Part One: Modern Prometheus
“It’s Alive!  It’s Alive!” – Victor Frankenstein

At first, I carried no sign.  In 2020, I marched with a notebook and a backpack for my first three protests.  The things I carried were extra covid masks, hand sanitizer, baby wipes (which were hard to find those early days), dark glasses, emergency jacket, water, cereal bars, and an assortment of flyers, newsletters and leaflets other protestors handed out and gave to me, but no sign.  I marched “unarmed”.  

Rally leaders told the “armed” protestors “Hold your signs up high!” as the police and media helicopters circled city hall. “And if you don’t have a sign, put your fists up!  This is what America looks like!” And that to me summed it all.  The protest sign as fist.  Or better yet, knuckle duster.

Cardboard resistance, nonvocal annunciation, creative rebellion. Combined with chanting, combined with physical demonstration, protest signs contribute to the full range of ancient performance poetry.  Integrative poetry.  Similar to what graffiti is to the elements of hip hop.  The written word in sync with the spoken and performed word.

Knuckle dusters showed up as diverse as LA.  Some signs had sticks attached to them to be held like a handle.  Some were just poster boards held with hands.  Some were poor man’s signs—simple sheets of notebook paper with a slogan.  Some people wore their signs.  Helmets of varying types—construction hats, football helmets, bicycle helmets all painted with slogans; or white T-shirts with messages on the front and back written with permanent markers.  DIY fashion as protest.  There was even activist cosplay.  One guy dressed up as Pancho Villa and had a sign that said “Poncho Villa”.

One Juneteenth rally held at the south lawn of city hall was dedicated solely to making signs.  Tables were set up for new activists to construct theirs. Cardboard, colored markers, glue, tape, glitter, construction paper, all made accessible—a total arts and crafts day.  Many of the handmade signs I saw were simple but effective.  When I say simple, I mean Sharpie-on-white.  White cardboard with black writing.

BLACK LIVES MATTER; WHITE SILENCE = VIOLENCE; AM I NEXT?  HOW MANY WEREN’T FILMED?  I CAN’T BREATHE.  If signs had pictures, they were usually of George Floyd’s selfie or maybe a picture of Martin or Malcolm with a quote.  One Sharpie-on-white I liked was “I’M SICK AND TIRED OF BEING SICK AND TIRED” a quote made famous by Activist Fannie Lou Hamer.  I wanted more than just sharpie on white, more than just a bumper sticker slogan re-written on cardboard.  There were tens of thousands of protesters in LA.  A sea of signs.  And they all said what needed to be said brilliantly.  And many of them had so much swagger.  I just felt like disrupting the swagger and bringing a nerd element that was uniquely me. 

Black Lives Matter Los Angeles spearheaded the whole Defund the Police chants.  I wanted to ask the question “And then what?” as a response.  My personal belief is that even if cops stopped abusing their power, other forces in power would still be abusing power.  Defund and then what?  I wanted to say that but not in a slogan.  As much as Fox News hated the protests, Fox News still profited.  Pundits like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson expressed their discontent but still received high ratings.  They were paid to disagree.  It was revolution for some and business for others.  

Working in higher academia I read and listen to scholars who say smart things, but they say the same things the same way and those who debate them say the same things the same way.  Scholars regurgitating the same old information.  The same old way.  Smart thought isn’t always original thought.  And that is an issue that bugs me.  I would like to think of constructive thinking as being composed of critical thinking, deep thinking, and original thinking.  A critical thinker is going to ask questions.  When the studies show that 6 out of 10 men “prefer (fill in the blank) to (fill in the blank)” or 75% of women are most likely to (“fill in the blank)” a critical thinker is going to ask how old are the men, the women?  What educational background of the men the women?  Etc.  Anything to get to the specifics.  They don’t just take research at face value just because it’s research.  A deep thinker is going to look for principles over details.  Core elements.  While activists and social critics criticize capitalism, the deeper thinker will criticize greed and exploitation.  Greed and exploitation being elements in capitalism but are also elements in other things. Did capitalism exist in 334 BCE when Alexander the Great was invading and conquering lands?  An original thinker brings to the table a subjective element.  They address concepts and ideas in a way that is characteristic of their unique way of thinking. 

Growing up in the church I had to read about Jesus.  I always found him to be a true original thinker.  He came out of left field criticizing both the Scribes and the Pharisees and got his message out through the telling of story.  To this day Christians, atheists, and followers of other faiths use the term “good Samaritan” to describe a person who helps those in distress.  It isn’t that original thinkers are saying anything new.  Nothing is totally new.  But due to the fear of sounding unprofessional or inarticulate or too simplistic many adults hide their original thought, thus limiting their full human effect.  Working in higher academia I have witnessed this trend.  A lot of intelligence, but not a lot of wisdom.  Children, I feel, tend to be the best original thinkers.  Original thinkers tend to be childlike but not childish.  One of my wishes in life is to be a Deep/Original/Critical thinker or “DOC thinker” as I like to call it.  DOC thought. It’s something I feel I both achieve and fail at daily.   

Prior to the pandemic I was in probate court for 4 years.  My aunt coerced my grandmother to sign a document while she had dementia in an attempt to make her the sole trustee of the estate.  I was raised by my grandparents since I was 3 months old, grew up and became their caregiver and power of attorney.  I confronted my aunt about it in 2010 informing her that what she did was elder abuse and showed her what the penalty was for such crime.  Her response was “Oh!  Oh!  Okay!  Never mind!”  Three years later, as soon as my grandma died my aunt whipped out the document, used it to evict me and sell the house despite there being a living trust prohibiting it.  My attorney tried to get the unlawful detainer dismissed and take the case to probate but the judge went forward with the eviction.  My aunt had filed the right paperwork in the right court at the right time, before we could file a demurrer, so I became homeless.  I couch surfed.  I slept in my car.  I slept in a laundry room.  My German shepherd went to live in a kennel and I would visit her on the weekends.  When I went to work I would cry on my lunch break then go back to work holding it in. 

I was given a record with an eviction which caused my credit score to go from “very good” to “poor and below average” for a duration of 7 years.  The court garnished my wages to pay my aunt for back rent despite there never being a rental agreement.  Despite having 2 bachelor’s degrees and 1 master’s degree, my academic library job wasn’t enough; so to support myself and my legal fight I took a second job at night working for the caregiving industry and that money went to pay my attorney for probate.  For 4 years I fought to prove that my aunt was not the owner.  I kept my receipts for the mortgage, property tax, insurance, and maintenance bills that I paid for.  I kept my grandmother’s medical records showing that she was being treated for Alzheimer’s.  I compiled a list of witnesses from doctors, clergy, and neighbors in the community.  My aunt had nothing.  In the end I got my money back and proved that my aunt was not the trustee but it taught me how racist court was. 

After my first day of testifying before the judge, my attorney took me to one of the conference rooms inside Stanely Mosk Courthouse inside downtown Los Angeles.  This was the same courthouse that OJ Simpson, and Charles Manson had their cases at.  My attorney goes: 

“Larry, I have to be honest with you.  I’m a White guy, and the judge is a White guy, and you are Black.  And the way that you spoke today, you were calm, you were confident, and you were organized.  That blew him away.  I saw the look in his eyes.  That is going to be our ammo!”  

My attorney was charging me $300 an hour, which meant $75 for every 15 minutes.  I wasn’t going to waste time talking about race, so I changed the subject quick to save money.  But it hung over my head.  How being calm and confident and organized could blow a judge away.  Isn’t that what I was supposed to be?  I’m in court.  Hasn’t a “White guy” ever seen a “calm, confident, organized” “Black guy” before?  What about all those Black lawyers and judges?  What was so special about me?  I remember how difficult it was in the beginning to find an attorney to represent my case.  The consultations were brutal.  In one month, I talked to six different attorneys alone pitching my case.  I had older White attorneys talking down to me at the consultations.  Two attorneys yelled at me and talked over me as if I were their opposing counsel.  Afterwards I still had to pay them for their time—$50 here, $75 there, $100 all to be rejected.  It gave me the conclusion that lawyers are just as racist as cops, they just don’t beat you or shoot you in the back.  But they see you the same way.  A smudge.  Gum under their shoe.  Law goes beyond the gun and the badge.  And so I wanted to show that somehow in my sign. 

There are higher levels of racism.  The unnecessary “game” of probate court got me thinking about a video game “system”.  And what exactly is a system anyway?  A series of different parts working together for the whole.  The circulatory system in the human body consists of the blood, the blood vessels, and the heart and within those components you have a series of arteries, capillaries, veins, atriums, ventricles, and valves.  The cooling system in a car consists of a water pump, a thermostat, a radiator, a fan.  When one part is defective the whole system becomes out of balance.  And that’s America.  That’s the American legal system.  So while the streets were yelling “Defund the police!”, “Abolish the police!”, “Reform the police!” and essentially saying the same things I responded with the principles of D.O.C. thought. 

June 5, 2020 would have been Breonna Taylor’s 27th birthday.  She died by police gunfire on March 18th the same year.  On June 5th I went to a BLM rally outside the Hall of (In)Justice—as the protestors called it—for a birthday celebration in Breonna’s honor.  The event was called “The Rose that Grew from Concrete” named after the Tupac Shakur poem.  Protestors and those in attendance were encouraged to take a rose from a table and place a rose by the memorial.  Later that evening on my caregiving shift, while my client slept, I drew a blueprint for my protest sign at his kitchen table.  “The System is a Racist Video Game” I wrote.  That alone would have been my “sharpie on white” but being the librarian that I am I had to do it up infographic style.  

So, I went deeper.  As my client snored, I drew stick people on paper and made a list of racists up the racist ladder: police, lawyers, judges, jurors, politicians, business owners, neighborhood watch, ordinary people; but I still needed to make it all sing.  I was taking several poetry classes on Zoom led by the great scholar and poet Annie Finch.  Her lessons were all based on traditional poetic meter and the musicality of words.  So, I edited and categorized my list based on alliteration.  Police became Cops.  Lawyers and judges combined became Courts.  Politicians became Candidates.  Business owners became Corporations.  Ordinary people became Communities.  Cops, Courts, Candidates, Corporations, Communities = The tongue-twisting five Cs.   

The next day, Saturday, I skipped the protest and took the time to construct my sign.  Across from the library where I worked was the 99 Cent Store.  Originally, I went there looking for colorful posterboard paper to use as the actual sign itself.  I could place images on it.  But then I saw they were selling carboard trifolds.  The kind kids used for middle school science fair projects.  I found the trifold design was large enough to fit all of my ideas on, sturdier than posterboard paper, plus I could glue the posterboard paper on to it—the best of both worlds.  

The library was closed due to quarantine, but I had a key.  I used the conference table in the back room as my laboratory.  I literally became Dr. Frankenstein and was no longer making a protest sign but a creature.  

I Googled video game characters from my middle school days.  Super Mario Bros, the Legend of Zelda, Mega Man, Metroid, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.  Since I love all things folklore, I see video games as a form of modern-day folklore.  I printed the characters out in color and embarked on the liberating process of cutting and gluing.  Kindergarten had prepared me for this day.

