Navigating through Asian America is a fucking journey

I sometimes think I’ve found my way, but shit happens to remind me I am nowhere near the end of the journey.

I got into it hella deep with moms this weekend. It started off with my mom telling me once again how much she hates my tattoos & piercings. I usually brush it off with a laugh & think to myself that she’ll get over them someday, but something else happened this time. I kinda… snapped and went off on her. It went from “when will you stop criticizing me and just accept me” to “I’m bout to lose my head from the high ass standards you set for me” to “I used to run off with hella guys ‘cause they gave me affection I craved from you.” Mah shit was all over the place.

See Korean people don’t talk to their kids about their feelings, tell them they love them & shit like that. It remains a mystery to my mom how I turned out to be this emotional, heart-on-my-sleeve type character. I’m not mad at my fam for being this way; I get it. Still, I can’t handle the way some things so down. Above everything else, what bothers me most is how everything gets brushed under the rug. We don’t talk about shit. I always try to creep up to my mom & put some semi-heavy shit on her that she can’t ignore. She always successfully dodges my attempts to work things out, to really, finally be close to her.

I thought this time she couldn’t ignore me. I mean I was crying and yelling, all that shit. Still, she managed to keep her face straight as an arrow, go feed our dog, then cook dinner for my dad. And as much as I want to be mad & call her cold blooded, it’s just a cultural difference that is embedded in her, and I can’t change 40 years of that shit easily. This stuff’s hard for a lot of people to understand, whose parents openly show how they feel towards them. That’s not how things work in my life, in my family. At the same time, this silence that’s so painfully scratching at all of us ain’t working for me either.

After all that, I still don’t know what I want from them, more specifically from my mother. This being in the middle shit—only half understanding my Korean side and half understanding my American side—is constant. I’m still tryna figure out how I can stop being half Asian and half American, and make “Asian American” its own, singular thing.

-ahnface