Chapter 2: Man (and Woman)

I was in the third grade when I had my first crush.

At least as far as I could remember. 

I don’t know precisely when I noticed her, but I remember a specific moment when I had already noticed her.

I remember sitting in class when she would walk past, and I would smile to myself, happy that she was even in my vicinity.

I remember thinking she was the prettiest girl I had ever met. She was Vietnamese American, her hair black and sometimes done in different styles. She had eyes that, despite being large and round, were still Asian. I remember reflecting on how I didn’t understand what made an Asian person’s eyes Asian. 

She had a ready smile and a way about her that made my stomach feel like butterflies were fluttering around every time I saw her. My crush on her would last until seventh grade when my parents took me out of public school.

That is a story for another time.

Her name was Vanessa Quyen. And to a third grader, it was love.

No one told me about this feeling. No one had explained to me what a boy could feel for a girl. And if I look back on my childhood now, romantic and physical attraction were topics that were made fun of, relentlessly mocked, and if pushed too seriously, shamed and ridiculed. Ridiculed by my parents as something abnormal for kids to feel such things. Mocked at by my brother. Shamed by my aunts. Laughed at by my peers because well, girls still had cooties in the third grade, didn’t they. 

The word “crush” would not even enter my vocabulary for some years.

One of the most embarrassing aspects of this childhood crush was my inability to know what to do with it. I kept it quiet for the first few years, from third grade through fifth grade, but sixth grade was when everything came to a head.

Because we graduated elementary school in sixth grade.

Because there was a school dance in sixth grade.

And twelve-year-old Jackson decided he was going as his crush to the dance. He just didn’t know how to ask a simple question. 

***

For most of my childhood, I only knew one other couple who were “friends” with my parents. My parents did not believe in friendships, and they did not allow my brother and me to “hang out” with friends.

We were told that friends were for convenience. We were to make friends with “smart” kids who did well in school so that they could help us do better in classes. By the end of fifth grade, I had never been to a classmate’s birthday party. Never hung out with friends outside of class. ‘Sleepovers’ weren’t just rare. They were foreign.

By fifth grade, I had a core group of friends: Andy, Stephen, and Huy. My best friend in fourth grade was Nick, but he left in fourth grade only to return in sixth grade. More on that in a bit.

In fifth grade, two new members joined our crew: Kevin, Nick’s cousin, and Linh, an F.O.B. Vietnamese kid who was as weird as he was Asian.

This was our core group going into the sixth grade. All Vietnamese American kids. We didn’t hang with the White kids. Garden Grove School District had enough Vietnamese immigrants that we had our own counterculture.

The schools might have been desegregated. But we didn’t mix with the Whites and Mexicans.

Adjacent to us were the girls. By the end of fifth grade, cooties were less real than it was in the third grade, but it didn’t make it any less awkward for the boys and girls to mingle. Recess still involved us boys running around, pretending to fight, or playing tetherball. The only time boys and girls mixed was when it came to handball.

That was when you picked pairs, raising your hand in a line, and the next person up would choose who would be their teammate. Sometimes, the boys picked the best player—usually another boy who can do a “curve ball.” Or the girl would choose her best friend. But sometimes, sometimes, the boy would pick a girl he liked. Or not pick a girl everyone knew he liked, which also said just as much in its silence. 

I never picked Vanessa, of course. I wouldn’t have known what to do. I couldn’t play handball on the same team as the girl I liked! I couldn’t even say “hi” to her without stuttering. No thanks. 

Going into sixth grade, my group of friends all had distinctive qualities. Huy was sarcastic, smart, nerdy, short, and funny. Stephen was hot-tempered and as quick to get into a fistfight as he was to make fun of a girl he liked, which happened to be Ana.

Ana would later be a good friend of mine—and already a close friend of Vanessa’s.

Andy was cool with his ripped jeans and apathetic attitude. The “like” triangle between Andy, Ana, and Stephen deserves an in-depth analysis of its own. There was lots of note-passing and whispers.

Things that were not only awkward for me as one of the kids passing notes but also as foreign to me as apple pies and homemade meatballs. How Stephen and Andy had the confidence to pass notes to girls was beyond my ken.

That like triangle became a quadrilateral with the arrival of Linh in fifth grade. Linh was an immigrant.

He wasn’t born in America.

He was the cheap Chinese knockoff I hated.

