This is me being
beaten into submission. What's a guy to do?
1. I have a birthmark stab in the middle right in my
philtrum, covering up most of it, in fact. As a kid, it was quite prominent, but nobody believes me when I tell them nowadays as it has faded somewhat. People always assumed that it's just a bit of facial hair. If nobody notices a birthmark, does it still exist?
2. I blame my fear of spiders on a special on spiders I watched at the age of 4 or 5. They said that spiders are poisonous and bites! At the time, I was also very scared of snakes, and I associated spiders with snakes and became deathly afraid of both of them.
3. I have somehow out grown my fear of snakes. Strange.
4. My hands aren't small for my size, but my fingers are short externally. It's weird, webbing between my fingers extends a full inch (2 to 3 cms) above my knuckles. This has convinced me that I would make a pretty good swimmer, once I learn to swim that is.
5. I makes me a pretty inconsistent basketball shooter though. Unfortunately, it's much more manly to be good at basketball than to not know how to swim.
6. Alcohol doesn't sit well in my stomach at all. I blame my father for this. Why couldn't I have gotten my tolerance of alcohol from my mom's side? I suspect I may be a bit allergic to it.
7. I have been told that I have either an off centered swirl in the back of my head or two of them. There has been no clear consensus amongst observers. Supposedly this is unusual, but I have my doubts.
8. My first memory, which I'm pretty sure is fabricated (or a dream) consist of me laying in my bed with all of my relatives standing over me. One by one, they introduce themselves and their relationship to me while I answer back by addressing them appropriately. Once I finished, I went back to sleep.
9. I was known in high school for wearing sneakers even when I had to dress up. In fact, I'm fairly sure that's how I ended up winning Homecoming King.
10. Just before I left for the Homecoming game where they announce the results, my mom tried to prepare me mentally by stating that usually Asians don't win these type of popularity contests. Guess I showed her! I then proceeded to leave the game at half time. We were losing 28-0. What did you expect?
11. The first movie I've ever watched in English is Back to the Future III. It was on the flight from China to Los Angeles. I was pretty confused at the start of the movie, but I'm fairly proud to say that I figured out the central plot line by the end of the movie.
12. Speaking of that trip. The plane was supposed to continue to San Francisco where I was to meet up with an acquaintance. I was 10, so my family arranged a chaperon. The flight was originally thought to have been to SF first and then continuing to LA, but I guess something got lost in translation. Nevertheless, she left me in the LA after we made it through customs and I flew to SF by myself.
13. Nobody knows this, but I actually got lost in the LA airport. Ten years old, not understanding a word of English. I got back to the plane by following a person who was also on the plane and I thought was going to SF as well. Turns out, I followed the wrong guy. How did I end up on the right plane? I didn't even know San Francisco was called San Francisco at the time. I think I just wandered around until I did.
14. I've been to everywhere in China. Name it, and I've been a tourist there. Guiling, Xi'an, all those mountain resorts all over the south, Taishan, Huashan, and so on and so on. Unfortunately, I don't remember any of it. I was a kid and was just bored and unhappy that I had to leave home.
15. My first flight was on a visit to Xi'an. My grandma was worried that I would get airsick and fed me some egg rolls. Grandma always knew best.
16. Actually she didn't. What am I talking about? She was a friend of our family physician, so she was able to influence our prescriptions. Being the eldest grandson, she took a policy of "better safe than sorry" with me. Any time I caught a cold or got sick at all, she would have the physician prescribe two weeks' worth of penicillin shots. Those shots didn't so much hurt than numb my
gluteas. This continued basically without fail until I moved to America.
17. I could go on forever about these shots. I distinctively remembered when the hospital switched over to throwaway syringes. Now that I think about it, I might have been under more danger from those shots. As a precaution, every time I was prescribed those shots, they would give me a test shot to see if I was allergic. Of course, once I passed the first one, it became very redundant for them to do this, but they did nevertheless, as if I could suddenly develop an allergy over the course of a month.
18. The only time the test shot returned a positive result was when I threw such a fit that they had to hold me down to administer the test. This worked out for me since after half an hour, my wrist was still quite red and swollen from their grip. The doctor took the precaution and changed the prescription to some Chinese medicine.
