(sidenote: you’d think nobody gives a rat’s ass about the humanities these days. while you are correct, rumor has it that Cornell fielded something like 500 apps for comp.lit last year for something like 6 spots. christ.)

In any case, I am still here and queer and according to my SoP, 100% AZN and ready to wage war on reprezentation… in the rarefied air of a steadily collapsing bubble.

“PENNEEEZ NICKELS QUARTERS DIMES!” he snarled as he shuffled through the train. “I’LL TAKE ANYTHING! PENNEEZ NICKELS QUARTERS DIMES!”

it didn’t take long for him to traverse the length of the car, and i was a little startled when he came upon me and paused. “PENNEEZ NICKELS QUARTERS DIMES!” he said before giving me a once-over. he looked me coolly in the eye and seemed to pause for a moment before turning to shout at his larger audience. “I’LL EVEN TAKE FORTUNE COOKIES!” he said before shuffling on.

you know, it’s times like this that i love modernity. i mean really really love it, SO MUCH SO THAT WERE IT TO PRESENT ITSELF IN ANTHROPOMORPHIC FORM I WOULD IMMEDIATELY KICK IT IN DA’ NUTS.

just sayin’.

well ridiculous shit is happening in the chink community.

some of you more responsible non-violent types might be appalled. me? i’m glad, because it’s about goddamn time people realized how fucked up asian families are with their “you must getting in top ten school or should slitting wrists” attitude. (the severity of the tactic attesting of course not only to the extent of the guy’s dementia, but also the extremity of internal cultural pressure. if you think MIT is a “pressure cooker,” you should send in an application to the institution that is chinkdom)

i mean y’all whities think it’s just an exaggerated prep school attitude, but O SRSLY it is so much more

Anyhow, as I rifled through my rolodex of heroes, it occurred to me that i have no asian intellectual icons of any sort, no Eastern locus at which my mimetic tensions gather. =P indeed furthur reflection made me realize that i have never had a male asian role model to emulate in any capacity — intellectual, affective, representational. not a single one. and not for lack of wanting and needing one, frankly.

As a self-professed slanty-eyed smartfag, i must say that a major part of my frustration with the Bear movement’s domination of the queer scene (aside from its tendency toward the same body fascism it originally deigned to move against) owes to the fact that the dominance of Bear social cartography effectively ensures that certain affective registers consequent to Oedipal sociality will for me remain unfulfilled. A distinctly Oedipal hieirarchy (and by that I mean the broader Oedipal model of family) is a de facto feature of the Bear scene — even the taxonomy of bodies reflects this: “Bear” (older bearded heavyset male) and “Cub” (younger slimmer bearded bear-to-be). The circulation of such a (hehe bestial) trope foregrounds a naturalistic sense of progression, a continuity between the young and the old, and what’s more, a mentor(ing relation)ship apart from pure sexual practice. Part of my own struggle with my sexual identity (and broader cultural identity as a child of immigrant parents) owes to the utter lack of such a relationship structure during my own coming-of-age. In the absence of a male ideal and a male homosocial mentor figure, I failed to develop a historical sense of my self and my world. Without a male ideal whose semiotic stability could organize my experience, my world has always lacked continuity. In many ways (and i don’t use this term lightly, as my mother was a violent postpartum nutcase) it has presented itself as something schizoid, devoid of coherence. while such may be the case, i’m under the impression most people operate without a crippling, persistent awareness of Althusserian/Lacanian ideological rupture. =P

At the risk of betraying my own desire to move beyond classical Western structures of affiliation and connectedness, i can’t help but wonder how different my life would be if i’d had access to not only to a stable family (and strong father figure in a distinctly Western aka classical Greek sense), but also to the parallel structure of mentoring and paternal care that has taken root in the queer community. I wonder sometimes if I am not deficient in some way for not being entitled to such mentoring? why am i not able to belong to a site of emulation, intersubjectivity, identification, paternal care? why is the absence of facial hair grounds for being disbarred from a community that prides itself on its ideology of inclusiveness and warmth? (reference: history of Bear movement, issues highlighted by Bear411sucks.com. addendum: i suppose the “return to nature” aspect of the bear-cub figure only “naturally” implies that hairless persons like most Asian men are ‘unnatural’, and hence undesirable)

While the Bear community’s emphasis on Western practices (loud gatherings at sports bars / community rugby tournaments / events that are traditionally attached to the working class) is perhaps somewhat removed from my own Asian domesticity (do not question authority / walk quietly through the house / do not make eye contact, let alone physical contact / to be loved requires deference, invisibility), the feelings, the affects, must fundamentally feel the same. To be embraced by a community and have your attachments be guided by that community’s very forms certainly must feel rewarding. These rewards are definitely experienced in a performative way – in the hundreds of Bear (which might as well be called Bear-For-Bear) websites on the web, the myriad Bear events (reference last weekend’s Chicago Bear pride), even Bear bars. Bear culture has even leeched into popular media (reference Cachorro.) Bear culture validates itself by making itself known — Asian ideology, on the other hand, demands that we blend in. Disappear. We demand a loss of faciality. Where eyes might meet I sometimes imagine an eraser.

For me, a gay Asian American male, to continually be rejected or marginalized by the Bear community on the basis of my lack of body and facial hair (note even the terminology! reference: Chaser) is infuriating. For me as an individual with a particularly violent and unstable family background, the rejection causes great pain and an even deeper sense of isolation. In many ways it simply recapitulates my early loss time and again.

