This morning I woke up and put on a purple v-neck t-shirt, in remembrance of Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase, Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Zach Harrington and GLBT teens everywhere who took their lives out of fear. This shirt, previously, has been a favorite shirt, bought really because my 2-year-old niece Lucy loves purple, and it turns out to look good on me. It will always mean something different to me afterward. I have no idea if it will help, but if it stops even one more kid from taking his or her life during this season of homophobia and intolerance, I’ll have done my job.

If you are a GLBT teen and a reader of this blog, and you’re having trouble due to bullying, or you feel despair at the thought that you can’t come out where you are now, please try to reach out to someone, somewhere. The internet provides you with the ability to get help I couldn’t have imagined when I was that age. GLBT teens are at three times the risk for suicide as their heterosexual peers, due to bullying, parental disapproval and the physical, emotional and even sexual abuse that can occur when you are isolated and unable to assert yourself and your rights. I would also add that in my lifetime, in just 20 years, I’ve seen a new level of acceptance from the world for the lives of GLBT people that I couldn’t have imagined. When the people in Dan Savage’s campaign say, It gets better, it’s true—it does. And not only for us as individuals, but collectively, as a community. Today there are gay-straight alliances, magazines, political organizations, internet-based communities and social networks, social groups, tv channels, films, in a variety I would have thought was impossible when I was sixteen and terrified to come out.

And if you are a Korean or Korean American GLBT teen, well, again, the level of acceptance for GLBT Koreans and Korean Americans is unprecedented and has expanded well past what I thought was possible as a teenager. You may think your family will say you’re dead to them, you may fear being left to your own and cut out of family life, but just know that the world is more than what we imagine it to be, and in that is the possibility for unimaginable love and acceptance. I’m not saying homophobia isn’t real, or the routine denial of even its existence by many Koreans. I’m saying that the world and your family can surprise you.

And if you are in the closet, and considering coming out, I’ll add only that you should wait until you feel safe. Whether it is cues in your family that acceptance might be possible, or that you’re finally on your own, and could make a living if your family throws you out, do not come out recklessly. When I came out to my mother, I did it after college, and I did it because I loved her and I didn’t want us to have a dishonest relationship, where she didn’t know about my life. She’s now very close to my boyfriend, and they love talking to each other. I would never have imagined that back when I was sixteen, but that’s more about the limits of my imagination then, and not about the world. It turned out to be just one of the moments I learned that the world was bigger and more interesting than my idea of it, and I’ve spent my life as a writer thinking about that.

Consider joining in today, and wearing purple, not just for the kids who’ve taken their lives, but for the ones who are still alive, vulnerable, and who need a show of support. It is a small thing in the face of something enormous, but sometimes all you need is that one small gesture at the right time.

This Korean gay drama was unimaginable when I was sixteen, and is part of what we mean by "It Gets Better." It may not feel like it right now, but acceptance and tolerance are on the rise. The current backlash against GLBT people is just a part of our enemies fearing that we've grown.

I love it.

Find other writers, I tell them. Find readers. Go to readings, buy the books, the magazines. Write and send your work out. Be where people can find you.

A few days later, I am in Maine at the house my family has rented at Goose Rocks Beach, and my brother-in-law and I read our horoscope online. Both of us face different challenges that are, nonetheless, similar in our lives structurally. Both of us are Leos.

Put yourself in the way of your fate, the horoscope reads.

It’s not the same astrologer, I’m sure of that, but I experience a short chill. I remember how so often what I am teaching my students, I am also in need of reminding myself about, as if in order to talk to myself I need to first tell 15-100 people and then let a few days go by. But all the same, whatever you think of horoscopes, finding your advice to someone else in your own horoscope is more or less one definition of the uncanny.

No one would say I’m hiding.

The narrative from the evening at the AAWW with Guernica picks up with how no one can believe Jin Young Sohn is only 19. As he begins reading he says, “I think I’m the youngest person here.” Light laughter. He reads a beautiful excerpt from a longer piece inspired by his grandmother, about taking care of her as a little boy, making her rice, in place of going to pre-school, as both his parents worked and couldn’t take him. Elaine H. Kim reads a story about two straight men in a gay bar in Seoul. Cathy Chung reads her excerpt, from her novel-in-progress. The entire editorial staff of Guernica attends, some of my Amherst students, some of my former students from Wesleyan, people I went to grad school with, and my agent’s assistant, and then people I don’t know. The very handsome and incredibly nice men of the Dari Project are there, for example, and they say hi afterwards, and one of them buys my first novel and has me sign it, which I always enjoy.

When the party closes at 9, I head downtown to Sweet and Vicious with my friend Meakin Armstrong, who tapped me as guest editor to begin with, and Cathy Chung, and friends of hers from MacDowell, where she made everyone read my novel while she was there.

