sometimes cant keep my mouth straight for my face

seriously. characters are how i feel right now.

Chuppa Jai could be anything really-- he's mostly male and frustrated and jaded like a sort of noir character, 'cept he's no genius at anything. He's angry and ironic and hangs out with other, cooler ethnicities.
He's like this one kid Karen worked with-- Yi who's the tallest 18 year old chinese kid i've ever seen and talks deep and ebonic even though he goes to the most well-off high schools in town.
no idea. he's cool though, maybe he just moved there or something.
anyway, Yi is a pretty awesomefuckin name for a kid that's 6'5'' or sumshit cause it's one syllable.
and it's just a vowel. its feral like a grunt but its one of those sophisticated vowels.
You look up to meet his eyes, like a nod, and you say as cool as you can, "hey eee."

yeah. but Chuppa jai got his name stuck on him cause he's just no good. His Hispanic friends make fun of him. He's ok with that. He's ok with most things cause he thinks that will make him seem cooler.

Chuppa Jai is half panda. I mean half panda like this:
Chuppa Jai is inspired by that one man my mom talked about, one of those isolated incidents she's never told me ever again about this boy who liked her in college, he was big and people called him panda SHONG MAO like literally BEARCAT.
maybe he smoked or something so my mom didn't like him.
I just have these old visualizations of him while she's talking about this guy and Chuppa Jai's born from that too. In my mind, the memory is sepia tone like in the old photos and they're sitting all lined up in birch desks in a classroom with rotting concrete walls. Panda sits in the behind everyone looking at the back of my mother's parted hair into two braids.
He makes a joke, my mother darts him a death stare. Her face is smooth and he stops laughing.

Chuppa Jai is my own masculinity. By that I mean my noncommittant and wimpy refusal of femininity. was against it my entire adolescence because I was jealous, i think, of those girls who had that weird sexual power, even at age 10. I decided i wanted a different kind of power and wanted to be a boy. But I never really got rid of my mindset fully and put a dick and balls on or anything but definitely dreamed of shaving my hair off and wearing cheap flannel, huge boots and ripped jeans, smoking out my brains while being badass like kurt cobain. wanted to be cool and have an addiction to something like music or cigarettes. caffeine would be ok. anything.
Also wanted to take kung fu since i was 5 years old.
Chuppa Jai is made up of 4th grade lai imagining herself beating up Katie and Katrina and that one German kid who made fun of Jenny and I wasn't brave enough at that time to defend. Cause if it had my doc marten's then I would have been invincible. At least i thought.

Chuppa Jai is when I am insecure about everything - including my fake masculinity- when I'm not ballsy enough and I chicken out. When I'm being a chode and I cant talk to attractive girls because I think they're better than me. When I give up on shit cause I hate failure

Chuppa Jai is demon #4.


Demon #5 is Meijuun

Meijuun is born from the girl who asked my cousin to sing the French National Anthem.
Meijuun is born from my cousin singing the French National Anthem.
Meijuun is born from when my grandfather subsequently picked up his harmonica and played the french national anthem.
Meijuun is all four of us singing ALLONS ENFANS DE LA PATRIE! LE JOUR DE GLOIRE EST ARRIVE!

Meijuun is my 16-year-old nanny from when I was 1 years old. she never talked much, they said. she liked books. A proper girl from the countryside. Not like my cousin's who went out all the time with him to talk with her friends. Meijuun stayed home and taught me chinese words on baby blocks. Useful ones like"chicken" and "cat".

It's important for a girl baby to have a pretty nanny. Because if the nanny's ugly it will rub off.
Meijuun was not bad, they said.
My cousin's was good too, but for boys, they say, it doesn't matter.

There's one picture of all of us in winter clothes, sitting in a knock-off disneyland spinning cup in a chinese park. Her hair was parted in the center and her cheeks were red from the cold, her eyes were closed. she held me up like a puppy.

Meijuun slept on the side of the bed when she was tired from me. She slept there so that I wouldn't crawl off the bed without her knowing.

Meijuun is calm and collected like a flight attendant. She makes drinks and her living room is cute. Sometimes she leaves for months and months and doesn't come back . Is she being cold on purpose, or is she just distracted?

Meijuun is the dream girl of Chuppa Jai number1 chode.

Chuppa Jai's real name is Jonathan. Meijuun does not need to make fun of Chuppa much to get him embarrassed.

In fourth grade, Jenny's eyes rolled to the side of her face when she talked. Was it a lazy eye? Her messy hair and acne gained her no friends. and even I abandoned her. i have been ashamed since. After defeating the evil kids with my ultimate Jackie Chan powers, I would gain the respect of all other playgroundmates and would make peace, counsel people, and give advice like the Dalai Lama.

Chuppa Jai is over that shit cause feeling guilty is for pussies.
Meijuun shoots Chuppa Jai a fierce stare. Her hair is parted in the middle and her face is smooth.

meijuun & the difference between raleigh and mie scattering

Meijuun falls into the thin spaces between the pages of a book when you look at it from the sides. Meijuun smiles at me when I see a electric socket's alarmed double-face.

meijuun & the copper daisies, or inter-shameful transpacific discourse

No one caught them growing in the meadows. An epidemic of bright copper colored flowers came unsuspected into the suburbs, first spotting up onto the sides of freeways, then into the corners of yards, the grout lines in the concrete. There they were pulled out adamantly as weeds, but unlike the living, the dead ones were hideous. After only a couple of days these copper-penny daisies, as the hikers called them, rolled up into a ball to produce seeds. The pretty petals pulled in, and bulbous masses resembling testicles would emerge. These unsightly hairy balls germinated in weeks after falling to the ground, the stems brown and useless, baking in the sun.

Now the city is full of these. The empty lots filled with half beautiful luminescent penny daisies, with testicles in-between. Children often pick at the ugly seed pods, amazed at how large they are. Proud of their discovery, they hold them up to their parents who snatch the treasure away, disgusted, then scold their children almost with seemingly too much passion.

In any case, the local news did not ignore the penny daisy invasion, reporting on it as if it were an issue of national security. And true, no one knew exactly where it came from and who or what was the exact cause. I saw a half-hour discussion special starting from the botanist from the university, the chief park ranger, and a meteorologist all with their theories. The ranger believed it was a species of rodent that was exterminated from the local ecosystem whose primary diet were these unsightly testicle pods. The botanist believed it was a scientific mutation, and the meteorologist actually didn't say much at all. He mentioned the lack of rainfall, but it didn't seem to relate. At the end no one actually had a concrete answer anyway. Typical local news coverage. All speculation and no information.

Really, not much happened except that there was this conspiracy theory upheld by some people in the neighborhood. That the government or something did it. I don't know. In any case, what ended up happening was that much of the city wanted this unnatural occurrence out of sight. I mean, people just walked around with their own personal bottle of Weed-B-Gone.

But really, the flowers really weren't so terrible to behold in the valley, viewed from enough distance where the hairy balls were hidden/blurred among the multiple blossoms. Almost majestic, a whole acreage of them. Meijuun thought so anyway. When we saw them for the first time it was before the excessive overgrowth, anyway. Went for a walk into the hills, and she was so amazed she plucked a huge bouquet, brought them back home and they sat in the middle of our table, gleaming under our cheap dim lights. Even after the reaction against them she still wore them in her hair, so that they wouldn't turn into pods, and instead would die discarded as beautiful browning copper petals falling out of her long black hair at the end of the day. Sometimes in bed I would see one she missed, gleaming even in the blue night-glow.