This Is Not a T-Shirt Read online

  But like that light in the photograph of our first office, the wildfire of community is sparked by one idea, one voice. Under the right conditions, that flame can spread from one person to the next, until the entire world is ablaze. By the end of this book, I hope you can find that ember within you, just as we did. This is how we kept ours burning bright and leading the way.

  3.   RIVERCIDE

  Then everyone looks at me

  They’ve never seen individuality

  —Voodoo Glow Skulls, “You’re the Problem”

  ORANGES.

  Riverside, California, began with round, dimpled oranges. In the late nineteenth century, a gift of three Brazilian navel orange trees took to the ranch town’s rich soil and climate. In the following years, a different sort of gold rush occurred here. Spectators flooded the valley with orange groves, setting off the state’s citrus industry.

  A hundred years later, Riverside County welcomed another influx of residents, the result of white flight from the greater city’s escalating crime and housing prices. Riverside’s construction boom of the 1980s wooed L.A.’s pale population with affordable tract home developments furnished with matching pools and bleached gables. The opportunities were as infinite as the landscape; virginal neighborhoods snaked through the desert’s creases and disappeared into the horizon. Strip malls dressed in Mexican mission architecture merchandised Kmart superstores and Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlors.1

  In the summers, the Pacific Ocean breeze would link arms with the hot breath of the Santa Anas and sweep L.A.’s pollution into our recessed armpit. On a 120-degree August afternoon, the opaque smog would bury our town at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains. I assumed this was typical. (Don’t all kids have to stay indoors during smog alerts? Don’t they all walk outside after an acid rainstorm and find their basketball corroding into a charcoal briquette?) Most playground days were cut short by the toxic air’s spindly fingers closing around our lungs.

  Yet when my Korean-immigrant parents moved to Riverside in 1982, they were sold on the suburban American dream of a two-car garage and a laundry room. They bought a house atop a long driveway that my brothers and I would skateboard down on our butts, dragging our Velcro Pro Wings sneakers as brakes. Our home was simple, with a triangle roof and square front windows—straight out of a children’s book—but it was our castle. I remember every corner and cavity. The splintered banister I held on to during the big earthquake. The air-conditioning vent in the floor that my brothers and I wrestled over to lie on in the dog days.

  I am the middle son of three boys. I was not the prized firstborn that my mom and dad could parade around to their friends. Nor was I the overindulged baby brother, loved and adored. Larry and Jimmy were obedient, jock-ish, and academic like my dad. I was different—emotional, angsty, and searching. How come I was the only one to get spanked? Why was I so good at breaking the rules, but so bad at the piano and all those things my Asian-immigrant parents hoped to boast about? Why did I get sent to the principal’s office so often?

  I was as much of a terror in the classroom as I was at home. I was frequently disciplined for stealing toys, tackling kids by the sandbox, and refusing to stay silent when the teacher was talking (even at that age, I didn’t feel invited into the conversation, so I bulldozed my way through). So, on the last day of kindergarten, when the exasperated principal dragged me out to my mom’s Volvo station wagon and handed her a white envelope, I anticipated the worst.

  I put my head down, crawled into the passenger seat, and watched my mom exchange some final words with Mrs. Woodburn. I couldn’t make out their conversation from the inside of the window, but my mom definitely seemed shocked. And confused. She got in but didn’t start the car, proceeding instead with the envelope.

  My mom ran her finger along the paper’s edge, tore the seal, and unfolded a single-page letter. She read it twice—at first mumbling in broken English and again more carefully—then turned to me with a strange expression on her face.

  “Do you want to go straight to second grade next year?”

  “What happened to first grade?”

  “Well, the school is saying that you don’t need to do it if you don’t want. How do you feel about skipping first grade?”

  The September before, on my first day of kindergarten, while the other kids were weaning off naps and coloring outside the lines, I was reading books and completing multiplication worksheets. In my introductory year of grade school, I grew bored of the Lincoln Logs and hopscotch, so the administration figured first grade would be just as dispensable. They suggested moving me directly to second grade in the fall.

