r e d.chilipepper

remnants of a childhood...

when you grow up in a conservative asian household, a few things are indelibly bread into your being. most of them are harmless habits: chopsticks are not to be inserted standing into food, shoes are to be taken off in the household, you bow to the urns on the mantles before entering the house and kowtow with incense that leaves you slightly delirious. other traditions i value: thriftiness, common sense, a good sense of responsibility for family and friends.

being asian is a complicated matter.

some, however, probably aren't so good: meekness, willingness to accept mistreatment and silently suffer, and a neurotic sense of incompletion and imperfection.

it's strange growing up in two worlds. once you crossed the threshold of the door, it was as if you were transported into another century, another world entirely. friends at school carried around pictures of scantily clad men, swearing was rampant, curfews were never before midnight. enter my home, and suddenly, heads were being shaken at movie stars getting divorced (and thusly was how kevin costner fell from grace in my household), and cussing resulted in serious ramifications.

what i have grown to dislike most was the complacency with which many of my fellow taiwanese accepted rudeness and mistreatment from others. i saw female friends dating idiots and accepting it. i saw male friends get pushed around on basketball courts and just accept it. they were, in their own words, "just not as athletic." one memory i cannot forget was the time i saw my father got called a coolie by the laundromat man who was far lesser of a man than he, and yet my father endured it. when i went to verbally slap back the bastard, my father got mad at me. i learned never to rage against things that bothered me. you just were to be silent.

well, i've had enough of that now. we're adults. we can express our feelings, our rage, our preferences to be respectfully acknowledged. we can say, no, "b*ttmunch, i refuse to let you treat me that way." and it feels damn good.

for a long time, i never said this to the person who needed to hear it most. but i'll say it now and just vent it out, regardless of whether it will ever be read by the due person:

我後悔認識這重殘忍的人。 我感謝我早放了你。