How I came to the U.S. (Early years 1970-1985)

[sanjay]

someone asked for this in another thread so I just spent an hour typing.

Life Story version Cliff's


Born in Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Hong Kong on 4/9/70. Both parents Indian, set up through an arranged marriage. Both their families came from what is now Pakistan before the partition with India in 1947. My type of Indian is genetically predisposed towards trading (like ferengi) http://www.amazon.com/Cosmopolitan-C...e=UTF8&s=books

Parents struggled financially, but killed themselves to send myself and my sister to private schools.Parents spoke to me in Indian (Sindhi), local language was Cantonese, and in school I learned the Queen's English. My elementary school was Kowloon Junior http://www.kjs.edu.hk/ and my secondary education was at King George V http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_George_V_School

Needless to say I was very much outclassed by the wealthy Britishers that could afford to go to the same schools. I felt very conscious of my poverty and being chubby and Indian didn't help. I read to escape and my imagination was my solace. I remember once when I had a birthday party and I had a few friends from school over to my apartment before we went to McDonald's for my party. "YOUR DAD HAS IS OFFICE IN YOUR APARTMENT?" I was humiliated since I had always thought that 1100 square feet was enough for 3 people and a live-in filipino maid.

My mother and father fought incessantly, but thankfully he was in the U.S. for business most of the time. He and his brother had a mail-order custom tailoring business where they would take measurements for customers in the Hyatt Regency (Oakland) on Hegenberger Road. This was the time (mid-1970's) when the Bay Area had the Warriors, the Raiders, and the A's kicking ass simultaneously. Their customers were all athletes. Unfortunately, in the early 80's the athletes started to become celebrities and the Italian's (Armani, Versace, etc...)started dressing them for free just to say that they were wearing these clothes. My dad's brother had become really focused on this clientele so the loss of them led both him and my dad to near bankruptcy.

My mother was forced to raise us in a crappy apartment while my dad was struggling to send us money from the states. She was forced to take in a boarder to help make rent. Keep in mind that our apartment was only 2 bedrooms. This meant that when my dad returned from the U.S.- he and my mom were on the bed and my sister and I were on matresses on the ground. The boarder was a nice filipina lounge singer named Marilou who sang in the Holiday Inn Golden Mile lounge. My love for ballads probably comes from when my mom would take us to see Marilou on slow nights. My mom also had to borrow money from relatives which was humiliating- but what could she do?

The embarassment became overwhelming and I wanted nothing more than to escape. When my dad's greencard application came through (sponsored by his brother) he talekd about us moving to the U.S. I was excited.

At this time, my mom loaned money to an African man in desperate need and he gave her some gemstones in exchange. She worked desperately to sell these stones in order to not have to tell my dad that she loaned money that she did not have to help a man in need. She tripled the money she loaned him and thus embarked the chapter in my family's life when we were making some bling. The stones they focused on were primarily from Afghanistan- lapis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapis and tourmaline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourmaline

Business was picking up, but I wanted out. As a result, my dad shipped me off to relatives who lived in Skokie, Illinois and I went gladly. I found out later that they only took me in because they wanted a loan from my dad and he worked out my stay as collateral. I went to Evanston Township high School http://www.eths.k12.il.us/ beginning in December of my Freshman year My little sister (10) also came with me since my parents were still thinking they might move to the U.S. She left at the end of the following Spring- being way too young to be away from mommy and daddy. I stayed even though I must have cried myself to sleep every year for the first year. I hated my younger cousins, but it wasn't their fault they had a pubescent boy thrust upon them for no reason.

I must mention that I was blessed with the chaos that comes from having a huge family. Not on my dad's side since he had but one brother and one sister, but my mother was one of 12 kids. I had 7 uncles and 4 aunts and the count of first cousins from this clan is probably now up to 30. My uncles inspired me to believe that I could change my own destiny. They were brought up with even less money, but they worked hard and became immensely wealthy. As a child, I loved visiting my three uncles who lived in Bang Kok. They were not wealthy then, but they were strong role-models and I cherished my time over there.

Sppeaking of family, I also discovered in my early teen years that my mother had given away a biological sister of mine to a cousin of hers who was unable to conceive a child of her own. This was in 1972 before being a surrogate was the thing to do. My mother could not stand the sadness of her cousin so she gave her her first daughter. We grew up a block away from this girl and she and my sister are close, but I am not so much. Nobody acknowledges the 'gift' but I believe that she probably knows it too. When I was younger people would tell me that my sister was in their class...it would always turn out that it was she to whom they were referring. She is now married and living in Miami. She is very religious which is something she must have gotten from my father.

