Category Archives: Narrative

AAPI LGBTQ Pride: To Be Me

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Growing up in a Hmong family with 3 other brothers and 1 sister was a real struggle to get by as my parents and close family members expected so much of me to succeed just like my uncle. I was born the second son in our family of 7, including my parents. Here is my story… Ever since I could remember, my family had always praised me to be the brightest, and a person who would always listen to their parents. With this in mind, I couldn’t bear to disappoint them by telling them that I like boys. I, along with close family members and friends, had always knew that I was different.

Having only one sister in the family, my mother had always spoiled her since she was the only daughter. My mother was always buying her pretty dresses, jewelry, makeup products, and all the accessories little girls loved. Of course, you can pretty much guess how jealousy had just taken a hold on me. So, I questioned myself about why I felt this way. I hated myself and I wanted to cry because being a boy, I can’t have girly things.

 

During second grade, I knew I had feelings for other boys in my class. I wanted to only hangout with them, to be put in the same group as them, and wanted to spend my entire day with them. This was all I could ever think about. Sadly, I didn’t understand my feelings at the time and I kept thinking to myself if this sensation of infatuation, only  a phase. I thought I was living a normal life. As I got older, I understood the term gay and that was when I started to label myself as gay. Although, I was still unhappy with the term gay because it didn’t suit me well. I hid myself in the dark corner of my mind and even persuaded myself that I was not gay. Afraid to be known as feminine, I would exclude myself from society and my classmates throughout my entire grade school education. Every friend I made, knew or assumed that I was gay due to my feminine voice, while at that time, I never knew that I wanted to become a woman.

When I was 20 years old, I was introduced to the term transgender and increased my vocabulary to define myself. The moment I heard the word, I immediately searched and googled the term many times. The feelings I received from knowing transgender was so overwhelming and I couldn’t wait any longer, because that was the day my life as a boy ended. From there on out, I considered myself as a woman and I have been living as a woman since that day.

Kimora Cha is 26 years old and identify as a Hmong transgender woman from Sacramento, California.

 

 

 

 


Celebrate June PRIDE Month by contributing your narrative to be part of AAPI LGBTQ PRIDE Narrative Series. If you identify as AAPI LGBTQ and want to contribute your narrative or have questions, please email Linda for more information – linda@mwsmovement.com

 

 

 

 

AAPI LGBTQ Pride: I’m Hiding the Best of Me

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Phiengtavanh was born in Vientiane, Laos in 1981; her family immigrated to the U.S when she was 4 years old to escape communism.  She is the eldest sibling with two younger sisters, and a brother. She grew up in North Minneapolis.  At age 17, she enlisted in the military for personal and professional goals; and pursued college at Saint Cloud State University while continuing her service to the MN Army National Guard.  In summer of 2005, she was placed on a  “stop lost” for a deployment to Iraq with the 134th Red Bulls Brigade Support Battalion.  She honorably served over 10 years in the military and took pride in her duties as the Human Resources Specialist.

My name is Phiengtavanh and I am a lesbian
Yes I said it
Not only am I gay
I’m many things and I don’t want you to just remember me as being a gay person
Or the characteristic stereo types
That were supposed to be embedded by social media
Or society that this is how we should be
For those that know me and who has not, well
I’m 32
I’m a veteran
I’m a current student
I’m a daughter, a sister, an aunt
I’m a step-parent
And I have a loving partner
And yes I am also a pet owner, I have a little puppy, he’s a Chiweenie
Being is gay is just a part of who I am
It doesn’t really define the whole me
So when I look back at my previous years
I was hiding the best of me when I’m not who I am
So being a lesbian completes the whole identity of me

IMG_3714Phiengtavanh is currently living in Ramsey County – employed as the data entry specialist to the Family Health Division of Ramsey County Public Health and working part-time as a Private Charter Screener for G2 Secured Staff.  In her spare time, she continues to enjoy time with family and friends while participating in various events with the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum.  Phiengtavanh is one of the recipients of the Minnesota 25 Veterans’ Voices Award in 2013 for her accomplishment within her community and society.

Celebrate June PRIDE Month by contributing your narrative to be part of AAPI LGBTQ PRIDE Narrative Series. If you identify as AAPI LGBTQ and want to contribute your narrative or have questions, please email Linda for more information – linda@mwsmovement.com

AAPI LGBTQ Pride: Refugee’s Baby Memories

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kong pic 1

Existing in ruptures, I suppose that is the consequences of living life. In 1993, my family went aboard an airplane that would bring us to the United States. It was not an easy flight, and as I know now, nothing about this life is ever easy. The dizzying pain of the shuttering noise overwhelmed me, leaving pungent ailments, vomit all over my own shirt. I was from a refugee camp, which my tender memories leave only with it, a vision of sipping chocolate aid milk.

