More Complex Shades of Yellow: Life as an Asian American sex worker
an excerpt

WARNING: No one under 18 should be reading this online novel. Please be sure you are 18 or older beforIt was really a mixed bag of emotions for me being in Los Angeles and spending time with my old college friend June*. I First Foray Into The Adult WorldIt was really a mixed bag of emotions for me being in Los Angeles and spending time with my old college friend June*. I just realized how much we had changed over the years and was dismayed to see that she became a fundamentalist Muslim. I have no problem with any religion, but I do have a problem when someone becomes an extremist or a fundamentalist of any kind. It just speaks to me of trying to cover up a deeper set of emotions. I met June at my old private women's college and we kept in touch for several years, but it was hard for us to get together when she was in Los Angeles and I had left the women's college and went to state university instead. We still had things in common but I found it disturbing that she was talking about moving to Africa because she 'hated white people' and hated 'racist white America.'

I thought that was very odd given that her family was upper middle class and very successful and had been for more than one generation. It wasn't as though she was languishing in the ghetto somewhere with the odds stacked against her. She was used to the best of worlds and had always gotten what she wanted. But I think I know the source of why she became so deeply involved with the Black Muslims. She revealed to me that a few years after she graduated from Ashley College* she was sitting in a male friend's living room when he tried to take her clothes off. She refused him and got angry and left. He knew where she hung out and where she lived, and shortly after she had rejected his advances, he got a group of men and they grabbed her, taking her into their car and beating her. They put a blindfold over her and then took her to some abandoned warehouse and gang-raped her. Then after beating her some more, they left her there.

That was a time period in which I had heard nothing from her. No letters, no postcards, not even a phone call. I had begun to worry about her, because she wasn't the type of person to suddenly just up and leave a friend. When she told me when the rape and beatings occurred, it corresponded to the time frame in which she virtually disappeared from the earth. Rather than get counseling and therapy, she turned to the Muslim faith. I just didn't agree with turning to any religion after something as traumatic as rape had occurred, and I was really enraged that a guy's ego had been 'bruised' and that he had gotten away with violating her along with his cruel buddies. Somehow all of my friend's anger at that event became turned towards 'white people' in general. I started to think that maybe she didn't want to have anything to do with ME as a friend, because I wasn't Muslim, and I wasn't black. Her mother, a successful and wealthy investment banker, also converted to the Islam faith and they both changed their names to Arabic ones. On the last day of staying with June, she told me she and her mother sold their condo and were going to move to Senegal, Africa, where she could be with ' beautiful black people'. I wanted to tell her that moving to Africa was not a way to solve your problems if you felt that America was racist, and that Africa had a whole different set of racial problems which not only included blacks against former colonialists, but blacks against blacks. Civil war had ravaged most of Africa's countries for years, and it wasn't necessarily about whites and blacks but about old tribal rivalries.

I knew somehow that this would be our last meeting together as friends, and I deeply saddened by her changed political and religious views. She couldn't see that religion wasn't something that was going to address the deeper psychological scars of her trauma, but like any fundamentalist, she was so convinced and became so self-righteous that it was impossible to argue with her. And I knew that seeing as how she was moving to Africa, she wanted to sever all her ties with America, and that included her friends and most of her family. When she waved goodbye to me at the airport, I knew it would be the last time I ever saw her, and there was a loss in my heart over a good friend that I still grieve over to this day. I always wondered what ever happened to her, and if she stayed in Senegal or decided to move back to America. I even did an internet search on her but it turns out about a hundred people on Southern California alone have the exact same name.

Plus my life too was changing. I was drunk with making so much money and having such a good time at the magazine shoot that I decided to start searching the modeling ads in the local newspapers at home. Why should I be going around working for hours and hours while I was in school when I could do a couple of modeling gigs a month? Most of the jobs and photographers listed however just seemed shady to me, but then I managed to find a gentleman who was working on a project in which he needed fifty beautiful women, and he had a female assistant who seemed very together. I thought the project name was interesting...it was called Triple Vision*, and it involved taking photos for bubblegum cards featuring semi-nude or lingerie-clad women with a set of three-D glasses. Plus it was paying 500 dollars up front, and I would again sign a contract to have them use the images for whatever they needed to in the future. I told my mother about all these modeling gigs, and through networking, I was able to find work on the weekends at a place where amateur photographers would come and take pictures of girls in a park-like setting at a local swinger's club. That paid a hundred dollars for a few hours worth of work, and it was there that I met a lot of strippers and a few porn stars who were supplementing their income with extra cash. I also hooked up with a few photographers that I felt were trustworthy, and one even came to my parents' house to photograph me in a bikini at our swimming pool. He turned out to be someone that fell in love with me, and I just had to keep ignoring his phone calls.

The Triple Vision project was pretty big, and they selected only the prettiest girls, a few of whom went onto fame in Playboy and Penthouse. Most were strippers but some were just girls interested in using their looks to make extra money. I'm friends with the photographer to this day, and we've often talked about where the girls ended up. Most of them did not fare well, with some getting health problems and heart attacks because of drugs, or they never saved up a dime and lost their looks through hard living. Only one of them that we knew of became successful in her own right when she stopped dancing and became a personal trainer. That was keyed me later on into using my exercise physiology degree to become a trainer. She was from a pretty rough background but she never did drugs, and kept herself healthy. She was an early inspiration to me that you have to take care of yourself and you can't stay in the business forever if you want to be sane. She got married and eventually had a baby. But networking was important in the business, and when you met one photographer he generally was able to hook you up with another. I never had a problem with guys coming onto me because I think they knew better, and I also didn't make it a point to 'offer my services' to photographers like some of the girls did. I couldn't figure out why one of the photographers at the swingers' club seemed to favor this one particular girl, who wasn't really even remotely attractive, and then I found out, no surprise, she was sleeping with him.

The photographer whom I am friends with to this day is named Arthur* and he is a very complex guy who also happens to have a terrible and wasting disease, one in which he will most likely pass away at a young age. Over the years it has gotten worse and worse. When I first met him, he needed help walking with a cane, and now, he almost is unable to walk most days and has to use the support of two walking sticks. It's unpredictable how most of his days are because he doesn't know how his body is going to react one day to the next. It's some kind of very rare muscular dystrophy. He's become quite famous as a photographer, having taken photos of some of the most famous girls in the business, including Tera Patrick and some of the Playboy Playmates of the Year. He did tell me something that I wasn't surprised by; that most of these girls had 'thug boyfriends' who manipulated them out of money. At the time I wasn't seeing anyone in particular because I had broken up with Bill and had also recently had an abortion, which didn't put me in the best frame of mind when it came to boyfriends. Arthur was a great guy, and we would spend hours talking together about the girls and the industry. He made me laugh because I used to call him a closet pervert...he was very straightlaced and conservative on the outside, but he showed me his fetish pornography collection and it surprised me that he liked the very hardcore stuff. A few years later, he wrote me a very rhoughtful letter on handmade paper decorated with dried flowers that I still have...it was basically a love letter and he said he regretted never having pursued me. But I'm glad he didn't, because I only saw him as a good friend, always platonic, never a lover.

It turns out that he got screwed over by the guy who owned the Triple Vision project, and because of bad business practices and dealings, the cards never really got the exposure they needed in order for money to be rolling in. He agreed on his kind behalf to be paid later on when the money began rolling in, but unfortunately the money never did. There were also photographers out there who had their own set of morals and would do things like take photos of the girls when they had 'no film' in the camera, or whose checks would bounce and then they just disappeared from the face of the earth. Another thing I found dismaying and irritating was how bitchy the girls could be. They weren't even famous runway models, and they acted as if the world revolved around them. I almost punched out a few of them for being rude and difficult and demanding. They were just so childish and stupid at times. My big thing was to always treat people with respect and send thank you notes, and that really paid off. People remember a girl for being nice more than they would for being a bitch. It occurred to me how ironic it was that we were being paid to look like harlots and that what really counted was behaving like a lady. I liked one of the girls though, who was very streetwise and tried to look out for me because I was still really naive about some of the ins and outs of the business. Her name was Terri* and she worked as a stripper, but was married to a guy who abused her, and had a mother in jail. Still, she always was nice to me, and though she had a tough demeanor, I sensed she had a kind heart in spite of all of her hardships.

A group of six girls, myself included, were invited to come to the San Fernando Valley with two photographers from Texas who had connections with publishers down there, and it was hell to be around girls whom I just didn't like. Not knowing a thing about drugs, I couldn't understand why they were staying up all night and why they seemed hyper with their noses running. One of the girls asked me if I 'did speed' and I had no idea what the hell 'speed' was. She seemed vaguely amused that I had never tried drugs before, but I wasn't about to start. It just seemed to age those girls. They were all dancers, and I suspected they did the drugs to deal with the long hard hours of working til 5am, but I also think they did it to cover up their own insecurities and problems. I was trying to sleep when they were up making noise all night long and watching the tv and laughing. Then when I woke up they had fallen asleep finally. We did some sexy videos filmed at a wealthy man's backyard and swimming pool area , nothing completely naked or hardcore, and the video clips and photographs were truly works of art. It wasn't hardcore, it wasn't Naked Honeys, but it was beautifully done, with the flowers and plants framing the girls, and we all wore pretty lingerie or bathing suits. We then discovered though that the owner of the house was, er, um...videotaping us without our knowledge or consent in the main bedroom where we changed. We heard a weird whirring noise, and one of the girls discovered the video cam. She stopped running it and pulled the tape out and we damaged the tape.

I now had a Naked Honeys layout and some trading cards to put in my portfolio, as well as being in a layout for a local sex newspaper. But I also remember my self-esteem being torn apart by a photographer in Berkeley who had an immense ego to go along with his sarcasm and casually cruel remarks. He just had a great way of making a girl feel like shit, and he said things to me about my body and my face that I remember even to this day. I had no idea what his personality was going to be like, and I had a male friend drop me off at the guy's apartment to do the day long photo shoot, so there was no way I could call my friend ( no cell phones) and tell him to come pick me up. At first this guy, whom I'll call Frank*, was very nice. But there was something in my gut that just didn't like him. He had body odor and his apartment was cramped and filthy, but he did have a lot of good work to show for being a photographer. Unfortunately I discovered that I was going to be typecast as an "Oriental Chick" and I found that degrading. I actually don't like it when Asians, Latinos, and Black women are considered 'exotic' because that connotates we are different from white women, and beauty shouldn't be considered different. It should just be admired for what it is regardless of what race you are. It was then that I discovered the porn industry could be pretty goddam racist and often took liberal use of damaging stereotypes, depicting ' Huge Black Guys' or 'Sloe-Eyed Oriental Chicks' or " Spicy Hot Latin Mamas". I just didn't like being put in some stupid cheap kimono and carrying a fan or parasol.

I think that's what made the photo session bad from the very beginning in addition to the cramped interior and his general demeanor. He would say things like, " I'm not really crazy about your face, but I do like your body. It's about the best body I've seen...no, wait, there was another girl who had a better body than you. " You could see it in my eyes that I wasn't very happy in the photographs he took. He did manage however to get my photos into three other magazines with me being on the front cover of two of them, but again, they were the 'exotic Oriental Beauty' type of magazines which I didn't care for. Why couldn't mainstream porn incorporate women of color into their centerfolds? Out of the 500 or so centerfolds Playboy had, very few were women of color, and that bothered me, because it was saying that our beauty wasn't as valuable or desirable as a white woman's, seeing as how Playboy was the most prestigious out of the men's magazines and the one most girls wanted to be in if they chose to pose nude for a publication.

