Boen Wang
speaker
122 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Boen Wang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The good are humble, quiet, and meek, while the evil are loud, boisterous, and proud. As Solomon teaches us in Proverbs, when pride comes, then comes disgrace. But with humility comes wisdom. So if I don't want to disgrace myself, I need to make sure the attention is always on the other person. I need to stay humble and never answer anyone's questions about me.
Because if I talk about myself, they'd soon discover my fundamental worthless piece of shitness and be as disgusted with me as I am with myself. Besides, who would want to talk to me in the first place? Who would possibly want to get to know me, befriend me, or, God forbid, date me? Sex was out of the question, even as an adult living on my own.
As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. So not only is it immoral to have sex, to just think about sex is a sin. I held on to that even after I left the church and graduated college. I simply could not imagine myself ever dating.
When I thought about the future, I pictured myself getting frozen fish nuggets from Trader Joe's, frozen hash browns and tartar sauce from Giant Eagle, and eating them together as the saddest fish and chips in the world while watching through all of Twin Peaks. Which is what I did my first semester in grad school, living with Craigslist roommates in a single room in Pittsburgh.
I read an interview in The Cut with a, quote, 58-year-old virgin who said that the worst part about his life is, quote, laying alone at night, falling asleep, and then getting up in the morning and remembering you're alone. I read that, and I was like, yep, all right, here we go. At age 25, I started dating my partner and now fiancé, Grace. They're the first person I ever dated.
We saw the movie Challengers the other day. The horny Zendaya tennis movie about three tennis players who fuck each other while fucking each other over.
And I was like, uh, well, I just really like the soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails. They also did the music for The Social Network and Gone Girl and The Watchmen TV show.
I don't know. It's just that Nine Inch Nails actually released an album of instrumentals in 2008 entirely through a Creative Commons license, so you don't have to pay any licensing fees. I actually use some of their songs in my podcasts.
I don't know what exactly happened in this moment, but I felt like a child. I felt swallowed by an overwhelming feeling of shame. Shame about sex, about sexual desire, and simply being a sexual being, for having a body. For a long time, I wished I didn't have a body, that I was a floating consciousness, freed from the shame and guilt of the flesh.
It's been seven years since I left Christianity, but the effects are still there. These mental grooves are so well-worn at this point, it's basically instinct. Where does my fucked-upness come from? Well, I think I can trace all of this back to my dad at the Oklahoma City airport.
The story of my dad waiting for someone to pick him up at the airport has taken on an almost mythological significance to me. This moment that sealed my fate years before I even existed. Because as he stood in the terminal, he also stood at a crossroads. Is there an alternate reality where Dave doesn't pick him up and someone else does instead?
Someone who isn't a Christian and my dad never converts and my life is so much better as a result. I was born in Oklahoma and moved away when I was two. I have no memories of living there or of Dave. What was it about this place and these people that made my parents choose Christianity?
If I went there myself, if I talked to Dave and the people who knew them, visited the places they spent time in, attended the church they worshipped at, and tried to imagine what their lives were like 35 years ago, maybe then I could finally understand why things went the way they did. Okay, I'm standing in the Oklahoma City airport.
I had this idea where I would like stand where my dad stood looking around for someone to pick him up, but I don't know exactly where that would be. I just seem just tired and want to lay in a bed. I think I'll go do that. Rolling my suitcase across the parking lot, I think about how my dad flew in from Beijing as an alien, to use the official terminology, while I arrived from Pittsburgh as a U.S.
citizen. How my dad was at the mercy of strangers for transportation while I have a license and rental car. how I would now retrace the route my dad took from Oklahoma City to Norman, and how the one thing we share is a sense of exhaustion, of wanting nothing more than a warm bed in a private room at the end of a long day in a strange place. Do you remember what you saw looking out the window?
Red Lobster, Chick-fil-A, McDonald's. Just naming chain restaurants here. All lit up in neon signs.
University of Oklahoma is our exit.
The next day, I go to my parents' first apartment. I just want to see it with my own eyes. The building is two stories and painted a pale yellow, with a big porch a guy is sitting on. All of a sudden, I guess that's some sort of warning? Maybe like a tornado warning? Is there a tornado coming? No idea. Anyway, I'm gonna do my parents' commute.
Walk to the old chemistry building that they used to stay at.
Three or four stories and like faded yellow brick. Some like castle-like turrets on the top. Interesting. Some of the outside is pretty corroded now. When you said, like, you just, like, parachuted into this place and you had zero, you started at zero, you had nothing. Do you think that's why, like, you relied so heavily on the church?
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