Interview: How Das Rush became a “creature of imagination”
Interview: How Das Rush became a “creature of imagination”
On finding belonging as a trans dad and writer, from Seoul to Silicon Valley
I’ve known Das Rush for over a decade. We met during a year of teaching English abroad, on a blind friend date in Gangnam, South Korea (yes, that Gangnam). Our nervous first dinner conversation over haemul pajeon turned into an epic eight-hour ramble through the streets of Seoul. We swapped stories of grappling with the influence of the Mormon church on our deeply imperfect childhoods, as we slipped in and out of the subterranean bars of Hongdae, talking and plotting out future adventures until the sun rose over the Han. By the night’s end, we felt as if we’d already known each other for lifetimes – a feeling Koreans call choa in yeon.
Das has been instrumental in supporting me through many of my initiations since I left Korea, from losing my brother to cancer to a devastating late pregnancy loss last year. I’m honored to share Das’ own initiations here, which include leaving the Mormon church and the Midwest to head to Harvard, coming out as queer and trans, getting top surgery in Southeast Asia, and getting married, divorced and re-married again.
Now, Das is also learning to navigate the sometimes-mean streets of new parenthood, while charting a fascinating new career path as a communications pro in the fast-growing world of AI tech in Silicon Valley. You’ll see evidence of that throughout this interview, in the form of AI-generated illustrations Das has created to accompany their words.
Each of the stories Das tells below seems to return to a kind of center, as Das tries to do in their meditation practice: cultivating an authentic sense of identity in tandem with cultivating a loving chosen family who accepts you for who you are. Even when everyone else around you is responding to your truth as if you’re speaking a foreign language.
Ryan: How do you define initiation?
Das: I’ve been turning this word over in my mind since you launched this Substack. One of the stories that I have kept coming back to is the Garden of Eden, in which these perfect child-like creatures are told by God not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Growing up, I was taught this story was a rather simple story that warned against giving into “temptation.” Like Adam and Eve, I had to decide who I would listen to – the devil or God.
Recently, I’ve been watching a six month old baby explore, with incredible focus and fascination, their own feet, the underside of our couch, and the dog’s tail, among other things. They can spend entire days mastering the art of taking hold of an object and putting it in their mouth. It has recast the story of Eden for me.
I identify less with Adam and Eve now, and more with God, the parental figure who has created and now must nurture a new life full of curiosity. It won’t be a single bite of fruit that ushers them out of their childhood, but many small discoveries. Sooner or later, their innate curiosity will produce knowledge, and as it does, my child will grow up. It’s a bittersweet one-way passage, and once they exit Eden, they can’t go back.
The form and details of growing up and initiation stories may differ, but the underlying resonance is the same. You learn things that you can’t unlearn. You gain experience, but you also lose a certain innocence, and as a result, you feel saudade. For me, that is the core experience at the heart of any initiation.
R: When was the first time you remember thinking to yourself, “Life will never be the same”?
D: Sixth grade. My English class that year was actually themed “rites of passage,” which is the best synonym I can think of for initiation. Mr. Norris was that teacher for me. He had printed on old school printer paper — the kind where you had to tear away the perforated sides leaving a bin full of ribbon trails — transcendentalist quotes and put them up all over the walls. Every day for a year, I read:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
During this time, my father left. I understand his reasons now. At the time, however, his absence felt like my world collapsing, like being kicked out of some sort of Eden. That was the beginning, the initiation, into questioning the beliefs of my parents. What did I believe? And what was just some story I was born into believing?
Around this time, I also realized that I wanted to be a writer. It happened in English class, when, in keeping with our theme of rites of passage, we read the short story Star Food by Ethan Canin. In it, a young boy, not much older than I was at the time, works in his family’s grocery store. He begins to have new-to-him insights about his parents, and the people he meets in the store, as he comes of age. There is one passage that particularly struck me:
It seemed you could never really know another person. I felt alone in the world, in the way that makes me aware of sound and temperature as if I had just left a movie theater and stepped into an alley where a light rain was falling, and the wind was cool, and, from somewhere, other people’s voices could be heard.
I wanted to be able to transmute what I was feeling into words like this. And then writing became the safe space where I could question the beliefs of my parents.
Since then, my initiations have usually played out first in my journal pages, then in my life. I’ve kept that book all these years, countries, and homes later because this passage was the first time, to quote a favorite poem by Andrea Gibson, that I realized “Other people feel this too.” It’s a realization that I have since found many times, in great literature, art, and friendships. Each time, it makes life’s initiations a little less lonely, a little easier.
R: You are also, like me, a meditator. What do you feel the connection is, between your meditation practice and your writing practice?
