Autobiography

The processes of multiple displacements and migrations have created a fundamentally new type of human being: a human being in which strange fusions of the imaginative past and illusive present occur; a human being who creates identities along memories rather than places, along ideas as much as material realities. For the constant migrant, alien, foreigner, outsider, the concept of home becomes less tangible and more romanticized, establishing comfort in movement instead of settlement, solidarity in change rather than static completeness.

“Tsaaaaa!!!” I yelled as I threw a piece of playing block toward the wall. Then my two younger cousins would squeal with delight and clap their hands.
“Yay! The bad guy’s head is cut off!” A-Ch’i would say.
“Let’s cut more people’s heads off!” Hao-Hao would say.
During the glorious old days, our lives revolved around the dramas we saw on television with the adults. Wai-kung (maternal grandfather) especially loved television; whenever he sat on his special sofa chair, the t.v. would be on with different dramas depicting life in the Old Motherland. That was one way for the older generation to relive their pasts back in the old country. One of the dramas particularly overtook the lives of the younger generation: Pao Ch’ing-T’ien, or Justice Bao as more commonly known in the west, a famous drama that robbed all ratings from other channels, depicting the deeds of Pao, an eleventh-century c.e. justice/lawyer figure in Song Dynasty China.
I was only about four or five when I watched this drama, so naturally all I could pay attention to were the terrifying and spectacular parts that I could reproduce with my cousins with playing blocks. To me, Pao was an authority figure that had the ability to cut people’s heads off. In a typical scene, Pao would sit on his throne, with his harsh expression made scarier with a curling mustache, and yell at the tattered prisoner kneeled before him, hands tied behind his back and pleading for mercy. “How dare you do this and that!” Pao would scream, and the court bodyguards would exclaim in a monotone agreement “weiiii-woooooo.” After some more melodramatic exchanges, Pao would lose his patience and sentence the prisoner to get his head cut off by a giant papercutter-like machine. Two bodyguards would appear to drag the kicking and pleading prisoner off and into a special area where the beheading machine was. The two bodyguards would place the prisoner’s neck directly under the blade, and then one of them would take the blade handle and swoooosh! down came the blade and the scene would end. I think I must have cried once when I saw this dreadful event occur, and then turned to ask Ma in between sobs, “why did Pao Ch’ing-T’ien cut that guy’s head off!?” Ma would say something about that guy being bad and deserving the punishment, and use that opportunity to warn me that if I ever became a bad boy who disobeyed rules, Pao might come to take me to his court.
When Pao sentenced a prisoner to be beheaded, he performed an action that would later serve as an inspiration for the various recreational moments that I shared with my cousins with playing blocks. After declaring his decision, Pao would take a stick-like thing from his judge-table and throw it to the ground in front of the convicted prisoner while screaming “tsaaaaa!” This odd ritual must have been a confirmation of his decision or something. So my cousins and I, fascinated by the godlike power that Pao had over people’s heads, soon started imitating what we saw on t.v. with our beloved playing blocks. Usually I would play Pao’s character; after all, I was the oldest among the three of us younger generation of cousins and we all were taught since birth that the oldest person must always be obeyed. I would use the long sticks of blocks as the sentencing stick that Pao used, and I would imitate Pao exactly as he performed his sentencing ritual in the drama, with the screaming and throwing and everything. Then as if I really did kill a bad guy, I would feel all self-righteous and great, and my cousins would beg me to let them play Pao next.
We all grew up fearing and (more or less) obeying the adults and teachers, because they were older than us and thus had the authority to tell us what to do; otherwise, we might get killed like the prisoners in the Pao Ch’ing-T’ien drama. My Ta Chiu-chiu and Erh Chiu-chiu (Ma’s older brother and first younger brother), who were both traditionally authoritative figures, often yelled “wo ta sih ni!” at us whenever we did something bad, which roughly translates to “I’m going to hit you to death!” A-Hsuan and A-Ch’i, my two cousins who specialized in overexaggerating things and making up shit (“Did you know that if you eat mochi, you’ll get really bad diarrhea?” “Did you know that if the chance of rain reaches over 70%, the metro trains will explode?”), even told me on several occasions that if they disobeyed their mother, my San Chiu-ma, she would slice their heads off just like how Pao Ch’ing-T’ien would do it (and they would also use that chance to rub into my face how “lucky” I was to have a Ma that wasn’t so scary and then force me to give them a bunch of shit because their Ma was “too strict” and wouldn’t buy them anything). Then there were our lovely teachers at school. I clearly remember two teachers from my early elementary years: one was my first-grade science teacher, Huang Mei-Mei, and the other my first and second-grade art teacher, Lin Mei-Hsiu. Huang Mei-Mei was a short, boney, and curly-haired freak lady who carried a permanent frown on her wrinkled face and always wielded a hitting stick. She enjoyed pacing around the room, slapping random desks with her stick to scare the shit out of whomever unfortunate enough to be sitting there, just to assert her dominance. I cried several times in Lin Mei-Hsiu’s classes, since I was a very bad artist who couldn’t even draw a tree and received painful hits for being so incompetent.

