Muted Rage
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Throughout childhood, kids used to accuse me of being Bruce Lee, as if he were some nameless buck-toothed coolie begging for a bowl of stale rice on their TV screens. “Hey, Bruce Lee, wanna fight me?” Who’s Bruce Lee? “Hey, Bruce Lee, can you chop this block of wood in half?” Why are you calling me Bruce Lee? If I had known then what I know now, I would have realized how much of a cultural icon he had become and how untouchable he was when he was one against many. That’s what I wanted to be when I grew up: untouchable. Not a cop, not a fireman, not a doctor: untouchable.
I remember one particular day back in elementary school when racism ceased to be an abstraction in my life. A friend and I were goofing around on this geo-dome playground apparatus when this white kid above us decided to smart off by calling my friend a “nigger.” Before the kid knew what hit him, we grabbed his shirt and started to drag him through the bars until a teacher ran over to stop us. He was crying and threatened to sue us because his father was a lawyer. We shouted back at him as the teacher wedged herself in between us, “Go ahead white boy, you deserved what you got!”
I remember the times when this kid and his brother, who lived at the end of my street, taunted me every morning on the school bus no matter where I sat. They made a habit of wearing out all their Chinaman jokes in two minutes, but they’d rehash them for me just in case I forgot that I wasn’t some run-of-the-mill white boy with freckles. The tipping point came when the little brother turned around in his seat and pulled the corner of his eyes to the side and announced, “Hey look, I’m a chink just like you!” Without warning, I swung my fist at his face and connected square with his nose. By the time the big brother ripped me off of his little brother, he had lost two front teeth. Suffice it to say, I was promptly sent to the principal’s office and my parents were called in for a little conference. I refused to explain my actions to either the principal or my parents. Looking back, I estimate that I spent a quarter of my elementary school days waiting to be called into the principal’s office.
Conversations between my parents and me back then were always mini-conferences. They’d always begin with, “Have a seat,” and always end with, “You know that we still love you, don’t you?” Every one of these conversations followed the pattern of accusation, renunciation and sentencing. Put on the stand to defend myself, I rarely had anything to say. How was I supposed to explain to two adults the reason why I threw those punches or how distrustful I was of other people and how isolated I had become because of it. Placed in a deep hole and packed in tight with shovelfuls of dirt, I was ordered to crawl back out with a smile on my face as the final humiliation. My parents demanded simple answers: “yes” or “no,” “I will” or “I won’t.” I simply resorted to silence and waited for them to hand me down their punishment. “I hereby sentence you ….”
After one particularly unrelenting day at school, I took my bike from the garage and rode around the housing track behind our house. In my right pocket I had a handful of rocks that I scooped up from the side of the road. Checking to see if anyone was around I tossed the rocks liberally into other people’s front lawns, hoping that one day all the fathers would be out mowing their precious lawns and with one terrific crack, the mowers’ blades would crunch and scrape against the stones, causing as much damage as possible. I felt that if my pride was being damaged by their kids each day, then their own vain suburban landscaping projects deserved to be suspended until further notice.
I was boiling inside; corrosion was seeping from little Love Canals running through my veins; I was going out of my damn mind second-guessing myself every time I woke up and prepared to go off into a psychological war zone, one that my parents and sisters would never be wise to. The uncertainty of my status among my peers caused me to become withdrawn and suspicious of any overture of friendliness. I figured that since I was being treated as a good-for-nothing, then nothing good would come from trying to connect with other people. The last time I visited my parents they didn’t mind telling me that once, for a whole school year, I had barely uttered a single word. I had stood mute, speechless. The teacher should have marked me down as “D.O.A.”
Not only was I an outsider to the other kids, I was outside my parents’ purview, too. I simply became uncontrollable; I didn’t listen, I didn’t care. Since I trusted no one, I was left alone a lot … to think the unthinkable and sometimes do the unthinkable. When I was around 9, my parents bought a liver-spotted Dalmatian puppy for me and my two sisters. It was cute as a button and everyone adored it, except me. I tortured that dog. I used hammers, I used rocks, I used my foot, I used my fists, and I even took a butcher knife and held it to the dog’s skin and gently poked it in the ribs to get the desired reaction. I wanted it to hate me like I hated everyone and everything around me. Like me, it became uncontrollable, mean and unpredictable. It finally sank its teeth into a neighbor’s hand for no good reason. It just snapped. I wasn’t there to see it happen. I was probably off kicking something down or burning something up. My sisters cried their eyes out when my dad took the dog to the pound the next day. That day regret never felt so real.
Don’t get the wrong idea; I’m not setting myself up to be vindicated and I don’t care to be forgiven. Shame has already given me a good talking-to. The past has passed. Or, so I wish to believe. Because, well into this anticlimactic age of 30, I’m still trying to come to terms with the untold and the unexplained that I dare not utter in polite company. The child in me still stands mute, waiting for me to speak for him.
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