How I found God through Asian Shame and Addiction

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They say God works in mysterious ways. How mysterious is it, that while looking at porn, going for sexual massages, or hiring sex workers, God was there? Was God there condoning my behaviors? Was he passively allowing these illicit acts to happen? Was God compassionate towards my plight? What about the plight of the sex workers?

I grew up learning that God is on the side of the poor, the widow, and the victim, but what about the perpetrators? Does God really care about those who will do anything to feed their addiction to the point of using women who may have been trafficked? Tough pill to swallow, huh? I sure didn’t believe it—since I was that perpetrator.

I didn’t start out as a perpetrator. I was first a child, and a victim of my circumstances.

I grew up as a first-generation Chinese immigrant in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Seattle. We were poor. My two younger brothers and I were scolded for getting hurt (our parents didn’t have health insurance), were in the free lunch program at school, and we stole money from our parents and relatives to buy treats for ourselves.

Crime in our neighborhood was rampant, and nightly fear was the common theme. Our parents worked nights at separate Chinese restaurants, and we were to fend for ourselves without adult supervision. I learned early on to distract myself through fantasy and make-believe, and found comfort in compulsive activities.

It started innocently enough: endless hours playing with Star Wars action figures, watching television, or playing basketball alone. Department store catalogs also offered a refuge from my bleak circumstances. I could fantasize and obsess about a cool toy, a CD player, or a new pair of Nike shoes. Whatever fears, insecurities, or emotional pain I had from feeling inadequate were buried and kept out of conscious awareness.

In early adolescence, I was probably also a love addict. I preferred slow, love ballads over rap music. On-screen, I preferred soap operas and movies with romantic or suggestive themes such as Can’t Buy Me Love, Say Anything, and Revenge of the Nerds. I associated love with sexual intimacy. Physical connection superseded relational or emotional connection. Looking back, it makes sense to me now, since I yearned for love.

Love, in our traditional Asian household, wasn’t expressed in words or displays of affection like hugs or pats on your back. So, when I saw what I perceived as love onscreen (i.e., romance, make-out scenes, etc.), my young mind was forever changed.

I was hell-bent on trying to find “love”.

As kids, we would stumble onto p*rnography on scrambled cable TV (scrambled refers to a signal that has been intentionally encoded or altered to prevent unauthorized viewing). The images were distorted, and we could barely see any n*dity, but the sounds were clear, and thus, I was transfixed by the allure of it all. Occasionally, I would stumble across an old Pl*yb*y in the neighborhood, but mostly I was left to my imagination. That alone was a powerful drug: imagining actresses or lingerie models being n*ked. Yet, imagination left me wanting. I desired the whole enchilada, a real woman!

In high school, I was too shy to even consider approaching girls. Part of it was because of my personality, but the other part was because of how my p*nis looked. I would derisively call it an anteater. Being born overseas, most boys don’t get circumcised. Yet, in the U.S., being uncircumcised felt like the worst thing you could do to a boy’s sense of masculinity. My brothers and I didn’t talk about it, but it had an impact on us. We never changed in front of others in the locker room after swimming. In junior high, P.E. class came with mandatory showers. We were diligent to use our hands to cover our private parts so no one could see. My internal shame and humiliation of being anatomically different than other boys was palpable.

To rid myself of this “problem”, I saved a few thousand dollars delivering newspapers during my high school years. When I turned eighteen, I scheduled a surgery appointment to get circumcised, all without my parents’ knowledge. I told one friend; he would pick me up after the surgery. The fee drained me of my early savings, but it was a cost I was willing to pay for some sense of sexual normalcy.

As stark as night is from day, I went from being uncircumcised for the first eighteen years of life to being circumcised from that moment on after the surgery. Oddly enough, the insecurities that I had up until then didn’t just vanish; they morphed and continued.