Ma, where are we moving?
To Chiu Chin Shan. It’s a charming city in Mei Kuo.
What? Where is THAT?

The rain drilled holes into the pavement and the sky was almost completely dark. The three cars, packed to the brim with relatives and luggage, traveled west-ward down the Sun Yat-Sen Freeway, slowly making their way to the airport. Taiwan’s freeways have an unfathomably low speed limit compared to other countries, which just made our drive to the airport unnecessarily long and tedious, especially for the unfortunate drivers who must also cope with the blinding rain and fog. Occasionally the thunder would strike, and I, along with Hao-Hao who was also in my car, would shudder upon the crashing noise. Despite the gloomy weather that was totally unfitting for a farewell ceremony, my spirits were nevertheless quite high. It felt like I was ready to embark on an adventurous journey into the unknown with my family, and we had nothing to lose in a brand new world. The presence of Ta Chiu-chiu, Ta Chiu-ma, and Ma in our car also added to the excitement I was feeling; it was as if everyone were here to witness enviously the marvelous departure of me and my family, set to fly across the great Pacific Ocean to a place where everyone wanted to go. The thought of the possibility that my relatives would be envious excited me even more.
The next thing I knew we were all gathered at the third floor departure lobby of Chiang Kai-Shek Airport, that final space where travelers bid farewell to whoever cared enough to travel all the way to the airport to say good-bye to them. While the older people chatted around the waiting chairs, my cousins and I shifted to the window-wall that overlooked the giant open-air parking lot. Unfortunately the departure hall completely covered up the view of the runway, and the only part of any aircraft we could see was the tail. There were three tails total that we could see, two white ones to the right and left, and one dark-blue one between those two. We decided to play the guessing game to see who could estimate correctly the airplane that would take me to Chiu Chin Shan.
“The one on the right! That’s your airplane!” A-Hsuan declared with his usual arrogant confidence.
“No, it’s the one on the left! I’ll bet you one-hundred Taiwan Dollar for it!” His brother A-Ch’i challenged. “What do you think, A-Yuan?”
I knew that China Airlines’ airplanes had a white tail, with two stripes of red and blue toward the back-side of the tail, going down vertically and stopping at the fuselage, while a small picture of our country’s flag occupied the vast empty space between the stripes and the other end of the tail. That meant it couldn’t be the airplane in the middle, the one with the dark-blue tail. So in an attempt not to piss off A-Hsuan and stir trouble for myself in my last moment with him, I publicized my decision: “The one on the right!”
Then we were all gathered in front of the small entrance carved out of the giant glass wall, through which only people with boarding passes could go through in order to get to their flight. One by one, I was pecked on the cheek by all the adults present: Wai-kung, Lao-lao (maternal grandmother), and all the Chiu-chiu and Chiu-ma. My cousins were of course much more reserved and only gave me smiles and words of encouragement as I was about to begin a long and uncertain journey.
“A-Yuan! Be sure to say hello to your Pa for us! We miss him!” San Chiu-chiu instructed me as he kissed me on the cheek with his ticklish shaved beard.
“Make sure to call us and write letters to us!” A-T’ing said.
“Good luck with everything!” someone else said.
As I got through each relative one-by-one, I waited for Ma and Chieh (older sister) to finish their one-by-one goodbyes and good lucks. Ma took out a tissue from her tissue pack and started wiping her eyes and face with it, while Chieh also took a piece out to wipe her face. I became curious as to why Ma and Chieh were crying, but it was rude to ask a crying person questions, so I decided against having my inquiries fulfilled.
After a while Ma, Chieh, and I finally entered the other side of the glass wall and approached the immigration booths to have our passports and boarding passes verified before continuing onward. Ma was still wiping her eyes and Chieh looked like she just got a fifty on her exam. I couldn’t hold in my curiosity any longer, so I blurted out to Ma: “Ma, why are you crying?” A question to which she just ignored as the stern immigration officer inside the booth alternated his vision between our passports and our facial features.
As we cleared the booths, I looked back to the way we came, and all our relatives were waving their hands at us. I waved back at them with a huge smile on my face, while Ma and Chieh looked on with the same expression they had while before we crossed the glass wall. We then turned right and continued down the hall toward our flight as our relatives also moved in the same direction, waving at us from the other side. Finally we turned the corner to the baggage screening room, and we lost sight of them.

