half man, half inappropriate

“Are you from Texas?”

I didn’t always sound like this.  In fact, I actually used to sound like I was born and raised in Orange County.  If a word ended with an ng, I wouldn’t just stop at the n.  I wouldn’t get lazy with ending consonants.  I enunciated my vowels just the way a Caucasian kid living in Irvine would enunciate vowels.  Somewhere along the line, sh!t done changed.

Puberty hit me quickly due to all that American milk loaded with hormones that I drank in my single-digit years.  Maturity missed the bus, and the next bus that was supposed to come around drove into a lake, and though nobody was hurt, maturity has been walking to its destination for a while now, but it’s almost there.  My face showcased full motherf*ckin’ peach fuzz by 3rd grade, and I was already sounding like Kat Von D in 4th.  I stood out from these children who still sounded like children.  How do you make it even easier for kids to make fun of somebody?  Give that somebody a mustache and maximize the bass in his/her voice.

I was still speaking Orange County English in 5th grade (1998-1999). While there wasn’t much versatility in my voice (Haysoos knows I can’t sing), I’d occasionally modify the pitch of my voice when joking around with my friends. When acting out characters to make my friends laugh, I knew how to add bass to sound more menacing and how to heighten the pitch to sound more timid.  My voice became my trademark.  We had a school play where we had to sing some silly, yet somehow educational tunes, and everybody knew when I was “singing.”  And everybody knew whether or not I was pledging allegiances—preferably to the United States of America.

However, around this same time, I copped Eminem’s “The Slim Shady LP.” (Well, my mom copped it for me. Thanks, Mom!)  You can say I listened to that album quite a lot.  That CD was on repeat on my discman.  Eminem just spit his life story so well in his flow.  The way he switched up vowel enunciations was just so clever.  In addition to learning the importance of assonance and off-rhyme in the craft of rap, I was just moved by his rhetoric.  I’d rap his lyrics out loud while alone; I’d quote his lyrics in daily conversation while not alone.  One night, I opened up notepad.exe on my Windows 98 desktop, and I found myself writing my own little rhyme.  Up until then, the only pillar of hip hop I touched on was b-boying thanks to my afrocentric white friend.  I had never tried rapping myself.  The music was more for enjoyment rather than inspiration.

As a Filipino American (Asian American?) growing up in Irvine, California, I faced no racism—that I know of.  In the years entering and being in middle school, I don’t believe anybody was really racist, but the kids my age started understanding racial identities and stereotypes.  “Asians drive those kinds of car.” “Mexicans have those kinds of jobs.” “Blacks enjoy those kinds of foods. Did I mention they play a solid four quarters of basketball?”  We were just kids trying to grasp a concept we didn’t—and probably still don’t—understand.  Paul Mooney said it best: “Everybody wanna be a n!gga, but nobody wanna be a n!gga.”  And with hip hop getting more and more mainstream every day, of course we’d be wearing baggy pants and dropping slang whenever possible.  You know, that country grammar…

I already developed a reputation as a nerdy jokester by the time I hit middle school (2000-2002).  I’d make people chuckle by incongruously using such slang in my normal voice—bonus points for saying it in an extremely black voice.  (Of course I knew how to talk black; I listened to Eminem.)  And right there was the problem at hand: I joke around way too much.  And I especially got way too good at memorizing/reciting rap lyrics with the correct cadence and vowel enunciations.  Hip hop was exploding all over the media.  Even my sister and I joked around about black stereotypes as we threw up gang signs whenever we’d encounter each other at home.  In 8th grade, I saw an independent film, The Flip Side, with my brother about a suburban Filipino family of five in which the eldest son actually cared about his ethnic roots, the middle daughter acted white, and the youngest son acted black.  (I’m sure there’s a rhetorical term for this.  What is it?  Hypotenuse?)

High school was the first time I became aware of my “problem” (2002-2006).  My homie, Version One, further sparked my interest in hip hop after he showed me freestyle battle videos of Jin Tha MC.  Other than that time I wrote like two couplets back in 5th grade, I further trained my mind to come up with more of them (but “I’m not just two lines, I’m one of a kind”).  Unfortunately, I never really had time to practice freestyling, so that dream died as soon as it was conceived.  One day in sophomore year English, the teacher asked who could fix the TV/VCR setup so we could all watch some VHS of Macbeth.  As the resident nerd (Irvine High School Tech Staff represent, bitches), everybody in class mentioned my name, to which I responded, <possibleExaggeration>”Naw man, my audio visual tip ain’t on the same level as my computer tip,”</possibleExaggeration> or something equally ebonic.  Later that day, I was wondering why that response and delivery came so naturally.

In junior year, my former football teammate made fun of the delivery of how I said, “my hand was on my waist the whole time.”  ”What are you from Texas or something?” and I could never really encounter him without being made fun of for that.  ”Are you from Texas?” asked my senior year English teacher, “You have a southern drawl to your voice.”  It apparently got that bad.  I used to be made fun of for having a low octave voice, but now I was getting made fun of for having the wrong accent.  I’m always the last to figure these things out.

However, I was still capable of forcing a “white” voice while I worked the register and drive-through at In-N-Out, but that brought nothing but trouble as well.  ”You have such an announcer voice!” “You should work for the radio!” “You sound like the movie previews guy!” I even had some Afghani actor (you can’t make these things up) give me his card because he thought I could do voice acting work.  Honestly, as proper and professional as my white voice is, it just doesn’t feel natural.  It’s really just the voice that I use when I try to have formal conversations.  And that’s sad because I have reason to believe I used to sound like that.  Meeting people in college was nothing but trouble as well.  

“Are you from around here?”

“Yeah. Irvine.”

“Weird!  You sound like you’re from Louisiana or something.”

—

“Where are you from?”

“Believe it or not, Irvine.”

“Really?  You have some kind of southern accent.”

—

“You sound like a radio DJ!”

“You sound like you’re five.”