Why do Asian parents have to be so nosy? I suppose they are so because of their overprotective nature as described by Amy Tan's character in The Joy Luck Club: "Do not ride your bicycle around the corner...because then I cannot see you and you will fall down and cry and I will not hear you." But the grass is greener on the other side and being around friends is a social situation that is inevitable. If Asian parents had it their way their sons and daughters would be ill-equipped and socially awkward. That is exactly what nerds are, they lack the social qualities that pollute middle class businessmen and elite socialites who dally with each other at galas and extravagant balls. I can't stand it when my parents subject my telephone list of friends to scrutiny, pinpointing their grades, their personality, their career path. It is as if they were seeking them out to be my lawfully wedded significant other. "It's not that serious, calm down," my long-distant friend Hien on Capitol Hill, would say. I suppose the generation gap begins when children despise their parents for being incredibly "backwards" and paranoid in a country which they half-chose to move to but cannot fully assimilate into. The generation gap is highly evident with parents dragging their children along to ung-hui (grocery shopping) and to doctor's offices where they need express translation. This is also evident in mother-daughter relationships where the daughter speaks only in English as if her mother actually knew what she was saying all along. But she speaks English so that others around her can acknowledge her forwardness instead of being associated with her mother's backwardsness (not knowning English and lack of manners including picking nose in public [lo baks do this, not popos/paw paws] and then examining it 360 degrees). As a child of first generation parents I will commit myself to raising my children in an "American way" by allowing them pseudo-freedom, not by abiding by my parents' ways like the Tiger Mother Amy Tan who revered her parents and tortured her two daughters to be violin virtuosos without bathroom breaks.
What else is new? My job hunt has been lethargic. I've been thinking more about spending the rest of my summer being lazy and unfettered from the chains of post-traumatic-school-syndrome. I've been having nightmares where professors would chase me for missing papers and unfinished assignments. I have been sweating from being chased for a Final paper that was not run through Turnitin dot com. These frustrating events illustrate how much school had an effect on me. For these four tourniquet years, college acted as a seal of approval and a tactfully complacent plug for my life. It has structured me. Now that I have graduated I don't have a weekly schedule and I feel forever lost (forever alone too, haha, the meme!) and aimless because I have no papers to tell me that I have achieved something upon its completion. I don't have these markers of progress and these pages of syllabi to indicate physical progress and consumption of snooty intellectual material which I now condemn as bullshit. I cannot say that everything I have learned is bullshit, but for the most part, it is bullshit!
I've been thinking a lot about my friends. Actually, no I have been thinking more about myself now that college is over I cannot see my friends easily, and they do not make time for me because they have work or because school made time for me because it would be a coincidence for them to bump into me, but they cover it by saying Hi it was great seeing you when it was all force of nature that collided us.
Now that Tanya has moved back to Las Vegas it gives me breathing room to assess the feelings I had for her. Also my Techhead friend Tiff is going to Boston University for five years to pursue science. On top of that I have forgotten about my later-found brother Dan from the AAFE Summer Street Festival last summer. I seemed to have forgotten that he did a major deed by sneaking me into Baruch with his ID by double-swiping and causing a large alarm to go off. I seemed to have forgotten about Elisabeth too, but I can't blame myself--she hasn't been responding to my eager text messages. On top of all this, my homegirl is aspiring to be a doctor which has put her off the radar as we don't hang out as much anymore because she is mostly busy with her other group of friends. And if she isn't hanging out she is at Hunter working in the North Building teaching chemistry which continues to baffle me because her background in chemistry is spotted. The dog days of summer have pushed me past memories of Dyker Heights, past Cheryl and Kohl's where we cuddled in each other's arms to the sunset above the generous parking lot, past Sara my first official religious girlfriend who said Godwilling every time we departed, past Dewey, past the song Boys of Summer, past all these frayed memories that contain loose ends.
Who will come next? Who will I talk to in Union Square next? Who will I chat up and find interesting and will find me interesting enough to keep me? Hien was the first stranger in a while that I got to talk to and she acknowledged me as a friend for keeps. I wonder who will be next to beckon my weird personality and run away with me and play some guitar. I suppose being jobless has its opportunities in friend-searching. But when the wallet is empty how can I sustain friends who chase the fat wallet? And women who chase both fat wallets and big dicks. Troublesome eh?
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