When I was 9 years old, my reality consisted entirely of the milieu of elementary school; my desires, pains, boredom, frustration, knowledge, sustenance, communication, and growth were dictated by the normative time and space that were assigned to me as a 9-year-old boy in a small town in Japan. I lived in a small world. It's not that I was ignorant of the "outside world," or the "adult's world" because those were still part of my reality. I hated school, yet I believed I had to go, even though my parents told me that I didn't. Days went by slowly, and I looked forward to my favorite TV shows on Fridays. I thought 12-year-olds were infinitely more mature than I was.

I turned 12 years old, and I started attending middle school (which is technically translated as junior high school). I loved every day, despite tremendous emotional pain that I was going through. I no longer looked forward to any particular day of the week. The "adult's world" became a slightly bigger part of my reality. I thought about my future, how I was supposed to live with dignity as a Queer person, how I would be able to have a career in music. I was filled with hope and anxiety. I desperately hoped to maintain my friendships for the rest of my life. Time began to accelerate, and three years of middle school felt as quick as the final year of elementary school.

When I was 16 years old, I was more uncomfortable with the society than ever. I had more money and freedom, but I was feeling constrained, especially at high school. My sexual exploration had already begun by then. I started working among people of various generations; I was teaching swimming to kids, from toddlers to youth, and my colleagues were from my age to my parents' age. I learned so much from everyone, regardless of their age. I respected all my students and never treated them as kids. My work was a refuge from the superficiality of high school. I had some people to talk to, but I didn't really have any friends at school; I couldn't seem to learn anything from my classmates. It was around this time when I decided to do my undergrad in the U.S. because I had no illusion about Japanese educational ideology and no hope for universities in Japan. I wanted to learn Queer studies and gain experience in activism. I really wanted to focus on learning. I listened to a lot of English music and read Harry Potter in English. My reality encompassed this imagined place in imagined future: a college in the U.S.

I turned 20 years old 3 months after I arrived in San Francisco. Everything was new and exciting. I wrote about my sexuality on my blog and explained why I came to the U.S. I had been open to a few friends at work, but this was when I stopped strategizing who to tell or not tell. I was tired of doing so. Yet every time I went back to Japan, I felt silenced again. It felt like I had two entirely separate realities, an exciting college life in San Francisco and an awkward time in my hometown. I was growing so much from living abroad, but there seemed to be only minor changes in the landscape of the small town. 16 hours of time difference, yet the speed of time wasn't the same. 11 hours of flight over the Pacific Ocean somehow demarcated these two worlds, and I was always blissed out to land in SFO.

My 25th birthday happened in the middle of the Ph.D. application process. It was a daunting process that required a tremendous amount of emotional and spiritual work. I was working on my personal statement one evening, with some wine. Because my research interests are very close to my personal background, I had to reflect a lot on my life. I thought of my ancestors who made me who I am today despite their sufferings. I started crying. I begged them to stay with me by my side so I could get through, and eventually I came to realize that they have always been there. It was me who had chosen not to acknowledge their presence, and various external influences had also interrupted our relationships. Thus, I reached out to my ancestors, and I felt powerful again.

*****

As a 25-year-old, I have a new relationship with time. I have gained some life experiences; I can draw on them to inform my thinking. These past experiences also haunt me; mistakes I made, people I hurt, emotions I suppressed. They belong not only to the past, but in fact I need them in the present tense to make better decisions. I also have different views of what's about to come; I face the future with slightly thinner fogs. It's all in my imagination, yet I aspire to actualize it, while it continues to fear me like no other. I have a better sense of who I have been and who I wish to become--two aspects of my life that guides me to know who I "am." Thus, the present is no longer simply what I consider to be "now" and "here," but it's become entirely contingent upon so-called "past" and "future." It's not as static, rigid, or stable as it seemed before. It's no longer about simply "being," but it's all about constantly "knowing" and "becoming." The borders between "the present" and everything else, as well as "presence" and "absence" have become incredibly ambiguous.

