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..

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.

(Ignore)ance

When I first heard of this word, I thought ignorance meant "not wanting to know". Since it has the root word of "ignore", the verb, which means to neglect, pretend someone or something is not there, not paying attention. There is intention involved in ignoring. I assumed ignorance was defined along the same lines, but I assumed wrong when my teacher in 4th grade told me it means simply "not knowing", instead of "not wanting to know". It was a hot, sweaty day after that recess when I learned of what that word meant when we were talking about history and its importance.

A student raised his hand and asked the teacher about the phrase "ignorance is bliss".

"Why do we have to learn history when my parents tells me this all the time?"

The teacher replied, "There are some things that we ought to know, and there are some things we ought not to know. History is important because it will help us understand the mistakes we ought not to repeat."

No students asked anymore questions after that. I wanted to know what those "things" were. Why do we need not to know these "things"? I wondered if these things could ruin my life? Isn't knowledge power? How is knowledge dangerous?

I had those questions throughout middle school and high school. Instead of following that phrase, "Ignorance of bliss", I followed the term "Knowledge is power". The computerized, internet age was beginning to pick up speed as computers, internet access became more and more accessible, more people were able to connect to each other, post knowledge on the web. Being the computer geek I was in middle school, I learned so much through the internet: from computer hardware, troubleshooting to glowsticking (raving) to insight on Hip Hop history, culture. I fed on knowledge and knowledge fed on me. In part, the computer, internet contributed highly to my identity: what was AzN? Counter-Strike? Import Cars? Import Models? How much "pryde" could I convey through my Xx's and Oo's in between, in the ends of my screen name?

Now that I am in college, some of the things I learn about society, human condition, institutions, the ills of history empowers me, yet at the same time, makes me more cynical. Sometimes, it hurts to know. It hurts to be able to deconstruct, destabilize your own reality, your family's reality. It hurts to know that you have agency coming from a environment where being dependent, sheltered was all you knew. It was so easy. Now it's so hard.

“Know history, know self. No history, no self.”–Mel Orpilla