 Hey, let's all take a deep breath. One more. God, it's 2 AM, and I'm walking under the West Seattle freeway, trying to get home, lost my friends, had my 18th birthday, missed the last bus. How did I get here? I remember Marco traces the perfect Cupid's bow in Ruby Woo, magenta blush and silver shadow, terracotta foundation smooth, his subtle stubble. Max douses his body with gold glitter to match his final pants. Joey sits on the couch and reads a book. While I put the final touches on my eyeliner and pull on my bell bottoms, my body births a galaxy of purple velvet stars. We load into Marco's car, stopping on Capitol Hill for snacks. Walking up Broadway, past ostensibly straight men, Max says, look at him. I do him. He's not that cute. I don't care. Put a bag over his head. A couple passes us on the glittery sidewalk. You want to have sex? Let's have sex. Marco shimmies his shoulders behind a tan muscular man. Stop it, says Joey. We're not talking to you, clearly. Marco loads us into his car. We drive down through the industrial district, silver factories loom on each block. We could be in a small city in the Midwest. The night is so quiet. Except for the hum of street lights, cars whooshing on the freedway, and street lamps casting shadows on steel buildings. And inside, there's such possibility. We park and enter a room packed with bodies. It is me and queer brown boys and a sea of strangers raving. My friends enter the mass of glowing movement while I stand wiping my brow, tasting salt. And then I'm alone. I've lost them. So I walk. Edging by the Seattle Viaduct, I see cranes flash by, swallowing yellow street lamps by the Pacific Ocean. Do you ever see things that are not there? A swimmer shrouded in blue lights, a mountain of broken glass. I'm not supposed to remember legs like tree trunks, throat and belly and feet swollen, unable to walk. The taste of tiny silver fish, the smell of soil in that forest of Malaysia, a courtyard of 100 families, yellow flames eating blue, the smell of sweat and burning, clink. Bodies packed on bodies, packed on bodies. At home, I run my hands across photographs. I can trace a broad smile here and there, a prominent nose, thick frame, and that's how I meet my family. They're wearing lavender and shoulder pads and owl-sized glasses, and it is 1999. My parents migrated from Malaysia. They migrated from the Bronx so that I could leave this all behind. Forget language and forget and forget and forget to be reborn. And images translated from family oral histories. Are you ready for more? Okay. All right. Well, this one's long, so I'm gonna abbreviate. And you can read the whole thing in a way journal in January, so yeah. And I'd like you to read it. All right. And can you hear me? Great. They water-boarded your grandfather, my dad says. He sits at the Cajun table, draws insulin up his orange-tipped syringe, face impassive, focused on the medicine. A Chinese immigrant in his 60s, he's already had a triple bypass. Sleeter Keeney sings the end of you from my boombox on the floor. Our table is cloistered with bows, newspapers, and a dog-eared sassy magazine. Seattle, 2000. The Japanese water-boarded your grandfather. Older generations, they hate the Japanese, but I have no hatred in my heart. I don't mind if you go. Shoulders tense. Dad left Malaysia as a scholarship student during the 60s. This former British colony holds family roots from roughly the 1900s. I've heard fragments of this story before, but the water-boarding is new. I'm flying to visit my friend, who's teaching English in the Japanese mountainside. I'll be fine, dad. So I book my ticket to Tokyo, the most expensive part of this trip. I'm a queer hyphenate, child of a Chinese immigrant and a Bronx-born and bred Jew. 20 years old, first generation Asian-American, I've never been outside the States before. I land in Tokyo, this place of bright pink and blue neon, green billboards, and giant crossings, bullet trains, and subway packers. I arrive not knowing the language, but globalization is a bitch. So a couple people around me on the train speak English. A middle-aged woman gives me directions to my youth hostel. It's past the McDonald's. Go through Shibuya Crossing. Take a left at the Sony billboard. I'm surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of bodies criss-crossing. Everyone is Asian. My feet move, but I can't feel my legs or chest. My head is detached. I stay in a six-bed youth hostel, tucking maps and journal under my pillow at night, sleep in a sea green slip, pull up the scratchy sheets, and hope that the balmy air yields no earthquakes. During the day, I eat my meals of salmon on jerry at 7-eleven, the pink fish peeking out from seaweed wrap and rice. I am this tiny blip of electric blue hair in a city of 13 million. Just another Seattle alternative who wants to, quote, go find herself. It's true. Here I am not oddity. No one stares at me among the swarms of people. The friend is a guise. Otherwise my parents would never let me travel alone. Really, I'm excited to search for my people, queers and subculture. I've never been to Asia before. I wander the neon lights at midnight in Shibuya and then Shinjuku. Shibuya has Alice in Wonderland on acid, swirls of candy colors, street style in high fashion, H&M next to indie boutiques, bars and tiny pod hotels. Shinjuku is Times Square, gay, red light, seedy, full of clubs and shiny skyscrapers. Shinjuku has thousands of bodies and cars and mopeds worrying by all neon and gigantic TV screens. Both areas emerged post-1945. Tokyo air raids destroyed more than 90% of these areas, killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced one million. Before the atomic bomb, Japan occupied Southeast Asia, Borneo, Burma, Indochina, including Vietnam, Malaysian, Singapore, Philippines and Thailand, World War II. The Japanese army maimed and murdered with bayonets and guns, mass graves and slow starvation. The war across Southeast Asia killed six to 10 million people. This is the Holocaust no one talks about, my dad says. My family lived in a relocation camp in Malaysia during the war, 1941 to 1945. We are haka, the guest people. My family was lucky because no one died. Wandering the streets of Shinjuku, I fall into a red-lit doorway, welcome guests of Club Rainbow. Why