Jordan: Better Not Regret This!

It's kind of silly to wait for Dominic to be asleep before posting this, but I kind of don't want him looking over my shoulder more than usual, silly as that seems.

Tonight...  Last night?  When's it flip between feeling like today and feeling like tomorrow? So, technically last night was the wrap party for Dominic's latest movie.  It's kind of a big deal for him, not a big part and he actually fucking dies, but he's got a couple good fight scenes and maybe more dialogue than a few of his parts put together, and it seems like it will get people to consider him for bigger things.  A lot of people initially joked about me being his date to a wrap party because my job is just starting, because there are a bunch of wires to digitally remove and half a car chase to render.  But, it turned out there was a point to it! 

Just as the evening was starting to get to the point where people start to leave, Dominic stood up, started talking about how everybody on the set had been really kind to a guy like him still finding his feet, raising his glass before mentioning me, and how I not only made extra sure that he looked good in post, but opened my apartment to him when he was injured, even though I clearly liked my space, looking out for him and encouraging him all through rehab.  It felt good, but I figured everybody already knew all that shit, and was quite taken aback when he said he never wanted to go without that again, got down on one knee, and pulled out a ring, asking if I'd marry him.

I don't want to repeat too much of what Krystle has said about how absolutely surreal this feels, but it took me a second to respond.  It's not just the tiny kernel deep inside me that thinks that I'm a straight man and another one asking this of me is just gross, it's...  Look, I was not always a great guy.  Annette and Krystle will sugar coat it with things that are technically true but not nearly as positively-motivated as they make it sound, but even after being with Dominic for a couple years, I tend to think people hang around for access to the great tits I inherited and because I encourage getting manhandled a bit, though I stop short of liking it rough.  The idea that a potential movie star wants to tie himself to someone who is Jordan Chang inside is insane.

So I said yes, obviously.  Everybody cheered, he put a ring on my finger, and we kissed like there was nobody else around.  Then they told him to to take me home and...  Well, Cantonese can be a really filthy language.

We were on the sidewalk with me getting my phone out to call a rideshare so we could go home and do that thing, when I realized we were unusually alone for this city, and on neutral ground, so to speak ("our" apartment is still kind of "my" apartment, after all).  I took a deep breath, said there were things about me that I could only have him believe now, starting with how I wasn't the original Lee Yuan-Wei.  Then we got into Jordan Chang, and the Inn, Ravi, Annette, Benny, and finally Missy Lee.  He laughed, of course, and I said he didn't have to believe me, but I was going to call the Changs in New York before Wang Chen-Ai in London, and wasn't it weird that she couldn't speak Cantonese or that I was so close to these New Yorkers even though I went to college in Boston?  The timelines didn't add up for me to be Max's ex-girlfriend, even though that's the explanation we usually used to explain how I knew my family.  Me being born a Chinese-American guy explains a lot about me, doesn't it? 

"So, you're really a man?"  He had that look somewhere between disbelief and queasiness.

"No, I was a man.  Now I'm a woman, and have been for years."  I shrugged as questions appeared on his face.  "I know, that's not how it usually works, most trans folks talk about always knowing who they really are and doing what they can to align their body with it.  Trust me, I've read everything about the biological basis of gender identity and sexual orientation that someone who got a B-minus in high school Bio can understand, and there just hasn't been a lot of research on people who have their bodies changed by a cursed inn!"

I probably sounded too flippant to be serious, or maybe he just figured this sounded like the sort of weird fantasy I'd be into.  "So I'm marrying a cursed American man."  He sounded more like he was playing along than absorbing something shocking. 

"Well, that just kind of how people refer to it; I personally don't believe in magic and curses and shit like that."

"Then how...?"

I shrugged.  "Dunno.  I used to be big into simulation theory, figuring that the computer program for which we're all NPCs had some sort of exploit or bug that redirected the pointers to the data for our physicality, but that's kind of just describing how magic works in the simulation.  These days I kind of figure there's some sort of machine under the Inn that releases a bunch of nanobots meant to alter time travelers or aliens so they could fit in among the locals, but if I read a book like that, I'd say it was full of holes.  It just kind of doesn't matter.  What's important is that I like who I am and don't want to hide any of it from you."

I stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and he didn't pull away or seem noticeably less into it than usual.  We'd both had enough to drink that he didn't second-guess himself when I stripped down to my undies and led him to the bedroom.  Maybe he finds this kind of exciting and flattering, knowing that he's so desirable that he figured I must be overriding my instincts to fuck him like this; I gather a lot of straight partners sort of use that as justification once they know the truth.  I wore him the fuck out, though, which made it easier to call Mom & Dad and "Doris" (the English name that the current Chen-Ai decided on) and not have them ask him to get on the phone and talk about who I "really" am enough to give him doubts. 

And then I came in here to write this.  There's a whole bunch of other people to call - Annette, Krystle, Kareena, Romain and René - but I kind of had to get this out, maybe exorcise my worries that he'll have second thoughts after he sleeps on it, or he'll try and poke holes in the story (I do sort of have a lot of lore for someone who lives pretty simply these days).  Heck, maybe I'll think I'm nuts once I've sobered up.  But for now, I'm pretty excited! 

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: Back... Home?

Man, am I not sure what to fucking make of the week in New York culminating in Max's wedding after flying up from Krystle's.  Like, I know you can read a lot of worry about how all the Inn stuff affects everything in her posts, but the experience of it, for me at least, was how much a lot of that didn't fucking matter.  Krystle wants to include what to all outside appearances are the parents of a babydaddy who quite notably isn't there?  Friend she really never hung out with that much is important enough to be one of the bridesmaids?  Absolutely random teenage white girl shows up?  Well, Krystle's family and Gabriel's family all start from the premise that these people are important to her and make room.  If there's gossip, it's well hidden.  It wound up being a really loving, accepting atmosphere, and they respected the entirety of what got Krystle and Gabriel there even if they didn't know it.

Back home...  Not quite.

It wasn't a race thing, I don't think, unless highly-assimilated third-generation Chinese Americans are unusually eager not to stand out, which I don't think is really a thing, although, granted, the past week or so has been a pretty shitty time for folks on a tourism visa like me to stand out.

And I get it beyond all that.  Max has gone through the Inn experience, and sometimes it means he gets me and sometimes it means he absolutely cannot understand how I could willingly give Benny my life or stay as Yuan-Wei.  I suspect things getting serious with Dominic kind of rattles him more; it's one thing to make use of your clitoris while you're stuck with it, but something else to put yourself on the wife & mom track Krystle is on. 

(And, yeah, just going with "Krystle" from now on.  She signed papers saying she wanted her name to be Krystle Potts, and who am I to argue?)

Still, I dunno, they could have not sidelined me.  Mom says it would have been easier if Dominic had come so we didn't have to insist, no, I wasn't an ex-girlfriend to Pei Pei and her family. 

On the plus side, I had a lot of time to hang out with Annette, who, as you may have heard, is doing really well, especially considering how volatile the publishing industry is.  She's managing editor of a small imprint, just moved into a bigger apartment, and wants to know all about Dominic because she is very single right now.  She had more restaurants she wanted to show me than I figured I had times free to eat. 

First up was her wanting to know how authentic a Chinese restaurant was (not bad, but honestly fancier than I tend to go for; I like holes in the wall).  She'd found a couple other really nice places, too. 

Thursday's big surprise was that we weren't alone - there were three young women joining us:  Emilia, Katey, and Monica, formerly known as Aidan, Kutter, and Rusty.  Apparently, Annette had seen some anxiety start to build in Katey a couple weeks after she came into her office to say she was staying on, all of her, which makes some sense, because one and a half Inn cycles passing is about when you realize, holy fucking shit, you have made a huge decision that is going to change everything forever that you can't take back.

I didn't have a whole lot of upbeat advice, being a couple of days into my family treating me like a not especially close friend even though they know who I am, but I think I was pretty honestly able to say that they'd push through it, that while the Inn doesn't seem to do much to the part of your brain that makes you good at math or the like, it does appear to reshape the parts that control physical attraction and gender identity, and once you realize your brains are part of your bodies and your bodies aren't things you are in but things you are, you can decide what to do with them.

They're good kids, all three of them, and, yeah, that kind of includes Emilia; she may have 40-odd years of experience but she's got the body language of a freshman that would set off some of my old fraternity brothers' predatory instincts, not quite comfortable in her own skin and always fiddling with her clothes, afraid they're making her look too inviting.  She knows that she's pretty and has a great body but mostly sees it as a target as opposed to a tool she can use.  Good dude, though, and she had questions about what adopting various local teams said about you. 

It's funny how obviously her girls are teenagers once you know their stories, though.  Monica is ready to bust with pride at every bit of responsibility she's shouldered and her jaw drops when you tell her something she feels she should have pieced together herself; Katey has a sort of innocent look that makes the occasional wise-ass comment stand out and has a bit of an attitude about the areas where she knows more than her dad, but she's a good kid at heart. 

Annette apologized for springing them on me when they left, saying Monica especially was curious to meet other folks who had stayed at the Inn while Katey and Emilia were trying pretty hard to act like they were just normal girls. 

Okay, you're all probably thinking, enough fucking sidetracks, what about the wedding?

It was pretty good, actually, once I got over where I wanted to be.  Threat of rain had us moving inside, and sitting on folding chairs rather than pews or benches was kind of odd, but fine.  Mom and Dad found chances to wave and say hi whenever they could, and for as much as part of me resented Pei Pei for taking my brother and family from me, she's pretty and smart (some sort of research scientist), and didn't seem like she had anything against me when we talked to each other.  Which I probably should have expected, instead of just letting my worries about what her being part of the family meant to me.  My kid brother may often be a dumbass in the way kid brothers are, but he's not stupid and our parents would have put their foot down if Pei Pei didn't measure up to their expectations!  We'll probably never be buddies, but she's okay. 

