The next morning, my dad came in with a blood pressure meter. He wanted to monitor my congenital heart condition, which my aunt had died of. He was that kind of father.

"Been cutting back on sodium in your foods?" he asked.

"Yes."

"No drinking? That's no good for your heart. If you're feeling festive, sip two beers."

"I know," I said.

"Three if it's really wild, like a birthday or someone's job promotion. As your cardiologist said, no sprinting, no diving —"

"Yes, dad."

"No heavy lifting, OK? No energy drinks —"

"OK, dad."

Beyond these walls were monsters, dragons, new-fangled dangers — growing up in America's slummier Chinatowns stayed with my father, garnished his sense of the world's malice. He kept his television remote control in its factory shrink-wrap, in case it suffered scratches.

My systolic was 175, diastolic 90 — an old man's numbers.

"Looks like you're getting worse," he said. "Your heart's getting worse."

It wasn't. My heart was leaping. I tried to calm myself.

He measured nine more times, ripping Velcro from my skinny arms, fastening them again, trying to achieve the numbers he wanted. Each fastening and unfastening of the ticklish arm band, he muttered more things about sodium. Gatorade was a death sentence, pickles, a grenade of woes. My father lived in WebMD factoids.

Then, lovingly stuffing the blood pressure meter back into its mint-condition cardboard box, he asked.

He asked in a way that so that the burden of uttering the word "gay" was his.

"Your mom didn't sleep at all."

"I know."

"Freddy wondered if you might be — if you were maybe gay. Of course not." He blinked a few times. "Are you?"

I simply had to nod. I told the truth.

My father looked indecisively at the window, considered what that meant. Then he cried. He did not know how to look good crying. I'd only seen him in tears twice, at his own father's funeral, and the time when my mother, in a fit of anger, tore apart all their wedding portraits and honeymoon photos. Old men were loose with their tears — young men too, but no one at his age weeps openly. People his age worked 70-hour weeks.

I knew, then, that this moment was not mine. I was past my worst years. This was no time to plead the loneliness of my adolescence. For him, right then, I could not add to the waterworks. I had to hold his hand through this.

We had to escape the house before my mother knew what was afoot. I grabbed blindly from my middle school wardrobe, dressing myself in 10 seconds flat and coaching him on how we'd sneak past mom. We ran past the living room and I said we were going for lunch. Dad reneged and barked, "Bicycle trip!" in a wobbly croak, for no particular reason.

"Bicycle trip?" my mom said. "Wearing that?"

I looked down to see myself dressed in baggy raver cargo pants, a T-shirt emblazoned with a cigar-smoking bulldog, the words "BIG DAWG ATTITUDE" written under his spittled jowl. My middle school shirts were three sizes bigger than my current ones. My dad faced the wall, shuddering the whole time.

We chose the first café that occurred to us. We ordered waffles in a blur, either walnut or honey. Through all this, my father remembered that he liked these flavors, and asked the waitress if he could have them.

"We still love you," he said. "But please don't tell your mother. Her 60th birthday's coming up so soon. Give me time to think it over. You know how she feels about—"

"— I know. Trust me, I do."

There is truly never a good time for these things.

And he had a point. My mother, the youngest daughter among five brothers, learned since childhood that the more she spoke like a man, the more respect she amassed. She, the devout tomboy, made a point of sneering at every effeminate woman or man she encountered on TV. Anyone who queered the ideal of masculine stoicism disgusted her. Chauvinism does strange things to women and men alike.

"Your cousin Freddy said you're too sensitive," my father said. "Mom always said that too. You're too sensitive for a man."

As if the ideal man shouldn't be. I wanted to ask him if he's ever been to a Chelsea bar and seen how "sensitive" the average gym queen was. Are you kidding me? Sensitive. And were Thomas Jefferson and President Lee Teng-hui heroic for their callousness?

He asked me if I was out to all my college friends in America. Yes.

"But Taiwan can't know about you," my father said. "We wouldn't be able to live here anymore."

"I have no intention of ever moving back," I said with the thrill of vindictiveness against the island I'd always planned on loving.

"But how about us? Your mother and I?"

And I knew: I could uproot myself, seek my authenticity, self-actualize, self-fulfill, self-assert, change my name, seek all those beautifully selfish things the American Dream offered, but in Asia, the peanut gallery of my relatives held my parents hostage. Mom and dad are too old to move to Maui and start life anew. They'd committed a lifetime to making shitty conservative friends, having stunted conservative relatives. People like me are blemishes on the family's genetic résumé. And I knew also that my mother would use my "defect" as ammunition against my father's genetics; his depressive brood; his suffering, complaining immigrant parents; his weird bachelor brothers with no dental care. My mother would use me to insult my father's family.

Everyone would use me as ammunition to attack someone else in the family.

We finished our waffles in the café, deciding that I would stage my return home for my mother's benefit.

At home, my mother's face was the sallow of old wax. By not denying the truth, I'd done this to the woman who devoted her life to me.

So I denied it, as my father and sister begged me to.

"I heard what Freddy said about me — completely untrue. Why, are my jeans too skinny or what?"

I couldn't exaggerate to you how much my mother's face lit up, or how much I wanted, for a shameful second, for my lie to be true. I began to tell her a story, got into the groove, told it with what could be called pizzazz, or maybe just mercy. A monthlong fling with a Korean girl became a year ("I liked her; she had a cocaine problem"). Immediately she laughed with relief.

"I wouldn't know how to deal if you were, you know,

," she said. "I wouldn't know where to start. All night I thought,

"

"I wouldn't disown you if you were," she said. "Not like if you married a fucking mainland Chink."

These were the people I loved. They said "Chink" and they said "faggot."