Welcome to the United Snakes
Land of the Thief, Home of the Slave
Grand Imperial Guard where the Dollar is sacred and proud
—Brother Ali, “Uncle Sam Goddamn”

Perhaps it was the temporary nature of this move that ultimately convinced Ma to uproot herself from our homeland and settle in america. Pa’s achievements in China Airlines granted him a three-year temporary manager position in the San Francisco Cargo division with high pay and limitless opportunities. Our whole family moved, because Ma did not want us divided by an ocean and saw this as a chance for Chieh and me to experience new things.
Ma started going to church shortly after we arrived. There she found a community of immigrants from Taiwan with whom she could relate. Pa, having been an agnostic all his life, soon got sucked in and before I knew it, I started attending Sunday school as well. I found the church people to be very nice, and I made friends easily with the children there (except for a few spoiled brats who permanently carried attitudes that I didn’t care for). I also found the bible stories interesting, and soon received a free one from the Sunday school teacher (who was also my best friend’s mother) as a gift. Then after class and service, free lunch would be served (donated each week by a different family), and we would all eat and socialize. For Ma and Pa, the church was a sanctuary where people who shared their cultural, ethnic, national, and linguistic background could come together after a week of dealing with white racist america and relax. For me, it was a space to play with friends and listen to spectacular stories of giants and water-becoming-wine and jesus-walking-on-water. Subsequently, our faith in this foreign religion grew, and before I knew it, we were taking baptism classes to prepare for that final affirming step into a guaranteed spot in the kingdom of god. Our entire family (even Chieh, who almost drove Ma crazy with her stubbornness and defiance and would not come to church until she found some teenagers there with whom she could relate) was baptized in front of the whole church, and I had never felt so proud to be god’s obedient child.
In particular, I found the story of David and Jonathan so fascinating that I read and read and read. I must have read it more than ten times. I even cried once after reading, heavily grieving over the separation of these two close friends in the end. I even prayed to god that he would let the two friends reunite in heaven. What fascinated me most was how close the two boys were with each other, and how they would kiss and embrace to avow their love for each other. I longed for this type of close friendship.

What the fuck are we gonna do then!?
Don’t fucking yell at me! How am I supposed to know?
She wants to stay here. She has a future here.
Where is the money gonna come from? Besides, it’s not safe for her to stay here all alone.
Damn it, I’ll make more money if I have to! I’ll come back to america if I have to! Taiwan has nothing left for us.
Speak for yourself! Don’t fucking shove your future at me.

