How to American Read online

  “No, it’s LaRONN James.”

  “Oh, okay. Sorry, nice to meet you, Laronn.”

  “Are you, by any chance, a religious person?”

  “Hmm, no, not really.”

  “You’re not a serious Christian or anything?”

  “No, I’m not religious. Why?”

  Well, this is probably a Jehovah’s Witness guy, complimenting my beats to lure me into their religion. I should have known it was too good to be true.

  “Okay, that’s great,” Laronn continued, “because religious people don’t agree with my line of work.”

  Ah, drug dealer, cool. As long as he wanted to buy some of my beats, I didn’t care if he sold crack to babies. I don’t judge.

  “I’m in the adult entertainment business.” Laronn dropped the bomb. “I make porn, and I perform in it.” I wasn’t sure how to feel about that, a bit impressed I guess; I quietly nodded. “Oh, that’s cool” was my only response.

  Laronn started opening up and talked with more excitement. “I love your beats, man. I want to buy a couple of them to put in my movies.”

  “Yeah, for sure. That’ll be cool.” I knew this was a story I’d be able to tell for the rest of my life.

  “That’s great, I want to put one of your beats in a new trailer for my website. It’s called Fudgestick.com. Check it out when you get a chance.”

  And I indeed went and checked out Fudgestick.com, for research purposes. The name was pretty on the nose; it was Laronn and his massive fudgestick having sex with MILFs. (If you don’t know what that means, look it up when you’re alone.) Two weeks later, my beat was on the front page of Fudgestick.com, accompanying Laronn’s performance in a hardcore porno trailer. With Laronn’s purchase of my beat, I officially became a professional musician, and I guess also a professional pornographer. This was the pinnacle of my music career, the highlight of my life. Fudgestick.com wrote me my first paycheck in show business.

  PS: Sadly, Fudgestick.com is no longer operating. I checked, for research purposes. Maybe I’ll show the world my Fudgestick.com music video trailer on The Tonight Show someday.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HOW TO

  GET HIGH

  For Asian kids, going to college is like going to elementary school. It’s mandatory. Asian parents are never proud of you for going to college; they are just not disappointed.

  “Dad, I got into college!”

  “So? Your cousin has three PhDs, from Harvard.”

  Both my first and second college choices were in Los Angeles: UCLA and USC. And they both unequivocally rejected me. I had good grades but I didn’t have enough extracurricular activities because apparently, the Yellow Panthers wasn’t a legitimate activity to these highbrowed admission officers; maybe I should have included Fudgestick.com on my college application. I was accepted by UC San Diego, the San Diego sister school of UCLA. I thought that was basically UCLA by the beach, so I went in blind without even visiting the campus. People used to always tell me, “College is the best four years of your life, enjoy it!” That’s way too much pressure. And that’s saying after you graduate college, everything is downhill from there. What a morbid thought. Not only was it not the best four years of my life, it turned out to be the worst five years of my life.

  I hated the school part of college and I despised the social part of UCSD. There was zero school spirit in UCSD. Our mascot was called the Triton; it’s a naked old man holding up a fork. Our sports teams all sucked; there were no Division I teams other than water polo, fencing and men’s volleyball. UCSD focused on academics and sports that nobody cared about. While my brother was partying at the UCLA versus USC rivalry football games at the Rose Bowl with a hundred thousand people, I was watching the Triton’s men’s volleyball team. The only cool thing in UCSD was its proximity to the beach and the surfing culture in San Diego, but I could barely swim. When my dad took me to the beach in Hong Kong when I was three, I cried and begged him not to put me near the water. I was born to be a land dweller. I ended up spending the better part of my college career smoking weed to mentally escape from UCSD.