I was never more glad to be out of that man's ugly apartment but I still do have some of his photographs of me. They were well done if not just stereotypical. I realized that his demeanor was just a way to cover up his own insecurity because he clearly knew none of the women he photographed in all their naked glory were ever interested in him sexually. And I took note that the men who seemed to have the most issues with women in their lives were the ones who came across as the most degrading and the most misogynistic. I came home another five hundred dollars richer, and from there, I started branching out into different aspects of the business. I thought about giving stripping a try, but the problem was the night hours, and I was in school at the time, so I couldn't stay out late. With yet another photographer friend, I went to a couple of the local all-nude clubs in my area, but the money seemed pathetic, and the girls were bored and lackluster on the stage. It didn't have much appeal to me at the time. Plus I was getting busier at every spare moment for school because by this time I was almost ready to graduate after being in school for nearly twice as long as I should have been, and my father was practically begging me to get out of school and find a job and move out. Still I was painfully aware of the sarcastic remarks that Frank had made to me, and I spent more time looking in the mirror for those imaginary flaws that he so 'kindly' pointed out to me during our photo shoot.

The photos in the 'Oriental Chicks' magazines, however, got me in contact with a big-name pornographer and photographer in the Los Angeles area. He had also seen my new Hustler layout, which was published about seven months after I had taken the photos. They sent me several complimentary copies, and the makeup artist Maria told me that a 'Danny' had been inquiring about where to contact me. Naturally Naked Honeys could never give the personal information to someone else without my permission, so I asked her to get his phone number and the name of the adult modeling agency, the most famous in Los Angeles, that he worked with. I called him and left a message and he got back to me right away. He had photographed softcore as well as hardcore ( actual penetration and sex scenes) porn in magazines, and was also a cameraman on the set of many hardcore sex videos. I didn't share a lot of details with my mother at the time about the hardcore stuff because I knew she would most likely be against it. Plus there was also the idea that the whole world out there would see these videos or these photos, but I felt like since I had already posed for one magazine and for other photographers, I could take a shot at the hardcore world. Maybe. Danny agreed to fly up to the Bay Area where I lived and stayed in a hotel nearby, even coming to meet my parents in person, because my father wanted to check out this guy for himself. Danny was likeable but he was also manipulative. The first time I went to his hotel room to do test shots, he tried to get me to sleep with him, and I refused him. Then he tried to make me feel guilty about it, and I put my foot down. Under absolutely no terms would I sleep with him. If he didn't like it tough shit.

I even went so far as to tell him to take me home, and forget about everything. But for whatever reason, he chose to respect my boundaries, and offered to fly me out to Los Angeles and put me up in a hotel to be shot for three major men's magazines over a period of two days. We were going to use someone's mansion in Beverly Hills for that shot, and there would also be a male model posing with me.

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I originally said that I felt one reason I got into the adult industry was because I had a lot of anger towards men and the power structure between men and women that I saw at home, but it's a secondary reason. I would say that making a lot of money was the number one reason I decided to actually get on a plane and fly down to the Naked Honeys publishing corporation. Twenty five hundred dollars! That just seemed like an astronomical amount of money. I had been working two jobs in college at the state university that left me exhausted. I would get up at 6am, go to work assisting a physically challenged young man ( cleaning, cooking) and then take the bus and go to classes until about 3pm. I took the bus back home and then jumped into my mom's car and went to go clean one house. It was fifteen dollars an hour, and I thought that was a lot of money. I had very little time to myself and even took one night class. I had a heavy class schedule and by the time I came home, all I did was eat dinner, do my homework, and then go to sleep. I also worked on Saturdays cleaning houses as well. But here was my opportunity to make more money in one DAY than I had in several weeks. I thought about how I used to work my ass off for minimum wage at Macy's in San Jose as well. A forty hour work week during the summer months would bring me about 150 dollars after taxes. It just seemed unfair.

This is one of the big things that I don't think most people truly understand about the primary reason as to WHY women get involved with businesses that largely cater to men in the sense that the job requires a woman to use her looks and sexuality, something that many women have been resistant to use, since it implies that's all a woman is worth. Many feminists also rail against the professions which they claim objectify women or degrade them. At first glance, it's very easy to have a negative reaction to the industry and to the way it portrays women. I admit wholeheartedly that before I decided to take the big step and have Bill take my photos to send into the Naked Honeys magazine, I thought women who did such things were loose and immoral, and I couldn't understand why or how a woman could expose herself in such an intimate way to the camera. At the same time I had always been fascinated by the women who did pose, as I had been enthralled with the centerfolds and photo layouts in the magazines when I was young girl. I think in many ways the dichotomic nature of the adult industry was what originally drew me to it. There was something powerful in itself about the taboo of exposing yourself, and also knowing that men fought wars, gave up their crowns, and ruined themselves all in the name of pussy. Something that to me looked like a freshwater clam with a beard was powerful enough to make even the strongest men melt.

We forget that even though the wage gap between men and women is closing, women are still underpaid, and they are the group that lives in poverty much more than single men do. The professions that pay much more than men are ironically the ones which will put a woman on display, whether it's modeling for Vogue or taking off your clothes for Playboy.Women unfortunately have found themselves in situations where they need a lot of money very quickly, whether it's to support themselves and pay bills, or whether it's to feed their kids or get out of a jam. To me that kind of desperation might make a woman more of a victim of an industry which can be predatory and cruel, but I didn't have the desperation in me. I had the drive to want to make as much money as a man or more, in a short period of time. It seemed more like whoring myself out when I worked cleaning houses for fifteen bucks an hour, or worse, getting paid minimum wage at Macy's. I'll be the first one to admit that I'm lazy about things, and I wanted a house and material goods in a shorter period of time than had I become a teacher or personal trainer after graduating college. As a sex positive feminist, I am not here to tell other women " you should go and take off your clothes for a living" but I am not one to place women in the industry in a position of victimization either.

A person can choose to be a victim or not. It's unfortunate that some women end up in porn or prostitution if they originally intended to be real fashion models or actresses. But you have to educate yourself about the business. Don't just go by what the media is always depicting because they never show positive aspects of the sex industry. When was the last time you saw a series on tv that DIDN'T show a stripper or hooker ending up dead or being shown as being really messed up emotionally. On the other hand if they showed the women who actually did use their assets and were intelligent and successful, too many women might want to actually go out there and get into the business. I admit also that you have to be a stronger woman than anyone would ever care to admit if you're going to get involved in the sex industry, because you're going to encounter the worst aspects of men and women. You have to be saavy and smart about your finances, because making big bucks also means being responsible about it, and making sure that you pay your taxes. So many girls I knew didn't do that, and the IRS was practically banging down their doors. There was a part of me that believed some of the girls didn't want to save their money because it would be a constant reminder of something they felt guilty about doing. I knew a girl who worked part-time as a stripper and was making over seven grand a month ( part-time!) and she had no idea where most of her money was going.

Some of the girls also, unfortunately, had predatory pimp boyfriends who either pretended to be looking out for them while helping themselves to the good money, or boyfriends who outright physically and verbally abused them and the girls were so afraid NOT to turn over their money. I think having a family was what really helped me to not become a victim, that they knew what I did, and I could always count on them no matter what. The other thing is that I REFUSED to be anyone's victim, and no one is allowed to degrade me. I've felt more degraded walking down the street in a t shirt and jeans, practically covered from head to toe, and had men catcalling at me. If I was going to be a sex object, then I would be a full-fledged sex object as my profession, and I was going to make a lot of money doing it. The stripclub, porn magazine or movie studio, or brothel are places to me where the control is largely in the hands of the WOMEN, not the men. It was interesting to see that the women would almost never take crap from customers, but many of them went home to husbands or boyfriends who gave them more shit than a stranger ever could. One other thing is...you have to be aware that if you're going to get into an industry that most people ( society) find morally repulsive, then you have to keep most of it private and secret, and you find yourself lying about it to people who don't know you. One reason why no one else in my family other than my parents and one or two cousins knew what I did was because inevitably, the scrutiny would be on my mother and father, and 'what did they do wrong to make their daughter turn into a stripper?'

Because stripping, hooking, or posing nude are seen as acts of desperation ( because what woman in her right mind would expose herself to perfect strangers?) there's a lot of scrutiny about the girl and her past. I even had a guy tell me, " If you look really carefully at most of these girls, including yourself, there's always something about them that makes you understand why they got into the industry to begin with." Well that's like saying the reason men and women are gay or lesbian is because 'something traumatic must have happened to them otherwise they wouldn't choose to be homosexual." Many people are under the impression for example, that women who are lesbians 'must have been raped' by their fathers or men in their family, otherwise, why would they 'hate men?' But that misses the point. Being gay does not mean you hate the opposite sex, but because so many people are opposed morally to the lifestyle, they automatically assume that there's 'hidden reasons' as to why someone would choose a different lifestyle. We LOOK for things that might not even be there. Only one thing does stand out to me about some of the girls I worked with, and that is a disproportionate number of them seemed to have fathers who were in the military, and they travelled around a great deal as children and young adults. It's true that some sex industry workers are victims of incest or molestation, but that doesn't explain why so many other victims of sex crimes DO NOT become sex workers. Most people come from less than perfect families, but we don't question or look at a doctor or lawyer's past to see why that person 'chose' that profession.

I would say that as a sex positive feminist, a woman must be aware of what she is getting into and have the inner strength to deal with things she might not deal with normally in the outside world. I'd like to say that it would be nice if people took the sex industry a little more seriously and not view it with such contempt, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. Recently someone said to me ' isn't the reason why sex workers end up dead is because they chose a risky job to begin with?" Well, here's the thing. Sex workers are not killed because they are sex workers. They are killed because some sick, cruel person with the idea in his head sees sex workers ( or people in general) as not human to begin with, and because most of the time, society will turn their heads and close their hearts to the victims. Why is it that we remember the names of the serial killers, but we never memorialize their victims? It's as if the victims are not worth remembering just because they happened to choose professions society doesn't approve of. I would never recommend that any girl or woman go into stripping, porn, or prostitution, because it isn't something that I completely condone. But if a woman WERE to choose it after careful consideration, then I would tell her what she should expect, and how she should deal with it.

I'd like to say with honesty that one reason I take the time to answer people's questions and thoughts about sex work is because I want to at least show them that you CAN be smart, saavy, and successful in this line of work, and that as with any other profession, you have to actually use your intelligence and your brains first before you rely on your looks. It isn't just about looks which make the money, it's about how you utilize your brain and capitalize on what you have to offer physically. I can count myself as one of the few women I encountered in the industry who actually did save her money, invest it, have financial goals, pay taxes, and make the business work for me rather than having the business ruin me. I don't often talk about the business with people because it's something not everyone is going to understand. There will be people who, no matter what you say, are going to label a woman as a slut or a whore or whatever if she does something that doesn't adhere to the traditional 'proper' Madonna role. It's amazing how we still cling to those old notions of the Madonna and the Whore, and the double standard. Yet I wonder just how many people would criticize a woman who becomes a stripper because she has to feed her children and because she might have found herself in a jam because a man left her, or because being a waitress or salesclerk pays so very little for so much more work.

