Christmas present for my mommy

Here it is: I was going to give her the gift… of my clean bedroom. Is that bad? I thought it was a good idea at first because she’s always nagging me to clean up this pile of stuff I’ve been meaning to either properly dispose of or donate, but haven’t gotten around to it for months. I know it bothers her, and since I don’t know what else to get her because she’s incredibly hard to shop for, I figured this would be a mutually beneficial present. But now I’m not so sure. I can picture my mom looking unimpressed and unenthused when I show her my clean room and announce, “Merry Christmas!”

Any thoughts?

 

Paul Rudd is my step-father… I wish.

A few nights ago, I had a dream, one among many, that my mother re-married to my all-time favourite male celebrity crush– Paul Rudd.  She was so happy, happier than I had seen her in a very long time, and I–well, I was just delighted I had such a hot and funny step-dad.

When I told my mom about my dream the following morning, she didn’t know who he was.  I thought my mom would think for sure that Mr. Rudd is a typical unattractive gwai loh.  So I pulled up a picture of him in a suit, and she said, in Cantonese, something to the effect of, “You would match me with such a handsome man!  You’re really spoiling me!”  Or at least I think that’s what she meant.  Anyway, she laughed a bit and said that a few times, about how I was spoiling her with a guy as handsome as him.  At least I know she likes him now.

Boyfriend dream

Woke up and wrote this all down before I forgot because I think it’s a little special.

Boyfriend dream

I was in a relationship with my dashing friend Owen.  We also were on tour with the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, on their tour bus as they drove across the country (which they don’t do, of course).  At one stop, the QFF set up some promotional stuff in this town, including Owen’s contribution: a bright pink, glittering diorama featuring him and another girl on stage.  There was also some writing with the diorama explaining how super gay he was.

Owen’s mother was there, and he had not come out to his family yet.  I found her staring at her son’s very loud diorama, and went over to her.  I asked her about his singing and his songs.  She kept asking me, “When?” which confused me, and when I tried to clarify, she only repeated the same question: “When?”  I told her I hadn’t heard any of songs Owen had been writing, but that he had told me he was writing some songs last summer.

I walked off so she could absorb the news of son’s strange coming out.  There were also two other younger kids there with her, presumably her other children.

I texted Owen to “come here” since his family was there.  He didn’t respond.  Instead, the next thing I knew, he was standing with his family and talking with his dad.  It appeared they were arguing.  I stood a little way off, watching, knowing this wasn’t my place.  Both of us, and possibly everyone there, was dressed in black.  I was dressed in my uniform from Fifth Avenue.

Owen came over and said I should properly meet them.  He took my hand and confidently walks over to his family.  I, on the other hand, am a nervous wreck.  I look up at him, and his face is hard and determined, and I feel bad.  I ask him if it’s really appropriate/too much that we’re holding hands especially since his dad just got the news and isn’t okay with it, and we let our hands fall.

Owen introduced me to his father, who glared at me.  I knew he though I “corrupted” his son.  My lip trembled from being so nervous.  His dad said I was just a “sex hookup” and left.  I yelled back as he was leaving that Owen and I hadn’t even had sex yet, and that we were still together because loved each other.  I said goodbye to his family, and called his mother Alice (because we were totally bffs).  I told Owen his mom was much nicer/understand than his dad, while Owen struggles to genuflect awkwardly and for seemingly no reason at all.

That’s it.  I don’t actually know if Owen’s mom’s name is Alice but it would be freaky if it were.  I texted him today and told him I had a dream with him in it but he didn’t respond.  I’ll ask him about his mom later.

By the way, Owen has a girlfriend.  Or so he says.

Crazy dream

One that I had a couple nights ago.

I was watching TV and the news was reporting an actor of a famous show like CSI or something had died.  They showed a photo of him posing, a white cloth surrounding his body, arms outstretched, reminiscent of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel (I recognized his face though it was not until after I woke up and thought about it that I realized it was David Sutcliffe).  Anyway, he was reported to have lived in Vancouver, downtown and for some reason, he was a homeless person, helping kids.  The news showed the last known footage of him where some people were interviewing him, and that was the last they saw of him.  Police were asking for witnesses; Maggie, my sister, was, I’m assuming, in the room with me, as she then said out loud and stressed for everyone to report anything remotely suspicious, including “people who may weren’t supposed to be where they were.”

