Underneath my yellow skin

Author Archives: Minna Hong

Gender-blending and me

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Gender has been a big topic in my life–much against my will. If it were up to me, I’d not think about it at all. Sadly, that is not a choice, especially the way things are going in America right now. I have often thought that if I were just left alone, I would be fine with the label ‘woman’. Meaning, if no one ever talked about it, it would be fine by default.

However. Given that people are way too consumed by the gender of people they don’t even know, I reluctantly have to think about it. To recap: I am AFAB, and for the first fifty years of my life, I begrugdingly accepted that I was a woman (especially in the eyes of others). I didn’t feel a kinship to the word, but I was fine with it. Fine.

I was not elated. I was not even happy. I did not embrace the word or really consiber it mine. It was just shorthand for being physically coded as female whilst being inner coded as ‘who the fuck knows’?

I just left it as I was a woman even if I did not feel like one. That was, however, because I didn’t truly know what a woman was supposed to be like. I’m saying this with no snark. I did not fit within the traditional/stereotypical description/definition of a woman, and I haven’t since I was a kid. I don’t like cooking, cleaning, sewing, any kind of crafting, pink, makeup, fashion, clothes (both the styling thereof and actually wearing them), etc. I did not like dolls when I was a kid; I much preferred stuffed animals.

I did not dream of my wedding or play mother and baby with my (nonexistent) dolls. The dolls I did have, I just made them have sex with each other–regardless of gender. That should have been a sign that my sexuality was YES PLEASE, but I was too repressed to recognize it at the time.

I think the only traditional female markers I have are my boobs, my hip-length hair, and my love of sappy ballads. I mean, I guess plushies are still coded female, but not quite as strongly as it was when I was a kid.

My hobbies are considered more male as well. Video games and martial arts, both with a heavy emphasis on weapons. I used to watch sports (football, baseball, and basketball, specifically), but I stopped for political reasons. Plus, I just lost interest at some point.

when I crush out on someone, I don’t want to say I don’t see gender, but it’s just not that important to me. I have mentioned several times before that K has marveled at how easily I can switch someone’s gender, and I truly think it’s because I don’t see gender as rigid–and most definitely not as a binary. In addition, I only see it as a part of someone’s whole, so I don’t get hung up on how someone should be in accordance to their gender.

In fact, one of my biggest gripes is when people want to make the definition of woman and man so narrow and rigid. Why put people in boxes/cages that can’t be expanded? It’s also a part of another pet peeve–the idea that men and women can’t be friends. There is so much wrong with that statement, I almost don’t know where to begin.


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Mindfulnot, not mindfulness (part three)

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Yeah, I’m back for part three of my musing on mindfulness. Here’s part two in which I talked about, well, I’m not really sure what. I think I had more side notes tahn I did actual post. That’s just the way I roll, though. I make no apologies for it. I will footnote you all. day. long. I have footnoted footnotes before, and I will do it again.

That’s a word I love, by the way. Footnote. Side note, too.

Back to mindfulness. When I started researching the negative sides of mediattion, I expected to find nothing. I thought it was just me because people seemed to be universally positive about it. “It calms my mind!” “It makes me see the world in such a different way!” “It eases my anxiety!” “It connects me with the world!”

I know that there are proselytizers for anything and everything. I know that. I have lived that. I am careful not to do that myself because I can tip into that way too easily. And, I’ll be honest. The more praise something gets, the more suspicious I am of it. Not because I think it’s going to be trash, but because I know it won’t live up to the hype.

There is only one movie that I ever ended up really liking after being skeptical about it before going to see it and that was The Royal Tenenbaums. I don’t like many of the actors in it, and I did not have hope. Much to my surprise, I really liked it. Other than that, though, I am pretty accurate as to what I’m going to (not) like.

I really wish I had known I was neuroatypical earlier in my life. It would have made things so much easier. Things fell into place once a friend gently suggested that I take online autism test. The irony is that I knew my brother was autistic several decades ago beacuse he exhibited classic autistic traits–no eye contact, did not like being touched, very into techie things (there’s a picture of him gumming an alarm clock when he was a baby, and my mom told me he took it apart around the same time), had to do things his way, and basically stimmed (before it was a known thing).

A few months before my medical crisis, I was talking to my brother, and I casually said something like, “Because of you being on the spectrum–” He stopped me and asked me what I meant by that. I scrambled and backed up, but in the end, I told him what I meant. We’re pretty open with each other, and I did not want to lie to him.

