letter to X.

X.,

Thanks so much for thinking of writing to me. The question is not too personal at all. I'm happy to share my experiences if they can help you in any way. It sounds like a really tough situation for your brother but I'm sure one HUGE thing that helps him is knowing that he has a sister who cares so much about him that she would solicit friends for advice on how to support him.

I don't know what's going on with your brother. Is he out to your parents/to you/his friends? Does he live near home? Does he otherwise have a good relationship with your parents? Is he the kind of person who has always tried to be the good son, studying what your parents want, first chair violin in the youth orchestra, etc.? Are your parents very Christian or religiously dogmatic? Does your brother have a partner or other gay friends, especially gay Asian friends? Do his friends really care about him or are they just people to have fun with? The answers to these questions can help you understand where he is.

What I can do is tell you a little bit about my own experience. As you've seen, the [Bananarchist] family generally can be good-humored and liberal. I don't mean liberal in political orientation, I just mean that we're more accepting of life paths other than the become-an-engineer-marry-a-Chinese-doctor-and-immediately-have-kids track. That has made it much easier for me to be comfortable with my identity, not only because it means my parents are slightly more accepting than most (though still very disapproving, we'll get to that later) but also because I didn't get drilled from an early age that I had to be traditional. So turning out to be gay didn't derail my life plans or make me hate myself.

Maybe that was the American part of my upbringing, feeling confident in myself even though/because I was different. Up until I was about 28, I didn't struggle with the idea of being gay. I didn't feel depressed. I admitted to myself that I was bisexual (at the least) a few months before I turned sixteen; to me it seemed like a relief to finally pin down why I was so oddly fascinated with Kristi Yamaguchi during the 1992 Winter Olympics, despite that awful Captain Morgan blouse she wore during her long program. I started dating a girl soon thereafter, and then came out to all of my friends (and the school, in a newspaper article). I had a great community in high school comprising other gay friends and really understanding straight friends, and my brother; nobody shunned me or made me feel that being gay was at all a bad thing. Actually, I did tell one teacher, who turned out to be as reactionary in spirit as she was skeletal in body, which only made me disrespect her instead of making me feel any worse about myself. And that's where I think I just got lucky...if my parents had inculcated more of a hatred for gay people in me, or if I had felt obliged to follow a traditional path, I might not have had the strength to shrug off other people's judgment and reaction because I might have felt ashamed of myself. As it were, coming out only made me feel braver and cooler than I already thought myself to be.

(When I was 28, my girlfriend at the time broke up with me, and it sort of threw me into a spin to realize I was single for the first time since I was 15, and I could try dating men. I still think I'm pretty much a homo, but just the fact that I was given the opportunity to set myself up for new relationship was enough to make me question whether I could just marry a nice dull boy, or a Bavarian sociopath, and go down the traditional path that I never thought I wanted. At this point, this is mostly irrelevant.)

I came out to my parents the week before I left for college. I had already been dating girls for two years by then, and surely they suspected from my two very close "best friends" that something was weird about me? Still they didn't take the news well at all - I remember almost nothing except lots of crying at the kitchen table and their anger. Maybe their disgust, too. But one good thing about traditional Chinese parents, at least in my experience, is that unlike western parents, Chinese parents have an expectation of lifelong caregiving, so they don't just kick their kids out of their house and never talk to them again. But what Chinese parents do is nitpick, nag, sigh, tell you over and over again that you're ruining your future by following your selfish desires rather than submitting to a sacrifice that is more rational, that they are ashamed of you and they can't tell other parents about you, that you'll regret your mistakes, that Jason Chen is doing better than you even though ten years ago you scored 40 points higher than him on the SAT and everyone thought you were going to win at Life. I mean, my parents wage this emotional warfare on me not only for being gay, but for choosing to study a social science in college rather than engineering, for going camping, for coming home after midnight, for failing to shower...basically anything with an unknown outcome. Not to say that being gay is the same as choosing to be an English rather than biochem major, but it's a difference in degree, and I've found that my parents reacted similarly (though on a much bigger scale) to my being gay as to anything else they've disapproved of.

After the initial shock of my coming out wore off, I went away to college and my parents didn't have to think about my future for a few years. I made friends with liberal, hippie, activist people who didn't seem to give a second thought to my being gay, and from then on I surrounded myself with the kind of people who would support me (or at least judge me for the right reasons), and I made my life on the East Coast. I told my parents about my girlfriends but they never had to meet them. After college my relationships got more serious, and they met my partners. Two of them actually came to Thanksgiving, as just "friends," but as Peter likes to say, "Our parents weren't born yesterday." I wonder what Grandma thinks of this; she still asks me how Stephanie is doing. My parents were nice to my girlfriends and we did family trips to Napa etc. together. They seemed to like my partners and appreciate that I had companionship in my life. My girlfriend comes to visit and I go to New York every other month, and my parents are extremely welcoming to her when she comes, to the point where they instruct me not to fuck it up. At this point, I think they are just desperate to see me partnered and want to maximize my chance at that, even if it means being really nice to a girlfriend rather than being really nice to a boyfriend.

