the beautiful worst

Excerpt from Kung Fu Lessons

You learn, at a very young age, just because you have the same last name as Bruce Lee, and you do kung fu like Bruce Lee, and your dad is occasionally on the covers of magazines like Bruce Lee, does not mean you are related to Bruce Lee.

This is around the time you start to understand, if someone has dark hair, it doesn’t automatically mean they are Chinese like you.

Once you understand these distinctions, they are easy, automatic, but when you go to school, you discover the other kids, and sometimes adults, have yet to learn these lessons.

For a while, you make no distinction between life at home and life at school and life at the kung fu school. Your days are dedicated to learning. You learn to write, gripping the pencil. A callous forms on your finger in the First Grade that remains with you for the rest of your life. You learn to kick and punch and count in Mandarin. You learn to meditate by standing still for one minute at the end of kung fu class before bowing, your right hand curled into a fist pressed into your left hand’s palm to signify, peace over war.

Weekends while your parents work are spent with Mum, her silver perm a bouffant halo set with hairspray, and she holds your hand as she brings you to the library and the traditional American bakery that smells like sugar; or with Nai Nai, her white hair coiled and pinned in a bun, and she holds your hand as you take the Red Line to Chinatown and the traditional Chinese bakery that smells like sugar.

It does not occur to you to question these aspects of your life, because you are simply living it. But when you share these facts about yourself with classmates, or their parents when you go on playdates, or later, teachers at day camps and after school lessons, they ask you questions.

You know kung fu?

What belt are you?

Can you beat me up?

You respond to their questions with a sense of pride.

I know kung fu.

My parents are masters. They are my teachers.

We don’t have belts at our school. Belts aren’t that important.

But sometimes your answers confuse people.

Their confusion confuses you.

You learn there are many ways to answer, Can you beat me up?

You can share what your mother taught you, not in kung fu class, but in the car, on the way home. You asked her, “What am I supposed to say when they ask me if I can beat them up?”

She said, “Tell them a real warrior doesn’t go into battle.”

This answer is not interesting to kids on the playground.

You can perform a form you learned, but then they say, You can’t actually beat anyone up with that.

You learn the most efficient way to demonstrate your skills is to use them.

You kick.

You punch.

You get into trouble at school and home and it doesn’t make you at all relatable to your classmates.

This is how you learn your mother was right.

A real warrior doesn’t go into battle.

• A Letter to My Fellow Asian Women Whose Hearts Are Still Breaking - R.O. Kwon
• The Long Western Legacy of Violence Against Asian-Americans - Jane Hu
• This Is Where 150 Years of Ignoring Anti-Asian Racism Got Us - Venessa Wong
• My White Adoptive Parents Struggled to See Me as Korean. Would They Have Understood My Anger at the Rise in Anti-Asian Violence? - Nicole Chung

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