A few weeks later, he called me to tell me that he had looked up autism and it really helped him. i felt bad that I hadn’t told him before beacuse I thought it was obvious and because he knew his older son had it–and his son was a lot like him.

It’s funny to me that he had no idea that he was autistic and needed me to tell him whereas I also had no idea that I might be and needed a friend to suggest I check it out. I thought I might have ADHD, but I never in a million years dreamed I might be autistic as well. Why? Well, mostly beccause of how autism is portrayed in society. What is emphasized when autism is mentioned? Male, stimming, can’t look you in the eye, can’t empathize with other people, low-to-no emotions.


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More on being mindful and meditation

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I want to talk more about mindfulness, meditation, and Taiji. I started a post aabout it yesterday, but as is my wont, I meandered all over the place. And probably fell asleep while writing it. My sleep is just terrible lately, for reasons that aren’t part of this post. So, yeah. Mindfulness? Miss me with that noise.

Look.

Look!

I’m not against mindfulness. In general, I’m pro-doing what makes you feel better as long as it’s not harmful to you in the long run or to other people. And, by not harmful to others, I mean truly harmful. Not, “you hurt me by setting entirely reasonable boundaries” harmful, but actually harmful.

I’m a big believer in acknowledging that most of us are just getting by as best we can. Life is hard, yo. And that’s for almost everyone.

Side note: I had a deep and abiding hatred for Christianity for most of my twenties. I had the  misfortune of being raised in a restrictive, sexist, conservative, Evangelical Christian church. I reacted very poorly to God with a capital G after that.

It took me ten years to get over my hatred. Then, I spent my late-thirties being studiously neutral to Christianity (while secretly judging it). It’s only in my forties and fifties that I can truly say that I’m fine with Christianity*.

Side note to the side note: It’s like Christmas and my birthday. I hated both when I was younger.Really hated them both. Then I reached a point when I said I didn’t hate them any longer, but still felt negatively about them. It took a long time (and a lot of Taiji) before I actually felt neutral about them. Do I feel positively about them? No. But, I’ll take it as a win that I no longer hate both.

Also, I have a new birthday. It’s the day I died and came back to life. It means much more to me than my actual birthday because, well, it just does.

Side note to the side note to the side note: When I was in my twenties, my mom would call me every year on my birthday. Foolishly, I would try to brush it off because I absolutely hated my birthday back then. My mother would get teary and go on and on about how important the day had been to her. That and the birth of my brother were the two most important events of her life. She went on about it for so long, I started comforting her.

That’s my role in life, you see. I’ve called myself her emotional support human, and I am used to it now. Back then, though, it really chafed that she dumped all this on me ON MY BIRTHDAY. It had to be about her, even on a day that was supposedly supposed to be about me. One reason I hated my birthday, by the way.

Wow. I really went in circles in this post, didn’t I?


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Mindfulness? More like mindlessness (part two)

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Today’s word is mindfulness. Words I don’t like, I mean. That’s what I’m focused on these past few days. I can hear you wondering aloud what issue I could possible have with mindfulness. Being aware of one’s inner sensations, feelings, etc., as well as one’s outer environment can’t be a bad thing, right?

Of course that’s a leading question. I would not ask it if I did not have an answer that was counter to what common belief is. I will say that I get the point of mindfulness and  I am not saying it’s completely bad. What I will say is that it’s not universally good, either.

Side note: Twenty years ago, it was not a thing. Now, it’s a big thing. Being mindful, I mean. I know that things change over time, but it’s bemusing to me in this case.

Roughly seventeen years ago, my Taiji teacher started to incorporate meditation into her classes. I struggled with it from the start, and at a certain point, I started having flashbacks. I told her I could not do it any longer. She put a pair of practice deer horn knives in my hands and showed me how to walk the circle. I fell in love with the  deer horn knives, which I have talked about several of times. This post is not about that, though.

Once mindfulness became a societal thing and somewhat of a godlike idol for many people, I became intrigued by the phenomenon–and lowkey irked. Not just because I’m a contrarian who hates it when something becomes a snake oil answer for everything that ails you, but also because, well, it makes me wonder what I’m missing.

Here’s the thing. Mindfulness is like ASMR to me. If I had no reaction to it, then I would just let it go. I hate ASMR. It sends me into an instant rage (well, certain types of ASMR. Funnily enough, I read a story from someone who in some professional capacity studied ASMR? Shilled the positive benefits of it? Something like that. He said with a straight face that ASMR could not fail anyone; it can only BE failed by a person.