In Calibri font size 72 I pasted “THE SYSTEM IS A RACIST VIDEO GAME!” 

Next to Doc and Little Mac from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out it read:

Level 1

Racist Cops

(Cops Are Just the Foot Soldiers.  Don’t Be Fooled!)

Next to Samus Aran from Metroid it read

Level 2

Racist Courts

(Lawyers, District Attorneys, Judges, Juries)

Next to Link from The Legend of Zelda it read

Level 3

Racist Candidates

(Mayors, Governors, Senators, Representatives, Presidents)

Next to Mega Man from Mega Man it read

Level 4

Racist Corporations

(Corporations Fund Politics; Corporations Run Sweat Shops; Corporations Control the Media)

And finally next to Fire Mario from Super Mario Bros it read

Level 5

Racist Communities

It’s We the People vs. They the People

I gave my creature a gender and made it a she.  I needed a yin to compliment my yang.  I named her Peggy after Peggy Carter, killer of Nazis, and Captain America’s dear heart.  Since Cap carried a shield, I noticed my creature was big enough to function as one.  A large trifold 24 inches tall and 18 inches long when closed, but when opened, possessed a 36 inch wingspan.  One hell of a protest shield.  The creature would protect me from projectiles thrown my way, protect me from the summer heat when used as a parasol, and be padding for my knees during demonstrations where we’d drop to a knee for 9 minutes in the middle of the street.

I Googled pictures of Peggy Carter and found two pictures of Hailey Atwell aiming guns at the viewer.  I taped them to the back of the trifold and then…“It’s alive!  It’s alive!”

One of my concerns was that my sign wasn’t “Black” enough.  After all, many of the marches were inspired by or led by Black Lives Matter activists.  And many of the signs had specific Black imagery or Black quotes.  There wasn’t a single Black person on my sign except Doc from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.  And Doc was important because of the DOC thought and the pun associated with it.  I even named my creature after a White woman from a comic book.  My creature was more philosophical and conceptual than tangibly political. 

I always got called “Not Black enough” by folks growing up.  I wasn’t Black enough because I liked rock bands or because I liked mayonnaise on my sandwich, because I failed at games like spades, and sucked at the electric slide, or this: the great grand Uncle Tom of Uncle Tomisms I liked a White girl, or two.  Actually, on second thought, it was three—and none of them had curves.  But no matter what I liked I was always Black enough for the cops.  And getting screwed over by them was my racial rite of passage.  To heck with my preferences and that is the reason why I always say swagger is the new superstition. 

After some soul searching, and soul power searching I said fuck it and put my insecurities aside.  After all, it was the pandemic.  I’d be wearing a mask and dark glasses anyway.  Who would know me?  Not a single soul.  And it’s Los Angeles, everyone’s a little off.   

Sunday June 7, 2020 was Peggy’s first call to action and she responded effectively.  I kept her folded up on the train to downtown LA.  We got off at Union Station, walked past the homeless encampments at what used to be called Father Sera Park, crossed over the 101 freeway overpass and made it to Spring Street.  Helicopters circled overhead.  Some LAPD, some NBC News, some drones. 

In the early days of the 2020 LA protests, police on motorcycles would direct traffic so that we could do our demonstrations.  Thousands of us took over Spring Street.  It was more than a parade.  Peggy’s left and right wings opened, and the nerdy video game characters began speaking.  Rather than being the laughed at like Carrie at her pig-blood prom, Peggy was given the red carpet treatment.

“Hey, bro, let me see that sign.  Shit.  That’s a cold one.  That’s what’s up.”

“Excuse me.  Can I take a picture of your sign?”

“Oh shit.  C-5.  I gotta remember that.  Can I take a picture?”

“Did you make that?”

“When all of this is over with, I hope you laminate that sign.”

The streets had our approval, and it was enough to know that Peggy would be back.

Part Two: Axel F

“Stir it up, got to break it up now/
When I think about tomorrow…/
I don´t wanna take it anymore.” – Patti LaBelle, “Stir it Up”

The first R rated movie I saw as a kid was Beverly Hills Cop.  I saw it in the theater when I was 7 years old.  My mother and grandmother both took me to see it.  Two other R rated movies I saw latter on would be the purples.  Purple Rain on VHS and The Color Purple in the theater.  The purples traumatized me a bit.  What Prince did with Apollonia in the barn—Woah!  And then how the White mob circled Sophia prior to the cop bashing her eye with the gun handle—double woah!  I gave up on R for a while.  I stuck to Indiana Jones and the chilled monkey brains.  That was the 80s for me.  Watching how adults acted perplexed me.  I was a kid instructed by the adult world to be good but the adult world never practiced what it preached.  The adult world was too complicated for me.  Some would say no parent should ever take their kid to see such things.  But I’m glad they did, it helped me be a better teenager and an introspective writer at 15.

But Axel Foley outsmarting the cops and those in authority had a deep impact on me.  He was Br’er Rabbit in the flesh and did what Shaft did but in a comedic way.  Aside from Lucille Ball and the Three Stooges, Eddie Murphy was my introduction to comedy and especially the Black/White dynamic on screen.  

Though the streets of Beverly Hills had changed since ’84, the snobbery had not.  How Axel Foley insulted authority was still timely. When 2020 came, I got to be my own version of Axel Foley.  For months MAGA supporters had taken over Beverly Gardens holding rallies.  And week by week their numbers grew to thousands.  They had every right to gather, every right to express their patriotism.  They had every right to vote for Trump.  But these were not just Trump voters, these were Trump cultists.

 Signs that once read: “God and Country” now read “God Guns and Trump”.  There were signs that read “White Genocide is Real”.  On national television during the presidential debate Trump said: “Proud Boys stand back and stand by!”  And after that, very proudly the boys showed up to Beverly Hills.  Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, QAnon Followers, those attempting to resurrect the Tea Party.  Months later those same forces would storm the US Capital.  

 Together, Peggy and I, marched with 75 counter protestors from Roxbury Park to Beverly Gardens.  Google Maps had it at only 1.2 miles.  Roxbury Dr. was residential.  We passed houses chanting: “Out of your homes and into the streets!  While you’re sleeping, people are dying!  Out of your homes and into the streets!”

 That 1.2 miles felt longer.  Rich liberals came out of their homes and clapped.  They threw up a rich liberal fist.  They knew where we were going but did not join us.  Why would they anyway?  They were rich.  And they were liberal.  As we marched on we wound up on their Instagrams.  If the revolution wasn’t going to be televised it would be tweeted.

We changed streets, turned right on Wilshire where there was more traffic.  The quarantine was lifted, people were out driving.  The noises returned but we made a bigger noise.  Supporters honked their horns.  They knew where we were going but did not join.  We looked like the crew who would put bananas in their tailpipes.  On Wilshire the chants were: “How do you spell raaa-cist?  B-H-P-D!  How do you spell raaa-cist?  B-H-P-D!” 

We made a left on Rodeo Dr.  The street I watched Axel Foley cruise to the Patti LaBelle “Stir it Up” track 35 years prior.  A different decade but same game and same rules.  We paused so the posh could see our black-clothed glory.

“Out of the stores and into the streets!  While you’re shopping people are dying!  Out of the stores and into the streets!”

  The power of attention was surreal.  The posh and the plastic withdrew from their stores for a moment to film us.

“Out of the stores and into the streets!  While you’re buying people are dying!  Out of the stores and into the streets!”

 The audacity Foley had to park a dented Nova next to a Mercedes.  Each one of us a blue Nova in black, our lives mattered.  Picking up the pace, we moved forward.  Patti LaBelle sang in my head but we chanted as we marched passed restaurants: 

“Out of the bars and into the streets!  While you’re drinking, people are dying!  Out of the bars and into the streets!”

“Out of the clubs and into the streets!  Join us!  Out of the clubs and into the streets!  Join us!”

No one did.  Who would anyway?  They watched, filmed us with their phones, and raised their spectator fists in rich liberal solidarity.  So we marched on alone until we turned right on Santa Monica Blvd and there was where we faced 2000+ Trump and MAGA supporters.  75 against 2000.

Beverly Hills was awkward.  The police seemed to let people fight, as long as it was one on one and not a mob attack, meaning if you squared off, they let it happen.  I saw it as their way of saying if you want us to be defunded then this is what you get. 

A White woman with a cell phone videoed a Proud Boy who then slapped the phone out of her hand.

“Did you see that, officer?”  She said. “Oh my God!  Did you see that?!”

The cop saw, said nothing, then looked away.  The Beverly Hills cops were there to stop a riot, they weren’t there to stop what would cause one.

Our signs read Black Lives Matter.

Our signs read No Justice No Peace.

Not a single sign of ours mentioned Joe Biden’s name or the Democratic Party.  For us it wasn’t about partisan politics, it was about something else.  It was about standing up to a political cult, which in a materialistic secular humanistic world is far more dangerous than a religious one.

It wasn’t supposed to be a fistfight.  It was supposed to be a chant off.  Our signs vs. their signs.  Our songs vs. their songs.  The purest purpose of counter protest, and we had a legal permit by the city to do this.  The Beverly Hills Police department formed a line to divide our motely crew from their MAGA crew.  The line was ineffective as folks crossed over from both crews. 

“Hey, Helmet Man!  Hey, Helmet Man!  Let’s go one on one!”  A Proud Boy called out to a member of our crew who wore a safety helmet, challenging him to a fight.  Helmet Man did nothing and walked away. 

“But you’re not Blaaack!  You’re not Blaaack!”  A MAGA supporter yelled to a Latina ally who was holding a Black Lives Matter sign.  

Peaceful protests are subjective.   For some people it means no blows thrown.  But even those types of protests may be void of the spirit of peace.  Nonviolence and peace are two different things when pondering the concept of inner peace.  Neither crews seemed to have had inner peace that day.

I held Peggy up.  She said nothing about defunding the police, nothing about BLM, and nothing that criticized Trump.  Peggy just called out the system for what it was.  And with that she shut up screams. 

“Hey, let me see that sign.” A Proud Boy asked.  I turned to him and let him read.  He gave it a long look, then walked away.  He didn’t debate me.  He didn’t say bullshit, he just quietly walked away. 

A right-wing media reporter kept trying to get a woman in our crew to talk.  “What’s your end goal?  Why are you here?  Tell us your end goal.”  His camera and microphone followed her every evasive move. 

Back at Roxbury Park we had all been instructed to not talk to right-wing media, so the woman stayed silent.  He was quite larger, and she was quite smaller.  Peggy was large enough to function as a wall, so I stepped in between the two of them which allowed the woman to slip away from the reporter. 

“The goal is to win the game,” I said to him.  The reporter then took the time to film my sign; and just like the Proud Boy he, too, walked away.  I was asked zero questions. 

Damn.  Peggy was a right-wing repellant it seemed.  For better or for worse. 

When I was kid reading those stories about Jesus, there was a tale of him stopping an angry mob from stoning a woman by saying: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”  But that wasn’t the weird thing that stopped them from stoning.  Jesus knelt and began writing in the sand and as he wrote people watched and one by one they walked away dropping their rocks.  No one knows what the hell he was writing.  Some say they know but the Bible never says specifically what it was.  Whatever he wrote it worked.