The reception was nice, too, even if I was on the outskirts compared to the test of my family, but that also meant no awkward small talk with Benny, filling out a tux like i never did and living my best life as someone's personal trainer.  Folks did notice the empty seat next to me, but as I told Dominic when I got home, I could have gotten laid a lot of I wanted to, because I fucking rocked my qipao and I'm already a good-looking chick from Hong Kong whose perfect English and job in the movie industry makes me pretty damn fascinating to any single guys in their twenties and thirties (and older in a couple cases), especially with a story about my boyfriend being worried about ICE, which was weighing on a lot of Chinese-American minds that had not forgotten being treated like shit during the pandemic.  Lots of ways to get people's attention.

At some point Kareena came by and asked if we could grab lunch the next day, and I said of course before a second cousin saw us together and remembered that I had been at her wedding to Benny/"Jordan" as well, thinking it was weird that I had been in Kareena's bridal party but now was attending a wedding on this side of the family, and I just sort of shrugged and said I was on the continent and hate to miss a good party before getting dragged onto the dance floor.

Kareena, if you don't remember, was originally my roommate Ravi's girlfriend and arranged fiancée, but while I was Deirdre and Annette was Ravi and Benny was me, she and Benny formed a connection, which is what led me to roll the dice and wind up as Yuan-wei ten years ago.  She's gorgeous and smart and otherwise terrific, way out of my fat, angry old ass's league, and kind of finds the whole Inn scramble romantic and exciting.  I was pretty happy when she texted me a cool spot to meet at the next afternoon, and a bit relieved when she arrived alone, saying Benny was putting in some overtime.

Not that he wasn't going to be part of the conversation; after a bit of catching up and her quizzing me about Dominic, she took a deep breath and laid it out there.  "So...  Benny and I aren't getting any younger, and we've talking about starting a family for a while, but it's kind of weird for us, considering.  Both my parents and yours have been on us about it for a while, with mine shocked I don't have a couple kids already and yours more understanding but still wanting grandchildren.  What do you think about that?"

I sat and thought for a second, not sure I'd really ever considered this possibility, before answering.  "I guess I think it's up to you.  I'm the one that walked away from that life and that DNA so you two could be together, and--"  Something clicked.  "Oh, shit, I've been moaning so much about being pushed aside for the last few days that I never thought of how that might make things easier for you to just get on with your lives!"

She shook her head.  "It doesn't, actually.  Benny - well, Benny's been more self-conscious about being Chinese-American since the pandemic, and he's kind of worried he doesn't have it in him to raise someone else's kid.  He's talked about making the guy who's living his old life an offer to be a sperm donor, and though he's coming around to believing me when I tell him that that would make me feel like we were raising someone else's kid because I love who he is now, body and soul, it feels precarious, you know?"

I kind of did, but still felt confused.  "I get it, but I don't know if there's anything I can do.  Like, it's tough for me to be less threatening on the other side of the world, unless you're telling me you're going to block me on social media and ask my family not to mention me--"

"No!  The opposite!  I need you to be part of this!  I think we all need to remember that we were always going to be an unconventional family and it's okay.  I know things were always going to be weird between you and Benny, but he's going to need to be able to talk to you about what things were like for you growing up and what comes from having Jordan Chang's DNA and that you'll be supportive but have no claim."  She took a breath, embarrassed about the outburst.  "Look, neurology isn't my specialty, and we don't know how that Inn affects people, but lately I sometimes wonder if he's got more of what I think of as the old Jordan in him, especially as you don't seem nearly as insecure as you were as a guy, or maybe it's just the past ten years, but I think he kind of needs your approval."

I leaned my head back as she fidgeted a bit.  "Ugh.  How the fuck am I ever expected to be the mature voice of reason?"  Not the first time I've asked that.  "I mean, obviously I'll support whatever you do.  And for what it's worth, the wedding before this was someone who got knocked up by someone living her original life in a pretty harsh situation, and you'll never see anyone who loves her daughter more.  You'll be okay."

"I hope so."  We stood and hugged, and she said we really should talk more often, even without all the other stuff, and I agreed.

By the time I got on the plane the next day later - with security being really weird, what with all that was in the news over the weekend - and certainly by the time I arrived back in Hong Kong, I wasn't so sure.  Is it selfish to try to maintain these old connections, especially when I've got a pretty good life here, or is it necessary?  I kind of wonder if that week in New York was so stressful in part because I sometimes let my original life stay at the back of my mind for months at a fucking time.  Is this place home now because I can sort of be at ease here without handling multiple sets of expectations?

Also, my being away for two weeks for friends' weddings has apparently led to Dominic thinking things while alone in our bedroom, and, honestly, he had better not fucking propose any time soon because I do not have the mental bandwidth for what our wedding would look like while I'm trying to catch up at work!

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: My First Real Bachelorette Party

STOP READING OVER MY SHOULDER, JONAH, OR DO YOU WANT TO EXPLAIN WHAT I'M WRITING TO THE NORMIES?

I'm just going to leave that up there, because I'm writing this on the bus that's taking the bridesmaids from New Orleans to Atlanta, including the adorable junior bridesmaid.  She's probably the one I have to worry about snooping the most, but I'm sure Jonah will tell little Moira not to bother Auntie Jordan if she tries to stand on her seat and read over my shoulder. 

"Auntie Jordan".  I do not feel old enough to be an auntie, even acknowledging that becoming Yuan-Wei made me physically younger by a few years.  And on top of that, should I be this kid's auntie?  Am if really that close to her mother? 

I mean, even when we both lived in the same city, we didn't hang out a lot.  I was a well-off college girl and she was working the service economy, and even when you feel you're not supposed to be on those positions, you don't form friendships along those lines.  Heck, when or paths crossed at the Inn, I made fun of him. I basically hired him/her to housesit while I was on a trip, was all.  We were kind of allies more than friends, really. 

But a funny thing happens when you move to the other side of the fucking world (or country) and there's nobody else to talk to about this big, weird thing in your life which keeps being weird even though you should have gotten used to it.  Those messages become a lifeline and I probably tell Jonah more than I do Annette or my brother Max, even though they've been through it.  They've gone back to things being normal, mostly, but we're fellow long-haulers, sharing something others can only half-understand.  We're gonna want each other right at hand for stuff like this. 

Of course, I say that like yesterday was some sort of fucking hassle rather than a blast. 

It was a long flight from Hong Kong to NOLA, but I flew first class (I don't throw money around much, but definitely do for that), and the folks at the airport were only a little racist and willing enough to believe that being from Hong Kong was different than being from China (it is and it isn't these days).  Nice rideshare to the hotel to drop luggage off because I was there before check-in time and then to Jonah's place, and a big hug when I got there.  I was first, but just barely, and Moira and Karla arrived on the same plane soon after.

This isn't my first bachelorette party.  Aside from the one for Chen-Ai/Bingbing that played like a weird celebration of things she'd acquired to me, and new-Chen-Ai's which was a small affair most notable for he announcing her new English name, I've been invited along with a couple friends and co-workers since settling here.  But the vibe was different from the get-go.  Jonah and I had a little time to gush like teenage girls about how happy we were and how strange it was that it was happening this way before the Boston contingent arrived, and then it was fun as we pulled out our party dresses and did each other's hair and makeup (I had never realized just how much white and black people could find themselves envying my hair!) and got ready to go out for dinner.

I forget exactly where we went for dinner - Jonah says it's almost impossible to have a bad meal here - but I had red beans & rice with alligator sausage and loved it.  It's definitely local, but also feels a lot like the Chinese-American fare that I grew up on and which kind of horrifies Chinese folks who visit America, although the five is also Hong Kong, straightforward meals with basic ingredients and no shame that you're fuckin' wolfin' it down.

The conversation over the meal was really fun, too, because while we've all met on one occasion or another, what we've got in common is that we know and love "Krystle", and while Moira is the one who has the most stories - sure, Karla does, but Jonah is often laughing like they're all new to her, and they may be - and we've all seen her when she wasn't sure of herself and are all impressed at the person she's grown into.  We wind up having more in common than we think at times, too - both Moira and I can talk about coming to new countries where we speak the language and mostly know the culture but finding it daunting, and I had no idea that Karla was a big manga & anime fan who had just been doing some sort of matching cosplay with her oldest at Anime Boston the weekend before.

After that, there was music, and bars, and more music and bars as we went up and down Bourbon Street like complete fucking clichés, including late-night beignets because Krystle said we had to do it.  We sang and had random folks toast  "Krystle" and had a bunch of people say we looked sexy and, hey, we weren't the ones getting married, so could they buy us drinks?

Nothing happened, of course, and the folks at the hotel's front desk apparently have beaucoup experience checking folks who dropped their luggage off fifteen hours earlier in after midnight.

The alarm came much too early in the morning, it seemed, but either Jonah or Karla had anticipated the condition we'd be in and booked a minibus and a driver to get us from New Orleans to Atlanta where everybody but me and Little Moira would be meeting our boyfriends, because Dominic ultimately decided he wasn't making a trip to America under the current conditions.  It's about seven hours, which isn't too bad considering airport nonsense and other things like us being hungover enough to mess up all sorts of things.

Which brings us up to now, somewhere in Alabama.

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: More Secretly American than Usual

Even though it probably wouldn't have done a lot of good or had much impact, considering that I've spent my life in New York, Massachusetts, and California before Hong Kong, I feel like it would have felt really good to cast votes again President That Fucking Guy in the last three elections.  And that's even before he did anything - as someone born and raised in Queens, hating That Fucking Guy is my goddamn birthright.

But he has done stuff, and I've been a woman with a Hong Kong passport for almost ten years now, and I'm dating a guy from here who is suddenly a whole heck of a lot less interested in seeing America than he was when Max and Jonah/Krystle invited me to their weddings last year.  I can't really blame him, at least up to the point where he says maybe I should just cancel what I've booked entirely, since it wasn't like this was family or anything, but just friends from years ago, and he's been sleeping on the couch for the past week.

Oh.  Yeah.  He didn't move back to his apartment after his lease lapsed, because being all up in each other's business all the time didn't drive us apart but instead confirmed that we do indeed like each other enough that neither he nor I is going to suddenly decide that we don't want the other around.  Not enough to make always being around each other and in the same bed after work something we're gonna want to stop, anyways.  I know that sounds like me avoiding saying I love him, which it's not - I do love him! - but that doesn't make me any less wary about sharing my space.

