Unreliably Yours

So, I don’t know what y’all think about “Asia Asians”-but they suck. Whew! That said, I DO have FOB family members. Moving on, I am sort of testing the waters here, with my new project, Mestizo Revelations, and I hope that people reading this will have replies and comments that can help me form new ideas or inspirations for this ‘zine, which will be about ethnic identity and culture.

Questions: Does being a certain kind of ethnic mean you have to like your fellow ethnics, or the culture they hail from? Can one still be proud of something one has no desire to entertain? In what is pride being taken in, then?

Returning to the Motherland/Ethnic Pilgrimaging-A trend since the ’60’s radical identity movements.

Questions: Is it a motherland? Or do I stand where I stand? How much of our identity is truly formed by our ancestors’ culture or more truthfully formed by our own experiences? I’ve got to say (and I don’t want to write too much here about it, since it’s part of my project, and I need to keep some tender nuggets of writing material to myself), I myself subscribed to the belief that “going home” would actually fortify something in me.

I was wrong.

I realized I am American.

(What a profoundly obvious conclusion, sucka!) It’s American style, my way. We’ve got to wake up to the unlikely realization that we are Americans, regardless of ethnicity, politics, etc. It sounds shitty, coming from a progressive, rail against the man perspective, but it’s infinitely and smug smilingly true. If you’re ethnic, just try and go to a country where you look like the people and realize how not them you are. Our attitudes, styles, preferences and experiences all have a unique tinge that people in less diverse, less bitchy and in your face, individual rights-asserting-til-death countries will not have, for better or worse. My experience with LA ethnoburbia is that it’s very, very rare. I feel quite privileged to have grown up in such circumstances for many reasons, especially after visiting Asia.

What do you all think about being American? It has such a dirtiness to it, I know. I don’t mean the obvious reactionary, flag waving, apple pie Americana, but just the simple fact of our lives: being either born and/or raised here.

Discuss. I’m feeling ferklempt.