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By May Chow | AsianWeek Staff Writer

Four years ago, Lily was at her parents’ house getting ready for relatives to come over to enjoy a traditional Thanksgiving meal. She had racked up 20 lines of cocaine in her bedroom. She figured, two lines, every 10 to 15 minutes.

The blood that came gushing out of her raw nose in the middle of dinner was a complete surprise.

“I didn’t even know I had a very bad nose bleed, all I saw was blood all over my plate of food,” said Lily, who was 17 at the time. “My face was numb and covered with blood. I rubbed my nose but I was so spun out that I didn’t even know what was going on. My parents kept on saying, ‘Honey, you have a bloody nose,’ but I was so f — ed up.”

Hand-in-hand with the model minority stories that cover the front page go stories like Lily’s, about Asian Pacific American teenagers who are fighting drug addiction under the eyes of their family. Not just a problem for one ethnicity or gender, drug use in the APA community is often overlooked both within the community and by the statistics.

“Speed, crack, acid?”

Now 21 and clean, Lily talks of this incident with a tone of sadness and wonder.

“Man, I was so messed up,” says the Stanford University senior, who quit using three years ago. “It felt great but it was so sad that I couldn’t even enjoy the fact that I was with my family.”

Underneath the orange and yellow glow of McDonald’s light, Lily, 21, fidgets with her blue scarf, picking at the little balls of fuzz. Her eyes trace the raindrops streaking down the side of the window. Lily’s rain-soaked clothes hug her body, accenting her sylph-like frame.

“So, what do you want to know?” she asks with a nervous smile. “Speed, crack, acid?”

She’s been a user and a dealer. Lily got her first taste of drugs when she was 13 years old. She shared a joint with her older sister. In high school, her daily drug use ran the gamut — from acid to mushrooms, cocaine to heroin. In order to keep up with her addiction, she began selling in addition to working at various part-time jobs.

Lily’s cherubic face warded off any suspicion that she was a drug dealer.

No one except Lily and her friends knew the extent of her drug use. Everyone on the outside thought Lily had a good life — nice home in the suburbs, middle-class family, loving parents. But she did not have a picture-perfect life.

What people didn’t know was that Lily — who is of mixed Asian and European descent — was depressed and sad. A main reason for that, she says, is that it was hard for her to find people to relate to, especially in school.

“My parents ignored me a lot, and being hapa was really difficult in high school. I didn’t know anyone else who was like me at school,” Lily says. “The cliques at my school were ethnically based, so I felt really alone.”

Lily went to two high schools located in affluent neighborhoods on the Peninsula. At her first high school, she was beat up, picked on and teased for reasons she, today, still is unsure of.

“I was really quiet in high school, and the girls who picked on me were really, really mean, so I just did drugs to deal with it,” she says. “If I didn’t do drugs, I probably would have done other bad things. The drugs I did sedated me to a point where I didn’t want to do anything.”

In the middle of her junior year, Lily transferred to another school, one where your parents’ wealth and who you were friends with were the most important things. It didn’t take much time for Lily to know that she was miserable in this new environment.

She made a few friends and started getting high with them at school.

“We’d sit in the back of our econ class and cut lines of coke or speed and just do them while the teacher would talk,” she says. “We never got caught.”

Outside of school, Lily went to raves where she smoked speed, snorted cocaine and popped Ecstasy pills.

What started out as a fun diversion, a skewed perception of therapy, degenerated into an unceasing pattern of coke highs and acid trips.

“The worst thing was I did a lot of drugs by myself or with others, whatever got me high, and I wanted my friends to get high,” says Lily. “I’d get an 8-ball for myself, get it for my friends. All I wanted was to get higher.”

Neither of her parents really suspected Lily had any problems, because she was always seen as the “good one” at home. Even before Lily had started using drugs, her family never talked about drugs or health issues. Lily remembered one time her parents left for a week because her mom had a surgery.

“My sister and I didn’t even know why my mom had to go to the hospital and today we don’t know why,” Lily says.

Even when Lily’s father found cocaine and razor blades in her car, there was some sort of denial that Lily — daddy’s little girl — was a cokehead. Her dad confronted her about it and said, ‘I’m not going to tell your mother about this.’

Shame and Denial

Substance abuse problems do exist in the APA community, according to Ryan Yamamoto, program associate for the Los Angeles-based National Asian Pacific American Families Against Substance Abuse (NAPAFASA). However, numerous factors, including shame, denial and loss of face, deter family members from seeking help or addressing the issue.

“Sometimes, there is a role reversal, where the parents don’t know about the different types of drugs that are out there and that their children are abusing it,” Yamamoto says. “Many APA parents don’t know about the rave scenes.”

