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“Tennis Ace”
Written January 10th, 2007
Well, it’s been about three weeks since I found out that my dad was 62, but I still have a hard time believing it. I had always known that my dad wouldn’t live for very long because classic Vietnamese tradition and culture had taught him shit about health and medicine, but now that I know his real age, I’m worried that his death may come sooner than expected.

For the last few years, I’ve treated him like shit and didn’t really care at all. As I’ve described to some of my friends, “The distance between me and my dad is so palpable that you can take bites out of it... Hell, no you can’t! The distance is so palpable that it’s actually solid iron.” I don’t actually know what my dad really thinks of me ever since I came out to him and my mom. I just like to think that he’s always on board with how my mom feels, but a part of me also thinks that he feels that I’m throwing my life away. He could die thinking that I’m on the road to misery, and I would never have the courage to ask him what he actually feels or too reassure him that I’ll be okay.

In the past, we did a lot more stuff together, and it was for leisure. From as early as first grade to junior high, we used to go to the park by my house to play tennis for 2-3 hours every Saturday or Sunday morning. [Between junior high and high school] I lost a lot of respect for him. The way he treated my mom and his bigoted views of females and other races made me hate him even more. Just so I could spite him, I vowed to never touch another tennis racket ever again. Early in the summer before the start of sophomore year, the morning wake up calls to go play tennis completely ceased altogether.

So today, when I told everybody that I was going to join tennis this year, nobody believed me at first. But believe me, I’m hella going to do it. It may be the last thing that I’ll do that’ll make my dad happy, and the only way that we’ll ever get close again.
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No stockings hung above the fire place this year, and no tree ornamented with colorful globes and lights took center stage in the living room. The days leading up to Christmas were just as any other day in the winter.

My parents, having become old and tired, did not decorate the house this year. This was not a sudden decision, as during the previous years, the motivation to dig up the boxes of ornaments and lights and get out the ladder had been diminishing. A son, having grown up and learned to prioritize “better things,” was no longer around to help.

I sat back in the couch in the computer room with a photo album in my arm. Photos of me and my family from the 1990s—was flipping through them the only way I could ever be close to my family again?

Christmas in the Park, 1991:


In the first game and the longest game that parents ever play with their baby, the parents play God. With a perfect strategy, they shape their child’s destiny and establish his purpose in life, but the game occupies their minds so much that they never realize, in the end, it is all pretend. Fate, like the roll of a dice, gives the parents no real control.

The little child in a knit sweater and a knit beanie waddling along concrete, confused as to why water is erupting from the ground before him—who would’ve ever seen him as one who would, in years to come, come home drunk and vomit in the toilet, shove six-gauge tapers through his earlobes, lie to get money, lie to get sex, and ultimately betray his parents?

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“Not Good Enough”
Written April 23rd, 2007 (Excerpted)

[I told my parents about Junior Prom.] It had gone well at first. I opened by asking my parents if I could get my $100 birthday present by the end of this week. When my mom asked what it was for, I told her very bluntly that I needed it for junior prom.

My mom took it very lightly while my dad sat there with his attention divided between the Sharks game on TV and his food. She asked me where it was, when it was, which of my friends were going, and she laughed when I told her that we were taking a limo there. She agreed to give me the $100, and then she continued eating.

Funny. Neither of them asked me about whether or not I had a date.

Finally, my dad spoke up. “This stew is so spicy! I think I bit onto a pepper!”

My mom added, “Yeah, so hot; what’d you put in here, honey? My face is on fire!” As their annoying charade continued, I got more annoyed, so I contemplated a way to get them back on topic.

“So I’m taking a guy from Monta Vista High School!” I blurted out. I immediately focused on my dad’s facial expression, which turned out to be as stoical as ever.

My mom did all the talking, which I had expected. She asked rather normal questions about what his name was (“James... Cutler, not Silva”), how old he was (“16”), how’d I meet him (through Jack), where he lived (“Cupertino”), how he did in school (“Well”), and whether or not he was actually my boyfriend (“No, he’s my friend”). I answered all questions honestly, and everything went calmly.

