The first time I met my step father Paul was on March 23rd of 2003, I was ten years old. Him and my mom picked me up from Boston Logan Airport in a black Lincoln stretch limousine, and in that short thirty minute ride back to a suburb called Newton, I quickly realized that my life and the world as I knew it had been completely flipped upside down. So I threw up all over the expensive floor carpets in the back of the limo.

I threw up because I got super car sick almost immediately. In the ten years of living in China, I could count on one hand the amount of times I got to ride in a vehicle that’s not a public bus or train, let alone a limo. So as I was swallowed up in the plush leather couch in the back of the Lincoln, I found this new and luxurious treatment to be extremely foreign and nauseating to my up until then a pretty much rube like lifestyle.

I threw up because the travel from China to the US itself is incredibly demanding. If you were lucky and could afford a direct flight, you still spent about seventeen hours in the air stuck with crying babies and the ever lingering smell drifting out of the bathrooms. If you couldn’t afford a direct flight, well then you should prepare to spend anywhere between twenty-four and thirty-two hours on this overseas journey. Not to mention the hours spent standing in lines at the various custom check points, anxiously waiting to be let inside the greatest country of the world, or so they told me. 

But I’d like to think that I mainly threw up because the entire experience was as bizarre to me as something like, time travel. You know how in the films whenever people travel through time they always get sick, either a headache or a really sick feeling, sometimes the cure would be to drink chocolate milk, I think this happened in the latest Men in Black movie. But the point is to say that going from living in a world where I was sharing a bed with my grandparents and where we didn’t even have indoor plumbing, to all of sudden being in a multistory house filled with whatever one wanted from Costco, being chauffeured everywhere I went, surrounded by the likes of people I have never seen in the rural town of Yichang, not even on TV, was OUT of this world. And while my poor underdeveloped brain didn’t grasp that at the time, my body knew to react.  

But this was how I got introduced to Paul, a 6 foot 2, 230 pound Swedish guy pulling up in a limo, meeting him felt like walking into a cloud of mystery, just like the rest of my reality at that time. As the years went on the mystery unravelled themselves and they became examples both of who I didn’t want to be, but also exactly who I am today. I guess you really are a product of your environment, and I’ve spent much effort in the recent years trying to unlearn a lot of what I picked up from him. 

I never had any siblings growing up, the one child policy of China left many kids in my generation to grow up being the only kid in the house (by the way I do have to clear up here that although it’s called One Child Policy, they really meant you were allowed one birth, so say if a woman gave birth to twins or triplets, they aren’t going to force her to choose between one of her newborns and discard the rest, this wasn’t like ancient Sparta). Although I did have a bunch of cousins running around me, it was clear that they had their own mothers and fathers, and at the end of the day, they went back to their respective homes. I cant say whether or not having no siblings affected me growing up, I don’t remember wishing for a older brother to protect me or wanting a younger sister to protect, I don’t recall feeling anyway or another when I saw my friends who had twins that seems to mimic their every move and thought, but I do notice that in my life over the years I tend to love a little harder, and bond a little stronger to those around me, my friends, my loved ones, maybe all that extra love is just a result of being alone all those years.

Sometimes I tell people that my move-in day at NYU was my first day ever in New York City, how before that faithful day on Washington Square, I had never even set foot in New York State let alone the Big Apple. I tell this version of the truth because sometimes I like to be dramatic, or rather romantic, you could say I sometimes have a tendency to embellish the details of my life that I can’t recall that clearly. But that version of the story is a lie. My move-in day in New York was my second time ever stepping foot in the city. I actually visited New York City with a couple of high school buddies at the end of senior year, Oliver and Alex from Newton South asked me if I wanted to drive to Queens, stay at some motel, and then take the train into the city. In all fairness I don’t remember much details about that trip, I don’t remember where in Queens we stayed, although after ten years in New York, I still couldn’t tell you much about the layout of Queens, I was more of a Brooklyn boy. I do remember us going into Time Square, I do remember buying a fake Louis Vuitton wallet I think for $40. The highlight of that first ever New York trip though had to been me smoking weed for the first time ever. That I remember very clearly. We had gotten to our motel in Queens, put our shit in the room and went to the subway, under the train tracks Alex had packed me a fresh bowl of greens and told me to hit it, he was lighting it with one hand, holding the little glass piece in another while I leaned in for the first high of my life. I blew it. Like literally I accidentally exhaled and blew all the weed into the air, very embarrassing but also rather a common rookie mistake if you ask any smoker. Alex loaded up another bowl and eventually I got high for the first time of my life, little did I know that weed was going to play a much more major and instrumental role in my life once I actually moved to New York just less than a year later.