It's our space now, and in a lot of ways it's not that bad or different.  Dominic and I have a lot of the same tastes, even if he occasionally insists living in America has time my palate.  Over the past couple months, the food in the fridge is different, you see more stuff labeled in Chinese characters on the walls and shelves, some of my baseball stuff has given way to his martial arts stuff.  As I was telling Max during a zoom call the other day, it's starting to feel more like Jordan Lee's apartment than Jordan Chang's.

He laughed at that, saying I worry way too much about names and what they mean and if the Inn has fucked me up in some fundamental way, and he's probably right, but I point out that I'm zooming with him from a park rather than my living room because I couldn't talk about this sort of thing with Dominic around.  He says that's kind of going to be the new normal, though, because he didn't tell Pei Pei that he spent a year as someone else when he proposed and doesn't think it would be right to spring it on her at the wedding. 

That's when I understood the reason for arranging a call - he's just going to let his fiancée think Benny is his real fucking brother, and I'm just some girl who used to hang out with him and his folks because "Missy" was a theater kid who would come to New York to see shows while at school in Boston.  And while I get it - Pei Pei is a nice girl who has no connection to the Inn whatsoever (believe you me, folks checked!) - it made me feel like I was being pushed out of the family when I often feel like I work pretty goddamn hard to stay in touch.  I blew up at him a bit more than he deserved, though he sure fucking deserved some of it, probably because I was stressed out about visas and if I wanted to buy burner phones for the trip and just everything about how my home is rejecting me, again, in large part because That Fucking Guy is president again. 

I'm still coming, but there's a good chance my family and folks like Annette and Jonah won't get to meet my boyfriend, and I'll be making sure that there are folks ready to call lawyers to deal with ICE fuckery if I don't text every ten minutes after the plane lands for every airport.  It's crazy, considering I live in China (yeah, Hong Kong, but the SAR isn't nearly as S as it used to be), and makes me worry about whether I might just get cut off from people I care about long-term.  I know that's what happened with my grandparents, and what happens with a lot of Inn people, but I guess I've been in denial about it happening to me, and what sort of Hong Kong girl that will leave me. 

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: Could Be Worse!

Hope I didn't get folks too worked up over the last post.  Anyway, Dominic had a rough night of it - compound fracture and what is apparently way more internal bleeding than you want from the femoral artery as a result.  I mean, you want none, obviously, but I feel like transfusions for "just" a broken leg is kind of alarming!

If it was alarming to me, it was absolutely panic-inducing to him, so I wound up in "reassuring girlfriend" mode the next day - no, I was not just attracted to you for your body, and it's not nearly broken enough for me to put me off, you'll heal up, and be back at risking your body/skillfully making it look like you've risked your body in a couple months - which, admittedly, is not natural to me.  I'm not a bitch, I don't think, but there's still a lot of New York asshole in me which is not exactly helpful when someone feels legitimately down or isn't used to busting your chops as meaning "see, it could be worse" rather than "it's worse than you think".  Trying to quickly think of solutions when he's down, that sort of thing.

And, like, trying to make sure he's not down for very long.  There are logistical considerations in fucking someone whose full leg is in a cast and not supposed to have any weight put on it, but we're figuring our way around them.  Purely for the purposes of making sure he knows he's no less a man in this situations, of course.

I kid, but that sort of temporary handicap is no joke, especially in a place like Hong Kong where folks often have tiny, cramped apartments and some of the elevators are like sixty years old and break down a lot.  Dominic's apartment, for example, is on the sixth floor of his building and he's often joked about the stairs being his workout.  His parents are in a high-rise whose elevator doesn't have any problems but which is just a bedroom, kitchen, living room, and bath, since they downsized after he moved out.  Which leaves me.  I don't know if I'm really rich right now - Chen-ai/Bingbing didn't exactly drain the family accounts but she sure as fuck convinced the nice lady living her life that she deserved a good chunk of it - but I've got a nice condo with a spare bedroom should we not decide to sleep in the same bed for whatever reason, and the building is relatively new and reliable.  There's the family house, but...  Well, I'm not sure what to do with it, to be honest, but that's a whole other thing.

But, yeah, Dominic is moving in, at least for the next couple of months, a lot sooner than I expected we'd be having this conversation.  We've gone over to his place and brought a lot of clothes over, and he insisted on being the one to buy a cheap bit of plastic storage to keep them in.  So far, we're not clashing too much, except over breakfast, when I am trying to get out of the habit of grabbing the closest thing Hong Kong has to a New York bagel and coffee en route to work because he'll make dim sum.  Along those lines, he and his parents are not really sure what to think about just how American the contents of my apartment are.  The place you see the most Chinese characters is one the Blu-ray shelf and the pantry, whereas my jottings on the refrigerator's notepad are all in English and so are most of the books and magazines lying around.

More than being generally Western - which isn't that big a deal; folks in this city have been using a lot of English and getting into Western things to look worldly and sophisticated for a long time, and the transition to sucking up to the Mainland instead is kind of happening slowly and reluctantly - it's my place.  Me, Jordan Chang, not Jordan Lee Yuan-Wei.  And I suspect that while that just looks eccentric to friends and lovers who pop in for a visit or stay the night, it's probably pretty fucking weird for Dominic when he's got time to settle in and look around.  Like, why does the Christmas card from a random-seeming family from New York have a place of prominence while the one from my mother (you know, Chen-ai, or the while lady posing as her) doesn't?  How would someone who went to college in Boston know this family from New York, getting all these texts at odd hours and there was a package with some Christmas presents, and do you know what it fucking costs to ship stuff internationally these days?

I'm not worried he's going to find out my secret and have some sort of gay-panic freakout; the Inn's curse kind of protects me from that, which becomes weirdly convenient once it's not the most fucking frustrating thing in the world.  But, ugh, I'm not looking forward to coming up with weird stories (which you kind of have to after the face I made when he guessed that I had dated my kid brother at some point) or pushing my original life even further into the background.  But I guess that's what you kind of have to do when your new one fills out like this.

And I guess I can; Jonah is getting married next year and seems to be making her peace with it.  I just wan't figuring on doing it the week I'm exchanging a lot of Christmas greetings with my American friends and family, is all.

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: Too much time to think right now

I mentioned a few months ago that I was trying not to jinx something, but I guess I may as well.  His name is Dominic Wong Tak-Lok and I think I may love him.

We met on a dating app, as you do, but it actually started to take off when we crossed paths at work.  He's a guy who would be about to break big if Hong Kong's film industry was what it once was, a pretty darn good screen fighter in one of the big stunt teams who has the charisma to jump to speaking roles; he's had a couple things - mostly stuff that goes straight to the likes of iQIY - where he's a sort of featured heavy, the guy that gives the star a run for his money on the way to the big showdown with the villain and lodges himself in your memory because that guy was sort of cool.  Anyway, he was in a fantasy action thing and I came on-set to set up mo-cap when needed and show the director monster designs to make sure that there was actually room for a bulky ten-foot-tall beastie on screen.  So I was putting some dots on him, he said funny meeting you here and poured on the flirting; I wasn't seeing anyone exclusively and he was my type, so I went with it.

Not that "my type" is particularly specific:  He's tall, well-muscled but just short of the super-sculpted way that Benny says isn't achievable without risking dehydration, and gets a nice five-o'clock shadow.  Some of his family emigrated back in the 1990s, so he's spent a fair amount of time in Vancouver, which means his English is pretty good and he doesn't think I'm weird for preferring baseball to soccer, and he respects that I'm good at my job so he doesn't try to mansplain movies to me.  He's got an impressive, responsive dick.

I wasn't expecting much more than some good sex and some good times.  I've been a woman for ten years, even if I figured to become a man again during the first, and though I've had boyfriends, I really only got hurt by something ending once, and that involved a bunch of weird Chen-ai Inn Conspiracy Shit.  I kind of figured that's how it was going to be, just because of who I am.  I figure that the Inn alters the parts of your brains that control gender identity and sexual orientation but don't mess with anything that speaks to your experiences or skills (I've read so much fucking neuroscience of gender for dummies shit since becoming Yuan-Wei) and just kind of figured that who I am was kind of set by the first twenty-five years of my life, where I was overweight, angry, overlooked by girls and pissed off about it.  I kind of go into relationships expecting the collapse.  And sometimes I wonder if how I behave as the girl in a relationship is really me, or me trying to be what I wanted girls to be as a guy, or how I think girls act, or how I think girls should act.

(If a therapist went to the Inn they could make so much fucking money from zoom sessions with folks who can't tell a regular shrink why they're fucked up)

It's been really good.  We both tend to work long hours, but Hong Kong is a good city for when you're looking to have a date at 3am, and when he's not working, he's a good cook and not weird about how I make more money than him so I sometimes pay for dinner.  We go to movies and elbow each other to point out stuff that we think is kind of funny or weird from a behind-the-scenes perspective.  His family is pretty cool about me being a couple years older and doesn't talk about my eggs running out or anything.  He has yet to fail to bring me to orgasm, and all that martial-arts training seems to translate well to how I kind of like being picked up and kind of manhandled without crossing a line.  Like, he knows his own strength and that I like to feel some power without actually getting hurt.

And, right now, sitting in this hospital, I wish the stunt coordinator on his current job had been similarly committed to people not getting fucking hurt.

it's so fucking ridiculous, because I was there to make sure something like this didn't happen, helping with green-screen work so that we could put a fake cement wall in behind him so that if he didn't manage to leap onto the car's hood in time, we wouldn't be crushed between them.  We do a lot of that stuff - folks don't realize how much CGI is letting folks do practical stunts safely - but some jackass figured they could store equipment behind the green screen, and Dominic's leg got pinned.  It's a pretty gnarly fracture - they brought him into the OR rather than just setting it with a cast - and they won't let me into his room, even though I'm the one that called his parents and told them where to come.

So, yeah, maybe I'm in love.  Can't imagine I'd be this freaked out otherwise.

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: Mothers & Matrimonies

Hey all, been a minute.  Just dropping in to congratulate Jonah/Krystle on her engagement and state for the record that while I would feel like a complete asshole to ask her to choose a date that's either the weekend before or the one after my brother Max's wedding next summer so that I could just take a couple weeks of vacation and minimize the brutal jet lag next June, I am absolutely not above just casually mentioning this circumstance in a slice-of-life blog entry about how I've evidently reached the point in my life where everybody I know is getting married and it's kind of a pain in the ass.

