Too Fast, Too Late

Finally, it is getting hot. The sun is shining. The skies are blue. Once again. The wind blowing through what is left of my hair, I keep on rolling the the lever for the windows to sink so everyone else with their windows down can hear the music too. The speakers are bumping bass-intensive trance music to pass this drive by faster. Faster. Faster so I can pass everyone by. This repetition of melodies cycling round and round this never ending road leading me down and down that I am actually going up waiting for the climax waiting for a brick on the road anything anything

I push the gas pedal, the engine roars like a mechanical lion. This jungle, I call 87 N, has a lot of traffic during this time. I smell the gasoline burning, intensifying the heat of this hot day. These exhausted pipes fuel this air. I can see this air getting more rigid like waves of a toxic ocean, like the transparent outlinings of ghosts. So empty, yet dense. I can taste the bitterness of this so-called necessity to go faster, to maintain this speed.

I am trying to get home 75 miles per hour. The fast lane, though it's just me.. It's 3:27. 3 minutes until the middle of the hour. I can't stand being in the middle. I wish I could have those 30 minutes back because time is so precious. That's what I've been taught.

PAUSE.

Where am I? Where am I going really? How am I really doing? Output more Q's so more A's can come out at such an alarming rate. product product. BEEP BEEP. It's TIME to WAKE up, but I'm too tired to get up again and again and again. To get back on this road. Back and forth. Back and forth. I am beat down by time though so many people want to beat time. Sometimes, I just want to take it slow so I can see myself move without the blindfolds.

I'll be sure to give you time.

Four Corners of My Lime Green Wall

It's great to wake up to a fruity color like lime green. The color of the walls I wake up to remind me I am in my room in San Jose. Where I can sleep as long as I want. Where during a break like Spring Break I do not have to worry as much about reading, writing papers, or exams. Where my stomach does not feel as empty. Where my mother comes in the middle of the night yelling at how skinny and green I am and forces a glass of milk down my throat. It's quite dark. Let me open the blinds. Ah, sonshine. Good morning.

Spring Break has been a trip though I haven't been around much besides around San Jose. I've been here since Saturday. I hitched a ride with Thinh, Nam's friend, along with Phi, Helen, and myself. When I got home, I noticed the smell of my house more. It's like as if my nose had become unfamiliar to the scent of my home. My nose had to get used to it again. I could smell the distinctiveness of my house. I realized how powerful the kitchen is in our home dictating and controling the scents around the house. My mother's cooking, I could taste home upon sniffing it.

The red carpets of my house was something I had to get used to again. Being at Juan's place for almost month, I've gotten used to gray carpet. In my room, I notice the pee stains left by my chihuahua dog, Lucky. Whose dog isn't named Lucky if you are in a Vietnames familly? I call my dog Bang Lai, a name I thought of when seeing her run around and bowing for food--the rhythm of her movement. Don't ask me why else I named her that. It was the first sound or combination of words I heard in my head.

I've been going through my family pictures lately. My baby pictures included. I laugh at the naked pictures of me. I laugh at the little scribbles I angrily made as a kid in the photo albums. "Stupit family." "Retarted Guy." "Girls are Retarted." That's what I had written when I was a boy whose feelings were hurt. I wonder if I will laugh at a lot of things I had gone through not so long ago just like how I am laughing at the marks made by my adolescent self. Of course i will. Perhaps I should think more that way. I laugh at the stories I wrote when I was in elementary school. For instance, the mini-book I wrote about my macarena-singing stuffed gorilla who I had named "Banana", which I still have sitting somewhere downstairs. I should bring it back upstairs to my room.

Hearing my voice of me then is hilarious. This laughter is something different. Not the laughter you laugh at/with a comedian like Dave Chapelle. Or when you are embarrassed or nervous. Or when you see or hear someone else laugh. Or when you see or hear something silly or awkward. Or when you see or hear something that is ironic, satirical, absurd. Or when something is cute. No, it's incredibly different. I am guessing it is the laughter when a memory gets open up and you start to remember or at least try to remember how you were, what you were thinking of during that period that picture was taken. It's funny because yeah perhaps you look silly or cute, but that was you, and in many ways, that is you. Funny, how that is. I am still laughing about writing about why I am laughing. That's funny too.

The four corners of my lime green walls are dark now that the lights are off. I know it will be bright again. Until then, I have to keep my blinds closed until morning. I know these walls will shine again once I wake up after hearing the owl near my house hoot and open those blinds. Ah, good morning sonshine. It's 1 pm and it's time to live again.

Down Varsity Lane

I drove down varsity lane at Willow Glen today with Phi and Michelle. It was more like driving down memory lane. I spent 7 years of my life at Willow Glen from middle school to high school. It's hard to believe so much has happened, how much things have changed at Willow Glen. New buildings, new signs, different colors. At least as I was driving, the bumps on the road felt the same. The bumps of my past.

I saw the basketball courts where I spent most of my time in 6th and 7th grade. I developed a move called "monkey style" that was a lay-up with a pass behind my back before shooting it into the basketball. A few friends of my friends who played with me should remember this. Good times.

