So, I shaved my legs the other day. If you are a normal girl, this isn’t anything out of the ordinary.
(Unless you had a fantastic, orgasmic experience those commercials always promise with their new, intimate shaving creams. In which case, you need to e-mail me right away and tell me what I’ve been doing wrong for the past four years.)
For me, smooth, stubble-free legs are indicative of three events: the approach of spring, the end of winter quarter and the end of Sugar Lumps.
Listen, Davis. We had a good time. I’ll remember watching yo’ fine ass shimmying into the kitchen to fondly make me coffee the morning after an intense night of Scrabble.
But it’s time for me to move on to bigger, better things. Like wearing dresses without tights and staring creepily out of my bedroom window at the people sunbathing at the pool outside without my pants on.
Alas, all joking aside, our time together is coming to an end.
As a columnist this quarter, I had three goals: 1) to see how much profanity I could get away with, 2) to write about tits and ass, and most importantly, 3) to bring awareness and create discussion about women’s and Asian American issues that I’ve yet to see addressed in the paper.
After three months, I hope I at least accomplished the last part, though I know that I’ve barely scratched the surface of the issues I have written about.
So much more can be and needs to be said about how we react to foreign accents, how our titties can define and restrict our perceived femininity and the cultural and familial aspects of the Asian female body stereotype.
At the same time, I wish I had written about anti-aging creams, hair (the kind on top of your head and the kind that’s not), skin-lightening/whitening creams, Asian American plastic and cosmetic surgery trends and booty pop underwear.
These are awesome topics and they deserve to be discussed, debated and thought about. Fortunately, this can and will happen whether or not this column exists. Yes, Sugar Lumps will be no more, but the conversation will continue.
And I hope that that’s how you read this column – as a conversation, as if you were sitting with me at the CoHo over a cup of joe and thinking to yourself, fuck, this girl be batshit cray-cray.
If I learned anything from writing this column, it’s that just because my opinions are in print doesn’t mean they’re any superior to yours. Like in real life, my thoughts and opinions on today’s women’s and Asian American issues are sometimes jumbled, tactless and inelegant.
If you were to ask someone else the same questions on the same topics, you could get a more insightful and gracefully worded response. And I encourage you to do so, because other than being a creeper, I’m just like any other student sitting at the CoHo.
Until you taste the coffee, each cup looks like the same creamy dark brown. After all, in spite of all the things you add to it – say, your traits, experiences, thoughts and opinions – they all have a tendency to melt away after a few stirs, as if they never existed.
But that’s not true.
At first glance, I am just another Chinese-Vietnamese American woman. And sometimes, I feel like whatever else happens in my life, nothing will ever change those things. I’m a single mocha latte whether you turn it this way or that, same as all the other single mocha lattes.
What I forget, however, is that even if it looks like nothing’s changed, it’s not until we taste it do we remember, relive the spoonfuls of sugar, Nutella or milk we’ve added that makes every cup different. It’s only then that we realize what a wonderfully rich concoction we have created for ourselves.
So I thank you, my uncommonly attractive and well-read readers, for sharing this cup of coffee with me, sugar lumps and all. Thank you for helping add that extra bit of sexy and sass to this quarter’s brew.
If you find that you miss me (which is as inevitable as the next day’s sunrise), you can find me at the CoHo, sipping my coffee, wearing a dress with my shaved legs and red lipstick. Feel free to come up to me and whisper breathily, “I wanna taste your coffee.”
I’ll probably knee you in the groin at first, but I’ll know what you really mean.
Come out and watch KATHERINE TANG NGO dance in VSA’s culture show on April 2, and hear her perform an original piece called “Titty Titty Bang Bang” at SickSpits’ next Open Mic night. Send your sexy goodbyes to kthngo@ucdavis.edu.