I am, of course, pretty happy for everybody in my life who is tying the knot, especially them, although I'm not likely to join them any time soon; I had a long string of bad dates before meeting the guy I'm seeing now.  The funny thing is that my mother is starting to get antsy, quoting some statistics about women over 30 getting married or having children, and I tell her that wither you consider me a man over thirty or a woman under, but you can't mix them up willy-nilly like that.  She says it's perfectly reasonable - I've lived that long and I certainly seem to identify as a woman - but she's had two kids and is about to attend her second wedding, anything from me is a bonus.

Meanwhile, both of the Chen-Ais got married this summer, and I was a bridesmaid at both.

For original Chen-Ai/current Bingbing, it's to some guy whose family owns a bunch of factories in Guangzhou, who doesn't seem particularly evil himself, but the rest of his family and friends...  Ugh.  This was my first trip into the Mainland, which I gather isn't necessarily that big a deal for a lot of Hong Kongers, but I've been kind of skittish about it.  I'm not politically outspoken, but folks know I've spent a lot of time in the United States and that I tend to take that perspective.  Plus, I'm a Chinese-American guy who has taken over the life of a Chinese woman and while we've all experienced how the Inn's magic keeps people from believing in it, maybe there's someone in the Chinese government who sees me or the "Lee Yuan-Wei" identity as an asset.  Or just a criminal.

It doesn't seem to have bothered Bingbing, though, who after draining her old bank accounts as much as she could without the lawyers starting to lean on her sought out a new potential rich husband, and this guy is probably a good target because he may technically be what they used to call a "princeling" - wealthy family, educated abroad, not involved with the business's day-to-day - he seems to be an earnest socialist and humble.  Enough that, after I'd wound up dragged along on a few outings with them, I asked if she has Inn-related plans for him, and she stook her tongue out saying "yuk, no interest in having one of those things on my body, and his is big that I don't know what I'd do with it."  I gave her a look and she said she liked being Bingbing and wasn't looking to change.  Much more fun, she says, to be the pretty wife who is good at social things than actually running the business

I think she remembered my skepticism, though, because I fucking swear she had the dressmaker make my bridesmaid dress tighter, shorter, and doing more to push my tits up into a plunging neckline than when we tried them on, so I spent the whole wedding and reception looking like I was some tacky Kong Girl trolling for a rich Mainland husband of my own from among the much-less likable folks on hand.  Just gross even when they weren't grabbing my ass.

(It's been a while, but, no, I haven't become a shrinking violet or anything; I just enjoy guys pawing me a whole lot more after we've established we like and trust each other than before, and part of that is them not being asshats because I'm not one to hide what yoga and dance do for me!)

I admit, I did agree to a date with the least-objectionable one, but I'm glad the night ended on a silly-seeming pop-cultural argument as opposed to actually getting near a second date.  And that wasn't all bad; the guy I'm seeing now had actually been in the restaurant and mentioned it when a dating app matched us up, saying that I was right and he was impressed at my willingness to call something a red flag.  So not a total disaster.

I'm happy for the newest model Chen-Ai, though.  As much as she's made some solid progress in that identity, Cantonese is a tough language to learn at her age.  Six months ago, she met a nice man her apparent age that works at one of the large UK-based banks, they hit it off, and when he was reassigned back home, he proposed.  And while immigrating to a new country by marrying someone from there is not nearly as straightforward as people assume - I've reap up on this "just in case" - Hong Kong to the UK is apparently one of the easier cases; the new quasi-stepfather says that making it easier for Hong Kongers who held UK passports before the handover easier to immigrate was one of the few good/competent things Boris Johnson did.

This was a much smaller ceremony, as a lot of Chen-Ai's friends have sort of fallen away as she disappeared and returned as someone else who had a hard time communicating with her.  It's good, I guess; she's going to be starting a new life on the other side of the world and being able to make a clean break is probably pretty handy, but she gave me this big hug like I was her actual daughter and thanked me for how much I'd helped her to be able to get by so that she could meet someone like him.

I'm not sure what to do with that, really.  I know that I was often a real asshole before going to the Inn and especially while I was Deirdre, and I don't really recall a point when I decided to stop being an asshole.  Anne likes to point to me deciding Benny could keep my old life as that moment, and, maybe, but sometimes I feel like I was more intimidated than generous there, or what it means that I had to be made attractive or female for me to treat others well.  I like myself more than I did, and it's not just knowing that there are folks out there who want to fuck me.  If the thing I've got going now doesn't work out, I know I'll be okay.

But Chen-Ai didn't have anyone from her old life when she got married as Bingbing; her real daughter and the real Bingbing are men in Montreal and I gather she didn't really have any regrets about their not being there.  I don't know if the original Yuan-wei will come when and if I get married, but she came to graduation and we get along okay.  We'll find a way to explain why my folks are there.

Is there a point to this?  Probably not.  It's just been crazy hot and busy and I've had my weekends eaten by weddings lately and I needed to blow off some steam.

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: City Without Baseball

It's a silly thing to worry about, given everything else, but Spring Training has started, and even though the Mets look like they're going to be a force this year, I kind of wonder if I'm going to be able to follow them from here in Hong Kong.  I can - the internet is a thing, obviously, and I can easily afford MLB's streaming package, but trying to watch postseason games in the morning last fall felt profoundly wrong even if work didn't get in the way.  It would be nice to develop a rooting interest here, even if the quality of play wasn't great, but...  Well, there's a movie I found in one of the video stores in the Ladies' Market a few weeks ago called City Without Baseball, and while it's not really about baseball and how there should be more, the name isn't wrong.  There's no damn baseball here and, like, should I start following some Taiwanese/Japanese/Korean team at random?  Would that make me the same as the fucking hipsters from back when I was my original self who started "supporting" an English Premier League "side" out of nowhere and then started acting snotty when I called it "soccer" instead of "football"?

...

Okay, so this isn't really about baseball and rooting interests, but, like, that's the most obvious and harmless way that being Yuan-Wei in something approximating what the original Yuan-Wei's life might have become is messing with me these days.  The only time I actually speak English is at work or when talking with "Mom", and even she wants me to help her practice Cantonese these days.  I'm glad to, because...

You know what?  I should have led with this.  The person who was living the live of the lady now going by "Wang Chen-Ai" died a month ago.  It took us two weeks to find out because, I mean, why would you tell some random middle-aged woman in China that your grandma passed away, and neither of them really did social media.  It's not immediately some sort of tragedy in terms of someone's life being cut short because they aged fifty years overnight - I gather it was someone about the same age - so maybe something like that is going to happen down the chain, but it was a shock.  Fake Chen-Ai figured she'd had at least ten more years in her once she got back to being herself, but, well, sometimes a decline comes fast.

I don't really know what she's thinking, but she's seemed really shaky at times, so I've tried to spend more time with her.  She's been taking Cantonese lessons and appreciates when I help her practice, and about a week ago she said we should probably try to do more together, stuff that looks like mother/daughter but is just two people trying to get to know each other and the city we're supposed to call home on the one hand, and maybe trying to carve out some sort of corner where we can kind of be ourselves, and she says she and her father used to watch the Giants a lot back when they had just come out west, so I thought maybe that would be something.

Selfishly, I'm not happy but with this turn of events but kind of like the idea of not having to start over with a new fake mother every year or so.  I tell her that a lot of us have gone through something big like this, but she's kind of getting a lot of culture shock that she'd been able to stave off by leaving a lot of things to Chen-Ai/Bingbing and staying in, and I'm not sure of the best way to help.  There aren't fucking books on this!

(And, once again, I want to know how things got to the point where I'm the mentor/voice of reason!)

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: Finally Being Called "Home"

I'll get to the title I just entered, but first - do you ever think of how weird "Western Names" for Chinese people are?  Like, if I asked you what your favorite Chan Yuan-Lung movie was, you'd think you'd never heard of the guy, and that's kind of fucking crazy - you would think that after decades of having success on both sides of the Pacific, folks would at least absorb the name by which Jackie Chan is known in Hong Kong as a fun piece of trivia, or maybe try to use it more if they're good progressive folks, but nah - they (heck, I admit it, we) just keep using the name he chose because white people couldn't handle a Chinese name and he wanted to do business with them.  Even though people use the names of Japanese and Korean actors all the time, this weird and sort of racist tradition continues.

Although, heck, I'm named "Jordan" because my parents wanted to make things easy on me and Max at school and later on, and I went to using that after graduating college as Yuan-Wei because I'd rather go by that than "Missy".  Sometimes, growing up, I kind of wished I had a Chinese name; today I'm kind of grateful because it gives me a way to more easily reclaim a bit of who I am than other folks who have been to the Inn get.  Being Jordan Lee lets me more easily separate myself from Lee Yuan-Wei, even if it also means I'm also not Jordan Chang.

But it's apparently time to accept being Lee Yuan-Wei more.  The person who has been Wang Chen-Ai for the past couple of years is kind of stuck in Hong Kong despite not really knowing any Cantonese or Mandarin - just disappearing in the United States for a few months gets a flag put on your passport, apparently.  It's not as bad as it sounds - you can get by there just speaking English, and whatever magic the Inn has which keeps people from believing it exists must make her claim that some sort of stroke erased her first language but not her second sound less ridiculous.  She's hired "Bingbing" - the original Chen-Ai - as an "assistant" despite my warnings, but I can't exactly argue with someone on the other side of the world and a different culture from what is home that she shouldn't lean on the person who knows it best.

The family's lawyers feel a little differently, though, and have contacted me, saying that I really shouldn't leave my mother in this situation.  Romain and René - the original Yuan-Wei and Bingbing - either don't have super-strong opinions or just sort of freeze trying to figure out what their interest should be at this point and I don't blame them.  Meanwhile, my employer is finally getting around to opening a department in Hong Kong; they'd planned to do it a couple years ago, but then there was a fucking pandemic.  Now, though, they really want a piece of the visual effects market in China, and to a lesser extent Korea, Japan, and India, and here I am, with a pretty good record, speaking the language, and technically only living in Southern California because they sponsor my visa.  As it turns out, the timing of this works out pretty good for "Lee Yuan-Wei" - because they couldn't open two years ago, I've got more experience, so if I transfer to the new location, I'll get a promotion to lead animator, probably a couple years ahead of when I would if I stayed in L.A.  It's a good opportunity, but I'd like it more if it felt like "spend a couple years overseas, come home with a promotion" rather than maybe the end of my life as an American.

