Coming Out Is Never Over
June 27, 2003
Someone asked me once to recollect the first time I knew I was gay. I knew the answer immediately. It started in the first grade, when the students in my class would tease me on a daily basis about whether I was a boy or a girl. Sporting that “rice bowl” Asian haircut and my K-mart issued jeans and T-shirt, I too would wonder if I was a boy or a girl. Would I be happier as a boy, since everyone at school thought I was a boy?
I never articulated my questioning of my gender with my immigrant parents, who would come home tired from a long day at work. My mother often reminded us kids that giving us a good education was the reason she and my father came to America. As for many Asian Pacific American families, issues of gender and sexuality were not topics of conversation in our house.
By the time I was a young adult, there was such a severe language barrier between me and my parents that we didn’t speak the same language anymore. Their APA kids spoke English exclusively and watched television shows they didn’t understand like The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. Our parents and grandmother spoke their native Korean language and watched Korean language news that we kids had little desire to understand and learn.
By the time I was twenty years old and seeking acceptance from my family, I “came out” to my family as a lesbian. It was a coming out for them as well, as a family that has a gay family member.
Accepting who I was would have challenged all the culturally accepted gender roles and religious beliefs they held. Newly aware of these cultural barriers as well as of the communication gap, my sexuality became an unspoken source of conflict with my family. We had little to say to each other and eventually lost touch for years at a time.
We lost contact for many years, unable to communicate about who I was and how much I wanted them to accept me. Many years later, we had an attempt to normalize relations and I was welcomed back home with a home-cooked meal and the eternal criticism of my very short hair and tomboy attitude.
With every attempt at reconciliation, the constant unspoken struggle for acceptance is between us. Though I have sought their acceptance of who I am as a lesbian, it was I who found a better acceptance and understanding of their struggles as Asian immigrant parents raising children in a culturally foreign world.
I understand now that the language barrier was a daily hindrance for them as they worked blue-collar jobs to make a living, raise their kids and hold on to self-respect and dignity. In their native country, my father was a math professor and my mother a pharmacist. In the United States, they worked on assembly lines and in factories. For community, they found the local Korean church among rows of English-speaking churches and it served as their only social outlet and civic resource.
I look back now and see that there were many other cultural and religious conflicts that my parents had to face with their children being brought up in a new culture. My sister started dating white men and wearing make-up in high school. My brother stayed out all night. And my parents never talked about any of it, though I know now how they struggled to understand these behaviors.
Now, my sister is married (to a white man) and has a son. My brother is a minister with a wife and four kids. I’m thirty years old and I’m still trying to have a conversation about my life with my parents.
Instead of verbally acknowledging me and who I am, my parents still try to feed me or buy me some clothes, tell me my hair is cut too short and that I should stop acting like a tomboy. It took a long time for me to realize that this has always been their way of acknowledging me, who I am and who I’ve always been in their eyes.
We may never break through the unspoken struggle for acceptance that is between us. But, we do have a greater understanding of each other. Last week, they sent me a bra. It fits too. I think we’re making progress.
Esther Lee is a district representative for District 3 State Senator John Burton, D-San Francisco.
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