I had two extremely stressful days. This is primarily because my mother found my stash of hormone pills and went berserk. I am extremely upset that I do not have any semblance of privacy. I am also very upset that my mother sees me only through rose-colored glasses (maybe not so rose-colored) and picks up only masculine cues, saying that there is absolutely nothing feminine about me, and that the idea of me living as a woman is preposterous. Most importantly, I am upset that my mother thinks she can control my life and my gender presentation.
My mother may be ethnic Chinese, but she was born and raised in Korea and completely assimilated into that society, and now she is a product of the Korean mega-churches that dot the Southern California landscape. And it is these churches, and their preachers, that put up so much an obstacle for me. They are the ones supporting Bush and his immoral war, as if it were the Armageddon. (And hoping that Bush would take his moral, Christian war to the heathens in North Korea.) They are the ones pushing for California's upcoming ban on gay marriage and domestic partnerships. And they are the ones going left and right to limit women's rights by tracing everything back to the original sin of Eve.
I spent last night watching the National Geographic Channel special on September 11, 2001 (and was upset twice - at the destruction of World Trade Center, and at the crash of United 93, where a character from Perfect Girl, Martha, dies). I still vividly remember the horrors of London bombings on July 7 of this year. Both attacks were carried out by religious extremists from abroad who had assimilated themselves well into their host nations and societies; the New York attacks were done by those on student visas, and the London attacks by Pakistanis who had naturalized and assimilated into British society. Go ahead and call me paranoid, but having seen the extremism in Korean churches in Los Angeles (and back in New York), I expect them to be up to something similar as well. I won't be surprised if they decided to take a 10-minute drive to West Hollywood to bomb a gay nightclub. If they believe in honor killings for deviant family members (like the Pakistanis do), they can surely bomb a gay nightclub.
I expected better from a culture supposedly modern enough to flood America with cell phones and cars. Apparently I was wrong. It takes more than a high-tech manufacturing industry to make a developed country. (By contrast, South Africa, which used to be in the pits with its apartheid 15 years ago, is now considered developed, because its manufacturing cranks out BMWs, and its society is open enough to consider gay marriages.)
Blogger (the host of this blog) lets me blog here in several European languages, plus Chinese, Japanese, and... Korean. Perhaps they should rethink about it, considering that the Korean culture is far more primitive than the rest. Or they should go ahead and add other primitive cultures' languages, like Urdu for example. They should add more developed cultures' languages, like Thai, first.