I am trying to catch up to my friend Laura, who’s out with Wendy Lee, who also read that night downtown at McNally Robinson, from her debut novel, Happy Family, a novel I happily blurbed that is, as I put it, about some of the actual taboos of this culture. I still like it. Wendy gamely offered to come up but it’s her night and I said we’d come down and find her. We find her in the dark back beer garden there with her editor, a very nice man who thanks me profusely. My friend Laura is with a woman who tells me how much she loved my book, when she was an editor at a paperback imprint of a large publishing house and one of the bidders. She also tells me it makes her night to meet me, and all of this is a pretty incredible thing to hear from a stranger. We leave and go to eat at Public, where I have the most beautifully made scallops and talk to Wendy’s lovely boyfriend, and Laura, an old friend from when I trained as a yoga teacher.

I wake up in New York on Thursday morning in Laura’s apartment on 14th St. and 6th Avenue. The night before, someone said it looked like the apartment in La Boheme, and it does, except with Mac computers and me. My friend Laura’s room-mate, who I’ve not yet met, emerges from her bedroom to go to work, and she’s very nice, we have an awkward cordial moment and then she leaves. Laura comes out. We talk about Facebook and global warming. As we do, I briefly have a vision of an enormous wave of water behind her, sweeping down from the Bronx, out of the Iowa floodplains, and then she says, I’m glad you came, and I say, Yes, me too, and then she leaves and I stay to take a shower, before getting on a train back to Wesleyan, to finish the conference.

The themes of my teaching there this week via the consultations I have with students directly are women’s invisibility, invisible narrators who are characters and are supposed to be in there and yet are not, and missing narration–events that collect and the reader cannot feel why they are with each other. The students seem mostly to think, unconsciously, that if they are a woman they should not quite be there, and this is troubling. One student tells me he thinks first person is too common and third person sets his work apart, even though I think third person keeps his story too constricted and thus confusing and frustrating.

The course meanwhile is full of some of the warhorses of creative writing classes: start on top of your story, and nowhere else, for example. But the theme I decided on for the week was excitement. I’d been at a friend’s dinner party and we were talking about what we read that we liked. Her friend and literary agent there said of something he’d just read, It ended where you thought it would. It was okay but I wasn’t transported. As I headed to Wesleyan, it seemed to me like a signal to follow into the week’s class.

——————————–

I leave Wesleyan to drive to Rhode Island for the Ocean State Writers Conference after a quick dinner with Kit Reed, my friend and mentrix, and her husband Joe Reed. They are skeptical of my chances of getting there. It’s clearer to them than to me that I’m tired, and sure enough, I make ridiculous mistakes while driving, and a trip that should take an hour and a half takes almost three. I feel like a bag of other people’s ideas and language, after the constant pace of readings and consultations, and it’s almost like being drunk. This moment is what most writers fear when they teach, but I know that the brief suppression of my own thoughts doesn’t last, and what happens next is usually a great deal of writing, as if in response to the suppression of it. Last year I wrote most of a new story the week after Wesleyan, in two days. For now, though, I just want to go to bed.

I get to my dorm at URI with the help of my friend Amity Gaige, who’s also there, and she helps me get settled. When I ask for an internet connection at the front desk, she says, What are you going to do? Blog? And raises her left eyebrow authoritatively. I feel vaguely ashamed even though my sole desire is to check email, to see if, as a friend says, anyone loves me today. Instead, I lose track of my car and wander the campus for an hour in the dark, looking for it, as it has my toothbrush in it, before finding it in the fourth of the three directions I search. I sleep the night in a cement-walled room that feels like a hospital, and the next morning get up and teach 63 students about how to figure out plots for stories and novels from the scenes you write that come to you and you don’t know what they are. Then I go to some panels, I have lunch. I go to my room and do yoga and then give a reading with Peter Covino and the other faculty of the conference. I talk about what I’m thinking about, which is how I knew Peter when he and I used to be poets together in the East Village of New York, and read in dark gay bars on stages.

Go to open mikes and read at them, I tell the audience, by way of summary. And then I read my excerpt.

I leave after the reading to go to Maine, and stop at a hilariously huge Italian restaurant off the highway called The Chateau. When I leave, I still don’t know why the name is French. It’s the only French thing about it. I drive for hours and get to Maine before 1AM, fall asleep and wake up to the singing of my nieces and nephews down in the kitchen.

