So, here I am caught between dread and fear. I know that's not very clear, so here's how I see it. Fear is when you see something dangerous or something you believe is dangerous, right? Like when you freak out because there's a spider. Dread is when you are certain something dangerous is coming. Like opening a door into a room you're 100% sure is full of spiders.
There are two bits of context you need for this. First, I bleached my anus. I'm planning on making a video, just me, for Connor where I fuck my ass with a transparent dildo and I want my anus to be as photogenic as possible. This is relevant because, A) I want it to be a surprise and B) my anus is very sensitive right now.
Second, when I was ten, I was the only East Asian kid in my class (and I'm only half). On the first day of school, I came to school with a Hello, Kitty backpack because I was ten. I was not the only girl there with a Hello, Kitty backpack. On my second day of school, I was. Every other girl who had been carrying a Hello, Kitty backpack no longer was. On the third day of school, there were three Hello, Kitty dolls on my desk. And that kept happening for a couple of weeks until the school made a rule that giving gifts in class was only permitted on birthdays and holidays.
Shout out to my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hauser!
She could tell that this was humiliating for me, but I don't think she knew why. To her, I suspect, it was just the subtle bullying of picking out one innocuous trait someone has and harping on it ad nauseam. For me, though, the humiliation was much simpler: I'm not Japanese. I'm Chinese on my mother's side and Swedish on my father's.
I could take being bullied for being Asian in general or Chinese in particular. I'd had those facts thrown in my face by white kids my whole life. But being bullied for something that I wasn't? That struck me deep.
From then on, I started a campaign of hyper-self-representation. I ditched everything Asian that wasn't coded specifically Chinese. Hello, Kitty hadn't been a Japanese thing in my mind before, just a cute thing that I liked, but then it became "other". For a few weeks, I took one of my mom's hiking backpacks to school because it was red. That lasted for as long as it took to find something in Mulan.
We went clothes shopping, and I dragged my mom around for hours looking for girl's shirts that had high collars, ultimately settling on a bunch of turtlenecks. When we got home, I immediately cut the sleeves off, forcing my mom to stitch them so they looked presentable. I also started wearing a lot of pencil skirts or approximations thereof. All of this in pursuit of cheongsams. Mom didn't want me wearing a cheongsam every day because Chinese girls--the ones in China--didn't do that, but I was going to make it happen.
As for my hair: braids! All day, every day, and in increasing complexity. This was to represent Dad's side of the family. You know because Scandinavian girls always have braids. Always. This, too, embarrassed my mother eventually. Dad was into it, though, so it was less of a fight. That actually became the first thing I bonded with my paternal grandmother over. She's racist and has never liked my mom, but being invited over to teach me to do proper Swedish "oppombinding" thawed her out a little.
Oppombinding is like braiding your hair with a ribbon. And let me tell you, the addition of ribbons opened some fucking doors for me. You know who fucking loves hair ribbons? The Chinese! Mixing those two things made me feel like I was on full self-representation even when Mom made me wear jeans to school.
I still do it sometimes. Representing myself well is still a big part of who I am. I'm just a bit more elegant about it these days than assembling makeshift cheongsams out of H&M finds.
Okay, so, as of this moment, Connor and I are in the car driving to Szechuan Charlie's. Connor asked if I wanted to go, and I said, "Oh, yeah, that sounds good" like an idiot! Everything at Szechuan Charlie's is spicy. Also, Szechuan Charlie is a real person, and he is really my mom's brother-in-law, and he will put extra chilis in anything I order.
So, I'm sitting in the car very quietly dreading Uncle Chih-Ming's hot pot blasting through my bleached asshole and fear that Connor will think I am that girl. You see, not once in our relationship have I given him the "I don't know what I want for dinner" runaround. He's gotten "I'm not hungry yet" plenty of times, but I've never said I wanted something and then changed my mind. That's not me. Hot pot does sound delicious right now, but it's going to be hell later.
Also, what if my ass is too red for the pictures I want? What if I get anal fissures? I cannot put myself through that. So, I'm trapped, and every mile we drive makes a burning, blistering shit more likely and a mind change more inconvenient.
Then, mysteriously, Connor hits his turn indicator and pulls into a gas station. I glance at the dash because I refilled the car yesterday, and we haven't driven much since then. Sure enough, it's almost full. He doesn't pull up to a pump, just a parking spot.
As he undoes his seat belt, he looks at me and goes: "You know the phrase 'the silence was deafening'?"
"Yeah," I say, having no idea what's going on.
"Well, you just sat through 'Californication' without saying a damn word."
"I did?"
"Yep, so I'm getting us some gas station burritos and Blue Moons, and we're going to go up on the ridge, and you can tell me whatever."
He opens his door, gets out, and just as he starts to close it, I blurt: "I don't want spicy food!"
The thunk of the car door sounds right in the middle of that. So, Connor opens the door and goes: "What?"
"I don't want spicy food."
"Okay, how about a hot dog?"
"No, that's what I was thinking about."
"You were thinking about not wanting spicy food so hard that you didn't notice when California funk-rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers came on?"
"Mmhmm,"
He gets back in the car. "What's up?"
"I don't want spicy food. When you suggested Szechuan Charlie's, I agreed without thinking about it, and then I realized I didn't want it, and I didn't want to be one of those women that changes her mind out of the blue."
Connor silently stares at the steering wheel. In the light of the gas station, I don't see any emotion on his face, just that look of the wheels turning, like he's doing the Beautiful Mind thing. It keeps happening. He's just sitting there. Someone has pulled up next to us, gone inside, bought snacks, come back out, and driven away in the time he spends figuring out whatever it is he's figuring out.
"I Febreze my clothes before I put them in the laundry." He says.
I'm worried he's having a stroke. "When? I've seen you undress and drop your clothes in the hamper."
"I have a can in my office and one in the bathroom. Also," he reaches over and opens the glove compartment. There's a can of Febreze in there. "It's not hard knowing when I'm about to change clothes."
"Okay..."
"I started doing it because I was worried about you, I guess, getting sick of my body odor."
"Huh..." I say.
Okay, so, when I was preparing to move in with Connor, one of my Chinese friends warned me about how terrible white guys smell. Also, black, Arab, and South Asian men. She's also racist, but only about small things, so it's not often you get a chance to call her out on it. Faced with such an opportunity, I did. I called her out for being racist by saying that I was going to be living in a hell of non-East-Asian man stink.