are gay clubs always called Rainbow, unicorn, kissing rose? Cheesy, but totally recognizable. I walk down basement stairs, saunter in my sunburn face and red mini dress, screaming out, I'm young and alone, there's nothing in nobody to stop me. Step out onto the dance floor and I'm enmeshed in movement, face surrounded by light and texture from crayon colored wigs, gold feathers and rhinestones. Sweat runs down my lip, attractive. I see ravers in fishnet dresses and magenta pigtails, rainbow bright with furry unicorn, strawberry shortcake and stripey tights, all dancing under disco lights. I've stepped into fruits, stretching my arms through the crowd, I find a silver wall to lean against. I try talking to the women next to me, but it's too loud. My tongue is dumb. I am ABC, American born Chinese. Fumbling against the wall, I don't know the culture and there's so much subculture. From the subways and streets and maps I'm learning, here's how to find what you need. It's too hot, I take out my bottle, splash some water on my face. Splat, my grandfather's head tilts upside down as they bring buckets and buckets to hit his face again. Wave after wave, sputtering, spitting, screaming water. It comes down his nose into his eyes, mixing with tears and snot and blood. Covered by cloth, gasp, a baptism, body strapped down to a wooden board. He came home a new man. He failed to salute a lieutenant or maybe he didn't do it fast enough or maybe they didn't like how he looked. Did it matter? He never could remember things as well, got his dates and times mixed up. My dad, who was six at the time, doesn't know exactly what happened. But we were lucky. The army interrogated, detained and killed thousands of others. Waterboarding can dilute your blood. I'm gonna skip ahead a bit. So basically next, this character goes to the countryside to attend a rave to try to find queers. Is she successful? No. Okay. All right, so this is after the rave. And the character sitting with her friend ordering breakfast. Cause when you rave, you stay up til 6 a.m. I'm surrounded by Asian women and they're so submissive. It's the culture. They love to please men. After this confession, he, the friend sits up, fiddles and flashes his camera at a couple of women standing outside the cafe window. What fails to register in a snapshot? After a beat, he turns to me. You're holding your chopsticks wrong. I glance at my hand. It is a claw bunched up pointer finger and thumb near the tip of my chopsticks. My stomach pinches, throat dry and lumpy. I say nothing. Then I shift in my seat, look over his head and pretend to scan the menu. I leave shortly after, escape his gaze and the lonely Japanese countryside. I am Asian, but not Asian enough. I am wrong and a woman trying to find home in diaspora. Here, I'm the imposter. In Tokyo, I become American in ways not possible in the States. It's not home, but it feels more like home than anywhere I've been before. Back in the U.S., I hear, where are you from? Where are you really from? And in preschool, what's wrong with your face? What's wrong with your eyes? ABC, foreign, lives on my skin. Within 24 hours, I leave the mountainside and the only person I know in Japan. Take the bullet train back to Tokyo. I am back to machines and metal and people bustling. Pink neon lights my face as I lean against the steel building in Shinjuku. I think that's brave. You came all the way here and you don't know anyone. Says the pixie face skinny blonde working at a nearby hostess bar. I stand in front of her with my backpack and red mini dress, hair held back by baby barrettes. Feeling free in one of the world's largest cities. At 23, she's an older woman. We chat and exchange phone numbers. We're both strangers. She's from Berlin and I'm from Seattle. Young women, what price is our safety? We're not supposed to walk solo, feel the kiss of night air, nor count the stars while dancing till 6 a.m. with strangers. We're not supposed to wander 5,000 miles from home traveling alone. The night is not ours. Adventure is not ours to claim. Yet here we are. Two young women amidst nightlife, a sparkling sea of strangers in worlds made for men, not speaking the language, not knowing anyone. Standing outside the hostess club, we're the only women. We're the only female travelers. Cleave through what we know of home and homeland. The Japanese held my family during war, put them in internment camps 70 years ago. How can I wander around and feel so free for 10 days in Tokyo? Freedom, so tired, so cliche, so freedom fries. I don't mean it like yoga woman with arms outstretched, a commercial sun salutation where ocean meets sands. This is not running through fields of red poppies. Young white women twirling gauzy gowns' faces thrown back in ecstasy. It can't be contained in a stock image. Instead it's a mess, contradictory. Like when you're at the doctor's office, but they can't find your pulse, but duh, you do know you're alive. Veins beat, pound rhythm against your skin. Where you drive in the rain, car almost crashing into a 16-wheeler, but you don't die drenched by waves of water. It's a queer sense of belonging and possibility to be this tiny light in a city of 13 million, in a country of 125 million, and in a continent of 4.3 billion. My last day in Japan, I walk past silver trains, kaleidoscope billboards, wander small against giant crowds. With the sound of Japanese pop and scooters coming along, daylight turns to night then it's 2 a.m. The ground rumbles, I find a street to lean against. Gonna find home. I'm just another Asian-American queer girl dreaming. Did I really think I could be like Kerouac looking for girls' visions and everything? Poor me, college student traveling to Tokyo while my aunt, a.k.a. mom's best friend, is 65 and working three jobs in South Brooklyn. I'm a tiny figure with a backpack lit by fluorescent billboards, the ground quakes new cement on top of centuries old dirt. I stumble for a few minutes and then find the street back to my hostel. The room is dark, packed with sleeping bodies. I sit on my bunk bed, breathe quietly among the six guests. I'm a tourist in Tokyo and a foreigner in the States. Asia for the Asians. That was the Japanese occupation slogan. Somehow I'm trying to find home against history. Thank you.