Part of it being your fate, of course, is that you cannot know it until you are in possession of it. Here in Maine, surrounded by pancake mornings and beers at the beach and margaritas at night, I don’t know if I’ve managed to be in the way of my fate and I won’t know. And if the message for me from me is about excitement, then perhaps that’s covered by how I go to Greece next, next week. All I really can think of to sum up the aftermath of the week of writers and writers conferences came to me from a former student, who wrote to me after being rejected this year from all the MFA programs she applied to. This shocked me, because I thought she was a shoe-in. She had the single greatest reaction to being rejected, perhaps ever, in the history of writing:

The Iowa letter said something about having over 800 apps for 25 spots. I can’t even imagine. The numbers are baffling… I’m probably overemotional and tired on this Friday evening, but I also weirdly feel buoyed by the rejections, like it confirms for me how important writing is, whether or not I have an mfa.

Thank you to everyone I met this week at Wesleyan and URI. Good luck to us all. And if you are a fan of my friend Paul Yoon, go check out his story at StorySouth, and if you like his, vote for him. He’s a contestant in their Million Writers 2008 contest.

This started a while ago.

Here are some of the thoughts in my mind as I drive:

• a taxi ride from back in April, in which the driver told me a story of giving a ride to someone who described a “plan” to take the wealth of the country and place it in the hands of a few. I realize it bothers me because when he said it, this wasn’t one of those crazy times, like the driver who held up a picture of a woman and said, Do you know who this is? This is God, but instead it was like he was saying there was a plan also for a new stadium on the West side of Manhattan. He didn’t need me to believe him.
• I am thinking also about my own money, of which there isn’t much, and how, after the event is done, I’ll go to my accountant, because of continuing tax issues I have and because he keeps night hours–I don’t like my wife’s TV shows, he tells me.
• The stories from dinners at the conference, of people in Vermont burning their furniture to heat their houses because they can’t afford oil or gas heat, and of people sleeping in their cars along the roads, without homes. And so driving into the city no longer feels casual after that, and my sturdy ’94 Geo Prizm, which gets 35 miles to the gallon, makes me feel rich.

Because I am thinking of this and more, some things have gone wrong. For example, I made a Facebook event for my reading and then…felt like I was done. Facebook is very easy for making invitations to events, and it was so easy, and so many of my friends are on it, I didn’t send out emails or put it on my blog. When I realize I forgot to do more than this, I have a moment of feeling how I live in a future I don’t know I would have chosen, but that I did manage to choose, all the same. So to recover, I make calls on the drive down, apologizing to perplexed friends who I know are rightly mad at me for this. The student interns, who for some reason I feel like I’ve known for a long time, mock me for this the next night, when I return, and even insist I delete applications from my page in front of them. But for now, I step onto the train, feeling both exhausted and foolish. And on the train down, I fall asleep.

I arrive at the exact time the event begins. The room is standing-room-only full, and my three writers from the issue are there: Catherine Chung, Elaine H. Kim and Jin Young Sohn. The events director of the workshop hands me a cold free Singha beer. A reporter from Korea Daily takes a picture of me with the three writers I chose. Then I read from this essay:

I lived my first three years in Korea, in my grandfather’s house in Seoul, before we moved to Truk, Hawaii, Guam, then Maine. My mother tells me that the first written words I ever read aloud were “Obi Mechu”, the Korean version of, if your American child looked up at you and said, “Schlitz Beer.” I was on her lap, looking over her shoulder at billboards as we drove through Seoul.

My father’s family in Korea keeps traditions they brought with them from China in the 15th Century that the Chinese no longer keep; they use an archaic Chinese script in the keeping of our family’s records. They perform, inside the confines of my family, these rituals of this lost homeland—even as they tell me they fear I’m “not Korean enough,” with no sense of irony whatsoever.

If I were, say, to be as like them as they asked when I was younger—if I were to be “Korean enough,” I still would never be Korean enough for some. I would still go to my grave an alien. I think of them, though, now that I live in America. I wonder if what we do as Korean Americans is so very different from what they do in Korea with the traditions of China. If we are headed towards becoming a performance of the myths of the homeland that would be bizarre and even antiquated to the people who live there now.

Go check out the issue. As you read it, pretend you’re inside the Asian American Writers Workshop, a loft office on West 32nd, near Broadway, full of books and people. There’s a low stage with a stool that’s lit up, and the room is mostly dark. Small origami cranes of different colors cover most of the wall behind the stage. People have turned the fans off to hear the readers.

More tomorrow. If you live in New York, and you would have wanted to come, I’m sorry for not telling you about this event. And, should I even say it? This is probably a bad time. But if you’re on Facebook, add me.

So that this confusion never, ever happens again, here is a guide to these incredible-looking men who are appearing with increasing frequency on our tv and movie screens here in America.

1. Rain

Rain is arguably the most high-profile, internationally.

