Troll
It started with prayer.
I shadowed my mother around the temple through incense smoke and whispers to ancestors. That’s what the monk who’d read my mother’s palms at 19 called me--her shadow. He’d mapped out everything from my father’s stooped shoulders to her eventual death. There I was, in those creases and chains, following.
At Phat Ba’s porcelain and gold feet, we kneeled and shook the fortune sticks out of the cup to the insistent rhythm of our hopes, and the color-coded fortunes laid out whole what I was to be for the year. I kept distance from my mother as she walked the grounds, pausing to bow to each of the Buddha statues seated under trees, above fountains. She only pulled me close by the elbow when we came to the grapefruit tree, my height to harvest.
The monk, ông thầy, lifted the orange drape of his robe’s sleeve so it would not dip into the aluminum trays of cá kho tộ, com, canh chua: all made vegetarian, in the way of Buddha. My mother and I sat under a tree and ate, the flavor deep and peppery in tofu’s mimicry of flesh.
Those bites, under the monks smiling nods, wove together all my cheesy t-shirts of wolves howling at the moon and bears pawing at honeycombs, the endangered animal fact cards I eagerly awaited in the mail, the hamster I smuggled on a plane. All of this coalesced into my decision to become a vegetarian.
With my dad’s child support checks, I fed myself boxed mac and cheese, microwaveable bean and cheese burritos, and Teddy Grahams. At school, I hovered around the cheerleaders’ lunchtime practice and entertained their body talk until they discarded half-eaten sandwiches, which kept me full until I went to work as a cashier at Target, adjacent to a Taco Bell, whose employees learned my orders of Mexican pizzas. “No meat,” the drive thru speaker crackled back.
It took time to educate myself. I read about the geopolitical and environmental impacts of the meat industry and found a deeper cause--political and spiritual--for going vegetarian. The foods I ate were a way to marry Buddhism and punk rock, to unify seemingly disparate parts of my life. Here was something that could be mine.
The shine was temporary. My mother was not proud as I thought she would be, since she’d introduced me to this way at the temple. “Why you so picky,” she said. “You not gonna eat my food? It’s vegetarian. Just pork. In Viet Nam, we eat what we have. Eat. Eat. Ugh. Fine, starve then.” I didn’t mention it to her again, just ate around the dried, shredded pork she sprinkled on top of my rice, forked to the side the chunks of chicken and, when she wasn’t looking, slid them over to my brother and sister’s plates. My mother had taught me not to waste.
I began to obsess about what I ate. This turned into counting calories and got down to 500 a day. While babysitting my toddler sister one day, I got up off the couch to chase her in her purple Teletubbies costume and immediately blacked out and knocked my head in a straight fall to the tile floor. When I came to, I saw her tiny face hovering over mine, her brow knitted in worry underneath her purple felt hood. I would stay vegetarian for fifteen more years until I visited Viet Nam for the first time and did not want to refuse people who offered me meat, but I stopped denying myself calories that day. I didn’t want to die in front of my sister.
That’s when I started piecing apart the wholeness that the temple’s fortune sticks had predicted. Vietnamese astrology treated you as a whole, destined, with predetermined dates of when and what was lucky. A refugee from war, my mother had taught me to survive by fitting in by keeping my hair straight and not too long not too short, by speaking without an accent, by smiling in pictures but not showing teeth. With one piece of my body at a time, I challenged her assimilation-to-survive aesthetic. I had been doing this all along anyway, trying to look more white, more brown, more this, less that. This was just a new iteration, a story untold—something to distract. I was extra.
Fishnets diamond my legs under PE shorts; my sloppy needlework stitched band and animal rights patches onto my sweaters that covered my bulging chest and my arms, laced and dotted with self-inflicted cuts that tested my edges of pain, and then stirred my maternal will to survive by nursing my own wounds; I dyed my hair alternating colors of the rainbow, which attracted whistles and comments from everyone on the street. I had made myself visible with $6 pots of Manic Panic. I was all pieces that I could change and reassemble. I turned blades to my hair, shaving the back, sides, chopping the top to spike. “Like someone die. So bad luck,” my mother wailed in mourning of my hair, so I was alone with the cool breeze on my scalp.
