Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: isolation

Looking for ways to make my life better

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I was talking in yesterday’s post about my writing. I would dearly love to be able to write fiction again, but it’s a struggle. The words still come fairly easily, but they are not catching fire like they used to. I have mentioned before how if my writing is going well, then there’s a sparkle to the words. A lightness that I can tangibly feel–and see. when it’s not going well, the words are flat and lifeless. Sometimes, I can find ways to spice it up, but oftentimes, I just have to trash it and start over.

I don’t know what to do with my writing, honestly. I know what I want to write. I know what I feel compelled to write. These are not the same thing, though I might be able to meld the two together.

I have to say that it’s time to sort my family shit out. It’s a bit crude to point out that my parents are in the last stage of their life/lives, but it’s true. And it’s wrought/fraught because of my father’s dementia. But, that’s not the only reason. There’s also the fact that my parents are broken people. They have been my whole life, and they’ve only gotten worse as the years have gone by.

I clearly remember having an argument with my mother about social justice issues. This was since my medical crisis. We’ve had plenty of arguments about all the ‘isms’ beforehand, but this was after, I think. My mother said she was a traditional/old-fashioned person and tried to justify it by saying she had been born in 1942.

This argument drives me batshit insane. It’s always given as an excuse for attitudes/beliefs that are frankly horrible. In addition, though, it’s the laziest, most contemptible excuse one can give. Yes, she was born over eighty years ago. But you know what? She was not cryogenically sealed for the ensuing eighty years, only to be defrosted in the last three years. She lived in America during the Civil Rights years. She saw the ERA movement in America, and got to witness marriage equality in both Taiwan and America. Well, she wasn’t here (America)when it happened, but she got to see it happen. She got to experience Taiwan elect its first female president (something America hasn’t managhed to do), and many more progressive things in her eighty years on this earth.


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Objecting to objectification

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There was an interesting discussion between Jessica and Rich on How to Do It about objectification and how to do it in a meaningful and thoughtful way. My immediate reaction was that you can’t. I was pretty adamant about it and upset by the concept. Even with Rich’s caveat about sapiosexuals, I still thought they were being too flip about it.

Then I calmed the fuck down and read it with a more tempered eye. I had my own objections to objectification, but I think Jessica and Rich are two of the most thoughtful columnists on the net. Rich a little less so than Jessica, but they are both heads and shoulders above many of the other advice columnists.

Here’s the thing. I get objectified all the time. All. The. Time. The further out from the norm you are, the more objectified you are by society. Being Asian growing up was a whole traumatic thing. That’s the one Rich mentions in passing, that objectifying someone who might be very sensitive about race would make the sex not great. Which, while he’s right, I think really undersold how undermining it can be.

When I was a teenager, no one wanted to date me. There were many reasons for it, but a big one was being Asian in a white Minnesotan suburb. Then, I hit my twenties when Asian women started becoming exotic. This was….not great. I had an argument with my bestie in our late twenties when I declared that I was done with white guys. Every single one who wanted to date me had an Asian fetish, which fucking sucked. She argued that I was being discriminatory and I should give the white dudes a chance. Not because they were white dudes, per se, but because no one should be discriminated against.

Which, nope. When it comes to dating, I am all about discrimination. Or rather, I would not want someone to date me because they feel obligated to or because they fetishize me. My argument was this. In that time of nascent Asian fetishization, most people in Minnesota did not consider Asian women datable. Therefore, those who were attracted to Asian women, had to overcome the societal indoctrination that only white women were worthy of dating. In other words, they had to be predisposed to dating Asian women, which quickly turned into fetishization. And, every single white dude I dated in my twenties had an Asian fetish. I did not want to waste my time, emotional bandwidth, and energy on someone who had a 90+% chance of only being attracted to my race.


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Fixing a Broken Society

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It’s been three days since the Las Vegas shooting, and it’s already fading to the background as new atrocities spring up to take its place. Yes, the news is faithfully reporting about it, but there’s not much there, so it’s not dominating the headlines as it once was. I’ve read about the shooter, but there’s not much there. He’s the oldest of four boys, and his father left the family unexpectedly when they were kids. It turns out the father was a bank robber, which was interesting, but not sure it means much of anything. The picture of the killer is a high-stakes gambler. He met his girlfriend while he was gambling and she was working in a casino. The shooter’s brother said his brother was a multimillionaire, but if he liked to gamble, who knows what happened to the money? Another brother said they were all angry when their father left, but the shooter was the least-angry of the four. Then the brother revealed that he hadn’t spoken to the shooter in twenty years, but wouldn’t say why. To me, that negates the ‘least-angry’ claim as the brother doesn’t know what happened to his brother in the last twenty years. The girlfriend claimed not to have known anything, and she told her brother not to panic. The police weren’t aware of the shooter before this, and there are no immediate red flags as to why he did this.

Putting him aside, when I hear about a shooting, I immediately assume a few things. One, the shooter is male. This one is solid as there have been very few mass shootings done by women. Second, that it’s going to be a white man. This one is pretty solid as the vast majority of mass shootings have been done by white men. One notable exception was Elliot Rodger, the…

::has to Google it because there have been so many mass shootings::

Santa Barbara shooter. He was half-Asian, and part of his screed was a healthy dose of internalized racism. He would see white women with full Asian men and grow angry that he couldn’t get a girlfriend because in his mind, he was better than those full-blooded Asian men because he was half-white. The first people he killed were his Asian male roommates (with a knife), and I bet it’s partly because of his internalized racism. He was a PUA (Pick-Up Artist) and an incel (his word. Involuntary celibate), and he was full of rage because he wasn’t getting pussy he thought he so richly deserved.

His race was notable, but his mentality wasn’t. Another thing I think when I hear about a mass shooting is that the shooter will be an angry man who has a history of violence and/or watches a ton of FOX ‘News’ and gets riled up about all the ‘illegals’, ‘hostile blacks’, and ‘angry atheists’. This man is bitter because his life hasn’t gone the way he’s been told it should go, and he knows it’s ‘their’ fault. It doesn’t matter who ‘they’ are. It could be women (it’s women a lot of the time. 54% of mass shootings involve domestic violence, as I noted before); it could be minorities or undocumented immigrants; it could be Jews; it could be just about anyone else. It certainly isn’t their own fault; it can’t be!


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