  I’m not sure how much of that choice was really in my hands, but without hesitation I voted to skip first grade—a decision that continues to impact my relationships today as reflected in my combative approach to work and underdog spirit. For the rest of my schooling, I was at least one year junior to the other kids. As an adult, a twelve-month difference in age is negligible, but the spread between seven and eight years old is an ice age to a population that counts fractions as significant milestones. (“Seven and a half!” “I’m almost ten and three-quarters.”)

  My age was a strike against me in divvying up baseball teams or riding roller coasters. I was the baby, the butt of the jokes, the kid who was twelve months behind in getting a driver’s license or watching R-rated movies. I spent the next fifteen years overcompensating: my girlfriends would always be older, and athletically I would always have to prove that I belonged on the field with the big boys.

  To make matters worse, I was one of the only Asian American kids in my school. My hair refused to part like that of the blond kids with Tony Hawk flops, and I hid behind chunky glasses and had rabbit teeth, like a grotesque, stereotypical wartime cartoon. To distract from my age and skin color, I amplified the only thing that would cause me to be showered with positive attention: my artistic skills.

  My first memories are of drawing on brown newsprint with crayons. Maybe if I’d been born during the Renaissance, I would have scaled chapel walls painting portraits and landscapes in oil. But this was the 1980s. My childhood was set against the backdrop of Saturday morning cartoons,2 breakfast cereal mascots, and newspaper comic strips. I’d fix my pencil in one corner of notebook paper and make my way down the page. Doodles would spool out of my head like ribbon—deformed caricatures, cusswords in 3-D lettering, naked girls with giant circular boobs like the most immature tattoo flash art ever. By bedtime, I’d stack my drawings into neat piles and stash them away behind the heavy encyclopedias in the back of my bookshelf, far removed from my parents’ purview.

  They weren’t exactly pinning my art on the fridge. Even in my early years, my parents watched anxiously as I lost myself to those colored markers and construction paper; they didn’t emigrate from postwar Korea so that their son could draw funny faces for a living. They failed to see how drawing Garfield comic strips was a valuable asset that would protect me in the merciless Western world (to be fair, neither did I). For Asian immigrants, watching your kid gravitate toward the arts is like when white kids tell their parents they want to drive race cars. I begged my mom and dad to enroll me in art classes, to buy me tutorial books. They denied me this. Time and again, they turned my focus back to my school studies with the end goal of a secure and lucrative degree. They pushed those sparks of creativity down deep, but they only fertilized years later as seeds of rebellion.

  Unfortunately for my parents, I kinda liked being the art guy. Unlike my race and age, my talents set me apart in a way that was under my control. My classmates would vie over me for group projects, and I almost felt popular. I could draw anything—Ninja Turtles brushing their teeth, Bart Simpson in Mickey Mouse shorts, the Tim Burton Batmobile—and would guarantee that our foam board presentations had the coolest art. In junior high, my skills distinguished me as one of the better graffiti artists and accrued instant credibility. In high school, the football players would pause from picking on me t
o request illustrated patches for their letterman jackets. I painted murals and campaign posters and got elected for them. I illustrated comic strips for the school newspaper and reveled in a broader audience admiring my work. My art granted me a voice in this world. My drawings set the stage from which I would be heard.

  * * *

  BY MY early twenties, I’d resigned myself to the fact that I didn’t have the technical expertise or network to gain acceptance in the art world, but I still believed I had something to offer. If people wouldn’t come see my paintings, I’d bring the artwork to them. The world was my gallery. If people across the planet wore my T-shirt designs, I’d be able to affect just as many onlookers, if not more. So, we started The Hundreds with a fall collection of seven graphic T-shirts with designs crudely drawn on Adobe Photoshop and reduced to one-color screen prints to save on costs. A decade and a half later, we’ve designed at least two thousand unique graphics and have produced over four million individual shirts. And still, T-shirts remain the core competency of our business.