As they showed the area around which the actor lived downtown, I somehow found myself transported to where the camera on TV was shooting.  My mom, Maggie, and I were all there, going to this restaurant + movie theatre that combined a meal and a movie for a really cheap price (why hasn’t anyone thought of that?), and best of all, it was in the same building so we didn’t even have to leave.  I distinctly remember it being quite bright outside — lots of yellows and oranges.  When we went inside and stood in line behind a couple, I noticed the movies they had playing.  They were books lined up on the floor that indicated the movies.  Unfortunately, I don’t remember any of the movies apart from Alice in Wonderland which my sister and I had already seen.  We all agreed on a strange, indie movie that none of us had really heard of before.

We paid for our tickets and were invited to sit down and wait for our food and the movie.  The couple who were ahead of us in line sat directly across the table from us so that we were facing each other, like a picnic table.  Somehow, there was a piano in front of me and I started playing around on it, eventually playing Vanessa Carlton’s “Papa” because it sounds hard.  As usual, people didn’t seem to take any notice and when I was done, I wondered what else to play.  There were a lot of songs I could’ve played but they didn’t sound as good because the piano part alone doesn’t sound all that great without singing, and I wasn’t going to start singing in this restaurant.

I heard the couple in front of us and everyone else in the restaurant speaking French but I didn’t know what to say since I wasn’t fluent.  My sister, who sat nearby, was reading through a French-English dictionary and suddenly asked aloud, “How do you say ‘The French got an army…?'”

I replied, “Les francais ont un…” and the guy sitting across from us, obviously listening, finished my sentence and said, “un arme”. (I’m told that’s not the right word for “army”, btw).  There was something else about “the English” but I don’t remember that.  I eventually started playing my own song, “Un Pas” and the woman in front of us smiled and mentioned to her boyfriend, “Ah, Amelia…” or something wrong like that.  I knew she meant Amelie, the awesome French movie with Yann Tiersen’s music so I stopped playing and told them in French that actually, I was playing a song that I wrote but that I love Amelie and Yann Tiersen.

They were eventually called in to eat or watch the movie or something.  We waited around for a bit more before being called in too.  I texted my friend/super film guy about the movie we were going to see and his reply was something along the lines of “Oh, that movie has great 3D, 5, 6, and 7D, and we’re already 3 weeks into the course and we’ve only started learning about 3D!  It’s a cool movie and I like the toys.  I also like the Glum [something] character.” and somehow, I knew that the Glum character was me.  Did that make me a part of the movie?

So we went down this hallway and I was carrying this big gameboard mat thing for some reason.  It was a turquoise color.  We go into this other room where I set the mat down.  In the room is a guy wearing a mask that doesn’t quite cover his face.  Something like this:

He told us to find some books in the room and put our hands in them.  There were conveniently two books right by me — one which i don’t remember but that it was a bigger book, and my Spanish-English dictionary.  I saw my mom sitting at a table with no books but with some Chinese magazines like the ones she reads and the guy with the mask told her she could use them.  With our hands in the books, he came around and with this bottle of pastey-looking stuff and smeared it on the books.  Then, he told us to start flapping our arms and fly.  Which we did, and which it worked.

However, my Spanish-English dictionary was too small and it fell off my hand and then became useless.  I told the Mask Guy and he picked me up and I clung onto him while he flew around the room, my head leaning into the warmth of his shoulder.

Suddenly, I’m shouting, “DIE, CHICKEN, DIE!” and I wake up on the floor.  I have a hunch he dropped me and that I was unconscious for a while but I somehow got saved or something.  Anyway, I think I went flying again and this time the dictionary worked.  There wasn’t anyone else in the large room with me but while I was flying, these black snake-like cords were launching themselves at me from nowhere.

