Unlovable Is a Lie

To My Beautiful Unborn Child,

During the fall of ’98, the air was clean and crisp in Colorado. Filled with innocence, wonder, and an explosion of color made by the fall trees, life was good. The Denver Broncos had won their first Superbowl and they were looking to win another. I was a prime, young, innocent nine-year old fourth grader in our beautiful mountain state. And during this magical season, I had my first crush.

I stared at her from across the way with bashful eyes. She was everything I had dreamed of; big, bright, doe-like eyes, long hair that went down to her waist, and a slender frame that fit her clothes flawlessly. She looked like the picture-perfect girls I could only see in teen magazines and on movie posters. Every now and then, I thought I caught a glimpse of her looking back at me; and when that happened, I would be in heaven for the rest of the day. The idea of her noticing my existence was enough to set my little heart a joy.

My crush was different from me in many ways. She was popular, I was a nerd. She was blonde, tall, radiant. I was short, fat, and had glasses. She had many friends, and everyone knew her name; I was happy if anyone could remember I went to the same school.

On one fateful day though, I heard the most unbelievable news. Her gossip-powered friends cackled by me and paraded a most fortuitous announcement. My crush was looking for a boyfriend. Her friends laughed and scoffed at her idealism saying that she, a nice girl, was willing to date anyone. My heart skipped a beat. The angel was as fair as she was beautiful, an equal-opportunity boyfriend-haver. And as Lady Luck would have it for me a second time on the same day, I had a chance to become her boyfriend before anyone else caught wind because we rode the same school bus and we were always the last ones left (I lived at the last stop and she lived at the one before mine). There was a space in her life and an opportunity for me to present myself. If she truly wanted a boyfriend, and if anyone would do, I just needed to ask on that bus ride home.

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There was finally a fighting chance for a loser like me. As the stars were aligning, I was preparing to throw my Denver Bronco hail mary into the endzone to become her boyfriend. And once it was so, I would be popular. I would have friends who cared about me. During recess I would get picked first in soccer. The other kids would invite me to their houses to play on their new Nintendo 64s. People would get to know me and see just how cool I already and always was. People would finally know my name.

The moment was on a Friday. There was no one else on the bus but me and her. She was three rows behind me (the cooler you were, the further back you sat). I did a double take to make sure no one else was on the bus, and then I made my move.

Eyes downcast, I awkwardly shuffled my way towards the back of the bus. Feeling nervous and out of place, I tried to speak but the words would not come out.

It was her who spoke first.

Are you ok?

So kind of her to be looking out for me, I thought. I stumbled a bit, and then my mouth reacted before my brain. I blurted out the words:

Will you be my girlfriend?

What? Eyebrows furrowed.

Will you be my girlfriend?

I repeated myself, this time less reactionary, a tad more confident, thinking about Elway’s miracle pass against the Washington team.

Ew.

She got up and left the bus. It was her stop.

She wasn’t that kind after all. I was destroyed. It was like a tsunami had crashed onto me and crushed me into my seat. The play was incomplete. There was no celebration dance. My nerdom and friendlessness could not be rescued. I suddenly began to hate her gossipy friends, the bus driver, the Broncos, Elway, everything.

No one had seen or heard me get rejected though and I guess that was a plus. But I couldn’t tell anyone about this and I doubted she would either.

The following Monday, I felt like all eyes were on me. Kids were snickering when I passed by. They made faces at me where they pulled their eyes back to be small and wide-slit. Various idiots walked by me speaking variations of ching-chong hoping I might accidentally understand. Racism was par for the course though. No one made any mention of me trying to ask out the prettiest, most popular girl in our grade. Did the gossip battalion not catch wind of my bold mistake? Maybe nothing I did mattered? Maybe the kids were just making fun of me because that’s what you do to the only non-white person at your Christian Elementary school. Being made fun of without the world knowing my blunder was easy enough to deal with. Just another day. Relieved, I walked away, glad that nobody knew my dreadful secret.

