LIMERENCE

new moon prayer riding on muni in san francisco november 2006 i'm not sure what the date is but i know i'm around new moon time....

dear goddess,

within whose arms you carry all love for us clasped to your breast in a deep embrace so that we may always hear your heart beating in love with us ...... please take this love that you allow to flow through me and use it to fill the eyes of a child so that he or she may know beauty and fill her or his heart to the brim that it can know the joy of contentment and comfort ..... and embrace this child so that she or he may know belonging and acceptance ......and please allow each loving breath that you exhale into me nourish every molecule of this humble human body that i may generate more love with every breath that i expel into this universe ....... and may another and another and another and another child receive this love and be free from doubt pain sorrow sadness suffering and come to know love and come to foster love with each breath she or he exhales back to you and then to me and back again in a whirl-windy-every-morning-breath-cyclone of love-seed-loaded-molecules ping-pong-ricocheting around your
wall-less
endless
universe of
intentional
deliberate
loving
chaos

........please let the chaos WIN so it may liberate all the box-makers and box-dwellers from their illusions of order
that they
may be swept-up and tousled in this whirlpool until they too remember what has

always been deep in their CELLS
just what it is to ..................

NOT FILL IN THE BLANKS

....and let them run away from paperwork and official forms..... and go find a duck pond to sit by the edge watching tiny wriggly guppies .......and let them eat jujubees .... and yell hallelujah to everything the guy crashed out on the park bench tells them about nixon

HO

My Inner Donut

Here's the verdict. According to the results of my donut personality quiz: I Am a Boston Creme Donut

You have a tough exterior. No one wants to mess with you. But on the inside, you're a total pushover and completely soft. You're a traditionalist, and you don't change easily. You're likely to eat the same doughnut every morning, and pout if it's sold out.

I'm the first to admit that it's true.

I DO take it a bit personally when my favorite donut is sold out.

To discover your own Inner Donut, go waste some time on this site ... http://www.blogthings.com/whatdonutareyouquiz/

Johnny Marzetti's House

 

Meeting Johnny Marzetti

"Johnny Marzetti Special"
Available only on Mondays at Michael's Goody Boy Diner
1144 N. High Street, Columbus, Ohio

Gringo Minority

FURTHER CONVERSATIONS WITH MY SISTER ...

I'm glad our kids don't have that whole cultural bias thing...maybe it is a good idea to grow up "everything and nothing"

Interesting phenomenon though, being "everything and nothing", sort of a generic brown person.

That's what it felt like to me.

Funny how folks want you to proclaim your allegiance to one race

Yeah true

Some Blacks preach to me that I should have racial pride, I tell them I have plenty. Then I remind them that I have an Asian/Pacific Islander facet, too. On the other side, Filipinos get pissed at me when they discover I don't understand Tagolog.

I suppose we should be proud of the human race then....

Dad likes to claim the Native American part

I know

Too funny

That's a tiny fraction though

He has no real clue about Native culture

Teeny tiny

Our culture is middle-class, urban America which for us was Brady Bunch re-runs and tuna on white bread. A Filipino/American friend & I came up with a name for us: GRINGO MINORITY because we’re Brown Americans, raised by our non-white ethnic parents with no distinctive culture or language beside mainstream-American English.

I don't think dad likes the whole Black part too cause he used to say " we have very little Black…very little" whenever I asked what nationality we were

It’s weird, I know! He and his wife are not exactly Black Panthers

I love the Black part! Kick-ass food & culture...

…and emphasized the Irish (or Scottish depending on when he was telling it) and the Native American

The folks in Dad’s hometown kept telling me when I visited that we're English!!

oy vey!

…and our aunt, Dad's sister, sat in front of me & my husband when we visited and told us she couldn't help it if she acted White since it was in her blood.

How funny!

I think the floor dented from my husband’s jaw hitting it and his tongue was bleeding from biting it. I may have I strained an eyebrow muscle from the abrupt raising of it.

Sometime’s people's perspective's are hilarious

(OF COURSE, NOT WHEN THEY'RE CHASING AFTER YOU....)

