I don’t know any white person who would look at a white nerd and think, ‘why do white people have to be such nerds?’

For a time, I resented my parents for not encouraging me to do sport. My brothers had both taken judo lessons (cool) and tap-dancing lessons (not cool). My oldest brother, also gay (but more on that later), disliked sports and headed in other directions: macramé, a collection of African violets, goldfish, and various other crafts projects. My middle brother, the straight one, became the goal-tender for the school ice-hockey team, and could also play tennis, throw a baseball and ski with competency.

The first weeks of grade eight were filled with anxiety and excitement of the try-outs for the rugby team, a sport played in few other cities in Canada than Vancouver. Who would be on the team? Who would be chosen for which positions? All of this confounded me greatly. I’d never heard of rugby but didn’t understand how anyone knew enough about it to try out for a team, nor how the other boys could learn a new game with just a few trainings and drills. As this year and the next years progressed, I understood no more. There were broken arms and black eyes. The boys on the team were considered school heroes. The girls paid them extra attention. I just didn’t get it.

When in grade nine, I found I couldn’t read the blackboard from the back of the class and had my eyes tested, it was no consolation to consider that maybe the reason I could never catch that baseball headed towards me in outfield was that I couldn’t see it properly. The frames I chose for my first pair of eyeglasses were the same shape of my father’s: metal-rimmed, huge squares on my face.

When I was seven, I moved from the tiny kindergarten and grade one “annex” to the main elementary school and discovered that the craze among boys was collecting hockey cards. Recess was filled with a frenzy of trades and bargains, the lucky ones opening new packs, the enclosed chewing gum quickly consumed before we had to return to class. Kon, a handsome Greek boy, noticed my confusion one day, and called me over. “Here,” he said and gave me a handful of cards of my own. I’ve remembered him any time since I’ve ever met other Konstantines.

{quote_middle}When I was twelve, my group of friends were two other Chinese boys, and one Caucasian, the son of Salvation Army ministers. We were pulled out of our regular classrooms for a session once or twice a week at the Learning Enrichment Centre. There, we were introduced to the very first personal computer, the PET 2001. We did I.Q. tests which showed we were all very bright. We hung out and were basically smart together.

Thirteen was my first year of high school and I lived in a happy sort of oblivion. I only wore t-shirts from Hawaii, where I’d spent summers at my grandmother’s house. My pants were slightly too short. I held my books close to my chest, like a girl, rather than swinging loose next to my side, like a boy. I did what I wanted and had no idea of how I was perceived by others. At the final school assembly on awards night, I surprised my parents but myself most of all. I won not only the top academic award for my year but the top service award, for volunteering as a stagehand, a member of “Save the Children” and a library monitor. Definitely not cool.

However, we were similar in many ways: an aptitude for music, an early love for Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, excellent grades at school. And I somehow knew, from an early age, that he was “different” and that I was too. If we were the same in multiple areas as well as our sexuality, did that mean I would have to be a nerd too?

This was about the same time that I’d decided to leave behind my friends from elementary school, the other Chinese kids – also bookish, also library monitors, all of whom had similar eyeglasses and a lack of ability at sports. Later I learned that in other high schools in east Vancouver, there were so many Asian kids that the stereotypes of the Asian nerd were unsustainable since there were Asian jocks and dumb Asians and average Asians too. But in my mostly white high school, we Chinese-Canadians were nerds: out-of-place, quiet, smart, clumsy and excluded from any giggling conversations about the opposite sex.{quote_bottom}

So, I consciously moved away from that. I found new friends. I spent a semester in an outdoors education program where we hiked and canoed and cycled. I searched for new experiences to differentiate myself from my nerdy oldest brother, from my nerdy old friends, from my entire nerdy race: bespeckled, ambitious and put-upon. I traded in my identity as a nerd for another more generic one, the outsider, and then eventually, that outsider took on specific names, gay youth, gay Asian, gay activist. In university, I took an adult swimming course. I also took up weights, like so many other gay men do. I fell far behind in being good at computers. I lost my virginity.

One summer when I was home from university, a childhood friend, Arthur, one of the same that I’d left behind at age thirteen, left numerous messages by phone for me and then finally reached me directly. “Let’s get together with Ken and catch up and talk about old times.” Arthur had become a school vice-principal. Ken worked as an accountant. I doubted that any of us were nerds any more but it was still not a time that I wanted to revisit in my life, no matter how wonderfully oblivious I was at the time to other’s opinions nor how I embraced my intelligence and knew how to operate a computer better than any other kid in the school. Reminisce about being twelve? And now, at twenty something, would I end up having to talk about my sexuality with people I barely knew? I made feeble excuses, said I would call when I would be less busy, and never did.

When I see an Asian nerd I still think: why do Asians have to be so nerdy?