19. I eventually got so tired of those shots into my butt that I made a deal with my grandma: I would take IV drips of penicillin every other day for two weeks instead of getting shot in my butt everyday. So yes, I spent a good deal of my childhood before I turned 10 getting IV drips of penicillin for colds.
20. I had a cousin who was dropped on her head as a baby. I've only met her twice at family dinners and she spent both dinners staying very quiet and being fascinated by her own fingers. She also had this smell whenever she went. To this day, she's still the only mentally handicapped Asian I've ever met. It's sad how shameful we Chinese treat the mentally handicapped.
21. As a kid, I hated visiting my ancestral home. To me, it was fields of mud and horse and cow manure. I couldn't walk anywhere without stepping on something unpleasant.
22. But once, when I was about 8 or so, I suddenly got an inexplicable urge to go visit there. I told my grandma this one night, she was very shocked by my admission and wondered what was wrong with me. The next day, we received a phone call that my great grandma had passed away.
23. I was never a good hugger as a kid. My grandparents always wanted to hug me but I'd always shy away because I thought it was not boyish/manly.
24. The only time I met my great grandma, she was blind. Being the eldest great grandson, she especially wanted to meet me. She spent minutes running her hands all over my face. Looking back, it was nice, but at the time, I hated it and couldn't run away fast enough.
25. When I'm with a group of friends, I have a bit of a habit of always wanting to prove I know the most about certain things, like say a movie, or football, or how to play a video game. I have to constantly try and catch myself.
26. Sitting, I have good rhythm and dancing skills.
27. Standing, I still have good rhythm, but the dancing skills go out of the window. I'm a bit of Linghu Chong here. Sitting down dancing, I'm number 2 of all time, number 1 being Michael Jackson. (I like the analogy here, MJ is a bit like Dong Fang Bu Bai don't you think?)
28. I was good enough of a trumpet player to play melodic parts in my school band, but once the seating went over to a challenge basis, I lost my motivation and played rhythm instead. I just don't like the idea of challenging my friends to a contest and showing them up.
29. I don't see the resemblance between Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson. I'm sorry, I just don't. Maybe I'm weird, but I just don't see it.
30. I like my eggs either scrambled, hardboiled, or over hard.
31. I used to get tonsillitis all the time as a kid. Eventually, my grandma got fed up with it and decided they should be removed. I went into the operation without anesthesia, or not enough, since all they did was spray a little into my mouth just before I went into the operating room. When they cut out the first tonsil, I snapped up in bed and demanded that they stop. After finally getting me to lie back down by promising they would not put anything more into my throat, they removed the other one. All in all, very painful. But I consider myself lucky, since right after the operation, the entire hospital lost power.
32. My first crush was Barbara Yung in Legend of Condor Heroes. When she peeked out of those curtains from that boat, I was gone. Well, I was like 5 or 6, give a guy a break.
33. My first real crush was a girl in my class. From 1st grade until I moved away in 3rd grade. She was the girl that always gets elected to class offices. She would always be the Head of Class and I would be the Vice Head of Class. I never minded being up for offices below hers. She was so very cute and I liked her hair too.
34. Once, I was also the Math Assistant, in charge of collecting all the math homeworks. I was terrible at it. Not because I was derelict in my duty, but because I was too nice. Homeworks are only considered late once I handed the stack of workbooks over to the teacher, so if a classmate or two forget to bring their homework, I would hold off handing the workbooks over. But some of the classmates took advantage of this and would "forget" their workbooks for weeks, meaning the next set of homework would be set by then. So I had the entire class coming up to me to ask for their workbooks and I would hand them back out and collect again later, keeping track of who was late in turning the last homework. After a couple of weeks, I lost track.
35. Speaking of math, my math teacher in elementary school was pretty hot too. Yes, I thought about such things when I was seven, so sue me.
36. On my first day in pre-school, my class sit around in a circle as the teacher began handing out apples. I panicked because my family would always peel the skin off the apple before letting me eat it because they were paranoid about germs, and could afford to have maids do it. So I cried and made a huge fuss in front of everyone and demanded that the teacher peel the apple before giving it to me. Eventually she relented, all the while giving me the evil eye, but it felt a Pyrrhic victory even while I was throwing my fit. I stopped demanding for my apples to be peeled afterwards.
37. Everyone thought I was going to grow to at least 2 meters tall when I was little. I ended up being only 180cms. Somehow, I feel like I've let everyone down.
