My Inner Whitey

I've been pondering a lot about my own internalized colonization lately, and I've decided to try and document the progression/development of my inner whitey, or just overall inner-colonization.

When I was growing up, my family really liked (and still likes) showcases of Vietnamese pop music such as Paris By Night. Consequently, one of my biggest idols when I was a wee-little kid was Đon Hồ:
But that didn't last very long. No one thought Paris By Night was cool even though I went to a school with so many Vietnamese kids the school celebrated Tết(Vietnamese New Years). Instead, my next idol (as well as every kid at my elementary school) was Red Ranger:

He was the first of many white people that I'd secretly idolize growing up. To speed things up, from elementary school to middle school, I was really interested in the military and grew fond of war movies - particularly movies about the Việt Nam War. The games I played growing up always involved killing VC's, not as a member of the ARVN, but rather, I always wanted to be Johnson, the white guy who jumped out of cool helicopters, blowing up villages and gunning down hordes of VC's with my M-16 rifle like Rambo.
Also, during this period of my life, I was first exposed to the annual April 25th protests in Westminster, where people lined the streets and set fire to Hồ Chí Minh pictures and Vietnamese flags (not that pro-colonizer yellow with red strips flag, I'm talking about the yellow star flag). I find it interesting that the only internationally reknown or historically recognized Vietnamese person I was ever taught about while growing up was someone who my community considered a fuck-up and traitor. No one ever made an effort to actually teach me about a Vietnamese figure I could be proud of and look up to, instead, they talked about how America was so great for letting us flee and take refuge in our Little Saigon.

Onwards to high school. It was in high school that I started developing my own musical tastes that branched out from what my parents exposed me to. My parents provided the foundation of my musical appreciation with bands such as The Beatles, Carlos Santana, and the Eagles. It was my friend named Cody Pettrow who really had an impact on the music I listened to as well as my decision to pick up playing guitar. He really got me hooked on Weezer, and we shared a deep love of Rivers Cuomo (bordering creepy fan-boy status):
Rivers Cuomo basically taught me that it was okay to be a loser - if you're white.

Next, I got into the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and for a while my idols were Anthony Kiedis and John Frusciante (who is still arguably one of my biggest musical influences as well as idols):











I don't think I cannot emphasize enough how much I really liked John Frusciante (picture on the right). It was a sort of affinity that lasted throughout high school and through much of college. I still have a folder with pictures of him on my laptop and I used to go on youtube just to watch live performances of him. I wanted tattoos because of him. I thought smoking was cool because of him. Yeah, kind of sad, I know. I had a small Frusciante hiatus when I really got into the Beatles and Nirvana and started looking up to John Lennon and Kurt Cobain.

Basically, I spent most of my life looking to the white heterosexual man for someone to look up to and idolize next, resulting in me spending a lot of time lamenting that I wasn't white and that my daydreams never actually involved the real me because no asian boy fits the mold of cool lead singer of a rock band or village-bombing figher pilot.

It wasn't until high school that I started having non-white idols again. I hung out with the group of asian kids who adored Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese (specifically, Taiwanese since the girl who had a thing for me was Taiwanese and she made an effort to distinguish the difference between Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese dramas). The girl who had a crush on me sort of projected her idols onto me such as Jun Matsumoto (left) and Van Ness Wu (right):


Basically, you couldn't be asian and cool unless you strove to be either Japanese, Korean, or from the Taiwanese boy band, F4. I remember Vietnamese friends trying to learn Japanese, Korean, or Chinese, but never once bothered to learn Vietnamese despite being unable to speak their parents' language. It wasn't cool to be Vietnamese, but I had the advantage of having long hair and not too many 'Vietnamese' features and could somewhat pass as an ambiguous asian, but seriously, despite going to a school with lots of Vietnamese kids, I associated with a predominantly Taiwanese and Japanese crowd. Hell, even I tried to learn how to speak Japanese at one point. Learning Vietnamese was called fobby while learning Japanese, Korean, or Chinese made you cool. Whenever we went out to eat, we'd drive far distances to eat Japanese or Korean food, but despite being only minutes from Westminster, I never once ate Vietnamese food with my friends in high school. The only time I remembered having Vietnamese pride as a kid was in middle school, not because I was proud of who I was, but because we had to stick together to fight back against violence from the Latino and white kids (which makes me question, where the hell did all the Taiwanese kids that I knew in high school go to middle school?!)

As an asian male in high school, I quickly learned what Yellow Fever meant before Wongfu made it cool and popularized. The girls I knew outside of the Japanese-worshipping clique, liked white boys. As a Vietnamese kid, I wasn't white enough for those asian girls and not Japanese enough for the other asian-asian girls. Fuck. It sucked hanging out with girls and have to listen to them talk about how hot white guys were and how lame asian boys were because we're so timid and lanky. I remember me and a bunch of guy-friends had huge bouts of 'fuck girls, they're stupid' phases.

I also remember that high school was when I first learned how to masturbate and first watched porn. This was significant because before this I was always teased about my penis size for being asian, but actually seeing another man's penis - and not just any type of man, but a white man - really fucked with me. When I realized that I actually wasn't as big as the guys in the porn I saw, it made me realize that all the things the white kids were saying to me in middle school could actually be right.

Anyways, I'll save college for later because I have to get back to studying, but yeah, I still carry a lot of this colonization with me today. I'm still insecure as fuck about my penis size. I get pissed, but also really sad, when I see an asian girl dating a white guy. I still can't imagine an asian guy as front person of a band. My concept of what it means to be a man is still all sorts of white. Regardless, the first step to fighting back against a colonized mindset is to know what the fuck went wrong.