Let’s be honest: There’s a whole lot of uncertainty at the moment we are currently in. We are facing a pandemic, the proportions of the likes our living generations have not seen in a century. It’s easy to feel powerless and helpless as so many things have been taken out of our control: our ability to go and see friends, our graduations, our school life. Whatever you might be feeling at this moment might be a representation of the grief that you are experiencing as a result of the lost time and opportunities. Don’t count yourself out from fully expressing the weight of your sadness. Tell your friends and family and lean on the ones who care for you most. Let us be a platform for you, and write to us about how this pandemic has affected you. We want your stories. This post today features a moment when I took ownership of myself and the story I wanted to tell. Enjoy! - With love, your Editor, Jireh <3
1. Week before: Wearing White for International Womxn's Day 2. Two weeks before: Emceeing the TEDxCSULB 2020 Conference 3. Week before: Inside the state capital rotunda, advocating for students 4. Taken right after my tattoo 5. Me and my dog Mooka en route to moving my things out of the dorms for the rest of spring semester
I would say one of the biggest taboos in my Asian American community is probably tattoos and piercings. Body alterations are often seen as base and degrading especially in a religious household like my own, which touted the often phrased “your body is a temple” in maintaining the sanctity of your image as a representation of your purity. So of course, I decided to get a tattoo this past Friday the 13th. For me, I too had once held the views that tattoos and piercings disrupted a professional appearance, but those negative stereotypes have broken down since college. There were individuals whom I admired as leaders and academics who had numerous tattoos and piercings.
As a 5’3” first-generation Asian American, not just my stature, but my culture and the colonialist frameworks in which we operate, place me into the boxes of quiet or submissive. I am lucky to not have experienced that type of discrimination much in my lifetime, but in other ways, I have faced stark marginalization because I am queer. Sexuality isn’t as easily demarcated as race and gender norms. There have been countless times where I’ve felt burdened by my burning desire to share about the relationships that matter to me in places I know where my experiences aren’t seen as valid or even worse, abhorrent. 2019 marked the year where I had really broken barriers in myself, learning more about the communities that I was serving at my school through student government and within my hometown by working at the Self-Help Center at the Pasadena Courthouse. As an open and vulnerable person, it was eating at me that I felt that my service was struggling because I was failing to live at my fullest and authentic self. It took a lot of soul searching and writing to come to terms with my own happiness; this was in large part to the safe space that was provided to me through the Spoken Literature Art Movement with Matthew Cuban and Alyesha Wise.
Commuting alone to L.A. and carpooling with friends on the weekends sometimes three hours at a time to get to classes was the first time I had really fought for something I knew I needed for myself without the support of my parents. With the individuals I wrote alongside at ArtShare-LA, I found commonality in the stories we shared with each other, earnestly looking for ways to empathize and heal together as a community. My writing grew, but so did my awareness that if I wasn’t living at the best of myself, I couldn’t create or give to others.
"If I wasn’t living at the best of myself, I couldn’t create or give to others."
My decision to fully come out to my online community on the first day of spring semester was a decision for myself. I wanted to stop living in fear and the shame that had hounded me for the past half-decade. So this past Friday the 13th when I walked into Port City Tattoo, I scanned the flash sheets before me with heavy trepidation. Candidly, I was extremely unimpressed by the selection of pieces they offered that all seemed overly machismo or goth. My eyes caught on to a sheet that offered softer motifs with intricate daggers, the moon, and crystals. Then I saw a sun with a woman’s face and the Roman numerals XIX (19) above it. I knew that it was going on my right shoulder.
The tattoo artist, Wade, was extremely warm and welcoming and somehow knew already why I was there. “Do your parents know you are gay?” I told him this tattoo was to be another item on the ever-growing laundry list of things my parents were in denial of including my sexuality. I was so extremely grateful for the conversation we had and when asked what he would be in another life if not a tattoo artist, Wade replied he would be a “general of compassion.” His kindness made it ten times less awkward for me to be literally shirt off in a room of strangers (mostly older men) as he was poking a needle into my upper right shoulder. I knew that this tattoo would represent for me 2019: the year I stepped into myself, my current age. And the sun has always been a representation of new beginnings in my poems.
“A septum piercing is much more polarizing,” I was told just a few days later by a piercer at JUL head. I knew I wouldn’t be able to tuck the piercing much in the next six weeks as it was healing. This scared and excited me. We were already practicing social distancing, and I had walked in, pacing, too nervous to sit down, and washed my hands every ten minutes. I knew I was going to get the piercing then because the next few weeks would be in social isolation with my family. There would be few opportunities to find space alone in the house, especially since I shared a room with my sister; I wanted to take control over what little autonomy I had. (It also had NOTHING to do with the fact that I found septum piercings really cute on girls I liked…)
"I am tired of constantly being polite to make others comfortable."
Surprisingly, my parents didn’t offer more than a sigh when they saw my piercing when I came home. They saw my tattoo after a run in a tank top and they acknowledged it with much less chagrin than I expected. My mom told me that the appearance of my body didn’t change my spirit. I’m sure she meant it more in a religious context, but it described how I felt empowered by my new septum and tattoo. I had grown immensely as a person in the past year and these changes were a physical reflection of my personal development.
Who I was had always been out there, an active thinker, a writer, a fighter for change. Yet part of me is still constrained by my innate desire to conform, to be a people pleaser. My popo (grandma) follows me on Instagram, and my gong gong (grandpa) is afraid I won’t be hireable with this nose piercing. But I think to myself, I am intrinsically different, queer and other. Maybe I do want others to pause when they look at me. Yes, I am a 4.0 Honors student, involved in all the extracurricular and co-curricular activities you could dream of. I fit the narrative of your achieving, well-behaved, respectful Asian American daughter. And yes, I value the collectivism of my background. And I am also reaching the brink of girlhood to cross over into womanhood, I am tired of constantly being polite to make others comfortable. If I am advocating alongside and on behalf of the communities I am part of, I want to own all of who I am, walk into every room with a solid sense of my identity, so I am not shaken.
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