To say that sex work isn't work is also another stereotype. While the girls make a lot of money, it's also a different sort of work that requires you be a therapist, a good listener, a mother, a nurse...all those things which women seem to have in their maternal nature anyways. It can be taxing emotionally, physically, and spiritually. But that's where you have to really take care of your health and your own well-being, because a surefire way to ruin your business is to get hooked on drugs or alcohol. You have to be able to sense when you're burning out and when you need a lot of time by yourself. It was one reason why I chose to make my home my castle, even when I lived in an apartment, I had beautiful, calm things surrounding me, soft colors of parchment, olive, gold, and a very strong botanical theme...lots of floral things, palm trees, fern prints. It was like coming home and relaxing in a garden. I could throw off the stress of work with a simple soak in the tub, and get a pedicure the next day and be sure I worked out, and sit and read a book, hug my cats, and be surrounded by a calm beauty that relaxed me. I didn't need chaos when I came home, that's for sure. Plus it was a reminder if I had nice things, I was successful at what I was doing. I knew where every penny was, where every penny was invested or spent. I kept track of my earnings and did everything by the book, and my father helped a great deal with that, doing my taxes and investing my money for me. In that respect I'm also a lot like him. I continually think about the future, and I never want to do without or be impoverished.

So when Naked Honeys offered me that amount of money, I was flabbergasted. But I still hadn't told my parents about that, and there was no way I could hide a trip to Los Angeles. So I just broke the news to them casually rather than have a family affair where we were all sitting down at the dinner table. I told my mother that NHP* was Naked Honeys magazine, and that I had sent in my photos to them and they had chosen me to work with them as a model. My mother didn't seem surprised but she was slightly annoyed that I had chosen to go with the more explicit magazine rather than something softer like Playboy. She said, " Well, I don't know why you want to be in that magazine, but give me all the contact information. " As it turned out, one of my best friends from college lived in Los Angeles, and I hadn't seen her for several years, so I called her and she was thrilled that I would be making it down to LA. I even told her ( she had converted to the Islamic faith and was always pretty conservative about sex) why I was making the trip and she laughed and said, " Well that's certainly a change of pace for you, Michelle." But I avoided bringing up the subject with her. I would be staying at her place and I let Naked Honeys know they didn't have to pay for the hotel, just my ticket. A limosine would come and pick me up at my friend's condo, and we would be going to Studio City where the sets were and the hair and makeup artist would be. They even paid to have my nails and pedicure done before I arrived in LA. Everything was very professional and very discreet, which I appreciated.

Inside I was nervous but thrilled. My father didn't say much so I told him jokingly it was 'his fault' that he allowed me to come with him to the barber shop where I first looked through those magazines. I should mention that this was one full year before I found out about my father's affair with another woman, so I could say safely that the pull into the industry was more of a financial lure than an emotional one. Still the thought of being so angry at my father never failed to tug at my heart because somewhere, I thought, there must be a deeper psychological reason as to why I was doing what I was doing. My initial anger at my boyfriend Bill was also a factor. But it was also a combination that I was now feeling good about myself and my body after years of struggling with my self-esteem and with eating disorders years back. I was dismayed by the lack of women of color in the magazines although I realized they catered to what made the most money, and although things have changed now ( think Tera Patrick and Asia Carrera) at the time, busty blondes still reigned supreme as the choice beauty for men's magazines.

I was sure that I gave all the information to my parents and they wished me well as they drove me to the airport. My father gave me a big hug and for one moment there I felt deeply ashamed that there I was, his daughter that he had protected and always stood up for, even if we didn't always get along, was going off to show her nudity to the world. God forbid what if one of my father's friends saw my photos and recognized me? That's the double standard.It's more acceptable for a man to get caught looking at porn than it is for a woman to get into the industry. We don't have names like slut, whore, trollop, slattern, or skank to describe men. Inevitably men also classify women as those who are to be respected and married, and those who are unworthy of being placed on a pedestal because she's 'dirty'. I think that comes from men's fear and fascination with women, especially women who use their sexuality to gain power and money to begin with, and sometimes there seems to be a mutual contempt that is exchanged between client and stripper or prostitute. A girl thinks. how dumb is this guy to be giving me a lot of his money? The guy thinks, how low and desperate or dirty is this woman to be showing her wares to strange men like myself?

My girlfriend June* came to pick me up at the airport, and off we went to her condo that she shared with her successful investment banker mother. She lived in tony Westwood and her condo was in a high rise building which overlooked the city. I had given her phone number with her permission to the Naked Honeys studio for contacting me, and that evening, a gentleman with a German accent called me to solidify what time the limosine would be picking me up outside of my friend's condo. I thought, well, this is it. There's no turning back. You're about to expose yourself to the world so you better never run for public office, I told myself.

At 9am sharp the next morning, the limosine pulled up and I got in. The driver was a young kid and I'm sure he had seen just about everything being a limo driver. Traffic was heavy and it seemed to take forever to get over to Studio City. I was instructed not to have any makeup on. My first impression was that the studio was just like a regular movie studio with different scenes and sets, and everyone was very friendly and professional. I met the editor in chief of Naked Honeys, the main photographer with the German Accent ( let's call him Hans*) and the makeup artist, his wife, a beautiful Latino woman. They had me sign my contract and gave me the check for twenty five hundred dollars and returned my photographs to me. Immediately I was hustled over to the makeup chair where I would sit for over an hour while the makeup artist, Maria*, would pile on the goods. I was stunned that I had to wear so much makeup. It was overkill, and while my skin was good, she still had to put on pancake makeup and powder. I had to wear false eyelashes and wear eyeshadow, rouge, and lipstick so intense that what stared back at me from the mirror was a bizarre-looking geisha. The makeup, Maria told me, HAD to be heavy because the strong camera lights washed out the makeup, and because my skin was darker, she had to apply brighter and more intense colors. There was so much dark brown eyeshadow that I looked like I had bruises on my upper eyelids. My face felt like it was about to crack.

They wanted me to keep my hair natural, and so luckily all Maria did was brush it and put some spray it in it. I had my nails done bright red because I figured that was what most of the girls in the magazine were wearing. I just looked horrifying unnatural and then it occurred to me that was why the girls looked so good in those pictures, even the ones which were not visibly airbrushed. Great attention was paid to detail. I had to wear heels that did not have any scuff marks on the bottom, and panty hose which had not one snag or flaw in it. The few scars I did have were covered with Joe Blasco concealer stage makeup, and then Maria led me onto the set where I was to be photographed. It turned out to be an airline set complete with a fake partial 'jet' that had airline seats. I wore gold earring and a gold necklace. This was the first time I was going to be seen naked by anyone else except my parents and a few boyfriends, so I braced myself. At the same I was telling myself these people had seen so many naked women it was all routine to them, just a job, and no one was going to try to come after me with a hard-on or anything. In fact the photographer Hans was a very boyish, very friendly guy, making me feel instantly at ease. He did tell me that sometimes girls would show up on drugs or drunk, and it made that very hard for him to get them to cooperate with them. I didn't understand why someone would want to make themselves loopy before a shoot, because you certainly wouldn't be looking your best.

We started with poses that I couldn't believe they were asking me to do...they seemed so unnatural. It then occurred to me that the girls who looked so much at ease in the magazines, reclining and lying down, were not really at ease. These positions were made the flatter the body, and I thought, what would happen if a woman was less flexible than I was? I had to hold those positions for several minutes while they adjusted the lighting and the camera started flashing. Every few minutes Maria was reapplying makeup and making sure my stockings and garter were in place. I started to sweat because of the strain of sitting in weird positions on the airline seat and hoisting myself up so I could look and appear as sexy as possible, when I was feeling anything BUT sexu. It was crazy. Maybe that was why most of the girls in Naked Honeys were NOT smiling, because it was just so strenous to pretend like you were in ecstasy sitting in one position for so long. My foot started to give out on me and Hans kept snapping away saying, " Good, good, one more shot, one more shot." My hair kept falling into my face and they kept brushing it away. Most of the shots, I had my eyes closed, as if I were making love to some invisible man on the airline 'seats'. I thought, you know, this is crazy...if the men only knew just what the women went through to 'look sexy' in the magazine.

Then we had a lunch break and Maria and some of the assistants ordered food for me, healthy chicken salad and fruits. She was a health nut, this Maria, and very petite, like me. We talked about where I was going to school and about how my parents felt about the shoot, and she seemed surprised that I was intelligent. She did say a lot of the girls were actually extremely shy, and they didn't talk a lot or express themselves much or were doped up. She was also surprised that I was calling my parents the minute I got to the studio to let them know where I was. Her husband Hans came in and thanked me for being a 'good model' because he was tired of working with girls who seemed unable to follow instructions because they were difficult and on dope. Another photographer came in and asked me if I was interested in visiting the NHP headquarters, which was in Hollywood. NHP published many different pornographic magazines and had hundreds of people working for them. It was all so matter-of-fact to see naked girls. In fact at the time, there was a woman editor who selected the photos for print. There were copies of some of the magazines there in the studio and every one of them catered to various fetishes, from S and M to huge breasts and full-figured women, to young waif types and women of color. It was at least nice to see that men had very different tastes, and even though the industry seemed to favor blonde-haired women, that they had to have something for everyone's tastes.

I was also especially grateful they didn't choose to stereotype me in some geisha outfit with a parasol. Unfortunately that would be a recurring theme in the future. I liked it when photographers didn't have to typecast their models. I then found out that the reason the owner and founder of NHP had been shot ( and was in a wheelchair as a result) was NOT because of the more explicit nature of his magazine, but because he had been the first pornographer to depict an interracial 'love scene' photo layout between a black man and a white woman. That just enraged a lot of the readers, and one of the guys happened to be so angry that was why he took a gun and tried to kill the owner. Naked Honeys definitely pushed the envelope for its time with its interracial love layouts and its very explicit depiction of women in the centerfolds and other spreads. There even happened to be an Native American woman named Hyapatia Lee who was also a centerfold in Naked Honeys, the first ' Indian chick' in a skin magazine and they depicted her in a tepee lying around naked on a buffalo skin. She later came to the club I worked at as she worked as a travelling headline dancer after her porn career.

Lunch was over and everyone hurried back to the set to do the rest of the photos. I was simply amazed at just HOW MANY SHOTS they were taking. All this work for just eight pages of large photos. I wondered what happened to most of the photos they never used and Hans told me those photos usually ended up in 1 900 phone sex ads, or they were used in future smaller layouts. Now came the really risque part. I was actually starting to get really embarassed lying there with my legs open, and the main reason was because I had always thought of myself as 'really ugly' down there. I think a lot of women are uncomfortable with what they have and we're all paranoid about that body part being ultra clean. I thought, you know, I don't even think my boyfriend saw me THAT close up. The camera angled in on what I call the 'honey pot shot' and I kept giggling because I was so nervous. And there the guys were, with the lights and the cameras, standing around matter of factly simply because this was their job. The photographers got paid a great deal of money. In fact Hans is still with Naked Honeys and he gets paid about ten thousand dollars for every layout. What a great job for a guy taking photos of beautiful women and getting paid so much! But clearly it was a work of art as well. Hans was sweating more than I was by the middle of the shoot, and he was very intense and focused on getting the 'right shot' and making sure everything was in place. I had to suck in my stomach as I lifted my legs in the air or placed them over the airline seat.