And there we were, back in america seven months after leaving San Francisco. Pa quit his job with the airline and found a new one in Los Angeles because he loved america so much. He missed his church friends and other connections he had established, and he missed Chieh especially. Chieh stayed behind to attend Berkeley, a source for bragging for him and Ma. Ma missed Chieh too, but she was extremely unhappy to be away from her parents once more. This time, Pa wanted the move to be permanent; he wanted to stay in this land of gold forever, despite Ma’s bitter opposition. And then there was me, the naïve child who was just following my parents wherever they decided to take me.
Actually, though, I was secretly glad to be away from Taiwan again, because those seven months between the two americas were mentally and emotionally strenuous. I never experienced any form of “culture shock,” as anthropologists like to put it, when I moved to america. However, right when I stepped foot into my old elementary school—the same one that I thought I would never see again 3.5 years earlier—I knew I was in for it. I never fully adapted to this “new” lifestyle and this should-be-familiar schooling system in which teachers hold supreme authority over hitting sticks and other forms of student torture. My spoiled american body and mind took serious blows as I was no longer the top of the class, as I had been all the previous years. So as soon as I heard the news that Pa found employment in america and was considering moving again, I rejoiced, first overtly, then silently and a bit guiltily when I saw how upset Ma was and after Ma told me that Wai-kung and Lao-lao were sad to see us go again.
Ma’s discontent with america became more and more apparent as the years passed. Under Chieh’s international student status, by the end of her four years at Berkeley in 2003, our family was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. During these years as well, Pa switched jobs multiple times, quitting here because the boss’s daughter gave Pa a hard time, getting fired there because the boss was a bipolar motherfucker who blamed Pa for his own problems. There was a period of time when Pa was unemployed, sitting on his ass all day at home as Ma went to work illegally under the table (our non-immigrant status at that time only granted Pa the right to employment) and I went to school to try to get straight A’s like a good Asian kid. One day, Ma just lost it, and went off like a New Year’s firecracker. “You lazy piece of good-for-nothing shit! Sitting on your obese ass all day long, not even trying to find work. We have newspapers don’t we? Why don’t you look in there? Damn it, I work so fucking hard but still don’t make enough to pay the bills. Is this why you brought me over to this goddamn country? Away from my parents so I can work like this?” And Pa just sat there, staring at the t.v. like he did all day long at home with nothing else to do. Upon seeing Pa’s nonchalance, Ma screamed in utter frustration and marched right out of the house to vent herself.
Ultimately, Pa did find work; he was offered a small position at a small company run by a couple from church. Once again, the church became a sanctuary for my family, providing the necessary social networks and cultural ties to survive as People of Color in america. Pa and Ma eventually joined the Mandarin choir group, so every Sunday we had to show up an hour early so they could practice their hymns. The choir group became their main circle of friends, always singing together, eating together, taking short trips around the city together, and gossiping together about the latest rumors surrounding the money scandal involving the pastor or a choir member wishing to resign and switch to another church (“Wayne, go over there and sit at the other end of the table. We’re gonna gossip and we don’t want you kids to listen”). I, on the other hand, had a whole different experience at church. Dealing with bigoted, upper-class middle and high school people caught up in teenage drama could really take a toll. Sure, I made some friends at church, but most people I could not tolerate (“Omg! Look at these awesome shiny pens! Aren’t they pretty? Omg they are soooo cute.” “Omg so like, she was telling him that I liked him, but like I totally do not, but that other bitch told HER that I hate her, so now she thinks I hate her and HE thinks I like him but I totally hate them both and omg I have all these problems and no one understands!”). Then there were the Sunday school teachers, who liked to teach class by the method of instilling fear (“So when the great rapture happens, and you do not believe in god, you will surely be left behind on earth, and all your loved ones will be taken to heaven already, and you will be all alone and satan’s army will surely torture you in the new dark world!” “Homosexuality is a sin, but that doesn’t mean we should hate homosexuals. We should only hate their sin. So pray for those who have lost their way or surely they will forever be shut out from god’s grace!”). As god’s obedient child, I found no other choice but to sit there and listen to all this bullshit. Especially during this time of crazy hormonal changes in my body and the burgeoning of my intellect and sexuality, I was approaching a mental breaking point. It could happen any day now.

