Chapter 4: Children, Like Arrows

By seventh grade, puberty had hit. Sex was being talked about with increasing frequency. School dances were coming in rapid succession. And my crush on Vanessa had blossomed into full-blown infatuation.

As such, my focus was not on school.

It wasn’t on the growing violence of some of my friends who were following their siblings’ footsteps in a world of gangs, guns, and drugs.

My world was taken over by a growing interest in connection with others.

Even by seventh grade, my parents rarely let me go out with friends.

Once in a while, they let me go to a friend’s birthday. Sometimes I just made one up to get out of the house. 

But there was AIM—AOL Instant Messaging. On AIM, I wasn’t the chubby Asian kid with the wrong eyes. I was just a screen name. I could forge my own personality and identity.

It was a place where social queues that I found so difficult to follow because they had never been modeled or explained to me could be done away with because I just had to focus on words.

It was connection stripped of awkward pauses and racial assumptions. Where I could look something up on Yahoo! if I didn’t understand what someone was talking about.

It was the first space where I felt like I could control the narrative.

During the summer between sixth and seventh grade, Ana and I spent many nights chatting on AIM. We talked about all sorts of things, but I remember specifically one night.

It was June, 21st, 2003.

We were twelve years old, and I was desperate to read the new Harry Potter book. I told my parents I wanted it, and they said they would buy it for me. Anything to get me reading. But they hadn’t yet.

Ana and I were chatting on AIM and I told her how badly I wanted to read the new book. Ana told me she had a copy of the new book!

“Lucky!” I typed into the gray box that was my virtual social playground.

“I can type the first few chapters out for you if you want.” She typed back.

“Really? That would be awesome.” I said back. I felt bad, but I was also flattered that she would spend the time and energy to do that.

And she did. She began typing, and as the night wore on, it felt like she was reading the book to me—one keystroke at a time.

I never had any romantic interest in Ana. She was Vanessa’s friend and Vanessa was the girl I had spent almost four years thinking about.

If I reflect back, my pre-teenage self did find Ana attractive. I had found her pretty. And smart and witty.

But in the innocence of my “like” monogamy, I saw her simply as Vanessa’s friend.

And it stayed that way.

But that night, as she wrote into that little gray box—a private thread between just the two of us—she became a friend. My first friend who wasn’t another boy.

What I didn’t realize then—but would see blossom in high school and beyond—was that I was learning how to socialize in a way that my physical discomfort in person couldn’t. AIM provided me with a shield that opened the world of human communication and connection in ways that would have otherwise been impossible for me.

Ana and I did not spend much time together in person. I think we exchanged brief hellos in person.

But on AIM?

On AIM, we grew not just to be friends, but close ones.

I learned to ask questions, understand a girl’s internal logic, and developed the ability to listen in a way that I wouldn’t have without the barrier of the chat box.

The screennames, the stripping of face, voice, and tone, created for me a space where I connected with people more than I ever had in my life. 

AIM was a liminal space in many ways, but more. It transcended time, overcame distance.

It was a place where I began to develop into the person I wanted to be and to merge that into the person I was. 

Almost every day, after school ended, I would rush to my computer and sign in on aim. Who was on? Huy? Ana? Andy? Vanessa?

There is an irony that was lost on me. I rushed home from the place where my friends were so that I could talk to them.

But it didn’t feel ironic. 

It was on that platform that my overwhelming shyness and self-doubt was overcome. I could type “hey” to Vanessa and feel only a small flutter—nothing close to the paralyzing fear I felt in person.

And she would respond back. We would chat, talk about classes and friends and interests. It was as if I wasn’t me.  

I surpassed that fat kid who wore ugly clothes he never got to choose. I transcended the flattop haircut my mother forced on me, no matter how much I begged her to stop.

I was simply my screenname—and I could talk with her, with Ana, with my friends, as an equal.

AIM became my refuge. My training ground. My social ascent.

But like most things that offer escape, it came with a cost.

 ***

My grades suffered. And in a Vietnamese home like mine, that was the one sin that could never be forgiven. Especially as my brother started flourishing in school.

Two examples, very different in nature but resulting in the same outcome, will shed light on what led to my parents’ re-assertion of control over my life.

For twelve years of my life I had never exercised. In fact, I didn’t even know what exercise was.