On the weekends with my dad, our ritual began with a stop to Tower Records to rent movies, big and squeaky in their plastic VHS cases. I began to wander. I slipped on headphones at each listening station, flipped through all of the music magazines, and browsed the cds of the canon--The Ramones, Subhumans, Crass, and the new release from Rancid. My dad was the one who introduced me to The Ramones’ movie Rock and Roll High School when I was just a kid admiring PJ Soles in her pigtailed fangirl glory, and the first album he gave to me was Oingo Boingo’s Dead Man’s Party. These were my primers for navigating Tower, and that space introduced me to a whole new language, one that would lead me to other, much smaller record shops like Bionic in Huntington Beach and Noise Noise Noise in Costa Mesa. Although I was usually the only girl in there, pushing past dirty leather jackets and scuffed skateboards, the record shop was my classroom. I left each visit with stacks of ‘zines where I read about the bands that became the soundtrack of high school--Naked Aggression, Defiance, Nausea.
Just as I had deconstructed and reassembled myself, I cut out pictures from ‘zines to collage my walls from ceiling to floor. To fill the empty spaces, I photocopied magazines at the library and taped the black and whites of music, art, and fashion. My mother snuck into my room while I was at school to rip down pictures of musicians whom she told me later, “Look like rapers.” As much as I tried to make those four walls my own, it still did not feel like home. And my mother warned me that home could be nowhere else. The outside world, she threatened from her own experience, was dangerous. On the back of the door, she did her own decorating: news stories about identity fraud with her note scrawled, “Don’t let mail sit in box,” kidnapping and rapes, lists of reasons people got parking tickets, and the verbal warning that needed no posting: “You friends not your family. No one love you like me.”
We began to fight harder, throwing things at each other, yelling then silencing, and my mom wrote pages-long letters about how much I hurt her. “I love you because I have to. You’re my daughter. But I don’t like you.”
That particular fight, and I can’t even remember what it was about, sent me shuttling to people’s couches--my dad’s for awhile, then my aunt and uncle’s, and then my friend Carolina’s mom Bella welcomed me to stay in her home for the rest of the summer.
My dear friend Carolina--all light and laughter and love--had a brother named Rafa--all tattoos and smoking and angst and Chicano, so exactly the kind of picture my mom would tear up--whom I started dating when I was fifteen. He didn’t say much but was a vegetarian too. Our courtship was pretty much just him telling me he was proud of me for going meatless. He was also the friend of my ex and somehow that felt like a victory—another of my mom’s ways to survive; her lessons were with me even when I rebelled against her. And then we were together.
Rafa was the drummer in a neighborhood punk band called Solution for Ignorance--a name I always laughed at--and they practiced in his garage, which became a community space--the opposite of my mom’s emotionally enforced barricades. In that garage, I shared a couch with white boys who called themselves Stinky Nuts, the Pirate, Poop, and Jason whose ordinary name was counterbalanced by his realistic zombie FX makeup. They talked a lot about anarchy and made fun of me and Carolina for being the only ones enrolled in high school. Once they saw me reading a book on the couch in the garage, and after all the heckling, I kept my books hidden away in a bag covered in sloppily sewn band patches. Punk culture was making me question and crave learning, and I never pointed out that Rafa and his friends’ talk of anarchy was just another subscription to an ideology that kept them from thinking for themselves. Everything was “fuck it.” I hadn’t lost my mother enough to say “fuck it all” with conviction. As much as I tried to distance myself from her and what she wanted for me, I always felt the responsibility of our history to try and unfuck things.
At first, because we were just kids transforming childhood spaces into our own, we befriended a rich girl who wore designer bondage pants and got her hair bleached and spiked at a salon. She had a Disneyland annual pass, so we licked the re-entry stamp on her hand to transfer it to our own, before the Magic Kingdom began requiring tickets to re-enter the park. Under the spinning rockets in Tomorrowland, we sipped peppermint Schnapps out of souvenir Mickey mugs, smoked glowing cherries of cigarette butts in the tree-covered recesses flanking Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and shouted punk renditions of “It’s a Small World.”
Before the Disneyland Resort renovated all of surrounding Anaheim, Harbor Boulevard at Katella Avenue was rough. Once, my friends and I were supposed to meet up with a guy who could get us booze. We crossed Katella to a rundown seedy ‘60s motel, called the Sun or something else ironic, and as we knocked on the door of his room, a working girl came out of the adjacent room and approached me. Her breath still warm and musky, she told me she liked girls too and asked if I wanted to be with her for an hour. I’ve got prostitutes in my family and am not opposed to being with women, but it was something about the rush of her hustle--that she hadn’t even closed the door on her john before marketing to me--that really eroded my Disney buzz.