  UCSD’s student body was made up of a majority of Asian students. I was one of them, but I didn’t want to be lumped in with everyone else. I was used to being different. So I tried my hardest to be the opposite of a stereotypical Asian student: I grew my hair out down to my shoulders, I started smoking weed and I never went to class: the holy trinity of an underachieving party kid from Arizona State. The only difference is, I wasn’t getting laid. I wasn’t trying to be a bad boy; it was a cry for help to stand out in a school with twenty thousand students. I felt like my identity was being judged based on the other Asians around me instead of my own personality, my inside voice screamed, I listen to Jay-Z, motherfuckers! In high school, I didn’t want to be perceived as the weird foreign kid; in college, I didn’t want to be perceived as the same as everyone else. I had a new identity crisis. One way to not be another Asian is to smoke so much weed that you transcend into being a stoner. If someone asked, “Hey, do you know that kid Jimmy from dorm 706?” I wanted people to say, “Yeah, the kid who’s high all the time?” instead of “Oh yeah, that Asian kid.”

  I went into UC San Diego as a mechanical engineering major but I was smoking way too much weed to keep up with the engineering curriculum. At the highness that I was, it would have taken me seventeen years to graduate with an engineering degree. I had no idea what I wanted to do. So I switched my major to economics, the easiest major that Asian parents would still approve of. I didn’t give a shit about the economy. How was I supposed to care about fiscal policies when I only had student loan debts and no assets? As long as weed was twenty bucks a gram, the Federal Reserve was doing their job. I ended up graduating UCSD after five long years with a pathetic 2.7 GPA. I Daniel Day-Lewis’d myself into being a stoner who didn’t care about grades, and at some point I actually started to believe I was this stoner character. There’s a Chinese saying that describes when someone goes too deep into something and they lose themselves in it, , which literally translates to “the fire leaves and the devil enters.” In my case it was “the brain leaves and the THC enters.”

  HOW TO GET DEPORTED

  Tijuana is a Mexican border town just south of San Diego where all the underage college kids in San Diego go to party. It’s a dirty cesspool of sins, which translates to a Disneyland for college students. There are dance clubs, strip clubs, clubs with donkeys, cocaine, sex and everything a college student could dream of. In my freshman year at UCSD, my dorm mate, John, and I went on our first trip to Tijuana with our friend Ian. Ian grew up in San Diego and had been going to Tijuana since high school, and he knew all the party spots. He was like our gringo Gandalf of Tijuana.

  We got off the San Diego city trolley around 10 p.m., ready for some shenanigans. We walked over the border and took a Mexican taxi to Revolution Boulevard, where all the debaucheries go down. It was a street filled with dance clubs and strip clubs with neon lights, accented by the smell of tacos and used condoms. Right as we got off the cab, a shady Mexican man wearing a cheap suit and sunglasses approached us. “Titties?” He motioned his hands like two titties bouncing on his chest. Of course we stopped and listened. He repeated, “Titties? Titty bar?” As intriguing as that sounded, our plan was to go to the nightclub first. So we politely declined and kept walking. He followed us down the street and kept on pushing. “Titties? Sucky sucky? Fucky fucky?” He was getting shadier by each word. “Titties? Titties? Cocaine? Heroin?” It escalated quickly. As he finally gave up, he just yelled out, “Maricon!” Within the first thirty seconds of arriving in Tijuana, we were offered titties, blow jobs and cocaine; us three Maricons knew we were in for a wild night.

  Ian led us to a dance club on Revolution Boulevard. It was twenty dollars for an all-you-can-drink dance club party. We treated that bar like starving refugees at HomeTown Buffet. Next thing I knew, we were hammered, fist-pumping in the middle of a sweaty Mexican dance club, and John was
nowhere to be found. “Shit, he probably went to the titty bar by himself,” I said to Ian. Then we heard the crowd cheering on the other side of the club, and we saw John in the middle of the commotion; he was dancing like Beyoncé as water was pouring onto his head from the upstairs balcony. John was having the time of his life. Ian and I looked up and we realized it wasn’t water being poured on John; it was actually a dude pissing onto John’s head from upstairs. John was way too drunk to realize he had been christened in a Mexican golden shower.

  “No way.” I looked at Ian in disbelief. “We have to get him out of there.” “John!” Ian screamed out. “Come on, let’s go!” John was more excited than I’d ever seen him. “Guys, this is amazing!” Ian and I looked at each other, not sure what to say. John yelled from across the club, “They are pouring water on me and the whole crowd is going crazy! This is awesome!” We just nodded and let him have it; it would be better if he never found out, and I hope he never reads this book.

