Asian Hiphop Chat Rooms

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8/28/00
I recently wrote about the state of my life.  Well, maybe its not as bad as I thought.  This well no doubt upset quite a few people and for that I am sorry.

I just got a DSL connection.  Before I was crawling along with a dialup connection.  Well, I crawl no longer.  With this high speed connection, I downloaded the new version of Internet Explorer.  I need this to participate in the chat and converse with my fellow asian brothers and sisters.  I was all set.

I logged on.  As the java script ran and the icon moved in animated splendor, I found myself anxious.  I was about to connect with a community I felt a great deal of affinity for.  A community that I had not been in touch with for some time.  I looked forward to intelligent discourse about what it meant to be Asian in America.  About the commonalties in our experiences, our views, and beliefs.  I was looking to connect with a community.  I was looking for intelligent conversation.

What I got was something all together not intelligent.  I saw varied sized text of different colors and style.  Sentences following no known form of cApiTAliZatIon.  I saw bizarre forms of spelling: "Hello mah brah!!"  "N E Weigh...???"  What the frak did I find myself in?  Some weird form of hip hop dyslexia???  I went to room to room trying to find one coherent train of thought.  No such luck.  What I did find were adolescents flirting and yelling "Beyatch" at one another.  One conversation saw the term idiot 8 times.  Another had moron 11 times.

Well at least they spelled it right...

And all this occurred in the Young Professional room.  So much for the nerdy model minority.  One stereotype down and several others to go...

But slowly it dawned on me.  Perhaps, Asian America hadn't changed all that much.  These were just the everyday lingo of kids 5,7, maybe even 10 years younger than me.  A virtual reality  generation removed from my own.  Perhaps it wasn't Asian America that had changed, but me.  I'm older (if not more mature), living and working on my own.  My generation's experiences are different.  We are in very different points in our lives.  Perhaps my contempt was an attempt to mask my sense of loss for my innocence.

I realized that I hadn't really understood Asian America.  I have always tried to educate others that Asian America was so much more than Chinese and Japanese, more than crab rangoon and chopsticks.  But it seemed that I needed to teach that to myself as well.  I saw that this community was much broader and diverse than even I had thought off.  Much like any community or generation in the past or yet to come.

So I left the chat rooms here at AsianAvenue and moved on to the BigBrother chat on AOL, wiser and hopeful.  After all isn't the true purpose behind chat rooms to meet girls??