My life is wierd.
Living in as a gay man AND Korean is pretty weird. I'm always puzzled by it.
I'm also half white, which gives me my 5'11 height, so it's not that my life is just gay and Asian, but I'm also in-between worlds. To give you an example of the strangeness of my world, I often ate ham sandwiches with rice and kimchee (which is basically rotten, fermented cabbage).
To others outside my family, this is just weird. But it gets weirder. Here are the top 10 weird things about my life, and how they made me who I am today.
- White people think I am Asian, Asians think I am white.
- I am tall to Asians and short/small framed to all-white groups.
- I don't age. I am 41 years young. The photo is me at 40, just over the hill. I haven't grayed, yet.
- Ageing for me is not so much graying and wrinkling, but looking like a more ugly, overweight young adult.
- I grow a beard on the left side of my face, but not the right.
- I looked Latino as a baby, Asian as a teen, and Filipino as an adult, although I have been asked by hundreds of strangers if I were scores of different races, and I've been spoken to in dozens of languages.
- I've lived on a wealthy hill in San Francisco, in the gay ghetto in West Hollywood, the slums of L.A., the Mojave Desert, white conservative Orange County, Sacramento, cow country, and gang-infested Stockton, CA. I've met a great deal of people, both good and bad. None of them could ever guess my ethnicity.
- I was a member of an all-gay fraternity in college. Yes, it was fun. It may have been the only place I've felt at home, as members came from all the continents (except Antarctica).
- Changing my haircut or clothing can make me look like nearly any race.
- My eyes change from light yellow to dark brown, with green and hazel depending on my shirt (my father was a ginger).
- That whole kimchee and sandwich thing!
I hope you enjoyed this snippet in my weird life. Let me know in the comments if you want to hear more! (I got carded for wine today and seriously thought the cashier was going to call the cops on me).
