My grandma too, don’t get me wrong here! They’ve both done so much for me…
I was on the phone with my friend tonight, and her stories just prompted me to tell her an embarrassing story I had forgotten for so long, a story that I had never told another soul. I can’t describe it here, but if you could take the time to read it, it would mean a lot.
I don’t know why, but I think I am more prolific with my writing at night.
Hey, a new year, a new beginning! I really don’t have any resolutions… other than to try harder in school. I say that every year… Hahaha, maybe this year will be the year!! =]
I know I said that the first child gets everything, but that’s not always true. The second child gets the right to annoy the older one. But I suppose that’s true in non-Asian families as well.
I got a party to go to today, and when I want to go out, I have to follow a routine. First, I ask my mom if I can. She’ll usually shoot me down really fast, maybe four out of five times I ask. But if I really want to go out, I keep pushing it. If I do, maybe a third of the time she’ll let me out. But it usually involves a big fight. And after all this is over, I have to tell my sister to get out of the house on the day that I’m going out. But my sister likes being a punk and messing with me.
She can’t live without a computer, and making her go to a place without a computer is like torture to her. Yesterday, I was very serious about her leaving the house, and I used a firm voice to tell her she could either go to my grandma’s or up to the restaurant. She sat there with a pouting face, whining a bit, and not answering me at all. I started to lose my patience after I asked her for the tenth time. I got so pissed that I just told her she could stay home and I stormed upstairs. My usually calm dad even yelled at her afterwards. But what the fuck?
She takes so many things for granted. One, that computer is mine, not hers. Two, how many times do I tell my friends “Hey, sorry, I can’t go. My sis is home. Maybe next time”? It’s killing my social life. And whenever she’s got a party to go to, do I step in the way? Hell, I can’t even if I tried. But no, whenever I want to go out, she has to stay at home. It’s not fucking fair. Earlier, when I tried telling her that, and that next time I want to go out and I want her out of the damn house, she has to be OUT. No whining, no pouting. She straight up ignored me.
And when I punish her by telling her to get off the computer, she looks me in the eye and says “No” like I do to my parents. It pisses me off, because she thinks she’s queen of the world. But she’s so selfish. And she’s in for a rough surprise if she thinks she can stand up to me. Her saying “No” to me isn’t going to change anything.
My mom called me earlier, and asked me what I was doing. I replied “Nothing”, which is true. And then she rambled on for 10 minutes straight on how I have to study more, Why the hell am I so stupid, I should get off the computer, She’s going to take my laptop away, My laptop is ruining my life, blah blah blah. Did she even ask me if I was studying before she called? Noooo. If I’m not studying when she calls, well, it’s so obvious (sarcasm here), I must not have been studying the entire day. And when she gets home? If I’m not studying then? Then I must have been on the laptop the entire day, just because I’m on it when she gets home. Really, mom? Really?
I’m the type of guy that can’t study in the morning. I just can’t do it. Or at night. But that’s because people are home then. When my parents are home watching TV, and the TV is only like 10 feet away, and my sister is on the computer and only 5 feet away, how can I concentrate? I can’t. Nighttime is also relaxation time. It’s also the only time my parents are home (weird, huh?). And when they’re home, I feel so awkward trying to study. So I don’t. But if I don’t, then they think I haven’t been studying at all. I could read my textbooks 8 hours a day, and they still wouldn’t know. And then I get those long phone lectures.
Can you just shut up, Mom? You don’t know me. You don’t know what school’s like anymore. You can’t assume everything is rosy fine. So shut up, alright?
Hey guys, finally calmed down enough to write a post. Been such a hectic week! Stayed over for 5 nights at my cousin’s house, and of course that meant I didn’t get enough sleep. My progress report also came in the mail, and my parents flipped. I should count myself lucky though, because I managed to dodge it for about 9 days. But now they are really mad. My dad wasn’t, but my mom was. He just lectured me a little bit, but she dropped a nuke on me.
She kept yelling at me to stop talking back, but she wouldn’t let me even explain things! Then they brought up the “stop blaming your teachers for your grades” thing, and I had to cringe at that. Really, my physics teacher is kind of retarded. I won’t say who, but if you are my physics teacher, just know that about 3/4th’s of your students acknowledge that you are an incompetent teacher. And the other 1/4th are too retarded to see that.
My teacher asked me what the speed of light is, and I replied “300,000 km/s” and she said “No, you got it mixed up with meters. But good try”. Uhh, no, lady, what I said is correct. She also marked like 3 questions wrong even though I had the exact same answer as my friend, who got it right. Do I learn anything in that class? Nope. Every new unit, we go do the activities ourselves, write up why things happen the way they do, using principles we learn ourselves. Very little intervening on her part. I’d have to say, I taught myself more than she taught me. I could go on and on about her incompetence, but I won’t. Just know that she is.
Then there’s my Brit Lit teacher. I won’t say she’s a bad teacher. In fact, I know she’s really, really smart and I respect that. She’s just so soft-spoken that it’s hard to keep my head up in class. And she’s also kind of… narrow-minded in some ways. We had to analyze a Shakespeare poem for one of her quizzes, and my answers just weren’t satisfactory. I got three No’s (which made me cringe) on my paper, and I’d have to say that my explanation was very reasonable. I guess she was only looking for her explanation of the poem, but really, if there’s only one explanation for a poem, why the hell do scholars still debate over Shakespeare’s work? Because there isn’t any solid answer. Good poetry is poetry in motion. It cannot stay still.
