided that the majority of the film would take place near and around Batman.

The plot is relatively simple: Doomsday is rampaging through Gotham City – yes, Gotham City. Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane are already on the scene covering the news for The Daily Planet. Everything the audience sees will be through media coverage, and the lens of Olsen’s video camera – much like Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project before it.

As Lois and Jimmy run down a street, past overturned cars and demolished facades, towards the creature, the Batmobile rockets past. Batman tries his best but his bat-missiles and large caliber guns have no effect on the creature. He makes a dramatic escape just before the Batmobile is crushed by a blow from Doomsday.

The seismic shock-wave shakes Jimmy’s camera and almost knocks Lois off her feet. The creature turns to face them but Batman glides in and knocks them into an alleyway, just as a cement mixer flies by.

Batman checks to see if they’re all right. He looks up into the sky and says, “I have her. Do your thing, I’ll keep her safe.” A red and blue streak shatters windows with a sonic boom as it collides with the monster.

Batman helps the journalists to their feet and tells them to stick close if they want to stay alive. “Do what I say, when I say it.”

The rest of the film follows Batman, from the perspective of Jimmy’s camera, through a maze of corridors, ruins, sewers, etc., intermixed with scenes of The Man of Steel taking on the creature in a titanic struggle – all through shots from news cameras, cell phones, video feeds from Alfred and Luscious Fox (I’d love to see a scene with shocked citizens reading Lex Luthor’s villainous monologue Tweets). This is how the audience sees Superman because this is how we would see him, from a distance. This is how he would be to us if he existed in our world.

The reason for Batman’s involvement, and the location of the battle, is made clear as he explains to Lois, during calm moments, about how Lex Luthor has taken control of a Wayne Enterprises project for the military and turned it against Superman.

“He’s controlling that thing, amping him up with signals from a quantum matrix unit.”

“A quantum… what?” asks Olsen.

“I don’t think nows the time, Jimmy,” replies Batman.

Batman’s mission is to find the kryptonite protected Luthor and wrest the control/interface from him. This will allow Superman to finally bring the creature down. But of course, Batman has to get into the heart of Wayne Enterprises by getting past all the security he has installed, as well as all the obstacles Luther has placed in his path.

And that’s the movie. Non-stop action with Batman kicking the butts of all the goons and villains Luthor has hired to stop him, Superman action on an epic scale. The film ends with Superman’s “death”, but a knowing smile from Batman tells us that the last son of Krypton will be back.

I don’t know about you, but I’d go see it.

We argued back and forth. He attacked Descartes and Darwin, and I attacked Christianity and his mom. I said humans were machines with delusions of grandeur, and an elaborate survival mechanism that didn’t quite translate to the frontal cortex; he said, “there has to be more.” Both of us got yelled at by our coach.

We continued our discussion on the bus – the coach glaring at us the entire ride back. Yeah, coach, it was our debate about the nature of human existence that inspired the other team to score 4 goals on us… in the first half.

My teammate insisted that I was being pig-headed, dismissive, arrogant and even rude (I did say at one point that he should take his head out of his existential ass). And I told him that his argument couldn’t hold water – unlike the witches he was so fond of burning on the weekends. I insisted he was simply giving into his primal fears, that he was just not ready to face an eternity of nothingness.

“What do you mean, nothingness?”

“Well, if you’re right, then our souls endure and we get to see how all of this ends. But, if I’m right, when we die, there is nothing. No fears, no contemplation of the void, no pain, no redemption… nothing. You can’t mind being dead if you can’t mind anything.”

He looked stunned. He had been so passionate about his position, he hadn’t stopped to consider the eventual end game of my position.

“All the while that time is killing us, we’re just killing time. There is no grand design, there is no “purpose” to any of this. It’s about passing the day in the most comfortable chair and the most entertaining book we can find,” I said.

Okay, I didn’t use those words when I was 14, but that was the gist. It probably came out more like, “You’re so stupid sometimes, man. All this is bullshit, dude. Don’t you get it? Wake up already! When you die, it’s like going to sleep, only you don’t dream and you don’t wake up.”

