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We looked inside some of the posts by thinkingiswishful and here's what we found interesting.
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2K
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2 days ago
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9
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7
Last Seen Tumblr Blogs
Fun Fact
There are dozens of funny blogs to kill time on Tumblr.
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i feel like bo burnham did the exact opposite of sell out. like his early stuff is pretty tacky run-of-the-mill edgy™ comedy which was his way of breaking into the business but now he’s just like “hey do you guys want to hear about how celebrities are products manufactured by a capitalistic society preying on the marginalized also art is dead *funky synth noise*”
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it’s hard out here for a baby-faced demon
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If 👏 you 👏 are 👏 at 👏 uni/college 👏 register 👏 to 👏 vote👏 this 👏 is 👏 not 👏 a 👏 drill 👏
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On Being Half White (or anything at all)
I was born and raised in Orange County, California in 1995 to a white father and a first-generation Vietnamese mother. The first 10 years of my life I lived in a comfortable middle-class suburb called Fountain Valley and was raised by my Vietnamese-only speaking grandmother while both my parents worked.
In many ways, I was culturally raised with Vietnamese traditions of food, religion, language, and manners. Every day I ate my grandmother’s cooking which usually consisted of hastily prepared meals like com tam I’d drench in nuoc mam but occasionally included more time-consuming traditional dishes like pho, goi cuon, and banh cuon. Every night my grandmother would teach me how to recite Vietnamese prayers until I mastered them verbatim. Although I never personally took interest, you’d always hear faint Vietnamese music or TV playing from my grandmother’s bedroom. To this day I get agitated when people don’t take off their shoes in homes (especially mine.)
My upbringing revolved around a generally conservative Vietnamese mother compounded by Catholicism which led to things that may be considered abuse by some family’s standards but was pretty normal in Asian culture (especially for a first-generation family that came from extreme poverty.) I won’t get into details, but years later after seeing how some of my white friends in healthy households were raised by their parents, it probably wasn’t the best for my mental wellbeing and maturation.
My school was so Vietnamese that the last name Nguyen and Tran spanned many pages, for both students and faculty. Orange County is home to the largest Little Saigon in the United States, so South Vietnamese influence is rampant in the community where I grew up. Every week my mother used to make me fetch her ca phe da from a local shop, where I always very anxiously ordered coffee in stumbling Vietnamese. The folks behind the counter knew me and would always smile amusingly at this strange-looking white boy shyly attempting to speak their native tongue.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back, all adults that didn’t know me were always amused at my primal understanding of Vietnamese. My grandmother (almost bragging) would flaunt my understanding to people by commanding me in Vietnamese to do trivial tasks like picking up a random nearby item. They shared the same applauding smile as the coffee shop owner and the same amusement as if I were an aberration. Did they just view me as a white boy who knew Vietnamese? Because certainly they did not view me as one of their own, since I was not like them.
Race was never something I thought about deeply, even when I moved to Texas and was surrounded by more Black people in school than I had ever seen in my life. I followed many social justice blogs when I had a Tumblr back then, and knew racism existed and was bad, but never really understood the complex history behind race in America. Even then, when I was 13 – 18, the concept of race was never a defining factor of my life because I was shielded by my skin. When I moved to Texas, more people mistook me for being Hispanic or [Insert Literally Any Ethnicity Here Except Vietnamese]. But it wasn’t discriminatory. It was more of the same amusement of me not looking completely white and people’s inability to guess my ethnic background. I now acknowledge the privilege of living my whole life passing as a white man in the public perspective. And perhaps in many ways, I am a white a man. No thanks to the failure of public education, I never thought about structural racism (especially for African Americans) and the history behind racism until I was in my 20s and stumbled upon books like, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The New Jim Crow, Are Prisons Obsolete?, The Hate U Give, Lies My Teacher Told Me, and The Fire Next Time to name a few. My lackadaisical perception on issues like race, gender, socioeconomics, and capitalism were warped by my ignorance, and the more I try to learn about others, the more I also discover about myself.
What does it mean to be biracial in America? Certainly, it carries more weight to a biracial African American growing up in the 60s than it does to a biracial Vietnamese American growing up in the 2000s. Is it even correct to call myself Vietnamese American, or am I just American? I feel as if parts of my Vietnamese culture that were so ingrained in my psyche have fleeted.
I’ve been in Texas for a majority of my life (about 12 years). In those 12 years:
• I no longer lived with my grandmother.
• I no longer lived in a Vietnamese community.
• Most of family lived hundreds of miles away in California.
• Being an only child, I spent much of my time alone.
That’s a long time to grow and lose a part of your identity. Adopting Vietnamese culture when I was a child didn’t feel like a choice but more a part of life. Given the choice in Texas, I shed myself from that life and embraced the lifestyle granted to a mostly white boy living in an upper middle-class suburb. Filling out ethnicity forms went from being 90% “Asian” or 5% “Other” to now where I am unequivocally 100% “Caucasian.”
How did my sense of identity change so drastically in all these years and have I lost a vital part of my heritage because of it?
I’ve never been to Vietnam, but I want to.
I regret not keeping up with the language, which I’ve forgotten completely (other than greetings and counting to 10.)
I regret not visiting my grandmother more often.
(I do not regret abandoning my religion, but that is a journal for another time.)
I feel like I lost the connection I had with being Vietnamese growing up. The closest I can get to rekindle that feeling is through food. I don’t bother ordering food in Vietnamese at restaurants anymore, just to avoid the ethnicity question and the barrage of interrogations that follow. Yes, my mother is Vietnamese. No, I’ve never been to Vietnam. No, I do not speak the language. Yes, I want to visit someday. My parents are still together… It gets old, like having to perform the same tricks for my grandmother in front of random adults.
Still, I wonder. Who would I be without my mother’s side of the family’s influence on my life? Yet, I have no Vietnamese pride. White pride is a joke. And with the current cultural climate and the stigma behind white folks, I almost feel embarrassed to be lumped in with that demographic. It’s hard to identify as anything but biracial, and maybe as the world shrinks smaller, that’s where we are heading anyway. Although racism is still very pronounced all throughout the world, continuing to embrace monoracial status perpetuates stereotypical cycles that I struggle to identify with today being only White or only Vietnamese.
“It’s natural to ask one’s ethnic mix and I accept that—but I sometimes wonder if people who aren’t half-bloods realize the weight of the stone they’re lifting. If they comprehend the deeper conflict that may arise in those being questioned; if they realize there might be things nobody wants to talk about under there, things that bite and sting and can’t really be understood.”
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