He did not say that exactly, of course. But that’s what he meant. He said that no one actually had a negative reaction to ASMR because ASMR was a positive reaction. Gotta love that circular meaning! I get what he was trying to say, but to me, that’s not a legit answer. It’s pretty amusing that he wants to make it so that ASMR is negative reaction-proof. He went on to say that if the people who reacted negatively could actually feel the ASMR properly, they would react positively to it.


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What is forgiveness, part two

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I want to talk a little (lot) bit more about forgiveness.

You know that thing when you say a word enough times in a row and it starts to sound foreign? Like table. Say it repeatedly for a minute, then see if it still has meaning to you.

I mention that because I feel that way about certain words, and not just from repeating them. I wrote yesterday’s post about it, and I want to continue unpacking what forgiveness means to me–and why it is so fraught.

As I said in that post, I was raised to believe that my emotions didn’t matter, that I didn’t matter outside of what I could do for other people. My father was cold, emotionally distant, and deeply selfish. Narcissistic, even, in the classic sense of the word. Not a diagnosis–just how I experienced him as a father. He was obnoxiously sexist–well, let me clarify. He didn’t like anyone in general, but he esppecially hated women. Or rather, put them in a very restrictive box. I’ll give you one example.

The last time he was here, my brother, my mother, my father, and I went to Costco. While we were there or shortly thereafter, my father said it must be so hard for the housewives (and, yes, he used that word) to shop there. I was confused and asked him why he said that. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know and I should have just kept my mouth shut, but something inside me just would not let me.

This is pretty typical of our relationship, by the way. I know my father is deeply sexist. He has been all my life. I know he is going to say ignorant things about women, and sometimes, I think he does it just to get under my skin. Or at the very least, he simply does not care. I say that because he’ll often preface what he’s about to say with, “I know Minna won’t like this”–then why the fuck say it? It’s on par with, “I”m not sexist, but”–yes, yes you are. Even if you have that one female friend who totally says you’re a feminist, man.

I know my father is goading me. I know I should just let it go, especially now that he has dementia. But I can’t help myself. It’s as if something inside of me just won’t let it go. I’m sure it’s partly the neurodivergency in me, but I am a grown-ass person. I know what he’s doing. I should be better than that.


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Some words are meaningless

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There are some words that I just don’t understand or get. I mean, I know them on an intelligence level, but I don’t get them on a cellular level.

One is gender, but that’s more the concept of gender. I’m not talking about that in this post because that’s not the point. I want to talk about another big picture word that I feel gets too mired down in toxic Christianity. (And maybe other religions, but that’s the one I know best.)

Fair warning: My bias is that I grew up in a very sexist, patriarchal, conservative with a small-c,  toxic, and just overwhelmingly negative Evangelical Taiwanese church. It was awful, and my lasting memories are, quite frankly, scarring. I walkekd away from the church in my early twenties, fought about it with my mother for about ten years (while being intensely angry at a god I didn’t think existed), and then made my peace with it.

However, any time the word/concept of forgiveness comes up, I become incandescent with rage. Or at least I used to. it’s not as bad now, but I still involuntarily grimace when I hear/read the word. And no matter how people try to explain it in a positive way, I still view it as a negative.

“Forgiveness does not mean forgetting.”

“Forgiveness just means getting past the anger.”

“Forgiveness is for the forgiver, not the forgiven.”

These are the common phrases, and they never fail to elicit a huge eyeroll from me (even if it’s mental).

I was reading an old Captain Awkward post, and the idea of forgiveness came up. One commenter made several comments that closely mirrored how I feel about it. I’m not going to say the name, but she talked about how it bothered her after she left her abuser how people wanted her to perform being a good victim by at least giving lip service to forgiving her abuser (paraphrasing).

I appreciated that she didn’t just push back on forgiveness itself, but that she embraced anger. She mentioned how anger helped her, and I really related to that. Growing up, I was told that any so-called negative emotion I showed was not ok. Oh, it wasn’t said in those specific words, but believe me, I knew it. By the look on my mother’s face. By the way my father shouted at me if I  dared show I was not happy.

People were supportive, but there were still murmurs of, “Oh sure, anger for a while, but then–you let go of it, right?” To which she defiantly said that her anger was what healed her. Again, I’m paraphrasing, but she rejected the idea that you had to let go of your anger at any point.