Of course, that was not the result that I wanted. As my dad was sitting there, completely “focused” on the TV, he was definitely thinking something about the topic but wouldn’t say it. I sensed that a topic change was about to come up again, so I intercepted with the first thing that popped up in my head, “Dad, I need you to come with me to pick him up and drive him down here this weekend.” (Not actually necessary, but all I really cared about at that point was saying something to pull him into the conversation.)

“Hold on,” he muttered as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He got up, dropped his dishes off in the sink, and walked over to and sat down on the sofa facing the TV, leaving me and my mom alone at the dinner table. I asked him again, to which he snapped back why James couldn’t just find his own way over here. “He can take the bus or taxi, can’t he?” my dad suggested.

“Or bike over here?” my mom added in more calmly. “That Jack guy used to bike over from Cupertino when he stayed here overnight... those several times...” The look on her face suddenly twisted as she leaped to a completely irrelevant and false realization. “Brian, was Jack really Kathleen’s boyfriend—”

“Yes!” I shouted over her. I knew all those times I housed Jack for Kathleen was going to come back and bite me in the ass. (I’m not blaming anyone for my mom’s misunderstanding.)

My mom got up from the table and joined my dad on the sofa, leaving me alone on an island in our kitchen. At this point, I knew that my mom was already driving miles away from my original intentions of this dinner conversation, and she was trying to drag me along with her. “Brian, I need you to always tell me the truth!”

“I’m not lying! Jack was Kathleen’s boyfriend! Only thing he ever did was introduce me to guys!” I defended myself.

She reiterated herself again. “Brian, why can you hardly ever be truthful with us? Where’s your respect? Do you think we’re just easy? That you can beg us to drive you down to cities three hours away, not clean up your room, and then yell at us? Normal kids aren’t like this, and me and your dad are even more lenient then their parents! Why can’t you treat us like how those kids treat their parents?”

Reluctantly, I argued with her briefly. “You don’t even have any idea of what ‘normal kids’ are like! I have friends who, when they do talk to their parents, yell all the time! You give me permission to do things, and I do thank you for them. These friends of mine don’t get permission for some of the things they do, but they do them anyway, and they make sure that they can piss off their parents as much as possible in the process.”

“Brian, you don’t compare yourself to others!” she retorted.

“What?! I can’t compare myself to others, but you can?”

“Well, those kids are just bad kids anyways.”

When my mom judges the quality of my friends, I know that the first thing she looks at is how they do in school. Who were the friends that I was thinking of when I made that argument? Maggie, who’s doing a hell lot better than me at, and cares more about, school; Jack, Mr. 2200-something SAT score; and Vance, future UCSD student.

Arguing with her was just going to lead to dead ends, so I tried to get back on track. “Look, I don’t care. I wanna know what dad thinks about me going to prom with a guy.”

My mom fell quiet, and our eyes fell on him. My dad was silent, and his face was stern. He didn’t turn his head to me; his eyes still laid glued to the TV. Finally, he began droning on with the same dribble he gave me last year when I came out. “Make school your first priority. Nothing else is important right now. Once you’re done getting your education, you can go ahead and do whatever you want with your life.”

I sat still at the dinner table, gaping at him in disbelief. It was like nothing had changed; he was still dancing around the main issue and could not open up to me. My attempts to get closer to him within the last four months started to look futile.

“Not good enough,” I declared. I abruptly left the dinner table without another word and trampled off to my room, where I found myself toying with my tennis racket.



As I stood there at the entrance to the tennis court at the park by my house, I replayed the events of the past hour in my head. 8:45, there was still a slight hint of blue in the sky, but it was dead silent. I squinted through the darkness to completely make sure that no one was still at the park; looked like everybody had already settled into their homes. The air was chilly, but that still couldn’t cool down my rage. What I did for the next five minutes was as hazy and as unclear as the dark blue shadows that the night sky cast over the earth.

I clutched my racket handle tightly, letting the racket frame absorb my anger. And then the anger was transferred into the cement as my racket frame made contact. Over and over again.