During lunch time, a crowd gathered around my crush. I tried to see what was going on. Apparently, the most popular boy in our grade had asked her out and she had said yes. Her face was flustered with happiness and looked to have forgotten about the interaction we had the Friday before. Apparently, she had told her friends she was willing to date anyone hoping that the one could take a hint. She cast a wide net and did what she had to do. I was a rube, a casualty of war. Internally, I was so embarrassed. I resolved to tell no one about my bus hap and would take the story to my grave.

But the idiots came clamoring. Since there was one perfect couple at school, everyone needed to know everyone else’s crush. For the next few weeks that’s all anyone could talk about. There was an open and constant discussion of who liked who. Every stone had to be turned over and every private thought had to be publicized by the gossip committee. Everyone was subject to interrogation and even I, the loser of the school was not spared. Boys and girls alike pestered me, demanding to know who my crush was. I never gave in. I would never give them that satisfaction.

When you don’t give in to demands, people start to believe whatever they want. Eventually rumors went around saying that I was gay and that I didn’t even like girls. This was even funnier to the masses. Apparently being Asian now automatically entailed being gay. It confirmed their biases and added to the list of traits to the Asian stereotype. Everything that seemed slightly right about me to them became truth not just for me but for all my people. I was different from them in one way, so it made sense that I was different in other ways too.

I didn’t care what they thought. Or at least I thought I didn’t.

On Sundays, our family would go downtown to attend a Korean church. This is the only place I would see other Korean people. There were some kids at church who weren’t losers in school, like my friend’s older sisters. A lot of them were pretty and popular too. I never thought our race could be liked, I thought we were all doomed to be losers because we were Asian. But some of my friend’s sisters proved them wrong.

Downbeat and lost in the world of girls, I thought that maybe if my crush, a white girl, didn’t like me; maybe a cool Korean girl would consider me. I took another chance on the opposite sex via one of my friend’s sisters, but this time more so out of curiosity and not out genuine attraction. I knew it was a longshot, and never had any expectations for the conversation to go well. The talk was simple and slightly different because of cultural hierarchy:

Could I be your boyfriend?

Ew. No.

Why?

Because you’re my younger brother’s friend.

Oh.

And I only date white guys.

What?

You know, white guys, like all the hot guys in the movies or in any of the boy bands.

Dating only white guys was a new revelation to me. If my white crush did not like me and if Korean girls were only interested in dating white guys, was I to date no one? Was I actually better off gay? Or did men hate Asians too? Maybe a beautiful black woman would sweep me off my feet? Or did black women hate me too and also only date white guys? Did you have to be a white male to have a girlfriend of any race? Did my crush reject me because of my race and not because I was a loser? I mean, I was smarter than this. It had to be because I was a loser. But maybe it wasn’t? I remembered the “hot guys” on MTV, TV shows, and movies. They were mostly white, some black, but not any kind of Asian. Asians in the media looked like me. Glasses, weird, greasy, unlovable.

The idea of race being the reason for my unluckiness in love began to brew in my soul. I questioned if I had been automatically born a loser because of the permutation of my gender and race. But I looked around, there were plenty of other losers at school who were white. But did they have a choice? Were they born into a stereotype or did they get to choose? I could admit that I was not the best looking and that the weight and the glasses didn’t help. If I lost the weight and glasses, could I be attractive?

I never wanted to give into this narrative of race being the reason for me being undesirable. Until one day, another kid at my school, a loser like me, nerdier, fatter, weirder, but white, got a girlfriend. This kid had done the impossible. He found a girl that found his weirdness cute and adorable. This new couple was inseparable. She actually liked him, there was no fine print on the relationship. And he was just as ugly and just as low on the social totem pole as I was. The only thing that set us apart was that he was white and I was Asian.

Maybe losers were loveable, just not me. Asian boys were not supposed to be loved by anyone. Not white girls, not black girls, not even girls in our own race.

Fifth grade crept up on me. The Broncos did win another Superbowl, but I didn’t care, there was no one who looked like me on that team. Sports were for white people to watch and for black people to play. The trees this fall were just different shades of ugly brown and the air felt dirtier. The magic had left the mountain.

This school year, we had two new students join our class. One was a Chinese girl from China and the other was a Korean boy with a cleft lip who was adopted by a white family.