Wake up again.  I think I just got hit by a black cord or something.  Next to me in a row are piles of those black cords, wriggling around, and I can see chickens in there.  I tear at the pile closest to me to free the chicken but when I get to it, it’s grey and thin, and it looks more like a robot chicken (no pun intended) than anything else.  So I got the chicken and I don’t quite remember if I picked it up and started flying with it or not but I did start to fly again and I realized I was in my house, although the house itself seemed to be on a much, much larger scale — everything was gigantic.  I flew around the walls, avoiding the black cords, and into the kitchen.  I managed to open the back door and the gate, both of which were huge, and flew outside to supposed freedom.  But I still had a feeling I was being watched so I tried to fly as stealthy as I could, flying into the neighbour’s yard so as to stay away from the windows of my house and not be watched.  I heard the door close behind me as I flew away.

I’ve never been good at flying in my dreams and this one was no different.  I found it hard to control where I was going and how high and low I wanted to go.  I veered around my neighbour’s yard for a bit and then proceeded to go to the back lane where I suddenly became Wallace, from Wallace and Gromit.  There was Gromit standing behind me and I “knew” again that I had to walk/shuffle sideways to avoid seeming strange.  So we shuffled slowly sideways, me looking north, towards my house and him walking with his back to me, facing south.  I saw something moving in the windows of my house but couldn’t discern it.

Eventually, we shuffled and shuffled all the way to a busy street where there was a guy who dressed like a lame hipster/gangster stared at us as we slowly walked from him.  I think he may have been leaning on a fire hydrant.  He had a cigarette and I thought he was going to attack us but he merely stared and stared through his colorful sunglasses, and burned this guy standing nearby with his cigarette .

Eventually again, we got to a basketball court with lots of teenagers around, who were also staring at us suspiciously and that decided we weren’t welcome so they chased us.  I was suddenly running with two other people: Chris Martin from Coldplay and this other girl.  While we were running, she took out two books from her bag and gave them to me.  I tried to fly but I couldn’t get very high.  I realized that in order to fly and leave this place through some sort of portal, I needed to sink a basket.

All the kids crowded around me, taunting me and calling me names.  They wanted me to lose and were throwing basketballs around me, at the hoop in the hope of deflecting my ball.  I saw Chris Martin and the girl nearby and knew they were invisible to everyone since they had found the portal and were waiting for me.  They cheered me on.

I threw the ball and closed me eyes, not knowing if I got it in or not.  It was up to me to decide, not everyone else.  With my eyes still closed, I thought I didn’t get it in but I said I did because I was so tired of losing.

Family Event

An assignment for non-fiction class about a family dinner.

Family Event

I am told to write about an event of some sort about my family but nothing comes to mind.  I also don’t remember much of my childhood, and have even less memories involving my family; simple things like dinners at home are a blank to me, though I can speculate what may have happened.  Not knowing what else to do, I ask my older sister, Florence.

We’re supposed to be killing computer-generated people and warriors in an Age of Empires game online but instead, I stall and ask her some questions about our family before she hits the start button in the chatroom.

“Do you remember having dinner together as a family when we were younger?” I ask.

“Yes.  I made dinners” is her reply.  Florence is nine years older than me and my twin sister, Maggie.  I don’t remember her making dinner.  I can imagine it and it seems like it could be real but I don’t have any actual memories of it.

“Father didn’t cook and mommy worked often,” she continues.  This also makes sense.  It’s not that my dad couldn’t cook because I remember him teaching me how to cook vegetables one time, so I’m left to wonder why he didn’t do it for us then.

I tell her I can’t recall any time we as a family sat down and had dinner or dinners with other relatives.  She tells me how there were occasions when we would have dinner with our grandparents and someone would usually end up crying.

This disturbs me, and I know it to be true as well.  Perhaps I am only used to the mother I know now, who doesn’t yell very often and have lost touch with the one who would to yell at her children.

