Saturday, August 20, 2005
A few years ago, when blogs started to become all the rage, a couple of my good friends prodded me to start one. Their reasoning was that in our circle of acquaintances, my life seemed to them to be one of the most entertaining, unique, self-deprecating, but mainly downright interesting. Truthfully, I found the idea of blogging a bit self-important and narcissistic, and while I had dabbled in biographical creative writing as an undergraduate, I resisted my friends' insistence to put my words onto the world wide web.
I think part of the fascination other people had about my life was that on paper, I was part of the quintessential perfect nuclear immigrant Asian-American family: my dad is the founder and CEO of small high tech company in a well to do suburb of Los Angeles, my mom is a very put together member of our community church, and along with their two sons: me, a Harvard graduate, and my younger brother, a former National Junior tennis champion who won a scholarship to play tennis for Stanford, we were the ideal Chinese-American family. In our hometown, we were kinda like the Jones's but with an Asian last name.
The obvious line here is that the myth was not real, and yes, there were many many cracks in the penetratable surface, but the "faults" in my life and my family were not the main reason why my friends would persist, "You really need to blog." Rather, it was my complete honesty and blunt fact-of-a-matter "OMG the sky is falling but not really" way of story telling that I think they found amusing. Or maybe it really was schadenfreund. Either way, I finally decided to commit to trying to transfer my energy and enthusiasm of my life's drama onto this blog.
There are many reasons why I like the name 50 percent for the title of my musings, and in future posts I will go further into them. In this post, however, I will explain how the name was first conceived and the impetus for it. Well, in junior high and high school, I was very active in my hometown's local Chinese Christian church. Twice a week it was Church Youth Group. For some of you this may ring a bell - memorizing bible verses, car washes to raise money for missionary trips, water balloon fights at yearly Summer retreats religiously themed around such vanilla topics as "Following His Path," or "Light the Fire."
Anyway, so in my same age group of Youth Group and Bible study, there were 8 of us, 5 guys and 3 girls, and we would look forward to our weekly get togethers where we walk in God's path together. This continued all the way through our teens until we graduated from high school where we departed for different ends of the country to go to college. Well, fast forward 4 years, and guess what, 4 of us turned out to be gay or lesbian. Yes, I am not joking about that, I am being completely serious - 50 percent, of which I am in. And I say that proudly and guilt free too.
So on that note, I hope in future posts to provide you with such amusing tidbits from my life. I'm not a professional writer so be lenient (although I am getting a Masters in Fine Arts right now, but not in writing). However, hopefully, the events that I write about such as, "The Day I Came Out to my 18-year-old Brother and how Immediately After he One-Upped me and Told Me that his 17-year-old Mormon Girlfriend was Pregnant but he needed to Borrow $1000 for a Paternity Test," or, "The Night I Came Out to my College Roommate and then he Nervously Said 'Cool... Does this Mean I Can Now Date Your Ex-Girlfriend? We've been Instant Messaging and Flirting a Lot Since You Two Broke Up.'"
Welcome to my life!
posted by 50-percent at 1:59 PM 5 comments
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