The problem is not necessarily the Bears’ concern. They have their fun, and they have earned it. But what options are available for me? What gay Asian male – imagined by popular television or otherwise – could be a father figure to this 28-year-old spazzy recovered ivy-league meth-head who, posturing as intelligentsia , has largely gotten through life with strategies of avoidance, deference, and isolation? Why are others entitled to such relationships simply because they have more follicles in their face? That the Bear community has even failed its own (see account in The Bear Book volume II, in which a member of the community develops a disease that causes him to lose all his body/facial hair) is on paper ludicrous but in life potentially quite devastating for any h0m0 attached to this world of meaning.

My question is (as usual) an unproductive one. It may not even be a question. I suddenly find I am no longer able to ask one. But maybe this post would do better as something else entirely – something that is not so much a guided inquiry as an articulation of a need, as the identification of a void that greatly needs filling.

Asian-America, I am throwing down the gauntlet. I need an image of paternal care, empathy and instruction. it can be straight or gay, i don’t care. but I need it now.

(Mr. Miyagi does not count)

I had wanted very much for my inaugural post here to be in response to something substantial. Unfortunately i’ve been so exhausted as of late that i’ve been unable to come up with much of anything. every day I approach this site and just as quickly turn away from it; I find myself actively resisting racial discourse at the moment. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe I’m still stubbornly occupying the affective dead-zone that asserts itself in the wake of any trauma, private-personal or public-national (the VATech rampage, after all, took place just one month ago.)

My suspicion is that we are all still coping with the remainder of Cho’s violence, though life has largely returned to normal. The moment of trauma has incurred, the seeming coherence of the Real has shattered and over the past few weeks has quietly reassembled itself. And now is the time for the ironing out of pleats, time for the Nietzschean active forgetting — what is necessary, I suppose, for the social world to move forward.

I haven’t completely forgotten Cho though. I still feel a vague sense of pity and unease when I think of him. I confess I don’t remember him as much as I do the media’s response to him, and the implications for both Asian Americans and Asians on Eastern soil. And what I take note of now is the extent to which the frenzied, highly public speculative aftermath — those crazy few days when google-news showered us with nothing but headline after headline, OMGZR the killer is from tEh Korea!! we must tighten immigration laws! (nevermind the slew of insipid reactionary commentary barring the teaching of race/class/identity/literary issues in the classroom) — has permanently altered my semiotic compass, my practices of reading and interpreting, my way of sense-making as i go about my day. Such are very minor shifts, barely perceptible, but they are always deeply personal. Take this site, for instance.

It seems innocuous enough. good times, great taste, food and decor thoroughly informed by slanty-eyed goodness. but what irks me to no end is why the owners decided to call it “MY Asian Village” and not simply “Asian Village” (note even the graphical emphasis on MY in their logo, the bright red background and inversion of letter fill-color.) It’s a subtle point, yes, but I’m a stickler for detail, especially when I’m trying to post to kick-start this blog, *ahem*.

What bothers me, of course, is the easy slippage between (uh oh, here it is) the notion of possession and the well-circulated imperialist fantasy of master-slave ownership. It’s a very slippery space, and the lingering question for me is this: how can we, as Asian Americans, achieve more cultural valence on our own terms, apart from strategies of possession/consignment over to (a presumably) superior Other? how do we even make a claim to power within the social symbolic? [i touched upon a few of these issues here, in a brief letter to a reporter writing about Cho's NBC media 'carepackage']

this washington post article actually asks some interesting questions. they are good questions, ones i have no answers to.

the question i have to extend is one about boundaries, about our limits in imagining the forms that violence can occupy. the author of the above writes thusly:

“All the cheap rage, all the macho posturing of a demented boy is condensed in that image. A young man holds out his arms, at eye level, each hand covered in a dark glove, each holding a gun. He wears a vest that looks vaguely military, and his eyes are set in a steely rage. A black cap, turned backwards, covers a shaved head, as if he meant to doubly annihilate his personality.”

but what exactly makes Cho’s presentation mere “posturing”? on what grounds can we qualify his rage as “cheap”? surely we can all agree that the costs of Cho’s “posturing” amount to some of the highest in recent history: 33 lives. highest toll ever in a school related shooting. if his rage were so cheap, it wouldn’t be making headlines.

if murdering 33 people in 2 separate killing sprees is “posturing”, it is hard to see how one might lay a claim to “the real thing”

from the introductory paragraph:

“It is chilling that we recognize this pose, that is so deeply a part of our society, that a profoundly disaffected young man reached for its simple form — a mixture of arms spread to menace and arms spread as if in expectation of crucifixion. The American Rage image so often brings with it that narcissism, that mix of grievance and anger.”

it seems to me that part of the panic over this event stems from a fear that this “American Rage image” (a tropological figure of christian redemption, nihilism, and anticommunitarianism) has had its iconicity shattered by the illegibility of a boy who we now know felt much more than he cared to show. and while idiot NBC reporters keep insisting on homogenizing-slash-”honkeying up” the social field (“college is all about football and being loud in clubs! i’ve never heard of an introvert IN COLLEGE! impossible!”), what i can’t help wondering is if, had the video footage contained a similarly stiff inarticulate white man, would the words “posturing” and “cheap” be falling from reporter’s mouths? would it be “posturing” if it were a black man with a gun?

what is chilling is not that we recognize such an icon. what is chilling is that such an icon is racially marked, that the media continues to reinscribe it as such even as it is being blown apart.

what is chilling is that the power behind such an image cannot, in the minds of the american public, cannot possibly be wielded by persons with almond eyes even after it clearly just was