Sweet Thang: Ode to My First Time
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Sweet Thang
Don’t you know you’re my everythang
(Whoa Whoa) Sweet Thang
Don’t you know you’re my everythang
Yes you are
You are my heat
You are my fire
You make me weak with your desire…
– “Sweet Thing” by Mary J. Blige
I lost my virginity to a Vietnamese boy named Thang. I met him at the end of high school, just as I was about to discover a new world of college and independence.
Thang had been introduced to me by a Vietnamese friend, and all of us hung out one weekend while my cousin from LA was visiting. I could tell Thang was into me the whole time, despite my cousin’s attempts to flirt with him. He visited me at school a few times, and he would even come to the mall where I worked; on some nights, I lied to my parents about working, and spent those four or five hours at his place before returning to the mall so my parents could pick me up.
We would spend these hours locked in his bedroom kissing and fondling each other in complete darkness. Once in a while, his mom or dad would bang on his door and mutter something in Vietnamese, but he would pay them no attention and focus on unhooking my bra. We never went all the way; hell, most of the time, we only went halfway.
I could tell he sensed that I wasn’t ready yet, that something was holding me back, and he never pressured me. Some nights, we’d lie in bed and just talk … and I came to realize that he was a complex and unique individual so unlike anyone I’d ever met in my eighteen innocent years.
Though Thang was in the 11th grade and two years younger than I, he told me that he was actually 20 years-old, maybe even older: he didn’t know. He talked about being a refugee from Vietnam, by way of Cambodia and the Philippines, how his parents lied about his age and declared him to be 12 years-old when he was in fact much older, because they believed that Thang would have a higher chance of entering the U.S. if he were just a kid, instead of a young man. They also forged his birthday, and he will probably never know when his real birthday is.
He was at odds with his parents, not because of this lie, but because of the life they gave him as a result of it. He was still technically a minor, so he was forced to go to school with children much younger than he, though he was clearly more developed, both emotionally and intellectually. His parents, especially his father, also treated him like a little child, as if they had forgotten (and denied) how old Thang really was. He came from an abusive household, and he resented not being able to move out and start his own life. He couldn’t find comfort with the friends he made (or his previous girlfriends), because he felt they were at a different level than he as a result of their age differences. They thought he was too serious and sometimes conceited because he wasn’t into doing drugs or getting drunk, as he wasn’t affected by the typical pressures of puberty that they were feeling.
I guess he felt a connection with me because we both came from turbulent households and were trying to flee away from them. I told him my plans to move out during the summer of my senior year. I had applied for financial aid, and forged my mom’s signature to get more money as a “student living away from his/her parents,” so I could pay for college myself with no strings attached. My parents had the utmost expectation that I was to still live at home during college and even after, until I got married and lived in a house of my own. Likewise, Thang told me about his plans to graduate a year early and go to college.
Thang and I also viewed our previous relationships similarly. We were both virgins, and were very choosy about who we lost our virginity to. I told him about my ex, who I had broken up with about a month before meeting Thang.
My ex-boyfriend was this redhead who was the first and only guy to ever express any interest in me in high school. I met him while I was new in Seattle during my freshman year, and he was the only guy that was really nice to me at that time. He was two years older, and though we were friends, we never became anything more before he graduated. During my senior year, we ran into each other, and he expressed the same interest in me he had before, and I took a chance — partly because I was lonely and I needed someone to make me feel attractive and wanted. But he turned out to be a handful, as he was addicted to drugs (I never knew he abused them to begin with), and his parents had even committed him to a psychiatric hospital. I told Thang about skipping school once because I had been subpoenaed by my ex’s lawyer to be a witness on his mental state of mind.
I had wanted to break up with him for the longest time, but I felt guilty, especially since his mom told me that since he and I started going out, she noticed that he seemed happier and actually went clean for a short period of time. The turning point occurred when my ex started pressuring me to have sex with him. It was total non-stop pressure, in the guise of too many “I love you”s and “All I have is you.” He wasn’t a virgin, either — he had lost his virginity nonchalantly to a girl who was bored and wanted to do it to pass the time.
One night, after arguing with him again about not wanting to do it, he walked out of his room and took his anger out on his father when he pushed him and demanded that he give him the keys to take me home. Next thing I knew, I heard screaming and broken glass, and my ex and his dad were engaged in a fist fight. His mom eventually told me that I needed to go, so I took a cab home and decided it was over. My ex called me a lot to try and make up, but I told him it would never happen. I didn’t want to lose my virginity to a loser like him. And who knows, maybe it was the awakening of my sense of self, but deep down, I felt it was somehow “wrong” to share a once-in-a-lifetime thing with someone like him. Also, I noticed how several of my friends lost their virginity during high school, and how emotionally upsetting it was for them because they had picked the “wrong” guy, so during this time, I vowed to wait until after high school to have sex. Because I was so close to securing my plans to move out and go to college on my own, I didn’t want to do anything stupid, like sleeping with a fucked-up person and then regretting it.
At that time, I wasn’t sure how to explain it, but being with Thang just felt “right.” I asked him to my senior prom, and after spending an hour there, we drove to a secluded area, changed into casual clothes, took pictures of ourselves at close range, and walked around holding hands and exploring the area. And that was all we “explored.” I think it was during that time that I realized that this guy was cherry-poppin’ material.
When I saw him again, I had already graduated and moved out of my parents’ place and into this tri-colored shack a few blocks from my school, the University of Washington. My friend’s older brother owned the house, and only charged me $210/month for rent. It was a three-level house which I shared with a Swedish hospital worker, a 6′3″ blonde transsexual, a Christian evangelist, a Louis Gossett Jr. look-alike originally from Ghana but worked in Germany, an older female Vietnamese student who was repeatedly beaten up by her Vietnamese boyfriend, and my Vietnamese girlfriend from high school.