The self-hatred I had for Asians—woven deep into the fabric of my psyche.

He entered the scene without embarrassment.

Without cultural awareness.

Linh spoke with a fobby accent—thick and almost unintelligible. He was awkward, wearing clothes that the rest of us would have laughed at if he wasn’t physically a bit bigger than the rest of us. His skin was dark, many shades darker than the rest of ours. His features were more pronouncedly Vietnamese, clearly Kinh in origin. His hair was never done, always fluffy and frizzy.

And he did not hide his crush on Ana as he relentlessly teased her. He would call her names, poke her with his fingers, and even chase her around. It provoked her to chase him around the playground as she kicked his shins. 

It was the strangest thing I had ever seen.

For a boy who didn’t hang out with kids outside of school, it was a strange and otherworldly phenomenon watching my friends interact with each other across gender and even cultural divides.

Between Linh, Stephen, and Andy, Ana had her hands full. But Vanessa was available, as far as I could see. And Ana’s proximity with the group also put Vanessa in proximity. Within that concoction of pre-teenage romance, the larger group formed: Andy, Stephen, Huy, Linh, Ana, Vanessa, and me.

***

My first outing with friends was through an invite: Vanessa invited me to her birthday party. Technically, she asked the entire group. But I was a part of that group. 

I don’t know what compelled my parents to allow me to go to a birthday party, but I asked them, and they said “yes.” In fact, my mom even helped me pick out a present (for the life of me, I can’t remember what it was) and even wrapped it for me. She dropped me off at Vanessa’s house, just around the corner from our elementary school in Garden Grove. 

I remember going into the house and being awed by the fact that it felt…American. There was no alter with its glowing red light. No pictures of ancestors who were dead and gone were framed as gods to be worshiped. No statues of deities to burn incense to.

Her parents greeted us, smiles on their faces. They spoke with accents but also with what was distinctively intelligible English. It was the first time I learned and would be reinforced for several years to come that many of my Vietnamese friends were Catholic. And being Catholic, they were somehow in closer proximity to the Whiteness that felt so foreign to me. White people spoke about Jesus in their homes, not Quan Yin. 

Vanessa and all my friends? They spoke of Jesus in their homes, too.

I didn’t know what to do with the present, so I held it awkwardly as her parents opened the door for me. I had never been to a birthday party! And whatever my mother had wrapped, I distinctly remember feeling Vanessa wouldn’t like it.

I looked around. Vanessa, Ana, and some others were preoccupied.

My name wasn’t on the wrapped gift.

I placed it discretely on a table and distanced myself from the present.

Mission accomplished; I went to greet the birthday girl.

The birthday party was uneventful, as far as I could remember, but it was revolutionary in so many ways for my eleven-year-old self.

I had been invited to Vanessa’s birthday party.

My parents had let me go.

I had been in the same house and said happy birthday to her.

Mission accomplished twice over.

But it was also revolutionary in a way that was buried in my mind. I didn’t understand it then.

The house made an impression on me in a way that I couldn’t describe then. 

It was a single-family home with a large front yard. Nestled in Garden Grove during the mid-1990s, something about it just felt American—the expansive lawns, the shaded sidewalks, the quiet. Large trees reached high into the sky, lining both sides of the streets, their branches and leaves providing a calm, almost transcendent atmosphere.

Vanessa’s house had one of those trees in its front yard. It was neat and spacious, but what stood out was that it didn’t scream Asian. There was no Chinese zodiac calendar, no tin foil covering her parents’ oven range, and no smell of fish sauce. 

Her parents were nice. As far as I could tell. But what did I know? Maybe her mom beat her like my mom beat me.

She didn’t seem like she would, though. 

For most of my life we had lived in apartments. First on a different side of Garden Grove, where South Vietnam’s flag flew in the air, where grocery stores were called Supermarkets with titles like Người Việt.

By the time I was standing in front of Vanessa’s house, we had moved to a rented townhouse in Santa Ana, next to a Kentucky Fried Chicken that infested our home with rats. 

What buried itself deepest in my mind was this: perhaps my experience was not normal for a Vietnamese kid.

I didn’t know that a large number of Vietnamese refugees came to the United States in 1975, a decade and a half before my parents did.

I didn’t know that my parents had only nine months of practice with English before I was born.

I didn’t know that some Vietnamese families had sponsors who taught them how to navigate the vast cultural landscape.

