With graduation from SDSU looming on the horizon less than six months away, there’s a lot on my mind as to what comes next. In the short term, rejoining the workforce with a shiny new bachelor’s degree in hand and finding a way to pursue a master’s degree. In the long term, an uncertainty that’s been slowly chipped away by introspective rumination on my present and past circumstances.
The existential pressures of age started to rear their heads years ago when I decided to return to college at the end of 2019. That “new year, new decade, new me” aspiration was a hopeful attempt at reorienting myself in life, to move on from the addled wreck stuck in past traumas and struggling with depression & anxiety; to rediscover my “true” self. Along the way, what were random single white hairs on the side of my head back then have now become a noticeable salt-and-pepper mix on my scalp and beard. I’ve already long carried an acute awareness of my biological age and a sense of having to “catch up” to it, most of my peers having earned their college degrees long ago. Seeing it increasingly reflected in the mirror each day only made the distance to the associate’s degree graduation finish line all the more agonizing.
Those pressures were further aggravated by the sudden death of my cousin Stephen in 2021 at the age of 43, which I only found out about months after the fact by way of Facebook. Following his passing, a part of Aero Drive was honorarily named after him and his brother Deegan (whom had passed away back in 2013, aged 47) for their service to the City of San Diego, bringing the city its first street sign with Chinese writing. And I was left as the last surviving male heir to my grandfather’s name and bloodline, the mixed Mexican grandson he and my grandmother never wanted. This heavily influenced my decisions to apply to SDSU and subsequently enroll after admission was offered.
Cousin Deegan was 20 years older than me, and I only remember seeing him once upon a 1994—he was visiting town on holiday from school out of state, overlapping during one of my extended stays with my dad. We went to go see the Street Fighter movie in the theater, then stopped at the adjoining arcade to play the namesake game and a few others. I remember him being very kind and patient, encouraging my curiosity and engaging with my kid self’s eagerness to show off everything I knew. That night, in him I saw what I hoped my future self would be like once I grew up. Cousin Steven was only 8 years older than me, and despite being local to San Diego, I still only ever saw him a handful of times, mostly at family functions. Due to the age difference, we didn’t really interact much; he was always too preoccupied charismatically engaging with all the other adults present. Their topics of conversation usually went above my head, especially when use of the Chinese language was involved.
Thanks to the shrewd business acumen and accomplishments of my Aunt Susan in local government, they were setup for success. They got to grow up in a large two-story house in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Tierrasanta, attend university at UCSD without concern of affordability, and had inroads to local politics. Meanwhile, I grew up in low income neighborhoods in San Diego. I even have early memories of a period of being unhoused, staying at shelter with my mother an older sister who still lived at home. Halfway through elementary school was when my mother bought her house on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border, the start of early 5 AM rises that regularly ended in being late to first period class, sometimes missing it entirely.
Growing up, I’d always known that my paternal grandparents had not wanted me. The story of how they took my dad off to China to get married when they learned I had been conceived was something my mother told me repeatedly as soon as I learned to speak. It also wasn’t lost on me during stays with my dad, who always lived with them, pictures of me never joined those of Deegan, Stephen, or my aunts and uncles hanging on the walls. During those stays, my grandparents didn’t ever speak to me. Somewhere along the way, I formed the assumption that it was largely the result of a language barrier like the one with my maternal grandparents that only spoke Spanish, one that lasted until only a few years ago.
I recently received an email notification for my abandoned ancestry.com account announcing new “hints” available for my grandfather. I opened them to find naturalization records and passenger lists of my grandfather’s adolescent immigration with my great-grandfather, and his name on a roster of graduates from a Bay Area high school. It was then that the realization that my grandfather had been a fluent English speaker the whole time really sunk in, that all those times I attempted to spend time around him and left in silence remained an intentional choice all throughout my life.
I can’t say that realization had any hurtful impact, all it did was further affirm what I’d known all along. However, it has proven to be highly motivational. This upcoming year, I’ll be graduating SDSU and entering my 40s, the same decade that claimed both of my paternal cousins; each new day can no longer be taken for granted. Not only that, but middle age will only be a short decade away. This leaves precious little time to find a way to meet the bar set by my elder cousins, and make my own notable contributions and service to my home city of San Diego.