I held Peggy high with Christ in mind but eventually a fight did break.  An angry patriot with an American flag wrapped the banner around the pole, then used it as a baseball bat to knock one of our guys to the ground.  I watched the whole thing happen.  He then threw the American flag on the ground committing a sin worse than Kaepernick.  He climbed on top of our guy and started pounding him.  Helmet Man and the other security from our crew rushed in to pull the patriot off.  As they pulled him off the Proud Boys rushed in to fight and the melee followed.  Our guy was still on the ground.

The cops came with their Beverly Hill-billy clubs and began swinging them horizontally at everyone—mostly our crew. 

“Allies to the front,” someone shouted.

Brave White women and White-passing Latinas opened their umbrellas creating a Spartan-style phalanx wall and ran towards the cops.  When nightsticks battle umbrellas, nightsticks always win, but the black umbrellas served as snares snagging the batons once they tore into them.  A blinding net.  This allowed our fallen guy to finally get up and escape from being trampled, arrested or beaten. 

As the clouds parted, a voice arose either from Beverly Hill Heaven or a loudspeaker saying:

The Beverly Hills Police Department has declared this to be an unlawful assembly.  You are now ordered to disperse.  Failure to comply will result in arrest or other police action.  You have 4 minutes to disperse.

This message was only to our crew.  The MAGA rally continued.  So, dispersing is what we did.  $1,000 or 6 months in jail would be the penalty if we didn’t.  We turned around and marched our arses back to Roxbury Park with the BHPD’s Lenco BearCat, it’s armored SWAT vehicle, making sure we did.

We never stopped the cult from believing.

We never stopped the cult from storming the United States Capital building 68 days later.

We never stopped the cult from reelecting The Orange Man who would later have Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, by his side and in his ear.

We simply took a stand for a few minutes just to say no.  

In 2020 I attended 27 protests.  A small number compared to the full-time activists.

Today Peggy sits in my office.  I’ve never laminated or framed her.  I keep her as a conversation piece. 

I show her to younger people, older people, and people of all races.  With her, I tell my story of resistance. 

I start with her and work my way back to the first night I was stopped by the police.  

November 1998:

My grandmother in the driver’s seat and I in the passenger’s.

Her taillight was out.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff asked to see her identification then asked to see mine.  I was just a passenger.  

But he asked to see mine.

When he gave me my ID back after scanning it in his database, he looked at me and said: “It’s a good thing no one in this car is wanted for murder.”

What a random thing to say.

He gave my grandmother a correctible violation, also known as a fix-it ticket.

But the light was never out to begin with.

Let me repeat that.

I said the light was never out to begin with.

The post The Importance of Being Peggy appeared first on The New Absurdist.

I was thankful Mom was off. She’d recently had to take a second job because she  couldn’t afford her house payment on the money she was making as a data analyst with only a  high school diploma. I set my bags down in the room and popped half the edible before heading  to the kitchen. Normally, we’d have had more people over for Thanksgiving. We had Dad’s  family over last year, and my uncle Alejandro, on Dad’s side, invited us over this year. But I’d  always felt guilty over the fact I don’t speak enough Spanish to converse with Dad’s family  fluently, unlike my cousins, who were full Mexican as opposed to my half, and who had grown  up speaking both languages. Today, it was just Mom, Dad, and my brother. There were my  grandma Virginia and my aunt Tami in their urns on the kitchen island in the front room, where  Mom worked at her day job, but they were only here in spirit. 

We’ve got a picture of Tami on the kitchen island. She and Mom both have a good tussle  of brown hair and the same smile. But Mom’s had her hair dyed blonde as long as I’ve known  her. She usually wears a cardigan and some comfy-looking utility pants. That’s what she was  wearing when I walked into the kitchen.  

“Is the food ready?” I asked, the edible working its way through my system. 

“Only if you give me a hug first,” Mom said, and we hugged.  

Thanksgiving dinner was the usual: a whole turkey, baked macaroni and cheese, rolls,  stuffing (with onions), green beans, and mash potatoes with gravy. It was all her cooking because  she had always been the one who cooked. I can’t remember the last time I helped. I was good at  getting food in and out of the oven and even better at getting food in and out of the container.  Whenever I was home, I would focus on washing the dishes. I had a knack for slotting them in  the right place in the dishwasher. My brother and Dad were good at putting them in the sink, and  Dad had gotten better at washing the dishes when he was mad at my brother for not washing  them; it was progress. I downed a tall boy of Hell Yes Ma’am beer that Mom got for me (it’s my  favorite beer because it tastes great and gets me fucked up the fastest) and went about putting  some food on my plate.  

Sitting around the table, eating together, it was hard to believe that my parents had  divorced ten years ago. They’d been back together for four years by now. Nice things happen,  sometimes. My brother and I are iterations of our parents. Matthew has Mom’s hair—thick and  wavy. I have Dad’s face—round. Growing up, people said Dad and I looked like twins. I’m not  sure if that meant I looked older or that he looked younger. Mom has always said she felt I look  like her—that is to say, white. She is one of the few white people to have said so.  

I ate while Mom talked. Dad ate while Mom talked. She was talking about how happy  she was to have us here as a family, how not everyone got to do that. When I finished, I felt full,  but I didn’t feel high, so I went back to my room to get the other half of the edible. It had only  been thirty minutes, not enough to feel the full effects. I should have realized that.  

The first time I smoked weed was when my friend had me huff on a bong. He had come  back from spending time with family in Oklahoma, where he earned his nuke med degree while  working at a Wal-Mart. He said all the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek Indians hung out at the  Wal-Mart, and they were tall, taller than he was. Anyway, he told me to huff through the bong  like I was eating ass. Never mind the fact that I’d never eaten ass up to that point in my life. Then  I remembered I was huffing it after he did, and I thought, “oh, wait.”  

I don’t use a bong because it’s too big to hide. Instead, I use my pipe—it’s a green  Gandalf pipe, except you can smoke weed in it. When I rip, it hurts my lungs and makes my eyes  feel like they’re on fire. But it’s worth it for just to feel like I’m sitting on a cloud when I sit on  the couch. I didn’t bring the pipe, though, because I didn’t want Mom to suspect anything. She  says she has a hound’s sense of smell. Instead, I dropped by this place called iHemp just before I  got home. It was on Stratford Road, just down the way from the Enterprise where I’d picked up  the Hyundai Elantra. At that Enterprise, I’d met a cute girl who, it turned out, was dating a  classmate of mine from back when. Like mine, his name was Nicholas, only he went by  Harrison. I remember the last time I saw him was in this cluster of auto shops beside a tree  barrier that separates Dad’s neighborhood from the rest of the city. I was riding bikes with a  neighbor once, back before my parents divorced, and that neighbor went crashing through the trees on his bike, making sounds like he was on a motorcycle. He rode in front of one of the auto  shops, and this lady, who looked a lot like Kathy Bates from Misery, came out holding a tiny  black revolver. I stood on my own bike, my fat thighs straddling the bar because the skinny little seat hurt my ass, and jumped when she looked at me. She went back inside like nothing  happened.  

Anyway, the iHemp was closing early because of the holiday. It turns out the store had  been open a few years, yet I had never bothered to come in. That’s mostly because weed isn’t  fully legal here in North Carolina, and I know that whatever I get here will be dogshit compared  to the edibles I had in Denver the previous spring. I bought four Delta 9 indica gummies for  eleven dollars, but the clerk packed five on accident, and I didn’t bother to correct her. She told  me to make sure I only take half the edible, so I could get a feel for how it made me feel. I said I fully intended on doing that, as that’s what I did in Denver, and that was a great fucking time. 

“No one wants to green out,” she said.  

Greening out is essentially an overdose on weed that, most of the time, people don’t die  from.  

“Oh, yeah, I know that’s like,” I told her, but what I didn’t tell her is that the last time I greened out, which was the first time, I had five shots of cannabis-infused cashew milk in one  hour. My heart pounded like a jackhammer, and it got hard to breathe. A friend who was there  with me walked me around my apartment neighborhood until we found a stoner friend of ours  who put me in his car and took us to the BestWay down the street. I hid in the backseat. The lights stretched as he drove down the hill. He put on some Chopin as he went inside the  convenience store for some whole black peppercorns. When we got back, he told me eat the  peppercorns and make a pizza for myself. He also had me throw out the beer I’d been drinking. I  eventually mellowed out after telling them “thank you for being here with me” ten times each.  

For me, a green out starts with a pounding heartbeat, followed by a sense of panic, which  is exactly what I felt when Mom told me she was going to die.  

“I think about Tami, and I know I’m going to die like that,” she said.  

To which I responded “wait, what?” Because Tami died of an overdose on some pain pills  and maybe a little cocaine. She’d died three years before this Thanksgiving, but in October,  which was her birth month. Mom had texted to wish her a happy birthday, but Tami never  responded. That was odd, considering she loved to talk. Mom later went and found Tami alone in  her bed, her finger pointing up to the ceiling.  

“What do you mean you’re going to die like that? Like an overdose?” I asked Mom. 

“Oh, no,” Mom said. “But I just realized that one day I’ll die.”  

Mom looked at me like what she was saying wasn’t any big deal. I felt my heart start to  beat faster, and I had to take a deep breath. The white fluorescents showed the lines on her  forehead and, all the sudden, I had second thoughts about finishing my second Hell Yes Ma’am. I  couldn’t figure out how to tell her this was the worse thing she could say to her lightweight  almost-thirty-year-old-son who was tripping his balls off, so instead I just nodded like it was an  every day thing she was telling me.  

“I’m going to take a nap. When I get up, do you want to take a walk?” I asked her this  because walking was what we did whenever I was home. I like walking with my mom. 

“Ok,” Mom said. “But it’s cold out.”  

I went to my room. For the most part, I just lay in my bed, trying to get some sleep. I  would occasionally go out to get some water, not trying to talk to anybody as I’d never been this  cross-faded in front of my family before. My heart was pounding too fast for me to count. I tried  to calm myself down, so I put on some YouTube. But I couldn’t stand anything in my algorithm  as it all had to do with the development of different nuclear bombs, so I put on a peaceful music  stream. I slowed my breathing, trying to listen to the music, and drank water. The worst type of  trip is where you lose your appetite, and that’s exactly what happened to me. I kept breathing and  checking my heartbeat, holding my hand to my chest. The guy kept thumping and thumping, and  I kept tossing and turning, trying to find the position where I wouldn’t feel my blood pulsing in  my ears. I hate hearing it beat like that.  

The last time I went to the doctor, the nurse told me my blood pressure was high. I told  her it was because I had white gown syndrome, which is when your blood pressure is elevated  when you visit the doctor. It’s a real thing, I swear. She told me I needed to eat healthier, and I  was reminded of all the times people called me fat when I was younger. I’ve spent a lot of time in front of mirrors, assessing the fat around my middle, torturing myself in trying to figure out  whether it’s growing or shrinking. When I jump rope in the gym, I watch each part of myself— cheeks, pecs, biceps, and stomach—move up and down with the rhythm of the exercise. I tell  myself I’ve come far, but I still check it afterward. I can never decide if I find it endearing or  hideous. Indulging myself in my vice is my way of forgetting about that, of not feeling guilt  about eating, if only for a few hours.  

