gaysianthirdspace:

Some excerpts from an interview with Amy Lin for API Equality Northern California’s Dragon Fruit Project collecting oral histories of LGBTQ Asian and Pacific Islander people:

AL: one day I think [my teacher] was beating me with a water pipe. And my pinky sort of broke off… and at that point I was like, ‘okay, I probably need to tell my mom about this.’ So I approached my mom and was like, ‘hey mom, so this happened at school.’ And my mom actually told me, “Why didn’t you just beat your teacher?!” That was [my mom]’s way of telling me that you need to be more aware of how people are treating you because things are — like, just because you’re a kid, it doesn’t mean that people see you as a kid. Everything comes in a very political way and you need to be becoming more conscious about that and then start defending yourself.



Interviewer: In Burma you said it felt more like home -­ you had a lot of family around you. Can you describe more -­­ who was around you, what that was like? AL: Yeah, in Burma it was mainly my mother’s side of family, which consists of my cousins and -­ I mean, my mom has 7 other siblings, so multiplied by each one has like, 2 children so 14 people in 1 building… so dinner was big. Lunch was big.

Interviewer: What was your favorite at those dinners and lunches?

AL: I had a bad habit when I was a kid that I liked to eat off everyone’s plate. Like if I see the food that I like from other people’s plate, I would just pick them up and they can’t say no to me because I was a kid. So I abused that a lot. There are these little fried fritters that I really liked. They’re made of bean and basically a bean paste and then fried and those tend to be paired with noodle soup. But I like to eat them alone just as it is. And so whenever I see a plate of it sitting at the table, I just slowly move over to that plate and then hog it to myself and slowly hide away. But of course within 30 seconds my mom would catch me and like, “you should not take that away.”