  Streetwear, as a medium, is established on the graphic T-shirt. For one, the profit margins are unbeatable when you’re cranking out tees for $5 a pop and flipping them for $35. On a spiritual level, however, the T-shirt is effective because it’s about messaging. Young people are not always the best communicators, but they have plenty to get off their chests (pun intended). To this day, that’s my primary rule when it comes to designing T-shirts: have something to say. Here at The Hundreds, we begin with an opinion on an issue and then incorporate our signature attitude and personality. The goal is to tell a full narrative with a perspective and a purpose. And even after all these years, we find that we still have much more to speak on.

  Everyone has something to say. I believe that’s what makes us human and special. Even if you’re an apathetic person, that indifference is a chosen way of life. I built my brand and lifestyle around my opinions, and my opinions were rooted in my identity as a Korean American middle child, an underdog, a skateboarding hardcore kid, and a streetwear devotee. My voice was manifested in my art. Those cartoon drawings made their way onto T-shirts, which rolled into denim, and jackets, and furniture. If design isn’t your thing, you can use whatever medium you work with to carry your voice, whether it’s how you staple together a TPS report, fill the fries at McDonald’s, or govern a board meeting. But you have to first home in on who you are. Once you’ve carved out your little corner, the next move is stepping out and inviting other people in.

  4.   STEP OUT

  A step apart, I don’t fit

  In with my peers, but I don’t give a shit

  —Gorilla Biscuits, “Hold Your Ground”

  SKATEBOARDING WAS MY first community. At thirteen, I was one of eight misfits in our middle school who found refuge in skate. Eight of us in Etnies and Acme wool caps and XXL T-shirts, piling into the Volkswagen bus of the junior Dan Ballou (the only one who was old enough to drive) after school. Eight of us swarming an abandoned bank parking lot on the wrong side of town, sliding up and down waxed red curbs on the noses of our boards. Thirteen-year-old kids smoking out of Coke can bongs and devouring drugstore porn magazines at dusk in the Death Box (a subterranean drainage ditch off the side of Chicago Avenue). We burned through Plan B skate videos on cassette and scrawled our names across broken windows with Mean Streak paint markers before scrambling home like cockroaches. While our peers were making out at Friday night football games, we were on the couch at C&C Board Shop, grip taping our boards and drawing in our black books.

  The skateboard was the key to our clubhouse. And the best part? Anyone could be a member. Skateboarding didn’t appraise your skin tone, how much money your parents made, or how you dressed. As a young man, I’d realized that skateboarding didn’t reward tough guys, popular kids, or athletes. What mattered more than anything was if you could skate. And because it wasn’t a team or competitive sport, nobody cared how skilled you were. It wasn’t about talent. It was solely about how hard you tried. How much fun you had. How down you were. I was up for all those things.

  Yet over the decades, I grew to feel differently about skating as it came to be about point systems and the Olympics; about pop stars in Thrasher hoodies and billion-dollar athletic shoe companies like Nike and adidas running the show. I’d romanticized skateboarding as the bastion of the anti: the dark horse. Commercially unviable and built to fail. But by the late nineties, as skate outstripped its subversive layer, I searched for other communities that would accommodate my perspective and became entranced by the sound of hardcore punk. I was most attracted to the hardcore scene’s independence and liberty. And the music helped me work out my Korean han (a hypothesized, inherited state of emotional frustration) in the mosh pit.

  It started with Gorilla Biscuits’ 1989 seminal hardcore album. I’d followed my older brother, Larry, to the record store as he loaded up on Fu-Schnickens and Shabba Ranks albums. I’d never owned a CD before outside a Disney soundtrack, so I asked to buy my first, Start Today by Gorilla Biscuits, based solely on the funny name and cartoon mascot on the back cover.

  When I got home, I cut into my room, slid the disc in, and pressed my ear up against the speakers.

  “What do you mean that it’s time, time for me to grow up?” the vocalist, Civ, bursts forth in the opening verse. “I don’t want any part. It’s right to follow my heart.”

  I had never heard a sound like this—pulverizing guitars, the desperate call-and-response—it felt important. It was certainly more urgent than the sound of John Tesh’s magical piano wafting from my parents’ radio. Staring down the road to adolescence, I knew exactly what Civ meant. He longed for a past that I had just discovered. I wanted to know everything about hardcore.