I don't think my employer would fire me for not going, but I have joked about it being a shame I'm not in a relationship so that I could believably become a citizen through marriage.

As you can see, there's a huge part of me that hates all this and resents that it's going to push me into upending my whole life again, and I kind of want to do what i did when I woke up as Deirdre and just put my foot down and say fuck it, I'm going to keep living my life no matter what.  But I was talking to my folks, and they kind of pointed out that the Inn has been good to me.  Not that I should be grateful for the way it messed up my life, but I've got friends, I'm physically younger, healthier, and more attractive, if in a different way.  This life comes with resources and I've been able to redirect it into something that probably suits me better than both my original path and the one it was on.  I've got friends in Annette, Jonah, Ernesto, and a few others like I haven't had before.  If that means helping to look after some 75-year-old white woman who finds herself trapped in a Chinese life she doesn't understand, I guess it's not a bad price.

I'd just like to feel like I've got a little more control over it before something else sends it in a different direction!

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: How Did I Become the Voice of Reason?

I hit "new post" to offer some advice to Andi after reading her post, but just doing that made me pause, because who the heck am I to offer expertise?  Like, I fell into a situation where it seems like I know what I'm doing and have the resources to cushion my stumbles, and every once in a while I get Jonah asking me something like I'd know better just because I graduated college a couple times and now I'm acting like I can just jump into Andi's issues.

But, you know what, I kind of can.  At least enough to say it's okay to be freaked out.

I mean, you look at the way people stop posting individually or sometimes the entire blog gets real quiet for months on end, and you might think that when there's no relationship drama or external circumstances messing with chances to get back to the Inn, you're supposed to just have completely acclimated after a few months or whatever, but it's been seven and a half years for me and it's still weird as hell sometimes - fuck, it's weird more often than not, both because or in spite of being able to let family and friends in.

Anyway, I can speak to her specific situation a bit - go ahead and let a guy suddenly having an interest in Andy-as-you throw you!  Maybe you never though of him that way, but he sounds like he was a big deal and it's totally natural to have trouble with the idea that someone else is being a better you than you could be.  Benny dropped a huge chunk of fat that I'd just accepted and had girls looking at him in ways that they never looked at me, and even before Kareena, I had a lump in my stomach about fucking that up and then was mad about what he'd taken from me.  Yeah, I relinquished it willingly, but I had to, or else I'd be the asshole, right, and in a really bad situation with a good person.

So, it's probably a little too late because your brother went on his date while you were posting, and maybe it was a comedic disaster that will never be repeated.  But if it's not, tell him it bugs you so that he can slam on the brakes before it gets too late.  He's your brother, and I as much as Max would probably be pissed at me for horning in on his dating life just because it intersected with my life, I'm pretty sure he'd listed.

It's probably going to be nothing, though.  I mean, yeah, you see some people get all caught up in their new hormones and rewired brains and meet someone new or see someone with different eyes and just fucking go for it, but most of the time, diving into a relationship is hard.  Like, I enjoy getting laid and even going on dates, but when it becomes something else, I'm still trying to figure out how to make it work.  A lot of my not posting this year was because I met a guy and it was going well enough that I didn't want to jinx it, but it still never clicked.  I'm not trying to be the guy, exactly, but never really seemed to click as the girl, and a month ago he got frustrated with something stupid and we ended it.

Then again, you guys are teenagers and probably crazy with hormones and he might dive right in thinking he's just going to hang with his best friend and gets really caught up.

Probably not helpful, that last bit, but you've got to consider the possibility.

See, I suck at this.

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: Pandemic Pounds

Huh, it looks like everybody just sort of laid off at some point last year.  Can't blame them' the Inn apparently didn't open at all last summer, and at a certain point, when you're staying in and taking all the appropriate precautions - and I suspect that once you've been through the Trading Post Inn experience, it's really fucking hard to say that the odds are against anything bad happening to you - there's not much to talk about on this blog.  Oh, sure, there's your "regular" life, but to the extent you're talking about that online, you're doing it on Instagram or some other social media app or just a group text, and I'll be damned if I'm going to write about the same thing multiple times.

So why am I here?  Well, I gather the Inn is opening for Memorial Day, and that means there's going to be a new Chen-Ai soon, and I've got no idea what to expect from that.  They're not going to be a mother figure for me of any sort, of course, but the very fact that there will be someone in that spot means that all the people who may have thought something was suspicious a year and a half ago but either lost interest or couldn't spare resources to dig are going to get interested again.  I'm not looking forward to that, and I kind of wonder if anyone else is in the same situation.

Mostly, though, I'm sort of trying to figure out what it's like to be Yuan-Wei again.  Like I said back in October, working from home and not going out and being social got me back into a lot of pre-Inn habits, especially with food.  I know I'm not alone in this among people who have been able to work from home, but I had a lot of days where work wasn't necessarily holding all of my attention, but I didn't want to just walk away from my workstation, and the kitchen is the closest room to the home office, so I'd get myself a snack or a soda three or four times a day.  That didn't really happen when I was Dierdre - something about her body just rejected eating too much viscerally - and I think some of the memories of feeling like absolute shit when I tried to eat too much carried over into being Yuan-Wei.  Then I kind of liked the way I looked, and had the sort of metabolism I would have killed for back in my first life, but I guess it's been slowing down even as I started living that way again.

Not that I got fat the way the old me did - women's jeans will tell you that you've put on weight and the yoga isn't cutting it - but I guess I found myself accepting it more as the pandemic dragged on, since it would be weeks until I was with other people regularly and going up a size was no big deal.  I went up and down a bit over the winter, and wound up being "up" a bit when we started coming back to the office.  I wasn't going to wear a crop-top or anything, but I had enough of a muffin top going on that I made sure I wore a top that covered it, and when we went out for drinks afterward, I couldn't help but notice that there were certainly women my age who hadn't let themselves go at all.

It's frustrating, because I know it's stupid to feel this way.  I've been fat, and this isn't the same feeling, but I also know that even when I stood no fucking chance, I'd look past girls who just had a couple extra pounds like I do right now.  Plus, I like being hot; it's fucking gratifying to know you look great in a bikini or naked and that people will put out some effort to have sex with you.  I don't entirely mind that I'm going to have to put a little more effort into it for a while (as long as it doesn't involve that running bullshit), but I sort of feel like I should have learned a lesson or have some perspective after all of this that makes it all make sense, you know?

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: Different sorts of weird

Hey, it's been a minute, and I can't even really say that the last year of my life has been screwy in ways that don't involve the Inn, because I've still been in contact with Chen-Ai/Bingbing about stuff, and she still acts like she wants to be friends. Like, the sort of friend who charges you ten thousand American dollars to sign documents so that nobody goes looking for Chen-Ai because she didn't file her taxes on multiple continents, but still a friendly sort of mercenary.  We're helping each other out, so I should be happy to kick some cash her way!  Really, she says, I should just let her hire herself as her own business manager.  I'm actually not sure why she hasn't just gone and done that anyway, beyond maybe not wanting to have an ugly confrontation when the Inn spits out a new Chen-ai.  I half-suspect that she had someone lined up, but she's gotten cagier since the pandemic, because who knows when there will be enough people at the Inn to trigger the curse?  It didn't happen at all this year, from what I can tell, and I have moments when I think we won't be out of the woods by next May.

I never thought I'd be thankful for travel restrictions, but she absolutely would have come to visit "friends in California" this summer if that had been a thing.  Of course, on the other side, it's been a tricky thing with my visa.  VFX work is still going on, so I've got a job in California, even if CGI is not as easy to do from home as you might think - the 3D scanners and powerful render farms are at the office, so I'm a bit limited in what I can do at home and there's lag.  Plus, the amount of work has tapered off as studios push movies out and thus need less overtime to hit a date, and a lot of film and TV just hasn't been shooting, which means less work is coming in.  Ironically, a lot of what is coming in is from China, which raises the question of maybe me working from "home" in Hong Kong.  There's been talk, but the lag would really suck unless we opened an actual office there, which the guys up top aren't quite ready to do.  Plus, if I leave here for Hong Kong, who knows when or if I'll be able to come back.  My passport as Yuan-Wei may be Chinese, but in my head and heart I'm still Chinese-American, and not being able to see my family or anything would just suck.

Not that I don't occasionally think of picking up stakes and settling in Hong Kong for good.  It's not like I didn't notice racism for the first twenty-five years of my life, but when you're a big guy who has lived in Queens all his life, your voice says you belong there, you've got places you can go to escape it because everyone's Asian there, and I was kind of tough to beat up.  I didn't know much kung fu, but I was fucking difficult to knock over at my size.  Being fat isn't much fun, and makes you another sort of target, but I didn't get kicked in the face like the skinny guys did.  It's something I didn't have to deal with a whole lot after becoming Yuan-Wei - I spent my time in good environments and the creeps just thought I was exotic and might be excited to fuck any white guy - but ever since people started in with that "China virus" shit, there have been a whole fucking lot more people yelling at my ass, and some of the worst are in the nice neighborhood where I live.  Like, Wuhan is as far from Hong Kong as L.A. is from Texas or something, but they don't even need to see me pull out some sort of ID that shows me as legally an immigrant to figure that I personally brought the virus here and my having a house is stage one of some communist conspiracy to kill all the white people and take over their country, but I guess these guys have always been rich white assholes and they are not handling the first time they've ever felt unsafe or restricted very fucking well at all.

They need a trip to the Inn, every fucking one of them.

I don't know if that would really change them, though.  Like, I always used to think that the last few years have really changed me, but seven months of mostly staying in has me wondering how much the stuff I thought was different really was.  Sure, I've got a clitoris which has a direct line of communication with my pleasure center, and I'm kind of at the point when whatever chemistry happens in your brain when you're around a guy with the right pheromones is starting to train me to find them attractive even from a photograph, but, shit, that's just chemistry.  I'm back to hanging around the house, working on a computer all day and then either shifting it to gaming mode or finding something on Netflix after that, pretty much like before I went to the Inn the first time.