But once in a while, my parents' anxieties and resentments surface. Like I'll tell my mom that I'm going to hang out with a friend she knows is gay, and she'll say, "Watch out for AIDS"; simple, hurtful ignorance like that. Then my dad once every two years or so goes completely apeshit and tells me 1) I'm a selfish brat and 2) a slut because it's all about sex and any two animals can have sex so why should I choose sex over family/tradition/normalcy and 3) he's never been okay with me being gay because he's Catholic and it's a sin and 4) any other thing he can think of that is mean and angry. Usually we'll spend 2-3 hours screaming at each other, threatening to never speak again, and eventually tensions calm and it becomes clear that it's not my dad's disgust/hatred that actually motivates him. What scares him is 1) that I'll be alone and I won't have kids, and every parent just wants grandbabies to smother, 2) that he can't face other Chinese parents because they don't have homos for kids, and 3) that I'll be disadvantaged and treated badly because of other people's prejudices. When I see it this way, I can sort out the hateful words from his legitimate concerns for me, then I don't feel so personally crushed when he lashes out.

But the negativity is only once in a while. In fact, my being gay comes up explicitly only once in a while, with my family or with other people. (Although being gay comes up implicitly ALL THE TIME, at least in my thoughts, because it's shaped my worldview such that I sometimes skip the entire 94.9 to 96.5 range in the FM dial for fear of chancing upon that unpleasant Alan Jackson song "Cornbread and Chicken," because i don't want to be reminded of homophobia in twang form; then again, I do this with my ethnic identity too and avoid doing things like watching "The Hangover.") But day to day, since I've been living at home since November, the issue is not whether I am gay but whether I have walked the dog, whether I will be home for dinner, whether I will sit with them for a little while and watch TV, whether my girlfriend and I are fighting or doing well that day, whether I should invest my earnings in a particular way, etc. If they're being mean, it's about whether I'm a failure, not whether I am a gay failure. I think it's really easy for a person who is thinking of coming out or who has recently come out to his parents to have tunnel vision: because you focus so much on how you're going to make that initial revelation, everything becomes about being gay. Parents can have this reaction too. So in the few weeks, months, or even years around the initial revelation, the gay kid and his parents freak the f* out and feel like their worlds have been upended. The parents have to deal with all their hopes and dreams suddenly shattered, blah blah blah...it's hard for me to have sympathy for this, since I think those hopes and dreams are oppressive and insulting to individualism (like, what does your kid want, not what do you want for your kid?), but still I understand parents who aren't expecting to deal with this can feel like they've been struck by lightning.

But once that initial craziness fades away, it becomes more livable, more humane. I like where I am with my parents now, even though it's not where I want to end up. We can love each other and they can remember that I'm a very good daughter even if I like Jane instead of John Wong, Esq. (Maybe it helps that my girlfriend went to Yale and is also a lawyer $$$). Eventually, if I have kids, then my parents and I have to evolve to a new relationship. Maybe then I'll need to come out to the rest of the family. But we'll all get there, or they'll just resent me and nag me and whisper about me until we all die...so be it, that's the lot of being a Chinese kid. When I came out to my parents, I was only seventeen, and I wanted everything, immediately. I wanted my parents to wave a rainbow flag and declare they they would always support and love me, and I wanted us all to drown in tears of happiness. But it didn't happen that way for me. My parents probably wanted me to stop dressing so crappy and study something useful and make money and stop living so far away and stand up straight and marry Gilbert, the portly programmer whose cubicle is next to my dad's, everything, immediately, but it didn't happen that way for them, either. Understanding is a gradual process, and that's hard to accept or remember sometimes.

I hope this helps in some way. I'm really sorry to hear that your brother is depressed and struggling with his sexuality. If he is anything like his sister, he is warm and loving and has lots and lots to offer the world, and he deserves to be happy. I think the best thing you can do is tell him you love him unconditionally and will support him, and that you'll help with your parents. I have a couple of Asian friends whose siblings are gay, and they have been in unique positions to talk sense to their shocked parents, so maybe their experiences are more relevant than mine. One friend's older brother is gay - a really creative, bright man - but when he was 17 or so he ran away for a week and lived with a much older man. His story ends with a Harvard degree and home ownership before 30 (thank Confucius!!) but you can imagine how freaked out his parents were in that week. I can pass on contact info if you'd like.

I just read back through your initial message and I realized that you asked specifically about what kind of pain your brother might be going through. Hrm, I feel like I didn't really respond to that. This email focuses more on dealing with parents, less about negative reactions from friends, other family members, employers, and hardly touches at all on a much pricklier issue - whether your brother is ashamed of himself. I guess the best thing is ask your brother lots of open-ended questions, let him know you don't judge him and you want to be his ear, and maybe he'll feel comfortable enough to tell you.

A friend of mine is in the midst of starting a website that has resources for Asian parents with gay kids. The website (http://asianprideproject.org/) is still a work in progress, but she put up a very powerful (although pessimistic) letter that her dad wrote to her after she came out to him. Her dad came to America when he was young, so his English is very good. I feel like this letter gives insight into a Chinese mind in a language that we second-generation illiterates can understand. Even though her dad seems to be rejecting her rather than accepting her in this letter, it might be a good read for you and your brother just to anticipate what could be coming: http://asianprideproject.wordpress.com/2009/01/28/father-to-daughter/

Whew. I hope some of this helps you and your bro. Feel free to forward this message to him, or to give him my email address. Tell him that life is too precious to be sad about something as wonderful as discovering who you love. Why is being gay something to be depressed about? It's not like he's a...fobby chain-smoking Korean hipster asshole or something else, something to be truly ashamed of - oh God wait, he's not a fobby chain-smoking Korean hipster asshole, is he?!?! THAT'S something to be worried about.

xoxox
Bananarchist