Our booze hook-up finally opened the door and ushered us into the room. Inside, a guy was duct-taped to one of the flimsy motel chairs, gagged and struggling. As quickly as we were ushered in, we backed out. I’m pretty sure that’s the last time we went to Disneyland together.
Instead, we became seatbeltless freeway flyers, packed into vans that our licensed friends borrowed from their suburban parents: Chain Reaction and The Doll Hut in Anaheim, The Glass House in Pomona, The Showcase Theatre in Corona, some random bar in La Habra, and Koo’s Cafe in Santa Ana, where Rafa’s band often played. One night at Koo’s, a middle-aged man in a beret and cargo shorts approached to bum a cigarette from my friend Katie who has a gravitational pull on people. Not me.
Immediately, I judged him. I thought he was some creep with a young punk girl fetish to relive his ‘80s youth. But he talked to us in a very TV-dad way. “I come here to share a meal, a story, a laugh. It’s important to be good to each other.” Katie, much more open-hearted than me, nodded and chatted with him. Taught to always distrust strangers, I stood back, smoked. When we parted ways, he told us, “The OC Weekly interviewed me.” My interest piqued by reading, I asked, “About what?”
“You gotta read to find out.”
On my next visit to Tower Records with my dad, sure enough I saw Mark on the cover holding a cardboard sign that said, “Homeless in Orange County.” He’d never mentioned that, but it all made sense--sharing a meal at Koo’s, his clothes. In the article, he detailed how he’d become a person who was homeless. Decades later, his story is still imprinted on my memory.
He’d been a contractor--house, truck, business--and was living the typical suburban life that people think of when they hear Orange County. He and his wife had a son, but their marriage didn’t work out, so they co-parented. When their son was three or four, his wife started dating again, and a long-term boyfriend moved into the house they once shared. A year or so into their cohabitation, his wife called him, hysterical. The house was on fire. It turned out that the boyfriend had been sexually abusing the son, and that day did so much damage to the boy’s body, he panicked and lit the child on fire to cover the evidence. The flames could not be controlled. “I lost everything,” he explained in the article.
That article would become one of the many reads that changed me. I’d been raging at my mother for things that were big between us, but we were small in scope. We only used fire to cook and pray.
The first Asian American punk rocker I met called himself Troll. The summer I lived in Bella’s home, my dad, patient and devoted, drove me and Rafa out to San Bernadino for a huge showcase revival, including TSOL and Vice Squad. My dad had introduced me to concerts—Little Richard, John Fogerty, Joan Jett, and countless others. Now he was handing this tradition off to Rafa.
My dad’s always on White People Time, so we got there super early and were left in the roiling heat before the venue opened its doors. Rafa knew people. In part because of his band’s network, but he also just knew how to approach people with ease, as if they’d lived on the same street their whole lives and he was just bumming a cigarette like it was any other Tuesday. I was always, at least that’s how it felt, a step behind his elbow, reticent from the fears, doubts, and insecurities my mother had seeded in me. We were walking along the sidewalks of the surrounding neighborhood looking for shade when we approached a van with its sliding door open. I looked down and wanted to keep walking, but Rafa stepped up to the van and, in his way, lifted his chin and said, “Hey, man. Can I get one of those?”
“Yeah, man! Come on in. I’m Troll”
Troll was round, except for the foot-tall green and purple tri-hawk and the studs on his leather jacket. His girlfriend, a white girl, sat next to him, her bony knees pressed together, and a big pregnant belly bulged on her lap. She dragged a cigarette and stared out the greasy tinted windows. Rafa and Troll shot the shit while they smoked and sipped Coronas.
Rafa and I often fought, both verbally and physically, and he showed me that I was abusive too; he would not be the last partner I would strike. But Rafa also reminded me of my mother in the way that he always came to my defense in front of other people. They were going to be the ones to come down on me.
Rafa asked for a beer for me when Troll didn’t even acknowledge me. When Rafa handed me the bottle, Troll said, “What’s wrong with her?” Rafa redirected the conversation and, because Troll did not acknowledge me, I pored over his face. He was dark-skinned with pockmarks and a wide, round nose. His potbelly and the way he pronounced “th” like “d” reminded me of my uncles. The more I found familiarity in him, the more I wanted him to recognize me. “So why ‘Troll’” I heard Rafa ask.
