When I began speaking about foster
care—which is, to say, acknowledging the subject and its role in my life—I
started to teach myself not to take others—those outside the system, those whom
I will call the unfostered, those who don't care—to heart. My friends would
ask, "How was your day with your kid?" and I'd answer, but I'd come
to find, they didn't really want to know. It's an awkward, "Oh"
gesture: I don't care to explain why I live a different life than those of the
people around me, and increasingly, I care less about maintaining relationships
with those who don't care why I have a stake in my subject. Because it's
mine.
The late Justin Chin writes
unapologetically on his subjects because they are his: HIV, sickness, gayness,
performance, Chinese American diaspora. In the opening essay of his 1999
collection Mongrel: Essays, Diatribes +
Pranks, Chin sets the stage for his “Monster:” it
started with his high school queens, the gay people for whom he watched their
performances in and out of drag. Chin traverses his identity with a nod to
fulfilling social and institutional stereotypes: “The stigma of being
associated with the queens who were so resoundingly ribbed and teased and
tormented made me nestle in my comfy closet: I was on the swim team, I
participated in sports—something the queens never dreamed of doing” (4).
Still, it takes one moment, or
someone interested solely in purveying sex, for us to ask what is wrong with us.
Following a sexual encounter with a man who cruised him to a public restroom,
Chin writes, “It never occurred to me to say no. I spent a good deal of time in
the stall, trying to clean up, crying and . . . . making deals with God, asking
God for a sign, ignoring and rationalizing everything I perceived to be a sign,
praying for forgiveness” (6-7). How do you pray for forgiveness from a monster
who is yourself? When our fears harbor our monsters, the monsters lurk behind
every corner.
I used to ask myself: On what day will you realize you are in your
Father, and he is in you? As John 14: 15-19 professes,
If you
love me, keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you
another advocate to help you and be with you forever. I will not leave you as
orphans; I will come to you.
If God loves me. Which is, to say,
if I love me. The Bible itself says God looks out for his orphans. Does that
include the fostered? Those who return to foster care? Those who grow up to
watch for the future in foster care? What is the difference between a child
whose parents die and can’t care for her and a child whose parents live and
refuse to care for her? Does that make me unworthy of finding a God who will pardon
me for refusing to stand with him?
I wonder.
It took sixteen years for me to admit
I feel I burden others, especially when the problem is beyond my power. It
started with watching my friends and family and beloveds get hurt. And even
when their problems had nothing to do with me, because I felt responsible for
them, I felt guilty. Justin Chin calls this failure to come out “incidental to
[his] personality” (10). The incidental protection he observed in his friends
who accepted him because he hated and liked the same subjects—and not because
he was gay—was a Rapture, a Book of Revelation fear that he would be taken from
this earth and join Christ on his terms for eternity. So, before me, I see I am
not the first to believe in my end because of me; I believed in it because of
what I was born into. Maybe I would be carried off for as many times as the
people who willingly take in children who are not their own would allow. Maybe
my failure to acknowledge my subject is incidental to my elusive grasp of God’s
shaped hole, the point where I feel I can stop asking for his forgiveness. It
should not change my conviction and belief in my voice, but it does because I
wonder when my compassion will give out—when it won’t be enough for the people
I love.
This semester, I had variations of
the same conversation with different students: in our moments of incredible
duress and when it is clear that only us—by ourselves—can confront what makes
us feel most vulnerable and intimate—why is it so scary? Why, even when we are surrounded
by our beloveds and their support, do we feel we cannot do it? The dragons, as
I call them, differ: parental substance abuse, individual addictions, sexual assault,
medical trauma, cyberbullying. We all have dragons. They function precisely
because they are unknown to anyone else—only our dragons want us. The more they
want us, the more no one else will. That is their power.
