Of Being Angry and Half-Asian American
I’ll always remember Bruce Banner tell Captain America, “That’s my secret, I’m always angry,” before the Hulk turned much of Manhattan into a smouldering heap of collateral damage. I thought, “At last, someone who gets me,” as I myself tried to forget exactly how angry I actually was.
My anger erupts, scorching anyone unlucky enough to be close to me. In one moment, I am a raging conflagration of curses, the next I’m a pile of regretful cinders. I sift through those ashes and put myself together again: 52 year old single dad of a 15 year old son, a partner to a performing artist, a martial arts teacher, a photographer.
In case you’re wondering, yes, I’m in therapy, three years and counting. It’s helped immeasurably. Because over those three years I finally found the source of all that anger and am able define its fire: the endless uninvited speculation of my race; the incomplete inclusion from cultures that I always believed were my own; the inspections, the suspicion, the hostility, the fetishization, the violence.
It’s not as if I did not know I was angry about the disconnectedness I and other biracial people feel or the fact that I had experienced a great deal of race-based trauma growing up — to be biracial is to be angry about a great many things. However for my entire life, I had watered down my anger with annoyance. I was annoyed by race baiting nicknames, I was annoyed by having my body commented on, annoyed by regular attempts to stereotype or define me.
In the midst of this, I gaslighted myself and made excuses for others until I one day I could not call what I felt by any other name.
Nowadays, I catch myself daydreaming about a time when my mostly cheerful, chatty self who mentors and trains martial artists, who delights in photographing the wonders of the world, who loves all as well as he can would no longer worry about being stoked into a rage by the bellows otherness and racism. I know that getting there is going to take a long time, possibly the rest of my life.
I also know I want to keep a tiny piece of it, enough to create another kind of fire, one hot enough for me to forge an alloy of sorts, something stronger than my Korean and Polish halves have been on their own so far — and hot enough to burn away my own hesitancies and doubt so I can sit and write for what for so many years I was unable.