Being circumcised made my p*nis area lose its girth, and now I was wracked with insecurities around size. My p*nis was smaller now due to the loss of the foreskin. The insecurities continued to mount: our Asian immigrant roots, our socio-economic status, my lack of identity or vision for my future, and now my smaller p*nis.

My college years were a testing ground for everything: alcohol, mar*juana, sex, and m*sturbation. You name it, I've tried it. Like a key looking for a lock, I was trying to find something that fit. Drugs and alcohol just made me sick. Sex, though, felt good. I felt loved for the first time. It was often brief and casual, as I was wary of a relationship where a woman would get to know me. I feared if a woman really knew me, she’d find me lacking in some way and then end the relationship. That fear was all-consuming, so I would intentionally end relationships. It was a means of staying in control without the risk of emotional depth or intimacy.

After college, I embarked on a television journalism career. I was the first one in my family of three generations (from my grandparents on down) to go through the American educational system from kindergarten to college graduate. It was an enormous burden to be the role model of success for everyone in my family. I was already starting on the proverbial wrong foot since journalism wasn’t valued. Knowing this, I steeled myself even more to prove my worth to my family. I was determined not to give up, even when I was living in the middle of Montana and Ohio, hundreds of miles away from home.

Lonely, scared, and petrified of failure, I clung to what I knew best. Basketball and sex. I played obsessively during the day, and at night scoured bars to find casual sexual partners. It was a lot of work, and rejection took a toll. The easier substitute came in the form of er*tic magazines and p*rn videos; this felt better­—a similar high without the risk of rejection.

In Ohio, I dated the first Asian woman I came across, a Korean woman from an affluent, “Americanized” family (her parents were college-educated in the U.S.). We dated for a year, and despite my reluctance in relationships, we got married. It was a marriage born more out of fear than love.

I was too scared to be alone, and marriage gave me a sense of stability and Asian credibility.

Asian parents love marriage and what it represents: honor, prestige, and a continuation of the family line. To be Asian and single after a certain age is considered anathema to the culture and your family name. With the marriage, the only cultural box left to be checked off was to have kids; that would be the Asian trifecta of honor: a good-paying job, being married, and having children.

It didn’t take long for this promising trifecta to implode.

Three short years into our marriage, my then-wife caught me looking at pornography on our computer. In quick succession, we got divorced, I was laid off from my news reporter position in Los Angeles, and I was labelled a porn/sex addict (*paid link). In other words, I was a degenerate.

The divorce rocked me. My job loss was equally hard. I accepted a job as a restaurant host just to make some money. I plummeted even further into the abyss of addiction. It knew no bounds.

I felt forsaken by God. If there was a “God”, he didn’t exist in my world. Why would a good God not save my marriage? Why would God upend my life?

I didn’t know much about God at the time. What scant knowledge I had about Christianity came from attending a Chinese church during high school. God was about unconditional love, but he was also adamantly against premarital sex. This tension was hard for me to understand. In the end, I felt my sordid activities, from casual sex to paid-for sex, not only betrayed God but also expelled me from his grace and mercy.

Ironically, in the years of healing and growth to follow, I learned Jesus was always there. He was by my side during my fear-driven childhood and cultural estrangement from my family and society. He was beside me during my marriage and divorce. He was weeping for me in my vain search for validation, adequacy, and love through sex. He doesn’t dismiss my desire to honor my heritage and family. But He also insists that Asian shame doesn’t need to keep me shackled.

Recovery and healing don’t just happen. We need to have the humility and willingness to acknowledge past hurts and the impact it’s had on our thinking and behaviors. Yet, God offers a new freedom to those who are courageous to confront hard truths about themselves and oftentimes their families, cultures, and societal messages they received.

Recovery isn’t perfect, far from it. To embrace the path to recovery (*paid link) means accepting a journey where I fall often, but I fall forward. Forward into the knowledge and understanding of grace, where God’s perfection in Christ blots out our imperfections, one day at a time.

Next Step:

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