  When we finally got out of the club; all the hustlers, drug dealers and prostitutes flocked to us like a pack of vultures. We ducked into this hole-in-the-wall taco shop to calm down from the overstimulation. We sat down on the high stools with a couple Dos Equises in front of the hot iron skillet filled with taco meat. The chubby Mexican lady with a red apron started heating up the little corn tortillas. She masterfully scooped a spoonful of meat, sprinkled a garnish of onion and cilantro and flipped the tacos onto a plate right in front of our drooling mouths. I was skeptical about the corn tortillas at first, from what my grandpa taught me in El Pollo Loco: it’s flour or nothing. So I asked the lady, “Do you have flour tortillas?” She didn’t even bother to look at me. Ian, a Tijuana taco shop veteran, said, “Dude, nobody does flour tortillas here; you sound like an idiot gringo. Eat the corn ones, they’re delicious.” I reluctantly bit into the corn-wrapped carne asada taco, and I realized I had been living a lie. This corn tortilla tasted like Salma Hayek’s lips. The sweet corn taste and the grainy texture layered with the meat, onion and cilantro transported me to a Mexican nirvana. I wanted to cry and hug the chubby Mexican lady who made this perfect taco. But I was a little bit too drunk to stand up straight. We decided we’d had enough excitement for one night and it’d probably be a good idea to head back to San Diego before another golden shower hit us. So we called a cab back to the border, but this wasn’t where this story ended; it was where it began.

  Going into Mexico from the United States was a wide-open revolving door with almost no security. Crossing the border from Mexico to the United States was quite the opposite. The border crossing point was a gray windowless cement tunnel with metal barriers. Instead of wide-open revolving doors, there were border patrol agents with guards carrying assault rifles standing behind them. This was no place to fuck around. I was a bit worried because we were all pretty drunk and John smelled like pee. We tried blinking really hard a few times to sober ourselves up, a drunkard’s futile attempt at sobriety. Ian, our trusted Tijuana guru, explained to me: “Dude, don’t worry, it’s super easy. I just show them my driver’s license and tell them I’m an American citizen, they let me right in every time. No questions asked.” Ian went up to the border patrol. And he was right; he got right through. Then John stumbled up to the border patrol counter, and he went through in a breeze. If they let John through, I was pretty sure I was in good shape. The stern border patrol lady signaled me over, and I promptly handed her my California driver’s license. She scanned my license.

  “Are you an American citizen?”

  “Yes.”

  I replied exactly how Ian had told me. Except I was too drunk to remember one minor detail: I wasn’t an American citizen. Unlike Ian, I was a permanent resident with a green card. Oops.

  The agent typed something into her computer and she stopped. She studied me for a long beat; then without saying a word, she got up and whispered something to the armed guard next to her. The guard looked square into my soul and marched two steps towards me. “Come with me, sir.”

  The man with the assault rifle led me down a long empty concrete tunnel to a small empty room. It had a wooden desk, two metal chairs and a blinding LED light on the ceiling. He stood in one corner with both of his hands holding the assault rifle. He said, “Have a seat.” I sat down on the cold metal folding chair in front of a heavy wooden desk. I sat there for thirty minutes and the guard never took his eyes off of me. Finally, the border agent who had checked my ID entered the room. She shut the door behind her and sat down across from me. She cut to the chase:

  “So why did you lie?”

  “I… I don’t…” I was so nervous I could barely form a sentence.

  “Why did you lie about being an American citizen?”

  “I’m sorry, that’s what my friend told me to say. I’m so sorry.”

  “Your friend told you to lie?”

  “No, but he said he just shows his driver’s license and says he’s an American citizen, and he told me to do the same.”

  “Well, is he an American citizen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, are you?”

  “No.”

  She looked over to the guard and had no further questions. I pleaded:

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to lie. I just didn’t think about it. I was going out in Tijuana and I was a bit drunk. I just did what my friend said he does when he crosses the border. I’m so sorry, ma’am. I’m just a stupid college student.”

