Chapter 8: Be Angry and Do Not Sin

“When I was your age,” my dad said not for the first time. “I could punch a bull and it would die.” I shook my head, trying on a dark purple dress shirt. “I could break its skull with a single punch.”

I stood in front of the mirror. I was sixteen years old. My hair was long, bangs covering my eyes so that I had a whip my head to move them.

I weighed in at one hundred and thirty-four pounds, having lost sixty pounds in four months through a combination of exercise and starvation. My braces left my lips pursing awkwardly over them.

I noticed the way my jeans fit me, pressing a bit too tight against my hips, causing the little bit of fat that I still had left to seem pronounced.

My mom used to call me “fat-one.” Now she called me “skinny-one.” I was okay with that.

Better to be called skinny than fat.

I pulled a polo over my head—not the one that the school required us to buy, but one that I wanted to wear anyway. It fit better, and made my chest and arms look more muscular.

Most kids would have been written up by teachers for wearing this shirt—it wasn’t even the right shade of red. But as an Asian, I got away with many things.

My hair was not to code.

My shirts were of a different material and cut.

I broke the rules in small ways that would not have been allowed non-Asian students.

Was that a good thing or a bad thing? I wasn’t sure.

I turned back to my dad as he and my mother looked at some other clothes.

“You couldn’t have killed a bull with a punch. I’ve seen pictures—you were super skinny.” I wanted to add that I could’ve beaten up his teenage self. I didn’t.

“I was skinny, but I was strong. Trust me. I could have killed a bull with a single punch. I wasn’t weak like you American kids.” I shook my head, unable to comprehend how he could believe such an outlandish tale.

I didn’t understand the quiet powerlessness he felt in his life.

The way my mother domineered and belittled him.

The way the world laughed at his accent—at him.

The way he had no other options in life but to check spark plugs until he retired.

The way his sons didn’t look up to him.

The way I ignored anything he had to say.

 I think he simply wanted to remember a time when he felt in control. Powerful. Desired. Masculine.

In the 1980’s through early 2000’s there was a vice that many Vietnamese men engaged in—going to “cafés.”

My father did not go to these Vietnamese cafés.

Places where young Vietnamese girls would dress in lingerie while serving coffee and food to men—some as old if not older than he was.

Yet, like that type of toxic masculinity, I can’t help but feel that they come from the same place. A place between powerlessness and a growing anger at the world that emasculated them.

I did not understand the old men who went to those cafés.

But why did those men go to cafés—looking at girls young enough to be their daughters?

I think it was a place where they felt some semblance of power.

A place where they were seen.

And even—if only for a moment—a place where they could pretend they were wanted again.

I didn’t understand that then. I didn’t understand my father then

Tran Minh stood about five feet, six inches tall. Back then I was about his same height. At the time, his face was skinny, his cheek bones pronounced. He had thick eyebrows, bushy eyebrows that sat he often moved up and down if he was in a joking mood.

His skin was several shades darker than mine, and his black hair was full, combed to the right in a non-descript style to blend in.

He looked distinctively Vietnamese, and I remember wanting to look nothing like him. But despite the darker complexion and more pronounced Kinh features, I look at my face in the mirror now and see parts of him reflecting back at me—his eyebrows, his smile, the crinkle of his eyes.

It was what laid behind his eyes, though, I think revealed him more. There was sadness in them, yes—but also defiance in those eyes that I had paid no attention to.

To me, a teenaged boy who wanted nothing to do with his Vietnamese parents, my dad was barely human. Not that I didn’t think of him as a person. But I did not want to think of him—his hopes, his desires, his joys, his frustrations, his dreams.  

My dad—the man who taxied us, cooked for us, worked for us—was also the man who was emotionally unavailable. He didn’t want to know me as a person, an individual. He didn’t care about my hopes, my desires, my joys, my frustrations, my dreams. He just wanted to impose his on mine.

