Fixing My Destiny - Prologue. Prologue - Flashbacks

The scent of caked-on bubble gum on the sidewalk was barely registering in his nostrils as he walked along the foggy streets of San Francisco. Jack Chan was taking the Muni trolley downtown to find a job. At 23 he had finally finished his undergraduate program, a bit later than his peers, but finished with a respectable degree nonetheless. The sounds of trolleys changing tracks and rushing past moderate rush hour traffic pleased Jack as he got to West Portal Station a bit early to beat the morning mob. He was looking through his phone, trying to find the right tunes to play during his ride downtown.

 

As the trolley moved towards Forrest Hill, he started preparing himself for a potential interview; remembering his past, his experiences, his lessons learned and, most importantly, the regrets and disappointments of his life. Shaking the familiar sinking feeling that he felt every time he thought about this, he changed the genre of music to something a bit more upbeat and lively, hoping some hard rock would keep his spirits up at least to put up a good façade for the interview. While others have always questioned his taste in music selections for various moods, he had always felt hard rock soothed whatever his emotions were cooking up and gave him a strong appearance regardless of how he felt inside.

 

Sure, regrets and disappointments plagued the lives of each and every person sitting in the trolley with him that morning, but it didn’t matter to Jack. To him, his disappointments with himself and his regrets in the road not taken, had taken its toll on his life; constantly forced him to settle for less than what he originally aspired to be. Jack blocked out those thoughts and just let the lyrics of his favorite bands flood loudly into his brain, hoping it would help him ease his own rushing judgments.

 

It almost worked too; his eyebrows began to loosen up from its tight bunch as they often did when he was deep in thought or resolving an inner conflict of the brain.

As the trolley got to Castro Station , moments of his childhood stared flashing before his eyes, moments he’d rather not relive again. One of him in the school yard, wheezing, as he tried to run around the yard, in kindergarten. Another one of him being kicked in the face in fifth grade, as the jocks pushed him around. His first crush in 7th grade when he couldn’t get himself to ask out the girl, he sat across from during science class.

Regrets that he had when he didn’t grow into the person, physically or psychologically, the way he thought he would, when high school came around. He was still physically incapable of playing the sports he wanted to when everyone else around him seemed to already be proficient. Then came the never ending piles of schoolwork that was thrust on him , when he was accepted into one of the best high schools in the Bay Area. Jack never got to slow down, friends were few and far between, although he always tried to connect with others, the guard he kept up to protect himself from being hurt again like when he was younger, prevented him from ever getting close to others, eventually alienating himself from his fellow students.

 

Jack always thought with that much time spent on schoolwork and maybe three to four hours of sleep per night, he would be at least above average, if not one of the best, by the end of his high school years. But he knew he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. He was barely scraping by, yet he felt determined that even with his mediocre grades, he could try to strive for something unobtainable, something that would make his parents proud.

 

His parents were a traditional Chinese couple who understood that as a first generation Chinese immigrant, Jack would have a horrible time connecting to others even though he had arrived in San Francisco when he was just 4 years old. They didn’t push Jack verbally, but they made sure that whatever they wanted was clearly, but indirectly shoved into the path towards the ominous cloud of vagueness of what success was supposed to be. They pushed Jack to learn English, but not to forget his Chinese roots, so he learned Mandarin on Saturdays. They wanted Jack to learn the violin, starting in his 4th grade, which Jack absolutely loved, but knew had no talent for. So, he eventually stopped by the time the stress of high school kicked in. They wanted Jack to learn more languages, which Jack was able to please his mother with, by trying to finish what his mother couldn’t do because she became pregnant with Jack. That is, learn Japanese in high school. He was horrible in Japanese, the syntax was totally alien to Jack, especially with conflicting grammar structures between Japanese, Chinese and English. Jack stopped taking Japanese after his fifth semester after having tried to learn Japanese for seven semesters. Yes, mediocre would describe Jack, he wouldn’t lie to hide the fact that he’d failed classes before; he owned up to his academic history and made no excuses about it to himself, or to anyone else.

 

The fact he didn’t mingle with his classmates came back to bite him in the ass when he had to find a date for prom. He didn’t go to the regular school dances, much less formal dances, so when he had finally found a date, he didn’t know what to do on the dance floor. He found that he had absolutely zero hand-eye-feet-shoulders-(insert body part here) coordination and he knew he would never embarrass himself again after junior prom. Except, another year came around and the same thing happened during senior prom.

 

Jack always seemed relatively happy in his outer appearance though. Blemishes from acne aside, from his teenage years, he was always able to show a very large smile without a lot of effort, which generally fooled everybody around him, including his parents, of how genuine or sincere the smile was. He would chat with his classmates and pretend he was happy, content and that he felt on top of the world. But deep down only Jack knew how lonely he was. Most of all, after that incident in 7th grade with his first crush, puberty finally set in and he knew he was no longer attracted to the cute girls in class, but the white jocks in his classes. He knew it was wrong, he knew his parents would never accept him and he knew from the lack of sports he did, his inward personality and his cold fake exterior, that people called him names like “fag” and “gay” since he was in elementary school. While he knew those were just words, when he realized that those slurs were eventually pointing to the truth, his high school life was even more in shambles. With his turmoil with school stress, inner rejection of his own sexuality and his slipping grades, Jack knew he was never going to grow up to be anyone special, nothing extraordinary, just what he was afraid of – mediocre. And that thought alone scared him, pushed him further inside.

