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Living Resistance: Myself, Covered
- Vanderbilt University Press
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222 LIVING RESISTANCE Myself, Covered Beverly Yuen Thompson “Would you just look at that guy with all those tattoos on his arm? Why would he do that?” my father growled, scowling at the man seated across the restaurant. I stared into my bowl of oatmeal, waiting for the moment to pass. I was careful not to pull self-consciously on the sleeves of my shirt, aware that it might give me away. It was, after all, difficult to justify wearing long sleeves in the middle of summer, every summer , for more than a decade. Luckily, my eighty-something father didn’t seem to notice. But just in case, I had a list of excuses ready: sun protection, stylistic preference , acclimatization to the humidity of my adopted hometown three thousand miles southeast. Aside from my father, I’d describe Spokane as having a very tattoo-friendly culture . That context fostered my early love of tattooing as an art form, along with my close friendship with Charissa Vaunderbroad, a local tattoo artist. When we were both nineteen, she tattooed an armband on my upper arm. With this third tattoo, however, I quickly discovered a deep conflict. While I loved the medium for personal expression, I did not love the attention, or, more accurately, the hostility that my tattoos often invoked, especially from older people. So I began my practice of hiding my tattoos, more and more as they encroached on my “public” skin. I chose to hide my tattoos from my father—for good reason. He knew of my friendship with Charissa and each time she was mentioned, he would unleash a torrent of angry verbal insults about the low status of tattooing, concluding with the damning question, “You haven’t gotten any more tattoos, have you?” I eventually told my father about my first two tattoos, but the third tattoo crossed the line of my father’s grudging tolerance. From then on, I hid all my tattoos from him. A new tattoo effectively sealed off the possibility of disclosure to my father. When I tattooed my Chinese zodiac sign—a snake—in a visible place on my arm, I knew I had crossed another line. My father harbors a hysterical, nearly phobic hatred of snakes; even the sight of the reptile on television provokes him to grab the remote control and zoom to another channel. Aware that my father could not endure even a televised snake, I knew he was incapable of casually glancing at his daughter’s snakedecorated arm. I chose to hide the tattoo from my father. Even though my Chinese astrological sign is central to my self-understanding, concealment is necessary to preserve our otherwise close relationship. Ironically, the bond of our shared profession (we are both academics) became the basis of my full backpiece tattoo. It depicts Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of book knowledge; a caricature of me reading stacks of books for graduate school; and a Myself, Covered 223 portrait of my father in his academic regalia. Even more ironically, the location of the tattoo threatens to peek out of my shirt collar, thus requiring great vigilance about my clothing during my semiannual visits. I call it my “redemption tattoo” reasoning that, if my father were ever to find out about my heavily inked state, I could at least point to his portrait as proof of my desire to honor, not denigrate, him. Later, when I moved to Manhattan to attend graduate school, I immediately felt unwelcome. As I walked around Chinatown during the sticky days of midsummer, angry glares pierced my tattooed skin. I could feel the onlookers’ revulsion, so reminiscent of my father’s own reactions. I had moved into a family member’s apartment in a neighborhood full of long-term residents. As a mixed-race Chinese and Anglo American, heavily tattooed twenty-two-year-old, I was different. I spoke only English , entertained white people, and blared punk rock music. Many Chinese people perceived the tattoos that covered my body as deviance, as the worst possible outcome of Americanization. The reactions I experienced in Chinatown—social rejection and ostracism—were dramatically different than those in Spokane. Luckily and curiously, Chinese hostility toward tattooing practices did not flow from my mother, who unconditionally accepted me. She was the exception. Her sister , however, expressed the quintessential negative reaction that I came to expect and dread from Chinese people. My aunt voiced discontent for all forms of body decoBeverly Yuen Thompson. (Photograph courtesy of Matt...