An Ode to Patriarchy

Strophe

When I learned I was going to be a father, I was in Hanoi, quaffing bia hơi while perched atop a red plastic stool. My first thought was that an early, reckless death was now forever off the table. A man can only be so irresponsible.

I began to hope for a girl. If my child is a boy, he will come from a long line of men who have felt no compulsion to look themselves in the mirror.

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Every morning I wake to my son bleating like a calf, more goat than child. Atoms materialize in my breath and fingers. The nauseating, ear-piercing whine.

I catch myself wondering when it will end. It, being fatherhood.

My son bleats and I wake.

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The academy has taught me to isolate the past into weapons of my own making: archive, text, stories of my family's migration from Ilocos Norte to Hawai'i, their offspring's fornications with Native, Japanese, Korean, Cambodian, Black, and Haole people.

But there are other pasts. The past of my white, southern grandfather who preached that divorce and homosexuality were tempestuous paths to hell.

Sometimes, the past is not an archive; it's the white uncle asking you at your own grandmother's funeral how you learned to speak English.

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We all have work to do. Wake work, as Christina Sharpe put it. The work of dwelling in the wake of racist oppression, "plotting, mapping, and collecting the archives of the everyday of Black immanent and imminent death."

I attempt a different type of death work. Ode work: the work of giving honor and respect in a way that also dismantles that honor. I do not know how to speak of the dead without honor; I cannot speak of my elders without respect, even as I seek to strip every piece of metal from their armor.

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Statistics my son will need to know:

As a man, you'll be three and a half times more likely to commit suicide than a woman. You'll be six times more likely to be killed by someone with a gun, and over ten times more likely to be incarcerated.

If you are bisexual, like your father, you'll be twice as likely to be depressed as a straight person, and nearly twice as likely to commit suicide as a gay or lesbian person.

As an Asian American, you will be three times less likely to seek mental health treatment, and far less likely to report sexual assault.

As a person born in Hong Kong, you'll meet people never satisfied until they dig this fact out of you.

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I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, the whitest big city in the United States. My parents were both preachers' kids who met on the evangelical routes between Hawai'i and Oregon. As the only non-white person in my class besides my twin brother, manhood was a game I could never win. In time, I grew so far from this thing, "man," that I began to see beauty in the blurred-off distance.

When I was twelve, my uncle died. I heard whispers—"gay," "HIV," "AIDS." I told my parents that I loved the way he talked and they scolded me. I did not know it was a lisp. I was kept from his funeral. I did not know his name was supposed to be a warning sign.

When you hide, your heart starts grumbling like thunder that pounds until your whole body becomes the storm.

______

I grew up dreaming of androgynous punk rock stars with inky black hair. Karen O, Korean-born yelper spitting on herself on stage. Billie Joe, pink punk rebel—hot mess, Chaplin Tramp, slurring every word with a nimble tongue. I had a hard time believing that anyone could look at that man, whose body language invited desire, who sang in contradictions and nonsense, and not feel aroused.

My sexuality became a faith-based conviction.

Dear God,

          I can't be the only person here

                              who is solidly breathing in...