6/11/23 The US is homogenous blob

Full disclosure this is an opinion piece and probably somewhat controversial if you’re a patriotic American. I’ll try to explain my rationale below. This will be a train of thought I’ve had for quite some time I wanted to write down.

I was born and spent the first 4-5 formative years of my life in Chongqing, China as well as in Liuzhou, China. I was able to speak Sichuanese as a child and have a penchant for spicy foods because it’s the local culture, much akin to Cajun/Southern spice here in the US.

Chongqing is considered the gateway to the Western frontier of China as it straddles where the confluence of ice melt from the Himalayas meet to flow down towards the East and the East China Sea. It’s also the site of the Three Gorges Dam. There are also a huge number of ethnic Tibetans who reside in the provinces that surround Tibet, aside from Xinjiang to the North. As such it’s one of only four specially administrated cities in the entire country, the other three being Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. It’s also where the Chinese government fled after Japan invaded, but before the rift that caused the Guomingdang to flee to Taiwan, and was considered a temporary capital city and bombed to hell by the Japanese.

The city of Chongqing area itself was part of Sichuan province prior to 2010 and the area has 30 million people. The entire province of Sichuan has 83 million people. Therefore prior to this the province aka state I resided in had essentially 113 million people, which is roughly 12 million shy of the entire population of Japan. Hence I’ve grown up in an envrionment that had tons of people around any and everywhere I go. I’ll reference this later.

After moving to the US and during my teenage years I felt more and more alienated from American culture and society. I never attributed it to my ethnicity, as some do, because I had other visible Asian students in my school and classes. I know the whole, “woe is me I am a self-loathing Asian” often derives from that aspect but again I never experienced that. Nor do I remember ever experiencing outright discrimination due to my race possibly due to how diverse the schools I attended were.

There are only two experiences I can recall, with the latter not being related to race. The first was when I first arrived in the US and spoke little to no English and was outside in the playground. A boy older than me came over and taunted me and I felt negatively and went to a teacher. She promptly made him apologize to me and that was that.

The second was in middle school when I was transferred to the “gifted and talented” or advanced courses. We were required to write out journal entries for English class and because I had just joined I noticed students who were taken out of class or went to classes different from mine. Upon asking one of those students who I thought I was friends with he replied, “to get away from you” with a deadpan expression. I thought nothing of it but wrote that in my journal entry. In hindsight, he was probably making a negative joke? I had no idea but don’t remember being offended by the comment.

Regardless what happened next resonated with me. Our English teacher made a class announcement regarding it. She explained the scenario and that if any student ever made a comment like that again they would meet dire repercussions. I felt rather awkward that she read my journal and made a big deal out of it. But upon reflection as an adult, these individuals who stood up for me helped foster my trust in administration and fairness.

In fact, I can recall multiple female teachers who advocated for and supported me growing up. I have a huge thing for female role models and support women’s rights wholeheartedly. I believe my position as a gay man is to make the world more equitable for women because I’m more privileged than they are in many regards, in spite of my sexuality. Anyway, back to the topic.

Because of where I grew up and in short, my family's dysfunction, I never felt safe or at home here in the US. It wasn’t until the first time I returned to China when I was 16 years old that I reconnected and fell for the culture and family I didn’t know I needed. I promptly devoted my last two years of high school and college to moving back to China to escape everything here. I deferred college in the US to spend a year in China with my relatives and self-studied Chinese. I moved to Shanghai after college for the aforementioned.

Cue to becoming disillusioned with the fantasy of China and the realities. It wasn’t until after Shanghai that I realized there were many amenities in the US I missed. Most specifically my car, having a trunk to carry groceries, and realizing I’m more American than Chinese. Realizing it cost more to eat out and I needed to buy groceries but it took two hours round trip to get what I wanted was quite the cold water in the face. Taking three hours to buy a bedsheet and blanket due to taking the subway and walking stuck out to me. It wasn’t until then that I even started to appreciate Denver and Colorado for that matter. The ability to go buy what you want from Target and then go for a hike that didn’t have lines of people snaking through the entire path, the tourist traps, the harassing vendors.

I had a lot of fun in China. I had my first real crush and sexual experiences—my god I thought I’d never meet anyone I liked more, thought we’d be together forever, etc and now he’s married and has an 8 year old who I’ve met and think to myself “I’ve sucked your dad’s dick”.

I met my roommate at a Shanghai nightclub where I disclosed I was gay and she said she had a free room but to say I was her cousin to avoid neighborhood gossip, I was shunned by fancy gays at the warehouse party in Shanghai, and I get hit on by people who claimed they simply wanted to be my friend. Moreover, I essentially dated multiple people at the same time without understanding it was dating. I always expected the US norm of someone asking you out, seeing them routinely, and then becoming official as the course. But it became apparent when the guy who let me stay with him when I visited Suzhou asked why I had a hickey on my neck after visiting Shanghai during the day when I claimed to be seeing a “friend”.

