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✈
(an eye-opening memory)
➶ For every rich, heart-eyed businessman spending half of his regenerative monetary value in a five-star casino on the Las Vegas Strip, there were three children of racial minorities whose livelihoods were constantly at stake not twenty miles north. The real worth of these people–too often ignored by the systems that put them at risk–is ignored in trade for the incessant exchange of superficial paper: money. ‘Money makes the world go ‘round.’ This common idiom was a phrase that Dante’s Italian grandmother would never let him forget. She lived in their large, mixed household; one large and disconnected family to the youngest generation meant dozens of broken ties, ethnic struggles, and acts of seeing less than eye to eye in a climate that was less than familial.
➵ At a certain point in his development, the mixed-blood Chinese-American realized that these two ideas (a privileged socioeconomic perspective blessed with blissful ignorance and a conflicting break in extended domestic ties) were connected in a plethora of ways. This intersectionality left the amateur computer hacker feeling helpless and worthless. Although he would one day grow to become a very confident, intelligent, and powerful adult, the teenager felt at a loss. As a young man, his formidable years were often lost in the crowd, his persona drowned out among his cousins and the popular students at school. His friends were thankfully amazing, if not temporary, but his purpose seemed clear: worrying about himself and less about conservative values. This was key. This was the beginning of his extroverted cocooning process, of his true struggles in control and dominance.
➷ This was a turning point in his life.