I had sometimes thrown a ball into a hoop—and I wasn’t even very good at that.

I had played tetherball, but that required little physical exertion.

I had played handball but that also didn’t require much output.

Physical education in elementary school had been more about familiarizing us with the names of sports than actually training for those sports. 

My parents never played sports with us. We never even watched sports; other than the occasional basketball game I would turn on to watch the Lakers own every team they played against. Kobe Bryant. Shaquiel O’Neal. Yeah, they were awesome.  

But playing sports? That was something else entirely.  

AIM did not help with this lack of physical movement. I spent my days in front of a screen, imagining a world where I was someone different.

My introduction in physical exercise felt like a blow to the chest. Literally.

“You’re going to be tested on the mile every month. Eight-minute miles are an A. Nine-minute miles are a B. Ten-minute miles a C. Eleven-minute miles are a D. Slower than eleven minutes and you get an F. Alright now line up.” 

I got in line, my heart racing before I even began to propel myself forward.

“GO!” the coach yelled and everyone started running. I took my first few steps, and I was out of breath before I got to the first turn of the field. This feels like death. I “ran” the mile and ended up at twelve minutes and some change.

An F. A failure. Like me.

My mile pace did not improve. Each month it was the same feeling of overwhelming dread followed underperformance. No one taught me how to run, how to pace, how to fuel, how to improve. It was simply expected that I would meet the standard—and I didn’t meet that standard.

By the end of the semester, I received my failing grade. 

P.E. was not the only class I wasn’t doing well in. B-minuses and Cs littered the page of my report card. I knew what that meant. It meant a beating. It meant kneeling on jackfruit. It meant ceaseless yelling, screaming. It meant shame and guilt.

One day, as my family sat watching something on TV—I can’t remember what—I snuck into the backyard and grabbed my bike. Somehow, I knew that day, that day my report cards were going to be sent home.

My parents had us in the Garden Grove School District even though we lived in Santa Ana. The reasoning? At the time I simply thought it was because my parents wanted to avoid Mexicans.

Upon a fairer reflection of their motives, I believe they wanted us to have friends. Which is both surprising and ironic. They didn’t let us hang out with friends. But I think, deep down, they knew that Garden Grove provided us with enough Vietnamese kids that we wouldn’t be utterly alone. 

That we would be with kids who, at least in some ways, understood the lostness that I experienced on an almost everyday basis.

It also meant that my parents used my grandparents’ address rather than their own. As far as the school district was aware, we lived in Garden Grove, at my grandparents’ home, not our home in Santa Ana.

And so, I got onto my bike and began peddling. I needed to get to that report card before my grandparents did.

It was like running in P.E., except I had a purpose. An aim, so to speak. I needed to get to my grandparents house and steal that report card from their mailbox. What I would do next, I wasn’t sure.

My parents would just ask for another copy, I supposed. But it would delay the inevitable, but delay was what I needed.

The dread inside me propelled my feet. Peddle. Peddle.

I knew Asian kids were supposed to be smart. But to be honest, I only knew one Vietnamese boy that was smart. That was Huy. Which, ironically, was my Vietnamese name.

All the other boys, including Andy and Stephen, didn’t do well in school.

The girls? The girls were smart. Van and Ana especially come to mind as those who aced tests. By third grade they knew how to spell words like restaurant. 

But I was the dumb kind of Asian. More on that later. 

I peddled hard until I got to my grandparents’ house. No mail in their mailbox! Crap! I rode in circles. Did they already take in the mail or did the mail not come yet? I rounded the corner and saw the mail truck.  

Nothing to do but ask, I supposed. I rode up to him and gave him the address. 

“Do you have their mail?” I asked. He eyed me and then shook his head. He had already dropped off their mail.

Darn.

The trouble I was in was worse than I expected. But one more incident before we move to my punishment.

*** 

I was sitting at my computer, late into the night. My light was off but my room was across the hall from my parents so they could easily see the glow of my computer screen if they walked out of their room. 

I wasn’t doing anything in particular. I think I was on AIM chatting with a few friends. Someone sent me a picture. It was a picture of an Asian girl in a red outfit. She is fully clothed, but it is clearly meant to be revealing. She’s in a pose that, again, was meant to be revealing. Seductive.

I was thirteen years old.