 

As more people got on and off the trolley at Church Station, his mind wandered into his own past, trying to remember anything he’d forgotten, perhaps a detail that would help him explain why he could never excel at anything in particular that he tried in life. Jack knew he was in a dark place, he knew he couldn’t hide forever, yet he never really understood why he turned out the way he is today. He couldn’t find anything wrong with his upbringing, yet he found everything wrong with his life. His parents were still married, he questioned how happy the couple was, but they were married, working mediocre jobs and paying for a house that was too steep for their budget. Love was never a topic to be learned in the family. His extended family was just as cold as his parents, only coming together for special occasions like a death in the family or the occasional fake sincerity ‘Hello. How have you been? Happy (insert holiday name here) and I’ll talk to you soon!’ phone calls which made Jack cringe at the cold and fake pleasantries. He was sick and tired of maintaining family contact when there was truly no good reason to do so anymore. How could he understand how to love, if there were no examples of love he could see anywhere around him? Jack shrugged it off.

 

He remembered why he was sitting in the trolley today. He was going to get interviewed for a job downtown in the mall. Jack blocked his thoughts of his past, opened his folder he brought with him and reviewed his resume. It was extensive, three pages worth of impressive experience, skills, professional development, awards – at least on paper. Each item on his resume, down to his very name, was something he could easily glance once and scoff at how insignificant he was, how meaningless and how his resume helped build the confident, outgoing, and experienced exterior who could easily answer interview questions thrown at him left and right. He knew how to handle himself with just the right charm to impress and reinforce his outgoing personality and live the lie that allowed him to carry on yet another day without happiness, alone and appalled at how he was able to survive for so long.

 

He looked at his education information on his resume. He had just spent five years in the east coast studying engineering, barely graduating with a degree. He realized he really had no knack for the science in innovation and certainly not in math, but he enjoyed designing and spatial thinking was something he could very well grasp. It was the only talent he thought he’d had left, that kept him from dropping out altogether. He had taken out student loans to keep his parents from selling the house to pay for his education, but now with a slow economy and his dad approaching retirement age in a year, Jack knew that it was a mistake for him to escape to the east coast, only to prolong the problem at home and to sink his own financial responsibilities into the ground so far, that he knew it would take himself decades, if not the rest of his lifetime to pay them back.

 

He looked at his engineering experience on paper and scoffed at how all of that research and project experience meant nothing, as the economy tanked, so did the jobs. All of the entry-level and internship engineering positions were filled by those who were laid off before he graduated, with 5-10 years more experience than Jack had. He had no chance against his over qualified peers. His attempt at applying to work at the mall was to finally get some money in his bank account, to pay back some of the interest of his student loans until he got a real job that paid him well enough to get him through. Jack had worked retail in high school and college, so this was nothing new to him. He straightened his tie while his mind went through the rest of his resume just as the deep red paint on the walls of Powell Station were visible. Jack sighed, took a deep breath again, looked at his phone to make sure he wasn’t late and walked out of the trolley back to the surface streets. The escalator to Market Street was always filled with incense of whoever was selling; well let’s face it, more like peddling for cash for cheap trinkets that were useless. He strode in a brisk pace to the mall where he had an interview on the third floor. His cool exterior, portrayed by his sunglasses and emotionless face, gave clear indication to others walking on the street to go around Jack. Jack didn’t mind the isolation, he preferred it, especially on public streets.

 

He filled out the job application on site, handed in his resume, which the manager took a glance at and became wide-eyed; since he read the experience and education Jack possessed and found that he was way overqualified for something as simple as an assistant manager for the clothing store. Jack gave the manager the forced smile again, which the manager mistook for a sincere and genuine one. ‘Another one falls for the smile, yet again’. Jack thought. By now his default fake smile came naturally, over the years as he’d perfected how to contract the muscles on his face to give convey the right message across, how to fool someone to let him off the hook.

 

“We’ll set up an interview later this weekend if you have time. I have a couple of applicants and I am interviewing throughout the week, so if you don’t mind I’ll give you a call. I’m sorry I couldn’t interview you today, but we have someone from corporate office show up and we’re rearranging all of our schedules.” The manager was calm and soft in his voice, but had a smile that also seemed a bit too rehearsed to be real, Jack thought.

 

“Well sir, I’m just glad I am given an opportunity for an interview. I’ll look forward to your call.”Jack held his hand out and shook the manager’s hand.

 

Jack turned around to leave the store, sighed at his disappointment at another $4 wasted on Muni (the municipal railway) and he wasn’t anywhere closer to getting a job.

 

Jack took the Muni back home and on his way he thought about his future. He knew his academic history yielded anything but success. He knew his social history was an absolute disaster. He felt truly down as the trolley stopped at Church Station and he saw a few gay couples exiting the trolley, holding hands, seemingly happy as they held hands, puppy-eyeing each other. He thought if he would find such a person. A single tear rolled down the right side of his face as the trolley left. Jack wanted to know what it meant to love, to be able to trust someone without calculating eyes, without his guard up all the time and for once in his life, someone to help Jack be able to look at himself in the mirror and no longer see ‘the failures of Jack Chan’, but a human being he can finally respect.

 

A couple of passengers looked at Jack with raised eyebrows, seeing a young adult with such togetherness show the one moment of weakness. Jack wouldn’t have it, not like this. He wiped his face and rubbed his eyes, went back to his phone and read some text messages, trying not to see what the other passengers saw, or if the other passengers understood what he was going through. He didn’t want to know if they saw right through the fake appearances he fought so hard to keep up. He felt a little piece of himself dying every single time he enforced this over-confident personality to keep up with appearances. He felt vulnerable and he looked down and closed his eyes as another tear fell, from his left eye this time. Jack rubbed his eyes to keep the tear from becoming visible to others, as he pretended to close his eyes and rest. The gray and orange trolley continued down the dark tunnel, as he slowly reflected on the mediocrity of his life once again, alone.