In this queer refugee life, I am always imagining the sweet escape, thinking of its landscapes as close enough, to enjoy its everlasting moments. And I linger in these fantasies that wretched my birth and travels to America. Imagining back on my queer life, the blockades of anguish, mixed with sweetness always had a fervent flavor. At the earliest onset, my feelings of queerness, of loving and desiring, were nothing but strange, familiar, and true. And yet, I myself could not fathom its sweetness, which I mustered as anguish. I must perpetually compete with these recurring cleavages in this realm of life. These continual exigencies are what makes life meaningful, interesting at the least, I suppose.

kong pic 2

“I realize now,
Those moments of eery chaos,
Will always thwart my memories,
I realize now,
That illusionary specter of joy,
Were my only hopes of life,
I realize now,
Those discolored ambiences of life,
Were the containment of all which is never to be had,
I realize now,
Those remnants of glimmer,
Was and can never be consumed, and,
I realize now,
The unsettled visions that outline the shallow spirals,
Can liberate me from my desperation,
I realize now,
The protruding anger of my soul,
Was always the symbol of my emancipated queer life,
I realize now,
That moment of desolate altercation,
Is it not the emblem of my refugee life,
I realize now,
Never to let go of the blemishes of my imagination,
It is to be happily queer in a world of deformed chaos.”

That moment is funny to me now. It is as clear as that window that shows the first signs of storm clouds. And yet, that moment exists only as a remnant of memory, driving down that dark, suicidal road. That moment of desperation, I realized, that despair is not death, but the languishing hunger to master life’s most miserable grandeurs. I suppose now that the drive, the run, the escape, the realization, the return, all were leading to this moment in my gay, my queer, my Hmong, my refugee, my bizarre, my funny, my beautiful life.

Ruptures in the human heart, physically and emotionally, are inevitable consequences of living. This discursivity in my happiness will settle itself. Living an unsettled life, of queerness, and embracing all of its exigencies, its messiness, of loving that man, of hating myself, of loving myself, I like the view from this focal point. For now, I will allow the intermittent episodes of my life to encapsulate itself into an everlasting nothingness, to be sorted out in other spaces and times unknowable.

 

Kong Pheng Pha is a writer from Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota.me in sf

 

Celebrate June PRIDE Month by contributing your narrative to be part of AAPI LGBTQ PRIDE Narrative Series. If you identify as AAPI LGBTQ and want to contribute your narrative or have questions, please email Linda for more information – linda@mwsmovement.com

 

 

AAPI LGBTQ Pride: Learning to Choose Who to Love Wisely

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A couple of years ago, I met someone I really wanted to be with and it was love at first sight. When I confessed to her my feelings, she told me she liked me as well but was too afraid to fall in love with me. We saw each other for a month then she stopped talking to me and I didn’t understand what I did wrong. It made me feel like a fool.

Ever since I was young, I suffered from deep depression and it continued into my twenties. After we stopped seeing each other, my depression returned. I drowned myself into music and did not understand why we couldn’t work. I also began throwing my heart to people who I knew weren’t interested in me. Through my depressing Facebook posts, a close friend contacted me and I came out and confided in her about my relationship troubles. After we talked, I collected myself and compiled this list that helped me get through my breakup and depression.  I also wanted to share my personal reflection thoughts that helped me through my process of working through a breakup. I hope my reflections will encourage people to also make time to reflect if they are experiencing depression or in the midst of looking for themselves.

There were many warning signs that our values and relationship practices didn’t align, but I was swept away into the “love at first sight” so I kept telling myself she was “the one.”

I’m glad the break up happened and I had friends who were there to talk and support me through the process, and now I’m thankful that she is no longer in my life.

MY PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

  • My previous actions were not “stupid” (whether I was broken hearted or not). It was a learned experience for my own self growth.
  • Watch out for warning signs, if someone says they are “too scared to fall in love” or “think we are moving too fast” regardless if they say they like you a lot, thank them and move on. My friend stated, “You don’t want to be with someone for two years then they cheat on you and say I wasn’t in love with you till you kept chasing me.”
  • Don’t feel stupid after following your intuition (whether I was broken hearted or not), if you think someone might like you and confess to them, and in the end they didn’t like you. It’s fine. You saw the correct signs and took action based on it.
  • It is okay to leave your heart on your sleeve, that’s just the person you are. You just keep loving and if that person brings you down, it wasn’t meant to be. At the end of the day, you need to pick yourself back up and start over.
  • Find someone who compliments your life, not someone that brings it down. (Throughout my dating experience, I’ve always fallen for people who were “broken” and their actions were probably unclear, they never complimented my life. They made it more complicated.)
  • Keep continuing on the journey to self-love.