It's starting to make me feel like I'm seeing a stranger in the mirror for the first time in a while, too.  Especially since I'm not really using that time to make the girl in the mirror into what I want from her, unless I know I'm going to have a video call with upper management or a client that day.  The rest of the time, there's no point in makeup, and I'll just slip into a t-shirt and either some loose shorts or some leggings, and flip-flops for shoes.  I haven't worn heels in long enough that I went to the closet and made sure I could still walk in them while writing this.  A lot of my female co-workers have said that they're not looking forward to having to wear bras again when this is all over, but I'm not quite with them on that; my tits are just big enough that it stops being fun after a few hours.

I haven't quite eating too much or stopped doing yoga, and I've even started swimming a bit in the little slice of ocean I've got behind my house on occasion because I do like seeing a narrow waist in the mirror, but it's an effort and between that and my period, I'm starting to wonder what the point of being Yuan-Wei is if I don't get to hang out and be with other people.  It seems to be a whole lot more fucking work just to be the person I used to be!

And it makes me wonder how much this Inn stuff really becomes normal.  Annette and I have talked about how we're not like "regular" trans people because we figure that the part of our brain that determines gender identity also gets changed by the spell, and we just have to catch up the same way we do with who we're attracted to, but I'm starting to wonder if I ever really accepted being a woman, or if it just seemed like an okay trade-off to having a chance to go back to college and be popular and have lots of sex this time, even if it was the other kind.  Now, though, I'm starting to wonder if I'm actually comfortable with being a girl, or if I just like being attractive and popular.

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-wei: Not Seeing a Master Plan Yet

Jacky kind of left his post-Inn visit to chance, but that is not how Chen-ai operates.  I may not know what her whole deal is about, but she had never sprung anything on me that hasn't taken some planning, even if I never see it coming.

Take last night.  My co-workers and I are rolling out of the building at around 9:30pm - something can't miss its Christmas release date, and, no, it's not Star Wars - and doing the usual when we've been hit with that much unpaid overtime:  Grabbing a snack at the taco truck a couple blocks away, because we've worked straight through dinner and who is going to want to fucking cook by the time we make our way home through traffic?  Add some beers from a nearby convenience store, and it makes for a fine end-of-week bitch session.

It's my turn to buy the beer, and I'm walking back to the truck when a bright green convertible slams on the brakes and turns into the lot.  The driver gets out, a blonde wearing a sparkly pink dress that shows pretty much all of her legs and has a plunging neckline that makes it clear she's got the sort of slender build to go braless, plus matching stiletto heels and dark sunglasses.  She makes a beeline in my direction.  "Missy?"

My colleagues raise their eyebrows, and I'm pretty confused too.  "Do I--?"

She takes off the glasses, and it's suddenly more obvious that the blonde hair is a dye job.  "It's me!  Bingbing!  Oh my god, the look on your face!"  She quickly pulls a phone out of a handbag, shoves herself against me, and takes a tongue-out selfie with one hand while extending the two fingers with the other.  "Can you believe this?  Missy and I grew up together in Hong Kong, and then I'm out here doing a scavenger hunt of all things, and I find her!  What are the odds?"

All my friends are smirking like seeing me uncomfortable is hilarious.  Rafik is the first to respond.  "If you want to catch up--"

"No way."

"Yes!  We're supposed to do this with partners, but since I'm between boyfriends...  Oh, you're still hung up on that!   But that was ages ago, and we were totally different people!"

I sighed.  "Fine.  Whatever you say."

Chen-ai/Bingbing squealed, and everyone made a point of calling me "Missy" as I got in the car, barely shutting the door before she hit the gas and tore out onto the highway, leaving me grabbing hold of the door while trying to buckle my seat belt, and soon work was out of sight (along my own car, I suddenly realized).  I looked over at Chen-ai, expecting her to drop the act, but she just switched to Cantonese.

"I should have done this years ago!  Is this what it felt like for you, seeing Yuan-wei's face in the mirror after choosing not to go back to being that fatty again?  So light and sexy and full of energy and free?"

"No!  What the fuck is wrong with you?"

She didn't say anything for a few minutes, and then seemed a little more serious and like the Chen-ai I remembered as we pulled into a gas station.  "You know, it's going to go a lot better between us if you just let some things go.   I promise."  She reached into what passed for a back seat and pulled out a garment bag, then nodded toward the restrooms.  "C'mon, go get changed."

I thought of refusing, but we were kind of out in the middle of nowhere and pissing her off was maybe not a great idea.  I snatched the bag and went to the back of the station, hoping this wasn't how I got left behind.

It was a really nice dress, as sparkly as hers but not quite so low-cut, even if there was no wearing a bra with it.  The cut (and underwire) pushed my tits up and in, anyway.  The matching handbag was just big enough for phone, wallet, lipstick, keys, and pepper spray; the matching shoes were also stilettos, and I felt a little wobbly from not having really gone out in a while (and folks were just going to have to deal with my unpainted toenails).

Chen-ai hadn't abandoned me, so I tried to play it cool.  "Pink and blue dresses?  Trying to say something?"

"Nah, it's just funny.  We've got a private joke."  She let me get secure in my seat before driving off this time.

We were in the city a half-hour later, able to walk past a round-the-block line at a club.  She asked what I was drinking, I said a 7-Up, and she said "Bicardi & 7, got it."  Before I could say no, it was in my hands.

We attracted attention, and though we weren't attached at the hip for the next three hours, I would always find her near me after a while.  I'm not going to lie, there were moments when I was a bit carried away by the great DJ, the cool light show, and the very hip crowd.  Some folks bought me really expensive drinks, and I do have the phone number of an actor who went from flattered that I recognized his face to curious when I said it was from putting it on a stuntman's body.

But Chen-ai seemed to being having an even better time, grinding on the biggest stars in the place, screaming that she loved that song, flirting and getting numbers from people half her age like it wasn't fucking weird at all.  Every once in a while, she'd make sure to introduce me to one, taking about how he might be a really good contact to have, or saying he'd been looking my way.

I guess she didn't quite know how much Bingbing could hold, because after a while she put her arm around my shoulders and said she needed me to drive her to the hotel.  I disentangled myself from the finance creep who was hitting on me, got her to the sidewalk, and took the key when the valet returned.

The car was annoyingly fun to drive, and the hotel was five-star.  I tried to drop her at the elevator, but she grabbed my hand, half-drunkenly saying we had to talk.  Her room was a suite, of course, and she had apparently already used the place's app to order room service, remembering how I liked my steak.

Hungry from not having my tacos hours ago, I attacked it right away, looking up to see her smiling.

"So what's this all about?  Making sure I can see how well you planned everything and prepared to fit in so that I don't try and push back?"

She gave a little "ugh!" gap, like the accusation was me being paranoid.  "Fitting in's not that hard, Jordo.  Like, all those eighties and nineties movies and TV shows you millennials watch, that's us.  Not that much has changed other than the phones!  And as for what it's about, like I said, it's easier for everyone if we get along.  Everyone thinks we're best friends anyway."

"Right, you want to be my friend."

"Why is that so hard to believe?  I told you that I'm impressed by how you handled all this, I stepped in when I saw Carlotta and Giorgia were trying to mess with your life, I've shared what I know about the Inn.  I know it's not great that I never really learned to play the part of a good mother because I resented Yuan-wei and that I like you better than her, but now I don't have to!"

"If you like me so much, why did you make me dump Jacky?"

"Did that turn out to be a bad thing?  Look, it's not your fault that you never developed the instinct for when guys are trouble the way other girls do, but were you going to listen to the woman you imagine is some sort of supervillain if I said he set off alarms?  Obviously not.  I figured maybe a little time as a woman would have made him appreciate you more, but from how receptive you seemed to be to other guys tonight, I'm guessing it didn't turn out that way."

I didn't concede the point, but I didn't say anything.

"Besides, you're going to want me by your side when they start asking about your mother."

That was what I was waiting for.  She said it in the same casual, fun-loving way as everything else, but a chill went up my spine and I carefully set my fork down.  "Chen-ai, what did you do?"

"Nothing, really, but my old identity is in limbo, so when nobody sees her for a few weeks, there will be some questions, especially if anybody finds out she's not at that place I checked myself into."  She gave me a look like I was the one making trouble.  "What?  It's not exactly easy to disappear for long enough to overstay a visa.  But I trust you to cover for me!"

"You expect me to cover for you?"

"I wouldn't have given you power of attorney otherwise, although I admit, I did figure you'd be coming to your friend Bingbing for advice."  She shrugged.

"What the fuck else?"

"What do you mean?"

"What sort of other fucking mess have you stuck me with?"

"There's no other mess, and the business runs itself."  I crossed my arms and stared bullets.  "Okay, fine, I put ten million dollars into a numbered amount.  Hong Kong dollars, not U.S., I'm not greedy or anything.  It's just kind of like start-up money."

"You did what?!!?"

"Hey, I earned that money, and I deserve to take some with me!  It shouldn't affect you at all - I didn't touch your trust fund, and barring any sort of emergency, nobody will have any reason to freak out and call the police about how your frugal, sensible mother hasn't been seen in weeks if you just stay in California and let our employees do their thing."

I pushed away from the table.  "There's the fucking threat."

She stood up and chased after me.  "It's not a threat, Jordan, it's precautions, just in case something went wrong or I got homesick.  I didn't even see the need to tell you before you started interrogating me because I could see you're so happy here and such a good person.  Trust me, we're going to be great friends by this time next year.  Maid of honor at my wedding."

I snorted, and she ignored it.  A big, genuine-seeming yawn escaped her.  "Wow, I haven't had a night like that in twenty years!  I've got to crash.  The hotel laid out a toiletries in the other bathroom and some really great pajamas in the other bedroom, so we can talk more in the morning if you want."  She hadn't taken her heels off, and giggled as she had to find her balance on the way to the bathroom.

I said hell no to that, calling to charge a cab to the room as soon as she had closed the door.  I'd been watching my drinks, but I still felt pretty drowsy when I got home, and feel asleep right away.

