With a rusty dull blade, I make a small incision and cut counter clockwise around the protruding flesh on the right of my chest. Knowing that they will be gone in a few short moments supersedes the excruciating pain that is coursing through my traitorous body. I saw hard and fast that sounds reminiscent of dull scissors cutting through jean-like material echo through my ear. Again, I am absent of feeling the pain because my over joy that they will soon be gone is more overwhelming. I try not to cut carelessly, in fear that if I cut too deep, then I will have to go to a hospital and explain my self mutilation. The first yellow clump of mammary flesh falls with a loud thud into the red plastic bucket below. I press an alcohol-soaked towel against the side where my breast once was. God made these, man taketh away. The white towel rapidly turns pink and then a deep shade of blood red, but slowly it soaks. With one side gone, I can already feel the freedom to move my arm without any obstruction. Like I said before, just knowing I will have gotten rid of my womanly curves that betray me on a daily basis is enough to ignore the throbbing blood-curdling pain and I begin to cut off the left. My sculpting is not as precise with my left hand, as I am not as well-versed in being as controlled, but somehow I manage successfully and once again replace the once was fleshy area with an alcohol-soaked towel. Finally I don’t have to lie down anymore to get that almost flat chest. Finally I am without the burdens that have lied to me all my life, so much so that I am ignorant to me slowly bleeding out, as I fall into a deep un-awakening sleep.
Where has the time gone? It was almost a year ago that I received an email from a television show that offered to help search for my supposed Vietnamese foster mother. The application requires a large amount of personal information. I start to fill it out, then stop, start filling it out again, then stop again. My mind seems trapped in the risk/benefit analysis of giving up my privacy to complete strangers and the slim chance of finding a woman who isn’t even my mother.
During my interview with John Safran, he brought up the subject of privacy rights vs. birth searches. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to convey the thoughts I’d expressed in an earlier conversation with a fellow adoptee. Some people seem to focus on the privacy of parents over the need for an adoptee to know, but there’s more to it than that. Many adoptees have to give up their privacy in order to even begin a search. Many of us have to trust complete strangers with information of which we’re usually very protective. We become ripe for exploitation. Then there’s that devastating disappointment when nothing is found.
Thinking about it makes me want to scream at woman considering giving up their babies to stop. Do they understand the vulnerable position in which they place us? Did they ever consider it? I’m sure many were convinced they were doing what was best for themselves and their babies. Maybe they were in some situations, but it doesn’t feel like it from where I’m standing now.
Part of me dreads another disappointment. I’ve so far sent out two inquiries. One ran into a dead end. The other never got back to me, not even to tell they were still looking or to say they’d found nothing.
So I waffle back and forth, filling out the form a little each day as I continue to weigh the costs against the potential benefits. I know I’ll eventually send it. How can I not?
If you can play on the fiddle
How’s about a British jig and reel?
Speaking King’s English in quotation
As railhead towns feel the steel mills rust water froze
In the generation
Clear as winter ice
This is your paradise
There ain’t no need for ya
Go straight to hell boys
Y’wanna join in a chorus
Of the Amerasian blues?
When it’s Christmas out in Ho Chi Minh City
Kiddie say papa papa papa papa-san take me home
See me got photo photo
Photograph of you
Mamma Mamma Mamma-san
Of you and Mamma Mamma Mamma-san
Lemme tell ya ’bout your blood bamboo kid.
It ain’t Coca-Cola it’s rice.
Straight to hell
Oh Papa-san
Please take me home
Oh Papa-san
Everybody they wanna go home
So Mamma-san says
You wanna play mind-crazed banjo
On the druggy-drag ragtime U.S.A.?
In Parkland International
Hah! Junkiedom U.S.A.
Where procaine proves the purest rock man groove
and rat poison
The volatile Molatov says-
PSSST…
HEY CHICO WE GOT A MESSAGE FOR YA…
VAMOS VAMOS MUCHACHO
FROM ALPHABET CITY ALL THE WAY A TO Z, DEAD, HEAD
Go straight to hell
Can you really cough it up loud and strong
The immigrants
They wanna sing all night long
It could be anywhere
Most likely could be any frontier
Any hemisphere
No man’s land and there ain’t no asylum here
King Solomon he never lived round here
Go straight to hell boys
Someone on flickr reminded me of this song this morning. At first it might look really offensive, but check out the wiki link above. There is another explanation here. You gotta love The Clash.
