Music…

Careless Whisper

Make It Big

Wham!

and Words

Time can never mend
The careless whispers of a good friend
To the heart and mind ignorance is kind
But there′s no comfort in the truth
Pain is the all you’ll find

Shoulda′ known better, yeah
I feel so unsure
As I take your hand and lead you to the dance floor
As the music dies
Something in your eyes
Calls to mind the silver screen
And all its sad goodbyes

Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.

Wham! came onto the scene while I was in high school.  It all started with the dayglow song, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”.  This is not a post about that song, which, even today, permeates my head as a detestable earworm.  Wham! got enough radio (and MTV) airplay, but they remained mostly in the periphery of my attention.  That’s where this band remained until I graduated high school.

Shortly after I graduated high school, I found my kin.  I sleepwalked through my first eighteen years without really finding other Chinese Americans.  Only a handful of Asian American students attended my high school.  Even when we crossed paths, it felt as if we were still a token group.  Once I graduated, I met other Chinese Americans.  It felt transformative.

Many teens cross this same threshold upon graduating from high school; they undergo an extreme shock to their environment.  While starting school at the University of Miami was chaotic, I expected it to be less traumatic.

Miami is only a moderate drive from my home in Fort Lauderdale.  My dad is buried in Miami, and Interstate 95 was the main road I traversed as I grew up.  It is my sentimental street.  In fact, I spent the preceding summer at the University of Miami.  As I navigated my senior year and slipped into college, Miami seemed like the “safe” default choice.

The climate was the same as Fort Lauderdale; we watched the same local TV stations.  The drive from Fort Lauderdale to Miami took less than an hour, door-to-door.  I could easily drive home to do laundry or grab a bite to eat.  I expected it to be pretty much the same.  It was a little too far to commute every day, but close enough for the weekend return home.

A flurry of activity filled the last few weeks of senior year, though, upon graduation, everything slowed.  In that moment, everything moved in slow motion, the way you may remember a car accident.  I found a job waiting on tables at a local restaurant.  In many ways, I was killing time until I started school in September.  As I mentioned above, I first discovered people like me, Chinese American teens, during that summer.  I do not exaggerate when I say that it changed the trajectory of my life.

Until that point, I developed angst and anger about conformity, since it was the birthplace of my being bullied.  I spent my energy fighting against the forces of consistency and affirmation.  I argued that we were all different, and any attempt to bucketize us ultimately harmed us.  I lived the life of a perpetual ‘otherness’, the odd one out.  I was the mismatched sock who maintained that I could still keep that foot warm.

That summer, I found people like me.  For once, I wasn’t the token Asian person in the group; I was like everyone else.  I sat with others who experienced the same things that I did.  They were the only Asian students in their schools, or among a small group.  All those vices from before abruptly became virtues.  I now valued conformity, consistency, and affirmation.  The romance of not needing to ponder every iota of my existence overwhelmed me.  Yes, even I succumbed to this succubus that was kinship.

As the years passed and I continued my studies in engineering, we all continued to meet.  Enterprising young Asian Americans will rent a hall to host a party with a cover.  They added a DJ to play dance music and 2-liter bottles of soda.  They’d come out ahead and make a modest sum of money, but this is where we spend much of our time together.  For the rest of us, it meant that we’d have what we’d affectionately call Chinky Parties regularly, every third weekend or so.  I spent my weekdays diligently studying engineering.  Seventeen credit semesters filled the week.  On weekends, I drove to Fort Lauderdale to wait on tables, to earn enough money to sustain me during the week.

On the weekends when there were parties, we rushed home at 9pm, the end of our shift.  My sisters and I would get showered and primped, and then we’d wander into the night.  Those rented dancefloors became our sanctuary, nay our stage.  We, who had navigated life as outsiders, suddenly became the in-crowd.  Though Miami clubs certainly had their distinctive flavor of music that compelled us to dance, the music played at our parties had a European dance influence.

The music at the parties included the typical expressive dance music.  The type of music that drove us to develop our own form of expression and moves.  The dancing that you might do with friends, and occasionally your sisters.  Like anything else, we all developed our favorite tunes.  With the less appealing songs, we might take a break and chat to catch up with recent events.  For our favorite tunes, we collectively felt compelled to run to the dance floor and expend our nervous energy.

The DJ would then alternate to couples’ music.  Songs that compelled us to couple and hold each other in a more intimate embrace.  At first, I dreaded these songs.  Even among my kin, I was still an awkward teenager who grew up without a father or older brother.  I still sucked at this.  After enough of these parties, a young woman of Honduran and Chinese descent caught my eye.  Truthfully, she caught my eye from the first day that I met her, but it was over these parties where I developed an affection for her.

During a particular party, like many other parties before, the DJ stopped the dance music.  The music didn’t mix into the next song the way that it normally does.  The familiar start of ‘Careless Whisper’ breaks the silence, telegraphing that we’d go into one of these transitions.  As we both stood on that dirty dance floor with an okay-now-what look, I worked up the nerve.  I extended my hand and asked her to dance; she smiled and accepted.

The five minutes that followed were bliss.  We were still drenched with sweat from our dancing, but that didn’t matter.  I held her closely as we talked about nothing in particular.  The dance floor was dark, barely lit by the rotating reflection from the disco light.  Though even then, I couldn’t see her beautiful face at all, since she took the initiative and wrapped her arms around me.  We didn’t talk; we whispered.  Words that meant nothing at all that I can’t remember, but only the two of us can hear.  It was a surreal intimacy.  We were our own island in an archipelago of similar couples.

We started to sway more as the saxophone portion played, like the desperate cry after a lost love.  The music changes, and our dance regretfully ends.  She releases her embrace and walks away with a cordial goodbye.  I stood quietly on that dance floor for a moment, still filled with longing for this young woman.  Her scent still lingered on my clothes; the warmth of her body slowly fading with her departure.