But the whole time they all made me feel at ease and assured me that nearly all the girls were very shy at first. They even had copies of Naked Honeys magazine lying around on the airline seats open to certain pages. I began to notice that a lot of the poses were pretty similar to each other, and all of them were supposed to be for the maximum 'sexy effect' look regardless of how natural that position was. Nothing was natural about posing with your stomach sucked in painfully or your leg twisted under you while the other was pointed in the air. My heels fell off and one of them hit Hans in the head, and we all had a good laugh about that. By the end of the shoot it was almost 4pm, and my face just felt like it was ready to split apart from the heavy pancake makeup. Even when I worked as a dancer I never wore foundation and powder because I hated it. I also didn't want to wear so much makeup that I looked totally frightening when I took it off. You see these porn stars and magazine models and when they're not in full makeup they're actually pretty scary to look at in person.

Finally the shoot ended and I was exhausted, as was the rest of the crew. They clapped and thanked me for a job well done, and I walked off the set and got to check out some of the pictures. I later wrote a thank you note to both Hans and Maria for their time and effort in making my first photo shoot a very pleasant and memorable one. Later, I washed off my makeup and got dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, and proceeded back to the limo so that the driver could take me to NHP executive offices. The traffic was crazy and we finally arrived at the huge, modern complex that was probably one of the most successful pornographic businesses around. There was nothing underdone about it, everything was glass and glitz and had a very reverent air about it, just like some investment banking firm. In the main hall was a huge glass cabinet containing dozens of the magazine covers of the various publications of Naked Honeys Production. I was ushered into the editorial offices, and shown everything from where the cartoonists worked to the editor's office, and met some of the editors of the lesser-known publications that catered to fetishes. It was all very business-like, and the workers seemed really devoted to their craft.

Several women worked there, and I wondered what kind of questions they received if they revealed they worked for a 'porno mag' and certainly not one that was as respected or artistic as Playboy. Naked Honeys had come under great scrutiny and criticism from many feminists as being the ultimate in depicting women as pieces of meat and as objects. But I saw it differently. You were only a piece of meat if you thought you were. No one else is allowed to degrade you as a woman if you won't allow it. Some of the crass humor in the magazine was true to the heart and hilarious despite the crudeness. But I think it WAS the crudeness that was part of the humor. No one dared to say it as bluntly as Naked Honeys did, and no one dared to depict the women in such a way before. I shook hands with the editor and thanked everyone there, and the limosine took me back to my friend's condo, where my shaky hands clutched the 2500 dollar check. I later called my parents and told them how the shot went, and that was the first check that went into a money market my father had set up for me.

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See what's new at AOL.com and Make AOL Your Homepage.just realized how much we had changed over the years and was dismayed to see that she became a fundamentalist Muslim. I have no problem with any religion, but I do have a problem when someone becomes an extremist or a fundamentalist of any kind. It just speaks to me of trying to cover up a deeper set of emotions. I met June at my old private women's college and we kept in touch for several years, but it was hard for us to get together when she was in Los Angeles and I had left the women's college and went to state university instead. We still had things in common but I found it disturbing that she was talking about moving to Africa because she 'hated white people' and hated 'racist white America.'

I thought that was very odd given that her family was upper middle class and very successful and had been for more than one generation. It wasn't as though she was languishing in the ghetto somewhere with the odds stacked against her. She was used to the best of worlds and had always gotten what she wanted. But I think I know the source of why she became so deeply involved with the Black Muslims. She revealed to me that a few years after she graduated from Ashley College* she was sitting in a male friend's living room when he tried to take her clothes off. She refused him and got angry and left. He knew where she hung out and where she lived, and shortly after she had rejected his advances, he got a group of men and they grabbed her, taking her into their car and beating her. They put a blindfold over her and then took her to some abandoned warehouse and gang-raped her. Then after beating her some more, they left her there.

That was a time period in which I had heard nothing from her. No letters, no postcards, not even a phone call. I had begun to worry about her, because she wasn't the type of person to suddenly just up and leave a friend. When she told me when the rape and beatings occurred, it corresponded to the time frame in which she virtually disappeared from the earth. Rather than get counseling and therapy, she turned to the Muslim faith. I just didn't agree with turning to any religion after something as traumatic as rape had occurred, and I was really enraged that a guy's ego had been 'bruised' and that he had gotten away with violating her along with his cruel buddies. Somehow all of my friend's anger at that event became turned towards 'white people' in general. I started to think that maybe she didn't want to have anything to do with ME as a friend, because I wasn't Muslim, and I wasn't black. Her mother, a successful and wealthy investment banker, also converted to the Islam faith and they both changed their names to Arabic ones. On the last day of staying with June, she told me she and her mother sold their condo and were going to move to Senegal, Africa, where she could be with ' beautiful black people'. I wanted to tell her that moving to Africa was not a way to solve your problems if you felt that America was racist, and that Africa had a whole different set of racial problems which not only included blacks against former colonialists, but blacks against blacks. Civil war had ravaged most of Africa's countries for years, and it wasn't necessarily about whites and blacks but about old tribal rivalries.

I knew somehow that this would be our last meeting together as friends, and I deeply saddened by her changed political and religious views. She couldn't see that religion wasn't something that was going to address the deeper psychological scars of her trauma, but like any fundamentalist, she was so convinced and became so self-righteous that it was impossible to argue with her. And I knew that seeing as how she was moving to Africa, she wanted to sever all her ties with America, and that included her friends and most of her family. When she waved goodbye to me at the airport, I knew it would be the last time I ever saw her, and there was a loss in my heart over a good friend that I still grieve over to this day. I always wondered what ever happened to her, and if she stayed in Senegal or decided to move back to America. I even did an internet search on her but it turns out about a hundred people on Southern California alone have the exact same name.

Plus my life too was changing. I was drunk with making so much money and having such a good time at the magazine shoot that I decided to start searching the modeling ads in the local newspapers at home. Why should I be going around working for hours and hours while I was in school when I could do a couple of modeling gigs a month? Most of the jobs and photographers listed however just seemed shady to me, but then I managed to find a gentleman who was working on a project in which he needed fifty beautiful women, and he had a female assistant who seemed very together. I thought the project name was interesting...it was called Triple Vision*, and it involved taking photos for bubblegum cards featuring semi-nude or lingerie-clad women with a set of three-D glasses. Plus it was paying 500 dollars up front, and I would again sign a contract to have them use the images for whatever they needed to in the future. I told my mother about all these modeling gigs, and through networking, I was able to find work on the weekends at a place where amateur photographers would come and take pictures of girls in a park-like setting at a local swinger's club. That paid a hundred dollars for a few hours worth of work, and it was there that I met a lot of strippers and a few porn stars who were supplementing their income with extra cash. I also hooked up with a few photographers that I felt were trustworthy, and one even came to my parents' house to photograph me in a bikini at our swimming pool. He turned out to be someone that fell in love with me, and I just had to keep ignoring his phone calls.

The Triple Vision project was pretty big, and they selected only the prettiest girls, a few of whom went onto fame in Playboy and Penthouse. Most were strippers but some were just girls interested in using their looks to make extra money. I'm friends with the photographer to this day, and we've often talked about where the girls ended up. Most of them did not fare well, with some getting health problems and heart attacks because of drugs, or they never saved up a dime and lost their looks through hard living. Only one of them that we knew of became successful in her own right when she stopped dancing and became a personal trainer. That was keyed me later on into using my exercise physiology degree to become a trainer. She was from a pretty rough background but she never did drugs, and kept herself healthy. She was an early inspiration to me that you have to take care of yourself and you can't stay in the business forever if you want to be sane. She got married and eventually had a baby. But networking was important in the business, and when you met one photographer he generally was able to hook you up with another. I never had a problem with guys coming onto me because I think they knew better, and I also didn't make it a point to 'offer my services' to photographers like some of the girls did. I couldn't figure out why one of the photographers at the swingers' club seemed to favor this one particular girl, who wasn't really even remotely attractive, and then I found out, no surprise, she was sleeping with him.

The photographer whom I am friends with to this day is named Arthur* and he is a very complex guy who also happens to have a terrible and wasting disease, one in which he will most likely pass away at a young age. Over the years it has gotten worse and worse. When I first met him, he needed help walking with a cane, and now, he almost is unable to walk most days and has to use the support of two walking sticks. It's unpredictable how most of his days are because he doesn't know how his body is going to react one day to the next. It's some kind of very rare muscular dystrophy. He's become quite famous as a photographer, having taken photos of some of the most famous girls in the business, including Tera Patrick and some of the Playboy Playmates of the Year. He did tell me something that I wasn't surprised by; that most of these girls had 'thug boyfriends' who manipulated them out of money. At the time I wasn't seeing anyone in particular because I had broken up with Bill and had also recently had an abortion, which didn't put me in the best frame of mind when it came to boyfriends. Arthur was a great guy, and we would spend hours talking together about the girls and the industry. He made me laugh because I used to call him a closet pervert...he was very straightlaced and conservative on the outside, but he showed me his fetish pornography collection and it surprised me that he liked the very hardcore stuff. A few years later, he wrote me a very rhoughtful letter on handmade paper decorated with dried flowers that I still have...it was basically a love letter and he said he regretted never having pursued me. But I'm glad he didn't, because I only saw him as a good friend, always platonic, never a lover.

It turns out that he got screwed over by the guy who owned the Triple Vision project, and because of bad business practices and dealings, the cards never really got the exposure they needed in order for money to be rolling in. He agreed on his kind behalf to be paid later on when the money began rolling in, but unfortunately the money never did. There were also photographers out there who had their own set of morals and would do things like take photos of the girls when they had 'no film' in the camera, or whose checks would bounce and then they just disappeared from the face of the earth. Another thing I found dismaying and irritating was how bitchy the girls could be. They weren't even famous runway models, and they acted as if the world revolved around them. I almost punched out a few of them for being rude and difficult and demanding. They were just so childish and stupid at times. My big thing was to always treat people with respect and send thank you notes, and that really paid off. People remember a girl for being nice more than they would for being a bitch. It occurred to me how ironic it was that we were being paid to look like harlots and that what really counted was behaving like a lady. I liked one of the girls though, who was very streetwise and tried to look out for me because I was still really naive about some of the ins and outs of the business. Her name was Terri* and she worked as a stripper, but was married to a guy who abused her, and had a mother in jail. Still, she always was nice to me, and though she had a tough demeanor, I sensed she had a kind heart in spite of all of her hardships.

A group of six girls, myself included, were invited to come to the San Fernando Valley with two photographers from Texas who had connections with publishers down there, and it was hell to be around girls whom I just didn't like. Not knowing a thing about drugs, I couldn't understand why they were staying up all night and why they seemed hyper with their noses running. One of the girls asked me if I 'did speed' and I had no idea what the hell 'speed' was. She seemed vaguely amused that I had never tried drugs before, but I wasn't about to start. It just seemed to age those girls. They were all dancers, and I suspected they did the drugs to deal with the long hard hours of working til 5am, but I also think they did it to cover up their own insecurities and problems. I was trying to sleep when they were up making noise all night long and watching the tv and laughing. Then when I woke up they had fallen asleep finally. We did some sexy videos filmed at a wealthy man's backyard and swimming pool area , nothing completely naked or hardcore, and the video clips and photographs were truly works of art. It wasn't hardcore, it wasn't Naked Honeys, but it was beautifully done, with the flowers and plants framing the girls, and we all wore pretty lingerie or bathing suits. We then discovered though that the owner of the house was, er, um...videotaping us without our knowledge or consent in the main bedroom where we changed. We heard a weird whirring noise, and one of the girls discovered the video cam. She stopped running it and pulled the tape out and we damaged the tape.

