There’s a quote that Elissa Washuta writes in her Memoir White Magic:
Maybe wanting to be special is an American condition, the swamp of entitlement from which the American dream is supposed to be able to grow. Orlean sees it in Zanesville’s Terry Thompson: “There will always be vain, obsessive people who want to own rare and extraordinary things whatever the cost.”
I didn’t yearn to be special; I just wanted to not be invisible. In America, being invisible denies you a future.
Instead of assimilating, I’ve earned enough hyphens to make myself interesting: Started as a Rock Manager, then became a Personal Trainer, helped build a fitness tech company that got acquired by Fitbit, became a non fiction writer during the Crazy Rich Asians era, then that got me to be on TV. I’m not as invisible anymore.
My “Specialness” has made my life more opportunities, I don’t continue life out of scarcity anymore. Being a part of the “Asian Representation” wave, I get to reap the rewards of the seeds that I have sown as identity politics have changed dramatically. People remember my non American name now without calling me “the Asian guy.”
On the premier of my show, my cousin asked me while having celebratory drinks, “How does it feel to be famous? just remember us little people when you forget about us little people.”
All this feels like a second childhood, a bewilderment that I existed this far. I’m getting a second chance. You would think it’s all gratitude that I have for life. I should be happier then, right?
However, no one has taught me what to do with my first childhood.
I was a quiet sad kid. The elementary kids around me were already talking about being in gangs like the Bloods and the Crips. The bullying made me come home with tears too many times to where I couldn’t hide it from my dad anymore.
He put me and my sister into karate class when I was 5. By the time I was 8, my sister was getting too old for the kids class so he moved us to a Kung Fu school that was much tougher. Sifu didn’t led up on me as he pushed me as hard as the adults.
The training was grueling. My dad hated I whenever showed disdain in class so he’d beat me when I got home. How ironic that he wanted me to learn martial arts to defend myself, but I didn’t use it to defend myself from him.
By the age of 12 I already spent half my life training to be violent, while drowning in violence. I knew how to break a rib with an uppercut, how to lock in a proper choke hold, snap a angle with a roundhouse, kicking down in a 45 degree angle. Yet every so often I see brutal rage come from my dad on me and the family.
My breaking point was when my dad laid his hands on my mom, for some reason it doesn’t matter anymore. All the pent-up anger coursed through my veins, and I tackled my dad to the ground, telling him to stop. While my dad berated me and called me a terrible son and threatening to call the cops, my mom took my dad’s side and said I needed to apologize.
For that one moment, I never felt so betrayed in my life. I thought I was using my skills to defend my mom, and here I am being blamed for what I was taught to do. I felt the existential feeling my soul floating from my body as it went numb. There was a slight ringing I kept hearing in my head while things were being thrown in the house. My life right now is over. I just need to leave and get out.
Before I left, I picked up my Chihuahua and gave him the longest hug. He was my best friend and knew it might be our last moment together. He peed in his bed out of fear, hiding his head in his tail shivering from the yelling. The way he teared up and wouldn’t look at me as I held him—I think he knew it was our final goodbye. After that, I couch-surfed for months looking for work. Some nights I was stuck on the streets, surviving with other homeless people.
I saw true invisibility, where society doesn’t care about you.
That cousin that said I would forget him if I got famous, I look at our text thread as its mostly a one sided conversation as it’s mostly me reaching out to him. He’s in a relationship now, trying to build his architecture career. It’s hard for him to come out to see me as he’s working on his new chapter in his life.
People ask me what my next stage in life will be, what new goals I have made. I look around and know that I have more opportunities and privileges that most people can’t get. The amount of dreams should be limitless. I appreciate that all those years weaponizing my body gave me the athletic IQ to be the successful personal trainer that I am now. All that trauma gave me content to write essays and to develop my voice.
Yet people expect me to pick up where I left off. Their normal paths have easy guides to follow. I feel sometimes how unique my life gets, I get farther and farther away from my old friends. I’m feeling more alienated they can’t relate to me anymore.
This past Thanksgiving when I met up with family and friends, I felt they were all strangers to me.
Alone on Thanksgiving weekend I watched the movie Thunderbolts* in the late hours. From the same creators of the Netflix’ Dark Comedy revenge series Beef, the team of Jake Schreier and Lee Sung Jin wrote and directed a MCU movie about a team of antiheroes — Yelena Belova, Bucky Barnes, Red Guardian, Ghost, Taskmaster and John Walker — go on a mission to save the world, but have to save each other from their trauma past. This movie seems to give the answers to this hollowness that I’ve been feeling that I can’t explain to anyone.