My aunt Tami would take me to the Bagel Station on Stratford Road when I was younger,  all those carbs likely having something to do with my fatness. She loved to show me off at Pig  Pickins’, where she waitressed when I was a kid. Dad thinks the restaurant business is where she  got the things that killed her. In her later years, she worked for these jerks at a place on  Cloverdale. Mom said the manager treated Tami like shit. I remember going in there to say hello,  and her manager eyed us. Well, I eyed the fucker right back, and he went back into his hidey hole.  

When Mom came to see Tami, it was in this far-flung corner of Forsyth, bordering Yadkin  County. Tami had been living with her husband, this guy named Harold who really didn’t have  his wits about him. Mom said there were all these women in the house, unrelated to anyone who  lived there, and they were wearing big cowboy boots. In my daydreams, I call them the Coyote  Ugly Reject Crew. They all looked at my mother with disgust or scorn, the way she tells it.  Harold’s son led Mom to Tami’s room, and that’s where she found Tami, lying on the bed and  pointing up to the ceiling. No one had checked on her for a full day before they realized she was  dead. If I could trade Tami for anyone in that house, I would, if only just to talk to her again. The  thing is, Tami asked me to lunch the month she died. “My treat,” she’d said. I neglected to  answer her.  

Anyway, I got up because I knew I was greening out since I was thinking about death. I  went outside to where Mom was playing with our dogs and feeding the chickens. We have two  dogs, and God knows how many chickens. Our German Shepherd hates them. He’s always  barking at them and trying to kill them. The people on my parents’ neighborhood Facebook page are always complaining about the chickens, saying that residents are only allowed three chickens  per household per the HOA rules. I always want to complain about the renters who live next to  my parents. Over the past four years, three of them have died from drug overdoses or heart  attacks. And they’re all white guys with some Yadkin county accent. Instead of talking to me or  Dad, they just spit. Dad had some Yadkin county people over to get an estimate on building a  workshed. Once they left, they never returned his calls. If there’s a good Yadkin county person  out there, I haven’t met them.  

Anyway, I was trying to pet my German Shepherd because his fur was so damn soft, but  he was busy trying to tell the chickens who was sheriff around these parts, and he kept running  around. My pit bull was eating some leftover turkey, and a chicken was trying to get it from her. 

“They’re cannibals,” Mom said. “We have cannibal chickens.”  

I scratched my head, “we sure do.”  

I thought for a moment that maybe I should tell Mom what I was going through, but I  figured she’d panic worse than I was and take me to the ER. She had to take my brother there  once, when he screamed at a video game so much he burst a blood vessel in his eye. 

I thought better and said “do we have any whole black peppercorns?”  

“Yeah,” she nodded. “Why?”  

“The beer I drank is messing with me a bit.”  

“Oh,” she said. “What does it do? Help you not get drunk?”  

“Yeah.”  

“Ok, help me get the dogs in.”  

We got the dogs in after they chased the chickens back into their coop. Mom was talking  about how she’d have to go to work on Black Friday, but that we could still do some shopping  together. I had things I wanted to get, but I wasn’t thinking about those things, then. We went inside and, as Mom turned the corner to her room, I asked, “Can I get those peppercorns?” 

“Oh yeah, just look in the lazy Susan in the kitchen.”  

I went for it. I passed Dad, who was sitting on the couch watching TV, on my way there. I  eyed him in a way to see if he was watching me. Dad’s default look is to glare so that you see the  whites of his eyes, so it looks like he’s angry. I’ve been told I have the same look. I spun the  Susan until I found the peppercorns and took them to my room. I ate a handful, and my mouth  went dry in an instant. I drank some water, put the peaceful music stream back on, and tried to  take a nap. That’s when my brother Matthew came into the room.  

“You left your food on the table,” he said.  

“Oh, yeah?”  

“Clean it up.”  

“I will.”  

Matthew looks a little bit like Fernando Valenzuela, only lighter, enough to make him  pass. We’re different in that he doesn’t care about his whiteness or his Mexicanness. I think that’s  a good thing. Growing up, all the Mexicans I went to school with said I wasn’t Mexican. Even  my cousins in L.A. tell me I’m white. It’s usually white people who identify me as Mexican, my  overdosed neighbor who’d rather spit than talk to me, for example. My first girlfriend, who was  white, called me a short half-Mexican the first time we met, and I cried myself to sleep over that.  

We still got naked together, though, so I guess bygones are bygones. I remember how she  used to caress my stomach and tell me my body was perfect, and how I have never once had that  thought about myself. She eventually left me for this El Salvadoran guy whom we went to  college with. I guess she had the market cornered on chubby Latinos.  

There was a woman, a hardworking, intelligent woman, whom I got close to recently. I’d  flirt with her every chance I could get, and she’d flirt with me when she could get away with it.  Well, we both got way too drunk one time, and we were all over each other at a party. What I  remember is that she kissed me three times on my big cheek. Instead of kissing her back, though,  I asked her, leaning into her shoulder, “Am I Mexican? Tell me I’m Mexican,” and she said,  “you’re Mexican,” and then she went inside the house.  

Mom had said she was happy to celebrate Thanksgiving as a family, but I only ate one  plate before hiding in my room. We have a tendency in my family not to talk things unless  \they’re big issues that make us cry. Death, for instance. I hadn’t thought about Tami in years  before Mom mentioned her at the dinner table that day. I still remember her voice and her laugh;  I’ve caught myself laughing sometimes in the same way that she did. The last time I saw her was  at this house. She had come in from the basement on errands with Mom. She had grown older in  the years since I’d seen her last. She’d dyed her hair black, the way it was when I was younger.  Tami walked with a hunch and a shuffle on account of a car accident she was in as a teenager.  The windshield broke and some of it injured her uterus and hip, rendering her infertile. The only thing I remember about our interaction was my asking her if I was her favorite nephew. Only, I flipped it, saying “I’m your favorite nephew, aren’t I?” She pursed her lips and nodded, giving me a slight smile. I’ve wrestled with myself for years with my inability to answer her text. How  maybe if I had, we would have been able to do something.  

I thought about that as I lay in my bed. It didn’t occur to me, in that moment, that Tami  died in the same position. I now wonder what she got in using those pills. If she felt like laying in  her bed was like lying on a bed of clouds. I wonder if she felt the same strained heartbeat as I  did, if maybe she realized it had all come to a head, and if she realized she was dying as she did  so. Usually when I do things like this, I come to some realization about myself, vowing to be  better about something. By the time I wake up the next morning, though, I forget about it. This  was the one time I didn’t.  

My heart rate was finally lowering. I made sure the gummy capsule was locked up tight. I  remembered how Mom made a cheesecake and went for the kitchen. My body was on autopilot,  just searching for whatever could distract me from the slow drumbeat in my chest. When I  entered the dining room, though, my whole family was there. It was like they were waiting for  me.  

“Can we sing happy birthday, now?” Mom asked.  

“OK,” was all I could say.  

My family sang the song while I just kind of stared at the candles burning on the cake.  Mom loves to say “cha, cha, cha” between the verses of the song. I don’t remember what I  wished for as I blew out the candles. I thought about how Mom had texted “happy birthday”  down to the minute I was born, how we used to have so many more people over when I was  younger, and how that stopped happening as much. There was a Thanksgiving when all Mom’s relatives came over, and Dad got upset because they would eat and eat, but never help clean up.  Of all the people who helped clean, only my maternal grandmother Virginia did it, and she  wasn’t guilty of anything. Dad paid her back when he let her stay at his house as she was dying.  My parents had been divorced for six years by that point. I remember when Mom told Dad she  was divorcing him: it was because he wouldn’t take her seriously enough; it was because he  would never help the way he needed to; and it was because he wasn’t being a father. He told me  “I love you, mi’jo” as we sat in his truck while he drank a beer with the engine running. My  grandmother said he was her favorite son-in-law. He was only one who didn’t hit and wasn’t a  deadbeat. He had his issues, sure, but he worked past them in the way he could.  

Mom told me that as my grandmother was dying, she saw faces in the ceiling in the spare  bedroom at my father’s house, and would point out and name them for my mom: her brothers,  her mother, her father. Mom has told me she’s seen ghosts as well. I haven’t seen any myself yet.  

Mom cut the cake, handing out a slice to each of us. I bit into mine, and it was the best  damn thing I could have asked for. I continued to eat until I was full.  

The post Family History appeared first on The New Absurdist.

They were studying in a “lifestyle” school, more precisely a coaching center that teaches English. The students, as per the site, enroll to master the English Language. But it is not the language that they are becoming proficient in, it is in fact an image that they are mastering. Like fair skin, Indians, especially North Indians obsess over the English language. English coaching is as common and affordable as the Glow and Lovely “brightening creams” available in every corner store.

I often feel I might be placed relatively low in the hierarchical state of society, but I cannot ignore the fact that I had the privilege of attending a private English medium school. Since I was four I was taught to speak in a certain way. I knew the difference between “can I come in?” and “may I come in?”. I knew how to roll my r’s or pronounce aitch and not ech. This invisible privilege plays a part in my presentation of self. Over the years, constantly conversing in English has given me a certain level of confidence. I know when to pause, I know how to behave and I know how to be polite. I was taught the invisible rules of this society – the same rules that might be taught in a lifestyle school.

This superiority of English is injected into us from the day we are born. As we start to learn to talk, parents bring home the graphic books decorated with colorful pictures of a bright red apple to learn our A’s, a speckled yellow banana to learn the alphabet B, a curly tailed and fat bellied cat to learn the letter C and so on. But who would want their kids to fall behind? This is the lingua franca, the “window to the world”.

English is used for official purposes such as legislation, judiciary, and communications between the Central Government and the State Government in India and within corporations. Thus the official atmosphere in meetings in corporations and sometimes otherwise is filled with English. Proficiency in English continues to be the sine qua non to better employment in big business firms and even government concerns. Language mediates who gets to speak and where, and who is listened to. Many universities worldwide increasingly favored English in teaching and research, creating a severe disadvantage to non-native speakers.

As soon as I entered 11th grade, like many Indian children, I was on the path of becoming an Engineer. I was enrolled in a high-end coaching center which fed lakhs of students the dream of cracking JEE exams (a competitive entrance exam held for Indian Institute of Technology ). I had just lost my father and as a consequence, my family was suffering through a serious financial crisis. My mother, seeing it as my only chance to crack this exam, borrowed fifty thousand rupees to pay for the coaching fees.

These classes took place in a room as big as an auditorium. It was filled with hundreds of kids my age and older. The voices of teens talking to each other echoed inside the building. A petite girl shifted to make space for me as I took a seat beside her. Two tattered notebooks laid in front of her, notes written in both of them. One was an English notebook with some words with incorrect spellings and another was a notebook filled with paragraphs written in Hindi. I asked her why the two notebooks.