I now had a Naked Honeys layout and some trading cards to put in my portfolio, as well as being in a layout for a local sex newspaper. But I also remember my self-esteem being torn apart by a photographer in Berkeley who had an immense ego to go along with his sarcasm and casually cruel remarks. He just had a great way of making a girl feel like shit, and he said things to me about my body and my face that I remember even to this day. I had no idea what his personality was going to be like, and I had a male friend drop me off at the guy's apartment to do the day long photo shoot, so there was no way I could call my friend ( no cell phones) and tell him to come pick me up. At first this guy, whom I'll call Frank*, was very nice. But there was something in my gut that just didn't like him. He had body odor and his apartment was cramped and filthy, but he did have a lot of good work to show for being a photographer. Unfortunately I discovered that I was going to be typecast as an "Oriental Chick" and I found that degrading. I actually don't like it when Asians, Latinos, and Black women are considered 'exotic' because that connotates we are different from white women, and beauty shouldn't be considered different. It should just be admired for what it is regardless of what race you are. It was then that I discovered the porn industry could be pretty goddam racist and often took liberal use of damaging stereotypes, depicting ' Huge Black Guys' or 'Sloe-Eyed Oriental Chicks' or " Spicy Hot Latin Mamas". I just didn't like being put in some stupid cheap kimono and carrying a fan or parasol.

I think that's what made the photo session bad from the very beginning in addition to the cramped interior and his general demeanor. He would say things like, " I'm not really crazy about your face, but I do like your body. It's about the best body I've seen...no, wait, there was another girl who had a better body than you. " You could see it in my eyes that I wasn't very happy in the photographs he took. He did manage however to get my photos into three other magazines with me being on the front cover of two of them, but again, they were the 'exotic Oriental Beauty' type of magazines which I didn't care for. Why couldn't mainstream porn incorporate women of color into their centerfolds? Out of the 500 or so centerfolds Playboy had, very few were women of color, and that bothered me, because it was saying that our beauty wasn't as valuable or desirable as a white woman's, seeing as how Playboy was the most prestigious out of the men's magazines and the one most girls wanted to be in if they chose to pose nude for a publication.

I was never more glad to be out of that man's ugly apartment but I still do have some of his photographs of me. They were well done if not just stereotypical. I realized that his demeanor was just a way to cover up his own insecurity because he clearly knew none of the women he photographed in all their naked glory were ever interested in him sexually. And I took note that the men who seemed to have the most issues with women in their lives were the ones who came across as the most degrading and the most misogynistic. I came home another five hundred dollars richer, and from there, I started branching out into different aspects of the business. I thought about giving stripping a try, but the problem was the night hours, and I was in school at the time, so I couldn't stay out late. With yet another photographer friend, I went to a couple of the local all-nude clubs in my area, but the money seemed pathetic, and the girls were bored and lackluster on the stage. It didn't have much appeal to me at the time. Plus I was getting busier at every spare moment for school because by this time I was almost ready to graduate after being in school for nearly twice as long as I should have been, and my father was practically begging me to get out of school and find a job and move out. Still I was painfully aware of the sarcastic remarks that Frank had made to me, and I spent more time looking in the mirror for those imaginary flaws that he so 'kindly' pointed out to me during our photo shoot.

The photos in the 'Oriental Chicks' magazines, however, got me in contact with a big-name pornographer and photographer in the Los Angeles area. He had also seen my new Hustler layout, which was published about seven months after I had taken the photos. They sent me several complimentary copies, and the makeup artist Maria told me that a 'Danny' had been inquiring about where to contact me. Naturally Naked Honeys could never give the personal information to someone else without my permission, so I asked her to get his phone number and the name of the adult modeling agency, the most famous in Los Angeles, that he worked with. I called him and left a message and he got back to me right away. He had photographed softcore as well as hardcore ( actual penetration and sex scenes) porn in magazines, and was also a cameraman on the set of many hardcore sex videos. I didn't share a lot of details with my mother at the time about the hardcore stuff because I knew she would most likely be against it. Plus there was also the idea that the whole world out there would see these videos or these photos, but I felt like since I had already posed for one magazine and for other photographers, I could take a shot at the hardcore world. Maybe. Danny agreed to fly up to the Bay Area where I lived and stayed in a hotel nearby, even coming to meet my parents in person, because my father wanted to check out this guy for himself. Danny was likeable but he was also manipulative. The first time I went to his hotel room to do test shots, he tried to get me to sleep with him, and I refused him. Then he tried to make me feel guilty about it, and I put my foot down. Under absolutely no terms would I sleep with him. If he didn't like it tough shit.

I even went so far as to tell him to take me home, and forget about everything. But for whatever reason, he chose to respect my boundaries, and offered to fly me out to Los Angeles and put me up in a hotel to be shot for three major men's magazines over a period of two days. We were going to use someone's mansion in Beverly Hills for that shot, and there would also be a male model posing with me.

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See what's new at AOL.com and Make AOL Your Homepage.e you start reading. While this is an autobiographical/memoir work, all names and places for the most part have been changed for privacy reasons. My novel combines my exotic dance and adult industry career along with personal family memoirs and events, so it's not to everyone's tastes and some may find it offensive.

SHADES OF YELLOW: A MEMOIR
By DeepSeaSiren a.k.a Michelle

I can't stand the stereotypes of Asian women. All those movies which seem to lend a hand in shaping and forming American and European views about Asian females might have had great actresses and actors, because who can forget the beautiful Nancy Kwan as Suzie Wong in the 1960 movie THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG should be enjoyed as the classic love story it was, a poor beautiful prostitute who uses her feminine wiles and charms to capture the heart of a tall American man. Yet it's one of many, many movies which seems to play into the image of the Asian female as being subservient, agreeable, exotically appealing, yet beneath all the softness, a dragon lady who knew ancient 'sex secrets' that no other woman knew.There's also the aspect that culturally, at least in my family, both sides being from Japan and having emigrated here to America in the early 1900's, that the women definitely did everything for their men and children, and often times chose to stay silent rather than protest, but that belies their inner strength and the unescapable fact that they were the true backbones of their family, the core of which all other things formed around. I don't know anyone in my family who was a Suzie Wong, or a Kim from the play MISS SAIGON who committed suicide. In fact I don't know any Asian women who have committed suicide for their caucasian lovers.

But who the hell was I trying to kid here? This is something I've lived with for a long time, something which shaped me as a woman and as a feminist, being yellow...being an Oriental, being someone who did not have blonde hair and blue eyes and fair skin, and was not the one chosen to play the angel in the school play because I didn't 'look like an angel.' I was aware that people would judge me because I didn't 'look' American even though clearly, my family had been here longer than some Europeans, but no one was going to think I was the all-American kid who had freckles and whose family participated in World War II, or whose relatives were among the most successful small-town farmers of their generation. Hell no. I was always going to be the outsider, the one with the foreign face, and despite not knowing a word of any other language besides English, I was going to be spoken to by people in wonderment upon realizing English was my first language. " Oh my God, you don't have an accent. Your accent doesn't match your face. "

Wow, I didn't think I needed the Great Angel of Language to come down from the skies and put a sign on top of my head in a halo that said " SPEAKS ENGLISH ONLY." While my mother speaks Japanese and her parents are from Japan, my father, like me, doesn't know any Japanese. When my parents went to visit Japan for the first time, my mother chided him, " Thank God I speak Japanese otherwise your old ass would be lost. " They were reminded of just how 'American' they really were in that faraway land where the individual is not as valued as the entire community, where people blended an astonishing mix of old traditional values and yet embraced everything ultramodern and technologically hip, and where mass suicide was seen as the honorable thing to do rather than surrender or admit one was wrong out for fear of humiliation and the great tragic aspect of 'shame'. God knows I should have killed myself a long time ago when I was first starting to get into trouble at my Catholic school and proving that I was anything but a good Catholic girl, despite the fact that I was an altar girl in later years and a girl that the priest wanted to consider ' looking into going to the convent. '

When I say to you, 'who the hell am I supposed to kid,' that refers generally to the idea that to my chagrin and ambivalence, I had to embrace the stereotypes of Asian women in order to make a living at a job that also seemed to be at odds with my feminist principles of not wanting to be treated as a sex object. Yeah, that's right...what an oxymoron and a paradox. I hated the stereotypes and yet that was my selling point, my big selling point...I hated men seeing me as only a sperm bucket or a sex object, but that was something I actually became so I could make a lot of money in a short period of time. In other words, I chose willingly to enter an industry in which women are seen as objects, and every ethnic stereotype seems to be highlighted in big, bold letters...if you're Latino, you must be a spitfire, if you're African American, you must be a savage in bed, and if you're Asian, you must be the Oriental Sex Kitten of all time and carry a parasol and bow your head.

I became an exotic dancer and part-time escort, and worked in one of San Fransisco's largest clubs. I did a few adult films as well and posed in some men's magazines which would make some women cringe from the thought of just how sex-saturated this industry was, and how women make a living off being objectified and scrutinized for their youth, beauty, and appeal. So why the fuck did I do that? Just for the love of money? Just to flaunt myself in front of the Catholic school I had attended because I got thrown out of public school for misbehaving? Why did I enter an industry which chafed my feminist and my anti-stereotype mentality? I could tell you, and I will tell you, and that's going to be one hell of a story. All of it begins with one photograph I took because I was angry at a boyfriend at the time for hiding 'dirty magazines' under his bed. But maybe it began before that, long before that, in a room somewhere with my other young female cousins, in a room where her brothers hid those same dirty magazines under their bed. It all began with a Playboy centerfold whose name I don't remember, but whose body and face made me think, would I ever look like that when I turn 21?

Flash forward to the year 1997:

" You remind me of a Geisha girl I met once in Japan " the elderly man said in a whispery voice, as though his throat was lined with dried paper. He was sitting in the chair, tall and slim, like a pale praying mantis. I had sauntered offstage and moved over to the table, where he would then offer me money for a lapdance and maybe some conversation. To which I wanted to pull out an invisible samurai sword and hit him with it and then maybe commit harikiri or seppuku. But then who was I trying to kid? I was putting myself on display up there at the club, just like an object...a thing of beauty, an Oriental porcelain doll. I was using my ethnicity to sell myself, and I shouldn't be surprised then if men threw the stereotype of the exotic 'Oriental' chick right back in my face. What the hell was I doing here, anyways, fauning over someone who resembled something which should be buried six feet under?

* flashing forward* to be edited into the story *

I grew up in white suburbia, in a comfortable upper middle class home with a swimming pool, with a mother and father who played traditional roles as most parents did in the 1970's, where Mom was the homemaker and participated in school events, and Dad was the breadwinner. In my dad's case, he was an engineer for LearJet before I was born, and then went to work at Lockheed Space and Missiles in Sunnyvale, California, where he spent a little less than 30 years working for them as an aeronautics engineer. When I look back on those years, I have mostly fond memories, because as an only child, it meant I got all the toys and goodies and music lessons. The bad part was...if something got broken, who was I supposed to blame? I couldn't point any fingers. My dad was always the guy in charge, though. I was never able to pinpoint just why my father seemed to be more assertive and take-charge than most Asian men I knew, including some of my own relatives.