D: While we often picture meditation as some enlightened spiritual guru sitting cross legged in silence for hours on end, I think meditation takes many forms, and what defines meditation is the process of meeting and sitting with ourselves. That initial sixth grade classroom was where I discovered writing, which I consider a meditation of sorts. It was in those middle school and high school journals that I started to create that small safe space to discover who I was, when the world around me left very little room for that sort of self-discovery.
R: What were some of your first discoveries?
D: Gay was not an option where I grew up. I come from a Mormon family. The only examples of trans people were on the Jerry Springer show, where the revelation of their trans-ness produced a universal reaction of disgust. My mom advocated for segregated locker rooms so gay and straight people didn’t have to get changed together. (She has since become a passionate advocate and ally for gay and trans youth.) I didn’t realize that I was queer until I had left Indiana, and Mormonism. But my writing was a lifeline to that future discovery. Writing was a way to sit with myself, and to create my own space for belonging and embodied experience.
I think that’s what is so powerful about any creative practice. However unwelcoming the world is, we are creatures of imagination who can craft new spaces and ways of being.
Writing was a way to sit with myself, and to create my own space for belonging and embodied experience. And I think that’s what is so powerful about any creative practice. However unwelcoming the world is, we are creatures of imagination who can craft new spaces and ways of being. — Das Rush
R: You left Indiana to go to Harvard. In what ways did the physical leaving catalyze or make possible the spiritual leaving-behind of your parents’ beliefs – about Mormonism, about queerness?
D: A lot of my initiations and coming outs – leaving Mormonism, coming out as gay, coming out as trans – have followed a similar pattern. I leave a place without entirely knowing why, and I create a life and space where I know explicitly that I will still belong – even if I’m not Mormon, or I’m gay, or I’m trans. Only after I really know that space is safe do I even allow myself to consciously articulate the initiation.
In this case, the choice to go east for college was very much the fork in the road for me. As a Mormon, even while I questioned religious doctrine throughout my teenage years – most often the gender roles of the church – I was still doing so while attending church dances and social events, and spending my summers at Mormon youth camps. My dad had been pushing Brigham Young University (BYU) hard, sending me there in the summer for basketball camps in the hopes I would get recruited. At the same time, I was a classic gay golden child (varsity athlete, valedictorian) with good test scores. While my dad pointed west, along the same pioneer trail we drove at least once a year from Indiana to Utah, I pointed the other way. Financial aid, fortunately, removed any blocks to that path.
To this day, leaving my conservative Midwestern enclave for Ivy-League liberalism was the single biggest culture shock I have ever experienced. I was drinking from the firehose of courses on women’s studies and English literature. Now, when I questioned Mormon doctrine, I was drawing from this much bigger pool of ideas. College also provided a built-in sense of community that wasn’t structured around church. I gravitated towards a queer group of friends. Then, once I had a bunch of gay friends, I felt safe enough to come out as gay.
I then went abroad for ten years, first in Australia and then in South Korea, and eventually I found enough space abroad to realize that I was trans and to begin to medically transition.
R: What was it like to move from connecting with your queerness to understanding yourself as trans? It sounds like another initiation that began to take root in a meditative space.
D: It’s interesting – I went back to Indiana for my family’s Fourth of July a couple years ago, and my mom brought out a box of stuff from my childhood. I opened one box of kindergarten stuff and found that for an assignment on what I’d wanted to be when I grew up, I’d written “When I grow up, I want to be a boy.”
It brought on a big moment of compassion for my younger self. I’d not realized just how clear that feeling had been when I was young. It was quickly socialized out of me, as my parents made a concerted effort to have me act more feminine. As I grew up, I did what I think a lot of kids do when they first learn to be ashamed of something about themselves (and now I’m thinking again of those edenic fig leaves). I repressed and overcompensated.
The space and solitude that I found in my 20s was a long process of slowly letting that realization of who I innately was rise back to the surface, and reemerge in a way that was safe.
R: It sounds like this initiation felt like more of an extended conversation with yourself than a flash of insight.
D: Transitioning is a very different coming out from coming out of the closet. I don’t say that to minimize how difficult or brave or powerful it is to come out as gay, or any other sexuality that isn’t the monogamous hetero default way of being. But transitioning is changing one of the most fundamental social identities that we have: gender. It’s the first thing pronounced about us when we are born. With a six month old, it’s the first question I get about our baby, usually before someone asks their name or how old they are. While biological sex is real, we have turned it into a proxy for so much more than that. For what interests, clothes, careers, and roles, for instance, a person is allowed to have.