As the new race-based mantra of my life spewed poison from my heart, I looked at my new Asian classmates. And for the first time in my life, I understood why my past year’s classmates thought I was an ugly loser.

I looked at their small, slanted eyes and their unimpressive physical features. I would not let these people be my friends.

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The new kids took a seat among all the white faces and in the sea of good looking, wide eyed fair-skinned children, they stood out like a sore thumb.

They were ugly, just like me.

I understood why the kids at school made fun of me. If I looked just like them, I would make fun of me too. I would pull my eyes, scream funny languages, and most definitely never be a part of a romantic rendezvous with me or any Asian. I had never even met a Chinese person before and I was appalled. I would never date a Chinese girl, she was ugly. There was a reason why Asian people didn’t belong on the silver screen. Cause we were disgusting.

I went home that day, not even noticing my crush at the back of the bus. I was fuming with self-hatred. I got off the bus and headed straight for the bathroom. I took a pair of scissors and locked myself in for what seemed to be an eternity.

Resolved to change my outward appearance, I prepared to cut my hair and fix my face to be like those beautiful people in the magazines. Maybe then, some kind, forgiving, wonderful white girl would take pity on me and love me.

First, I threw my glasses aside. I then used my hands to grab the top and bottom of my left eye, I stretched my eyelids as far as they would go. I needed to make my eyes bigger. I stretched each eye for several minutes and repeated. I took my white polo shirt off and cut the sleeves. and after that I went for my hair. I remembered what I had seen on MTV. Boy band members had perfect hair. Never having used scissors to cut my own hair, I stumbled and pricked myself more than once. Blood poured out of cuts on my scalp but pain, I thought, was the journey to beauty. I tried all kinds of gels and waxes to make my hair stand, but it had zero affect against my ultra-straight, jet-black hair. I washed it out several times, stinging each time because of the cuts I had, but nothing would make it work. After much laboring I looked in the mirror and hoped to see a changed man. But I looked worse. I looked deranged, fatter even, the sleeveless look exposed more ugliness.

I gave up. It was useless. The race I was born into was despicable, greasy, and gross. I knew that no one in the world could fall in love with who I was, including me.

In a desperate act of self-pity, I went to my room and took a BB gun out of my drawer and went to my Umma on the couch. She was watching TV and going about her day. I pulled the gun out, held it to my temple and got her attention.

The TV snapped off and her eyes began to scream.

I pulled the slide on the gun, looked her in the eyes, wishing the gun were real, pulled the trigger and said:

Boom.

She ran at me, threw the gun aside and held me, sobbing

hajima, hajima, hajima…

We left Colorado the next month and moved to Korea for the rest of my school years.

Tears are streaming from my face as I am writing this story. The keyboard I am typing on is splattered with droplet after droplet as I dig this memory up from my past. Originally, I never wanted to tell you this story. I never wanted you to know about this part of my life.

I am not writing this because I want revenge or to push blame on anyone.

The goal of this story is not to accuse of wrong doing. I brought a lot of pain to myself through my own actions and my own thoughts. I just wanted to tell you this story so that you know some of the difficult thoughts and experiences I went through. And if you or any of your Asian brothers are going through something similar, I hope that this might be a comfort to know that another has gone through this pain as well.

If history is not written or recorded, it will repeat itself. And the more our stories are written and heard, the less likely it will repeat itself. Our culture is guilty of many things, and repressing memories is one of them. And if all our memories are repressed, we will never learn from them and never move forward. I’m simply trying to un-repress my memories for your future to be better, kinder, and more loving.

Know and learn from what I’ve experienced, felt, and been hurt by and push the pendulum forward. Know that my young self was wrong and that being unlovable because of your race is a lie. Anyone belittling you because of a stereotype or a perceived perception is not worth your time.

This story, in all its gloom, has a happy ending though. When I came back to America to attend university, I fell in love with a Taiwanese American woman, beautiful beyond my dreams and expectations, inside and out. She showed me a new way, a new culture based in love and helped me process forgiveness by loving me beyond measure and never thinking less of me. We had a beautiful wedding with friends of all different races and creeds getting together to celebrate our union. And then we had you.

PS. The Broncos won another Superbowl right before we got married.

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Previously published on medium

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