Let me return to mine, the foster
care dragon. Even as I reread Justin Chin's monster, which is not mine, I am
reminded that a visceral darkness is made beautiful and palatable because of
his conviction and his relentless pursuit in depicting that conviction—his
monster, his failures to surpass what will be a part of him—is a part of his
memory. I cannot Google Justin Chin and look away from a number of sites
identifying him by his sexual orientation and by his illness. It is his
resistance to Othering, to malicious group categorization and treatment by
identity, for which Chin remains alive. As he writes in “Persona 71,” “men and
women, white people and people of color, straight people and LGBT people,
lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and trans persons do not sound the same. We are
not homogenous. I am so over being queer, and I don’t care what I call myself
or what others call me.”
If God’s shaped hole was created for
us to find him, why did I feel guilty for being smart enough to run away? Or
return home? Or tell someone about my foster care dragon? Like Chin, “I’m not
exactly sure where and when I got the language for who and what I am. I just
seemed to have picked them up and understood what they meant” (8). Granted, I
am not professing to reclaim Chin’s gay life; it is striking how when we strip
away the categories, “the names called and used to describe that life [are] used lovingly and
violently at the same time” (8). It doesn’t matter what I was called, or what I
called myself. From recovering Justin Chin’s monster, I have learned to own
what makes me fostered.
The one who loves me will be loved
by my Father: “And at some point, and I don’t remember when, I stopped praying
for forgiveness” (8). Chin is unabashed in his refusal to hide behind what no
longer worked for him, even if he had lived a functional life with it for some
time. We are not homogenous; we are not born the same. What we do with our
lives is how we will be remembered. This, I believe, is what Chin spent the
rest of his life fulfilling—reaching for his stars and placating his heart:
“After coming to terms with my desires, I simply tried to
live my life the best way I knew how, and as much as unapologetically as I knew
how. I would rather folks see that I live and love in the same way and in the
same breath as they do, but in a queer way and in my queer way. And if they
find a monster in that, I’ll know that it is a monster of grace and beauty”
(11).
What I want for my younger
generation is to uphold the responsibility where a twenty-something advocate
without much of a family can walk around with a child who is not hers and own
the fact that I find myself most beautiful when I confront my dragon.
Sometimes, he’s in the backseat of the car, especially when I am alone. He may
be between the citadels and swings at the park in the fears of the child for
whom I’m legally appointed to speak. If there is a Hefty trash bag, he is its
most popularized and malicious form because my friends will hand me trash bags
and tell me to pack my things, as though there is a grace and beauty when the
monster comes from the people I love. I, too, want the people who follow me to
see that I live and love in the kind of breath where I have thought about
hiding behind my darkness and dragon, but somehow, summoned the courage to walk
away.
Because on this earth, where there
is a carrying off for Christ, there are also brave heroes and heroines. I want
to read them as much as possible, and I believe, of all the things God’s shaped
holes have inspired me to fill, it is to create and sustain a space for the brave
voices who fight dragons and who teach me to live with them. Because that is
also what God will do—give me another part of myself to advocate for those who
can’t or won’t or are unable to speak.
In five days, Justin Chin will have
been forty-eight. My mother turned forty-eight this year. That two people I
admire and am disappointed by have the same birth year, an ethnicity, a locale,
and this writer who looks to them—this speaks to the commonality of fate. My
mother did not choose to speak for me. That is why my dragon is so powerful.
Justin Chin, may he rest in peace, still guts me with his sensibility on what
it means to witness: it means to dispense with hiding behind one’s suffering,
which is exclusive to only us. We are much more unique and beautiful
individuals than to settle for hiding behind what recurs on this earth; we can
claim our pains as something new beyond our abilities to recollect and to
forgive.
*
Sylvia Chan is the author of We
Remain Traditional, coming out from the Center for Literary Publishing in February
2018. Formerly a jazz pianist in the San Francisco East Bay Area, she teaches
in the Writing Program at the University of Arizona and serves as nonfiction
editor for Entropy, where she will
debut a foster care series in the new year.
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