Think of him as being a Korean Justin Timberlake, maybe, but mixed with a Korean Jake Gyllenhal. You can check out his Donnie-Darko-esque turn in the as yet untranslated I’m A Cyborg. The below still from that was one of last year’s most popular image headers on this blog.

He’s shown an extraordinary range as a performer, able to dance around in angel wings in a Korean rap video, or appear in art-house Korean indie films. He’s most famous to US audiences for his dance battles with Stephen Colbert on the Colbert Report. He is an incredible dancer. In this clip, note the Dance Dance Revolution sudden-death round.

2. Karl Yune

Karl Yune, it should be said, looks nothing like Rain. Karl is the younger Korean American brother of another, earlier Korean American celeb, Rick Yune. Karl is familiar to most of you as an Abercrombie model.

That’s what I’m talking about. As you can see, Rain is more puckish, and more changeable. Rain has so many different looks, it’s a little shocking. That doesn’t really excuse what happened.

3. Rick Yune

Rick Yune, Karl’s older brother, is also a stunningly good-looking man. They look even less alike, though, than Karl Yune and Rain.

Rick is familiar to us from his roles as Johnny Tran in The Fast and the Furious, and as Zao, in the James Bond film Die Another Day.

4. Joon Park Hyung

Joon Park Hyung from the now defunct Korean boy band g.o.d. is in Speed Racer and it’s worth pointing out, he is not Rain, also. In fact, here is a photo of the two of them together, which was actually one of my favorite header images from 2007. All of the men here except the Yune brothers have appeared in my blog header, as I like to think here at Koreanish we’re a little ahead of the curve on these important, world-changing issues. This shot was taken right after Joon was signed to the film:

That’s the gang sign for “Hot Korean Actors Headed To America.” Rain is on the left. Joon is on the right. Joon is on the rise, and is signed up for the new Dragonball Z film.

4. Daniel Henney

Coming up is Daniel Henney. Daniel is in the new X-Men film featuring Wolverine’s origins, as someone called Agent Zero.

Daniel is, quite simply, stunning to look at, and once the X-Men film is out, People Magazine will likely want to tap him for their Most Beautiful issue.

6. Dennis Oh

The next one we should all be looking for is Dennis Oh, who is sometimes confused for Daniel, though, this is perhaps because they are both half Korean, half white soap star heartbreakers. The “they all look the same” thing extends to us half-breeds, it’s worth noting. They are also set in competition against each other–some even asking, which one is hotter?–which is again, only happening because they’re both half white. No one asks that question about Rain and Karl, for example. Anyway, check out Dennis Oh, the future crush object of America and the world, hot in his own right:

• World Famous Love Acts, by Brian Leung
• A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, by Yiyun Li
• We Should Never Meet, by Aimee Phan
• When The Emperor Was Divine, by Julie Otsuka
• Free Food For Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee
• Skirt Full of Black, by Sun Yung Shin
• Dance Dance Revolution, by Catherine Park Hong
• Grass Roof, Tin Roof, by Dao Strom
• The Hell Screens, by Alvin Lu
• The Gangster We Are All Looking For, by Le Thi Diem Thuy

I don’t know, I said. I just do.

I didn’t tell him the white kids asked me the same question.

Most of my childhood I felt like a shade, something in and out of perception. People would say things about Asian people in front of me that they would never say in front of someone more visibly Asian, and people would say things about white people in front of me that people would never say in front of people more visibly white. I vanished, it felt like. Or my appearance changed. White people thought my eyes were brown and my hair brown. Blacks and Asians thought I had green eyes and red hair. Why would you go to Korea to visit relatives, asked one co-worker of mine, at a bookstore in San Francisco, some years ago.

Because. . .and then I paused in my answer. Because I’m half Korean.

His eyes shot open. No way, he said.

I accepted it then, as I did as a child, in the way children do, that this was what I was, something that changed in the light around people and that I couldn’t control or predict. Most people, I think, when they meet other people, are confident that they give the appearance of belonging to this or that ethnic group, they feel confident that there is a home somewhere and a family that looks like them. This was not me, though. My mother was blonde, my father’s hair, shoe-polish black. Except for one red hair. Which he would pull out.

My eyes are hazel, half green and half brown. My hair, brown and red.

I soon realized I could give a different answer every time, to the question people always asked me: What are you. It hurt at first, as a child. Why was it no one knew what I was? And why did they seem suspicious, or even resentful? But soon it became a mark of distinction, to be like this. I have been mistaken as Mexican by Mexicans, African American by African Americans, I have been asked by strangers if I am Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, Argentinean, Hawaiian. What was I indeed. If no one knew, what could I be?

What could I not be?

An excerpt from my essay, “Kitsune”, in Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer, and in stores now.