My teammate didn’t say anything for the rest of the ride. I could see that he was really upset, or at least deep in thought. We talked about it again the next day, but it was more in the context of, “I’m still not sure what to think about yesterday. Damn, the coach was pissed.”

That was 28 years ago, and my stance hasn’t shifted much. I do believe that humans are just biological constructs, absent of immortal souls. I do believe that we exist only in the physical universe, and that the metaphysical is our collective need to have purpose beyond the physical, beyond erosion, beyond time, beyond end. We are, all of us, destined for nothingness.

But I also believe that we are free to create our own souls, to venture out into the void with language and music, with art and science, with beliefs and doubts. We are free to sail past this life and into whatever existence we choose for ourselves; free to land on the shores of gods and devils, of angels and demons, of heaven and earth. I just don’t think we have to die to do it.

“You are not an American,” my parents would say. They’d try to drum this into my head every chance they got. I’d come home late from hanging out with friends and they would say, “Why aren’t you studying? Why are you behaving like a hoodlum?”

“Have the police ever come to our door, mom? Dad? Do you smell alcohol on my breath? You ever find drugs hidden in my room? No, nothing of the kind.”

“These things you do, staying out late, talking back, sleeping all day, these are American ways. You are not American.”

“Funny, that’s not what my passport says,” I’d say.

This is what they said to me when I was in high school, like a looping MP3 file, like a wailing siren falling and rising in pitch – always piercing, always gnawing.

I’d wave a dismissive hand and go to my room. I’d play it cool and tell them they were still stuck back in Korea. “Learn to speak some English, learn to read your own mail, then we can talk,” I’d say. The door would slam shut but the yelling would continue.

The truth is, once I got behind that door it was all I could do to stop from shaking, from collapsing to the floor and giving up. What the fuck did they want from me? Did they expect me to not assimilate? Didn’t they understand the disdain and intolerance, the bigotry and the stereotyping bullshit, I dealt with on a daily basis?

My sister was looked upon as a sex toy by almost every pasty, pink retard she came across (I’m talking about pasty, pink retards, not all white men. Despite my experiences, I’m not a racist). She was a geisha, a container-shipped hooker who could love them longtime, and I was an asexual math geek with a tiny dick.

So what did my parents want from me? Did they want me to be a good little Asian boy, or did they want me to survive? Well, regardless of what they wanted, I wanted to survive, I needed to survive.

So, I didn’t apply to any Ivy League colleges – I went to art school instead. I didn’t take any SAT prep classes, I didn’t go off to Korean School and learn how to read and write my native language, and I was not a good little Asian boy.

I smoked weed, I drank before the law said I could. I hung out with girls and tried to get laid, I hung out with addicts and sampled their stashes. I dropped acid, I ate shrooms, I picked fights and told people older than me to fuck off on a regular basis. I rebelled as much as I could – without ending up in jail or in a ditch.

My parents bristled. We fought. Again and again we clashed over what they expected me to be, and what I needed to be. I wasn’t going to be an invisible man, I wasn’t going to be quiet and go along, I wasn’t going to simply work hard and hope that my teachers noticed me.

Don’t get me wrong, that much Asian-ness at home and something was going to rub off. I did have a work ethic, I did get to school on time, I did stay late and finish what needed to get done, I didn’t offer up half-assed excuses, and when I fucked up, I apologized and took responsibility, but I wasn’t going to be denied my due because some arrogant, ignorant racist thought of me as a mousy little piss-ant.

For years I raged against my parents’ expectations, and I raged against a society that refused to see me. And for some of those years, I just raged.

To tell the truth though, I do regret some of my youthful choices. I wish I had learned more of my native tongue. If I had, I could be writing this in Korean. I could be sharing this with my parents – well maybe not so much the previous paragraphs. Definitely not the part about all the drug use.

But anyway, something happened along the way. I stopped raging. I stopped wrestling with this Asian-American identity crisis and just started living my life. Not as an Asian man, not as an assimilated American, but as me. As Sang. It happened when I was 22.