This morning, there were text messages from "Bingbing", saying she understood this was going to take some time, and since she had to go back to Hong Kong anyway, she'd give me my space.  Then the selfie she took at the start of the night.

The whole night almost doesn't even feel real, even with that stupidly nice dress hanging by the hamper.  There's got to be some sort of angle.  There's no fucking way that Chen-ai really thinks we're going to be besties after all she's done, unless she's crazier than I thought.

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-wei: My (Ex) Boyfriend's Back (to Normal)

You know what's kind of fucking disturbing?  I know that Jacky's recent trip back to the Inn (I guess at the same time Jenn became Paola) is the first in a series of events that is probably going to play havoc with my life as Yuan-wei, but my biggest question is when I became such a goddamn feminist?

I don't think it was in just the past week or so, although I kind of shrugged off the naked text Jacky sent after the change.  He was naked and erect, but whatever; I imagine if I'd gotten my dick back after a year as Deirdre, I'd have been pretty excited.  Hell, I'd probably be pretty excited if it happened tomorrow.  Especially since whoever the last Jacky was, they kept him in good shape, maybe not quite like Benny did as me, but that a high bar.  It wasn't like a picture with just a dick, and good on him for still feeling good about his body after the other perspectives he's been getting.  I sent him a thumbs-up, meaning congratulations.  He asked what I was up to that weekend, I sent a shrug emoji ("I don't know"), and went back to whatever I was doing.

Fast-forward to the weekend, where I'm trying to clean my house and there's a knock on my door.  The camera shows its him, so I decide too be mature and talk to him, because all this shit can do a number on you and make you make bad decisions.  I buzz him in, not really thinking about what I'm wearing (crop-top, shorts, flip-flops) until he's looking me up and down.  I look back a bit - I haven't had many boyfriend's, but I've learned from real girls that there's no shame in trying to see how they've done without you, and also trying to see what some time thinking he'd be stuck as Bingbing has done to his taste in clothes, grooming, etc.  Tough to tell.

"So," I say after offering him a beer, "got any secret intel on why Chen-ai decided to pull up stakes and run now, besides the protests?"

"No, fake-me quit the job and deleted everything.  Hell, I'm going to have to buy a new laptop when I get home and already got a new phone because he went at them with a hammer.  Maybe there's some hardcopy back in Hong Kong, but he seems pretty thorough."

"Fuck.  Chen-ai is going to screw me over somehow, I just know it."

"Yeah, but look at the bright side - your new mother probably won't care if we're together or not!"

I stopped, right in the middle of reaching for a bottle in the back of the bottom shelf, then straightened up.  "Wait, what?  Are you serious?"

"Hey, I get that you broke up with me because of all this weird stuff, and Chen-ai being in the middle is scary.  I was mad for a while, but now that I see how it can mess with a person I won't hold it against you."

"You won't hold anything against me?  I'm sorry, when all of this went down, which of us told the other person what was going on, and which of us kept quiet about who they really were and fucked their ex's brother for a year?"

You'd think he would have anything to say, but he did.  "I was just thrown into all of this and he seemed--"

"Dude, you know what?  I don't care why you did it.  I'm just not gonna be with someone who did, especially when they're gonna be on the other side of the fucking planet getting into who knows what.  I'm sorry, maybe it was just an extreme situation, but we're not going to be like that again."

I put the bottle in my hand on the bar counter between us, not sure what else to do with it.  It gave him a reason to step forward.  "Well, how about one for the road, just to make sure it's all in working order?"

What. The. Fuck.  "Holy shit, are you serious?  No!  It wasn't my job to make sure you feel like a man when we were together, and it's definitely not now!"

"C'mon, you owe me that much!"

"Dude.  No."

"You want it - look at you, you're totally DTF."

"Are you serious?  I didn't really think you were coming - it's just a hot day and I had some sweaty work planned!  Plus, how did you spend two years as a girl and not figure out they don't ever owe someone pussy access?  Was Max just such an incredible, always-around boyfriend that things never got uncomfortable with anyone?"

His hand tightened on the bottle a little, and I worried that maybe I had pushed it too far, counted too much on him being able to see a woman's point of view and not enough on his brain not having been flooded with this much testosterone for two years, but he relaxed a bit and pulled it toward himself.  He took a drink and seemed to calm down a bit.

I exhaled.  "I think you should go."

"Yeah.  I, uh, just thought maybe things could go back to normal."

I spook my head.  "Sorry."

He nodded and went out the door.  There wasn't any calling me a bitch or some colorful Cantonese equivalent under his breath, but I still paid attention until he was in his Uber and driving away, and let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

I brought Annette's contacts up on my phone and was starting a text, but decided I wanted to hear her voice, so I hit the call button.  She answered, probably figuring this was some sort of emergency, and I told her about Jacky's visit.

"Wow.  Are you okay?  I haven't had many scary boyfriends, but there's always a guy or two."

"Yeah, it's just...  I was l kind of attracted to him because he seemed like me, you know?  Same hobbies, told some of the same jokes without prompting, doing the same sort of work, and--"

"Jordo, I love you, but you do realize you were the same sort of asshole, right?  Like, I heard you yelling at people while gaming as Deirdre, and who was that girl at the beach you said you were going to hate-fuck if you became yourself or Benny instead of Yuan-wei?"

"Tina Chen.  Fuck, I haven't thought about that in years.  Shit, was Jacky always like that without me seeing it?"

"I dunno.  It's tough to guess how a guy's going to handle being told no.  He didn't seem the type."

"Okay, now tell me when I started being the chick that lectures guys on that consent and agency shit?  I thought I was the fun bitch!"

She laughed.  "Oh, you are, but I've been a good influence!"

"Thanks a lot!"

"You're welcome, and congratulations on reaching the point in the story where, having learned how women want to be treated, you wake up from this weird dream a better man, confusing everyone around you!"

"You're a weirdo, you know that?"

She said she did, and then we started talking about her new job, apartment, boyfriend, and all that.

It got me spending a little more time looking in the mirror after slowing and changing to go out, though.  I always say that's still me, just in a sexier package, and even when I'm putting on lipstick or a push-up bra or whatever because I want guys to look at me, I figure that's kind of just biology too, but, shit, how much of the guy inside has changed over the past few years, and what would I be if I was suddenly myself again?

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-wei: Half a World Away

Been a while since I checked in, but I guess that happens to everyone - at a certain point, you are Jordan Lee Yuan-wei, recent college graduate with a job in the visual effects industry, and the fact that you used to be Jordan Chang, male and five years older, is less important on a daily basis.  Especially with my parents doing their best to act like I was born this way.  It was weird to get earrings for Christmas from my mom, but I'm not complaining.  Even though becoming a girl hasn't made me really into jewelry, that's her accepting a lot.

Of course, I don't may have one mother now, and Yang Chen-ai has been anxious in recent weeks.

I know that not many Americans have been following the news out of Hong Kong (this country has its own issues to fill all your worrying about the world going to hell needs), but it's something I get asked about a fair amount because I'm from there as far as anybody who doesn't know about the Inn is concerned.  What's going on scares the shit out of me, to be honest, because there's not a lot of scenarios that don't have Lee Yuan-wei going back there for more than a visit at some point, and I'm scared that it's never going to be close to the place I know again.

On the one hand I don't know if Chen-ai really cares about that.  Maybe she does; even evil people can love their home, though I think she's mercenary enough to put up with anything so long as the business continued to bring money in.  On the other, well, she had had her husband killed with the intention of setting me or whoever else wound living Yuan-wei's life up for the fall, so who knows what else she's afraid of happening to her should China take more direct control over Hong Kong and start looking into things that had previously been ignored.  It's enough to spook her, enough to get in contact with Bingbing and hint that if she would like to go back to her real life, that could be arranged, if Chen-ai were to become her.

I'm almost angry that she said no, for a bunch of really fucking stupid reasons.

I suppose all of you that read this blog because you, not having been to the Inn, see it as a weird or kinky fantasy saw this coming, because it's the most dramatic way to fuck with me, but it turns out that the person who has been living the life of Chen Bingbing for the past couple years is, you guessed it, my ex-boyfriend Jacky.  The one I broke up with because Chen-ai promised to ruin our lives if I didn't.  Who then, apparently thinking that I wasn't upset enough by the whole state of affairs, proceeded to fuck and then get involved with my brother without telling either of us what was going on.

The whole finding out deal was weird - I guess Jacky found out that Chen-ai was sleeping with whoever was living his life (he was working as her personal assistant), figured that meant he was never going back, so came clean to Max.  They didn't immediately break up, but he told me, and...  Well, the whole thing felt gross, and for a while my brother and I weren't talking, but eventually he met another girl and decided he didn't want to be in a relationship that wasn't just about the two people involved.  Jacky/Bingbing graduated from college this May and went back home to HK, and we'd kind of figured that was it.  I wanted that to be it.

I asked him what he wanted, and while he said that he had come to accept the idea of being Bingbing for the foreseeable future, it wasn't like he'd put down roots, and I can testify that the call of "how things should be" is damn strong, even when everybody thinks they're probably better off.  So who am I to tell him that there's probably some major league catch?

It's got me stupidly distracted, though, to the point where people are noticing at work.  I can tell them that I'm worries about folks back "home", but the truth is, they really don't give a shit; they just can't have our team missing deadline on animating a swarm of monsters.  so there's been a lot of overtime and I probably haven't been doing my best work.

And I don't get it.  I've always had it in the back of my mind that Chen-ai might decide to leave her old life behind and become a generation younger, I always thought it would be to become Yuan-wei.  It's just so much fucking simpler!  Has she stayed liking me enough to not want to mess with my life, or does she see some other way to mess with me?

Who the fuck knows?  This shit doesn't matter as much as the rest of what's going on in Hong Kong, and I wish it wasn't my first concern about the whole thing.

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-wei: Yes, It's Me, In the Sari

I dunno if Annette is going to make a post about the wedding on this blog, but I figure I'll leave all the really touristy, holy-shit-I'm-really-doing-this stuff to her, because as anybody who has seen her Facebook page over the last couple weeks can attest, she is really into doing that right now.  And who can blame her, really?  She's been an Indian-American dude, but only really did stuff that emphasized the "Indian" part of that a few times, plus it's all so foreign to everyone she knows in her "real" life that they more or less demand every second be documented, and she has happily complied.

