Thirty-two.

新年快乐!

"The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb." I don't know how well-known it is, but this is the full, unabridged text of the "blood is thicker than water" aphorism. It means that connections by choice are stronger than those by the happenstance of birth. Of course, that doesn't contradict relations between blood relatives who choose to support and love each other, but the logic of the chosen family still holds firm.

Harris, one of my closest friends, recently visited me in New York. While he was here, I accompanied him to bookstores across the city. In the West Village, I remembered the advice one of my favorite authors once gave: go to a bookshop, locate the section where your work would sit, and envision it there. I stared at the Han Kang novels on display, imagining mine next to hers and thinking I'd be in good company…until I realized that I hadn't looked at the shelves properly. So, I checked again and found that I would adjoin Colleen Hoover, another icon. All things considered, I was pretty happy with my would-be companions.

Chinese New Year is upon us (me) and I'm thinking of my closest friends, the family that I never had. I learned early on that I needed to keep them away from my biological family, because my father was awkwardly anti-social and my mother was plainly anti-everyone; nobody met her overly-exacting standards. They denigrated the two best friends I had throughout elementary school, one via a manufactured argument as we toured East Coast colleges and the other for his weight, after which I knew to never again expose anyone to my parents. (Of the former, my mother berated my best friend’s mother for sitting in a different seat on our tour bus. It was as ridiculous and embarrassing as it sounds.) They were my secret shame, a cross I was forced to bear so long as I lived with them. I could never invite my friends over, and my childhood was isolated.

My friends practically raised me. They were my confidantes, the people to whom I'd turn for advice and help because I couldn't trust my parents. As I came of age and came out, I did so without the very people who were supposed to support me unconditionally. Thus, when I moved to New York, I did so with great equanimity—I was getting a renewed lease on life, far away from my idiotic relatives.

At The Center for Fiction (CFF) in Fort Greene, I browsed the titles with Harris. CFF has become one of my personal favorites because the displays are well-curated with, dare I say, a strong ethical and informed point of view. I showed him their tiny machine that prints out short stories (from a select reservoir of works) on demand, and I perused their shelves until I came to Ken Liu's The Paper Menagerie and Other Short Stories, a book I first discovered and widely evangelized to all of my friends back in 2017. Compelled, I picked it up and took it to the cashier, to whom I said I had an unhinged (short) story to tell about my relationship with the book: including the purchase I was making, I'd gifted that very book to five or six people, almost all of them men I dated. This one would go to the current love of my life. (The cashier laughed and gift-wrapped it for me in pink.)

The Paper Menagerie… is my gift of choice to the men with whom I feel something serious developing for a couple of reasons. The eponymous story is about alienation and guilt from the perspective of a first-generation child of mixed parentage, which has broadly resonated with Asian American readers. Yet, not every story within the collection follows the same formula: some touch upon technology and lifestyle creep, while others invoke more magical realism. Each is an emotional tour de force on its own. Therefore, when I gave a copy to whichever guy I was seeing, it was because I wanted to pick his brain. (If I can correctly recall: Jun, Henry, Beau, Tin, and one intended for Jim.) What would be his takeaway from each story? What themes or subtexts would he be able to discuss with me? As I dated, I was looking for a partner that would last a lifetime, and I wanted someone with whom I could bounce back and forth ideas, thoughts, concepts, even (friendly) arguments. It's with this logic why I also ask the guys who play video games to let me watch them puzzle out The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild—I want to observe how their mind works.

A couple years ago, after a few months of seeing each other, I considered gifting a copy of The Paper Menagerie… to Jim. I didn't think we were in a full-blown relationship, but he did express to me that he wanted to get to know me better, so I thought that I should try to get to know him too. I purchased the book from Yu & Me Books in Chinatown and planned to give it to him for Christmas.

Cornelius, the sister I never had, told me that I was repeating my past mistakes. She critiqued me for allowing myself to fall into unfulfilling situationships, one after another, with men who were clearly wrong for me, all because I liked the comfort. She pointed out that Jim would be more of the same, which she could intuit based on how I spoke to her about him. After the horrible breakup I'd gone through with Henry, she said that I needed to stop allowing myself to be attached to these types of guys if I was serious about wanting to break out of my cycle and never again experience that degree of emotional desolation. Finally, I acquiesced. She was right. Instead, I gave the book to her, wondering how it'd taken me so long for me to do so because I should’ve prioritized her over any man all along.

Even though we aren't biological siblings, I'm closer to Cornelius and her sisters more than I ever could or will be with my own sister by blood. Maybe it's a result of the distance that not being related affords us: we're able to be closer because we didn't have to be in such physical proximity over the years. Regardless, they're the ones with whom I choose to spend every holiday whenever I can—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Day, Chinese New Year, whatever. My East Coast family has been there for me through thick and thin.

They're not the only ones. In lieu of my relatives, friends I've now known for decades are the people I want to be with because they want to be with me. The unconditional support that I never received from the family into which I was born has since come into my life by way of the family I built. It's a veritable menagerie of my own.