And so, I didn’t want to care about him.

I did not hate my dad. But I had been angry with him for the years of neglect. 

My father was absent not because he wasn’t physically around. In the course of daily life, I spent more hours with my dad than I ever did with my mom. He was the caretaker of the family. And in that domestic role, he served the function traditionally left to a mother.

And he failed miserably as a mother. He was a passive father, an emotionally distant mother.  

Yet, reflecting on his boasts, I am struck by the fact that it masked a quiet, simmering anger. And anger that stemmed from powerlessness and a life with no choices. No options.

He thought that in boasting of his fantastical strength he would seem more powerful.

More masculine. 

But what he did not see, was that his real strength came from a different place altogether.

It came from his restraint.

It came from the way he did not raise his voice at my mother’s berating.

It came from the way he quietly woke up before the sun rose, his alarm clock set fifteen minutes early so he would not be late.

It came from the way he pulled on his work books in the dark to do work that was, to him, as demeaning as it was exhausting.

It came from the way he came home and continued to labor—cooking and cleaning so that his two sons could focus on their homework.

It came from his choice to serve in those small ways that sometimes went unnoticed and certainly unappreciated. 

My mother came over to me and picked up the purple dress shirt that I had laid to the side. 

My mother was stout, perhaps five feet tall. For my entire life she had a short haircut that she believed made her look “handsome.” It was boyish—almost like a Christopher Robin haircut. She often dyed it different shades of brown and red, sometimes highlighted.

She had always struggled with weight, fluctuating between being overweight and sometimes dipping into obesity. 

There is a picture of my mother from when she was perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old. My age then. And it was around when she met my father.

She is young in the sepia photo, her hair flowing and black instead of short and dyed brown. Her face looks long and thin, rather than round. She has a gentle smile on her face, which contrasted with the glare that seemed chiseled onto mother’s face as I knew it.

I remember looking at the picture—truly looking at the picture—only once. Maybe it was because I did not want to think that at one point in time she had been young, vibrant, maybe even feminine. That would contrast too much with the caricature of a woman that I hated.

The woman who’s anger and violence dominated my life for so many years.

I did not find my mother pretty. She was everything in a woman that repelled me. From her aggressiveness to her movements, from her sense of style to the way she spoke—she was the opposite of what I found attractive.

It wasn’t only that I didn’t want to end up with an Asian woman.

It was that—in my growing internalized racism and deepening external disdain for my own mother—I couldn’t find beauty in Asian women, and Vietnamese women in particular, at all.

In many ways, my mother acted as a photo negative of my perception of femininity, refracted across all then Asian women I encountered.

And yet… the woman who often felt like the antagonist of my life’s story had to live a life she never anticipated.

The young girl in that photo did not know that she would have to survive a war.

She did not know she would be separated from an imprisoned husband.

She did not know she would not see her parents and brothers as they left for a country thousands of miles away.

She did not know she would have to count pennies to survive in a country overtaken by her enemies.

She did not know she would lose friends to rape and murder.

She did not know she would have to learn to speak and read all over again, simply to be understood.

She did not know she would be in a country that laughed her, devalued her, treated her as a social pariah.

The young girl in that photo had a vision for her future so utterly different from the lived reality of the woman who stood, purple shirt in hand at a Macy’s Men’s Store, with her teenage boy who saw her as something less than a full person. 

All I knew was that I did not want to end up with someone like her. She represented anger, violence, repression, guilt, shame—all in the form of a short Vietnamese woman.

My anger against her burned deep, simmering underneath the surface for years.

“This looks good. You should get it.” My mom said, holding up the purple shirt.

I don’t know why I chose it. The color was ugly, and it looked outlandish. But maybe that was the point. Maybe in wearing something that was so different than what I would normally, I would be seen.

It was my life’s contradiction—stitched into fabric.

Wanting to be seen but wanting to blend in.

