Drift Reality

When we were all living in Cleveland, my Khaleh sent two of her sons, Kia and Kaz, to live with us. There was about two years separating the two of them, with Kia being the elder. From what I can remember, and what has been told to me by my Mother, I could not have asked for more from my two older cousins. The two of them read to me and played with me constantly.  Combined with the attention I received from my parents and Dorothy, a family friend who lived down the street, I was constantly surrounded by love and attention. 

Many of the stories of my childhood occurred in the company of my extended family.  Dorothy, for instance, one day decided to take me to the natural history museum where they had a feature exhibit on dinosaurs.  My Mother tells me that at one point Dot motioned towards a dinosaur and explained, “Jiyan, that is a stegosaurus.”She was shocked when my response was, “No Dot, that’s a triceratops.”

I was a strange young child to say the least. 

I was about three years old in the wake of the Iranian hostage crisis.  One night I was sitting with my parents watching the news when the coverage turned to an Islamic student rally in Tehran.  The students were pumping their firsts in front of a flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran and chanting, “Khomeini, Khomeini.”  Something about the passion with which the students were chanting stuck in my mind. 

Several days later, Kia and Kaz were taking me to K-Mart to pick up some toiletries for the house.  As we were walking through the crowded parking lot something caught my eye and I stopped in my tracks. 

My cousins kept walking and it was several moments before they relized that I was no longer beside them.  They turned to see me standing in the middle of the parking lot, looking up towards the store, absolutely transfixed.  Tracing my line of vision they realized that it was the K-Mart flag I was staring at.

As they watched me in confusion my arm slowly raised into the air, my hands curling into a fist.  I began pumping my arm in the air, slowly at first, but steadily gaining in fervence.  Their amusement turned to horror when I began chanting “Khomeini, Khomeini” at the top of my lungs, while staring at the K-Mart flag in the crowded parking lot.

As people began turning to gawk at me, my cousins rushed over and Kia quickly picked me before they began hastily walking back towards the car.

I made sure to maintain eye contact with the K-Mart flag while being carried away, continuing to chant until we reached the car.

For any of you not fortunate enough to have an intimate knowledge of the Indiana Jones films, Short Round is the little Asian boy who plays Indiana’s friend in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”

In the opening scene, Indian Jones is attempting to acquire the ashes of a Ming dynasty emperor from a Chinese gangster in a cocktail bar in Hong Kong. When the gangster attempts to double-cross Indiana, an altercation ensues. Indiana Jones flees the scene (ostensibly before the Ninjas show up) with the blonde female lead and guess who is waiting outside in the getaway car?

Short Round.

A couple of years after I arrived in Cleveland, a number of douche bags in the year above me decided that I bore a striking resemblance to Short Round, which is ridiculous because I was much better looking than Short Round. At any rate, when the joke was suggested to me, I didn’t react very positively: I didn’t laugh and I didn’t even crack a smile. I found the proposition to be offensive and ignorant and I summarily expressed my opinion on the matter.

This didn’t sit well with the “crew” of jerk-offs, and before too long, I found myself being accosted by Short Round imitations whenever I walked nearby.

“Ahhh….Dactah Johnes.”

I ignored it at first, thinking that they would grow tired and stop – but ignoring them seemed to egg them on. The calls of “Dactah Johnes,” became more frequent and more public. At one point, four or five of them sat behind me in a school assembly and spent 40 minutes repeating the statement, over-and-over again, while I sat seething, but unsure of how exactly I was to react.

During that particular experience, a close friend of mine turned to them and yelled at them to stop – which they seemed to find amusing for some reason.

The cacophony of Short Round imitations continued for the better part of two months until one day, I was totally fed up and confronted one of the members of the group in solitude.

I spoke frankly and said, “Listen, this is really irritating. Why don’t you guys just cut it out?”

He responded as if confused about why I would be so upset over the antagonism. I stood there appalled by how ignorant someone could be that they wouldn’t understand why calling me the name of a young Chinese boy who speaks pigeon English in a film might possibly insult me.

It was then that I remembered that a member of their crew was Asian – Korean in fact.

“Well, how would Park feel if you called him Short Round?”

The guy looked at me in wonderment, surprised by my question.

