I had a professor, Fatima Jackson, who always said: “There’s no free lunch in evolution.” She used this to mean that evolution was not about progress, but becoming better suited for one temporal set of environmental circumstances and often less suitable for another. The topic of the class was applied biological anthropology. And because it was an anthropology class, bio always meant bio-cultural. I was taking this class after returning to college after a 17 semester break (you can do the math).

I also moved back home with the parents.  Among other things, living with your parents as an adult is a humbling experience. My mother still reminds me not to stay out too late, and occasionally stays up until I come in. Since returning home, I have wondered about how I learned my values, how my life experiences reify or dissipate ethnic family traditions, and how my memories selectively recreate the past to meet my present needs. I still look young, but my age is really showing.

I have a pretty good relationship with my family. It’s not perfect, but it’s satisfactory. Recently my sister made my birthday dinner and I invited some friends to join my family. I was anxious.  Not that my family would be offended by my friends, but that my family would make inappropriate comments to my friends.

Unfortunately for him, I told him that I didn’t have any secrets. I replied to his e-mail without any sense of fear. He could tell whomever he wanted. He wrote back with a softer tone, noting that he discussed it with his mother/my sister, and that she had said that it was an old issue, one which his father/my brother-in-law used to have lots of problems with. I felt vindicated.

But I still have never asked for the tapes back. I figured he threw them away. Besides, the idea of Uncle coming home and asking: “So can I have my porno tapes back?” is unsettling, even for me. 

About every other week, my mother conveniently forgets that I'm gay. I told her over a decade ago, but it's a memory she suppresses. So occasionally I have to remind her. She always responds with a noise that sounds like she’s about to spit.

There are conveniences to living with your old Korean parents. Food is never a problem. The house is always clean. And I can leave queer objects everywhere without them being noticed.  My friends think it’s funny that the Korea Times sits next to the Washington Blade on the coffee table.

My mother consistently asks me whether I will live with my parents in their old age. This has been an ongoing question in my conversations with my mother. From a very young age, she has told me that the worst thing I could do to my parents is put them in a nursing home. So I’ve always told her that I would take care of them. Now she also asks me what I would do if my spouse did not want to live with them. I’ve always responded that I wouldn’t choose a spouse that wouldn’t agree to live with them.

This has always been something I was open to, though I always found it a bit odd since I am the younger son, not the older son. Recently, my mother revealed to me that the oracle books prophesize that my parents will live with me in their old age. Once she said that and giggled, it was fated to be true. Even if I didn’t want to live with my parents, how could I change fate?

In any case, these particularities reveal a more universal issue about queer Asian Americans.  I am pulled one direction by my family and in another by my desires. If I really didn’t have any family, I‘d be much more of a hedonist than I am. But I would also have less security.

One thing that I’ve always been sure of in life is that I can take risks. Not because I am a risk taker by nature, but because I have a safety net, which is my family. I can move anywhere I want in the world and try a new profession or run out of money in the middle of a trans-Siberian train trip. In either case, I can always go home. And my family would pay for the return trip.

But this privilege, this entitlement comes with a price, which is my reciprocal responsibility to my family: not making them look too bad, helping them out when they need it, helping in taking care of my nephews and parents. It’s an intricate balance.

I think that if I didn’t have a family or didn’t have any relationship with them, I might just have become an artist, a philosopher, or a houseboy. In any case, I really wouldn’t care about things like saving money. But it is because I have my partner and my family that I do continue to plan for the future, that I do save, that I do take better care of myself.

I am of that age that just about all my straight friends (including those who rallied against having children) have given birth. Many queers I know are also having kids or adopting. And after becoming parents, people change. I feel like I’m on a similar path in a queer Korean dimension.  One of my partner's lesbian sisters has a girlfriend who wants my sperm. But a more pressing concern is that I have aging parents.

Since I am the only child in the family who does not have children, my siblings look to me to provide support to my parents. The idea is that since they have to take care of their kids, I should take care of the parents. It seems fair enough. Unfortunately, I am also the non-profit child hoping to get a PhD, which means that social security and me aren’t going to be enough to support them.

Money was never very important in my life. I just wanted to be comfortable and to have a little fun. By the time I start saving for my retirement, they’ll have raised the retirement age to give me some more time. But lately I’ve even felt the grip of money hunger that I’ve often criticized in my siblings.

My money hunger comes from my desire to take care of my parents.

Living away from my family for almost a decade, seeing them only on holidays and for vacations, I didn’t see the passing of time and my parent’s aging. For me, my parents would always be like they were when I was in high school.

But moving back into their house and seeing how they live and work on a day to day basis revealed their age. My parents are now really old. Both my parents fall asleep more often. My mother has a more difficult time climbing the stairs. She hasn’t driven in more than 20 years.  For the first time in my life, I know that I am stronger than my father. I saw him struggling to lift a box so I assumed it was heavy. But when I grabbed it, the box just jumped into the air. 

My parents, like many Korean Americans, run a small business. They leave the house everyday about 9:00 and come home every night around 9:30, except Sundays when they leave at 11:00 and get back at 6:30(if my sister doesn’t take care of the shop that day). They get two days of vacation a year: Thanksgiving and Christmas. My parents spend almost every waking minute of the day together. I think this is really impressive given that they never even really spoke to one another before getting married.

My parent’s current business has been in the same mall for about 20 years. Before Bowie Town Centre opened last fall, their mall was the last one to open in Prince George’s County, Maryland in over 20 years. In that time, the mall has gone from a low end mall (the anchors were Bradlees and Montgomery Wards) to a last resort mall. I don’t think that a single store in the mall is owned by a corporation. All the owners are Korean, Indian,Caribbean, African, or Black. I think that the largest tenant is a Black church. There are no anchor stores anymore. The two stalls remaining in the food court are a Mexican stall and a cookie shop, both Indian run. More than 90% of the clients are of African descent.

It is questionable how much longer the mall will continue to operate. My parents continually worry that the mall will close and that they will have to start over in another location.  Last fall, I told my mother that she should not look for other locations. She’s too old to start over.  I promised that if the mall closed, I would make sure that they could retire.

The main reason that my parents continue to keep working is that they have not paid off their house. It will take about two or three more years if they work, longer if it’s up to me alone. But I also know that I can also enlist the efforts of my sister and brother.

Gay men have a different life cycle, one that in more recent times in the UShas been structured outside of the family. Without the relationships to family, people are freed from responsibility, but also can expect less support from others. Without children, we can act like we just graduated from college forever. But there hasn’t really been an Asian American model for gay aging, one based on a continuing relationship with the family.  And now, my age is showing.  Not in the physical sense, but in the sense that my obligations to reciprocate are growing.

Reprinted with permission of the author