But I'll say that despite the fact that my father's family was here one generation longer than my mother's and his personality on the OUTSIDE seemed to be very different from the 'quiet unassertive' type, I think my father was more Old World Japanese than anything else. I've discovered though that through therapy and through talking with other people either in person or online, that I was not alone in the sense that my father simply lacked communicative skills with his own family. He was able to give speeches and able to relate to other people, but for reasons I'll get into later, he was never able to really relate to me, or to my mother. He was the kind of guy who expected that a woman wait on him, and that my mother's duty, rather than be thanked, was to set out his dinner, clean his clothes, clean the house, and make sure I wasn't getting into shit. I remember very clearly that until I was about four, when I started preschool, my father took an active part in my life and there were many photos of him holding me as a toddler, wiping me face, getting the bee sting out of my hand, carrying me and taking me everywhere with him to the park, for example.

And then that seemed to stop, almost abruptly. That I believe is what really shaped my attitude towards the male species, and towards men in general...that if men behaved this way, then I really didn't want to get married, and subconsciously, we always seem to pick the mates in our lives who resemble the parent we didn't get along with. I spent a lot of time verbally abusing men and being emotionally sadistic towards them because I know there was a part of me that wanted to get back at my father, and the powerlessness my mother had as someone who relied on him solely for finances. I had no idea just how independent and self-sufficient my mother was before she got married and settled down. My parents met and married fairly late in life when they were in their early thirties, and my mother was the last and youngest out of 16 children. Her father was almost 60 when she was born, so he was about 91 or 92 when she finally got married. I think that put his heart to rest, because my mother was the most beautiful and the most vivacious out of her family. Maybe I'm just being prejudicial because all my aunts were beautiful, with long hair down to their waists, and classic Japanese features. But my mother was something special. Men were always running after her, men of all races, and she was one of the very few women in her family who dated men from different races.

She was one of the most independent women in her time, but I didn't get to see that as a kid. What I saw when I was growing up was ( at least back then, anyways, because I see things a little differently now) a woman who had to rely on her husband for everything, and my dad wasn't always the easiest guy to get along with. He was a control freak, and rather than allow my mother to take care of the traditional womanly things like decorating the house the way she wanted, or doing the flowers the way she thought were prettiest, my dad had to meddle into everything, and his feeling was, well, I'm paying for this, and you're not, so shut up and do it my way. That kind of shit has burned me up since I can remember, and even now, he just does these things which make no sense to me. Thank God my mother won't put up with it now. But here was my feeling throughout my entire childhood...I WILL NOT ALLOW A MAN TO DICTATE MY LIFE. I WILL NOT EVER ALLOW A MAN TO SUPPORT ME FINANCIALLY.

But wait, before you jump out of your seat to accuse me of base hypocrisy...I admit the obvious...the fucking bitterest irony has been...I RELIED on a steady supply of men's money to keep my ass going financially, to buy my house, to buy all my beautiful things. I mean they weren't supporting me, but I'd be kidding you and myself to think that my own life wasn't made great because men 'paid' to see a good show and that has got to be the most traditional thing a woman has done...rely on her looks and sexuality to get cash. I mean how many successful porn stars or strippers have you seen who weigh five hundred pounds or who are so ugly that they could stop a whole wall of clocks? While men have different tastes, there IS definitely a basic type that they have in mind when they want to go and stare at a stageful of women swinging around poles and making them feel like the king of all kings.

So when they married, a few months later, my mom's dad passed away quietly in his sleep. I can picture that guy finally lying down in his bed next to the woman he spent decades married to, and doing his Lotus Sutra chanting and then going out peacefully. I used to say that if I died, I wanted to go dramatically and possibly even violently, like be some gangster moll from one of those old movies, Bonnie and Clyde, and having the cops shoot my ass up with my boyfriend or husband, but then I started to think, that would be too messy, and I don't want to have to have anyone cleaning up my blood or fishing my body out from the San Fransisco Bay after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. I'm also far too fucking vain to have to think, when I die, is my body going to be allright? Will I look fat in this funeral dress? Are my tits sliding into my armpits or is my face looking puffy and sallow?

Up until I was about three years old my ethnicity meant very little to me. I really wasn't around children my age because the old neighborhood where I was had people older than my parents, and most of their kids were at least teenagers, or too old to be bothered to play with a little kid. My parents were usually the only Asian people on the block, as back then, things weren't as intergrated as they are now, and in the Bay Area, there had yet to be the huge influx of Latino and Asian immigrants, which would strongly shape the culture of that area in later years. My parents also had mostly white friends, although we did have a neighbor whose second wife was from Vietnam. When I was a little kid I remember she was much younger, and very beautiful, with long straight dark hair down to the middle of her back. She used to cook hot Vietnamese dishes and teach my mother how to cook. They would go grocery shopping together and Mom would bring me, and Lin would bring her two adorable half-caucasian kids, who looked strongly more Asian, and people would think, wow, these women must be sisters. But they couldn't be farther apart in ethnicity and in personality...with one being born here of Japan-born parents, and one being born and raised in Saigon.

Now you know all Asian people look alike, right? I mean I joke about that all the time. Even to this day, I get mistaken for someone else at the grocery store...with people asking me, " Are you Chin? Suk Hee? Miyoko?
And I'm like, no, no, no. But then a couple times I caught people off guard and said, " No, and I haven't found any other Asian woman in Reno here who looks anything like me." Maybe it's the fake tits, but my face definitely doesn't look like any other Asian chick I've seen around here. On the other hand I could just let my chest do the talking, as I often have, and if men start staring and talking to the twins, I look down and look back up at them, look back down and up again, and say, " No, they ain't talking yet..." and then I jump up and down, and say, " No, they're still not talking." Besides who's going to really believe that a petite, slim Asian chick has tits which come forward like the prow on a ship? I'm really, really glad I didn't decide to go to double DD's. Call me conservative in that respect but I didn't exactly feel like throwing them over my shoulders when I get old and they sag.

My mother's family came here from Nagoya, Japan. Her family was very traditional, very Buddhist, and were a prominent samurai family there. Somewhere I have photographs of them sitting really still, looking so serious, with dark kimonos bearing their family crest of three white petals surrounded by a circle. Japan was one of the last feudal countries in the world, along with Russia, and about the same time that Alexander the II got rid of serfdom in Russia, Japan in 1867 under the Emperor Meiji began the long process of modernization, called appropriately ( and so creatively) the Meiji Restoration. You know what? They have a Japanese rice candy named after that guy. So for all his status, these days, I remember his name not from history texts, but from these little rice candies which had the edible clear paper around it. It just said EMPEROR MEIJI CANDY and there was the Japanese emperor dude on the front with a beard. It's kind of like the way we take presidents of greatness in our country and then go and name a mattress sale for them on the holidays.

Many things were undertaken and my mother's family felt the stress ( it's not all lies by the way in the movie THE LAST SAMURAI, other than the 'white knight saves the day' bullshit) and were forced to stop wearing swords and to begin adopting Western dress. But most people on both sides of my family did retain wearing their kimonos, and it was only my great grandfather on my father's side who solely wore suits and pants rather than Japan's samurai clans had to cease warring, and Japan was divided up into prefectures, which are similar to what we know here in America as counties. Each prefecture was headed by prefect, which was like a mayor.

Around the same time, yet again, another country would begin to unify itself...the German states, under the German Chancellor Bismarck, would would gather together all the tiny German principalities and unite them as Prussia. People don't understand just how many cultural similiarities Germany and Japan held...the strong military background, the conservativeness, and the idea that it was considered a totally great shame to surrender during a war. I mean they weren't on the same side in World War II for nothing. Think about it. While Germany didn't exactly commit mass suicide or have people jumping off cliffs, Hitler told the people to fight to the very end. Japan would have kept on going to, and they have this collective shame thing going...where the community is all important, and individuality is squashed. This might explain why despite in my earlier years, I tried hard to become part of a group so I didn't have to feel like an outsider, but then in the last decade or so, I was like, why the fuck should I care? It doesn't matter whether I belong or not. It matters that I stay true to my own beliefs, interests, and my promises are kept. Whether I'm wearing something which makes me look like a hippie or wearing some Chanel, it doesn't matter that I cannot be boxed into a small space or be seen as part of the larger picture. Part of it is fighting the temptation when I was growing up by many Asians I knew to 'shut up and just don't start any trouble.'

Japan has this great way of being able to usurp the cultural aspects that they deem as important to advancing themselves while still keeping these other cultures outside their own. Maybe I shouldn't say the word usurp because that just brings to mind a huge, gigantic protozoan amoeba which engulfs shit and then the shit becomes part of the amoeba. No, Japan was more like a borrower of cultures. They had retained their isolation since the days of the Tokugawa Era, when no foreigners were allowed into their country and those few Portuguese and British or Dutch missionaries and merchants who were there either got thrown out, or went the way of the samurai sword. Read: heads getting cut off. For a few centuries nobody really went there, until Westerners under Admiral Perry of the United States forced Japan to basically open its doors to the West. Emperor Meiji, probably under the strong influence of the bakafu, the true ruling military class of Japan ( the emperor was always sort of a puppet, which could explain why the same family has ruled Japan for over 1500 years...I mean, don't say shit, and you can rule, right? As long as you do what other people tell you to do).

( Skipping Over Some Material)

NOTE: Anything with an asterisk has had the name changed for privacy purposes. Again, please DO NOT read if you are under 18!!

Chapter Three

A Girl and Her Father

I would be lying to say that in many ways, my first hand experience with men began with my father. It wasn't always a positive experience, and I do feel that some girls are definitely driven into the adult industry by some kind of lack of power or a sense of powerlessness against men, primarily the men in their own families. While I feel that there are certainly many negative stereotypes about women in the adult industry, ( and the media certainly doesn't help...when was the last time you saw a movie or a book about some positive aspect of an exotic dancer's life? Or a call girl's life? Most of the media depicts these women as leading sordid lives of little value, and being constantly and continually exploited by the men who 'manage' them. They usually end up being someone's murder victim or die of a drug overdose, or are depicted as manipulative and messed up human beings. No wonder a lot of people think so poorly of those who decide by choice and choice alone to enter the industry.

But there is certainly one aspect that I did find constant about many of the girls, and I include myself in the group. My father did not molest or physically abuse me in any way, but I found myself harboring a deep resentment towards him as well as a great deal of anger. There did seem to be a higher percentage of girls who at least, from what they told me, were physically, sexually, or emotionally abused by men at some point in their lives. Some of the girls, even the dancers, had useless men in their lives who were their so-called 'managers' or outright pimps, and took the girls' money, threatening them with abandonment or physical abuse. A lot of people just shake their heads at the concept of a woman who allows a man to manipulate her in such a way, but I saw the vulnerable and fragile egos that accompanied some of the girls, already damaged in some ways by their families, and therefore easy prey for men who saw an opportunity to cash in on the girls. I noticed it right away with men who 'pretended' to care a great deal about some of the girls, when it was pretty clear to me that they were just using these girls for profit and were lazy bastards.