We planned it so that our flights arrived in Mumbai at about the same time, and then Kareena was there to pick us up.  There was a lot of hugging before Kareena told us that we weren't just attending, but would be part of the bridal party.  "Mummydaddy didn't want that at first, since it's usually just family and closest friends, but I didn't think it was right that either of you should be off in the back, since me and Jor -- that is, Benny -- wouldn't be together without you two, I insisted."  She looked panicked for a second.  "It's that too much?  Maybe you wanted to be anonymous--"

Annette, at least, was down for it.  "Hell, no, just be warned - I am going to be the worst gawking American with her phone out all the time!  How 'bout you, Jordo?"

I have to admit, I had kind of figured it would be like René at my graduation, there but kind of just out of curiosity, but I also know I wasn't going to watch my own wedding without Annette there for moral support, so what the hell else could I do but say yes?  Which meant a quick drive into the city, where Kareena had some pretty specific ideas for what we needed in terms of outfits.

Also, that our plans to fight jet lag and be really fresh for the second days ceremonies were kind of dashed, because now we had to be at the ganesh pooja, and while it was a nice ceremony, it was kind of uncomfortable.  Benny was there, so they weren't conducting it entirely in Hindi, but I think that they would have otherwise just to spite us.  Kareena had been necessity vague about how we fit into her going from a not-quite-arranged marriage to what they see as rushing into things with Ravi's old roommate, so they think maybe one of us slept with him or was rejected and faked evidence of him being gay or something like that.  Since some of have probably been putting some way to get Kareena and Ravi back together for the last couple years, we're not exactly welcome guests to them.

The atmosphere was a little different the next morning as we all got our hands and feet painted at the mehndi ceremony; that was almost all Kareena's girlfriends and they just saw it as romantic, wanting details of how everything went down.  We kept to the story about how "Jordan" used to be a big gamer and "Yuan-wei" was one of the folks he regularly played with, that I met Annette at some college-night thing, we took a trip to New York, and one or the other of us noticed some sort of chemistry between him and Kareena, especially once he started getting into shape.  It's a cover story that sounds like one when Annette and I hear it, but I guess it sounds reasonable to everyone else.

It takes a while and I feel genuinely weird looking at my skin afterward.  The henna patterns look like tattoos and I don't know that I really like that.  I never got one back in my original life, didn't even consider my body my own as Deirdre, and just never saw how injecting ink into my skin was going to make me better-looking since becoming Yuan-wei, especially since I could still  remember Mom & Dad saying that there could come a time when I didn't want one,  and figured that went double for chicks.  I put on makeup and jewelry and sometimes do prosthetics for movies and Halloween and shit, but seeing my body as an artistic medium was weird, even if I'm probably more used to it as malleable than most.

The sangeet was that night, and I nearly had a heart attack when I saw Mom, Dad, Max, and Bingbing arrive and sit down away from me, with Benny.  When I didn't see them, I could kind of put the fact that the Inn cut me off from my family out of mind, but this hit me a lot fucking harder than expected, them traveling to the other side of the world for Benny.  It also removed me that I hadn't just come here out of obligation, and that Benny hadn't agreed to the big Indian wedding to make Kareena happy.  We were trying to get them into a state of mind where we could tell them the truth.

Annette grabbed my hand and was an awesome friend through this, but I didn't get much sleep after, and the next morning, as we all helped Kareena get ready, I really wondered about some stuff for the first time.  She looked so damn beautiful and happy, and I thought about how is always just fucking dismissed her back when she was sort of Ravi's girlfriend, I guess because of the whole arrangement that seemed to drop her in his lap, but I couldn't help going down the what-if path, like, if I'd been in shape, would she have been attracted to me the same way she was to Benny?  Then maybe I never go to the Inn, or I wind up taking Max or something, and, nope, just gross.  And maybe Annette has nobody who can help her out and gets in a real mess as Yuan-wei, or Benny steals Kareena from me...

It'll drive you nuts if you go down that rabbit hole, so I dug out and just got through the wedding.  I haven't really been to a lot, but, man, these Indian ones are colorful and festive compared to Western ones with churches and bland suits - there was horses drums, and fire!  It lasted a while, but it was good for gawking, and then there was the reception with food, music, and so much dancing.

I was a bit creeps out when the first Chinese guy asked me to dance, but he was like a second cousin, and even if we were still blood relations, well, that's not that close, and he was respectful enough when I removed his hand from my ass.  That I hadn't seen any of them for fifteen years made a lot of difference, as did the fact that, by and large, they were kind of a nice break between Kareena's male relatives and friends and neighbors and all.  Don't get me wrong, the Indian dudes are all cool and fun, and I've got no fucking problem with guys seeing me as hot in part because I'm different, but the confidence and directness was a bit much, especially the ones who pushed the conversation to marriage awful quick and then boasted about the size of their parents' house.

Still, I had a lot more fun than I'd ever had at one of these as a guy, to the point that I was still going strong when Annette tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to my parents, who were winding down and making their way to tell Benny and Kareena they were done for the night.  I made my way back to my seat to collect the shoes I had taken off earlier (we were well into the barefoot dancing stage of things) and Annette went to find Max.  We all meet up in the hallway and told them that we had something important to tell them, although Annette and Bingbing stayed behind in the hall when we got to Mom's and Dad's guest room.

Dad asked what this was about, and Benny looked at me.  "Should you start, or should I...?"

"Oh God, they're in some sort of weird poly thing."

I think we all looked a little shocked to hear my mom say that, but Kareena recovered first.  "No!  But, honey, I think you have to start."

Benny nodded, and turned to my parents.  "Okay.  Well, them, here goes.  I'm, uh, I'm not your son.  She is."

I looked at him.  "Oh, that's fucking eloquent.  Real sense of the moment you've got there."

My Dad looked at Benny, then me, then back to Benny.  "I'm afraid I don't get the joke, son, or why you'd do this tonight of all nights."

"It's not a joke, Da-- Mister Chang.  There's this cursed beach house in Maine, and it turns people into the last person to stay there.  I stayed there after Jordan, like, four years ago, and we were going to all change back, but that's how I met Kareena, so we didn't."

"Think back, Dad - didn't we think it was weird that Jordan suddenly started to become easy to get along with and care about his health when he came back from that trip to Maine with Ravi?"

I gave him a look.  "You know, you could have mentioned suddenly no longer speaking Chinese and changing jobs...

"Stop it!"  Mom looked at us.  "This isn't funny, and Kareena, I would not think you would be a part of the boys doing this."

"I wouldn't if it was a joke, Mama Chang, but we kind of have to.  Jordan, the new Jordan, he tried to tell me five times - he hates keeping anything from me - but the curse protects itself even beyond it being hard to believe.  I always thought it was just a metaphor for him trying to change his life until the night he proposed, and I realized he wouldn't risk that moment unless he really meant it.  That's the only time the truth can get into your mind, when your life is already changing.  We were just hoping this was going to be a big change for you, and not just us."

"That's--"  She looked at me.  "Tell me something only my Jordan would know."

"Honey--!"

Mom gave Dad a look, then turned back to me.  "Come on, make me believe this."

So I did, and if I made sure to do it in Cantonese so that Benny and Kareena didn't understand, I'm sure as fuck not putting it on the Internet for anyone to read.

They didn't quite seem to believe us, but Dad was getting angry anyway.  "This doesn't make sense!  You say you could turn back but didn't, and how do you know if this is supposed to be protected?" He looked hard at Max, who stammered that was a while other story.

"It's part of mine.  There are some bad people out there that use the Inn, and Max got caught up."

"So you say.  But even if this is true, why tell us?  Why make us feel like fools?"

"Don't you want to know, Mom?  I mean, okay, things are going to be weird, but the weird things have explanations now!"

"Do they?  Even if this is all true, you said you could have changed back, but you didn't, even after someone else hit the gym for you!  Why didn't you?"

"Benny and Kareena--"

"Bullshit!"  Dad moved his gaze between me and Benny.  "I love my son, but that's not like you.  You could be so selfish!"

That fucking hurt.  "Do you have any idea what it's like to see someone take your life and improve it?  To just watch someone make your body and then make friends and get a great girl and even find a job he doesn't hate and just absolutely know that you're going to fuck it up?  It's goddamn terrifying, and I thought I was going to get into a very different situation instead of this!"

This time Mom was the one looking between us, not sure exactly what she should believe our who she should address.  "I...  I hope you don't think we loved you more just because--"

She started to well up, and I grabbed her hands.  "No!  And even if you did, that would have just meant that you were proud of me.  You couldn't have known!"

Our faces were close, enough for her to see my makeup, or my cleavage if she looked down a little.  "You do understand that is hard to look at you and see my son."

"It's been four years, Mom.  More than enough time to figure out bras and heels and lipstick."

"But I saw you on the dance floor, and you seemed so... enthusiastic.  Does that mean that before, you were--"

"Trans?  I don't think so - I'm hardly the first guy to visit the Inn and eventually be okay with the change to female, like it makes the new you the real you somehow.  But I dunno.  I'm into my appearance more, but I don't know if that means this is more 'right' or I've learned some sort of lesson or I just still like looking at hot chicks and that includes the mirror in the morning.  But the important stuff hadn't changed.  I still love Halloween and Hong Kong movies and the Mets.  I'm good with computers and still like to draw, and now I get to use them together."

I think that's when Mom really started to believe, although Dad needed a little more convincing.  We went through a lot of the last four years, although we didn't fill them in on all the details - I don't know enough about Bingbing's deal to spill and Max won't, and we left out the part about Max getting fucked by Annette. 

I guess it's good that they wanted to know a lot about Jacky and Ernesto - if they still thought I was just some random girl, they wouldn't really care about my (ex) (not really) boyfriends.  Or maybe they would.  On the other hand, they didn't say I should be paying off the student loans that Benny inherited, which I kind of expected.

So, I don't know if I'll be invited to Thanksgiving, or if Benny will be, or what.  But, man, is it a fucking load off.

-Jordo