“He would probably just laugh it off.”

And with that, I came to a realization: the joke did not start as an insult; it started as a question of how I would react to being compared with a caricature of an Asian boy from a film.

If I had simply joined in their mockery of me and laughed at the notion that Short Round and I looked alike, the situation could have been averted. It was the fact that I reacted negatively to the idea that there was some resemblance between me and someone who looked nothing like me, apart from having the same color hair and the same color eyes, which got me into trouble.

Some people might think that I just blew the situation out of proportion. After all, who really cares if a bunch of white guys think it is funny to suggest that I look like a Chinese boy from a film?

I care.

For me, it was about affirming my individuality as a half-Asian male. I didn’t think I looked anything like the character and I didn’t find the humor funny.

For me, the humor in their mockery was the notion that all Asians look the same; and all Asians speak with that horrid “me so howny” accent. It is in the context of these comparisons that the ludicrous suggestion that a young Chinese boy and a Korean/Persian male look alike.

So when a white guy starts chanting “Dactah Jones,” in a contrived Asian accent, it is funny because what he is really saying is, “Hey, you’re Asian – I saw a movie with an Asian guy in it and he had a funny accent and I think you guys are identical twins.”

That’s fucking hilarious. So what is the take-away? An Asian who can laugh at racism towards his own race is okay; there is something wrong with an Asian who can’t.

On an additional note, the fact that they had an Asian friend seemed to make the situation acceptable – even more so because he was the type of guy to laugh at his Asian-ness. It is like a white guy following up a joke about a black man with, “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’m not a racist because I have a black friend.” Bullshit.

For the record, I never laughed at the joke and to this day, I continue not to laugh at jokes about Asian stereotypes.

In the words of Forest Gump, that’s about all I have to say about that.

I arrived in Cleveland late on a Wednesday night in late July. Football practice began in early August and I had decided that after dominating the Dungeons and Dragons crew on the Bannockburn playground for several years, it was time to take my game to the next level and play actual organized football.

At Walt Whitman High School, I had actually made a feeble attempt to play football on the team, only to realize that the dynamics of the game change when it’s a 6′2″ guy weighing 220 pounds trying to tackle you, and not your friend Matt Lewis from down the street, who weighs in 150 pounds - and a flabby 150 at that.

After a sadistic assistant coach decided it would be amusing to play me - a 5′9″ 145 pound shrimp - at defensive tackle with the scout team, the football equivalent of telling someone he wasn’t wanted, I just got up and walked away from practice, never to return.

Moving to a smaller private school, I was eager to make up for my failed attempt at Whitman high school and prove my doubters (which consisted of 100% of people who had actually witnessed me play organized football) wrong in their assessment of my athletic talents.

The first day of practice, I showed up in high spirits brandishing a pair of Beverley Hills 90210 sideburns and wearing my most self-satisfied grin and to my surprise, I was actually given a warm reception from the group of kids standing around in front of the practice field.

At Whitman, a high school of 1200 students, the junior varsity team accounted for around 45 students; and the varsity team another 40 or so. At Hawken, a school of about 400 students, the total number of students on both the varsity and junior varsity combined, was around 35.

This may have accounted for the warm welcome I received. When you have 35 total players for two football teams, anyone would be welcome.

A couple of kids approached me - Josh and Chris. Josh was the quarterback - he was an undersized jewish kid who looked a little bit like an elf. Chris was an irish catholic fellow who played fullback and middle linebacker. He had a close cropped haircut and a neck that was slightly wider than his head.

“What’s your name?” Asked Josh.

“Jiyan,” I answered back.

“Jiyan,” he responded pensively and began rubbing his chin as if he were immersed in deep thought.

Chris narrowed his eyes and I could almost hear the rusty gears grinding in his head. “Like G-Spot, huh?” he blurted in Josh’s direction.

“Yeah,” answered Josh. “G-Spot.” Then, turning towards me and putting his hand on my shoulder, he said, “Your name is now G-Spot.”

“Okay,” I answered.

The two of them nodded at one another in satisfaction, and walked away.

Mentally, solitude is the perfect environment for introspection. Practically, television is what people do when they are in solitude. Unequivocally, this combination results in making you feel like shit.