There's also a side of me that hesitated for a very long time to admit that perhaps my own fragile relationship with my father was partly what got me into the adult industry, because I didn't want to adhere or to be part of an already negative stereotype that there's 'something wrong' with these girls to begin with, and yet, I did see aspects of that stereotype that seemed to fuel itself. I also believe that society tends to LOOK for things in a girl's background which might explain why she 'chose' such a 'horrible' profession to begin with...after all, what 'normal girl' would want to take off her clothes for a living and allow her private and most sacred self, her nudity and her sex, to be on prominent display either on the stage, in a porn film, or to various men who would basically remain strangers to her while they paid for her worth? But I definitely felt that at a certain point in my childhood, my relationship with my father changed and altered inexplicably to me, and that left me with a great deal of anger and frustration. Also, seeing my mother as basically a powerless woman, someone who waited on my father and had to deal with his bullshit didn't help. I also felt some anger towards my mother who seemed overly dependent on my father for many things.

In therapy, and from speaking with other women, I learned that many fathers, especially those from Old World type families or an older generation, seemed to lose touch with their daughters at a certain age. I think as babies, we are asexual...you can't really often tell the difference between a female or male when a child is very young, except by the way they are dressed. I see a lot of babies where, if they weren't wearing little pink or little blue hats, I wouldn't even know whether they were someone's son or daughter. I can remember my father being very doting when I was a baby and a toddler. I can remember everything from my childhood. I know some people whose childhoods were so traumatic that they refused to remember things, or were simply unable to relive the painful memories of abuse and neglect. My childhood was a very happy one when my father doted on me when I was a toddler. But that oddly seemed to change overnight, and as a little girl, I had no idea why.

Up until I was about four years old, my father took me for walks in the park, helped my mother change my diapers, was the one who comforted me if I fell off my tricycle or if I was chasing bees in the backyard and got stung. In fact one of my most pleasant memories of my father was him gently scolding me for trying to go after the honeybees in our backyard, and of course, I ended up getting stung in the hand. My father took me inside and gently pried the stinger loose with a pair of tweezers, then mixed some baking soda in a bowl of warm water and put my hand in there. I remember I was crying and he was wiping the tears off my face with a cloth. My mother came home from grocery shopping and she saw what happened, and then she put a bandage on the sting. Another pleasant memory brings to mind when I was making mud pies, and my father was helping me in the yard. My mother was really annoyed that we were making such a mess, but my father didn't mind, and I think it bought back childhood memories of his own when he was playing with me. Then I remember throwing a mud pie at my father's face, and rather than get angry or annoyed, he started laughing and just wiped the mud off his face and washed his glasses in the fountain.

Until I was about four years old, this happiness and fun times with my father continued, and I had no reason to distrust him or to harbor any kind of resentment or anger. My mother and father seemed happy from what I could see and what I experienced myself as a small child.

But when we moved to another house, and the house that I would stay in for over two decades living with my parents while in school, I began to notice that my father seemed to resent me more and more. It was as though as I developed into a little GIRL rather than a toddler who could be dressed as a boy, my father seemed to lose touch with that, and I couldn't help but think at the time, and for many years thereafter, my father wanted a son. After all, it was something which was greatly emphasized in Asian culture, where having girls was discouraged, and women were viewed as weak, contemptible, and devalued as human beings. There is no such thing as chivalry in many parts of the world, chivalry is actually a Western European concept. I'm in no way saying that white European men are 'better' than men of other cultures, but there is that emphasis that a woman should be treated with some measure of respect and put on a pedestal rather than demeaned. Men do not open doors for women in Japan, and they walk ahead of the women.

Despite my father having been here one generation ahead of my mother's family, my father constantly walked ahead of my mother, and it was never more apparent when his attitude towards me began to change into one of love and tenderness into what I thought was a deep hostility and resentment. Many years later, after my father's affair with another woman was revealed, did he tell my mother that because she began spending a lot of her time with me, and became very busy with my schooling, did he begin to take out some anger and frustration on her as well as me. But I seemed to be the primary target. When I was four, I remember my father reading to me from a storybook, and when my attention seemed to wander, he suddenly just hit me with the paperback storybook on the side of my head gently, and then just got up abruptly and left the room. I didn't tell my mother about some of the things he did to me as a kid because I sensed that she was already becoming frustrated and depressed with my father's inability to seem to communicate with her. When he took me places, it was as though now, he HAD to take me along, and he would jerk me along with him because I couldn't keep with him. Well, shit, when you're five years old, your fucking legs are a lot shorter than a 40 year old man's.

When in therapy I bought up some of the ways my father instilled in me a deep and forlorn anger, my father honestly could not remember some of those times, but neither did he deny it. It was a negative cycle which perpetuated itself time and time again. The more my father neglected me or was angry at me, the more I acted out, and most of it came out in school. I was unable to express myself as a child, because when you're that young, no matter how intelligent you are, you never put two and two together to say " Dad, I'm really pissed at you for resenting me, and I want to know why you stopped loving me. " ( or appeared to stop loving me). He became impatient with me on many different levels. Yet the odd thing about his disciplinary action was that he rarely punished me for things that he should have, such as throwing a hamburger across the table, or for throwing something at someone. Understandably, if I told him that some kid at school called me something racist and I retaliated by fighting, my father did support me and took my side. There was something about racist names that really set my father off too. My mother didn't pay any attention to those kind of comments, but on more than one occasion, I can remember my father just enraged and driving really fast after someone if they called him a name that was racially biased.

But when I spilled milk on accident, or bumped into my father as a kid and caused him to spill or drop something, he would become very angry and either swat me with a newspaper or spank me. I just didn't understand that shit, and that made my rage grow. I went to school in such bad moods that I fought with other kids just to be fighting, and would speak back constantly to the teacher. I always wonder...how the fuck did I end up getting straight A's in school with all that anger, and even worse, the inability to sit still in one place for more than a minute? Now looking back on those times it was clear to me and to therapists that I suffered from some kind of hyperactivity or ADD. But since 80% or more of kids who have ADD and hyperactivity are boys, they don't look for it as readily in girls. I also think it's because we expect young boys to be active and to get in more trouble than girls, and when girls do, they are seen as aggressive and tomboyish rather than having some kind of psychological trouble.

I already began to sense that somehow I felt, if I had been a boy, would my father have been happier, and less resentful of me the older I got? That drove me incessantly to succeed, and I can honestly say with great impunity that one of the major reasons I decided to get into an industry which paid women far more than men was because I wanted to show my father that even as a girl I could be wealthy and successful like a man, and do so in a very short period of time. To be successful financially and academically were big issues for me. But my father was not the kind of person to praise me. It was largely my mother that encouraged me to do well in school and to take on other pursuits, such as my love of music, art, and writing, rather than just engage myself in academics. I spent a lot of time in those years sitting outside the principal's office for fighting or for talking back and flipping off the teacher. There was rarely a day when something didn't occur at school, when I wasn't being admonished for misbehaving.

As I grew older, my father spent more and more time outside the home. He not only worked 8 to 5 as an engineer, but he also had a couple other businesses, including a small machine shop, and real estate holdings with another partner. I'll always give my father credit though for being financially saavy and always thinking about the future, because he started saving for my college education before I was even born. He took investment classes and got a real estate license. He was the one who instilled in me the value of being financially capable, and I took that to heart when I first starting making very large sums of money. I knew that I wanted to buy a beautiful house, and to have things in it that no one man or husband could give to me...those things I wanted to accomplish on my own, without the help of a husband. Again, seeing my mother financially dependent on my father was a touchy area for me...while I clearly understood this was something women did in those days, it was also something that I resented and hated. I didn't like the idea that my father would take control of the finances and dismissed my mother's ideas and intuitions when investing or getting involved with this shady real estate broker who turned out to have one of the biggest scams in the nation. My mother never liked him, and told my father there was something suspicious about him. My father naturally told her, " You don't know anything, just be quiet. " And sure enough, the guy walked away with millions of people's hard-earned dollars and escaped the authorities for many years. But my father never gave my mother the respect of even listening to her concerns. That made me angrier than anything.

If a man doesn't respect his wife, then he can't possibly respect his own children or even himself. To me, a man who openly dismisses a woman's ideas, opinions and concerns is a man who is someone who can't be trusted and someone I cannot respect in any way. My father was a very odd man to me, and even now, he seems to be paradoxical...he can't walk ahead of my mother anymore because he can't walk as fast as he used to, but I can't tell you how much I wanted to slug him for doing that, like we were fucking in Japan still or something. When my parents finally made it to Japan to visit ten years ago, my father loved the idea that women got left behind and men walked ahead of them and didn't show open doors for them. He's the kind of guy who will help himself first at the dinner table rather than offer to share things with my mother or me first, even on Mother's Day. Then my mother told me a hilarious story in which in Japan, my father was walking ahead of her, and he tripped and fell down on this wooden bridge. My mother left him there on the ground while he embarassingly picked himself up, and walked ahead of him for once. I've rarely if ever seen men who are fathers walk ahead of their wives and kids. I don't even see that being done in traditional countries like Mexico or India. So it was infuriating to me that my father would do something like that to his own family.

I knew very little about my father growing up as a child, but I feel that had I known the things that my father later revealed to my mother and I in recent times, I would have at least understood why he seemed to have such an inability to communicate with his own family. I'm not saying that excuses him from being a poor father, but it at least explains in some regard just why he found it difficult in later years to express himself in other ways besides anger.

I think even you, the reader, can gather from my thoughts and expressions here that I felt a tremendous sense of powerlessness and a great deal of anger towards my father and to the family dynamics that I saw between a husband and a wife. I knew that a lot of my mother's sisters had married men who were worse than my father, with some of thing being outright physically abusive or disrespectful. I was never able to get out of my head even to this day how some of the women in my family dealt with men who beat them, cheated on them, or threw dinners at them because it wasn't 'cooked right'. I started to actually think very negatively of Asian men, which was probably the worst thing in the world to do, to dish your own race. But I couldn't help but think, if these men had been white, would this shit be happening? Would they be doing the same, disrespecting and disregarding women as second class citizens whose only duty it was to serve them, and to be quiet, mouse-like wives and mothers? Now upon examining those thoughts, it became very apparent to me that it wasn't the women who were weak, it was the men. They couldn't do shit without their wives, who cooked and cleaned and contributed to the family in ways that some of these men could never comprehend. They weren't the submissive ones, they only appeared to be, but in truth, they were the lifeforce and the backbone of the family.

When some of my aunts died, my uncles who survived them often couldn't even figure out how to cook a steak or boil an egg. One of them complained continuously about how he had to 'take care of her' after she spent 40 years taking care of his worthless, lazy ass. Seeing these men in my family just made me even angrier towards the male race in general. I wasn't really around other kids' families enough to look at what went on between their mothers and fathers, but in later years, talking with both male and female friends, I understood that I wasn't alone in the regard that many men believed just because they earned the bacon, they had the right to tell women how to fry it and what to do with it. I have to say that my father never denied us anything, because he never complained about the way my mother spent money...she was free to buy clothes and jewelry, to spend money on me freely, and we went many places and travelled a great deal. But my father was strangely controlling regarding things that most men didn't care what their wives did, things like gardening and decorating. I think his feeling was, well, since it's my money, I can tell you what to do with it.