Dee is a 26 year old workaholic living in NoCal.dee

                                                                                                                                                                 

Celebrate June PRIDE Month by contributing your narrative to be part of AAPI LGBTQ PRIDE Narrative Series. If you identify as AAPI LGBTQ and want to contribute your narrative or have questions, please email Linda for more information – linda@mwsmovement.com

Celebrating our AAPI LGBTQ Pride

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June is the time of the year that PRIDE month is celebrated across the United States and the world. A time for our LGBTQ and ally community to engage in festivities, parades and march with pride to remember those who came before us, who we are now and where we want to be. Through the celebrations and fun, we must remember that our fight to end discrimination and oppression is long from over. Our LGBTQ family and community, we still face persecution based on our sexuality, gender, ability, class, faith and immigration status. Often our experiences as LGBTQ Asian American and Pacific Islander are silenced and dismissed in which MWSM collective will be highlighting six narratives for the this June 2015.

“With each individual who comes to realize that there are Asian queers and queer Asians, that space where the gay zone meets the Asian zone opens up a little more.”- Helen Zia, Writer, Journalist, Scholar

Never forget. Happy Pride Month!

-Maica

AAPI Heritage Month: I Write from the “We” that is Erased by Assimilation

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Film Screening: Hafu: the mixed race experience in Japan. Source: hafufilm.com/en

Growing up fourth generation, developing an identity as an Asian American has felt like something of a choice, or a process. Perhaps it was inevitable but it feels like a reaction. I think that for some folks in immigrant communities who are first or second generation, ethnic identity can involve a strong cultural experience. Not a monolithic or a static one, to be sure, but perhaps a more cohesive one. My identity is of being an American, but a racialized American. Which is also a cultural experience, just an American one.  I’m mixed, with a Japanese American father and a European American mother. My grandfather’s family were Buddhist missionaries who migrated to Hawai’i and helped found a temple there. I grew up in suburban Illinois without much of a community that looked like me or came from similar history.  Coming from a family that was more or less assimilated, sometimes I think I grew to identify as a Japanese or Asian American based on the negative aspects of being a racialized person, rather than the positive aspects of identity, culture, or community. My choice to identify as such was and is a reaction to the self doubt, in/visibility, and microaggression that people of non-European descent experience in America.  Ultimately I see this as a blessing because of the community and history I am still discovering, but also because it provided me with the earliest seeds of doubt about a racial system that I could not name but was keenly aware of.

I write from the “we” that is erased by assimilation.

I am decided by the fact
That our people came here to work in the sugar cane fields
That we came here to minister to those who worked in those fields
That we came here to get rich quick
That we died trying;
That we succeeded and forgot our mother tongues,
That we burned photographs and letters,
That our children would look at us as the enemy;
That we came here to live in segregated neighborhoods,
and that we did business in further segregated neighborhoods
That we came here to move to the suburbs
That each generation was foreign to the one that preceded it;
That our children would resent us for not teaching them who they were;
That we defined ourself against whiteness, while we craved whiteness,
while being used as a wedge against blackness,
That as we lost the our mother culture, we became something else entirely,
That we we were forced, coerced, encouraged, and then rewarded for assimilation;
That we came to sit in furious silence, or to laugh in self-hate,
when our American friends mocked our parents,
That we were still not American even after four generations,
That as mixed kids, we were Asian when you wanted to laugh,
but white when we challenged your racism, no matter where it was directed
That when we grew up, we died a little bit everytime we passed,
That when we grew up, we realized:
We would not be followed in the grocery store, but
our fathers would be followed home from the train station by boys calling them chink;
That our mixedness would be celebrated–
That they would offer our own bodies back to us as currency,
That this currency would only be of value when positioned against a backdrop of white power,
That the outsiders who celebrate our mixedness do so at the expense of our browner cousins;
That whiteness wants to extract the part of us that is not itself, both to taste it and to extinguish it;

Source: eclecticshaman.com

Source: eclecticshaman.com

That we are not the sum of our parts, that we are neither of our parts;
That those who want to consume us, and sometimes do-
Spit us out as not their own,
Swallowed us and owned us, unaware we are
Both/and neither
That the nature of life is dualistic, not binaristic–
That the roots of the family tree divide infinitely in half

 

 

 

 

 

 

10077_4340851356467_1874550948_nSusan Kikuchi works as a labor organizer and currently lives in Minneapolis. She is constantly having the same conversations over and over with herself, using new vocabulary each time.