Ecstasy and the animal tranquilizer ketamine (special K) are very popular drugs currently among APA youth, says Byron Shinyama, a youth coordinator for the Olympic Academy program at the Asian American Drug Abuse Program (AADAP), also in Los Angeles, which was started in 1972 after 31 APA youths died of drug overdoses in the Los Angeles County area. Marijuana is also common because of its relative low cost and accessibility.

“But you see, once these kids smoke pot, they’re all like yeah, we can handle this, and they get used to the buzz and want to try something else,” Shinyama says. “And that usually is speed or coke. You go to these raves, and it’s the club drugs.”

Randy Tili, an outreach specialist at San Francisco’s Asian American Recovery Services, said the APA women who come into the office are often hooked on crack and methamphetamines.

APA girls often don’t get included into the drug picture. There is the model minority notion that APA youth don’t do drugs, and if they do, they are boys. But both Yamamoto and Shinyama said they’ve seen and treated many APA girls.

“You’d be surprised at the patients we’ve received,” says Shinyama. “We get girls who are from very, very good and solid families, athletes, straight-A students, rich, poor, first generation, fourth generation, you name it.”

Shinyama said many start drugs because of low self-esteem, or they feel they need to do drugs to fit in and be liked by their peers.

“Curiosity, experimentation, escaping their problems, these are all reasons,” he says.

Vodka and Strangers

For Nikki, 20, her memories between the ages of 13 and 16 include vodka and strangers. A fourth generation Japanese American, Nikki was an exceptional student and athlete. She lived with her younger brother and parents in a nice neighborhood in Silicon Valley.

“I started drinking because I was hanging out with the popular girls in school and older guys and I realized that if I drank, the guys would be interested in me,” Nikki says. “It was the best way to fit in. The first time I got drunk, I dropped acid too, it was Halloween night and I was 13.”

It was hard for anyone to see that Nikki had a problem. Her parents never noticed anything, as long she was keeping up her grades.

Along with alcohol, Nikki also smoked pot, experimented with acid and inhaled nitrous oxide, otherwise known as “laughing gas.” But she says her drug of choice was alcohol.

“Vodka, anything clear and hard,” she says. “Half a bottle of vodka usually. It made me outgoing and fun.”

The guys she was with supplied her with all the alcohol she wanted. It came to the point where she would pass out and end up in rooms with different guys she didn’t know very well, or at all.

“I blacked out a lot, that’s the effect of substance abuse,” says Nikki. “There are portions of my past that I just don’t remember.”

Nikki said her drinking behavior became clockwork. It was a cycle that involved getting drunk, blacking out with guys, vomiting until her stomach ached and getting into fights with girls and boyfriends.

This all came to an end when her parents had her escorted to a seven-week wilderness camp in Utah for troubled teens.

“It was a complete surprise, I had no idea. I came home from school one day and there were these people waiting to take me away,” says Nikki. “If I had known about that beforehand, I would have run away.”

With only the clothes on her back, Nikki left behind her friends, family and the alcohol that had debilitated her life.

Nikki believed that she was going to return back to California after Utah, but instead she was taken to a 20-month drug treatment center in Montana, a move that made her furious. But it was there that she finally realized that she had a problem and wanted to stop drinking.

Nikki has been sober for four years, thanks to a 12-step program. She is a college student and works as a counselor at NAPAFASA.

“When I returned home from Montana, my little brother came up to me and said he was scared that I was going to be like the way I used to be,” says Nikki. “I never knew how big of an effect I had on him. I feel very bad because I took a lot of attention away from him and I was pretty mean to him.”

Nikki has never questioned the fact that she was brought up by loving parents. She says she doesn’t remember her parents ever sitting down with her to talk about drugs and alcohol, but her mother insists that they did have that talk.

Shinyama says family members are vital to their relatives’ drug rehabilitation. He’s seen parents who didn’t bring in their daughters until they hit rock bottom or ran into the police.

“There was this Cambodian girl who was referred to us, but when her father found out about it, he refused to let his daughter be treated,” Shinyama says. “The father kept on insisting that his daughter didn’t have a problem and wouldn’t let his daughter be associated with a treatment center. I don’t know whatever happened to her.”

In the Past

For Lily and Nikki, drugs are an issue of the past. And although both admit that there are always temptations lurking around every corner, they understand now that their judgments about what friends to have and whether or not to snort a line or smoke a pipe have more consequences than a quick high.

Walking back to her apartment, Lily makes her way up the stairs and kicks away a little package rustling in the wind. She bends down, picks up the packet and examines it.

“Oh look, baggies, a coke dealer must have dropped them,” she says as she closes the door behind her, with the baggies in hand.