She replied, “I went to a Hindi Medium school so it gets difficult for me to catch up. I need two notebooks: one in which I write what I understand and another in which I write the words I don’t understand. This way, I know which words to study better.” Looking over her face, I realized that I was never going to be as serious as her and lost motivation — she was ready to work twice as hard as me.

English entered our lands for all the wrong reasons. It was forced upon us. Outsiders tricked us and many of us still bear that oppression that was seeded by the Britishers. In India, British policy entailed a willingness to create a class that mirrored the colonizers’ frame of mind. This involved the opening of schools and universities based on British models, which embraced the hegemony of British language and culture. As Indians, the middle-class especially, started to realize that learning English would help them acquire a government job and make their future secure, gradually more people demanded to be educated in English. This resulted in the increase of private secondary schools to cater to these uprising demands in learning English and over time English became the symbol of elitism.

During a documentary shoot I was involved in, our crew had reached a remote village in Uttar Pradesh. While the camera team was setting the frame, a couple of the crew members were chatting up on the sidelines. A scrawny tall man hovered around the camera crew examining the equipment. He was the brother of the person we were about to interview. After surveying, he walked over to us and said, “The camera is quite impressive.” A couple of us looked surprised. One of my crew members carried the conversation while I moved on. At lunch break, the team member said, “That guy speaks amazing English. I did not expect him to speak so fluently.” In truth, we all weren’t expecting that a person belonging to a rural area would speak English so fluently. Our prejudiced mind was surprised.

This perception of elitism played a role in schools as well, creating a lot of shame and anxiety over non-academic matters. Although our crisp white uniforms brought forth a sense of equality between the students, possessions like bags, watches, tiffins, packed meals, and shoes revealed the drastic class differences between us all. The only non-material thing that separated us was language, and that was difficult not to notice. During our English classes we were asked to read the passages from our literature books, teachers selecting children at random or move in rows. Students would prepare beforehand, calculating which paragraph they would end up having to read. Accents and dialects helped us to judge who was part of the elite. If someone mispronounced something, they would not only be embarrassed but also demeaned. Children didn’t do it on purpose, but this inherent need to distinguish “the other” was definitely projected (the teachers attitude never helped either).

As I was growing up it became clear to me that the parents of others that were more educated than my parents spoke better English. By no means were my parents less intelligent, but not being able to speak in fluent English made me uncomfortable and ashamed (a short-coming on my end). I even started to distance myself from “Bhojpuri” the language that my father conversed in with his peers and even in the house. Whenever he used to open up the Mahua channel, where shows of Bhojpuri origin played, I would invariably shudder. It took years to unlearn, and get rid of the shame that I once carried. The shame did not originate from their inability to speak English rather it rooted from the image I constructed of my family.

I once fell upon a huge pile of Bhojpuri books covered with a sheet of dust in an ill kept state. The spines were tattered and the pages were yellow and torn, but I found myself opening up the first book of the pile and turning to a random page. The words felt familiar – I could read them but could not fully grasp the meaning. I photographed the prose to send to my mother, who had grown out of speaking Bhojpuri. During our phone call in the evening I asked her to read some lines from the Bhojpuri book. I heard a familiar tone that I hadn’t heard for the last thirteen years.

Bhojpuri over the years had grown to have attached a rather different image from its origin. Popular songs that generally objectify women or propose endless double meaning statements gradually decreased the gravitas of the language. A language which is older than Hindi. Its folk songs hold the tradition of northern India. This bastardisation of the language made me distance myself from it. I was affected too much by its image. But images change.

Those songs have become a melody that reminds me of a time that was filled with innocence and sometimes cluelessness. A time when I could sit next to my father and watch shows that I never fully comprehended. I remember my father’s voiceless laugh with his big belly bouncing up and down. Sometimes I think the reason why I gradually forgot his voice – because I never really spoke his language.

The post In India, English Is Not Just A Language appeared first on The New Absurdist.

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Since the village was near an army base, we needed permission from the local officials to shoot aerial shots of the village and the chain of mountains. Our line producer had managed to get all the permits. I think that as a form of courtesy (mixed with the intrigue that the camera often evokes in people), the officer decided to meet the director.

The army man was tall with an impeccable posture. I don’t remember much about his features, but I did notice that throughout the conversation, his arms were either crossed or gently placed near his hips with his legs wide apart. 

My boss and two other members of my crew greeted the officer with utmost formality. After pleasantries, my boss like every other time went on to explain the purpose of our visit: to make a documentary series on organic farming practices in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Any more detail might just cost me my job. 

After a couple of nods and mandatory laughs, the officer presented a proposition to them. I was just across the road near our car with a bunch of my colleagues waiting rather patiently for the conversation to end. After a long day of work, everybody wanted to either lie down or have a long steaming bath. I wanted both. 

“Why don’t you guys visit Badrinath? It’s only about 40 kms away. It’s a once in a lifetime experience,” said the officer with a huge grin on his face, probably proud of the suggestion, “I can pull some strings and get your crew an entry to the temple hassle-free.”

For the readers who do not know about Badrinath: It is a place of great significance for Hindus all over the world. A place of worship which is only open for four months for the pilgrims. Hindus come in great numbers to visit the temple. It is a once in a lifetime experience. But this experience could lead to a greater issue. This plan would mess with the airtight schedule that I had planned with meticulous detailing. 

Since the proposition was in fact a good one, my boss had decided that we would be visiting Badrinath. Almost all the crew members grew excited since it mostly comprised practicing Hindus. 

“Bhagwan ka bulawa aaya hain. God is calling out to us.” 

I, on the other hand, went into a sort of panic – my palms suddenly felt sweaty, my breath quickened and different scenarios started running through my mind. I began re-planning the [week’s] schedule in my head, trying to find the best way to account for this unexpected departure from the plan. 

“Okay so… if we decide to go to Badrinath, then we would have to postpone the recce and then the shoot, which means I have to stay an extra day. Or what if we skip the recce and start with the shoot the day after… then we would be able to complete the shoot within the schedule but the one time we did do that, it was a disaster.” 

The laughs of the suddenly energized crew who were crying and complaining a few seconds ago, agitated me even more. 

The conversation had finally ended and we all sat in our respective cars. My boss sat next to the driver’s seat while I sat just behind his seat. As soon as we boarded the cars, I leaned forward and started babbling, “Sir this is not a good idea. This is a disaster. And why do we need to travel to another place and waste a day? This doesn’t make sense sir. I did not plan this.”

With a calm and heavy voice, he said, “We’ll see what we’ll do. Calm down. I know what’s at stake,” and soon fell asleep. I leaned back and put on my headphones, still thinking about the decision he would take. 

That day, while having our tea in a small shop with old wooden benches and the sweet smell of milk, I realized I may have overreacted to my anxious thoughts. 

“I am sorry sir. It wasn’t my place to say these things. I am really sorry.” I said with remorse. 

With a smile on his round face, he gently tapped my head. We continued to cautiously sip our hot tea, a relief in the cold. It was a little too sweet for my taste but that is the speciality of the hills. 

“You need to let it go. You don’t have to do everything.” This phrase kept ringing in my ears. Something my boss had suggested to me a few times.

To let it go. First of all, I still don’t know what it entirely means. Secondly, the last time that I felt like I had let go, I was lying on the bed day in and out, binging on shows and had become numb to my surroundings. No exercise, irregular food habits and no hope had pushed me into a deep black hole of weight gain and subsequent PCOS or it could be vice-a-versa. It is safe to say that I had no clear ambitions. 

Somehow during Pandemic when all of us faced a collective crisis of existentialism, I decided to convert my longtime hobby into my profession. 

I still remember the first time I attended an online workshop for non-fiction writing. They had asked the participants to add our bios on a Google Docs page that everyone shared. Every time I would type “writer” near my name, my mind would reject it. I did not earn the title yet. How can I be a writer if I haven’t published anything? After much back and forth, writing and then deleting, I chose to write “wannabe writer”. 

As Clarice Lispector wrote, “Writing is just one of the ways of failing”. Something that I was way too familiar with, so I never did put my hopes up.

Gradually, I started sharing this news with family and friends. I was again faced with the familiar expression of pity but somehow for the first time in the longest time encountered hope. 

The closest ones came to my aid. A friend of mine made a short film with me and another one introduced me to my boss. 

During the first couple of months of my job, I was in constant fear. What if they realize that I am a living hoax, a talentless, good-for-nothing pretender? I did not have room for failure. Soon, this job became my everything. 

I spent countless nights researching, reading and writing. After a stomach infection, a UTI, a great number of fevers, sciatica, more than 20 outings, 300 interviews, a bunch of drafts, 2 panic attacks, and numerous 12+ hour shifts later we were ready with the scripts. I even added one more responsibility to my plate and became the Assistant Director of the project because who better to look out for the project than me? 

Letting go meant letting go of control, of not constantly thinking about the next step. To let go meant being complacent with the choices I made and being at risk of ending up on the familiar path of indecision and failure. 

After I came back from this trip, I realized that I never really enjoyed my trips. I always equated them to work. Always stayed a little too focused and on my toes trying to anticipate all the possible problems we could face. I had to bring out the best in me because who wants to see the worst in me? I had forgotten to enjoy the little things. I would chart out the schedules that were planned every second of the shoot. But during my shoots, I started to face the irrevocable nature of change. Every time when we went for a shoot, religiously something new would come up. Sometimes the characters were too shy to speak on the camera, or a rainstorm would delay plans, the research we did was not adequate enough or simply that the characters had changed their practicing styles. On a whim we had to find solutions and sometimes even new storylines. 

To see my scripts and stories crumble apart made my head hurt. The imposter syndrome would suddenly make a comeback. Surprisingly though, whenever we’d let go of expectations, we’d find that the shoot transformed into something new. Sure, it wouldn’t always turn out better, but it would never turn out worse. 

The constant need for change during production challenged me and, in fact, prompted me to give up control. Sharing rooms, sleeping on unfamiliar beds, eating new food, ending up in new locations, meeting familiar and unfamiliar faces, canceled shoots, and whatnot loosened my grip. 

I always felt because of a failed initial career, I was lagging behind my peers- losing a race, so to speak. I felt as if I had no other option than to make a sprint for it.

Recently we were back for a shoot in the hills of Uttarakhand, at a place called Supi. Even though we were covered in padded jackets, somehow the cold managed to penetrate through the thick jackets and into the skin. There was constant cluttering of teeth and the sound of hands rubbing together. The strong winds froze my nose. Unexpectedly, silver specks of snow started falling from the heavy clouds floating above us. Tiny dots started appearing on our black or brown hairs. The frowns on our tired faces slowly converted into smiles. The phones started popping out of everyone’s pockets. Momentarily every one of us had forgotten about the bone-chilling cold. I tried to make some videos of me catching some snowflakes on my hands but failed miserably. A not-so-loud “cut” came out of our director’s mouth. 

The host of the place came running towards us. With a huge grin on her flushed face she exclaimed, “You guys are so lucky. It usually never snows after January.” 

It was a once in a lifetime experience and I wasn’t going to miss it. While documenting the lives of others I had forgotten to document mine. Even worse, I forgot to live my life. 