My parents sat me down and tried to get me to go to church… again. This had been going on since I was 12. They would drag me to church and drop me off at the Sunday school program before they went off to the adult service. I would promptly walk out the back door as soon as they entered the chapel, and find my own way back to New Jersey from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Sometimes I’d even walk the entire way back. They’d get home and yell at me, punish me, tell me I needed to repent or go to hell. “That’s where I am, right now,” I’d say.

They had no idea why I was so dead-set against going to church. After all, there were other Korean kids my age there, I could make friends, be finally accepted for who I was. They didn’t understand, because I never told them. I never told them how ashamed I was of being Asian. I never told them how much I wished I could be a white boy, a hispanic boy, a black boy, anything but an Asian boy.

I couldn’t articulate to them, with my limited Korean vocabulary, that I was invisible to the people around me, to myself. At school, on the street, even with my friends, I was invisible. I felt hollow, always. And now they wanted me to cloister myself with a bunch of other Korean kids. I didn’t want to be around other Korean kids. All they did was remind me of my own shame.

So there we were, at my parents’ dinner table, 12 years later. “Sang, why won’t you go to church? You can meet a nice Korean girl, you can get married, you can become a better person,” they said.

“I’m not a good enough person for you?” I asked defensively – all my childhood memories of self-doubt and shame resurfacing, backing up on me like shit-stained porcelain.

“You know that’s not what your mother means,” my dad said.

“I’m not going to church. We’re not having this conversation.”

My dad was furious, my mom was patient. “Fine, give us one good reason why you won’t go. One good reason, and we’ll stop asking.”

I had many good reasons.

1. I didn’t believe in a god.
2. I knew something about the other scriptures that had never made it into the Bible.
3. I knew about the Dead Sea scrolls.

But the one reason I chose to share was the only one my parents couldn’t debate. As calmly and as sincerely as I could manage in my emotional state, I said, “You raised me, until the age of 12, without any religion. You told me, time and time again, that I am not an American. You wanted me to marry only a Korean wife, you wanted me to stay your Korean son. And now, you ask me again, to deny 5,000 years of tradition and heritage, and become a Christian.

“You’re right, I’m not an “American”, I’m not someone who is “Western”. You’ve seen to that. So to honor that, which you have always wanted me to honor, I will not go to church. Not now, not ever.”

We sat in silence. And in that silence, all the guilt, the doubt, the shame I had carried for so long, dropped away. I was done with it.

The answer I gave my parents was designed to be unimpeachable, it was designed to illustrate their own hypocrisy, it was designed to get a shot in, but it had effected me in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. It had liberated me.

It had liberated me because until that moment I had considered myself only as an Asian, this Korean boy, trying to fit in with all the Western kids. But I was done fitting in, I was done rebelling. I was done raging. I was done with allowing the outside world to decide who and what I was going to be.

The complete journey to my realization took more than that moment, more than the next few years, but it did happen. I did finally shed all the anger, all the doubt, the frustration,  and the shame.

I will never again allow others, or myself, to see me as an Asian man, or as an American man, but simply as a man, as a human, as a person. I will never again pen myself into the boundaries of a single culture, and I will never again be ashamed of how others see me – even if they don’t see me at all.

I was 11. Before any of my friends celebrated their ascension into manhood, before any of them had a bar-mitzvah, or endured a Mayan rite of passage, I would get to decide the fate of my coif.

Up until this moment, the only control I had over my hairstyle was avoiding my grandmother, and her erratic shears, for as long as humanly possible. She would corner me eventually. The next day I would show up at school looking like I got ambushed by a roving band of clippers and a cereal bowl.

Excited, I went to a salon down the street with a copy of Starlog magazine in my hands. I hopped onto a chair and showed the stylist a picture of Han Solo, “Can you cut my hair like that, please?”

She smiled and said, “Sure.”

She was confident and I was happy. She sprayed my hair with water and started to work her magic. Her hands were steady, sure, deliberate. Regardless of what was going on around her, she kept her focus on what she was doing. She was a professional.

I would be the envy of all my classmates, Julie would finally pay attention to me during recess, my parents would praise my decision-making prowess.