I think dysphoria is something that we all experience at some point. It’s the gap between who you are and who you have been told to be, because you were pronounced boy or girl at birth. As a trans person, that dysphoria was just pervasive and defining. But taking the steps to move through the world in a less dysphoric way was like swimming upstream against a hard current. There is still very little positive representation – trans people are usually the butt of jokes and the objects of disgust. That made it incredibly hard to tap into that sense of who I wanted to be. In fact, when I first came out of the closet, I remember telling a queer friend that I didn’t want to be one of those “butch lesbians,” because I had such internalized transphobia.
I think dysphoria is something that we all experience at some point. It’s the gap between who you are and who you have been told to be. — Das Rush
It took a lot of little realizations and little steps to transition medically and socially, steps I’m still taking.
In 2011, I was in Japan, and met an Oakland drag king performer, and through them, met someone who had recently had top surgery. A year later I was in Thailand having a bilateral double mastectomy. This marked the start of my physical transition.
Around the same time, I started playing with gender as a creative canvas, often going out on “Homo Hill” in Seoul in boy drag. At some point, I had the realization that the drag persona I was putting on, whom I called “Das,” was a truer expression of myself, and that maybe the real drag I’d been wearing was the girl drag for all those years.
I started hormones about three years ago, and only in the last year or so have I started passing in the world. Two weeks ago was the first time I went into the sauna in a men’s locker room, saw other guys in there, and didn’t turn and walk back out. I still have a surge of anxiety going into public restrooms, even though it’s been more than a year since someone stopped to tell me I was using the wrong restroom.
R: What has it felt like to re-enter the world with a new physical and social identity?
D: When I was recovering from top surgery in 2012 in Bangkok, I read the Ursula Le Guin novel The Dispossessed. The main character, after many years on another planet, returns to their home planet. A line in it struck me a lot like that Ethan Canin story back in sixth grade: “True journey is return.”
My desire to spend so much time in foreign cultures and unfamiliar places thousands of miles from my home country and family was a search for: “Where do I belong?” As an ex-pat, it was in so many ways easier to answer this question. I was explicitly an outsider, and a part of a community of expats who bonded together to navigate an unfamiliar context. When you feel like an outsider inside, it can be a relief to move through a social context where you are visibly marked as the other. My lived reality matched my internal reality in Korea. There was real comfort in that.
Coming back to the U.S., to California, required confronting what Tara Brach calls “severed belonging.” While my family didn’t disown me when I came out and came home from my post-college travels, time with them, for many years after I came out, was uncomfortable. They made an effort to welcome me, but it was clear that they didn’t really understand my queerness. They just loved me enough to make room for it.
That dislocation of feeling foreign in the familiar, and familiar in the foreign, really knocked the breath out of me. I started having panic attacks, and was deeply depressed for the first two or so years back.
R: What helped, if anything?
D: While I’d left Mormonism more than a decade earlier, there was still a void where my belief system used to be. I always loved prayer when I was Mormon, the quiet of closed eyes and everyone making space for words that were supposed to be sacred. Once I let go of the particular trappings of “Dear Heavenly Father” and “In the Name of Jesus Christ Amen,” I still needed, as I believe we all do, some way of communing with the greater whole, especially in moments of uncertainty or pain or suffering. That led me to eventually do a 10-day silent vipassana meditation and then a 2-month Buddhist walking pilgrimage in Japan.
From there, I’ve sort of crafted my own rituals of yoga, meditation, journaling, and communing. While writing is something I’ve done since my childhood, and meditation was something I had done on and off, repatriation and the return journey was the initiation that made that particular practice of sitting meditation into a life ritual for me.
R: What is your relationship to Buddhism now?
D: Buddhist philosophy and precepts today are a big influence on my personal value and ethics system. But I think my early upbringing as a really devout Mormon means that I will probably always hesitate to take on any system of belief wholesale, Buddhism included. Instead, I look for the ideas and guidelines that are resonant and try to live by them.
In engineering, there’s this concept of First Principles, which are sort of like the axioms in math. I try to get explicit about what my own First Principles for living are. What are my starting assumptions, and basic truths that I derive everything else from?
For instance, when I did my yoga teacher training, we read the Bhagavad Gita, and one of the First Principles I took from that was: I can’t get attached to the outcome of my actions, I can only focus on the quality of the action. I’ve come back to that one a lot as a parent. I can’t control the outcome of who my child is or will become. I can only focus on the qualities of love, acceptance, patience, and stability that I bring to parenting.
Another First Principle that I took from a friend of mine is: I’m always wrong about something, I just don’t know what. This one has been particularly important as I work in Silicon Valley, which I think is ground zero for a certain type of contrarian hubris. Whenever I start to dig in my heels or find that I’m taking on the rhetoric of a tech bro, I come back to this one and get outside the bubble.