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Getting out of my comfort zone

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I am a creature of habit. I tend to stick to the same thing day after day. I don’t have a problem eating the same thing on the daily, and it’s comforting to have a routine. I mention this because I’ve been thinking about dating. Just thinking about it. As I’ve mused about it in past posts.

I have waxed poetic about how I envy my brother for being decisive and energetic. When he started dating again, he made his plan and followed it to a T. He signed up with several dating sites and swiped, er, right? Left? Whichever is the ‘yes’ option many times. He put hours a day into dating. In other words, he took it as seriously as a job.

I warned him that Asian men and black women got the least responses on dating apps, but it deterred him not. He did admit it got tiresome at times, but he stuck it out. He averaged a date a week, and in a year, he found the love of his life.

In the process, he went on a trip outside the country by himself for the first time. He found a new layer of confidence in himself that he did not know he had. Over two years later, he’s still with his girlfriend, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this happy before. Well, that’s before all the shit that has happened in Minneapolis.

Putting that aside with great difficulty, I want to focus on my brother for a bit longer. When he started dating, I was thinking I might want to try, too. I looked at my OKCupid dating app, but I just couldn’t get into it.

See, here’s the thing. My inertia is way higher than my desire to get laid. I remember how great sex was. Believe me, I love sex. But. I don’t love what I need to do to actually get it. I mean, I probably could get sex fairly easily if I wanted to. Still at my age. But I’m not motivated to actually do anything about it. That’s my problem through and through.

I’ve been reading up on autism. There are articles about how there is no such thing as lazy and how somoene with autism has to fight their own brain to get shit done. This is the hardest thing for me.

Side note: I was looking for a song/video to include in this post as I do. I Googled songs about being the best me or something like that. One was a Bad Bunny song. I had heard a few of his songs, but hadn’t gotten too deep into it. Then, I saw his skits on SNL, and I noticed that he wore dresses in many of them. Somebody said something about him being pansexual and wearing dresses. I


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Looking for lust in all the wrong–well, no–places

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In the last post, I was talking about the possibility of me dating again. I summed it up in the last post, kind of, but I’m going to break it down in this post, kind of.

Here’s the thing. I’ve mostly fallen into my romantic relationships in the past. Meaning, a romantic relationship sprang up out of a friendship. While I have a type (quick recap: short dark hair, nerdy glasses, warm smile, deep voice, square body (thick), a nerd in general, funny, and, weirdly enough, optimistic), it’s not something that I stick to in real life, mostly because as I said, friendship leads to romance, and I don’t restrict my friendships by appearance.

I didn’t really date, either. I started dating my first boyfriend when I was sixteen. That was probably the closest to dating I did. We lived forty minutes apart, so we only saw each other on the weekends. He was a sweet guy and extremely smart, and we dated for two years. That was the closest to a typical relationship I’ve had.

My first boyfriend in college, we were good friends who spent a lot of time together. He asked me out, and I said why not? That ended up being a really complicated relationship that turned me off dating, unfortunately. It also wasn’t typical in that we didn’t go out on dates, really. We just hung out like friends–except with romance included.

I have always been good at sex. VERY good at sex. My motto was that I’d try (almost) anything once. Unless it was truly something I could not stomach, I was good to go. And I liked most of what I experienced. Sex is amazing! Sex is awesome! Sex is life-affirming!

Romance and dating, on the other hand, were hard. The examples I had in my childhood were terrible, and I was deeply and negatively affected by them. I was brought up in a cult-like church that was heavily sexist, conservative, evangelical, and fear/shame-based. Plus, Asian culture is deeply sexist in a different way to American sexism. So I got so much sexism shoved at me on a daily basis.

It’s hard to unlearn that stuff. And I noticed in my last relationship (about fifteen years ago) that I still immediately fell into my traininng as a subservient woman whose only purpose was to please the man* within my vicinity.

I hated who I became, and I realized that dating wasn’t worth it to me. In adidtion, I like being on my own. A lot. If I’m going to be around someone for a significant amount of time, it had better be a very positive experience. I like to say that I’m the cake and the other person would be the frosting. Meaning that the would be additive and not part of the substance.


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Typcasting my love

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Just for a change of pace, let’s talk about something more frivolous than the shitty state of the world. Which, quite honestly, could be anything. Literally anything. In this case, it’s romance sex,  and it’s still related to everything that’s going on.