Would cash, and my own discretion, finally supplant the Captain Caveman lunchbox? Would I finally be allowed to ride my bike beyond the confines of our building’s parking lot?

With brimming overconfidence, I dared to hope for a back-to-school wardrobe of my own design – landfall from the sea of corduroy and polyester.  My mind was swimming with portent. I saw only possibility… and not the progress of my hair-maiden.

“All done,” she said.

I looked up with anticipation. But Han Solo was nowhere to be found. Instead, two baby porcupines were wrestling on top of my head. The one on the right was winning.

What happened to my hair? How had she managed to detonate it and turn it into a pencil-lead bouquet?

“That’ll be five dollars, young man.”

“It doesn’t look like the picture,” I said sheepishly.

As more of the sprayed water evaporated, the porcupine on the left began making a comeback.

“Oh, well, we just need a little gel.” She rubbed her hands together and went to work.

I smelled like cough syrup and suntan lotion. My hair looked like two porcupines wrestling – in jello.

“See, all better.”

I paid at the register.

“Don’t forget your magazine.”

“Thank you.”

I caught a glance of my hideousness in every shop window during the long walk home. There would be no more choosing, no more mastery of fate, no Han Solo. There would only be a lifetime of exploded graphite and wrestling porcupines.

Then suddenly, as I turned the corner, Burger King appeared. Like Camelot in the distance it radiated hope and promise. I reached into my pocket and fished out the leftover five – I hadn’t given up a tip at the salon. I didn’t know I had to.

No, Captain Caveman wasn’t going anywhere. There would be no end to the ridicule tomorrow, there was no land in sight from the corduroy sea, but tonight, tonight, there would at least be bacon double-cheeseburgers and fries.

Her lips were pouty in a way that melted me. She was starting to cry. “I don’t know you,” she said.

“You know me. We talk all the time.” I wiped her cheek.

“We talk about art, we talk about philosophy, we talk about books, we talk about me. We don’t talk about you. I don’t know you.”

“That is me. All those things, they’re me.”

“Oh, your books and the music, that’s you? That’s not you.” Her Russian accent came out when she said her Os a certain way.

She trembled in my arms. I was holding her but she was alone. I might as well have been a blanket, a shirt. I tried to console her.

I told her a story from my childhood about playing Kick the Can with my friends. I thought it would help her to know me better. It didn’t work. She was still crying.

What did she want from me? I had worked at this. I had read, analyzed, I had absorbed and I had studied – all so I could be a better man, a better person. Didn’t she see that?

What more could I offer her? What more did she want from me?

I had told her stories from when I was a kid. Embarrassing moments, triumphant moments, tragic moments, whatever I could remember that would help her see the arc of my life. To see what I had become.

“Why are you still crying? What’s wrong?”

“The other night, when we were in the city, and we were just walking around in the fog. You talked to me. I was so happy. It felt like you were letting me in.”

We had left the show and just started walking. We talked all the way across town. I had told her stories, just like the ones I was telling her now. What had changed? I wasn’t keeping any secrets. What did she want to know? What was so revealing in that fog around us?

“It’s not what you tell me. It’s not the stories. Sometimes you let me in. But most of the time you keep me out.”

I didn’t understand. I had shared everything with her. When we were in bed she was the air, the room, the world. How had I kept her out?

I never knew. That was the last night we spent together.

–––––––––– 2009 ––––––––––––

She was convulsing, hyperventilating, sobbing. She had been raped – more than once.

For years she had tried to deal with it, handle it, control it. Therapy, meds, counseling, a new boyfriend who could help her in ways no other man could. She had worked at it, worked away at it.

A hit of medical grade marijuana, and a childish pseudo-argument between me and her boyfriend – two men she was on the verge of trusting – triggered something in her.

All of the anger, frustration, horror, guilt and despair roiling inside her, erupted and covered everything with ash.

We stared, caught ourselves staring, but we couldn’t stop. She screamed, folded into herself, exploded and collapsed.

Like the planes disappearing into the towers, the Michael-Bay-explosions that followed, life had come too close to art at that moment. I wasn’t there. I was watching this on a screen. I was pulling away from it, trying to gain distance.