I’m always wrong about something, I just don’t know what. This [thought] has been particularly important as I work in Silicon Valley, which I think is ground zero for a certain type of contrarian hubris. Whenever I start to dig in my heels or find that I’m taking on the rhetoric of a tech bro, I come back to this one and get outside the bubble. — Das Rush
Another one of my First Principles comes from my favorite Mary Oliver poem, Bone. It opens with the very human search for meaning, but it ends with this paradox: the search for meaning is absolutely critical to a life of presence, while at the same time, a fundamental part of the human condition is touching what lies beyond our comprehension.
R: I appreciate you naming the ways in which a value system can anchor you, especially during a difficult initiation, even if that value system makes space for uncertainty. I wrote about this recently and it resonates deeply.
I’m wondering about how you have remained anchored through another set of initiations: your first marriage and then your divorce, which happened in tandem with you repatriating and coming out as trans. You have now gotten married again. All of this makes you my go-to expert on how gender and identity impact relationships.
What do you think romantic relationships can and cannot offer in terms of anchoring us through initiations, and providing us with a sense of belonging and family? What are the parts a partner can bring? Where, in the words of
, do we have to carry the water ourselves?D: Divorce and getting married again really taught me the same thing: you have to do the work to belong to yourself, in order to find belonging with others. I think it is a myth that we have to heal ourselves in isolation, and then we can go out and have a healthy relationship. There is healing we do with ourselves and healing we do in relationship with others. The challenge is knowing what you work on with others, and what is your own work. I know for me I put a lot of my work on others when I was younger, and it’s been a process to really own my shit.
Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts has this line that I read shortly after I met my now-wife: “I feel like I can finally give you everything without giving away myself.” That’s the feeling for me of marriage at its best. You are each holding yourselves and your center, and you care deeply about witnessing and supporting this other person’s journey to be the very best version of themselves. But you also know you can’t do that at the expense of being the best version of yourself, and you can’t do their work for them.
This is a question I ask myself most days: What are my boundaries to hold, and where are the places that I have to be my own advocate? And as a parent: Where do I need to turn up and help carry water for the family, not just for myself?
“That’s the feeling for me of marriage at its best. You are each holding yourselves and your center, and you care deeply about witnessing and supporting this other person’s journey to be the very best version of themselves. But you also know you can’t do that at the expense of being the best version of yourself, and you can’t do their work for them.” — Das Rush
R: I’d love to talk about what it means to carry the water for your family members, and not just yourself. It’s hard! There is a constant dance between honoring interdependence and honoring autonomy as a parent that feels more delicate than when we were both footloose and fancy-free world travelers.
What are you noticing about how the initiation of new parenthood changes your sense of identity and belonging? How it changes a marriage?
D: We are still so in the middle of it. We have had to come apart a little as a couple, to come back together as a new family. I don’t mean “come apart” in the sense of the relationship breaking, but more so that we had to unstitch the fabric of our relationship to weave something new.
As a queer couple, it has also been an adjustment to have to occupy such different roles in parenting, roles that often break down along traditional gender lines. As the non-birthing parent, I had less parental leave, and had to go back to work much sooner, while my wife was breastfeeding and doing most of the early caregiving. At the same time, because of where I am in my transition, the world is perceiving and responding to us more and more as a straight couple. During those first few months, we worked through a lot of new conflicts that came up as a result. I was feeling the intense pressure of the “breadwinner” script to perform at work and provide for my family, while my wife was breastfeeding and increasingly feeling isolated from the adult world. It was not easy to realize that we were both holding a lot and overwhelmed, because what we were holding looked so different.
As you know, I’m an Enneagram Type 9, and like a lot of Nines, I really don’t like conflict. But I quickly realized that there wasn’t space to let feelings fester. We have had to quickly learn what needs addressing and what will just resolve itself with a nap. (Tip for new parents: a lot of problems go away if you just sleep for a couple of hours.)
Parenting has also given my own healing journey a greater sense of urgency, because if I don’t deal with my shit, I know that I’m passing it on to my child to deal with. That comes with a lot of opportunities to deal with some of the wounds around belonging, because now I am part of this core family unit. Before, my default coping mechanism used to be to really isolate and spend time in my own world, because that was often the space that felt safest. Becoming a parent, more than any other life experience, has motivated me to really do my work to be in community, because I want my kid to have a big and loving family network that isn’t just about genetics. It’s motivated me to do the work to see the places where I already belong, and to start to loosen up the scar tissue of earlier severed belongings.