I saw the spit pit near the basketball courts on the middle school side. The "spit pit" that was a stairway leading down to a room in the gym. No one should ever walk down there or else you'll get spat on.

I saw the shared running track. Dusty like how I remembered it. That was where I knew I had to change my weight and my look. I sprinted well, but my endurance was lacking. I was a pretty chubby kid. That summer before my Freshman year, I jogged literally everyday to improve myself. I lost 30 pounds. During my first year, I finished the mile under 10 min. PE was huge for me back then because throughout middle school I felt so insufficient. I had 15 min mile times. I wanted to change it all: my look, my athleticism, myself. And, I did.

I saw the field of tanbark which was the "new quad area" during the time. That table under the tree right dab in the center of the quad. I could still visualize my friends playing 13 on the tables. Along their side, I would watch, my hands in my uniformed khaki pant pockets, black sleeves of the same pull-over hoodie I would wear everyday. I could taste the chimichangas, the pink lemonade, the hot cheetos, the dominos pizza and breadsticks. Our little niche.

I wonder what I would do without all these spaces I had and experienced. What if I was not here, but there? What if I was born a few days earlier, I would be up a grade. What if I had stayed in East Side San Jose, and not moved to the outskirts of Willow Glen? Sometimes I see my life in a linear fashion. Upon analzying it, I see how each of the things that happen in my life fall into place almost so perfectly to form the person I am today. However, I know I don't have to look it that way all the time because I always have these questions of "what if"? What if I did not exist here, but I existed there?

The more I accept my home, the more my home will accept me. No more questions about where I belong when I know I belong here already. I am ready to enter through this door to stay here for awhile longer. That's only if it'll take me. It's all up to me whether or not I want to. And, I do.

Distance to Closeness

The roads stretch far into the distance. I have yet to reach Closeness Inn at the median of this road. I am not too close, but I can get there if I keep on moving. My feet hurt from walking this gray, stone pathway. This cannot be Wizard of Oz again. The more concrete I walk on, the more concrete this distance I've been keeping from people becomes. I wish I had my razor scooter to get there faster. But, wait, is time really that important to me?

Tick Tock. My grandfather clock calls from the grave. He looks from the altar. Tick Tock. Shall I move on?

This cannot be Wizard of Oz again. You are the new-age the tin-person from today's standards: The robot, who show me the how it is like to have a heart. Perhaps, I am the robot. We are robots together I suppose. Please travel with me to Closeness Inn. I don't want to walk this road alone. Let's reach Closeness together.

This cannot be Wizard of Oz again, but it is now that I see it that way.

Save Her to Define Me

Their speech and the movement of their mouths do not align. The weak woman character in the dubbed-in-Vietnamese Chinese kung-fu series cries in distress as she is getting raped by a villainous male character with hands that aggressively caresses her face traveling down to her waist and onto her.... Her voice is drowned by the dubbers inaccurately capturing the emotions displayed, skewing the tone of the scene. She screams. I wish I could had done something. Though I made sense of my world through these depictions on screen, it was not real, but it soon became real for me.

My 8 year old eyes, with pupils of dark brown, mirror the horrendous scene on the tv. I slowly form my perception of good and evil, man and woman.

I can see my little self growing angry, frustrated, confused of why women had to be weak, why women had to be dependent on a male hero to save her. I was a boy who wished he could be a hero to all those women under the evil of certain men. As a boy, I felt it was my duty to protect women, as a boy becoming a man.

I remember back then, I told my mother not to wear such revealing outfits out of fear she might attract other men. I wanted her to stay with me all the time, to smell her hair, to say she is my mother. "Please do not go to the doctor's, ma. I don't want him to touch you in those ways." I cried to my mother. I would use a plastic stool we would buy from Dai Thanh Supermarket on Story Road to hold onto her while she makes rice porridge. The familiar scent of her black, curly hair comforts me that I am home with my mother and that she is safe and that we are safe.

Manhood, I believed, was defined through these lines set by movies and television. I believed that one day I could be those heroic men in these stories. That was what represented good to me. I should have realized that women have the agency, that I should not be protective all the time of them, that I should not try to define myself through rescuing them to reinforce their fragility and weakness. Though I am conscious of this, I still have a tendency to be protective, but I am slowly letting it go little by little.

I want to let go of what I felt was right to me then
and move on what I think is right to me now.
The first step is to accept that "Women are not Roses".
They are who they are. Who they want to be. What they want to do.
I am who I am and I can't define them because I am not them.
I am not my mother. I am not you..