Celebrate May Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month by contributing your narrative to be part of AAPI Midwest Narrative Series. If you identify as AAPI in the Midwest and want to contribute your narrative or have questions, please email Linda for more information – linda@mwsmovement.com

 

AAPI Heritage Month: Where Do I Start?

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Where do I start? Writing a narrative is a bit challenging. I do not know where and when I should start my narrative. I mean, I have erased my sentences a few times, and just when I thought it was a good start, I erased it all over again. Was I too blunt and in your face? Am I taking too long to get to the point? Gosh, how about I start in the middle? My narrative here, what I want to talk about is my traumatic experience of being a victim of a sexual assault and my seasonal depression.

I didn’t noticed my seasonal depression until recently when someone close to me had mentioned that I maybe experiencing this every year at this time. I did not want to believe it but my trauma was more than enough for me to believe it. It is hard for me to talk about this traumatic experience. Even now as I write, I am reminded of the time, feelings, thoughts and struggle that I went through. I first came out about being sexually assaulted to a couple of my closest friends from high school. When I told them of my experience I thought that I would be more emotional and vulnerable, but I felt nothing of that sort. I felt numb. I gathered my emotions and got the courage to talk to them about my trauma, but that was it. I thought that it was enough that only two people knew. I did not want anyone else to know, especially not my family.

When I came back home from the trip I went with my co-workers and employee I was scared that my family would find out about the bruises–or in this case, hickeys on my neck. And they are not just your regular hickeys; they were huge and covered the whole front side of my neck. I panicked about what to do if my parents see this, if they saw the bruised-like hickeys on my neck. I had to cover it up with something and the answer was make-up; more precisely I used foundation to cover up my neck and it helped calmed me down. For a whole week I applied on the foundation until the bruised-like hickeys could no longer be seen. After my traumatic event, I tried to forget, but it never really went away and I was just lying to myself that it was not a big of a deal. I went through a whole year of keeping my traumatic event to myself without telling my parents. I pretty much do not remember what I did or how I did it so that I can keep my mind off of what happened to me.

I struggled with being a Hmong daughter and at the same time a victim of sexual assault. As a child, I was always warned to be careful around boys–and this was through the stories of girls being kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and/or raped. I thought “this will never happen to me,” because I know that I have been warned, thus I am careful around those who I interact with. I always think about what my mother has told me when going to someone’s house who I did not know, especially being careful of the drinks, because you never know what they could have put in it. In the stories my mother told me, these Hmong women were always portrayed as helpless beings or persons wanting to look for the attention by the way they dress and act. They were always with men who they did not know and were blamed for consequences as if they were seeking for it. This in turn has made me believe in a stereotype about how sexual assault and rape happens. In the most common myth, you are at a place far away from home, with some friends. You are probably having fun and staying out late at night. These guys who you do not know came up to you and offered you some drinks. (Be mindful that these drinks were already pre-ordered and not ordered in front of your face.) You drink it without knowing if it was drugged or not, and then, BAM! Next thing you know, you wake up in bed with a total stranger not knowing what happened. Although it was just a story, this myth was repetitively reinforced to me again and again, so I started to see; it became my reality. I have mentally prepared myself that if I shall ever come across this scenario, I’ll know exactly what to do.

In the communities we participate in and at home, we have gotten so worked up telling and preparing young girls about this horrid situation, which we seem to have dismissed the fact that it is not more than just a myth. In reality, it is NOT SOMEONE whom you DO NOT KNOW that will inflict this gender-based violence to you, but it is someone whom you personally know and have built a trusting relationship with, who can willingly commit gender-based violence to you. As a society, we always tell young girls not to take drinks from strangers or go out alone, but at the same time, we neglect to tell young boys not to rape. Socially and culturally, men and boys are not taught to respect women and girls’ bodies nor how to negotiate consent and not take advantage of women and girls as objects. This needs to change for the better.

After a year of suffering from this trauma, I came to understand that the reason why I am still having nightmares and trauma over this was because I was socialized and felt pressure to be silent about traumas regarding gender-based violence experiences. With all the stories my mother had told me, it had not prepared me for anything. All I learned was to avoid getting sexually assaulted and if it did happen to me, I must have done something to deserve it. This story my mother had told me, had taught me to be silent, just like her, and her mother, and her mother’s mother, and all the Hmong mothers before her. There was no outlet for me to speak out until I finally got a hold of my voice. This voice had came out to my own brother about my trauma and with this voice it had helped me to reflect and write about my lived experiences. Afterwards, I adopted the identity as a Hmong Feminist. I started to learn about the harm of rape culture and how to address it through a Hmong woman feminist lens. It is still difficult to write and talk about my experiences as I have only begun, but I will continue challenge this notion through critical conversations and will continue to seek a deeper understanding of how to heal, while renewing the meanings of my relationships with the people I interact with.