I listened to a Pride-Month-themed meditation recently, and one of the points really hit me – it’s our natural state to love ourselves. It’s others who teach us to hate ourselves or parts of ourselves. With my little one, I’m constantly relearning how to love myself the way I love them, to teach myself to rest the way I teach them to sleep, to teach myself to nourish and taste and sense the world the way I teach them to experience new foods. That is, without judgment, with curiosity, and with a desire to know themselves through each experience.
R: You and I have talked about how much gender comes into play in the parenting world — how it shapes our language, and thus our assumptions, and even our actions. Meanwhile, even gender-neutral terms like “non-birthing partner” may suggest there’s nothing to do while a partner is pregnant or postpartum, for example, which is dangerously inaccurate.
If you had to create a webinar as a Silicon Valley comms professional about how to approach parenthood in a less heteronormative, cis-centering way, one that invites authentic participation from both partners, what would you want it to include?
Whew, I love this question.
I go back to this idea that we have really let gender become a proxy for way, way too much in our society. As a trans dad whose queerness is often invisible, I have to really sit with and become aware of the ways that gender assumptions creep into parenting.
For example, I’ve started to joke that being perceived as a dad was a little like being white in Korea. I’d have Korean-American friends who spoke Korean much better than I did, but as soon as they opened their mouths, they would get criticized for not speaking perfect, unaccented Korean. The expectation was that because they were ethnically Korean, they should be fluent. If I said a single Korean word, however, no matter how badly pronounced, people would make a big deal about how impressive it was. I think that’s sort of analogous to how mothers and fathers are treated. Mothers are told they are never doing enough in a whole slew of ways, and fathers are treated like they are the greatest human alive if they take their kid solo for an afternoon.
So, back to the question — I think awareness is everything. Especially for the non-birthing partner, and especially if you are a masculine presenting non-birthing partner. You have to realize that the world is giving you constant messages that you don’t need to do as much. Become aware of these messages, so that you can discard them.
“I think awareness is everything. Especially for the non-birthing partner, and especially if you are a masculine presenting non-birthing partner. You have to realize that the world is giving you constant messages that you don’t need to do as much. Become aware of these messages, so that you can discard them.” — Das Rush
I also think it’s really important to remember our history and put that in perspective. America has long valued certain types of labor and work, and rendered others invisible, or treated the people doing it as property. To me, queering the family is the radical act of making invisible labor visible. It is identifying all the work that is to be done, and then coming together to decide the best way to do it, in order for all the members of the family to feel valued and loved and cared for. It is doing so with intentionality and mutual consent.
I think this means that if you are the birthing partner or in the more traditional “women’s” role, that you learn to identify that flash of anger or resentment, and turn it into a conversation with your partner, before it turns into you treating caregiving as a burden rather than a loving act of service.
If you are the supporting partner or in the more traditional “man’s” role, it means being curious about the work your partner is doing. It means opening your eyes, and seeing that work, and being really honest with yourself about whether you are letting your partner shoulder more than their fair share.
“To me, queering the family is the radical act of making invisible labor visible. It is identifying all the work that is to be done, and then coming together to decide the best way to do it, in order for all the members of the family to feel valued and loved and cared for.” — Das Rush
Of course, this all sounds great, but we all know there are days when you are both exhausted and stretched really thin. Sometimes you grit your teeth and get through those. Sometimes caregiving does feel like a burden. And that’s okay. That’s a place for humor and compassion, because it won’t stay like that.
However, if you are doing the work of sharing the labor, I really believe that it’s easier to turn towards each other in those moments, rather than it feeling like a delicate house of cards that just comes tumbling down while you point fingers at each other. If you can find even a small beat to laugh with your partner, that’s a good sign. If long after the kids are asleep and the floor is clean, you are railing against your partner internally, that’s probably a sign that something needs to change.
Those moments of overwhelm are a gift in that way. They strip back any illusions, and will let you know where things really stand.
“Becoming a parent, more than any other life experience, has motivated me to really do my work to be in community… to see the places where I already belong, and to start to loosen up the scar tissue of earlier severed belongings.” — Das Rush
NOTES:
On Das’ nightstand as a new parent: Angela Garber’s Essential Labor and Britta Bushnell’s Transformed by Birth. They’re now in the Initiation Writes Bookshop bookstore. If purchased there, I get a small commission to put towards buying coffee for more interviewees here.
In yeon, the Korean term for destiny, recently appeared in the film Past Lives, which I love. I first wrote about this term from my own perspective ten years ago here.
Das also mentions saudade, a beautiful Portuguese word that conveys deep longing. You can read more about this here in
.