Desiring to stand out and be noticed but wanting to simply fit in.

Longing to be special but just wanting to belong.

***

It was senior year for me, and my brother had finally embraced the label gay. He was at Orange Coast College and had begun to explore friendships where he could say the word out loud—without apology, without fear of reproach.

We were three years apart, and in many ways, Howard—born Hoang, renamed Howard, later self-chosen as Minh—was my opposite. That difference wasn’t just personality. It felt almost physiological, as if we had been wired to repel each other.

We had grown up under the same roof, raised by the same parents, subjected to the same punishments, the same silences, the same generational wounds. But we filtered all of it through different lenses—and became different people.

If I had envisioned my mother as the antagonist of my story, in my early years my brother acted as a secondary antagonist. His bullying, mean-spirited jibes, and physical torment etched itself into my mind, ensuring I disliked him from my earliest memories.

By my junior year, however, our relationship had developed what would be a one-and-a-half-year truce. In some strange way, the two of us became friends for that short period of time. He told me he was gay and I in turn accepted it without judgment or reservation.  

It simply made sense. 

We would spend time driving to LA, going to the movies, eating sushi, or simply talking.

He picked up on things I hadn’t said outright.

I, in turn, provided him with a space where he could talk about the men he found attractive, his celebrity crushes, and the future he dreamed about.

It was the closest we ever came to being brothers.

All that changed during Thanksgiving season of 2008.

My brother wanted to announce to the family that he was gay—with a bang. Both metaphorically and literally.

He had been Facebook chatting with someone named Joe Smith. Joe was an ex-marine, white, blonde, and a couple years older than my brother. And my brother was utterly infatuated with him. He spoke to me about Joe incessantly, repeating the jokes Joe cracked, the ones that made him feel seen.

And then he told me he wanted to have Joe fly out for Thanksgiving.

That year, one of the only years in my memory, we were going to have an extended family Thanksgiving meal. Joe would be the statement—my brother’s loud, unambiguous coming out.

And, he added, he would have sex with Joe.

I remember feeling uneasy at the prospect.

It wasn’t that he was gay, or that he wanted to have sex.

It was that… well, who was Joe, really?

Was he a sexual predator? 

I had my reservations, but I didn’t voice them.

I probably should have.

I think I didn’t for a number of reasons. 

It was around the same time I was navigating my relationship with Stephanie, gaining adult independence through earning money and having a car, and deciding what I wanted to do with my life after high school.

I was trapped in my own little world. 

But I think, more than anything, I believed my brother was a man. And in my understanding of masculinity, men didn’t get taken advantage of sexually. Not like women did. 

My brother wanted me to get to know Joe. To give my thoughts and opinions on him. I told him I would.

Joe arrived the day before Thanksgiving—friendly, extroverted, and immediately likable. 

Joe tried connecting with me, taking an interest in computers because I was interested in computers. We hung out—just the two of us—going to Fry’s Electronics because I needed an air duster. 

He hit on girls while we were out, pointing at women he found attractive and asking what I thought of them.

I’ve always prided myself on being a good judge of people. And I did notice things about Joe that were red flags.

He had immediately begun talking to me about his sexual exploits. He was a ladies’ and gentlemen’s man, having a list of his conquests written down. He told me in vivid details of a particular Asian stewardess that topped his list.  

But my brother knew about this. He knew Joe slept around.

Joe wasn’t a predator—not in the sense of taking something my brother didn’t freely want to give.

By the end of the night, Joe had won my approval and I gave my brother a shrug.

“He’s cool. I like him.” I had said.

That night, my brother gave himself to someone for the first time.

Thanksgiving Day was unforgettable, not because it was necessarily loud, but because it was so awkward. My parents kept insisting that Joe was a friend, while Howard and Joe made it clear they were lovers.

For my socially conservative Vietnamese family, it was like something short circuited. They were nice to Joe because he was white, but awkward because he was gay.

