Book of My Dayze I was 18 and just started my first year of college. I moved into my own apartment in Whittier in South Minneapolis, although I was going to school in St. Paul. The college required all students to live on campus for the first year or so, but I got out of it by stating that I wanted to be immersed in the community. The apartment was located two blocks away from Nicollet and 26th, the heart of a predominantly Vietnamese retail area. The neighborhood was made up of Southeast Asians, Blacks and Latinos, and some white kids who went to the Arts college across 26th. The day I moved in, there was a gathering of hoods hanging out on the porch next door to my apartment complex. When they saw me moving my stuff, they began to heckle me. "You know where you moving into?" "You real fucked up now." "You better watch your back." "This place is fucked up, son." And so on. I ignored them. Eventually one of them asked me where I was moving from. "Phillips," I responded. "Oh shit." "My bad." "That neighborhood is fucked up." "This is a step up from Phillips, son." Suddenly they wanted to talk to me, suddenly I had instant validation even though they still knew nothing about me. I was thinking of this story today because an old acquaintance of mine emailed me recently and suggested that I write a memoir, since there wasn't a well known book out there that chronicled the life of an Asian growing up in an American hood. But how would I go about doing this? How do I choose what to write about? What stories to tell? How do I write honestly and vulnerably without pandering? How do I stay reasonable without being boring? How do I capture how complicated it was for one Vietnamese boy to grow up in the hood? Don't know if I have the answers, really. But I'm thinking about it. Also did an exercise in my head about stereotypes and predictable criticisms, in the form of answers to a Q & A. Kind of like a brainstorm: Yes, I grew up in the hood. No, I'm not from the streets. Yes, I got a private college education. No, I do not want to assimilate. Yes, I love hip hop. No, I was not in a gang. Yes, I was asked to join exactly three different gangs. No, I told them. Yes, I hung out with a diverse group of friends and sometimes we did things that were not legal. Yes, sometimes we engaged in amoral activities. No, I was not hard. Yes, I carried concealed weapons. Yes, my friends and I read books and created art. No, I did not deal drugs. Yes, we traded money for food stamps. No, we were not on welfare. Yes, I got into many fights. Yes, I have had guns pulled on me. No, I never killed anyone. Yes, I was called gook and chink by people of every color under the sun. No, I did not retaliate with other racial slurs. Yes, sometimes I retaliated with verbal or physical assault. Yes, I had friends of every color under the sun. No, I do not think this makes me special. Yes, I remember gunshots, stabbings, mugging and robbery, fights in my front yard and alleyway, crack and police apathy. Yes, I remember trading Nintendo cartridges, sharing and borrowing new hip hop tapes, teaching each other new dance moves in the driveway, walking to school and the minimum wage jobs together, the airbrushed jeans and t-shirts, the running from the cops. Yes, I remember thinking I would never amount to anything. Yes, I remember dreaming. Yes, I remember my parents yelling at me and disowning me. Yes, I remember my parents telling me that they loved me and working all day and night for us. You see? This level of self-involvement already seems overly self indulgent to me. Not to mention strange. Some aspects of life and friendship differed from year to year, even day to day… sometimes I felt like I was living a couple of different lives. A lot of my friends didn't know each other, my family didn't know my friends and vice versa. Who the hell am I to write something like this?

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