Florence tells me, “Maggie would start crying if she didn’t eat certain things, or if you were bad and mommy yelled at you, or if I spilled something and get yelled at.”  I ask where dad was during this and I she merely confirms what I’ve been thinking: “eating”.

I imagine my mother’s loud, shrill voice, hurling insults at me in Cantonese while I stare down at my bowl of rice, feeling powerless.  As tears gather in my eyes, I feel aversion and embarrassment of my sisters’ eyes, and my father, watching the news on TV as if nothing was happening at all.

When I ask her if there was anything else we did together, she mentions grocery shopping.  Immediately, I remember that: my father always standing by the cart, indifferent to everything, while my mother, my sisters and I would go help bring preapproved food (by my mom).  But then Florence tells me Maggie and I would go into the toy and book aisles so we “wouldn’t get in the way”, and Florence would she looked after us.

There were questions my older sister couldn’t answer and she advised me to ask my mom, which I was reluctant to do because I didn’t think my mother would give me a straight answer.  My mother is the type of person who might pretend she doesn’t remember something but would simply rather not talk about it.  But I did ask anyway, to listen to what she had to say, when she came home and sat herself down in her green, mushroom-printed nightgown, in front of some Chinese programming on TV.

“Why didn’t we do things as a family?”  My mother gives me a look.

“Sure we did.  We went on vacations and trips…”

“But dad never came.”

“That’s because he would faint on planes,” my mom tells me.  “When you were young, we took a trip to Taiwan and he fainted at the terminal, before getting on the plane.  After that, he never went on another plane.”

I ponder this.  Maybe my dad had an excuse but…

“What about other things?  Like going out or doing activities together?”

“Well, those times we went to grandma’s birthday dinners and those potlucks—

“No, I mean things with just us.”

“We did lots of things together!  We had dinner at home!”

If the first thing my mother answers when I ask her about things we do together is dinner, then I know there’s probably not much else we were all there for.

“No, that doesn’t count.  Other things.”

“We did lots of things.  You just don’t remember,” she replies vaguely, before conveniently getting up and walking to the kitchen.

 

Perhaps my mother’s right; I just don’t remember the things we used to do.  Or perhaps the memories I’ve been searching for don’t exist.  Whatever the case, I know now that if I am to ever raise a family, I am determined to give them memories – memories they can write down and remember as good ones the rest of their lives.

Blood = money

Me: “Guess what?  I had a dream last night that I got shot in the back and it hurt sooooo much!”
My mom: “Was there any blood?”
Me:  “Uh… maybe?  I think so… but it hurt so much!”
My mom: “Good.  If there’s blood, then that means you’re going to get money sometime soon.”
Me: “Oh.  But what about me getting shot?  Doesn’t that mean something bad?”
My mom:  “Um… no, not really.”

10 Defining Moments of My Life (so far) — #8: Coming out to my mom

8.  I was trying to teach myself to play the guitar when my mom walked in and sat on the bed next to me.  Immediately, I knew she had something serious to talk about.  She looked at me and asked if I was gay.  I said yes, and already I could sense the tears waiting to be shed.  We had a long, long talk about it; she couldn’t seem to understand how I “became” gay.  She kept trying to make up excuses for it, but when I told her it was just who I am, she didn’t believe it.  Tears kept falling down my face, and some of them fell between the strings of the guitar and on the frets.  Needing to know how my mom felt about me now, I asked her if she still loved me.  She replied, “You are my son.  I’ll always love you.” and that was when I really bawled.  I hugged my mom tightly and cried on her, still not believing that she would really accept me for who I was because I knew she was the traditional Asian kind.

10 Defining Moments of My Life (so far) — #2: Spelling Test

2.  Despite only being in the second grade, I was disappointed when I misspelled “bonnet” on my spelling test (it was an Easter-themed spelling test).  I then felt nervous when we were told by our teacher, Mrs. Clarkson, to bring this particular test home to get our parents to sign it.  That night, I quickly presented it to my mom, hoping she would just scribble her name and get it over with.  She scanned it over, and I followed her eyes.  She asked me about “bonnet” and I replied that I had spelled it wrong, but everything else I had spelled correctly.  I was told to get a pen, which I did, and I thought it had gone too well.  And then the catch came: I was asked to help her write out “not good enough” on the page.  Through tears and not realizing the giant amount of irony, I spelled the three words out, wondering if my mom had overlooked the fact that I had managed to spell “scrumdiddlyumptious” correctly.