Joe left the day after, promising that they would be exclusively dating, and he would text my brother. The days and weeks passed, and Joe would not reply to my brother’s messages and calls.

One day, I texted Joe.

Me: Hey Joe, what’s up man? Howard said you stopped messaging him back.

Joe: Hey Jackson. Yeah… I’m sorry. I really enjoyed getting to know you. But I need Howard to stop messaging me. I don’t think I want to move forward in a relationship with him. Can you help me out by telling him?

What a prick.

I relayed the message to my brother. He had been shut in his room for days, a stubble of a mustache and goatee shadowing his lip and chin. His eyes were puffy, his demeanor down cast.

I believe something broke in my brother that day.

He didn’t blame me for what had happened. He had freely chosen to be vulnerable with a man who had used him for sex, nothing more.

Another name on Joe’s list.

We would grow distant again, not immediately, but surely. My brother would morph and change, becoming someone I hardly recognized. 

His flamboyance grew, his motions more exaggeratedly gay. And beneath the extravagance and flair, there lies an anger that radiates from him.

My judgment of my brother is not without an understanding of the incredible difficulty of his life.

Like me, my brother grew up under the crushing weight of violence and shame. But because of our birth order, we each had our own burdens to bear. 

He was the eldest son. Which meant he was privileged in ways I never was. My dad would take him to the movies, even as he left him home to fend for myself. Anything he wanted, my parents would give him.

He was praised for being smart, while I was cast as dim-witted.

He was lauded for being handsome, while I was fat and ugly. 

The “Tran” name rested on his shoulders.

And yet from a young age everyone knew he was different. And differences were not tolerated in a family like mine.

As a toddler he had noticed his gentiles and, in an effort, to remove it, had screamed and cried. That incident would be told and retold dozens of times to anyone who would listen.

He would be called feminine by extended family and friends, treated as “other” in a way completely than I ever was.  

And, as I have said, he received the greater brunt of domination by sadistic men.

My brother grew up alone in a very different way than I did. But yet despite their differences, there’s a similarity that can relate to.

He grew up in a world that not only laughed at him because he was Asian, but it also dehumanized him because he was gay. My parents would not accept it, even after his insistence.

They believed it was a phase. And in their denial, they denied something so close to him that it severed their relationship forever. 

There would be nights growing up where my brother would sit in the hallway of our house, screaming and crying for reasons I don’t think even he knew. He just knew he hated his life. He asked for help, begged for counseling.

My parents would simply say, “No. Counseling would be on your record, and you wouldn’t be able to go to college.” They denied him the help he needed.

And instead of providing him guidance or even comfort, my mother would go out into the hall and scream at him to stop or she would kill him.

My brother would slink away into his room and cry himself to sleep.

Over the years my brother would grow angrier and angrier with the world, even as he adopted the sadly ironic label of gay.

He and I are different in so many ways. But the trauma that we carry cut deep into both of us and we adapted in different ways.

My brother developed a mask that was loud.

He called himself the most handsome man in the world.

He is promiscuous and prideful.

He embraced his Vietnamese heritage, writing his PhD thesis on an indigenous Vietnamese goddess.

I had taken the opposite route.

Instead of being loud, I grew quiet and reserved.

Instead of seeing myself as desirable, I developed a persistent form of body dysmorphia.

Instead of embracing my Vietnamese heritage, I rejected it in favor of assimilation and white proximity and approval.

But our anger?

I think that we had in common.

*** 

After graduating from Mater Dei, and a failure to properly submit my acceptance letter to Cal State Fullerton in time, I began attending Orange Coast College. My parents were unhappy that I was at a community college, but my grades began to soar and so they began to leave me alone.

I was at Orange Coast College and with Hung. He was a friend from high school. An aspiring architect at the time, Hung was also Vietnamese but he was tall, lanky, nerdy, hair with no product.