The older I got, I think my mother began to get increasingly frustrated and irritated that my father was never home, and that when he was, he just wanted to watch the tv on weeknights and fall asleep there on the couch watching the news. I never saw my parents interact romantically or hold hands. In this regard I feel that Japanese culture shaped both of them...I noticed that many Asian people, regardless of whether they are born here or there in Asia...don't like showing physical affection or even showing their emotions, period, when they are around others. It's a certain reserve that they hold, and part of it is based I believe on not wanting to create 'waves' or 'ripples' in the pond. Because Japan in particular holds very high the value of the whole community rather than the feelings and rights of the individual, speaking out and or being outspoken are things which are extremely discouraged. In America, the spirit is about individualism, and while people as a whole tend to stick together and ostracize those who are different, still..happiness and wealth are things which are there to pursue regardless of what others think, and individuality in opinions and beliefs are encouraged rather than subdued.

All of this anger and resentment was seriously taking a toll on me, not just in my behavior at school, but in my own everyday personal life. I just felt like an outsider, and that no one would really understand me. I couldn't really communicate well what I was truly feeling, although I was always an active participant and very vocal in school discussions and the classroom, that isn't the same thing as expressing what you really feel, what your own emotions are. Now I see with great clarity that my father and I were so much alike, that was the reason we never got along. Upon acknowledging that, I was able to at least see why we conflicted, and why we always ended up arguing or just disregarding each other. It was an inability to really express what we were feeling, and the overlying anger which seemed to dominate both of our personalities. I think my father and I think exactly alike in the regard that we've always especially fought against the stereotype that Asians were passive and never 'said anything'...and rather than step back, we were quick to get enraged and show that we were anything but passive or lacking emotion.

A few years ago, I saw something incredibly moving on this HBO special which depicted the Latino comedian John Leguizamo in a live concert onstage in which he talked about his father and his family. His father was always yelling and doing crazy things, beating his mother, lying about his job... and eventually his parents got a divorce. He does this scene where he's just starting out doing comedy and in a small, seedy bathroom at the club he was working at. He then depicts his father walking in and it's apparent that John harbors resentment and anger towards his father for all the sins he committed while growing up. It clearly amounted to a whole litany of sins, but there's the scene where John portrays his own father saying, " You know, the way I loved you and your brother and your mother...well, it wasn't perfect. I did a lot of crazy, stupid things, but I did love you guys. I didn't love you perfectly...but I did love you...I just loved you MY way." That ends the scene, but for many reasons, this stuck out to me...because upon looking back at both of my parents, and especially my father, for whatever his trangressions were, and there were many...that he did love me and my mother, he just did it...HIS way.

No parent on this earth is perfect. It's true that some people make better parents than others, and some shouldn't be parents at all. But while my father didn't express love to me in words, I knew that his actions spoke loudly and clearly. I knew so very little about him, it's amazing how you can grow up with someone, be raised by them, and yet they remain a stranger to you. My mother was strangely more open about her background and childhood, probably because it was a very happy one, in which she had many brothers and sisters and parents who were strict but loving. Happy memories are easily remembered, because who wants to go back and think about memories when you're being abused or neglected? My mother's family, despite them being very traditional, was actually a very close-knit family, and no matter how they feuded or whatever, they always supported each other, and were always there in times of trouble. Nowhere was this more demonstrated than during World War II, after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and both sides of my family were interned in the Japanese American Internment Camps because they were 'seen' as disloyal just because of their heritage.

My father was there to bail my ass out of jail when I got in trouble with the law, he was there to help me financially, he was there when I tried to commit suicide in high school. He backed me up when someone hurt me or said something racist to me, and wasn't afraid to speak out when others were clearly uncomfortable doing so, even my mother. Now at the time in high school, I don't know if I was serious about killing myself, but I certainly didn't exactly feel like living at the time. It was actually my father who had tears in his eyes, though unable to express his grief, when he saw me in the emergency room and they had to pump my stomach because I took a whole bottle of aspirin. So, when John Leguizamo talked about his father and how his father did all these crazy things when he and his brother were growing up, his father did something very poignant and very touching, something which I think about deeply even now. My father was far from perfect, but it could have been a lot worse, and I realize that his love for me was done in the only way he knew how...which was HIS way, and no other person's way. I even wrote that recently in a card I gave him for Father's Day, and he actually showed it to my mother. He normally never does stuff like that so I apparently hit a note in his heart with those lines..." I understand that while you didn't love me perfectly, that you did love me, and you did it your way...which is the way you knew best."

As I was saying, life for me was stressful mostly because I put a lot of pressure on myself in doing well in school just because I didn't want to show that girls were less worthy than boys. As I entered junior high school, life became especially painful because it was the age when girls and boys were beginning to act differently towards each other, beginning to see each other as attractive rather than as 'having cooties' and screaming when they accidentally touched each other. There's nothing more fragile than a preteen or teenager's self-esteem. While a few kids can manage to get through that time period relatively pain-free, most preteens and teens I think suffer from angst...especially if they are different.

I went to a Catholic school where we were expected to conform, and I even was baptized as a Catholic when I was 12 because I wanted to feel like I belonged to something. At the time, I also actually did believe in most of the tenets and teachings of the Church. An elderly priest from Hungary took a special interest in my Catholic education, and he always used to have his Hungarian/English dictionary handy although his English was fluent. He wanted me to become a nun. I guess that idea didn't really take. But he'd probably be dancing for joy to know that I actually have considered, and still am considering, joining a Catholic community of sisters. I just haven't gotten myself to go and figure out just how to do it, other than writing to some convents and receiving replies. It's interesting to see that there are women from ALL walks of life, however, who have been choosing to become nuns, from executives to even women officers in the army and navy, and from all backgrounds and races. But it was the idea back then of at least belonging to some institution, even a religious one, that made me really get into the thought of no longer being an outsider.

My father was never a patient man, although he appears to be like the Rock of Gibraltar on the outside. I think inside he's just as hyperactive as he was as a boy, it just somehow turned inwards since he couldn't run around screaming and playing on the playground anymore. I did know that my father suffered from severe health problems as a child, including serious bouts of recurring asthma attacks, tuberculosis, and allergies to many foods. He would break out in hives at the drop of a hat. As I matured and grew as a preteen, it became obvious that I also suffered from many of these ailments which seemed to stem just as much if not more so from an emotional and spiritual state as well as a physical state. I got hives when I didn't feel that I had done as well on a test, I got asthma attacks when I got too emotional about things. Worst of all, I also developed serious anorexia, which caused my eyesight to become very poor. I always did wear glasses but I never NEEDED them. At the end of my bout with anorexia, which included limiting myself to 500 calories a day and doing hours of walking, situps and pushups, my eyesight was legally blind. I had to now wear glasses with coke bottle lenses, and my growth sort of stopped. I'm convinced I could be a couple inches taller had I gotten the nutrition I needed back then.

My mother was very concerned about this and kept pushing me to attend counseling, but my father's inability to understand my condition just hardened me against any kind of therapy. He could be very pushy about food, and if he got mad because I wasn't eating, I just refused to eat even more. We would go out to a restaurant and my father would order food for me, and I sat there, refusing to eat it as it got cold and went totally untouched on my plate. It was as if there was a battle of wills going on between my father and myself, and looking back on that, it's pretty clear to me now that was what it was. We would start arguing and since both of us HAD to get the last word in, the arguing either continued or ended with me just going to my room and slamming the door. My mother luckily would usually step in before the fighting really escalated. I just didn't understand why my father had to get the last word in, and there it was pretty fucking apparent that I had a hard time with giving up the last word, too.

My father's other business kept him away on Saturdays all day and on a couple of nights during the regular workweek. I think my mother was in clear denial ( either that, or she hid it from me, but I am more inclined to believe that she was in denial, because there was no where for her to go. She could have left him, and took me with her to live with her family, but then, we'd have to live in my father's child support, and my mother didn't have job skills because she hadn't worked for years and years since she married my father. Again, this was especially a sore point with me. If she had some financial independence, maybe she might have left and not put up with my dad's bullshit. But now, I see that there was also a part of her which was incredibly traditional...I don't think that she OR my father really believed in divorce, despite my father's family traumas of several divorces and remarriages. I think it might have also just made me go over the deep end somehow seeing as how emotionally volatile I was at the time.

But there were things that just were odd, things which my mother could not deny. She even blamed me for making things up. One time, my father had left for a few days to go to Las Vegas to meet some of his friends from work, so he said...but I decided to call him. I don't know what caused me to do this, but there might have been some second sight on my part. I called his hotel room, and a strange voice answered the phone. It was clearly a woman, and I said angrily," Is my father there? Is this Dave's room?" She clearly answered me, " Yes, this is Dave's room." Again, I said, " Well is my father there?" and then there was a pause, and the line went dead. I told my mother about this, and she refused to believe me. But then my father called back about a half hour later, laughing nervously on the phone about ' his friend' who answered the phone. He told my mother it was the wife of his friend who happened to be 'in the hotel' room at the time. My father was always a glib liar...he could lie with a poker face and he always had fast answers to everything. I realize now how much anger I was also holding because of her denial on my mother's part. The fact that she had gone into denial just numbed me, because what it said was part of the larger picture...she couldn't leave my father for humiliating her because she had no money to live on her own.

Later on, small things began popping up through the years. I found a strange musical tape in my dad's car that I know neither my mother, him, or me listened to normally. When I gave it to him he laughed again, nervously, and said, " You must have forgotten it there." I was only 15 at the time, so I didn't really think too much of it, but I did think it was odd. That same year, I found a shoulder length blonde hair on the seat. The car had dark seats so it was easy to see everything. Then my mother found one side of a pair of earrings in between the crack of the seat, and my father told her it was a lady from his workplace that he took for lunch. The blonde hair...well, again, there was a huge part of me that thought it was odd, because none of my high school girlfriends had that kind of hair. Only a few of them had ever been in that car anyways. Then towards the end of high school, my mother ( she must have clearly had her suspicions) because she noticed that my father's car odometer had about 150 miles extra on it, and Lockheed, where he worked, was only about a ten minute drive. He told her that he 'decided to take the day off' and go for a long drive to Monterrey by himself.

All of this shit was just starting to add up in my mind, although I had no real comprehension that my father could truly betray my mother for so long. It would have been more forgiveable if he had paid for a prostitute rather than carry on an affair that lasted from when I was 8 years old all the way up until I was almost 25. But the hard truth finally forced my mother to acknowledge what she could not, or refused to see, for many years. One time I was driving with my boyfriend and I saw my father turning onto a street which was close to where my boyfriend lived. Even my boyfriend said, " Hey isn't that your father?" My dad had this brightly colored Mercedes which was pretty unique in itself. I should have followed him. Sure enough, it was a Saturday afternoon, when my father said he was doing 'stuff for real estate' . Then I got really sick, came down with a serious illness, and it happened to be that Thursday night my father had been telling my mother he had gone to a friend's poker game. My mother never thought to call him, I suppose, to check up on him. But this time, since he had the car, and my mother clearly wanted my father to go with us to the hospital, she dialed this 'friend's number.'

A man answered the phone. I was there in the room. I clearly heard his voice stating in a puzzled way, " Well yes, I do know your husband, and we used to play poker games here on Thursday night...but there hasn't been a poker game here in the last nine years." My mother just hung the phone up and just sat there in shock. My father got home around 2am, and she confronted him as to where he'd been. He'd been lying for nearly a decade, and he was so clever. He would always make it a point to smoke his cigars on that night, to make i