But I didn’t want to pull away. I wanted to hold her and tell her it would be okay. But it wasn’t my place to do that. The man she loved was right beside her. But I knew, instinctively, even if I was the only one there, the last thing that would help her would be my embrace. That much I knew.

She began to describe the physical memory of it. “I can still feel him; his shape; the way he took up space inside me. That won’t ever go away.”

I remembered. With each word she said, I remembered what he felt like, the way he took up space inside me.

I was 5. He was in college. Very few people in Korea got into college in 1972. His family was proud of him. My parents told me to look up to him.

His father had taken off his shoes. Then he took off his socks. He rubbed his right foot, below the ankle, just above the bullet hole that had healed into a dark crater.

The good son peeked out from his room. He smiled and motioned for me to come. He told me it was a secret when he raised a finger to his lips.

I walked over. I was smiling too.

“We’re going to play a really fun game,” he said as he locked the door.

She wept. She remembered out loud. The images of my own molestation, my own rape,  was playing to her vivid narration.

But I no longer felt it the way she did. All I had left of my memories was the ash. Everything else had been burned away. But like the frozen shadows of Hiroshima, they remained in the place where the person once stood.

Two days after we witnessed her painful, hideous, shocking, healing and miraculous moment of self-awareness, her boyfriend – my best friend – sent me this:

Just a thought: molestation is the ultimate act of objectification, even if you weren’t aware – especially if you weren’t aware. So you were objectified as a child – sexually – in a world that saw you as invisible. You are taught this lesson: when people objectify you sexually, you become visible. Unfortunately, you are living in a culture that sees the Asian man as asexual. You go through adolescence and your twenties seeking sexual attention. It isn’t just validation. It’s the only time you feel that you really exist. The early childhood sexual trauma further complicates this by making you very particular about who you let into your personal space – welcome to a psychological conflict.

I’m sure your big brain has already completely, or partially, figured this out. If so, consider this my attempt to understand my friend. If not, smoke some stems, think about it, and get back to me.

I had never let her in. I had never let anyone in. She had sensed it, had felt it. She knew it then.

I turned 39 nearly four years ago. And for three of those years I sat alone and took apart my mind – one regret at a time. I examined each one carefully. Then I gathered up all the parts and put them back together. On Friday night, I found a leftover piece.

I’m looking at it, trying to figure out where it fits. But I wonder now, if it’s a piece at all. I wonder if it ever belonged.

Like a bullet in your foot. It heals into a dark crater over time. If you take out the bullet, you have to heal again.

But the bullet is gone.

“She is so hot,” said my boss as an Asian woman strolled by.

“Damn!” agreed Shawn. She negotiated a puddle and hopped into a cab. “Those were some nice legs.”

They both turned to me – the arbiter of all things Asian. I shrugged.

“You didn’t think she was hot? Come on, dude,” they said in unison.

“What’s the matter, she look too much like your mom?” asked Shawn.

“No, but if she was sucking my dick she’d look a lot like yours,” I retorted. We have an understanding in the office when it comes to mom-jokes.

“Seriously, you didn’t think she was hot?”

“What is it with white dudes and Asian women? Scratch that, what is it with dudes and Asian women in this culture? Every non-Asian man I’ve ever met had some “thing” about Asian chicks. What is it, they taste like sushi to you guys or something?” I wondered out loud.

“I don’t know,” said Shawn. He was almost remorseful. “There’s something about them.”

I tried digging deeper into this phenomenon but all I got were smiles and shrugs. They couldn’t articulate a reason other than, “They’re just… hot.”

“They” are hot. I couldn’t understand it.

I had dated Asian women. I had dated Latinas, Jews, mutts, Russians, general Europeanish types, French, Irish, African-American and unknown, but I had never developed a preference for any particular ethnic look. I never had a “thing” for any type other than, attractive.

“Is it because some Asian women have a thing about Asian men?” asked Shawn.

“You mean the thing where they don’t want to date us?”

“Yeah.”