We left the school ground and continued our walk to nowhere. I’ve never felt so good, so safe. I still didn’t know who he was. But that didn’t really matter, I suppose. We shared this bond that many people could never share, this closeness and warmth that many people search their whole lives for, and could never really find. When we held hands, we told the world to fuck off. When we held hands, I could see society crumble and topple right before our eyes. When we held hands, we risked rejection, torture, and death. When we held hands, all the wrongs in the world were righted.
I woke up. I wished I was still holding his hand.

“Ma, pull over right now, I CAN’T TAKE THIS ANYMORE.”
With her mother’s instinct that something was gravely wrong, Ma gave a short silent nod and dutifully pulled the car into a parking spot and turned off the engine.
“I can’t take this anymore. I need to tell you something. I bought that extra book for a reason. I couldn’t tell Pa because it was a gift for someone.”
“Why not? If it’s just a gift, why didn’t you just tell Pa? You know his temper. You saw how he exploded. Everything would’ve been fine if you just told him!”
“That’s the reason why I didn’t say anything! That book was meant to be a gift for someone that I like. In fact, it’s someone who I’m in love with.”
“Oh? Why couldn’t you say anything then? I don’t understand. Who is this girl that you like then?”
Tears welled up in my eyes as I choked to search for the best way to tell this story. “It’s not a girl. It’s a boy.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’m in love with this guy and I wanted to give him the book as a gift because love makes you do stupid things so stop asking me anymore questions!” By this time tears were free-flowing from my eyes and creating a mini-waterfall. Wet spots appeared on my pants as the water dripped and dripped.
Ma didn’t say anything. She took my hands and held onto them tightly. After a while of hearing me sob and choke for breath, she spoke up awkwardly. “How do you know you’re in love with this guy? You’re still young, you don’t know what love is.”
“I just know, ok?” I snapped. “I like him a lot. He’s good-looking. He has a great personality. I like everything about him. I feel very strongly for him. Isn’t that enough?”
“But…” Ma struggled to find the right words to say. “Maybe you’re just confused. But from the way that you’re crying, it’s good that you realize that this is wrong.”
I’m crying because I’m having a mental breakdown, not because I think my feelings are wrong.
“Have you tried praying to god? And asking him to change you?”
I shook my head. I could not believe what I was hearing.
“You should try it then. I’ll pray for you too. I won’t tell anyone about this for now, but promise me you’ll pray, ok? If we both pray then god will show mercy.”
Several weeks later, as I was doing homework, Ma showed up in my room and sat down cross-legged on the floor.
“So…” she said uneasily, “are you still gay?”
“What?”
“Are you still gay? Remember I asked you to pray?”
I was stunned at Ma’s usage of the word “gay”; I had never mentioned that word to her ever, but somehow she knew what it meant and applied that white-washed upper-class corporate terminology on me. “Um, no?” Surely, I was still madly in love with that guy.
“Why? You know, I pray for you every single night. I pray to god that you will change, and no longer be confused about who you are. Why haven’t you prayed?”
I didn’t know what to say. I was too flabbergasted. I could only murmur semi-intelligibly that prayers won’t change how I feel toward men and that I would rather not waste my time.
Frustrated, Ma scolded me. “This is so you. You don’t even try and you say it’s not going to work. Do you know how much trouble you’re going to bring to our family? What is everyone going to think when they find out that you’re gay? How are you going to survive out there in the real world as a gay? You’re just going to let other people talk about us and make fun of us? How selfish can you be? Think about this.” She then got up and left.
I continued doing homework as if nothing happened.