“Because I’m dat fuckin’ ugly, man!”
His girlfriend snorted.
Rafa turned to her. “When’s the baby due?”
Troll interjected. “Any day now. Hope it’s not ugly as me.”
“It’s half me too,” she said.
Rafa looked at me and then, “You know, you shouldn’t be smoking. It’s bad for the baby.”
“Thanks, asshole. I stopped smoking crack. I’m not giving up cigarettes.”
Rafa looked to me again, and I started to feel nauseated.
“It’s just really bad,” he said.
“Don’t fuckin’ tell my girl what to do,” Troll said.
I leaned out of the open door of the van and braced myself to throw up.
“She a poser or something?” Troll asked. His girlfriend snorted again, and I could hear the paper of her cigarette singing.
“Let’s go.” I felt Rafa’s hand on my back and we were out in the sun again.
I avoided Troll’s trihawk bobbing in the pit and watched from the side of the stage as Rafa threw elbows through the crowd and lassoed his shirt above his head. I felt hot breath on my neck and turned to see my people’s high cheekbones and side leer staring back at me. I sidestepped away and saw that he was wearing a polo shirt and dark jeans, topped by a haircut about ten years out of style. How he’d come to a punk show full of leather and spikes and chains, I wasn’t sure. Between him and Troll, I felt that worlds were blending and I wasn’t sure how to navigate. I turned back to the stage where Beki Bondage was leaning into the pit of cycloning hormonal dudes. I had my own side leer going on and saw in my peripherals the Vietnamese guy approach me again. This time, he lifted my skirt and his fingertips brushed the crease between my buttcheek and upper thigh before I pushed his chest and sent him flying across the sweat-streaked, beer-puddled dance floor. He knocked into a trio of mohawked head-bobbers and they pushed him further into the crowd. Before he disappeared into people, I thought I saw his cheeks redden and, for a moment that I’ve experienced too many times--however fleeting and misplaced--I felt bad.
As Vice Squad’s set ended, Rafa emerged from the pit shirtless and reeking of beer, his shoulders braced and the look in his eyes wild and ready. Part of my mother’s survival tactics were still embedded in me because, to this day, I’ll never admit that I need help or that I’m scared or in pain. But I craved more action than just staying there by the edge of the stage, so I appealed to Rafa. “Hey,” I said, pulling him close so I could see the change in his eyes. “Some fucking asshole just grabbed my ass.”
There’s something about dudes that I’ve always so envied. In all the times that I’ve wanted to escape my body, I’ve often envisioned myself as a man. I fantasized that when I got mad, no one would tell me to calm down or be quiet. My mother couldn’t remind me anymore, “Only if your husband let you.” My body wouldn’t have to cage that wild.
Head on swivel, Rafa was running into the crowd before I could even finish describing the guy who, I’d left out, was Vietnamese. Before T.S.O.L.’s set even began, Rafa was in front of me again, sweating and stinking. “The little Asian dude, right?” I nodded. He sucked his teeth. “That guy’s a little pussy. He won’t bother you again.”
“What’d you do?” I asked, but Rafa was already preoccupied with the roadies setting up the stage. “Double bass drums, babe!”
“What did you do to him? Did you hit him?” I wasn’t sure what answer would have made me feel better, but his response did not: “Nah, not worth it. Just scared him. He’s just a little Asian dude.”
I deflated twofold and watched as Rafa and all the other guys, revolved around the pit, their voices heaving together as they sung along with the chorus, “I wanna fuck the dead.”
Back at school for my junior year, I could see the color lines shifting and thrumming. Now that I had been with Rafa for over six months--some kind of threshold of commitment in teenaged time--and I was fully versed in the language of punk music and fashion, I was corralled into the group that circled on the grass in front of the administration building as some kind of anti-establishment demonstration, though all it got us were detention and Saturday School slips for breaking the dress code. All these white kids weren’t really protesting anything, just wanting to be acknowledged for their anger and to stand out as different.