The partial stories I wrote above seem to be in chronological order, from the age of 9 to 25. Yet they take particular shape as I re-construct them as my past, and I wouldn't have know how I would write them when I was living those moments. I wrote them with particular set of words, precisely because I am not in those moments. As much as my "past" influences my "present," my "present" creates my "past." What does it mean, then, to write down my imagined future? I've been thinking about new year's resolution. I think I'll try to eat more beans next year. But as soon as I write it down, or even as I think of it, it becomes my "present" and my "future," and immediately my "past," all at once.

Even from our daily experiences, we know that the flow of time is not homogeneous. Time at work passes very slowly. Hours in front of TV passes quickly. Days before the first date passes slowly. A year at the age of 22 passes more quickly than a year at the age of 13. Even the lengths of daytime and nighttime changes throughout the year. Why do we, then, stick to the idea that time flow is always steady and consistent? Why do we give so much power to our watches and clocks?

Western/Christian epistemology of time is driven by teleology, the study of the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence (which God had assigned). It's supposed to be that there is only one way, one path that all the existing thing will follow, in one direction, from the past to the future. Hence, there is of course only one reality, one truth, the truth, and only one way of knowing. In science, this is a paradigm called positivism. Knowledge exists as an entity out there in the world, and humans are supposedly able to own it by disciplining themselves through methodology, the study of the ways of knowing. The positivist historiography is marked by the concept of "progress," and anything and everything that are deemed as obstacles to this "progress"--nature, traditional knowledge, femininity, emotions, disabilities, queer sexualities, profanity, "uncivilized" ways of living--are to be enlightened by God's teachings, or destroyed altogether. Human life course is obviously comprised of a certain way of living: birth, growth, marriage, procreation, child-rearing, and death. Time is not only measurable but also a measure in itself. Time is a resource that one possesses as individual properties. This means that it's possible for me to waste your time.

Such a worldview does not have a room for my relationship with time. Such an epistemology of time to me seems androcentric, Eurocentric, and heteronormative. It doesn't have room for my coexisting relationships with my ancestors and descendants. Its unilateral direction doesn't account for circular and other fluid ways of relating to time, including menstrual cycles and reincarnation. There's no clear-cut expected life course for Queers. People with disabilities or chronic medical conditions may experience time differently from able-bodied people. What about people "doing time?" Such culturally specific, yet hegemonic temporality, ultimately, doesn't allow for my Queer sexuality and my cultures and traditions to coexist. My sexuality is seen as progressive, while my culture is seen as backwards.

When I was 21 years old, my mother told me that one of my uncles on my father's side is gay. I had no idea. I didn't remember ever meeting him because my father had severed their relationship a long time ago. The fact that I have a gay uncle (just like everyone else does!) made me think that perhaps some of my ancestors were also "Queer," although such conceptualization is both quite Eurocentric and presentist. It was a liberating thought; I no longer have to see myself at the end of a very long thread of heteronormativity, threatening what has been built over thousands of generations. As much as my ancestors and descendants are integral part of my existence, I am an integral part of their existence. I am not alone.

This new relationship that I have with time is enabling me to have an entirely different cosmology--one that allows for me as a Queer Zainichi Korean person in this historical moment to exist at all. I needed this knowledge to break away from the dominant system of knowledge about time, which dictates our epistemology quite pre-discursively. In other words, in order to "know" what we know, to view ourselves from alternative perspectives--to decolonize ourselves--we need a different relationship with time that is not so Eurocentric, androcentric, and heteronormative. Time does not exist out there in the world as an entity that we can somehow possess. Rather, time is relational, fluid, and complex, always experienced differently. Time, therefore, is embodied. (Well, duh!)

Influential Works:

-Clayton Dumont (2008) The Promise of Poststructuralist Sociology: Marginalized Peoples and the Problem of Knowledge, State University of New York Press.

-Avery Gordon (2008) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, University of Minnesota Press.

-Jasbir Puar (2007) Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Duke University Press.

-Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Zed Books.

-Shawn Wilson (2008) Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Fernwood Publishing.

Works that I think would have enriched this essay:

-Carolyn Dinshaw, et al. (2007) "Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion" GLQ, 13(2-3): 177-195.

-Elizabeth Freeman (2010) Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Duke University Press.

-Judith Halberstam (2005) In a Queer Time and Space: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York University Press.

-José Estaban Muñoz (2009) Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York University Press.