The snowfall lasted for about an hour. I experienced it all. My phone was filled with hundreds of photos and videos of myself, my colleagues, the mountains, the fluffy dogs, the snow, and possibly everything that would make this memory last forever. 

As the snowfall reached its end, I took a deep breath; a smell loaded with pine and musk that filled me with delight.

The post Learning To Let Go appeared first on The New Absurdist.

“Do you like it?” she asks, her torso draped over the jewelry counter from the strain of reaching over to place the ring on my finger. The counters are designed to mitigate physical interaction between the cashiers and customers, but her determination to outfit me in her homemade bling took precedence over the layout of the register counter.

“I do,” I reply. She points a finger adorned with a blue acrylic gem at the tray of green-stoned
jewelry.

“Let me see those.” Her eyes peer up at me from underneath the bang that runs across the front
of her harsh black bob.

She’s imposing, despite her petite stature at four-foot-nine. She doesn’t even need to bend down to see what’s in the jewelry case. She’s a televangelist on a Korean-language prayer hour broadcast on local cable in a less-than primetime slot. She comes in once a week to pass out her handwritten business cards and paw through the secondhand jewelry. She is a blinged-out Virgin Mary, a neon fresco cast in flesh, a disciple of Tammy Faye.

The televangelist holds up a necklace with a large gem in an opaque lime neon color: a faceted octahedron dangling from a chain coated in green residue formed from the neck sweat of its previous owner. It likely belonged to a small time drag queen who pivoted careers to a desk job when their dreams of stardom didn’t find them before they were booted from their parents’ health insurance.

Her vanity—her total disregard for anything that won’t sparkle on camera—is refreshing. That’s
the televangelist in her.

She sets aside the pendant and nods to me, the signal to set it aside for purchase. She picks up a necklace made of green plastic beads. Costume jewelry is difficult to sell; the consumer mindset it appeals to is one of theatricality, of the self-conscious performance of glamor. The wearers of kitsch like this, tacky even by the standards of their years of manufacture, take pleasure in the effacement of modern tastes. In their shared simulacrum of wealth, they create the images of the culture of unapologetic plastic overflow they grew up in: the intentional kitsch of Dynasty, the series. An untrained eye would discount it as camp. The costume-jewelry buyers’s covetousness is paradoxical: the sheen of something like costume jewelry implies the kind of richness that is frowned upon in the Bible: “Proverbs 25:16: If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it.” But the actual value is little more than the materials it’s made of; they buy to invent the glamorous image that they feel represents them. Overconsumption, the performance of it, is a vice that they can only afford at a secondhand store.

The televangelist settles on the neon green necklace and a pair of earrings with resin stones dyed off-aquamarine. Four dollars. She walks out after promising to return next week. The bejeweled gift was accompanied by her business card. It’s a small piece of green cardstock with her name and channel number printed on the front and the words “Read Romans 5” printed on the back, followed by the word “sin” in parentheses.

I read the passage a few hours later in the breakroom. It serves as a short introduction to finding salvation from humanity’s inherent sin, with familiar characters like Adam and Jesus Christ, even to someone not raised in the church—any church—like myself. “We know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope,” declares the passage. This is the gospel that her rings symbolize: if trash can be made into something beautiful, so can the wearer.

That’s the ethos of this charity shop, named after Mount Sinai in the Old Testament, which serves a hospital on the West Side of Chicago bearing the same name. The store has resold the donated items of Chicagoans since it opened in the 1980s. The televangelist is one of the neighborhood oddities who traffic through the charity shop: day roamers like trust fund babies, night janitors, social security pensioners, and anyone else without a place in the normal working hours of the workday. These people are older in age. The youngest of the charity shop evangelists, as I have taken to calling them, are sixty.

Most of them have accrued the physical afflictions that come with age: liver spots, wrinkles, pallor, cataracts, varicose veins, and other signs of the body’s denigration. Many of them show signs of more extreme maladies. In the case of the lifelong smokers, they have blackened gums and missing teeth—much too expensive to replace at the same rate as they fall out (they just keep them out and stick to soft foods). Some have tumors hanging from the side of their larynx. Benign, suspended in a brief moment of inactivity like the life of the body it’s grown from. For now, we are together. And then one day we won’t be.

The unstoppable march of modernity has left these folks in an alien culture, a space-age landscape run on technology too sleek to have been created by human hands. While the world around them strives towards the future they, the oldest, have been left behind by digital payments and Instagram stories. They have been left behind by trend cycles in a culture of constant novelty. So as an expression of their style, for their unbridled confidence in old age, as a protest
against the sidewalk treaders who would rather ignore them, they dress boldly.

The women favor loudly patterned blouses adorned with shiny brooches. Sometimes they wear animal prints: leopard and zebra like the wealthy of yesteryear. Their furs aren’t real. The prints that adorn these archetypal church ladies, signal a love for the personal expression of glamor; a word that has come to mean very little when used to describe clothing made to order en masse from thin pleather, polyester, and wall insulation. The men dress in business casual, accessorize with feathers, rings, and uniquely-rimmed eyeglasses. If they require an aid for their mobility, they will often opt for a wooden walking stick, updated dressings of a Biblical prophet costume. Style is a lost art in the age of convenience, wherein an outfit can be made to order and shippedfrom overseas in minutes. But in a place like a charity shop, the customer must hunt for their purchases. The sensibility persists in those that the age of convenience is not convenient for.

Most are religious. Not as religious as the televangelist, but religious enough to make an occasional reference to God at the checkout counter: “God bless your customer service!” Every day they come, willing to trade their allotted spending cash from their Social Security for tchotchkes, jewelry, clothing, even electronics past their obsolescence in this economy of reduced capacity. Here, we all gather under the denomination of trade. The gospel of the manufacture of goods is recited: “Hardwood furniture really isn’t what it used to be,” and “It’s so hard to find clothing without any plastic in it nowadays.” Their belief in an unchanging higher power is hand-in-hand with the persistence of objects that have resisted obsolescence. True believers may find evidence of a higher power in the endurance of the trappings of a world that once welcomed them; a person may find evidence of God in a bakelite Mah-jong set.

The whole thing occupies a rented warehouse with enough donated furniture to give extreme home makeovers to the entire population of a small township. Once through the front doors, customers walk down the center aisle through the heaping piles of vintage furniture in the front to the cash register planted in the middle of the sales floor: the functional altar helmed by someone like me who has been in the store long enough to know them by name. Behind the checkout counter is everything else: the clothing racks, the shelves of books, the piled home goods. They stay, sometimes for hours, in the makeshift pews assembled from secondhand dining sets and office chairs (and at one time, an actual pew donated by a now-defunct Baptist Church in West Chicago). They’ve been coming for years, some since the store opened, during the daylight hours when the rest of the city is working or in school.

Items are donated to the charity shop for lack of need, lack of love, lack of life. The largest donations are from deaths. Sometimes the death is inferred, like in a shipment that contained a marked up copy of the book “Live Free of Cancer” and the remnants of a last meal putrefied on the surface of an unwashed dinner plate. Other times it’s more obvious, such as when the previous owner’s belongings are shipped alongside the person’s ashes in an urn. The disembodied connection between donor and customer is like the relationship between saint and reveler. The continued subsistence of the store and those that depend on it comes from gifts of these deities of outgrown paraphernalia; and thus we are rewarded with shipments from the Patron Saints of Neiman Marcus Cashmere and Nabokov literature.

A young woman bought a night light in the shape of the Virgin Mary for three dollars. It was an opaque piece of plastic molded in the shape of the Madonna holding a baby, from the crook of her swaddling arms up to a halo around her head. A lightbulb was placed inside her cranium via an opening in the back and when the figure was plugged into an electric socket, a glow emitted from her halo, casting light onto the open wall beyond her. It had likely been donated by another Christian who had found enough comfort in the Lord’s protection that they no longer needed the light while they slept.

Religious objects are bought quickly. These are things like wall crucifixes, Jewish prayer books, even a tee shirt from the extreme end of the evangelical spectrum that said “Vaccinated in the Blood of Christ” (which, unless owned ironically, likely arrived as part of a death shipment). As it functions in America, religion is an institution that the masses participate in by buying the pieces of their own shrines at home: small fetishes made from the reappropriated artworks of the Romantic Period, endowed with no ephemeral divinity other than the shared belief held by buyers—the essence of the American free market.

The American spirit of self-determination claims that the spirit of God can reside within everyone, but is best shown outwardly by purchasing. Most of the modern empires of faith have had less to do with the holiness of their geographic location and more to do with the naivete of the surrounding people who live there. Many have crumbled beneath the weight of the crimes perpetrated by the con artist behind the gilded desk at its megachurch headquarters: the Falwells, the Bakkers, the Shamblins. And evangelical sites that aren’t taken down through the conventional method of prosecution for white-collar crimes often dissolve after an FBI raid and a classification of their beliefs as a cult.

That was the version of religion that I saw growing up: a cult of hypocrisy that used the image of an omniscient creator to hide behind their bigotry about the things that they did not understand. And as I got older and grew into myself as a queer man, my disdain for their way of thinking only festered. I was raised in an atheist household. I had no conception of a higher power at a young age except for my parents, who I knew were responsible for bringing me into the world. I was a product of love—not divine love but mortal infatuation un-entwined with any sense of cosmic destiny. I was a product of hormones and a honeymoon in Eastern Europe. There was comfort in the simplicity of my birth—I navigated the world without residual guilt of the suffering of any saints at the behest of my inherent sin. I felt nothing at the sight of the crown of thorns, at the figure of Jesus emaciated on the little cross jewelry that my classmates wore. But when I felt lonely I had nothing to turn to for comfort.

Belief in a higher power was an immaterial concept, a shared falsehood I couldn’t comprehend during my developmental years. Because the way that evangelical religion functions in America rests on tiny acts of divine intervention. These were any happenings before the eyes of the congregation that gently stretched the laws of physics: bursting stage lights, speaking in tongues, the face of Jesus inscribed in toast. The faith I was an outside observer to was merely an audience captivated by sleight of hand magic. No matter how hard I squinted, the browning on my toast remained absent of even minor gods.

Without experiencing the devotion that is built out of religious rituals, there was little for an outside observer like myself to find appealing. Every interaction I had with prayer, every time my skin prickled at the utterance of the word “God” was colored by the fact that I thought I was too smart to fall into the mindset of religiosity. But could I be blamed? There is little appeal in modern Christianity: the brash, bulldog ideology that was created from the attempt to merge the New Testament with American mass culture. I had, and have no interest in erudition from Mark Wahlberg or the crucifixion pageant performed by Marvel superheroes.

The current world shaped by the Industrial Revolution has begun to rapidly depreciate as it reaches the limits of what can be gutted. Paradoxically, the Bible preaches against loving the world in place of the higher power that created it: “John 2:15: Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Yet there is an innate desire of the world’s inhabitants to find meaning, even pleasure in the state it has been left
in, in lieu of reverence to a higher power. The garbage is already here. It can be enjoyed at least.