“No, it’s not that. I find plenty of Asian women attractive. Not just Lucy Liu and Kelly Hu. The ones walking down the street, the ones at the bank, the ones all around us. I just didn’t think that specific one was all that hot.” I had a swig of happy hour beer. “But it’s not like that with you guys. You pretty much think, unless their just broken, that any Asian woman is hot.”

They looked at each other to confer and said, “Yeah, pretty much.”

“Yeah, what the fuck is that about?”

More shrugs and smiles.

I was curious what was running through their minds when they saw an Asian woman. At last, I was curious and not angry about the objectification – the extra-special objectification – of Asian women in this country.

I kept pushing, “Is it because they’re generally portrayed as being subservient?”

“Sub… what?”
 asked Shawn.

“Submissive, docile, domesticated, servile.”

They stared blankly at me.

“Is it because you feel like you can just dominate them in bed? That you would feel free to do whatever you wanted to them?”

They considered this for a moment. “Yeah, I think that might be a part of it. But it’s not just that. It has to do with like, I don’t know, the whole foreign-exotic-look thing.”

“So they look to you like exotic sex-slaves, in a sense,” I said.

“Damn right,” said Shawn.

My boss sensed I was serious. “No, it’s not like that.”

“You both agreed that passivity was a part of the appeal. I asked you if it was because ‘you feel free to do whatever you want to them’ and you agreed. Then you told me another part of that appeal had to do with their ‘foreign-exotic-look thing’ that they had going on. I don’t think it’s a leap to say that Asian women, to you guys, are passive sex-slaves. I’m not taking offense – at the moment – I’m just trying to understand.”

“Well, yeah, but you’re making us sound like racist assholes,” said Shawn.

“I don’t think you’re racists and I don’t think you’re assholes. I think the barrage of ridiculous imagery of Asian women in this country, has broken you.”

“Like what? What imagery?”

“Japanese anime of school girls getting raped by demons; geishas and sushi off naked Asian chicks; almost every role given to an Asian actress is the role of a submissive – never saw a movie called The Asian Devil Wears Prada have you? Sandra Oh…”

“Who?”

“The Asian doctor on Grey’s Anatomy.”

“Right, right.”

“…her character isn’t submissive – except for the fact that she’s in love with a man who nearly choked her to death… in bed. But that’s not my point. Name another Asian female character you remember seeing on TV, before her.”

“…”

“That’s my point. There have been a few female Asian-American characters – mostly played by Lucy Liu for some reason – on TV, but that doesn’t penetrate. What penetrates is the whole Asian-sex-toy thing, ‘Oh, me so horny’ bullshit – fuck 2 Live Crew. There is an entire category called: Asian Porn. I’ve never heard of African Porn or European Porn.”

“Yeah, but “porn” means probably white-ish women and the rest…” suggested my boss.

“Right, there’s Gay Porn, Lesbian Porn and so on. But when guys log onto some Asian Porn, they’re not expecting Asian couples. They’re expecting an Asian woman and someone who is not an Asian man. Asian Porn doesn’t mean ‘porn shot in Asia’ the way Russian Porn means a movie shot in Russia.”

“I don’t know, man. I don’t know,” said Shawn.

“I think… I think that’s becoming my point,” I said. “I think your special desire is unconscious. I think it’s been so deeply programmed into you that you can’t even describe it. I could be wrong, it might not be any of the things I said – any of that imagery. It might be just the primal instincts of genetic diversity that get you guys going. But I don’t think it’s that.”

My favorite waitress came by, said my name, and smiled. She is not Asian. She has the body of a Penthouse model. She set down my beer and went back to the bar.

“If you guys had your choice between her and the Asian woman who walked by earlier, who would you pick?”

“I’d totally take the Asian chick,” said Shawn. My boss agreed with an eager nod.

“Yeah, I don’t understand you guys.”

We drank. I pondered. What was it?

Then, I had an idea. Most non-Asian people – all I’ve met so far – have never been able to accurately guess my age. And all of them have been shocked when I told them. But it wasn’t a surprise to them, really. They all subscribed to a myth of Asians aging well. “Wait, you don’t know how old they are…” I said.