To benchmark oneself is in man’s nature; to equate television with reality, is not. How many times have I heard people say things like, “Oh, I watch that show because I like to laugh at it.”

I don’t buy the inadvertent comedy excuse. If laughing at things that are inadvertently funny were a sustainable hobby, I would probably spend a lot more time visiting family during the holidays.

People use that as an excuse because they do not like to admit that they are actually drawn in to something that is so tortuously pop-culture because it makes them feel less special, less unique. People don’t like transitioning from being an individual to being a demographic, so they make excuses.

The truth is that people are drawn into the reality of television and they don’t even realize it - until the time they’ve spent in front of the television starts to manifest in their behavior. Like a rip tide, television pulls its victims into an ocean of popular culture and in the process, something drowns and dies.

I think what dies is your sense that you can decide for yourself what looks best on you; or what music to listen to; or who to be friends with; or who to fuck. Suddenly, you are wearing seven jeans, listening to Eminem, and trying to fuck a girl with huge fake tits.

Voila, any sense of humanity you once had is gone, and any chance for salvation along with it and I don’t mean salvation in the fucked-up crazy Christian institution sense of the word. I mean salvation in the sense of ever waking up and going through an entire day without thinking you are too fat, too ugly, and too poorly clothed.

And that ocean pulls at you. When a group of kids laughed at me for wearing white jeans, it was pulling at me. When Blake ridiculed me for quoting a line I had read in “Calvin and Hobbes,” it pulled at me. And when Dan made fun of me for holding hands with Deborah, it pulled at me.

And soon I found myself drowning.

In solitude.

Watching television.

Feeling like shit.

I don’t have a lot of warm memories from the three years I spent in Cleveland, going to Hawken. My relationship with most of the older guys on the football team was abrasive, to say the least; I had no idea how to interact with girls; and my strongest relationships tended to be with teachers. While this might have been good come report card time, it wasn’t very beneficial to my social life on the weekends.

Consequently, I spent copious amounts of time alone in my room.

There was only so much homework one person could do, so subsequently, I found myself learning new an innovative ways to entertain myself.

It is amazing what someone is capable of doing when there is nothing to do.

On a typical weekday, I would get back to my house at around 5 in the evening. I would normally change into a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt and start watching reruns on television.

At around 6, I would throw in a couple of Stouffers frenchbread pizzas and continue watching reruns. Since my father didn’t normally get home until 8 or 9 PM, we didn’t really have anything that resembled family dinners.

My Father, being the eternal pragmatist, had a remarkably simplistic solution to the problem of feeding me. At the beginning of each month, we would take a trip to the Stouffers factory and buy a bulk container of 50 boxes of Stouffers pizzas. The dilemna of how to feed me was magically solved in a one-hour long trip.

By 7, I would have eaten two Stouffers pizzas and watched about two hours of reruns on television. I would normally go up to my room at this point in time, and grind out my homework in an hour or two.

By 9, I would be done with all my responsibilities, and that is when I began to use my creativity to fill the time.

One of the things I would do is to read the Plain Dealer sports page. Not in the conventional sense that one normally imagines, but rather, I would skip the articles and instead concentrate on the box scores.

There was something that fascinated me about how I could visualize what happened in a game by staring at a chart with numbers. Not only would I study the box scores of the teams I was a fan of, but I would study the statistics of players who had formerly played for teams I was a fan of. It was all quite autistic.

After about thirty minutes of studying the box score, I would look through my old Dungeons and Dragons books, reading about the various spells; types of monsters; and types of characters.

Now that I am twenty-six, I can admit that I used to be addicted to Dungeons and Dragons when I was younger. Mind you, I stopped playing by the time I got to high-school, but there was always something that still fascinated me about the methodology involved with creating a universe.

I loved the fact that there were clearly defined rules for deciding how a character was brought into the world, how they interacted with the environment around them, and how they grew through time.

In the absence of interaction with real people, preoccupation with inanimate objects; and with concepts, flourishes. What is scary, is not that one can become hyperfocused on something inanimate, it is that time has the stench of death affixed to it in these situations. Memories are painted in the black and white of text in a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook.

Minutes melted into one another, and suddenly, it was 10 PM - time to go to bed.