I stared at the picture. She was probably eighteen or nineteen. She was pretty. I continued staring at the picture.

Then I heard my parents’ door open. I freeze. What am I going to do?

I knew it was my mom. I could tell by the way she opened her door. Sharp, decisive, loud.

Few things are more terrifying and awkward for a teenage boy who is having a physical reaction to a picture of a girl than being caught by his mother.

I could have exited out of the picture. I should have exited out of the picture!

But in my panicked state, I decided to jump into bed and cover myself with my blanket.

She would not see my adolescent reaction to a seductively dressed, attractive girl! 

My mom opened my door with a sharp turn of the knob.  

She looked at me, face glowering. “Why aren’t you asleep?” she hissed. The computer screen is to her right, facing in the same direction she was.

As I looked at her from my bed, I could see the Asian girl in the red outfit staring at me next to my mother. The contrast was stark. The humiliation, beyond description. 

I hoped beyond hope she would not see it.

She looked over. My heart stopped.

“What is this?” she asked in a low, almost too even voic

“Nothing! Someone sent it to me!” I said. She walked out of the room, turned on the hallway lights, and then called for my dad.

No. No! No!

By this point it was safe for me to get out from under my blankets. I exited the picture as he stepped in. My dad came into my room, turned on the light.

“Show your dad the picture.” My mom insisted. Are you kidding me? “Show him!” my mom yelled, tears running down her face now. “My son is a pervert! A pervert!” she screamed.

Holy heck! The embarrassment was beyond what I could take. My brother opened the door, peaking his head before closing it again.

My mother proceeded to describe what her perverted son had been looking at to my dad. He glared at me with disapproval.

“Take your computer apart. You can’t use it anymore.”

Two thoughts crossed my mind.

The first, and most visceral, was that I would no longer have access to AIM. Which meant that I would no longer have access to my entire world. My friends. My life. All gone. 

The second, and more immediate, was the utter humiliation of it all. The shame.

They did not ask me about my growing attraction to girls.

They did not ask me about how I was dealing with my bodily changes.

They shamed me.

My mother called me perverted and cried as if I had done something truly horrifying.

Maybe I had.

Maybe in my looking at the girl in the red outfit I had done something truly wrong.

That my desires, my attraction, my growing awareness of the opposite sex was something twisted.

Like what had happened to me when my uncle laid his hands on me.

Like what had happened to me when my brother-in-law’s friends had me stripped and slapped my butt for their entertainment.

Like my teenage crush on Vanessa?

It was all confusing. A concoction of shame, of desire, of guilt, of self-loathing.

I pulled the power cables, undid the connections, and piece by piece took the dismantled computer to my parents’ room. 

I had lost the bit of autonomy I had. And it was about to get worse. 

The report card found its way into my parents’ hands and the uncovering of my teenage interest in girls unfurled in succession and my parents reacted with quick decisiveness. 

The next day, I walked out of my room and my mom glared at me. It was a Saturday morning, and it was one of those rare occasions that she wasn’t working on a weekend. I felt a mix of emotions and part of me just wanted my mother’s eyes to not look at me like I was some terrible, twisted pervert.

I had no such luck.

“There’s food on the stove, pervert.” My mother Vietnamesed. The word she used was dê. It carried with it two meanings: pervert and goat.

In the Chinese zodiac I was a ram. My mom said to me, “A ram and a goat are pretty similar. I should’ve known you would be a pervert.”

The words hit like arrows, piercing me with wounds that I don’t think have ever healed. At my most vulnerable, my mother always knew how to hurt me.

I had lost AIM, but my mother never missed her mark. 

But my mother, I think, needed to believe I wasn’t beyond redemption. I may have been looking at a picture of a seductive girl, but I was being seduced by someone.

No, I couldn’t be perverted. That would mean there was no hope for them to mold me into what they wanted to be. They needed to believe that it was my friends. My school. The internet.

I couldn’t just be interested in girls. I was being lured by friends who were bad.

Thus, the removal of my computer.

And thus, they decided, I needed to be transferred to a Catholic school.

Their very own plan of salvation. Their ordo salutis.

First, Catholic school.

Second, moral righteousness.

Third, good grades.

Fourth, a good job.

Fifth, lots and lots of money—the ultimate paradise. The promised land. The telos of life.

