Sorry. I’ll show myself out.
Originally published on December 31, 2021
“There’s always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself–whether it’s Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc.–because that’s the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else. But once you do that, then you’ve lost because then you become acquired or bought by that particular essence of yourself, and you’ve denied yourself all of the energy that it takes to keep all those others in jail. Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.”
-Audre Lorde
I. Greenpoint
On a good day, it took me two hours and twenty minutes to travel from my front door in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to my high school, which was located in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn. My family didn’t own a car, so I had to take two subway trains and a bus to get to and from school. One afternoon, as I was sitting on the subway listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers during the last leg of my trip home, I heard someone’s voice yelling over my music. When I turned towards the source of the noise, I made eye contact with an angry man sitting about four feet away from me. He was yelling at me. Startled, I turned the volume of my walkman down so that I could understand what he was yelling. “Maybe he’s mistaking me for somebody else,” I thought.
“CHINK. CHING CHONG WONG MOTHERFUCKER. I’LL FUCK YOU UP…”
There was a lot more, but that’s what I remember. This was not a case of mistaken identity. The man looked disheveled. Maybe he was drunk or high. I didn’t know. All I knew was that he was very angry. I was 14 years old. I’d been bullied since daycare, but by boys my age. I thought he might attack me. I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. “No,” I told myself. “Don’t let him see you cry.” I considered getting up and moving to another subway car, but he might follow me. Also, I didn’t want to let him bully me. “If he was going to hit you, he would have hit you already,” I rationalized. I turned the volume on my walkman up, and for the next twenty minutes, I tried my best to ignore him and focus on the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
When I arrived at my home stop, I got up, and exited the train. I took a peek behind me to make sure he didn’t follow me. About two-thirds of the car exited with me. So lost was I in my crisis that I failed to notice that the subway car was packed with people, mostly adults, from Greenpoint, who knew me. Not a single one of them intervened. One of them, a woman, approached me and asked, “why didn’t you say anything back to him?” I guess 14 year old me was at fault for allowing a deranged man to hurl racist slurs at me.
That was the moment when Greenpoint started to feel less like my home, like my community, and more like the place where my stuff happened to be.
II. Hobart and William Smith Colleges
About two years later, when I was a first-year student at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, I did respond when a white first-year student threw garbage on my bed and stole from my room, in retaliation for me reporting the garbage incident to security. One morning, when I was still asleep, the bully banged on my door demanding that I come out to the hallway. I was content to ignore him because no white boy was going to beckon me. However, my roommate had a habit of leaving our door unlocked, so the bully barged in. I chuckled at the absurdity of confronting him in my boxers, and told him to get the fuck out of my room. By now his banging and yelling had woken up the entire floor, which was unfortunate for the bully, who by the way was twice my size and a hockey player, because everyone got to witness me knock him on his ass. Instead of letting bygones, he urinated on my door and put glue in the lock. The deans knew what was going on and refused to intervene. Since the adults in charge refused to enforce their own rules regarding bullying, I took the avenue that was available for me- I wrote an article in the student paper’s humor section making fun of the bully. The bully responded by getting together with his friends and leaving a death threat on my voicemail. Finally, the deans called me into a meeting where they reprimanded me for making fun of the bully in the school paper. They also asked me if I wanted to move to another dorm. “No,” I responded. “I haven’t done anything wrong. They threatened to kill me. Why don’t you make them move?” “You’re right,” one of the deans responded. At 16 years old, I was one of the youngest people on campus, but there was no fucking way that I was going to let anybody else make me feel like I didn’t belong there.
During my sophomore year, I was the target of a different set of bullies. They were white, they were first-year students, and football players. I was their RA. As an RA, I had three rules:
Be nice to the maintenance and cleaning staff.
The cleaning staff doesn’t work weekends, so on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, vomit in bathroom #1 so that bathroom #2 will remain vomit-free.
Don’t mess with the communal lounge furniture.
One night the football players attempted to steal the lounge furniture. Twice. Twice I warned them not to. Hours later they did steal the furniture, so I decided that security would deal with it. Unfortunately for the football players, when security showed up, not only did they find the football players to be in possession of the lounge couch, but they also had two drunk, passed out high school students in their room. The football players made a bad situation worse when they attempted to block EMS paramedics from entering the room.
The football player’s friends blamed me for getting their friends suspended, and in retaliation, they defected on my door, and wrote “CHINK SUCKS FUCK YOU.” During my first year, the bully called me “gook” which offended me because gook is a slur used against Filipinos, Koreans, and Vietnamese (likely because white people can’t differentiate). I am Chinese. A year later, there was some progress because these white boys used the correct racist slur.
When I talked to the other Asian American and international Asian students about what happened, one of them told me, “that stuff doesn’t happen to us. It happens to you because you have a big mouth.” To the white kids I was chink (not gook, thank you very much), and to the Asian students, I was a loud mouth asshole that didn’t belong to their Asian club.