I have a type. I noticed it decades ago. Alan Rickman.

I could leave it there, but I won’t.

Let’s add to him, Rachel Maddow.

Those were the gold standard for so long. I added to my list Erika Ishii because they are just my everything. That voice. That personality. That bod. That face. That hair! Just, they are the whole package.

Ever since the hell started in Minnesota, I’ve been watching way more news than I used to (and than is probably good for me). I glommed onto a local news anchor, Jana Shortal, who has short, curly hair, is acerbic, yet warm, has a lovely deep voice, and is a lesbian.

I mention the last because that’s been a theme, starting with Rachel Maddow. Dark short hair, wonky glasses (wonky as in wonk, not as in broken/weird), deep, warm voice (of course, these days, a reporter has to have a great voice), nerdy, and a sarcastic yet rousing sense of humor.

Next up was Kara Swisher. Pretty much rinse, lather, repeat. Yes, I know that it should be lather, rinse, repeat, but I’ve always said rinse, leather, repeat–and I won’t ever stop. It’s gotten to the point where I’ll send K a name and a bio with a wry, “So my type!”, and she’ll quip something back in return.

Side note: K and I are both pretty passionate about politics. We agree on most everything just to different degrees. I can count the number of times we’ve flat-out disagreed on something on one hand. We can tell each other things we would not share to the world at large. We’ve been friends for thirty years, and I still learn things about her that I didn’t know before.

We’ve discussed our love lives, sure. She’s been married the entire time we’ve been friends and had her child about ten years into our friendship. I told her that she got the first year free to talk about the baby as much as she wanted. This is the thing I say to all my friends when they have something momentous happen to them. After that, I expect them to return to a more balanced conversation.

K never needed that time. She and I kept on as we always were with her talk of her kid being an additive. I commented on it from time to time, and she said that she was glad to be talking about other things with me. What I inferred was that she wanted to retain her identity as K and not just as L’s mom. I could dig that, and I was happpy to be that person for her. Everyone needs the friend who will just let you be you. And, I love her (now young adult) child as if they were one of my niblings.

K has been my rock throughout my, well, rocky dating history. She’s been there for my heartbreaks and thrills, and she’s not judged me along the way. She’s not coddled me either, though. She’s a straight-shooter, which I appreciate. She’s also been my wingwoman when we went out dancing, back when she lived here. A best gal pal who will hype you up is to be treasured.


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There are no rails any longer

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So. Trump talked of deescalation. I kknew better, but I felt a glimmer of hope that maybe he would do something that appeared to be deescalating. While I personally was gleeful about Bovino leaving (because I loathe him so much), I knew it was not going to make that much of a difference.

I was not wrong. Homan came in talking the same shit, though he wrapped it up in slightly less grotesque language (though still awful). And yet, they are pushing hard, still. Not only were Don Lemon and another journalist, Georgia Forte arrested for reporting on a protest of a local church (and two others were arrested as well), but the ICE raids are still going strong.

Today was another general strike day accross the country. Content creators are fundraising for local immigration rapid response teams as well. The exhaustion is bone-deep. There are some white liberals who say that we cannot afford/that it’s a luxury to be exhausted/fearful. They are not wrong, but they are also not right.

We have to do what we can, yes, but for some of us, that takes more effort than others. And some of us are closer to the danger than others.

Here’s the thing. Is this different than anything we’ve seen before? The brazen lawlessness is. But. The acts of violence against US citizens? No, that is not new. It’s just that it’s been easy for most Americans to ignore because 1. the vast majority of the people being acted upon have been black and brown; and 2. they didn’t literally see it with their eyes.

I have written a ton about how the ease with which people can videotape on their phones these days makes it harder to lie about what the feds are doing.  Lord knows, they keep trying, but most people are not swayed by their lies.

And yet, for every inch of progress it looks like we’ve made gets immediately drowned out by the hundred other nasty, illegal things this federal administration has done and continues to do. In the video I included below, Ta-Nehisi Coates says (I’m paraphrasing a bit, and I think he was quoting Russ Feingold): Against someone who is just determined to become a tyrant….you can’t really design a system that is foolproof.

It’s something I’ve talked about ad nauseam with friends. Our system is far less than perfect, and we’ve had growing pains in our entire existence. However, at the very least, we could believe that the president wanted what was best for the country. No matter how inept and horrible that vision was; it was sincere.


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