During my teenage years, I was stuck between stagnation and
danger. It's a cliché about the suburbs -- that among the strip malls and
cookie-cutter homes lies a sort of disciplinary violence. It manifests
as suppression and surveillance but we call it comfort, or safety. The
metaphors are too easy to come by. My unremarkable house was built on
the parking lot for the housing development that became our
neighborhood; concrete and asphalt lay beneath ten inches of soil in our
backyard, so everything grew out of the earth stunted and miserly. But I
also remember San Diego as a dangerous place -- white supremacists beat Mexican
workers in the fields, high schools administered dress codes based
on race, and on an off-ramp called Mercy Road a police officer raped
and killed women alone in their cars. Downtown there were too many sailors
fresh from their tours of duty in the Philippines or South Korea or
Okinawa. Swaggering with imperial entitlement, they would approach me -- a
fifteen year-old Vietnamese me in my short plaid punk rock skirt and black
tank tops-- as if they owned me, as if we were in Saigon during the
war. I was afraid of their potential for violence, every time I said,
"Fuck you!"
My friends were a grab bag of geeks and punks, and even these
were the uncool punks -- too desperate, too high, too pregnant, too much
trouble. For me, there was never a working fusion between the
intellectualism and the danger. I penned editorials against the Gulf War
in the newspaper office and discussed Bertrand Russell in the classroom;
I stole bottles of wine from model homes and broke into empty houses to
watch others drink from the bounty. I got straight A's (except for that
C in Advanced Placement physics), never drank or smoked, and changed
every morning in the school bathroom into torn tights and black
eyeliner. My best friend made an escape from the danger when she met her
boyfriend in Moot Court, bored with the drama of petty theft and
underage drinking. It never occurred to me to leave.
I thought the choices laid before me were as black and white -- I
could go the way of pretend exercises in careerism and proper romance or
sometimes idle, sometimes deliberate destruction. I was a smart but
stupid kid, but at least I know I wasn't alone in this. A sweet, shy boy
I met as a Morrisey fan became an overnight Marxist radical. The green
cardigan sweaters and modest pompadour went the way of work boots and
plaid flannel shirts. Was it a heart-felt commitment to the proletariat?
I suppose, in the same way I felt sure about moving to New York, the
East Village, to be an artist and activist. Dimitri and I went to
protest rallies and talked politics in the school library in hushed
whispers, arguing in a friendly manner about socialism, anarchism, and
the revolution.
Later I heard that he joined the Revolutionary Communist Party,
one of a dozen sectarian groups and sold papers around town at rallies.
I prefer not to think of him this way; it seems desperate and
sad, speaking to some scar I had never been allowed access to in high
school. Did he find friends there, desperate and misguided, grown isolated
and paranoid? When I became an activist I'd had my share of
unpleasant experiences with this type -- dogmatic, awkward, bitter. Did he become
one of them, barking at the opposition and crafting slogans for the
vanguard? Did it help him? Did it make him worse?
And I remember running into Dimitri after school with another
friend during my senior year; he was drunk, yelling incoherent slogans and
waving a flask. Slurring, he kept trying to hold Cathy's hand.
Over the years, after I left town swearing to make good on something
as long as it was elsewhere, the rumors would trickle back to me.
Melissa became a teenaged mother who smacked her baby and took her along
to purchase meth from her dealer, and then disappeared. Peter is an
archeologist and a married man. Patric moved to Long Island, then
Kansas, where he lives with his wife and children and works for the
phone company. Brian was born again. Austin is a physicist. There were
no real surprises, and I wonder what that means.
This summer I skipped my high school reunion, ten years gone by. I
was going to go. I planned on carpooling with Amy, a former classmate
who now works with Asian immigrant families at a non-profit in
Sacramento. We've chatted about the direction of our lives over coffee,
once or twice. A small group of girl geeks, we made the decision to
crash the hotel after the catered dinner. Now married to the boy she met
in Moot Court, Holly and I imagined ourselves reoccupying our former
roles as the sarcastic girls in the corner, talking trash and rolling
eyes.
But after a grueling first week of teaching summer session, I
cancelled. Instead I stayed at home curled up with Wendy Brown's
Politics After History. Holly called me from a stairwell in the
hotel, slightly drunk. She asserted, grumpily, that had I been there, at
least she would have seen some fights. Something, she said, to
redeem the night.
Am I not so different now? I don't know if I ever thought this
far ahead in high school; I stopped keeping a journal in eleventh grade and
I haven't been able to since, not with any consistency. Would it have
helped me make sense? My battered notebooks are full of truncated notes,
odd impressions and flashes of danger: "Detroit Marriott mall-like food
court -- Drinking Sweat in An Ash Age. Atlanta airport -- white
rocking chairs along the concourse. Kansas -- there is a NAZI on the
plane with 'SS' belt buckle, rings, tats. Oh fuck."
Does a journal become dangerous if you find yourself reviewing your
life for narrative structure, resolution, or consistent character
development? I used to spend caffeinated nights with the boys, playing
punk rock and pranks into the late hours of the morning. Later I walked
along the Hudson River piers, arm in arm with a girl long gone, past
meatpacking plants and drowsy prostitutes trailing johns behind them
like kites. These days are a whirlwind of airports and layovers,
restless naps snatched in uncomfortable chairs (vinyl and upholstered)
and far too many details (a rainbow of neon tubes above a moving
sidewalk, the empty chatter and cliched speech of businessmen, a swell
of academics glad-handing around the room). Two summers ago I saw my
first subterranean show in a dank basement (different than house shows,
which I have been to in abundance) in Bloomington, Indiana. But of
course it was a band from the Mission, their van with California plates
parked on the gravel driveway, the pungent stink of unwashed punks
smelling of a once-familiar sense of home.
In the end I think I didn't go to the reunion because it seemed
like an arbitrary anniversary, because it seemed like resolution -- how does
so-and-so get from point A to B? I would have been disappointed. Could I
really plot the points along this linear trajectory to illustrate how I
got here from there? How do you tell someone the story of your life in
five awkward minutes, when it makes no sense still?
::
The second issue of the Race Riot compilation zine is
available from Pander Zine Distro: http://www.panderzinedistro.com. It's
thick and smart and important, and even includes a directory of zines by
kids of color (past and present).
Get in touch if you like. Mimi Nguyen / POB 11906 / Berkeley, CA
94712-2906 / slander13@mindspring.com