“We can’t tell how old you are,” said my boss.

“That’s what I mean. You can’t tell the difference between Koreans and Chinese, and you can’t tell how old Asian woman are. That’s it, isn’t it? You think they’ll look that way forever. Either that or you see some schoolgirl fantasy in your head because they look so young to you.”

“So now we’re dirty old men?”

“No – well maybe. No, I’m saying that it makes biological sense that men would have a primal urge to mate with as a young a woman as possible. If Asian women represent youth and fertility to you, then of course you’d want to sleep with them over any other type.”

“I don’t know, I think you’re going way out there on this one,” said my boss.

“So you want to stick with Racist Asshole as the reason?” I asked with a smile.

We dropped the subject as another group of commuters walked by. Most of them were women, but not a single Asian in the group.

I finished my beer and headed to my train.

A beautiful Asian woman got on at the first stop. I wanted to talk to her. But as I thought about what I might say, the idea of her being a sex-toy violated my thoughts. I couldn’t shake the images of ball-gags and plaid skirts.

I had had plenty of fantasies that involved ball-gags and plaid skirts, but this one didn’t turn me on. I felt… sorry for her. In that moment, the earlier conversation still fresh in my head, I felt sorry for this gorgeous creature.

But only in that moment.

She sat down in one of the facing seats. Smooth legs shifted and crossed underneath her pencil skirt. She smelled smoky, pungent and flowery. What would I say to her? She pulled a book from her bag. The rock on her finger crushed any hope I had of being charming.

She caught my gaze. I smiled awkwardly. She smiled back and plugged her ears with the buds from her ipod.

I plugged my own ears with some Nusrat and leaned back in my seat. And then I wondered what my co-workers would think of her. What would they see when they saw her with me, in my home, in my life?

Would they, when she was in my arms, see her as a woman?

“I was like 7, mom. How old was she, 5? 6?”

“Well, she’s 18 now. Just take her somewhere, talk to her.”

Right, we’ll reminisce about our Lego days, help each other struggle through our Pop Rocks withdrawal.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

“What am I doing to you? She’s a very pretty girl, she’s going to Columbia.”

What are you doing? You’re setting me up for marriage, Gepetto. I’m still a virgin and you have me walking down the aisle with an infant I haven’t seen in 12 years.

She had tried to set me up twice before in previous months. One was with a girl from her church that barely spoke English. The other was the daughter of a frequent patron at my parents’ restaurant. I had managed to avoid both meetings by crying, “I have finals coming up.” My parents would stop traffic if it would buy me extra time to study for an exam.

But this one I had to go through with. I knew Jeanie’s mom, Mrs. Kim. She was a very close friend of the family and I had known her all my life. And I figured it would be just as strange and awkward for Jeanie as it would be for me. Maybe we could just laugh about it and hang out for a night, on our parents.

“Where am I meeting her?”

My mother beamed. I cringed. Making my parents happy was a difficult thing for me at 19. Mainly because the things that made them happy cost me in ways they didn’t understand.

I wasn’t trying to land just any girl, I was trying to land a white girl. That in turn would lead to acceptance by the general community of the boys around me. I would become assimilated and a stud with a single swing.

But Jeanie? I couldn’t bring her around. Even if we did end up liking each other. To date her would be the same as bringing a cousin to the Prom. No, I had to land the redhead in my Typography class, or the hot Russian girl in my Package Design class.

I met her at my parents’ restaurant. She was barely over 5 feet tall, demure, long flowing hair – beautiful.

“Hi,” she said shyly.

“He… hi,” I stuttered.

My mother folded a couple of hundreds into my hands. Did she want me to get a room? Thanks, mom. I’ll really enjoy impressing this girl with your money. Way to understand the male psyche.

We hailed a cab and headed downtown. She told me she wanted to see something that was uniquely New York.

“We could walk around The Village, maybe build up an appetite?”

“I’ve always wanted to see The Village.”

The evening had turned into something else. I wanted to get to know Jeanie. I wanted to be with Jeanie. My attraction for her grew by the minute. I couldn’t believe my luck.