Faces

My father and uncle sitting cross-legged around circles complemented with beer cans. The smell of cigarette smoke and alcohol consumes the air. One of my uncle with a cigarette in his mouth deals. A deal sealed, you can never take it back. Whoever made the deal must win or pay. Either or, either or. Faces, some red some smiling some dark some pale, face each other and onto facing the face of the dice facing the ceiling. The rattling of dice in bowls sounding like rattle snakes rattling: the click-clacking of venom. A strike into the heart with a bite. A bad omen. Dollar signs are on the line: who will take all that cash, all those chips? These color-coded tokens of yellow, red, white, and blue, have faces of dollar signs. The American faces on grassy-green bills show $20 on each of the sides of the rectangle: back and front with the front facing up. 2-dimensional. Stacks of them on carpet floor. American presidents on these leaf papers face these new refugees who've just come in. Faces around the circle face those faces of the currents of history printed and value instilled. Say "Hello" or "A-lo" to a pot of gold? Jackpot? Andrew Jackson? Jack Nguyen? Their eyes on the prize, in-n-out and between them, only them.

Friday Night(s)

I don't want to let the drink talk for me. I ask it where it was made. It answers Europe, perhaps Germany, perhaps Russia, perhaps here wherever here is, it answers through my reading of its name and labels of the bottle. I twist its cap. I smell the scent of nail polish. I imagine my multiple Vietnamese barbers from multiple beauty salons. I imagine them cutting my hair, calculating which angle to snip at, wondering if I wanted it that way. I smell that scent, yet I still consume it, a piece of myself, my make-up. My mother appears out of that imagery evoked by my scent. My mother appears when I hear you speak of whatever issues you have being a woman.

Tears drip down an unfamiliar face. I've never seen this side of me before. Thank you for witnessing it so I can witness it for myself. Thank you.

Possession

"No that's mine," I said out loud and in my mind. "That's mine...."

You know how you were growing up, there were a lot of kids who wrote their names on everything such as their backpacks, their binders, their gameboys, their water bottles? I remember knowing and seeing so many kids back in elementary school all the way up to high school who just wrote their names on everything. Of course, many of those kids progressed in writing their names on walls through the voices of their spray cans. I was never one of those kids who wrote their names on their belongings to show possession. Perhaps, I was a little ashamed of flaunting my name. Perhaps, I did not want to show that I was possessive. But, I was some way or another.

The Things They Carried by O'Brien was a book I had to read for AP Langauge and Composition my junior year. It made me really realize the things we mark ours define who we are whether it is our stories, our childhood toys, our family. Anything. It does not have to be materialistic. Posessiveness. I've always had trouble claiming my belongings. Throughout my childhood, I tried to avoid bringing friends over to my house. Perhaps once again, I was ashamed of the belongings in my house: the blood-red lights that shine from my alter with my deceased relatives' picture staring down at you, the smell of roasted fish or rice porridge, the unconventionality of everything, the lack of American-ness you can say. I couldn't proudly say this was my house, this was my family, this was my room.

If my belongings, or at least what I believe is mine, defines my identity, I suppose it is not too late to claim what is mine.

This is me. This is mine. Son's....

In a non-selfish way of course.

Hear I Speak

I hear the Vietnamese in me
as
the sound of my voice captures
the pinches of Accents
above, between, under
my words
my syllables.

It cuts through
what I call this overriding
tongue swirling to the
melodies of
The Wheels on the Bus
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Each word
pronounced,
sung
how
it's supposed to be. The real way. The correct way.

I hear the Vietnamese in me
and
it sounds so
B-\\E-A.....TI-------FUL.

Ode to Connie

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
She uses her tongue to educate and live.
Or perhaps, live to educate.
A dragon-boat rower,
her arms amplifying strength and might,
she fights her way
through Ignorance's waves of Injustices.
She uses her tongue to taste
the wine of her roots.
From the bottom up,
Bloom[helping others] [Connie] Bloom[helping others].
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

. . .

. . .
is what I hear in my house.
. . .
Silence.
. . .
I hear the rice pot set by my mother murmuring the words "Never go hungry". The smell permeates upstairs into my room where I sit glued to the monitor screen.
I hear my father's tool banging on the vocal chords underneath a decrepit car from one of his clients. It's cold and it's raining. It looks like he's alone at his shop today.
I hear my eldest brother scrambling through the refrigerator in the kitchen before eating 11 PM dinners by himself, standing up. His hands glued to the remote. His eyes glued to the television screen.
. . .
Silence.
. . . . . .

I come back. My room had changed. A constantly changing and rearranging museum. The order of how my books are stacked on my shelf near my closet against the radiant lime green wall have changed. I know my father had been going through my belongings. The silence had caused him to go through his son's belongings to decipher who is own son is. Who is his son? Who is this boy who he calls his?

I can imagine him flipping through the pages of my certificates, autobiographies, reflections, pictures mirroring what I had done in high school and been doing at Berkeley. My internships, my summer programs, my high school involvement, Key Club, graduation, Reach!, SASC, Let's Rise. Everything, not through spoken words, but through text and pictures. I can imagine him struggling to define his son through foreign words he had never seen before, through foreign people who had never seen or met before. Why is this? Because I've kept my home reality and outside reality separate. Silence.

Funny how I've been doing the same for my eldest brother. Dusty. I try to understand my brother by checking up on what kind of books he's been reading, movies he's been watching. I see it's always quite organized. Dusty still. I wonder who you are, Thanh. Silence.