In the end, however, we must be tellers of our own stories. If this will not be allowed, then silence is honorable and silence is powerful—because silence speaks loudly through the very presence of our very bodies.
—Jolie, my TA for my first Asian American Studies class

Asian American Studies changed my life completely. I entered UCLA with the intention of majoring in anthropology to satisfy my deep interest in human beings, cultures, and origins. And I did declare it. But the quarter after I became an official anthropology student, I took my first Asian American Studies class. It was a lower division course and it surveyed the general state of contemporary Asian American communities. In this class, I finally learned things about myself and my own experiences as a transnational migrant, Person of Color, and queer subject. I learned about other Asian American communities as well, enlightening myself about the pertinent issues that we are still facing today as a collective. Jolie, my TA, a working-class Cambodian American queer womyn, with her shaved head and tough physique, was in many ways an inspiration for me. She had a style of defiance against systems of oppression and a way of articulating her identities. Most of all, she was all about expressing herself, telling her own stories, and encouraging all of us to remember critically about our lives and histories and question all dominant forms of knowledge we had acquired throughout our lives under the american school system and media. She once gave a lecture about her own experiences of critically remembering her grandmother’s stories, challenging the objectifying and mystifying notion of the “refugee” figure, so that her and her family’s history could be uncovered and remembered, so that her stories resist mainstream knowledge about Cambodia or Cambodian Americans. After all, this was why Asian American Studies was founded forty years ago upon the blood and tears of all students of color who were fed up with the education system neglecting the needs of the marginalized and oppressed communities of color. Without raising the voices of the oppressed, we are just letting the dominant american (read: white, male, heterosexual, upper class, christian) discourse win. It was this class, as well as Jolie, that encouraged me to dig deeper into my own racialized and sexualized self and to discover who I was in the larger context of american society.
From Asian American Studies, I joined the Asian Pacific Coalition (APC) at UCLA, a coalition of twenty-plus Asian American and Pacific Island organizations on campus. I eventually became the LGBT programmer, dealing with queer issues within the Asian American and Pacific Island community, such as issues of race, class, culture, family, shame, and gender expression, and how all these intersect with our politicized identity as Queer People of Color in america. As a whole, APC also worked on prominent issues within our communities such as hate crimes awareness, granting financial aid to AB540 and undocumented students, and the UC admissions crisis. In many ways I identified with the issues and people of APC; I finally found a niche where I belonged and was allowed to flourish without boundaries and borders and fear of authority.

Hello?
Hello? Wayne! I have good news.
What is it?
We got our green card!
Oh. That’s cool.