I didn’t know that my parents were older than my peers’.

I didn’t know Catholicism was such a big part of assimilation.

I didn’t even know what assimilation was.

I didn’t know so many things that I do now.

But what I felt then buried itself into my subconscious.

My actual consciousness was getting through a birthday party at Vanessa’s house without looking like an idiot.

And for the most part, I was successful.

Other than not actually handing her a gift. 

Everything was becoming status quo. My group of friends fell into a relatively regular cadence until Nick returned to the scene.

***

Nick had been my best friend in third and fourth grade. He left town for fifth grade, only to reappear again in our sixth-grade year.

He had a confident demeanor, and his popular older brother showed him the ropes. This was in stark contrast to my own brother, who was awkward, navigating his own sexual orientation, and didn’t know his way around ropes well enough to show me anything.

Nick burst back into my life, and I was excited. Here was my best friend. But he had changed somewhat in the last year. A little more edgy. A little more sarcastic and sardonic.

Sixth grade was a weird year. Because of Nick’s return. Because we knew that we were all about to go to junior high and then high school, where everything sounded foreign, adult, and scary. 

For that one year, we were at the top of the social hierarchy at the elementary school. Not only were we “upperclassmen,” but we were also the oldest of the upperclassmen. Many of us had even hit puberty.

Which carried with it its own awkwardness.

The girls had “sex ed” in fifth grade, while the boys had it in sixth grade. It was something parents had to sign off on—I don’t remember how that conversation went with my parents. We sat in class as just the boys, watching a video on how our bodies change, how we perceive girls and women, and the host of bodily changes that accompany both puberty and our perception of girls and women. 

It was awkward. A bit funny. Slightly humiliating.

But it was something that was also fundamentally true. We had changed physically, emotionally, and psychologically.

Girls did not contain cooties like we insisted they did.

Girls weren’t just weird or mysterious anymore.

They were like Vanessa—bright, kind, funny. The kind of girl who made you nervous just by being nearby. The type of girl you wanted to dance with, even if you had no idea how to dance.

Or whether or not you actually wanted to dance.

The Bible is candid about attraction and even sex. Sex, as God intended it, is good. It was meant for His glory, to demonstrate the unity of Christ and the Church, to procreate.

Yet sex, as I have said in the previous chapter, became corrupted at the fall. Sex became a tool for self-gratification and control. Dominance. 

Even Christians oftentimes view sex as a man’s dominance over his wife.

It’s a disturbing image that, unfortunately, is too often idealized.

After Cain kills Abel, we get a short genealogy until we get to Lamech. In narrative space, this is a total of three verses from God’s judgment of Cain to Lamech’s introduction.

Lamech continues the tradition of violence post-Fall, but instead of mere physical violence, we see something else, as well. The twisting of male-female relations that was hinted at by God when he cursed Adam and Eve. 

Genesis mentions it with such brevity that its significance can easily be missed.

19 And Lamech took two wives. The name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. 20 Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. 21 His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. 22 Zillah also bore Tubal-cain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron. The sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.

23 Lamech said to his wives:

“Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;

you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say:

I have killed a man for wounding me,

a young man for striking me.

24  If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold,

then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.”

- Genesis 4:19-24

Lamech took two wives and casually tells his two wives of a story of violence. “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me.” He glories in his violence, seeing his own violence as even more than Cain’s.

Why does he tell his wives this? The implication is clear. They were to fear him. They were to stay in line. They were his position. Both of them.

The twisting of sex takes many forms. Sexual violence plays itself out in the Bible. Women are taken by force. A concubine is handed over to violent men, violated through the course of the night so many times by a crowd of men that she dies.

The Bible speaks plainly of sex outside marriage, homosexual activity, polygamy, and even of bestiality.

Life after the Fall was not just physical violence and murder. It included a twisting of sex, used to bring one’s about own gratification and sometimes to inflict harm upon others.

The twisting of sex, in its various forms, found its mark on me on a few different occasions.

***

The first was an uncle. My mind has blocked it out for the most part, but I distinctly remember him stripping me to my underwear in the car and, after laughing and touching me in my privates, sending me out of the car to run down the street. With just my underwear to cover me.

I must have been in third grade or so.

Another time was around fifth or sixth grade. My brother-in-law had friends who worked with him at an auto-mechanic shop. They got drunk one day and made me strip for them as they laughed and smacked my butt.