*'Une Vrai Americaine" - A Real American

(* MY FRIEND'S SLANG USE OF FRENCH IS NOT NECESSARILY GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT)

The layers of contradiction in my family's views on race and racial equality continue to taint my memories of my parents. I struggle with resentment of having to unlearn the shame I was taught to feel for exhibiting racial or cultural tendencies that were considered too Filipino or too Black. At eighteen, finally free from my family and country, a Cameroonian friend held a pocket mirror to my face as we sat in a Paris cafe telling me,

"Cherie, tu n'est pas une blanc! Tu n'est pas une vrai Americaine!"

He laughed at me as I cringed in embarrassment.

As a child my parents talked to me and my two younger sisters about people being the same no matter what color they were. They were both nurses and told us that in medicine they could see the human being in every person they cared for and that illness, injury and death did not discriminate.

"We're all born, we all bleed, we all die no matter what color you are" my father often said.

Basic physiology and anatomy was emphasized to us over external physical characteristics as the core essence of our humanity, as if they hoped to raise us as neuter-race, neuter-identity beings. But even under our own roof, it was noticed if we'd been a bit longer in the sun than my mother liked, or if a casual interjection of street slang entered the conversation. With raised eyebrows and disapproving comments, our and other's racial and cultural differences were noticed, pointed out and sometimes ridiculed. I did not become aware of our family rituals of bigotry, the self-hatred it created that I reflected toward myself, and my own expression of it towards others until I was into my young adulthood, long after Monsieur Henri had confronted me with that mirror.

During grade school my mother had a co-worker friend from the hospital who was married to a tall, man with an exotic Jamaican accent. They shared dinner with us often and over the years I grew accustomed to them as extended family. The one thing about them that I found particularly extraordinary was that they were both very tall. They towered over my five-foot mother and my five-foot-seven father. As I stood by their sides swinging on a playful hand, peering up at them I wondered if they ever bumped their heads on doorjambs.

One evening as I cleared the dishes and began loading the dishwasher, after we'd shared another dinner with them, my mother sighed as she scraped a plate clean,

"Funny how after all this time I can't get used to it. I still think that it's disgusting. 'Salt and Pepper.' "

I was sorting steak knives from the rest of the silverware to keep out of the dishwasher basket. I cast a glance across the dirty dishes, expecting to see some sort of catastrophe involving salt and pepper in the dishwasher.

"What's disgusting about salt and pepper, Ma?"

I couldn't see what she was referring to. I looked up, her mouth was turned upside down in a grimace.

"You need to learn this now. It's not about salt and pepper. That's what you call it when someone who is very dark marries someone who is very white. "Salt and Pepper". It's disgusting."

Before that moment I'd never seen our friends as anything but very tall, very nice, very funny grown-ups that I liked. At this moment my mother transformed us both by lowering these glasses of bigotry before my eyes. She also revealed her truth to me, that all she'd raised me to believe about equality and humanity was really a lie to her. Now I saw the situation with educated eyes. Her girlfriend was Swedish - tall, pale as porcelain, blond as bright sunshine with a handsome husband as black and elegant as Sidney Poitier. Up until that moment everything I knew about them was good and fun and "normal". I was confused by this notion that because they were married they were doing something bad. But now I was a co-conspirator to my mother's truth. My child's mind told me that these people must be bad for being married since my mother just told me that it was disgusting.

My own family was composed of three brown-skinned, black-haired daughters of a fair-skinned Asian Pacific Islander mother and African American father, yet those color conscious lenses were never turned backward to examine ourselves; as if by being the ones to keep pointing a finger outward, showing how everyone else was different from white America, we would be shielded from revealing and addressing the colors of our own cultures. Perhaps my parents believed we would somehow be granted immunity from racism.

In my early twenties an angry ex-boyfriend ranted at me during the adolescent tragedy of an ugly break-up and claimed that my mother only liked him because he was "a white man to take me away from it all". Of the many ironies in his uttering that statement was the situation involving his own mother's rejection of him and my family's acceptance of him, even housing him, rent-free in our home for eight months. My parents, sisters and especially our lovable family dog, Rue, absolutely hated him.

Driving through San Francisco over the years has become the most effective exercise in understanding exactly where my father's opinions on race lie. As an adult, riding in the car with my father at the wheel has been the best confrontational therapy to help me understand how listening to his bigotry toward Asians throughout my childhood undermined my self-esteem and re-enforced my desire for a separation from any ethnic identity.