In the case of entirely secondhand decadence sold at a charity shop like this one, the items have already been consumed and discarded. With a new owner, the synthetic undergoes a resurrection, which offers a different way to interpret the definition of “decadent.” For a culture like America’s, one that shrugs off the principles upon which it was founded in favor of perennial modernity, lots of waste is left behind. So when confronted with photographs of landscapes decimated by chemical runoff and sea life asphyxiated on shoelace aglets, a rational person would feel compelled to clear out their Amazon cart and rescue some pre-loved items from their destiny as trash, to thrift. Overconsumption isn’t the problem, it’s hyper-metabolization, the secular shame of fetishized novelty.

Despite its service, desire for new things has reached such a fever pitch that the store has begun to fall into obsolescence. Most of the clothing that has been donated displays the tags of already-defunct fast fashion retailers, made from more plastic than actual cloth. The housewares have more frequently come from the shelves of Walmart and Home Goods which the original buyer tired of after a few uses. Though they’re returning to the economy, these things weren’t meant to last very long anyways. The line between donations and tax-deductible waste disposal has begun to blur.

The cash register receipts must be wound by hand now that the gears of the machine no longer turn. The clothing racks sway with every shove of the hangers, thrown off balance from the weight of the load they bear. And when a counter drawer collapsed beneath the weight of miscellany, doomed to otherwise be forgotten among safety pins and sticky notes, a small piece of paper inscribed with the Virgin Mary was revealed, shoved between the cabinet wall and the drawer slide. It was a flier given by a Catholic Church with the Memorare prayer: “Remember, O most compassionate Virgin Mary,” it read, “that never was it known that anyone who fled your protection, implored your assistance, or sought your intercession, was left unaided.”

The store’s inventory grants customers intercession, a deliverance from the weight of a necessity that can only be alleviated with a purchase. “Things tend to find people here,” is what my boss told me when I started, “so don’t worry about trying to push people to buy things. If they want something, they’ll buy it.” But in order to complete the transaction, to receive the offering made, they must actually buy it at the cash register, the altar equipped with altar people like myself to aid them. And while I do not believe in divine providence, I believe in the power of a salient community united in the religious-adjacent belief that if they revere the charity shop, it will return blessings unto them. I am a part of an intangible network that is much larger than myself. I receive from them for my servitude to their holy site, most often loose cigarettes, even though I tell them I don’t smoke: “Let this humble gift bring you a little bit closer to Heaven in exchange for your kindness.”

The televangelist comes back one evening, within the hour of the store’s closure.

“I’ll be quick,” she says. “I want to see that.” Her bejeweled finger hovers over a necklace of warm-toned glass beads like a string of hard candies.

“That’s pretty,” I say.

“I know,” she replies. “I’ve got good taste. You see what I buy.”

“Are you going to make it into rings?”

“Yes.”

“Can you save one for me?”

“Maybe. There are some people at a jewelry store over there—” she gestures eastward, “that want to buy some.” She winks at me and leaves. She will be back for more supplies soon, just like the rest of the sidewalk roamers that find themselves drawn back to the store each day. 

They, the practitioners of the secondhand gospel, will tread the sidewalk every week until their hip, or heart gives out. And when it does, their estate will send a truckload of their leftover belongings to the shop, which I will sell to another wanderer, just like them.

The post Charity Shop Evangelists appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Since I don’t want to be a physical girl I’d settle for being an intangible idea. A symbol of a girl. The thought that my physical form simply represents a girl, a girl that signifies some greater principle or dogma, is attractive and cathartic. A girl so singular yet all-encompassing, free from the burden of constructing a complex identity. To be treated as a religious or political symbol, rooted in the Earth and its history, would mean to be treated with the dignity and respect of a perfect representation. Whenever I pass by a mirror I think of my dog, and I don’t look myself in the eyes. I pretend I’m a universal girl, on the cover of a newspaper or a missing person’s poster. I pretend I’m a vessel for communicating the decay of society, or a new mascara brand. Only looked at for what I symbolize. 

I was reading The Name of the Rose, and found a passage that stuck out to me concerning singularity and universal ideas. Eco writes: “I found myself halfway between the perception of the concept ‘horse’ and the knowledge of an individual horse. And in any case, what I knew of the universal horse had been given to me by those traces, which were singular. I could say I was caught at that moment between the singularity of the traces and my ignorance, which assumed the quite diaphanous form of a universal idea.” I stopped to picture myself as a horse, as Adso of Melk, as a girl. My skin clasped around my bones tightly. I was caught up in the dissonance between universal symbols and individual meanings. 

I remember my trip to Istanbul, when I stepped into a mosque that was not a mosque at all, but a coalescence of holy worship. Half mosque, half church, remnants of conquest were vivid and visceral on the walls of the Hagia Sophia. Its religious purpose had always been dictated by whoever ruled over Constantinople, and to the current Turkish government it was undoubtedly a mosque. Christian and Islamic paintings blurred into each other, ending abruptly in destroyed ruins. They were erased and painted over by hand; the symbol transformed at the whim of men. On metro walls in Vienna, I saw how swastikas became grids for tic-tac-toe, passerby filling in the X’s and O’s as the symbol slowly deteriorated in form and meaning. Originally, the swastika was a cultural and religious symbol implying fortune and well-being. I somehow felt its development was buried deep within the metro walls, until it finally succumbed under a graffiti artist’s hand. 

In the dawn of Yugoslavia, my great-grandfather embraced the atheist label. An aspiring academic, he had studied theology in Sarajevo as a young man. To him, religious scripture was merely a text to be critically studied. His wife, on the other-hand, adorned the hijab; a label of staunch resistance to his intellectualism. Obviously, he could not be an intellectual with a covered wife, as these two universal ideas had no point of intersection. When friends visited their home or they attended public events, they reached a compromise: my great-grandmother would wear a wig, so that he could maintain his reputation and she could maintain her faith. Their identities meant virtually nothing in relation to each other only a few years prior. The symbols seemed stronger than the very individuals that created them. Engulfing them in false universality, strict and unforgiving. 

I believed symbols are so entrenched in history and connotation that I forgot they are so malleable. I watched them break, bend, and stretch, yet still had faith in their durability. “A cowboy rides into town on Friday, stays in town for 3 days, then leaves on Friday. How did he do it?,” my grandfather asked me when I was a child. He still loves to ask me riddles, and always the most ridiculous kind. The horse’s name was Friday. I know that now. Back then, I wouldn’t have fathomed that response. It’s instinctive to always assume the name ‘Friday’ denotes the fifth day of a week, a symbol of time passed. The riddle shows how hesitant we are to accept the fallible nature of symbols, that Friday is the fifth day of a week but it can also be the name of a horse. There is nothing essential about the name ‘Friday’ to the passing of time; ‘Friday’ can be changed by governments and drawn over with spray paint. Much like Eco’s horse, the horse in my grandfather’s riddle is far from a representation of a universal idea. It’s only our ignorance that gives it such a form. 

Perhaps becoming a symbol would not be very different to what I am already. Perhaps the vulnerable flesh of a living, breathing girl is not very different to the vulnerability of an obsolete symbol. Both require theatrical fabrication, and elaborate myths about their supposed power. I look in the mirror once more, smiling. I am not a universal girl. The horse’s name was Friday.

The post The Horse’s Name Was Friday appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Here are a few: 

“Con chúc ông bà… (I wish my grandparents…) 

– Sức khỏe dồi dào” (an abundance of good health) 

– Tiền vào như nước” (may money flow in like water) 

– An khang thịnh vượng” (security, health, and prosperity) 

– Phát tài phát lộc” (riches and fortune) 

– Vạn sự như ý” (everything you wish will be) 

Every year, I try to up the ante, coming up with more impressive things to say. 

– “Tiền ra nhỏ giọt như cà phê phin” (may money drip like a coffee filter)

– “Nhiều bát canh cà chua” (many bowls of my grandma’s world-famous tomato soup) 

The more words I say, the more luck I will bring to my grandparents. 

The more outlandish, the more memorable. 

It makes sense in my head. 

Luck is a funny thing. On most days, I treat it as this unpredictable ideal that comes and goes as it pleases. On holidays such as Lunar New Year, however, luck can be controlled. Cleaning the house from top to bottom will entice it to come in, for example. 

For my maternal grandpa, or Ông ngoại, luck is accompanied by hard work and tenacity. If you work hard enough, luck might take notice and decide you would make good company. 

◆◆◆ 

Over the years, Ông has recounted his experiences growing up in communist Vietnam. 

Born on May 1, 1942 in Indochina, a French colony comprising the modern-day territories of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, he has lived through a lot. May 1st marked International Labor Day and the annual street parade of workers. As a result, there were barely any nurses and doctors left in the hospital as my great grandmother was giving birth. Luckily, my great grandfather was a doctor and friends with a nurse, and so, my grandpa, Quan Khang Tưởng, (born Kouan Hoong Cheong, which changed to Kuan K’ang Shiang on the Chinese Visa until it was finally translated into Vietnamese) was brought into the world. 

A world that would actively work to erase his identity and squash his every chance for success.

When Ông was five or six years old, his older siblings went off to school, waking at 5 a.m. to walk 10 miles. My grandpa, too young to follow them, had to stay home. 

There was an all-girl Catholic school that was closer. On his first day, dressed in girls’ clothes, Ông showed up. A nun took one look at him and asked, “Are you a boy?” In an instant, Ông said yes. With that, he was sent straight home to his mother who fought the urge to cry out of frustration. 

Ông was finally able to go to public school at eight years old. It was far but not as far as the one his siblings attended. He started in third grade with other kids his age, all of whom already learned how to read, write, and count. Without knowing numbers or the Vietnamese alphabet, Ông was punished every day by his teacher, slapped on his hands with a ruler or forced to kneel facing the blackboard for a time out. 

This became such a frequent occurrence that every morning Ông silently made his way to the blackboard before his teacher inevitably told him to do so. He didn’t dare tell his parents in fear he would have to stay home again and further fall behind on his studies. 

After almost two years, Ông left for another school. A French school in Hà Nội called Lycée Albert-Sarraut. According to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this school was the only one of its kind: an educational institution operated by a Western power in a Communist state. 

Without knowing a word of French, Ông was severely punished again. But by his second year, things were looking up. Ông could read, write, and understand French. Everything around him, however, was about to take a turn for the worse. 

1954. The communists occupy North Vietnam. Ông’s family has to leave Hà Nội and make their way to the South, to Sài Gòn. 

There was another French school in Sài Gòn that Ông applied to, but all Lycée Albert-Sarraut kids were transferred to a French school about 200 miles away, a school his family could not afford. Returning to Vietnamese school was the only option. 

5th grade. Lớp nhất. In history class, Ông’s teacher recounted China’s domination and Vietnam’s fight for independence, smiling at Ông as she spoke. His last name—Quan—did not escape her. Ông was Chinese; his family left China for Vietnam to escape communism. Not that that made any difference. In this classroom, he was the enemy. 

After school, five to six boys were waiting outside. They jumped on top of Ông, tearing at and throwing dirt on his clothes. 

Every week, Ông returned home, coming in through the back door, to change. He didn’t want to tell his parents; they were already going through such financial hardship. This would have been the least of their problems, Ông thought, or worse, created more. Instead, he directed his focus on school, seeing it as his only way to fight back. 