I don’t recall my brother-in-law being there, and I don’t know where he was, but I remember the laughing, red, drunk faces of his friends.

In another incident, my eldest uncle would make us line up, stripped down to our underwear. We would stand there, exposed. It wasn’t sexual. It was dominance. We were naked and ashamed.

He would approach each of us, pinch our tiny biceps with his fingers, and pull hard. The pain was a powerful force that sent a little knot up our arm.

My brother suffered the greater humiliation of these early encounters with our nakedness. He would be chased down by these same men—my brother-in-law’s friends—and pinned to the floor. I don’t believe anything overtly sexual happened. But the message was clear nonetheless. He would be submissive. They could dominate him.

I remember lying in my parents’ bedroom watching TV as a kid. We didn’t have enough rooms for me to have my own, so they built a makeshift bed next to theirs made of cardboard boxes and compressed wood slabs.

My mom would watch movies that were clearly not rated for kids. There would be sex. There would be rape. There was full-blown nudity. All of it was etched into my mind as I was confused and impacted by the things that played out on-screen. Sometimes, when things got bad enough on screen, my mom would throw her hand over my eyes. But that was rare. Usually, the scenes would be played out for me to see.

I didn’t understand any of it. And that confusion made me unable to navigate within the space of daily life.

***

I told Nick about my secret—my crush of three years, which, for a twelve-year-old, felt like a lifetime. Nick was supportive at first, suggesting I ask her out. I didn’t know how I could. I froze every time I thought about it.

No. I couldn’t.

He told me he would ask her for me.

“Okay…yeah. That sounds like a good idea.” Oh, little Jackson.

I can’t recall exactly what happened next. But Vanessa told Nick she liked him, and he asked her to the dance…for himself.

I wasn’t just devastated. I was angry, hurt, humiliated.

My best friend had betrayed me.

That’s how I felt at the time, anyway.

I didn’t say anything in particular to either of them. I just stopped talking to either of them.

Well, mainly Nick since I was too nervous to talk to Vanessa anyway. 

But instead of Nick understanding he had violated the bro-code—not that I knew about the bro-code then—he confronted me one day.

“Dude, you’re being such a p***y. If you keep acting like this, you’re going to get jumped in junior high.” Such were the consolidating words of my former best friend.

As sweet as she was, Vanessa decided not to go with Nick to the dance.

Nick was not the villain in this story. And yeah, I kind of agree with Nick. 

But the point here is that it wasn’t any one person’s fault that I couldn’t just bring myself to ask a girl to the dance.

It was me.

It was Nick.

It was Vanessa.

It was my parents.

It was a social and cultural world I didn’t understand.

It was a growing awareness of girls I couldn’t comprehend.

It was my uncle.

It was my brother-in-law’s friends.

It was my older brother, who didn’t know how to guide me and was a victim himself.

It was no one’s fault, and it was everyone’s fault.

And in the drama of life, this elementary school romance mess-up was small. Childish.

But it represented something much more profound.

I didn’t know how to navigate the social space I lived in because it wasn’t made with me in mind, and I had no guidance. No one to hold my hand and lead the way.

I was a boy who felt utterly emasculated, utterly alone, utterly undesirable. Perpetually on the outskirts of everyone else’s stories.

And more than anything, I just didn’t know what to do with the butterflies that wouldn’t stop fluttering in my stomach every time I looked at her.

The Song of Solomon is an excellent contrast to a repressed and twisted view of sex. He declares to his sweetheart:

9  You have captivated my heart, my sister, my bride;

you have captivated my heart with one glance of your eyes,

with one jewel of your necklace.

10  How beautiful is your love, my sister, my bride!

How much better is your love than wine

and the fragrance of your oils than any spice!

- Song of Solomon 4:9-10

He was free in his declaration of love, specific in his description.

It is man and woman as God intended it.

I didn’t need to describe my crush on her at a Song of Solomon level to Vanessa.

That would have been awkward and weird.

But I needed to know that it was okay to say, “Hey, I like you. I think you’re really cute. Will you go to the dance with me?”

Even better, be okay with her telling me she didn’t feel the same way back.

But underneath it all, the tumbling, rumbling, tumultuous waves of childhood abuse, sexual violence, physical and psychological domination, and immigrant otherness—I lacked the ability to just be… okay.