"God dammed slant-eyed bitch! Go back to where you came from! See that, she ain't two weeks from behinds a water buffalo in a rice paddy. Ain't got no damned business behind the wheel. Asians don't have regular eyes anyway, they ain't got no peripheral vision. I don't see why we keep givin' them driving licenses, they can't see to drive no how."

Day after day these anti-Asian epithets clouded my head as my father drove me home from school, or my mother to and from her office at the hospital. We never said a word, just silently counted the blocks as we drew closer to home and freedom from the cigarette-smoke filled prison of his car. My mother finally learned how to drive and got her own drivers license and car when I was seventeen. Her driving skills were lousy but I attributed that to her Asian background and not her inexperience as a forty-eight-year-old, first-time driver.

I did not begin to make any sort of connection to his bigotry towards Asians and my own simmering inner-resentment of my third-world heritage until after I'd left the San Francisco Bay Area. I was living in Portland, Maine with my husband and our new baby daughter. As I drove home from the grocery store one afternoon I made a mistake navigating the unfamiliar streets and merged onto the road I needed. I backed off and allowed a car to pass that I almost accidentally cut off. The man driving the other car was not pleased with my maneuver and as we sat at the stop light. He leaned out of his window his face twisted with disgust and screamed,

"You fucking gook! Go back to Vietnam!"

I was shocked at his rudeness and shrugged and waved at him,

"Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off!"

But I was laughing at him too thinking,

"Boy this guy is stupid, I'm not Vietnamese, what an idiot. Sounds just like my dad"

The light changed and I continued on my way home without thinking twice about that moment.

When I arrived home with my groceries and began to unpack my bags, I opened the kitchen cupboard to clear some space for my canned goods and there it was. My moment of awakening. Next to the salt and pepper and other basic condiments was a bottle of "Nuoc Nam" Vietnamese fish sauce. My family isn't Vietnamese, but this fish sauce is identical to the traditional Filipino fish sauce called "patis". This was the closerst thing to patis I could find in Maine. I use it on just about everything I eat, it's on my table at every meal so there it sat on my shelf, its presence mandatory in any Filipino household.

The searing hatred in that man's voice exploded back into my ears, seized my neck and shoulders, convulsed down my throat where my disgust and despair regurgitated from the core of my being and I clung to the sink vomiting, heaving with panicked sobbing of realization that I was an object of racial hatred. I was an object of disgust.

Especially brutal to realize:

I was that "slant-eyed bitch" that my father wanted so badly "to go back to where I came from."

Thanks to Mom and Dad, I would never know just where that place was.

But in any case: Here I Am

Dad Calls Us Fat

As we've grown older, my younger sister and I are able to talk openly about the difficult messages that we grew up with. This is an excerpt from our conversation this morning.

My words are yellow, hers are italicized in green:

(btw - none of us are overweight)

"Dad freaked out ‘cause I told him I was fat this morning.

Fer heavens sake, you are in great shape nowadays

He's so obsessed with weight

More like he’s obsessed with insulting people, yeah we can just mess with him about it now

He was saying that our sister was fat and I've seen pictures of her lately and she's not.

We can't all have his chicken legs genes. He was a total ass to me when I saw him that time, I just ignored it

Really?

He calls my daughter fat, too

and my son, too

She ignores him

So does he , it's sooo rude though!

F= fluffy A=and T=tender. Yeah, tact is not his forte

He was like "so I guess you're a big fat Mexican woman eating tortillas and tacos"

What an asshole

I know!

So now we’re Mexicans? He's such a horrible bigot, too.

Definitely

Our dad, “The Brown Archie Bunker” ah the irony

I know what you mean

I have written so much on that topic just for personal processing not for publishing

Like how it was a good thing to be light skinned, etc...

Yep

...and have straight hair

Funny how the Filipino family thought my big, crazy hair sucked and the Black side of the family just loves my hair

I know...that's so awful and they'd say it to your face too

I love it when a sistah will straight out ask if my hair is a weave

ha ha ha

I understand where it's coming from, I don't get insulted, I show them it isn't and say: "why would I pay good money for white hair and spilt ends?"

btw, I'm slowly building a blog

Neat. You can put on it that Dad calls us fat

I started it because I wanted to respond to someone else's blog that I have been enjoying . Yeah, thanks, y'know I was wondering what sort of stuff I was going to write there . Some people get really confessional on them and it can get weird but some stuff is really insightful sharing and good to read

Well as long as it's therapeutic for them

Then there's one or two folks out there who think the world revolves around them

I'm sure there's plenty more like that...unfortunately

At least now I can look at dad's behavior with a compassionate eye and not just say "oh he's such and asshole" and leave it at that. But - I still hold him accountable for his behavior. My daughter and I talk about his inappropriateness and rudeness. It's what she expects from him, so she's prepared to deal with it.