Then it occurred to me, as I pushed the money deeper into my pocket, that luck had had nothing to do with it. My mother had arranged this. My mom knew better about my love life than I did. Somehow, my mom had mastered something that I was just beginning to explore. She knew more about what I wanted than I did.

This was not acceptable. I was not going to have love – or lust – handed to me with a baggie of Oreos and a juice box by my mother.

I pulled out a cigarette.

“You smoke?” she asked with disapproval.

“Don’t tell your mom,” I said with a grin.

No, Jeanie. We will not be getting to know each other. I’m sorry, but I am screwed up in ways that I don’t fully understand. In a few minutes I went from wanting to devour you to wanting to run. Sorry, but it just kind of happened all on its own and it’s not going away anytime soon.

“I can’t believe our mothers are doing this to us,” I muttered.

She watched Fifth Avenue strobe by and pretended not to hear. Silence for ten blocks.

“My mom told me you were going to Parsons?”

“Yeah, I just finished my second year,” I said, not turning to face her. “And you? Where you going?”

“Columbia. I haven’t really picked a major yet.”

“Cool.”

The rest of the evening passed in the same way – brief spurts of Q & A shuffled into a long line of pauses. The evening was almost painful. But it had worked. The next day, my mother didn’t ask how the night had gone.

I saw Mrs. Kim about a month later at the restaurant. She was talking with my mom by the bar when I walked in.

“Hello! You look so handsome today,” said Mrs. Kim in Korean.

I greeted her and bowed. I didn’t thank her for her compliment. You didn’t thank Korean people for a compliment like that. Doing that would be the same as saying, “Thanks, I agree.” Instead, you deflected it with a humble statement about how you owed a debt to your mom’s cooking.

My mother thanked her.

“Jeanie had a very good time. She wanted me to tell you that.”

“She was lovely company,” I said.

No, Mrs. Kim, your daughter did not have a good time. Thanks for being polite, but we won’t be going out again. Neither you, or your evil partner here, will be puppeting my romantic moves. You can dangle any bait you like. I will not bite.

My mother excused herself and headed to the kitchen. I answered some questions about school and my plans for the future. She was like all of my mom’s friends – future, marriage, kids, responsibility, church – accept in one way. She never tried to give me advice about anything.

All my mom’s friends were experts when it came to my future. They knew what I should do with my education; they were sure I would fall madly in love with their daughters; they had extensive experience with proper posture and perfect haircuts – and so I should listen carefully. The only comment Mrs. Kim ever made was, “That’s wonderful.”

But that day, she did advise me. It was the only time she ever did.

“You know, I’m the one who asked your mother – for you to take out Jeanie. Not because I wanted the two of you to get married someday. I just thought it would be good for you to be friends again.”

Of course you did. I know how you people operate. You already have the date picked out. You’ve already named your grandkids. You can’t lull me. I can see into your evil soul.

“My mother tells me how important it is to keep our traditions alive. I understand, and I agree.” I smiled. It was the politest way for me to tell her that I thought she was full of shit.

She considered my answer. She knew what I meant.

“Did you know your parents were arranged…”

Yes, lady. I knew my parents were in an arranged marriage. I knew their relationship was based on a practical partnership, I know…

“…to other people?”

...what?

“I’m sorry?”

“They were arranged to be married to other people. They both defied their parents and ran away together. You’re not supposed to know that. It’s supposed to bring shame on your home. But that’s the old way. We’re here now.”

My parents? These emotionless, loveless lemmings that avoided public displays of affection like land mines along the 38th parallel – these people? These people were… romantics?

My worldview was shattered. I would never look at my parents the same way again. Something washed through me, something comforting and warm.

For the first time in my life, I felt a connection with my parents that wasn’t just about being a family. They hadn’t arrived at love, they had begun with it. That made all the difference.

I wasn’t the adopted offspring of aliens. They were human. They had passion stored somewhere in those stoic vessels; they understood something of what I was going through.

Mrs. Kim rubbed my arm and smiled, “Your mom just wants to see you happy.”

“Thank you,” I said.