  The R-star logo on the back of that album was how I came to know it was real. Revelation Records: a Huntington Beach–based label that specialized in New York hardcore of the “youth crew” variety. If Revelation could give me a record as powerful and pure as Start Today, what else was waiting for me? I went down the line: Judge. Youth of Today. Chain of Strength. Bold. I collected and shared these bands’ albums like baseball cards but took them to heart like religious pamphlets. I gravitated toward friends who understood the music. If somebody didn’t get it, I converted them or left them behind.

  And I was just scraping the surface. Hardcore—as a music genre and culture—went deeper and wider than the New York scene of the 1980s. In my Southern California backyard, South Bay and Hollywood punk bands like Black Flag, Germs, and X owned the stage. In the mid-1990s, I had a thing for the darker Seattle tone of Botch and Undertow. Hardcore bands wrapped in political manifestos like the Nation of Ulysses and Refused captivated me. Then I learned about Ian MacKaye, the cornerstone of American hardcore. The D.C. icon fronted the Teen Idles and Minor Threat in the early eighties. That’s when I was born, so I felt like this made a lot of sense. Minor Threat pioneered the “straight edge” philosophy—the most punk rock lifestyle a punk rocker can adopt: abstaining from drugs, alcohol, and promiscuous sex.

  I’m a person just like you

  But I’ve got better things to do

  Than sit around and fuck my head

  Hang out with the living dead

  Snort white shit up my nose

  Pass out at the shows

  I don’t even think about speed

  That’s something I just don’t need

  I’ve got the straight edge

  I’m a person just like you

  But I’ve got better things to do

  Than sit around and smoke dope

  ’Cause I know I can cope

  Laugh at the thought of eating ludes

  Laugh at the thought of sniffing glue

  Always gonna keep in touch

  Never want to use a crutch

  I’ve got the straight edge

  I’ve got the straight edge

  I’ve got the straight edge

  I’ve got the straight edge.

  —
Minor Threat, “Straight Edge”

  Here’s the Cliff’s Notes:

  I don’t smoke

  I don’t drink

  I don’t fuck

  At least I can fucking think.

  —Minor Threat, “Out of Step”

  This idea of being the anti to the anti blew my nipples off. I thought being a rebel was enough, but this dude was rebelling against the rebels! I was on board with the whole kit. The music, the self-discipline, and the subversive attitude.

  Hardcore is just one of those things that you have to experience in person to comprehend. I can tell you all about hardcore. I can play you the songs (“How can you understand what they’re saying!” perplexed girlfriends would ask). But until you attend a show, meet the people, and dive into the community, none of it makes much sense at all. In that way, I find a lot of parallels with streetwear. If you just see T-shirts and hoodies, the campouts and Reddit discussions don’t add up. Only when you tap into the history does it all come together.

  I don’t remember who was up to bat at my first hardcore show, but I do remember where it was. There were only three venues my friends and I would frequent on Friday and Saturday nights: Koo’s Café in Santa Ana, Showcase Theater in Corona, and The Barn on the UC Riverside campus. A lot of popular bands got their start at The Barn, including Rage Against the Machine, Korn, and No Doubt. It was a small venue that fit a few hundred people. The punks in the pit would swing off the low rafters like a set of Barrel of Monkeys. I usually took my place on the side stage, shooting photographs.

  My favorite part of hardcore concerts was that it was always hard to tell who was performing. The venues were tight, the stages were small (if there was one at all), and the band and the crowd would charge toward each other like frontline soldiers in a swirling mosh pit. At some shows, the singer would rush into the mob and lend the microphone to the fans for the majority of the songs. The songs were shared and communal, belonging as much to the crowd as they did to the band. It wasn’t about who owned what; it was about everyone making it happen as a collective. There was no hierarchy, no distinction between purveyor and consumer. After shows, I’d meet band members in the parking lot to discuss politics and compare ideologies; then we’d go to Denny’s for a late-night snack together.