My Shooting Stars

The city lights dwindle in the distance. The polluted white ambiance softly pulses. The sky is streaked with long fibrous clouds that diffuse the half-moon’s light and break up constellations. We’re driving down a gravel road, the clock reads ten past midnight.

My thoughts are morbid. With the darkness covering the road ahead and blanketing the road behind all I can help to think of is this investigative news report I saw when I was three. It was about some guy who hunted down a bunch of people riding around on four-wheelers with a 12-gauge shotgun. It was sort of a monumental thing for me to see. It made me fear man. I was afraid when I went to bed that night and dreamed nightmares of men in trucker hats and heavy boots running after me and my feet getting stuck in the mud when I tried to cross the river. When my parents forbid me from riding four-wheelers they told me they were dangerous. "I KNOW!" was the response in my head.

I think about how it would be horrible for a maniac to be haunting these dusty roads with a hammer and soft step. What if he got her and I got away? Drifts through my mind. Well, you’d be crushed of course, but after enough tears and Jack Daniel Cokes you might pull through. It is a stupid idea though, because any maniac would have to make his way past my lifeless body before touching her.

I rock the steering wheel rhythmically with the road, avoiding rough patches and large rocks. There is going to be a meteor shower tonight. She was very excited when we left. But clouds blot out the stars and a cold heartless wind blows down hope.

Fact: Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus.
Fact: Seung-Hui Cho majored in English.
Fact: Seung-Hui Cho was South Korean

My roommate asked me if needed to worry about me the other day. Sounded a little insensitive to me. Just a logical progression of thought for him.

The road dips low, she breathes in softly, but audibly. Down. Down. Down. I wonder and marvel at the differences that make people good and others killers. I struggle with attachment, or detachment. I constantly try to drive the people I love away. And maybe it has something to do about being an orphan, and being abandoned by the people who are supposed to love you the most.

Sometimes she cries when I say things I should not because I’m feeling things I should not. I suffer silence with guilt; wondering why we say things we know we should not.

My parents say I grew up before I came to America. At 18 months I set foot in America, out ate my parents at a Thanksgiving dinner, and learned my first American word on the car ride home from the airport. By four I spoke in complete sentences, addressed my parent’s church on several occasions, and made an excellent wise man from “orient are” one year and shepherd the next in the Christmas pageant (I always volunteered to be Joseph and never understood why I never was). By six I buried a younger brother, cursed God’s name, became an older brother again, and read half of The Boxcar Children series on my own.

I’m searching. I know this spot where sand meets water and monarchs come in the fall migration to kiss the sand in long sips and will sponge salt off your skin if you stay still. But it’s night. And the gravel road is dark and long, but we drive; until turned away by a no trespassing sign and I admit we’re lost. I pull off the road onto a plateau were the grass has been blown flat by the sweeping winds. We lie on the car and stare at the sky looking for shooting stars behind threads of wispy clouds.

I laughed the other day at silly smiling girl in a tampon commercial. I laughed at capitalism and lies of marketing departments. I bet that commercial was shot mid-month.

My roommates tell me that I’m not that Asian. And I think I’ve finally realized what it is. I don’t adhere to the stereotype of Asian ethnicity that popular culture has ingrained in their minds. But my hair is dark, my eyes are slanted, my skin is smooth; I eat with chopsticks, cook rice and noodles daily, and watch Korean soaps. I’m stuck between feeling grateful that they’ve learned to look at me beyond a stereotype, and lightly offended because I am proud of who I am.

She shivers. The night is cool and I wrap an arm around her. She can’t stop shaking. I wish we could see shooting stars.