They made a huge deal out of these things and I never understood why until I realized they thought we were dating. I simply thought I was meeting people and never took them as bonafide relationships since we were literally an ocean apart as online friends who finally met. Also, the sexual experiences were just plain disappointing. I think I tended to build up a fantasy expectation that crumbled upon touching reality when we finally met.

After returning to Denver in 2009-10 I finally started to appreciate my American life more. There weren’t endless people around, I had a car, I had a roomy place to live, and I had my own goddamn shower and toilet. I put my life on hold due to a relationship and that was a bad decision, but I don’t regret it as it taught me much more than multiple failed relationships and years of casual dating would teach. Shoutout to Kyle though, literally scarred me for life for the worse or better but I’d like to think if I came out of it and if he still cares, like telling Pak to check in on me last year (2022), that it’s reciprocal even if he can’t articulate it. (Honestly Kyle, just tell me you’re sorry for your mistakes and you learned a lot. I’d appreciate that and be open to being friends. The whole autistic emotional void is difficult for most people to handle due to not having any type of feedback. It’s like dating an inanimate object that enjoys sex. Snails also enjoy procreation and can’t tell you how they feel…)

Due to my experience traveling, living in China, and living here in the US I honestly think the US is a homogenous blob. Everywhere and anywhere you move there is suburbia, some semblance of a downtown, Best Buy, McDonalds, AutoZone, Wendy’s, etc. There are very few places in the US you can escape these things unless you venture into rather small communities in the middle of nowhere. The US simply does not have the density of East Asia in 99% of places to compare.

Of course, you’ll argue the US has accents, local foods, and culture that is different than other parts and I agree. But because the US is only about 250 years old these differences will still require hundreds of years to become more prominent. In China, you can visit a city 100 miles away and they’ll speak your accent slightly differently, have their own foods you’d like or dislike, or go a little further and have no idea what they’re saying or what they’re eating. That is much more prominent.

When people say they want to move to a new US city I simply roll my eyes. It’s all the same to me, EXCEPT geography. The Pacific Northwest and Western coasts have the most gorgeous Redwood forests. The Rocky Mountains have their own appeal. These things are what I enjoy about the US. Even the lonely desolate landscapes of Wyoming have their own special type of dreariness to them. It’s the modern equivalent of being a pioneer. Of course, the locals and people are different but, “same same but different” as the Thai say.

I’ll have to think about how I want to edit this later. As of now, these are my recent thoughts on the larger perspective of my life and habitat. I feel privileged to have such an assortment of perspectives on everything in my life. If one seems detrimental usually another can see it as a positive. Or maybe that’s just the optimism that one needs to survive a dysfunctional upbringing. But it does make sense my therapist casually mentioned what I think of C-PTSD and the symptomology that applies to me. I tend to distrust people, think bad things will happen, and feel no one really understands. Moreover, most peoples’ problems seem petty and insignificant. She told me to just empathize with how they feel instead of comparing traumas but it’s hard to do.

Because I know shitting into a bag and going to school with frequent stomach pains, pooping yourself, changing your baby sister’s diaper full of shit at age eight, etc are not things most people encounter. Putting adult responsibilities on a child is a hallmark of dysfunction and why I know my current behavior, upon reflection, is me basically trying to get away with being a kid and gaining the attention and feedback I lacked. I also feel incredibly resentful of previous friends who tried to downplay what I experienced but I am at fault for not articulating the details of said dysfunction. My sister and I joke about the fact we’re not drug addicts and face-down in the gutter somewhere but I tend to think I would have come close had I met people who used those things as coping mechanisms. The worst things I can recollect people telling me don’t seem that traumatic honestly. That’s why working psych and hearing their stories made mine seem less terrible in comparison. I think most of the people working in psych consciously or subconsciously are working through their own traumas and focusing it on something that actually gets good results. It feels good to see someone improve and do better.

When are we going to have a TV show that depicts some of the more fucked up traumatic nuances people experience? One that comes to mind is a scene that normalizes a general hatred for people, what the protagonist wants to do, and the interventions that might help. Because we certainly don’t have it now. I have to add the general hatred towards people is resentment no one was there when I went through the most fucked up aspects of my life. If no one was there for me why should I, as an adult, feel compelled to contribute to other’s feeling better? I think me not contributing to making other people’s lives worse is enough self-control. Because honestly, it would feel pretty good if everyone normalized how fucked up what one experienced is. By helping them get through it they’re indirectly normalizing and helping anyone else who had that happen too. Happy things are easy to talk about, but sad depressing fucked up shit isn’t.