Prayers for Bobby — a reflection

Several months ago, I heard about and then read Prayers for Bobby.  When I heard it was going to be made into a TV movie, I was excited to hear about it, seeing as how it was a fantastic book.  And when I did see it, of course, I cried a few times.  Not only did the movie bring about so much emotion in me, as a young gay man, but it also reminded me of my own coming out and how painstakingly difficult it was for me and what it must be like for young gay teens all over the world.

Prayers for Bobby is about Bobby Griffith, a young man living in a small town in the US during the early 80’s.  It’s a time when the AIDS epidemic is just beginning and the belief of homosexuality (ugh, I don’t like that work.  It sounds so scientific and formal) was generally negative.  I won’t talk about Bobby’s life too much, as you can read that up anywhere (or just read the book), but that I just want to say how I’m glad his story, as tragic and sad as it is, is being shared with the world.  He seemed like a genuine, sympathetic guy, and after watching the TV adaptation, I feel so much sadness for other Bobbys out there–Bobbys with religious, ignorant parents and don’t put love first.

When I came out to my parents, it didn’t go as well as I had hoped.  My mom came into my room when I was 15 and asked if I was gay.  She did the easy part for me; all I had to say was yes.  We had a lengthy discussion about what being gay is and how she wanted to “help” me by trying to get rid of it.  Perhaps it was naivety, but I honestly didn’t think my parents would be the type to try and “cure” me.  They’re not particularly religious but they are traditional.  My mom tried to find an excuse–any excuse–to try and why I was this way; she suggested I go out on dates with my sister’s friends and even making an appointment with the doctor.  I thought this suggestion was wayyy out of line but I couldn’t blame my mom for not being able to look past her beliefs.  After all, she was raised in a different country with different values and beliefs, and she retained these beliefs even after coming to Canada (which is why it can be difficult to talk to her about certain things).  In the end, I asked her, “Do you still love me?” like they always do in gay-themed novels.

Surprisingly, she answered, “You’re my son.  Of course I love you.”

And then I cried some more.   Yeah.

It didn’t quite feel like love when we had other arguments about the taboo subject of being gay–and we definitely had some heated ones.  I won’t get into those now but maybe another time.

I don’t remember where I was going with this… I guess the film was very emotional for me because of there were such powerful scenes.  For example, when Bobby’s mother (played by Sigourney Weaver) tells Bobby (played by the wonderful Ryan Kelley) she won’t have a gay son, he responds, “Then mom, you don’t have a son.”  And if that’s not enough, she replies, “Fine.”  I’m tearing up again just thinking about it… in some ways, I never felt like a son to my parents because they never really understood me.

Throughout the film, I also remember thinking about how much better society (or at least Western culture, to some extent) has gotten since the 80’s in terms of recognizing gays and lesbians and their attitudes and treatment towards the minority.  It saddens me when I think about how there are still kids, teens, even youth who are struggling with this, who may contemplate suicide because of their parents.  I think of my ex and how he was/is so afraid to come out because of his overly-religious mother and how he believes she would kill him if she ever found out.  I think of his choice to stay in the closet and have an unfulfilled life because of it.  I think of myself, when I was 14, writing in my journal for the first time about my crush on a guy at school and then writing at the end, ‘If anyone reads this, my life is over.”  I remember being so, so scared to even write it, for fear someone might see it and know.

I look back on those days and am reminded that people are still going through that today.  Obviously I wish they weren’t; I wish people could just be who they are without fear, without consequence.  I wish those people, those young boys and girls everywhere, strength to get through it–strength that one day, they might be looking back on those days, feeling not an ounce of regret.  I wish for those people not to give up trying.  Not to ever give up trying.