I just say "whatever" to him

I don't like it, it's not cool, I tell him it’s not appropriate but I can understand why he does it

I don't..I think he's just rude

He's really screwed up in his perception of women and he is really rude

From all that nasty porn

Yup I wrote a piece about his anti-Asian bigotry and mom's anti-black bigotry...

...and there we were stuck in the middle...

...and growing up with that as a multi racial person. All the negativity of our environment came up inside of me years later when an evil man in Maine called me a gook

That was kinda exasperating..every time I got a new boyfriend mom would always say: " is he black?"

How about mom and her White Swedish friend with a Black Jamaican hubby, she called them 'salt & pepper" and said it was disgusting

omg!

Not to their faces of course and she hated that I dated Eugene in high school who was a really nice guy but they both didn't want me to go out with him because he was Black.

How the hell did we survive all that crap

We are resilient in a good way

I'm glad I live in this city now, cause I look like everyone else

I like the balance that happens when you're in a very diverse environment, not just 2 or 3 races
like our little town's very limited population

Especially our city...everyone is from everywhere

I loved visiting your area and can hardly wait to move

Me too!

I got email from Walgreen's about "Black Opal" makeup, it's been discontinued they say

That's too bad. I bet I can find lots of stuff for women of color when I’m in DC

They have Iman now

I'll ask my friend in DC where to get makeup. Hey, I just sent a Word file to you - I think this is one of the pieces I started to write about ethic intra-family bigotry I didn't open it first, it might be a draft, it should be about 6 pages

ok No problemo

Wow, I really need to organize this folder. I have no idea what half this stuff is

Some fun huh?

Argh. I need a secretary

Too bad they don't have a computer secretary program...or do they?

Yeah it's called Windows Office, and you have to not be a lazy ass and just stay on top of putting things where they belong

Hee hee

Ah well, there are worse things to be worrying about

Yup

Like wondering how we came out ok despite the esteem-withering environment we sprang from. But, y'know, it's how we know to raise our children right

No kidding!

Remember that one family in our grammar school had it really bad; talk about a negative environment. The mother was a great community person, very involved mom/household manager but highly critical of everything the kids did. Their grades were perfection but the kids were screwed up.

They didn't have Oprah back then

It was Phil Donahue and you had to be a mass murderer or a celebrity to get air time

So true

There was a story about Pink's song Stupid Girl on the news...how it was helping kids

Yeah I saw that on CNN which is way cool

It's dismaying to know that young girls are still going for plastic surgery and starvation to try and look how they think they are supposed to look

Things are getting out of hand with children and image problems

They never tell kids that the average size is a 14 and not a 2

...and that Filipinos and Blacks are not supposed to have little noses and blond hair ....and you're supposed to have an ass - that's what you sit on, body fat is important

and what you live off when you get really ill

...and that short is good

Did you ever see that documentary about the short guy who had that surgery that made him taller?

Yeah that was awful

That poor guy."

Write on, Langston!

ADVICE

Folks, I'm telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean -
so get yourself
a little loving
in between.

1951, Langston Hughes


(ok I could use some advice - I was trying to post this poem on my sidebar via the template but can't get it to work...can't figure out a short enough url to post my photo either. any suggestions?)

here we Are

There is contentment to discover in everything we sense. Though some days life's pain may seem overwhelming, there is still complete sweetness to be found in one breath.

eeyore syndrome

After reading my profile my daughter observed that I portray myself much too seriously in the "about me" section.
"Mom, you can be really serious at times but most of the time you're a very cheerful, happy person."
Her critique: too many pauses; too dark, too plain, too bland,you left out the "fun half of you".
OK so I've got my job cut out for me. I gotta figure out my "fun half".

Gosh, I thought that including the "Chicken Poetry" link was funny.