Untitled 27
Stuck in the same place I've always been
And I'll keep wanderin' and wanderin'
And wanderin' and wonderin'
When will my life begin?
Three of my favorite Disney songs are "When Will My Life Begin" from Tangled, "How Far I'll Go" from Moana and "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid.
In case you're not familiar with these songs, they're about being stuck in Mundania and dreaming of a grander world beyond your reach.
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When I was in grade school, my parents rarely let me play with friends. The only places I went were school and home, and friends were not invited over.
On the rare occasion that I did get to go to a friend's house, I knew it wouldn't happen a second time within the same month.
I'm not (too) bitter about it now. I get it.
My parents grew up in a different time under different circumstances. Theirs was a youth of war, and their early years in America were marked with strong anti-Asian racism, a lack of basic resources, and danger everywhere. I've no doubt they've suffered significant trauma, not only from the war but also from their interactions with others in the States.
So I understand their fear of the outside world. They wanted me to be in a place they could control and keep safe-- which included only the boundaries of our home.
It's no one's fault, but even so, all I wanted was more.
To learn how to ride a bike or swim. To play and make friends. To eat in restaurants and go shopping and and wear nice clothes and see movies and have experiences.
I wanted to know what was outside.
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Forbidden to go outside or play with friends outside of school while still starving for adventure and friendship, I turned to all your typical nerd hobbies-- playing video games, reading fantasy/sci-fi books, and diving into the corners of the internet.
I played a lot of video games as a kid. If you name a Japanese RPG for the SNES or PS1, I most likely beat it. Like, really most likely. If we want to talk about Final Fantasy 6, I definitely played through it at least 4 times. At least.
On days when I couldn't play games, I devoured fantasy books and got pretty fast at reading. Some days, I'd start reading a book on the bus ride to school, continue reading on the way back and on the couch at home, and have it done before bedtime. I read a more than socially acceptable number of Piers Anthony books and in retrospect, Piers Anthony is kinda a dirty old man, but at the time I wanted nothing more than to read about magic and dragons and fauns and terrible puns.
As the internet grew, more and more time was spent frequenting message boards and making online friends I only knew by their online handles, like Kit, Silver and Hawk. We'd spend hours chatting about nothing and celebrating holidays like CAPSLOCK MONDAY-- a weekly holiday in which we could, surprise surprise, only type to each other with the Capslock key on. We created as much excitement and nonsense as we could from within the four 90 degree walls that surrounded us as we crouched over plastic, mechanical keyboards.
At the time, an awkward teenaged girl with low social skills, low awareness of self, and low awareness of other, I simultaneously couldn't imagine a life different from the one I lived and yet immersed myself in the imaginary because maybe there was a chance that some small part of it wasn't just imaginary but truly existed somewhere in some form out there.
Maybe instead of cities with 4-lane 45mph streets and gigantic indoor shopping malls, there were towns with quaint, cobblestone roads and open outdoor markets. And maybe instead of dying lawns, there were forests you could run through and fields of of wildflowers and babbling brooks and snowcapped mountains. Maybe there were people who rather than spending their lives working for a salary instead spent their days traveling from fantastic city to fantastic city on their own personal quests, parting with and picking up friends along the way. Maybe life wasn't just about white picket fences, getting married, and having 2.3 kids and a dog, and maybe all these things really existed just somewhere not in the Suburbs of America.
Maybe, just maybe, life could be different.
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Once I moved away and went to college, all the old hobbies petered off.
I didn't spend nearly as much time playing video games, and rarely read books outside of class. I stopped visiting message boards and lost contact with all my online friends until there were none.
I spent my days with friends, as if trying to make up for lost time. I slept over often at other people's apartments and hosted friends at my own. All I ever wanted to do was play.
While everyone else furiously applied for jobs during our last semester, I lollygagged about and bought a one-way ticket to South Korea.
It was then that I was able to travel and find towns with dirt roads and open outdoor markets, emerald green forests and natural hot springs. I met people who wandered between lands and I met people dedicated to exploring as much as there was to see.
I realized then-- ah, so all those imagined worlds and imagined stories and imagined meetings-- they weren't lies after all. They were there, waiting just a little bit beyond the boundaries of our homes.