38. My mom always accused me of having "8 feet", meaning that, when standing, my toes point outwards. She says that it makes me look stupid, but I kept trying to explain to her that it's a result of gym class in elementary school, where they made everyone stand with their heels together but toes pointed outwards. Eventually, I got tired of her nagging and began to really try and correct my feet position. I think that in general, I've done pretty well.
39. Even when in China when sodas were hard to come by, I've always loved drinking soda. My dad used to get very frustrated and once asked me if I had drank anything besides soda since moving to the US. Keep in mind this was a year or two after I moved. After pausing for a long time, I told him that I had indeed drank some soup.
40. My first crush on an American girl was Amy. If you are reading this Amy, this should not come as a surprise to you because I'm fairly sure you figured it out. She was in my class and on the same school bus as me. She had brown, shoulder length hair and a very sweet smile. But she was a bit of a tomboy, her house used to be in the middle of a pretty big field and she pretty impressive biceps for girl. What can I say? I found her cute. I wonder where she is now?
41. I used to help out the school offices, my job consisted of running messages to certain teachers if something cannot be said over the intercom and collecting attendance sheets. We'd go around the school collecting them from teachers and take them back to the office to be scanned into the database. I didn't like this one kid, so I would discreetly mark him as absent when nobody was looking. It was part of my plan to take over the world. Strangely, nothing ever came of it.
42. Boxers.
43. When I was 6 or 7. I was chasing one of my cousins around the house when he ran through a little path that was between the sofa and the wall. I naturally followed him, but tripped and fell. Unfortunately, a nail was sticking out from the back of the sofa and tore right through my shoulder, leaving a scar that is still visible on my left
deltoid. That one hurt.
44. When I was 3 or 4, my mom bought a bunch of fireworks and wanted to set them off together. I was excited but scared of the fire as well. So my mom had her hands over mine as I held on to the end of one firework. The first two shots went off without a hitch but the third, fourth, and fifth shot backfired and came out of the bottom, right into the middle of my palm. My mom, with my hand between her hand and the blazing balls of fire, thought I was just scared and tightened her grip, telling me not to be scared. By the time she realized what happened, my right palm was burned pretty badly. Though the years have healed most of them, you can still clearly see the biggest one right below the second knuckle on the back of my right ring finger. If you look closely, you can still see another round scar in the middle of my palm. It was the only time in my life where I begged to have penicillin shots administered.
45. To my knowledge, I'm not allergic to anything.
46. By the second time I listen to a song, I can hum most of its melody. Lyrically, however, is a complete disaster. I get so many words wrong regardless of language that it's a joke.
47. My grandparents claim that I was born during the worst snow storm in the city in the last 20 years. I have yet to receive confirmation from my parents on this subject, and I doubt I will ever seek it.
48. I convinced looks, at least somewhat, is related to personality. While moving around, I would always be surprised to find people in the new town that look the spitting image of people I knew in the old town and invariably they would have the same personality. Like I told a friend of mine once (or maybe several friend many times): "It's like God has ran out of extras from the movie of my life." Wait, did I come up with that or did I bum that off of a comedian? No matter, it's true.
49. My family used to be very worried about my nose when I was small. I had a very flat button nose and everyone was worried that I would look like that as a kid. It scared me to death that I could grow up with a flat nose. Observing that whenever they said anything about it, they would pinch the tip and the bridge of my nose, I assumed that doing so would help my nose become less flat. So I did it all the time as a kid, pinching the tip and the bridge of my nose. I only stopped when I moved to the US and my mom made a comment that she used to be scared that I would grow up with a flat nose but it seems the fear proved unfounded. It was one of the great triumphs in my life.
50. I get very philosophical whenever I stand on the side of a busy street and watch the cars go by. To me, the passengers in the cars are just cameos in my life. But still, they are living full lives. They love and hate, get happy and sad, have sad memories and joyous futures, each life a story on its own. And yet in an instant, how many fully realized and fascinating stories whiz by in front of me? And to think, I'm a mere cameo in the movie of their lives. For all of my memories, quirks, knowledge, frustrations, and triumphs, my presence in their lives is for but a blink of an eye. Might that little bit of interaction be my greatest triumph or sadness of all?
So yeah, I hope I still have things to talk about with people who read this.