One serene afternoon last November while I was resting in my work office at school, Pa called me and revealed the good news. I should have been more excited, since we had been waiting for this magical card that would lift us out of hell for eight long years. But that day I was a bit more nonchalant than usual. I could imagine how relieved and happy Pa and Ma would be. We were finally permanent residents in this motherfucking country. That means: (1) I could finally apply for financial aid; (2) Ma and I could finally work legally; (3) We no longer had to renew our nonimmigrant visas every year, spending thousands of dollars each time for something whose usefulness lasted only a few months; and (4) I could go study abroad. I did become a bit excited later though, as I called up some friends to tell them about it. I even made the effort to tell my ex, since we used to fight frequently about immigration issues.
Ma called me later that night to tell me the news. Apparently Pa never told her that I already knew, so she was quite astonished and somewhat disappointed that she wasn’t the one to surprise me. We both laughed at the situation. Ma’s tone was especially joyful that night; it had been a while since I’d heard that tone of voice. “Eight years of waiting, and it’s finally here,” she squeaked like a happy little girl over the phone. “Eight years of prayer and god has answered our call!” She then asked me, “A-Yuan, so have you been praying too?”
I had not said a word of prayer since coming to college. I had continuously and diligently prayed to god for years for our green card, but he never answered. So I gave up. I used to pray before every meal to thank god for the food and blessing, but I also eventually stopped as I decided that it was not god, but my hardworking Pa and Ma, as well as the many nameless and faceless farmers and laborers, who toiled their asses off for the food in front of me. After involving myself in Asian American Studies and rediscovering my identity, I learned to decolonize my mind and unlearn all knowledge that had been given me for the purpose of controlling me and keeping me chained to the systems of oppressive authority. I don’t know what came to me, but I decided to tell her right at that moment that I no longer believed in god. I felt bad afterward, because Ma’s tone suddenly lowered and turned serious. She simply asked “Why? How could you?” However, we both agreed to drop the subject, for this was a night worthy of cherishing with a pleasant mood, a moment worthy of engraving in our fading memories of confusion, panic, and struggle.
I don’t know whether Pa’s love for america, the country that had given us more shit than gold, has really given him something in return. He works much harder now than ever before, driving around Los Angeles everyday to visit his sales clients and maintain their working relations. Sometimes he would spend more than four or five hours in the car each day, going to places as far apart as Riverside or Irvine or the San Fernando Valley (and I complain to my parents that they don’t let me drive enough. Imagine me sitting behind the wheel four or five hours a day!). Every time I see him, his white hairs seem to increase in amount. It pains me a little to notice that. Ma still works at the same office she had been working since we moved to Los Angeles, but now she no longer needs to work under someone else’s name. In a way, she is finally a person with a real face and name, working legitimately in the exploitive eyes of the law. At home for Pa, life is the usual: stacks of bills to pay, which include my shameless credit card and phone bills; learning to cook more dishes as he finally begins to notice how hard Ma works; reading the Taiwanese dailies to keep updated on Taiwanese politics, especially the recent mass-scandal involving the former president Chen Shui-Bian and his family; turning on the karaoke machine that a church friend gave him as a present to practice his unsharpened and much-to-be-desired singing talents. Sometimes Ma would sing with him, especially when the heavenly voice of Teng Li Chun (Teresa Teng) played through the audio, even though she can’t stand his voice. Sometimes they would discuss the politics they read about, although these discussions never last long since they both share similar views. Sometimes I am taken aback upon seeing how much in common Pa and Ma have with each other.

So when are you leaving for Vietnam?
Tomorrow night.
Are you all packed up and ready?
Yeah, more or less. Still need to pack toiletries, but generally it’s all done.
You excited?
A little. I’m more scared than excited.
Well I’m sure you’re going to have a blast. Take care of yourself, ok? And remember to tell Ma that if she or Pa ever need any money, just call me and I’ll go ahead and send some over.
Okay.
Bye Wayne. Have a safe trip!
Thanks Chieh.

“So how’s your daughter? I haven’t seen her in so long!”
“Oh, she’s busy as usual. Still trying to get settled in her new home. Apparently rookie nurses don’t get priority vacation like senior nurses do. So she never has time off.”
“Wow that’s tough. How much does she work?”
“Twelve hours a day, every other day. So at least she still has time to take a break.”
“That’s good. Your daughter is so good now! All married and working and making money.”
“Nah, it’s nothing. Took her long enough to find a direction in life!”
“Don’t say that! Your children are so intelligent and diligent. Speaking of which, how’s your son? How’s UCLA for him? Is he still superior at math like I remembered?”
“Psh, that son of mine. He’s studying this thing called ‘Asian American Studies.’ I don’t even know what it is and what he wants to do or can do with it. I asked him numerous times but he’s never able to answer me! He just mumbles some nonsense about non-profits or whatever. His Mandarin is getting worse and worse every time I talk to him. I can barely understand anything he says these days!”
“Wow really? So no math or science for him? That’s such a shame! He was such a smart kid.”
“Yeah, I keep on telling him he needs to think for his future, and not be like his Chieh who took years to figure out what she wanted to do. Especially in these hard economic times, we can’t afford to have him wander around looking for nonexistent work opportunities. That’s why I keep pressuring him to take his GRE’s so he can at least go to grad school.”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine. He’s an obedient and smart son; he’ll know what to do.”
“Yeah, sure. He better.”