The most self-important of them all was a two-person branch of the punk crew that joined halfway through the school year. One was six-foot-plus tall lanky guy who introduced himself as “Jason Rebel” as he tipped his cowboy hat and hooked his thumb on his Confederate flag belt buckle. He openly claimed, “White Power,” and spat chewing tobacco into a crinkled Coke can. His sidekick, or maybe his leader, was a silent beanied guy. He never looked me in the eye and once called Rafa a beaner, yet girls across social strata swooned for him, thinking his clenched jaw made him look sexy and strong. They found his silence intriguing. I just thought it was creepy. Years later, I found out that he murdered a cab driver. Hate crime.
The way that white supremacy amoebaed into punk at my school was how it was happening at shows, in other cities, throughout history. The racist entanglement and co-opting of a generative, equity-minded movement gave me more to fight for and helped me define survival in my own way.
One day, my mom picked me up from school. She’d gotten mad at me for taking too long to walk home. Rafa would meet me mid-way and we’d loiter in the parks along my route to the house. She made me wait for her in front of the school, where everyone could see. As she pulled up, she yelled at me through the open passenger window and waved me to her in the way that Vietnamese moms do, as if they’re shooing you away. I hurried to limit how many classmates witnessed this.
The next day at lunch, one of my classmates, a Puerto Rican guy who turned me on to the gem that is The Golden Girls (“Blanche is so funny, girl,” he’d laugh and swat my arm as if we were watching it right then), said, “I saw your mom.”
I deflected, “Your mom.”
“For real,” he said, “I’d never seen her before. When she picked you up yesterday she was all, ‘Ching chong ching.’” He swatted my arm like we were talking about Sophia and Dorothy. “Such a gook!” The survival instinct that my “gook” mother had instilled in me surfaced and I stabbed my Bic ballpoint into his arm. A perfect blue hole. He yelled and I saw in his eyes that he wanted to tell someone. “Don’t be a pussy,” I said.
After school, my mom drove me and my siblings through the Taco Bell drive thru. “No beef,” my mom yelled into the speaker.
I crunched layers of beans, cheese, and tomato in between crispy tortillas as I did my homework at the dining table instead of my room. At night, I sat next to my mom while she watched Wheel of Fortune. She overenunciated letters, “Mmmmm” and “Arrrrrrrr,” then doubted herself, “Oh no! Wait, con ơi,” she turned to me, “how you use ‘F’?”
A few years later, I sat with my mom watching a short-lived Fear Factor-knock off, Dog Eat Dog. The blonde bombshell hostess introduced the contestants to increasingly humiliating challenges, from chugging bull balls to being Houdini-chained and dunked into a whale-sized tank of water or Kool-Aid or anything. As my mom click-shelled and smacked her lips on pistachios, the hourglass with red lips introduced Troll. “Ai-ya,” my mother sighed with salty breath. “Hair,” she said and shook her head. Troll’s mohawk was still as charged as high as it had been that day Rafa and I met him in the van. My dye had since grown out, so now I was back to my natural chesnut with only tips of faded purple and green. In that time, Rafa and I had inevitably broken up. He disappeared for awhile and then returned as if nothing had happened. His head was shaved and he wore a clean white t-shirt and jeans when he drove me to Jack in the Box. He inhaled Sourdough Jacks and winced when I declined. “I got over that whole vegetarian thing,” he said, dismissing what had brought us together. After that, he never knocked on my window late at night again. I heard that he had a baby--a son--with someone else.
So I had no one to share in Troll’s fifteen minutes of fame, some punk rocker on a mainstream stage. When the hostess asked him to introduce himself, he didn’t mention anything about being a dad. Just whooped and yelled, “I’m crazy! Let’s do this!”
Staring at the screen, my mother said, “Asian parents, we don’t like this.” She switched over to Wheel of Fortune. I lay my head on my mother’s frail shoulder. As much as I’d resisted, she was with me all along. She clicked her tongue, “Don’t get hair dye on my shirt!” She swatted my head. I smiled. “‘Before and After,’ oh trời!” She clasped her hands in prayer.
Jade Hidle (she/her/hers) is the proud Vietnamese-Irish-Norwegian daughter of a refugee. Her travel memoir, The Return to Viet Nam, was published by Transcurrent Press in 2016, and her work has also been featured in Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, Southern Humanities Review, Poetry Northwest, Witness Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, The West Trade Review, Bangalore Review, Columbia Journal, New Delta Review, and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network’s diacritics.org. You can follow her work at www.jadehidle.com or on Instagram @jadethidle.