I had failed to mention earlier that despite our problems and his general business incompetence my dad would smile and be happy because he told us that God would take care of us. HE had no worries and I often felt bad for him that he was obligated by tradition to have a wife and kids. Especially since his wife could not see past their financial misfortunes for long enough to be civil to him. My father followed an Indian religious order called the Nirankari's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirankari

I hated God with a passion for all of our suffering, but I had high degree of anxiety as a kid so I would pray when my panic would begin. Then I would feel dirty afterwards. In school I learned and devoured the old and new testament which was part and parcel of an Anglican upbringing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglican

I learned many hymns and my favorite have always been Lord of the Dance and Onward Christian Soldiers. I sometimes still say the Anglican Lord's Prayer (ending with 'forever and ever, amen') in a moment of fear and weakness. At home we were Hindu, but my type of Indian has always been very open to any type of religious teaching, so we would always have visiting guru's and psychics who came and stayed with us because both my mom and dad had an open-door policy toards weird guests. Half our relatives were also followers of guru nanak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Nanak who is the progenitor of the Sikh faith. This means that I am equally at home in a Church, temple, or Gurdwara.

My type of Indian which is Sindhi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sindhi_people is a very ancient lineage and our physical location on the banks of the Indus river and on the border of India and India made us lovers of luxurious goods and things from foreign lands. Being alone in a new place is in my blood and in a way my business travels allow me to experience this.

My stay in Illinois lasted till the summer of 1984 and the end of my sophomore year. I went back to Hong Kong every summer, but it never felt the same to me. My parents business was cranking and they and my sister were having a blast. It felt weird to me, but despite my efforts to get reinstated at my previous school- I was told that if I wanted to come back I would have to repeat a year. Needless to say this was not the perfect situation- returning back to a school where I was considered poor, weird, and now mentally deficient.

My two years in Illinois were a blur. I was in puberty and wasted no time in finding my Uncle's Penthouse stash. Porky's on Cinemax was my first exposure to breasts on video! I shaved for the first time. My voice broke. I kissed my first girl...she was 12, I was 14 and it was lame. She was a classmate of my female cousin and I think she wanted to smooch me so they could all make fun of me even more.

I watched this miniseries called The Day After, which was about nuclear war and surviving the after-math. I suddenly became inspired and I would buy Soldier of Fortune magazine at the local 7-11. Soon I had quite an arsenal at my disposal...a blow-gun...shurikens...nun-chuks....I also had a mylar space-blanket and a snake-bite kit. I learned how to trap squirrels and birds in my Skokie back-yard. I also shamefully taught myself how to ride a bike at night since Hong Kong is not a big bicycling place.

Hip-Hop was just beginning to blossom and I became quite adept at the lyrics of UTFO and other contemporary artists. My cousin played 'When I hear Music, it Makes Me Dance' which was the dance track of the era, by some bimbo. Michael Jackson's legend was just beginning as he initiated the Victory Tour- at $30 per ticket it was the most expensive concert of all time. The album was Thriller and I knew all the songs, videos, and words. Michael was the first black artist on MTV (LOL irony).

I was unfamiliar with the U.S. class selection process. In a British school you have a weekly schedule- not a daily one. Being ignorant and pudgy- i decided to make PE my 8th period class. Turns out that 8th period PE was where they put the juvenile delinquents since these kids could not graduate without PE. My Uncle bought me a Panasonic vest that was silver with 2 speakers built over each breast and a connector for a Walkman in the pocket. I would wear my coat over this vest and the black kids stopped threatening to beat me up and steal my shit because I could play their mix-tapes so that they could spontaneously break-dance on large pieces of cardboard that seemed ubiquitious.

My cousins did not like me and I wanted to leave. Little did I know that this would lead me not to boarding school as I requested, but instead to stay with my Uncle, Aunt, and 3 cousins in Hayward, California. Turns out that he owed my dad money too and was also too eager to house me. My aunt let me know the day my dad left that she was miserable about my staying and that her baby son would have to stay in her room so I could have his room. Thus began my last two years of dependence on any human being. I vowed that I would be my own man beginning in that summer of 1985, my Junior year at Mt. Eden High School http://www.husd.k12.ca.us/mteden/index.htm

So I get to Hayward, California in August 1985 just before the start of my Junior year. I was in Hong Kong for the summer prior and designer jeans were just coming off their peak which meant the prices were dropping. Needless to say my mom loaded up on Jordache jeans and matching denim jackets for me. I also had Polo shirts in every conceivable color. The collars of both my shirts and jean jacket were popped up in 80's cool fashion. My one luxury was Birkenstocks which I felt were cooler than shit. I earned the nickname Fred Flinstone from the black kids who would yell "YABBA DABBA DOO" when I walked down the hallway. My hair was a thick black mass that would be gelled back with KMS brand gel. My scent was Obsession for Men and when I felt like dressing up I wore top-siders with no socks and a skinny knit tie. The sound-track was Depeche Mode's Black Celebration with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Madonna, and OMD playing on shuffle. The movies that spoke to me were Some Kind of Wonderful and Last American Virgin.

