When I reveal my my Shakespearean origin story, it’s not to pass blame or punish through shame. Two things you should know up front:
1. I will never punish anyone for anything. This is a problem, but not one I care to fix.
2. They’re my parents. At the end of the day, no one loves me more than they do - and I can’t love anything more than I love them. You should have seen my occlusion, posture, and strong feet when I lived with my mom.
Here’s the truth: my parents’ culture could have easily committed infanticide. They let me live. They fed me. They housed me. Not because it was easy, but because they’re softies - the kind who still dream and hope and wish and believe in the unknown. If I had an autistic kid, completely deaf in one ear and halfway to legally blind by age five, I’d do a better job at inclusion and accommodation. But I also have no social capital at risk.
My autism has decreed that shame is a scourge. It's not bc I haven't lived much life, it's quantum thinking. Shame warps natural selection, tilting it toward the sneaky. Not clever, not cunning - sneaky. The kind of people who’ve already decided they’re destined for the middle, and that their only way forward is by staying two steps hidden. I’ll participate in shame after someone teaches me how to avoid it and I choose it anyway - because I want shame. Until then? Pass.
And here’s the hinge - my parents’ big life change started with about three drunken seconds. That’s it. Three seconds that shame then stretched into a lifelong, life-rearranging saga for six very important stupid-beautiful adults and their teenaged kids with plans of their own.
Immigration? Straight-up hellish. Designed to traumatize. America greets immigrants with fear and hostility when those who emigrate are the most hippy dippy, starry-eyed dreamers. Employers sell the American Dream — rugged, resilient, rebellious — but the arrival is a slap: designated scabby kung fu geisha, eyeing the dulcet Audrey Hepburn. Imagine the whiplash.
American legacy maxes out at four generations. I hate moving after two years; I resent having to learn a new grocery store. The soft-handed Ahns had lived in the same golmok for four thousand years before landing in 1984 New York. Try raising a fussy baby in that.