This move to a Catholic school was a strange one on two fronts.

The first was that we weren’t Catholic.

My parents were Buddhists mixed with Taoist and ancestor worship. 

The second was that we didn’t have the money.

We were knee deep in credit card debt.

But my parents said it was that important. If I was going to throw my life away, they would reclaim my life for me.

My parents, my saviors.

We didn’t know anything about Catholic doctrine.

We didn’t say Hail Marys or believe in transubstantiation. I didn’t know what those even were.

My mom had been around Catholics as a kid and the one couple that were their friends was also Catholic.

My parents’ friends were the Vus.

If I was honest, I think growing up I had an innocent childhood crush on Mrs. Vu.

Not a romantic one, but one where I had a heightened emotional response around her.

One that made my heart leap at the prospect of being around her.

It was a kind of emotional magnetism that children can often feel toward adults who represent what they're missing in their lives

She spoke with a soft voice that was in direct contrast to my mother’s.

She was simple in dress, but elegant in the gentle way she moved.

She was always ready with a smile, a gentle pat.

She always made us some sort of sweets when we came over.

She was kind to her sons, understood their angst and anger.

She was patient with them even as they railed against their parents.

She was everything my mother wasn’t. Maybe even represented to me everything I never thought a Vietnamese mother could be.

I wanted her to be my mother.

Mr. Vu was a kind man. He used to be a professor at a university back in Vietnam before immigrating to the United States after the war. Instead of being able to continue as a professor, he worked as a janitor for a local college.

 The humiliation of that did not seem to outwardly affect Mr. Vu. He was gentle, like his wife, easy going, and always ready to watch us when we came over to play. 

Their home had the same feel that Vanessa’s had. There were jasmines and lavender trees in front of their house that was at the end of a cul-de-sac. Images of Jesus, Mary, and saints filled their house.

I remember staring at an image of Jesus. I don’t recall feeling anything in particular. Just remember staring at the painting of his face—he looked foreign. White. Maybe that’s what quiet looks like. It seemed to work for them.

Their house was a sacred space.

A place where their kids spoke English instead of Vietnamese.

A place where they did things like watching Lord of the Rings together.

A place where they had traditions like pizza night.

A place where their sons said, “I love you” and “I hate you” to their parents and it was okay.

A place where their parents said, “I love you” despite the “I hate you.”

A place where Jesus reigned, both figuratively and literally—his image looming large in the house.

I think the reason I didn’t react with outright rebellion at my parents’ decision was because in some small way I thought—maybe I could meet people who were more like the Vus.

The Vus had four sons, each of them a window into a world I didn’t know was possible.

One of them, much older than the rest of us, graduated college in computer science and became a successful software engineer. That solidified them as good in my parents’ eyes and so they continued that friendship.

The third son, Lim, was maybe six years older than I was. He was cool, popular, and did well in sports and school.

The youngest was a couple years older than me. Dan. He was small for his age but his sarcastic wit, his irreverence, his gothic sub-culture vibe, made him an enigma to me. 

This kid, his face just as Asian as mine, was fully American.

Their sons were allowed to argue. To talk back. To be complicated, messy, full of teenage angst. They even knew about and encouraged Lim and Dan when they started dating.

The Vus represented, in my limited understanding of the world, a different kind of Vietnamese American.

The kind that didn’t resort to just shaming and violence.

You will notice I skipped the second son. The second son in their home had disability—physical and mental. And while his brothers did not always treat him nicely, as brothers often time can be cruel, Mr. and Mrs. Vu always treated him—at least in front of us—with dignity and care.

Yes, they represented for me a different kind of life.

Maybe it was the Catholicism? Maybe it was just them.

I wanted to find out.

And so, with little argument, I accepted the transfer to St. Barbara Catholic School for eighth grade.

I accepted leaving Andy, Stephen, Huy, Ana, and even Vanessa without a fight. The shame my parents had laid, thick and heavy, was more than I could handle.

And the thought that maybe, maybe Catholic school would bring with it a place where Jesus ruled people’s homes like the Vus. I was willing to give it a try.

Looking back, I realize now that it was a life-changing decision, both good and bad.

It brought with it a host of issues that would need to be unpacked. 

But I walked into that new chapter that was a turning point in my life. It was the first of two milestones that clearly marked an end and a beginning.