Nplooj Siab is dedicated to youth organizing and has a life-long goal to write a book.

Celebrate May Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month by contributing your narrative to be part of AAPI Midwest Narrative Series. If you identify as AAPI in the Midwest and want to contribute your narrative or have questions, please email Linda for more information – linda@mwsmovement.com

AAPI Heritage Month: Citizenship In An Exiled Nation

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What does it mean to live in exile? To be a minority within a minority? To call oneself “Tibetan-American?”As young Tibetan exiles, a sense of physical security in our adopted country is almost always accompanied by a kind of emotional distance. As a people who’ve been dislocated, all we have left is the memory of our lost country.

I remember when my refugee mother once told me that her “soul lives in Tibet.” Although born in an independent Tibet, she became stateless after fleeing the Chinese invasion and occupation when the communists seized power in 1949. Forced into exile, she had to cross the Himalayas to Nepal as a child and start a new life in India. Again resettling in the US, she finally gained citizenship in a country not her own. I was born in India but had the privilege of coming here as a child and, thus, had less difficulty adapting to a new country as an immigrant. My mother may have a greater sense of freedom here, but she still mourns for Tibet. Yet, despite the severe trauma she endured, she still finds happiness in her memories of her ancestral homeland. I realize now that I was raised with a similar longing for a lost nation. The difference between my mother and I, however, is that I only know Tibet in my imagination.

image3I wanted to talk about my Tibetan-American identity at a time of increasing self-immolations inside Tibet and increasing racial tensions inside the US. In places like Ferguson and Baltimore, peaceful protests have been glossed over by the media in favor of scenes depicting graphic violence, no doubt for fleeting ratings boost. When I see such images, I can’t help but be reminded of the distorting of the peaceful protests in Tibet during the summer of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The state media portrayed Tibetans as violent “thugs” targeting the dominant ethnic group, Han Chinese, in a so-called “autonomous region” that once was an independent Tibetan state.

Now scattered throughout the world due to resettlement, the Tibetan diaspora has begun an internal dialogue on issues influenced by our host countries. Reconciling such issues with our own cultural history has been the greatest challenge for many Tibetan youth like myself. One important distinction that should be made here is that as an exiled nation, our culture has become a sort of collective body of trauma. And while the first generation of Tibetan exiles may not be the last, young Tibetans cannot move forward until the world acknowledges our history and, therefore, our existence.

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On our part, we as a community need to admit this and encourage fellow Tibetans to seek help and engage in he healing process of dialogue when they need it. For example, there is a severe lack of culturally appropriate community health resources at the present moment. That said, these spaces are slowly growing and emerging as we engage in a larger public conversation among our communities. In the Tibetan community, this has caused fear and doubt among some—particularly the older, more conservation generations.

The existence of white privilege and patriarchy also factor into this fear of difference. Having inherited the trauma of our elders and our parents’ generation, we now carry the pain of our ancestors with us as we grow and shape our identity. But collective trauma requires collective healing. The sooner we come to realize this, the sooner we will truly be free.

11328795_10206782038535856_309932531_nTenzin Pelkyi is currently a J.D. Candidate at the University of Minnesota, where she received her B.A. in Political Science and Global Studies. While in law school, she worked as a law clerk at Asian Americans Advancing Justice-AAJC and the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for Senator Amy Klobuchar in Washington, D.C. She also worked as a research assistant at the law school’s Energy Transition Lab and as a law intern for the Executive Office for Immigration Review at the U.S. Department of Justice. In addition to serving as president of her Law School Democrats chapter and as a member of the law school’s Diversity Week committee, Pelkyi has received widespread recognition for her advocacy, including from her university, several bar associations, and the Dalai Lama Trust.

Prior to law school, she worked in the nonprofit sector for various progressive organizations, legislative affairs at the state capitol, and community organizing in the Tibetan community. Her interests include immigrant rights, reproductive health, and racial justice. You can keep updated with Tenzin on Facebook and Twitter.

Celebrate May Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month by contributing your narrative to be part of AAPI Midwest Narrative Series. If you identify as AAPI in the Midwest and want to contribute your narrative or have questions, please email Linda for more information – linda@mwsmovement.com