As the years seem to pass by quickly, I count the moments in my life that I have made an active point and the seemingly short list questions my purpose in this world. As I enter an age where having a little one of my own seems almost impossible, I contemplate the other gender road I have always wanted to take. If I am to be single for the rest of my life, then why don’t I live it out as the opposite gender, something I have always dreamed of since I was a child. My oversized body stuff into clothes that never fit betrays my sense of worth and I wish my life away being something I am not. If I could sculpt my body as easily as I do with my hair, then my lame excuses for avoiding the gym would be more plausible. I spend many sleepless nights wondering what my life’s successes would be if I had had the access to transition at a younger age. But then I also look at the brutalization of those brave souls who took a chance and had their lives snuffed out prematurely. Life complications always leave an endless ocean of what ifs and just because my physical state of mind would rather be elsewhere, my mental state isn’t one hundred percent supportive – at least ninety-nine point nine, but still, not one hundred percent. Being transgendered is more than just a physicality – it’s a state of mind and while I know I can be just like one of the boys and out run them at their own gender games, there’s still an uncertainty – it’s like wearing a body mask that just itches uncontrollably and you want to rip it off screaming but can’t, so instead have to settle with some cold Camille lotion to soothe away the burning pain…
Killers at the orphanage gates. They’ve all come with their blades, their grins and their candy. Everyone in town recognizes their arm sleeve insignia, their flags and their loud, easy talk. To cut off the heads of one’s enemies while sparing the heads of their offspring must be a horrific enterprise. Even if one of these killers were to sever and then burn down his enemy’s bloodline, another line could be traced back to a rubber tree in a plantation on the western edge of town that survived the onslaught.
These mercenaries photograph themselves performing puppet shows or giving the tikes rides in their Jeeps. All the while, their humanity and magnanimity clash with their mission to engage in the sordid business of murdering these kids’ parents. Their wide fleshy smiles seemingly cradle the enemy’s children as if they were their own; as if they had fathered these children themselves.
Life is crowded in by death. It is a bizarre, fatalistic, ritual these Grim Reapers engage in when they hand out food and supplies to the sons and daughters of liberation. They mingle among the living, finicky about whom they take an interest in, searching for the cutest in the bunch. These shadows of death cross in front of the bright, shining orbs of young life lying expectant in their cribs, creating a voiceless void that sucks in both the infants and the soldiers, minute by minute and molecule by molecule.
For the past couple months, as you’ve probably noticed, I posted a series of excerpts from books on the Vietnam War that had an unstated, but clear, purpose (Notes from a Disintegrating Nation and It Was Never About Freedom). I’m more than happy to admit that I can come off as polemic and bit too scholarly for many people’s tastes. But, something must be said for a person who refuses to buy all the bullshit information that society chooses for you to eat your whole life.
No one enjoys being lied to, especially about one’s beginnings in this world. Growing up, it was generally expected that I accept the white baby scrapbook, the photos of little old me arriving at the airport in 1974 and my parents’ awkward silence on the country in which I was born and the unintended consequences of a war from which they tried to shield me. The looking glass into my past was wrapped in plastic and secured deep in reinforced concrete because I was never meant to step out of the amusement theme park that my life had become. For all the relative affluence my parents and this country handed down to me, I was expected to trade in my conscience and critical thought processes that had been hard-wired into me at birth.
The Vietnam War was recorded extensively, both officially and unofficially, and it has been imagined and re-imagined over and over to “teach” us lessons about life and death. In the American mass media marketplace, the war is usually recounted from one vantage point and with one singular goal in mind: To make the United States and Americans look good.
Ever since I can remember, the people of the United States and South Vietnam have been cast as the victims in the war and the twin beacons of freedom who fought for a noble cause. This kind of rhetoric is still used on us older Vietnamese adoptees to help explain how we were exiled from Vietnam and resettled in foreign countries. No one wants to acknowledge, however, the unpleasant paradox inherent in how we ended up in the very same country whose government and citizenry readily accepted waging a war against the very people who conceived us.
As a result of this rhetoric, compliant gratitude was slowly being fostered in me, leaving me temporarily with no defense against emotional manipulation and open to the planting of disinformation. However, no matter how unpleasant the topic of war was, I chose not to escape the devastation caused by other people’s decisions and actions. I wanted to rush back in time and witness for myself the events that likely contributed to my own adoption from Vietnam. Someone had to answer for the reason for my being here, I thought.
The more historical memory is contested with inconvenient facts and the more political propaganda is debunked and then dissolved through critical analysis, the more life seems to have purpose. And, if I can pique even just one person’s curiosity and get him to take a second look at conventional wisdom, then I feel I’ve served my purpose.
Stop. Just stop. Yes, I said stop. Look. Listen. My name ISN’T “Ann, Annie, Andel, Ardel, Andou or even Adolf and it’s definitely not ‘Sir’”. It’s “Anh Ðào”, pronounced “Unh Dow”, and certainly not to be spelt that way. And I said “space”, not “hyphen” between the two-worded first name, so why do you insist on adding one when you weren’t instructed to do so? And yes, there are accents/diacritics, that if you had any respect for my culturally roots (what little that is left of them), you would add or have the decency not to f*** them up. Just copy and paste, for Christ’s sake. And tell me, how many people introduce themselves socially with their whole name, or write it out on full on their name tag??? I guess it would make some sense when you don’t have a two-worded first name, but to me it sounds obnoxious: “Hello, my name is Kolbe, Anh Ðào Kolbe”. It’s hard enough to make a name for myself let alone any financial respect off of my starving artist soul, that YOU, yes you can’t even have the decency to give me foto credit, let alone proper and correct foto credit – even when I specifically spell it out to you how I would like my life’s signature in this world to be, but more importantly should be. How hard is it to cut and paste people??? Really. What’s in a name, that when shortened sounds anything but the same. So DON’T, no STOP, shortening it. It’s the one cultural attachment I have left, so don’t, no stop, taking it away from me. I am proud of who I am and my name, and I refuse to shorten it for anyone’s lazy, incompetent, disrespectful ass.
[Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, taught me that sometimes the truth is hidden in plain sight. In this case, all I had to do was open a book, and some of the truth spilled out. Bolded text is my emphasis.]
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
pp250-251
In France in the spring and summer of 1946, in negotiations over the future of Cochin-China, the southern region including Saigon, Ho Chi Minh, I learned with some astonishment, was accorded the honors of a head of state and negotiated with the French on that basis. Jean Sainteny, former chief representative of France in Vietnam, had signed an agreement in March that the decision on whether to include the South in that independent state would be settled by a popular referendum. But the French government had no intention of carrying out that agreement. Its failure to do so, and its clear intention to return Tonkin as well to quasi-colonial status by force, led to the outbreak of hostilities on both sides at the end of 1946. …
… Ho and his colleagues had every reason to feel betrayed in the fifties by France, the United States, and the international community – perhaps above all by their Communist allies, the Soviets and Chinese – because of their failure to enforce the exactly comparable agreement in the Geneva Accords in 1954. These had explicitly denied that the demilitarized zone (DMZ) was an international border separating two independent states. They had called for an internationally supervised election in 1956 to determine the government of a unified Vietnam. … Both internally and to the public Secretary of State Rusk and his subordinates proclaimed over and over that “all we may ask is that North Vietnam leave its neighbors alone” and that it observe the provisions of the 1954 accords. The implicit and often explicit premise was that the accords had created two separate, independent sovereign states, the two “neighbors,” North and South Vietnam. That was … a brazen reversal of the letter and spirit of the accords as written. Equally brazen…was the frequently repeated demand by the United States throughout the sixties for a “return to observance of the 1954 Accords” when the United States had never intended, did not support, and would never permit observance of the central political provision of the accords, which called for nationwide elections for a unified regime.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUMMY. Thank you for putting up with me for 30 plus years. Thank you for not kicking me out of the house when I came out, even though you feared I had picked a lifestyle that would dig me an early grave. Thank you for telling me to always cut my Krameresque fro and keeping my almost shaved head, even though I know you wanted to straighten my hair one more time. Thank you for giving me a second chance at a potentially better life (as if death was the only other option if I hadn’t been – NOT) and giving me the luxury to be the starving, struggling artist that I am today. I hope it is as special as you have made me. Much love, pumpkin xoxox
[Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, taught me that sometimes the truth is hidden in plain sight. In this case, all I had to do was open a book, and some of the truth spilled out. Bolded text is my emphasis.]
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
[Ton That Thien]
pp176-177
…on U.S. stakes in the coming elections in Vietnam and why our policy should change from Vietnam and why our policy should change from exclusive backing for military candidates, Ky or Nguyen Van Thieu, to encouraging, or simply permitting, their replacement by respected civilian leaders. As an outstanding Vietnamese journalist, Ton That Thien, had put it to me the leadership that the country needed had to have respect, and “for a government to be respected, it must be respectable.” Air Force General Ky, currently serving as premier (by support of the other generals and the Americans), could hardly be further from meeting that criterion. Vietnamese saw him as immature, lacking in strong nationalistic instincts, a playboy, promiscuous, narrowly educated, undignified, impulsive, only sporadically “serious.” And flamboyant (commonly visiting the countryside in a black nylon flying suit with a lavender scarf and a pearl-handled revolver, on which was engraved the name of his mistress). This in a Confucian culture giving highest values to age, dignity, maturity, education, and virtuous example. As Thien said, for America to favor or support a Ky – at the time I wrote this, the only choice of the mission for the presidency – as symbolic chief of state was seen by him and by a wide range of Vietnamese as an insult, a gesture of contempt.
But personality and appearance were the least of it. Ky was a northerner, a military man, a former French officer lacking any record of patriotic opposition to the French, widely believed to owe his position to American support.
…
As for General Thieu, Ky’s chief military rival for the candidacy, his liabilities were only marginally less than Ky’s. He wasn’t a northerner, but he was still from Central Vietnam, not the South, and he added to his list of liabilities by being a Catholic. He was more dignified, I acknowledged, more mature, more experienced and prudent than Ky, yet for other reasons these qualities didn’t assure him more public confidence. “Where Ky fails to gain the instinctive trust and respect of the Vietnamese because he is so ‘different’ in Vietnamese cultural terms, Thieu fails their trust because he is simply regarded as untrustworthy”: conspiratorial, sly, “too clever,” an impression strengthened by his role in the coups that had displaced a number of his predecessors. “Above all, as he himself admits, Thieu shares with Ky the political burden of being a military man; as he is reported to have remarked some weeks ago, “The Vietnamese people are weary of military rule.” I quoted a young Constituent Assembly member: “Give us anything. Young, old, I don’t care, Central, Southern, Northern: just as long as he’s not military.”