  She didn’t respond; she got up and exited the room. Leaving me alone once again with the armed guard. This time, I was sure I was going to get executed by his assault rifle.

  Another thirty minutes passed by, and surprisingly, I was still alive. I had lost all hope of ever seeing any of my family and friends in the United States. I was contemplating my last words. I thought about where I’d live when I got deported, where I’d go to school and how I would survive on my own in Hong Kong, China or wherever they were going to send me. Maybe they were calling me an Uber to Guantanamo Bay. But mostly, I thought about how disappointed my parents would be in their idiot son, who got drunk in Tijuana and lied to a border patrol agent. Then the door swung open and the border patrol lady came in again, holding a stack of paperwork. This time, she was accompanied by two other border patrol agents: a Latino man and a middle-aged Asian man. I was ready for them to seal my fate as all three of them looked at me with utter disappointment. The lady put the paperwork in front of me and said to me:

  “You are lucky this time. I am going to put down that you forgot your green card, and we won’t charge you with anything or put anything on your record.”

  The gods took mercy on me; I lived to American another day.

  Then the Latino agent said, “There is a fee for not having your green card at the border. Pay that and you can go.”

  I looked down at the paperwork; the fee was $360, basically my entire college checking account. Hey, can you guys just deport me instead? But I had sobered up enough to know that this was one of the best deals I’d ever get in my life. I gladly paid the fee and thanked the lady for her mercy. As the guard ushered me out of the room, the Asian border patrol officer said one last thing to me that I’ll never forget:

  “Don’t do that again, or we’ll send you back to where you came from.”

  Those words shook me to my bones. I felt like the lost thirteen-year-old foreigner again. All the Pledge of Allegiances, American football and BET Rap City didn’t change anything; I was still just a foreigner living in America. And worst of all, this came from an Asian American person. I was angry. I was angry that an Asian brother sold me out. I was angry that he thought he was better than me. I was angry that no matter how hard I tried, I was still a foreigner. I couldn’t come up with a response that wouldn’t send me to prison. I just took the comment and silently walked out. I was still nothing more than an immigrant who could be deported at any time.

  A YOUNG STONER LIVING IN A RETIREMENT COMMUNITY

  I was depressed w
hen I went home that summer after freshman year. I was back at square one of my immigrant journey, and I had learned nothing in school other than how to roll a joint. I stayed with my dad, who had moved into a retirement community in Monterey Park filled with old Chinese people. I was a longhaired college boy living in a sixty-five-and-older apartment complex. People looked at me like I was some kind of alien invading their morning tai chi class. I tried being friendly with our neighbors but they weren’t having it. I greeted our eighty-year-old Chinese neighbor with a warm smile. “Hi, how are you?” No response; he just stared at me. I tried again in Mandarin. “Ni hao.” Still no response; he judgmentally looked me up and down and walked away. It was going to be a bleak summer.

  There was a community bench right outside of my bedroom. Every day at 7:00 a.m., I would wake up to old ladies chatting in Mandarin. An old lady said to her friend:

  “When did you stop getting your period?”

  “I was thirty-nine, it was early,” her friend responded in a matter-of-fact manner.

  “I stopped getting mine when I was fifty-four.”

  And that was the day I learned about menopause.

  I didn’t have a car and all my friends from Beverly Hills High lived twenty miles away. I went from the general population in college to solitary confinement in a Chinese retirement community. I felt like I was trapped on a leper island quarantined from the world. I would go down to the park across from the apartment and sit alone on a bench just to get away from the grandmas talking about their periods. One day, as if it was a sign from God, a Latino kid riding a BMX bicycle stopped by the bench I was sitting on. “Yo, you smoke weed?” he asked me. My long hair signaled for weed dealers like the bat signal called for Batman. I said, “Yeah. You got some?” And he pulled out a joint. “You smoke chewy?” I had no idea what chewy meant, but any weed would do at this point. “Sure.” And we lit up the joint right there in the park. After a couple of hits, I started coughing like a real amateur.