Hung was like a neon sign hung (pun intended) high in the air proclaiming: Asian. He was the epidemy of what I didn’t want to look like. But he had been my friend for years and we often hung out at school. 

As we were walking across campus, two other students were a distance away to my left. They were heading towards us in a perpendicular direction. 

I heard one of them say loudly, “Ching chong!”

By this then I was no longer the shy, quiet kid I had been. I had spent nine months at a local mixed martial arts gym, training sometimes three or four hours a day in wrestling, muay Thai, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Jeet Kune Do, and even some Filipino martial arts.

I sparred, rolled, and practiced with passion. I felt empowered. It was deep, almost spiritual. In learning martial arts, I was not afraid anymore. I didn’t feel little, emasculated. I lived and breathed for the fight.

I stopped walking. Despite Hung’s attempt to ignore the two that had just made fun of us.

For Hung, it was just another day living as an Asian American in a world dominated by people who laughed and made fun of us.

The two guys began to bow, an exaggerated movement that brought back to mind my high school memories in a flood of anger.

“WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?” I screamed, anger boiling. The rage blinded me. I cursed at them, seeing two white men who represented—in that moment—the oppression that had suffocated me for so long. “DO YOU WANT TO FUCKING FIGHT?” It was a guttural scream, causing the two to stop in their tracks.

In that moment, I did not care about the consequences.

I did not care that there were two of them.

I did not care about the fact that Hung would not fight with me.

I did not care about the warnings my coaches had given me about avoiding fights.

I was just so sick and tired of it all.

The racism.

The jokes.

The constant kowtowing to people who made me feel small and pathetic.

In that moment I knew what it was like to be my mother.

To break a bottle and lunge at a man. To see only red and let the anger take over. 

The two stopped in their tracks, shocked by my sudden rage and, possibly, the violence they saw in my eyes, in my posture. I radiated the anger, ready to strike them down.

They both raised their hands, a universal sign of surrender.

“I’m sorry man. We were just kidding.” 

I turned away from them, satisfied that in some small way I reclaimed what I felt was my masculinity.

But I was also disappointed.

Disappointed that I did not get to take my anger out on them.

And disappointed that my anger had so controlled me.

What had I really accomplished? 

***

Be angry and do not sin, the Apostle Paul tells us in Ephesians chapter 4. 

The statement carries with it a command—be angry.

Be angry at sin but do not sin.

Be angry at racism, but do not sin.

Be angry at abuse, but do not sin.

Be angry at neglect, but do not sin.

Being angry is not fundamentally wrong, it is how we express our anger that determines its righteousness. 

Later, in the same chapter, Paul would say, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice.” 

Be angry and do not sin.

Let all anger be put away.

The paradox mirrors so many other tensions—body and soul, masculinity and femininity, strength and restraint, visibility and belonging.

My father’s bravado compensated the helplessness and powerlessness he felt.

Yet it was through his quiet services that his masculinity shined the brightest.

His body labored while his soul carried dreams he never spoke of until he passed.

My mother’s rage masked the girl in the sepia photograph, who never would have expected what life would eventually throw her way.

Her body aged in a foreign land while her soul carried wounds from a war-torn homeland.

My brother’s flamboyance protected the vulnerable boy who just wanted the love and acceptance he didn’t receive.

His body became a statement while his soul searched for acceptance.

The purple shirt my mother held up that day in the store—the one I thought was ugly but chose anyway—perhaps showed I understood something even then.

Sometimes we must embrace the contradictions.

Wanting to be seen but desiring to just belong with everyone else.

Perhaps, like so many things in like, we occupy a space of tension—a place that feels like we’re teetering on the edge of something real, but all too easily fall into something false. 

Masculinity, femininity, the tug-of-war between who we believe we are and who our bodies seem, sometimes, to trap us in are not contradictory.

They are two parallel realities, meant to be integrated someday but not yet.

Be angry and do not sin.

Let all anger be put away.