Mt. Eden was a much more ethnically diverse place than either my schools in Hong Kong or Evanston. I was not used to Asian kids speaking English fluently, and it was my first exposure to Mexicans. I fell in love with all the girls I befriended in my honors classes and ultimately each an everyone of them told me that I was their ideal FRIEND. At my 10 year reunion friends told my wife that they thought I was gay because of the swarm of woman that accompanied me everywhere.

I had a fat filipino friend who had a car and in exchange for letting him put me down, he would drive me around and keep me company. On my graduation night I caught him making out with the Korean girl I was madly in love with. He knew I loved her and she knew I loved her, but yet the temptation was too great for both of them. My heart broke and I ran home crying from the graduation party with the girl, my friend and 3 people chasing me. I don't believe any of them had seen such grief in a young man in real life.

My father had come to my graduation so I ran home and right into his arms. He held me and listened to me sob and explain why I was sad. When I was through he laughed. I was enraged at him for making mockery of my heart, my love, my life but till this day I remember what he said. He said son, "I am laughing because when I saw you run home crying I was besides myself in fear as to what had happened to you. When I realized it was about a girl I laughed because of all the horrible scenarios that raced through my mind, that was such a relief."

I picked UCLA as a college because the same best friend who betrayed me had picked it. We did not speak to each other for the first six months of college. Ultimately I missed him and reached out to him. As fate would have it, the Korean gal dumped him and told everyone he had a small weenie at a New Year's part we both went to together on a break from College. I entered college a virgin and had bumbling sex with 2 women before I met my wife in 1988- the start of my college Sophomore year.

Wanting to escape from my reality led me not only to books, but also to technology. Early in 1983 when I was 13 and when my mom had first started making money from the gemstone business- she bought me my first computer. Somehow she always knew what I needed and even when we were younger she would buy me my first love which were books about facts and science. Keep in mind that I was living in China and even though I went to British schools- there were never enough books for me.

The computer she bought me was a Taiwanese clone of an apple][, called an Orange. I went to the underground electronics market in Sham Shui Po (now the warez capital of the universe) and among the various electronics bits and pieces that they sold there, was a few hardware items that made me a pimp among computerists. First I bought a black market booster card that upped me to a massive 128K of processing muscle. Then I bought a SLIM floppy drive for my Verbatim and Memorex 5'1/4" Floppy Disks. The slim drive always overheated so I had to operate it with the top off, which was fine by me because it made it look cooler anyways. I also acquired a voice synthesizer card called SAM (software automated mouth) and I was able to make it speak while moving a set of synthetic lips on my screen. My game was Wizardry and Ultima was a distant second. For mindless fun I played Dig Dug. I subscribed to the Beagle Brothers Newsletter and manually copied hundreds of lines of BASIC onto my machine in order to have the latest games and hacks. We had a computer club at my school and I spent so much time there that my grades suffered and I was formally banned from the place until my grades improved.

I had no computers or access to them during the entire 4 year period of my high school. Apple was rotting at the core and the Mac and the Lisa were Steve Jobs undoing. When I got to college in 1987 some of my Azn friends had these machines called PC's which seemed like shit warmed over. They were always crashing and every feature was ad hoc as though it was cobbled together without any foresight or intention. If it weren't for Tetris, I would not have touched a machine until 1991 when my mom (my computer fairy) called me from Chicago where she was visiting my uncle and aunt.

"Someone is selling your uncle computers", she said.
"What do you mean? Are you at a store?" I asked.
"No, there's a guy here who has computers in his van and uncle wants me to buy one for you."

Basically she bought be an Apple Powerbook 170 from the back of a van in Chicago for $1200. Keep in mind that the Powerbook 170 was the type of machine that a 21 year old could only dream about, and it retailed for $2700 which was an exorbitant sum in those days. BAsically if P-Diddy had been around my lap-top would have been in music videos.

Alas, that was the last Golden period of apple computing and I ultimately switched to a PC, but to this day I long to return to my home and into he embrace of Apple. The only thing that keeps me from doing so is that Apple went from being the platform of rogues, renegades, and capitalists into the platform for queers, vegans, and artists..

[Seaweed]

reading now

edit: this does feature pirates right?

[sir tex]

[The_Tourist]

too much content; gonna read

[Skuyler]

go back to mexico

[prometheum]

posting in large thread

[Phil McCrevice]

very interesting

not so much a mystery man anymore

[Suicide King]

west Philadelphia born and raised.

[sir tex]

very interesting sanjay, good read

[Jerameh]

Thank you for this.

[IMVerygay]

[Seaweed]

do you do the whole not eating beef thing sanjay?

[FatCat4-9'er]

Oh my god, you really wrote this! I'm definitely looking forward to reading it.

And I'm definitely gonna' make it to the next happy hour!

[nailPuppy]

The details of my life are quite inconsequential... very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breathtaking- I highly suggest you try it.

[Seaweed]

Originally Posted by nailPuppy

The details of my life are quite inconsequential... very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum... it's breathtaking- I highly suggest you try it.