Met a newlywed couple–Gerard is an Air Force guy from Louisiana and Christina from California. Monterey, not far from where I grew up. We met in line at the festival, then ran into each other again under the shade of a tree.
If you don’t mind me asking, what ethnicity are you?, Gerard asked.
I laughed. That has been the subject of quite the curiosity lately, I said.
He guessed Japanese. His wife asked first if I was mixed and I said, no. She guessed Vietnamese.
At least you guys recognize that I’m Asian, I said. Christina is Mexican so she laughed when I told her the stories about all the Hola’s I get. She said that when she has bangs, she gets mistaken for Japanese a lot.
Maybe wherever I go, I just look native, I said. Just generally native. Like somewhere, no one’s sure where, I must be native.
Christina told me that Gerard’s losing his hair so he started shaving his head, but he’s got issues with going bald.
I told her that I’ve been noticing lately, a lot of guys having issues with it. Even last night, when I went to check out a band, I saw a guy who was dressed like a character out of that Mel Gibson movie, Mad Max. Spikes on his motorcycle jacket, bandana around his head, lots of chains all over. But it was his expression that was the hardest, like he was just daring someone to look at him the wrong way. He was a good-looking guy in a bad boy kind of way, but his face was too delicate, too pretty to be a real bad boy. If we were in LA, I would have pegged him for a struggling actor. He threw himself in a chair and took off his bandana, and he was completely bald. A very different looking person when he didn’t cover his head. But it wasn’t necessarily better or worse, just different, but there was something about him that made it obvious he wasn’t comfortable with it. Even though he’d come with friends, he sat there sulking for a bit, then took a wool cap out of his pocket, pulled it down low before he got up to walk around. I kind of felt like it was his attitude that was off-putting more than anything. Like if he could relax and smile, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But he just seemed so uncomfortable with his own body.
Gerard, in response to Christina poking fun at him for being so concerned about his hair loss, asked her, how would you feel if you lost all your thick, beautiful hair?
I’ve actually thought about what it would be like to lose all my hair just the other night, if all of a sudden, the universe deemed I should be bald. I’ve never had thick hair. It’s always been thin, delicate, with a texture like silk thread. I figure that if I ever lost all my hair, I would just have to own it with a heightened spiritual presence, like a monk. I would probably take it as the universe pushing me towards a pretty unique path.
I told him that if we–Christina and I– lost all our hair, we would just look like aliens. And maybe that’s the point because clearly they’ve been here before, because humans are dumb. We sure as hell didn’t build those pyramids by ourselves. It’s like if you have a 4 year-old and you leave him alone in his room with crayons and come back and he’s drawn the Mona Lisa, then you know he got some help. We sure as hell didn’t build those on our own.
Christina and Gerard burst out in laughter. Christina said that Gerard’s always talking about that, too, that some other life form helped us build the pyramids. The science and precision of them, especially given the times, is just impossible for humans, he said.
I told him that you look at all the places where big things got built and knowledge dropped–Egypt, Mayan civilizations, China…we all look similar. I nodded towards Christina. I’m mistaken for Hispanic and she’s mistaken for Asian…clearly we’re interchangeable. But you take away our hair, and with our big slanted eyes, you basically have someone who looks eerily like a distant descendant of the Grey’s. We’re the original mixed breed. We’re the OG Hybrid strain.
Gerard laughed and being Caucasian, he said he felt lucky marrying into our kind. I told him not to worry. Sexy is an attitude, a state of being. If Christina looks at him and thinks he’s sexy, that’s all that matters. Because however he is, it’s who he is. Just own it.