Think my mom would understand this? She doesn’t. She keeps saying “The teacher MUST be right. No matter what”. Even when I brought up the 300,000 km/s thing, she says the teacher must be right. And my mom calls me stubborn. Stupid hypocrite.
A teacher once told me about the carrot and the stick. You can either offer the horse (or donkey, whatever works) a carrot and get it to comply, or you beat it with a stick until it does. Guess what Asian parents like using more? The stick of course. Except in my case, it was a coat hanger.
When I was little, I hardly ever got rewards for completing tasks. It was either I do it, or I meet my old friend the coat hanger again. And believe me, I never wanted to see that guy again if I could help it. I was beaten until I knew my multiplication tables by heart, I was beaten if I didn’t do my homework, I was beaten if I got one bad grade, and I was even almost beaten once for not taking my nap.
I recently found an old cartoon I used to watch (Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot), and I remembered the days when I’d watch that, The Magic School Bus, and some other cartoon before my grandma would come in and tell me that I had to take a nap. But I was a little kid, and it was 3 in the afternoon. There was no way I was going to be tired enough to take a nap. So I just lay there, waiting till I could get up and watch TV again.
But my grandma walked in one time, saw I wasn’t sleeping, and threatened to beat me if she came back again and I wasn’t sleeping. Beating me if I don’t take my nap?? That’s a bit cruel, don’t you think? Well, I took my nap right away. I guess I was so scared of that coat hanger, the thought of it could even knock me out. These days, I wake up late in the afternoon, to my family’s displeasure. I got my revenge, grandma!
Alright, I hear people mention Asians (the Japanese mostly) being very perverted. But guess who’s more perverted? Everyone else. I was playing with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool today, and a good portion (maybe half?) of what came up when I searched “asian” has something to do with “beautiful asian women” or “pretty young asian girls” or something like that. Not even “chubby asian” was safe. I looked that up on Google, about half the sites that came up were porn related. Come on guys!! Asian girls aren’t that exciting! Isn’t it weird how the stereotype is that Asian men have small penises and Asian women are flatchested, and yet, almost everything Asian related is porn related.
But perhaps it’s not an Asian-exclusive thing. The perverted minds out there aren’t just targeting Asians. Some sick bastards actually look up “Jesus porn”… And “Obama porn”. Having an Obama fetish?? That’s just weird. And I can’t even comment on the Jesus one… Sickening.
Anyways, here’s some fun facts while we’re at it:
I am so gonna get my butt kicked by the search engines for this… And my family, if they see this.
I ran across an interesting post from 8Asians and I decided to share my experiences as Christmas is possibly the biggest holiday in America and it’d be nice to see an Asian’s perspective.
When I was growing up, Christmas was a hopeful, and yet disheartening time. Every year, around this time, I’d try extra hard to be nice. I’d pray that Santa would pay my house a visit, and leave something other than coal. Yes, I’m Asian, but I still believed in Santa as a kid. I think that as kids, we can see magic that adults can’t. When I was a kid, I wished for this magic to come true. But alas, it was not to be so.
Santa never came with the promised gifts. I think that if you’re old enough to be reading this, you’re also old enough to know that Santa doesn’t exist. But the sadder thing was that my parents never got me Christmas presents. So even though Santa didn’t exist for other kids, they didn’t know that. Their parents bought the presents and hid them under the tree, keeping the spirit alive for them. It wasn’t so with my parents. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a Christmas present from my parents.
You’d think that I was crushed as a child, but I wasn’t. The stubborn side of me refused to accept that Santa didn’t exist, and I vowed to try harder to be good for the next year. I can look back at it now and chuckle at how determined I was to prove myself to a nonexistent man.
I can’t say that my experiences are representative of all Asians in America, but I can say that there are probably some Asian kids out there that didn’t get any Christmas presents. Hopefully, I’m wrong.
Well, isn’t this odd? I usually wish for my parents to be more normal. Because honestly, shopping with Asian parents is kind of awkward at times when they make you translate every little question they have for the store lady. “How much is this? Are you sure there’s no more discounts? How about just a little bit? No? How about free shipping then? I don’t know, I think after wasting 20 minutes of your time, I’ve decided to go check out another store.”
But one thing that I like about Asian parents is that a lot of them push their kids to learn music at an early age. Some people think it’s cruel to make kids practice piano all day, but those people have obviously never picked up an instrument. Playing music is one of the most satisfying things a person can do. I started playing guitar last year, and I’ve continued playing this year. But still, no matter how much I love playing the guitar, two years is just not enough to be good.
If my parents had started me out at 5, and I kept practicing every year until now, I’d be good. I’d be extremely grateful for them. But no, they didn’t do the one thing stereotypical Asian parents do: force me to learn how to play an instrument. If only my parents were more Asian… But I guess I’ll just have to start making up for it now by practicing more. =/
Last Wednesday was when progress report grades were inputted. And let’s just say that mine aren’t the best. Winter Break’s started, and I know that my grades have to get here eventually. But I’ve been praying for the grades to come later… But now I found out that my friend (who lives a street down) got her grades already, so it’s only a matter of time before I get mine! Perhaps it’s already come and my parents just didn’t check the mail.
I think it’s ironic how I kept asking around if others have gotten their progress reports yet, because I was so afraid, and yet I’m even more terrified now that I know when it is. Ignorance is bliss, curiosity is torture, and the truth is devastating. It seems that I cannot win either way.
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