In 6th grade, Ông rose to the top of his class, skipping 7th grade and going right to 8th. Throughout high school, Ông maintained the same work ethic, knowing that if he did not pass his exams and receive a high school diploma, he’d be enlisted in the military. A military in desperate need of soldiers. 

Around this time, the communist Vietnamese government forced Chinese and other non-native locals to become citizens of Vietnam or face deportation. Ông’s family considered moving. Taiwan refused to receive them. Returning to mainland China wouldn’t have made any sense. They had to become Vietnamese citizens, a process which included changing their last name. 

Ông’s family fought to keep the Quan name. With such insistence, the government gave up and accepted it. 

Around 10 to 15 percent of students graduated high school in Vietnam. More than 80 percent failed.  Ông passed. But his fight would be far from over. 

There were 200 spots for freshman university students. About half were reserved for the extremely wealthy. 

Ông failed the doctor, pharmacist, engineer, and teacher entrance exams. His older brother received a high school diploma from a Chinese school. His younger brother failed to receive one. Both of them were off to the military. 

With each passing day, it was becoming more likely that Ông would be following his brothers. Until one day. A day my grandpa coins—to this day—to be his “Lucky destiny day.” 

One morning, a high school classmate passed by Ông’s house. 

“The aviation school is open,” his classmate said. “You could apply to be an air traffic controller.” 

By the time Ông’s classmate passed by his house, it was past 11:30 a.m. The admissions office closed at 12. 

With his high school diploma and no time to grab his birth certificate, Ông joined his classmate. His classmate was refused up front. The school was only accepting candidates born between 1941 to 1943 and his classmate was born in 1944. Ông, born in 1942, qualified.

If only he had brought his birth certificate. 

The Director of Civil Aviation (DCA) said it was too late to accept Ông’s documents. Ông begged and begged for them to reconsider. 

The school eventually gave in. They held onto Ông’s high school diploma and gave him until the following Monday to submit the rest of his papers. 

Luck was still on his side. 

There were 20 seats in the aviation school among thousands of candidates—close to 9,000. The entrance exam consisted of three parts: written, oral, and physical. The written section included mathematics, French, Vietnamese, and English. The oral section was in English and French. The physical exam tested his vision and hearing to ensure it was on par with the requirements for a pilot. 

The written section took four days. During this time, there was also a policeman exam going on. Around 2,000 candidates withdraw their aviation school application to take the policeman exam. Nine thousand drops to seven thousand. 

Ông excelled in French, English, and math. The same could not be said for Vietnamese. On the last day of the written section, Ông was presented with a philosophical Vietnamese essay question. With no understanding of what the question was asking, Ông wrote a few words and gave up. 

Miraculously, Ông moved onto the two-day oral section. The first of which was in French. Ông walked into a room to find his French essay on the table. The school had deemed it excellent. His Vietnamese essay…not so much. 

Ông still had a chance to win the school over. His French pronunciation was impressive. 

The next was in English. A representative from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was there to interview him. Ông spoke fluently in English. 

He had passed the oral section. 

After the written and oral section, 50 people were left. Those that were remaining were sent to an air force base for the physical portion. 

“Who here wears glasses?” 

Twenty people wore glasses. They were immediately dismissed.

Then came the examinations: vision, hearing, and heart. Ông passed them all. Five were dismissed. 

The pool of candidates had been cut in half. It was down to 25 people for 20 spots. Twenty people were accepted; five were waitlisted. 

Ông was lucky #25. 

Over the course of three months, all 25 candidates attend aviation class and take a flying exam. Three students fail. Twenty-two remain. 

After six months, another exam. 

Three students fail. Nineteen remain. 

These lucky 19 can now officially call themselves aviation school students. From 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. with a mere 30 minutes for lunch, Ông studied for the final exam. Three students fail. Sixteen students graduate. 

Ông graduated #2 in his class with the #1 graduate scoring just half a point higher. 

Working as an air traffic controller in an airport in Sài Gòn, Ông was exempt from enlisting in the war. This, however, did not guarantee his safety. 

1968. The war is at its peak. The Việt Cộng and the North Vietnamese military launches an attack on South Vietnam and the U.S. military. It is known as the Tết Offensive for taking place during the Lunar New Year. 

So many civilians die. Ông’s older sister’s house in Sài Gòn is hit by a communist rocket, instantly killing her. 

At 28, after one year of working at the airport, Ông’s mother arranged for Ông to be married, choosing my grandma, Trần Ngà Thi. 

They have three daughters together. One of whom being my mom. 

1975. North Vietnam fully takes over the country. My mom’s younger sister is born the year after. 

At this point, Ông was an airline security manager. Everyone who worked in aviation for the old regime, about 400 to 500 people total, gathered in the DCA building. Once inside, Ông walked into the personnel office where he saw a letter with his name on the table.

Ông was being promoted to army lieutenant. He grabbed the letter and destroyed it. Hard work and luck were simply not enough. This time, Ông had to be cunning. 

Under communist rule, each person was required to disclose everything about their life, family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors. The communists had no records of anyone before 1975. 

You had to physically write about every aspect of your life and circle over and over again. If there was any discrepancy found in your retelling or in someone else’s, you were called in for questioning. 

Ông had 30 employees under him as manager. If his position as an airline security manager for South Vietnam was found out, Ông would be sent straight to jail or a re-education camp. 

Security was an especially dangerous word as it was often conflated with intelligence and espionage. To the communist government, Ông could be considered a South Vietnamese spy. 

He thought about what he should say to his team carefully. For Ông, this was a matter of life or death. It was crucial for all his employees to be on the same page. 

All DCA employees were divided into 20 groups to clean up the airport. Ông’s group was assigned to the terminal where his office was conveniently located. 

Ông headed straight to his office and destroyed everything. Uniforms. Paystubs. Photos. Documents. Anything he could find that could be used against him. 

Later that day, Ông faced his team. He told them to not write down anything regarding their involvement in airline security. 

“We are smarter than the communists,” he said. “They don’t know anything about us unless we tell them. Why should we tell them anything bad? Be careful what you say because the communists will ask for proof of employment. Proof that as of today no longer exists.” 

Not one of Ông’s 30 employees declared their job in aviation. The first phase in Operation Outsmart the Communists was a success. To avoid getting caught, Ông had to lay low. 

Bà, my grandma, attended weekly mandatory communist meetings to report on her family’s activities. 

Ông was presented with two options for re-education: be sent away for 10 days or study in place for 21. 

Ông had a feeling there was a catch hidden somewhere. He chose 21 days. After his re-education period, he was hired to teach air traffic control for the communist government.

Those that chose 10 days ended up away from their families for 10 years. Ông went on to work for the communists for two. During this time, he explored every possible option to get his family out of the country. 

The first was to go to Cambodia or Thailand by foot. Along with three young children, Ông Bà would have to make their way through the treacherous jungle and carry weapons to protect one another. 

Others paid to leave Vietnam by boat. Two to three hundred people would be crammed in a small boat and go off to sea. Along the way, they’d face pirates, storms, starvation, and disease. 

Foreigners (non-Vietnamese people) were allowed to return to their home countries. People gathered outside to retrieve an exit visa. This gave Ông an idea. Perhaps he could figure out a way to leave the country legally. 

But first, he had to quit his job. No country would grant him an entry visa if they found out he worked for the communists. 

Between 1975 to 1980, millions of Northerners moved to Central and South Vietnam. To manage this migration, the communist government implemented the New Economic Zones program, which forcibly evicted Southerners from their homes and relocated them in the countryside. 

In an aviation meeting with over 2,000 people in attendance, Ông raised his hand, expressing his desire to quit. The head captain and communist major were outraged. Ông was escorted to a small narrow room where he was kept until the meeting was finished. 

The captain and major came in. They took turns berating Ông, accusing him of disobedience. “No! You misunderstand,” Ông said calmly, “Uncle Ho [Chi Minh] wants us to move to the New Economic Zone. I’m just following orders and willing to leave the city.” 

The captain and major were quiet and left the room. Ông waited for four hours. At 5 p.m., the captain returned. “OK Fine! Go home!” 

Ông didn’t wait to be told twice. As he made his way out, he ran into the head captain’s assistant. The assistant was riding a bicycle, rushing to get home in time for dinner. When the assistant saw Ông, he let out a sigh of relief. “Here, take this!” he said, handing Ông an envelope. “Bring this to your local security office. Thank you!” The assistant took off. 

The envelope read CONFIDENTIAL across the front. Ông quickly pocketed it and continued on home. 

He told no one about quitting. Not even his family.

The letter the assistant had given him confirmed that he was no longer an employee of the communists. Addressed to his local security office, the letter stressed to the local officers to control and suppress him. That night, Ông burned the paper as he cooked. 

The next day, Ông left his house at the usual time as if he was going to work. His employers, in their shock, had forgotten to reclaim his employee ID card. Carrying this ID held a distinct weight of power. Every morning and night, he’d flash the card to the local officers. The officers, upon seeing the Cờ đỏ sao vàng, the red and yellow star flag of communist Vietnam, saluted in response. 

There was a complete lack of communication between the communists. Ông used this to his full advantage. 

Ông would observe the chaos at the district office to prepare his exit visa application submission. Everyone who cited reunification with family as a reason to leave Vietnam was turned away immediately. “Tell your family to come to Vietnam,” they’d say. Instead, Ông stated he was leaving due to his physical and mental health. He slipped his application right behind a family with a significant amount of gold, seconds before the office closed for the day. 

Ông wrote hundreds of letters to different countries, asking for an entry visa. 

Three responded with good news: Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Tahiti, and the Central African Republic. 

Because Tahiti is an island in French Polynesia, Ông managed to evacuate Bà, my aunts, and mom to France by plane. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) or UN Refugee Agency provided them money for the plane tickets. With the help of a good samaritan, Ông also secured an apartment in the heart of Paris (about 2-3 days before being at risk for deportation) where they lived for two years. 

When the war was over, the U.S. government publicly promised whoever had helped the Americans leave Vietnam with entry to the United States. Ông reminded them of that promise and of his role as an air traffic controller. Finally, in 1981, my family arrived in New York. 

◆◆◆ 

Every Tết, or Vietnamese Lunar New Year, I kneel before my grandparents and wish them great fortune for the year ahead, usually in the form of catchy four-word phrases. 

The more words I say, the more luck I will bring to my grandparents. 

It makes sense in my head.

Without this custom and literal expression of giving back to your elders, I often wonder how I could ever reciprocate the sheer will and fortuitous circumstances that led my grandparents to the U.S. 

That resulted in my existence as their first grandchild. 

It’s a staggering thing to wrap your head around as someone whose only exposure to war has been through stories, images, documentaries, and the news. 

Sometimes, for that reason, the new year wishes can feel superficial. I always mean them sincerely. But they pale in comparison. 

My wishes come from a life of privilege. Luck has been handed down to me like an ancient family relic. 

No words or actions will ever be enough. The only real way to “pay them back” is to lead a life worthy of sacrifice. To study to get ahead. To be as bold as to resist as a means of self-preservation. 

Do so long enough and luck, just might, catch up.

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