I mostly resonate with Yelena Belova. We were born out of violence and feeling our only purpose in life to hurt people. We are slowly finding agency of a different future and when we look around the world and see how….
… we really don’t belong.
I think of this scene in the movie, where she’s so angry and in despair at the lowest point of the movie, Florence Pugh gives such a good performance of what I’ve been feeling the past year:
I’m so alone.
I don’t have anything anymore.
All I do is sit and look at my phone and think of all the terrible things that I’ve done. And then I go to work and then I drink and then I come home to no one and I sit and I think about all the terrible things I’ve done again and again.
I’m forgetting what my personal priorities were because they are always about not drowning in shame. That inability to locate a source inside me that seemed to run through my reason to push forward, is muddled with all the terrible things I had to do since I was a little boy. And I have to go home to no one because no one understands.
The way that her father tried to tell her when she was a child she “felt a lot of joy,” Yelena looks away for a bit and draws her crying eyes back to her father and says, “I don’t remember that feeling.”
The only memory of my childhood that I recall to every once in a while is my little dog. Sometimes when I’m sad I imagine hugging him while he buries his little face in my chest.
One of my castmates from my reality show has a close friend who was the PR person for the movie KPop Demon Hunters. The movie has been on my radar for a very long time. There’s pride that I have in the sense that Asian-ness is still popular. Ejae is probably one of the most famous people in the world right now, as she is given a second chance at becoming a global music star with her song “Golden.”
There’s an interview she did for vanity fair where she goes through the “Making of” the song Golden. She breaks down the timeline of how the song came from the early drafts to the final recording. In the video she reflects on her time in idol training and the remorse she still carries, thus confirming that I always thought “Golden” was a sad song.
– [Ejae] K-Pop idol training was a whole thing. My dream was always to become a singer and I had to kind of, you know, I did intentionally choose not to be an artist. I kind of let that go. ‘Cause songwriting kind of fit my personality more, and songwriting really truly did save me during a dark time. It was like therapy for me, so this song, when I wrote it, the melody and all was kind of very therapeutic for me. Like seriously, like songwriting, this industry’s really hard. Like things sometimes just never happen. It takes sometimes a long time, and I’ve been rejected so many times, so like it’s just, you know, like I just, one thing I’ve always like, oh gosh.
Oh god.
Sorry.
– [Adam] Take your time.
– [Ejae] Regretted when I, you know, came out of SM was I couldn’t let, you know, little Ejae’s dream come true. And I felt so bad ‘cause she worked so hard And I did feel like a disappointment. But like when “Golden” happened my mom would always tell me. In Korean it’s called mari ssiga doenda 말 씨 되다. Meaning whatever you say out loud, the words you choose will become a story. So all the songs I’ve written for K-Pop have been very not the best positive words. I have a song called “Drama Armageddon.”
[Ejae and Mark laughs]
– [Ejae] So it was a nice opportunity to write a song called “Golden.”And it’s just about, you know, it’s not, I feel like there’s different types of hope. You know, there’s a hope where like I can do it and you’re being badass, but this one I think for me, at least in the instrumentals, it was a bittersweet kind of hope. Like you feel like giving up every day, but there’s like this little part in you that keeps saying you can do it, so just keep holding on.
I feel for those tears that she tries to hold back. There’s a myth that people believe once you get successful, it automatically heals your pain. No amount of money or recognition can erase the shame and remorse of what feeling failure does to the soul.
Giving up can be an extravagance for others, because they have a backup plan to move back home. I never had a home. Even though I don’t remember as a child, maybe I was born with a bittersweet kind of hope that kept me going. To keep trying to find that home where I belong.
This year, I missed the boat of publishing any articles. The world has been on fire and I felt like I couldn’t contribute any art that can bring healing to the masses. The pond that I keep fishing for creativity keeps getting murkier. Yet all this year Ejae has shown me that my past isn’t too tarnished enough to where I can’t make art. To stay around maybe a bit longer for the ones who are trying to be there for me in this dark time. So when I was dancing to the soundtrack song “Golden” at Lion’s den in San Francisco’s Chinatown, screaming “We’re goin’ up, up, up, it’s our moment” on the dance floor with some of my new closest friends that came into my life, I’m just thinking “I can’t believe I’m dancing to this amazing sad song.”
Your sleeveless friend: Long Vo 
Leave a comment