Later in my sophomore year, another student assaulted my friend. Even though he had a history of harassing and assaulting women students, the college administrators protected him, and made sure that he graduated on time. I attempted to intervene by organizing a protest, but found that very few people hand the bandwidth to risk suspension. So I walked away from my $27,000 scholarship and transferred to a public university.
III. Running
On July 30, 2020, after completing the 635-mile Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee (GVRAT), I posted a finisher photo and a recap. Lazarus Lake, GVRAT’s race director initially didn’t have a problem with my post, but eventually deleted it when hundreds of runners left racist comments because I was wearing a Black Lives Matter singlet in my finisher photo. Initially, Laz claimed he had no issue with my singlet, and that he deleted my post because of the racist comments. Later he changed his tune and characterized my posting a photo of myself and attempting to start a fist fight. At one point, Laz declared that his GVRAT space was a “refuge” from all that”. After that post garnered more than one thousand likes, Laz deleted the post. In fact, he deleted every post where he spoke in service of the racist commenters. Luckily, I took screenshots of the posts, because nobody would have believed me if I hadn’t. Even then, Laz has gotten away with lying about what he said, and characterizing me and my teammates as bullies. He’s gotten away with it because not enough running journalists, podcasters, and bloggers are willing to challenge his lies. They want to remain in his good graces so that they can participate and cover his future events.
Laz hasn’t taken up my team’s offer to have a conversation since he removed us from his next virtual running event. He and his supporters have made it clear that we’re not welcome in their space unless we agree to behave in a way that won’t upset the white runners seeking refuge.
Ironically, I’m also not welcome in spaces where runners gather to discuss diversity. I’m not welcome because I responded to Laz and racist runners by showing everybody screenshots of exactly what they said. How dare I screenshot conversations that occur in public forums? Who do I think I am to quote people instead of offering rough summaries of what they said?
The conversations that are referred to were a handful of panel discussions that I attended. During the question and answer portions of the panels, sometimes I asked a question to the industry representatives about their company’s relationship to Laz. Another time I asked whether the industry’s push to be more diverse and inclusive also meant justice for sweatshop workers. I didn’t expect a clear, definitive answer, but I thought it was worth discussing. I realized how such a question would make people who work in the industry uncomfortable. It was not my intent to take space away from Black and Asian people in those spaces, but I’m told that’s what I did, and I’m sorry for that.
For what it’s worth, I’m not upset. I actually think they’re right to accuse me of being intimidating. The people who are referenced work for the industry, and or have large social media followings. They have positioned themselves as the voices and gatekeepers of many spaces. I think that I’m intimidating to them for the same reason I’m intimidating to Laz- because I’m an outsider. I don’t have a constituency or an industry or a reputation to protect.
I’ve felt like an outsider for a lot of my life. It’s very hard for me to not internalize my experiences and start believing that I’m supposed to be an outsider because I’m not worthy of belonging to a community. I’m not a delusional person who believes that they’re always right and everybody else is wrong. Maybe the problem is me. Perhaps I don’t try hard enough to be what other people want me to be. I swear that I do try. I just can’t.
I can’t parse who I am and turn off the other parts of me that others reject. When I think about diversity and justice and running, I think about Ahmaud Arbery, Black Lives Matter, my Chinese neighbors in Elmhurst suspiciously eyeing my wife when she goes for a job, all the racist bullshit my BIPOC friends experience, and I think about my mom working in a sweatshop when I was a kid. I also think about shoes, the apparel and who and where it comes from. I’m sorry that it makes people uncomfortable, but I’m not going to keep that part of me under wraps in order so that I fit in.
When I think of the “Stop Anti-Asian Violence”, I think of the violence that my Asian American and South Asian friends have experienced. I think of the fear I have that my parents or my brother will be attacked. I also think about the calls from Asian American leaders for carceral solutions. More police. More jails. I think about the anti-Black propaganda that’s being spread in the Chinese community. I think about how a lot of Asians are framing the issue as a race war- Asians vs Blacks, and what it means for my wife, my nieces and nephews, and my friends. I’m not going to stand with people who tacitly embrace anti-Black propaganda.
I felt like an asshole who did something wrong when that woman came up to me and asked me why I didn’t respond to the deranged, racist man.
I felt like an asshole because everybody, even the liberal white people, were uncomfortable with me at Hobart and William Smith.
I felt like an asshole for making Laz’s life harder by revealing that so many of his customers are racist.
I felt like an asshole for asking a question that made the running industry people uncomfortable.
I feel like an asshole for moving to one of the whitest states in the country, and not fitting in.
I feel like an asshole for not supporting Asian American leaders who want more police and more jails in order to lock mentally ill people up forever and throw away the key.
I am an asshole. I’m okay with that, but I’m also sorry that I haven’t figured out how not to be an asshole. I’ll show myself out.