Thang visited me a few times at my new place, and it was a relief to be able to make out in my room without fear of getting caught. Maybe it was the sense of freedom and liberation I felt in being on my own with no one to answer to, but I was getting more and more aroused every time Thang and I got together, and I became more daring and revealing with every session.
But this new sense of freedom opened a whole other world for me, and it meant that Thang was becoming less and less a part of mine. I could tell he felt left out every time I talked about college, about financial aid or getting textbooks. He couldn’t relate to my enthusiasm about doing mundane things on my own, like going to the local seedy laundromat every week, or going to the farmer’s market to buy $.50 bok choy. Maybe he envied me, or maybe my new “college lifestyle” wasn’t what he envisioned for himself when he graduated high school. I could tell that Thang and I were slowly drifting apart, and it would be any day that either he or I would be giving each other the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech.
My paranoia got the best of me. I was certain he was slipping away and looking for any excuse not to hang out with me that summer. When he did visit me, he appeared distant. I became really anxious that he was going to disappear from my life without ever giving me a taste of what I wanted … I had to act quickly.
That weekend, I invited Thang to see an independent Asian movie called “Erotique.” It was a series of vignettes depicting Asians having sex. I don’t remember the details of the movie fully, but in one vignette, a Chinese couple explores the “101 mystical Chinese sex positions” (or something) that the AM’s dad/grandfather passed on to him, all of which he and his girlfriend tried in one night. It wasn’t enough to keep them together, as his girlfriend had to leave the country, but at least she had one intense night to remember. That particular vignette struck a chord with me; Thang wasn’t at all into the movie, and at times, I could tell he was uncomfortable. I wondered if it was because he had never seen two Asians on the big screen getting it on like flexible rabbits. I had never seen that either, but it had the opposite effect on me: I was totally turned on.
We headed back to my place to chill as usual and eventually started making out. This time, we went beyond our usual topless-only sessions: my hands were unfastening his belt and pulling down his pants … and then his boxers. He followed my lead and slowly undressed me completely. We giggled like little kids at the sight of our nakedness, especially once we took a “peek” down there. I had never been naked in bed before, especially with an equally-naked guy within arms reach, so I was frantically relaying the movie back in my head to think of what to do next. But as soon as Thang kissed me, I felt the familiarity of his face, chest, arms, and legs intertwining with mine, and I relaxed. It didn’t take me long to get used to his genitals rubbing up against me.
The actual intercourse was, shall we say, priceless. To make a long story short, he couldn’t find “it,” no matter how hard or which angle he pushed. His “it” just would not go in…I remember him actually saying, “Where the hell is it?” and I didn’t want him turning on the lights at all to find out. We basically had to fumble in the dark…And I felt so incompetent trying to help him — it looked so much easier in the movies. We were too unfamiliar with sex to try any other moves/positions except the standard ones we were familiar with. Eventually, he and I just laughed at our ineptitude in doing something that just came naturally for other people on TV.
It was almost 4 a.m., and we were both tired, so he gave me a kiss on the forehead and we resigned ourselves to going to sleep. He cuddled up behind me with my back against his chest and voila … it fit right in. We were both caught so off-guard that we literally repelled each other, like when two people touch and generate static. At this point, we were wide awake again. We tried this position some more, but in the end, it just hurt for me, so we stopped and called it a night (or day, since we could already hear the birds chirping outside my window). A few hours later, we woke up, got dressed and sealed our good-byes with a kiss.
Two days later, we broke up over the phone. I knew it was going to happen, and whatever sadness I felt was overpowered by my giddiness in recalling what just happened two nights earlier. Since neither cherries broke (though according to my gynecologist, mine was halfway intact — did that mean I was still half a virgin?), I wasn’t sure if this was technically “our first time,” but I sensed that both he and I viewed our night together as special. Even as Thang was giving me his speech about us not working out, he being on the “wrong side of the tracks,” and that I’d probably leave him behind when I went to school that fall, etc., he had a certain giddiness in his voice when we talked about “that night.” We were even giggling like seventh-graders when we recalled how he “couldn’t find it.”
Lastly, he said, “I hope you didn’t feel like I pressured you.” That caught me off-guard for a second, considering that I was the one who took him to see “Erotique” as a prelude to our first time … all the way to practically ripping his pants off when we got to my bed. I wonder if he said it to mask any kind of guilt for breaking up with me, to which I replied, “No, I think we both wanted it to happen.” And that was the last time I really talked to him.
If this had happened in high school, I would’ve been a total mess. But that summer, I didn’t feel so bad that it didn’t work out between us. I had other things to look forward to, and being able to hang out with my friends until the wee hours of the night did wonders for helping me get over Thang. Most importantly, our first time happened on both of our terms because it involved two people who completely understood each other’s situation and respected one another’s boundaries. Regardless of what we had in common in the beginning and what little we had afterwards, I trusted him enough and was satisfied with my choice.
To me, it was the perfect “first time,” since it didn’t really focus on the sex, but more about the discovery of it. I believe that when it comes to sex, you will always remember your first and your best. Your “first” holds a sacred place in your memories because someone else can always come along and be better, and what was the “best” before is now second place and forgotten. Thang will always be my first, and that night will be forever etched in my mind, even if his face and the times we spent together start to fade.
I’ve seen him a few times in the years since then, mostly at clubs; he’s changed a bit, considering how it’s been close to a decade since we last saw each other. His hairline has receded, though he’s still calm and collected in a bad-ass kind of way. I’m sure I’ve changed too. I’ve thought about approaching him and saying hi. But then, something stops me, and I turn the other way. Maybe I’m not ready to let go of how I used to know him. He and I will forever be young and innocent together in my eyes.
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