Some thoughts on being a gaysian immigrant to California Two weeks ago, I helped to plan and organize a Lunar New Year dinner for 120 queer and trans Asian people. It’s a tradition that has been around for as long as I’ve been alive: the annual APIQWTC Banquet. Despite its mouthful of a name (much easier if you read it as API CUTESY Banquet), it was an event that left me feeling extremely raw and emotional at the end of it.

Various things in the last few years have alerted me to the terrifying fact: I don’t think I had an attention span at all until, well, now. That I was able to graduate from college, get married, hold down jobs… privilege, and opportunity. Most of the time, I was told that I was that way because I was simply careless, lacked attention to detail, and that was just who I was.

Maybe some day, I’ll think of the years between 2009 and 2019 as a lost decade. It was a decade of development, when I came of age, when I left home, when I made my home in so many different places in the world, where I tried on different ways of being, as if they were seasonal coats, or swimwear. Things are different now. When I was least expecting it, king tides subsided and became gentle lakes.