Reflections on Paper Tigers

New York Magazine published an article yesterday called "Paper Tigers," which discussed the social and cultural barriers Asians face in American society. I have been reflecting on it today, and as I consider it, I grow increasingly puzzled about the state of my own life.

I think it begins with a brief story about high school. On August 27, 2001, I wrote an entry on my blog titled "Doctor, Lawyer, or Engineer. Always the same thing." I don't have access to what I actually wrote, but I do remember that time. It was before my senior year of high school, and I fought nearly every day with my parents about my future. They wanted me to become a respected professional with a stable job. They argued that it was the safest route to financial security, stability, and happiness.

I just wanted to be a writer. To write novels. So I resolved to finish a novel before the end of high school. The plan at the time was to finish a novel, sell it to a publishing house, and prove to my parents that I could find my own path to financial freedom before heading off to college and pursuing something I had no interest in.

Ten years after that moment, I now find myself finishing my first year of law school. I'm not entirely sure how I ended up here. I know that I enjoy it and I feel no regret. But I also know that the 17-year-old me would be disappointed with what has transpired, and I can't figure out why I care about that.

Perhaps the most difficult part of the article for me came from this passage:

I recall one of the strangest conversations I had in the city. A woman came up to me at a party and said she had been moved by a piece of writing I had published. She confessed that prior to reading it, she had never wanted to talk to me, and had always been sure, on the basis of what she could see from across the room, that I was nobody worth talking to, that I was in fact someone to avoid. 

But she had been wrong about this, she told me: It was now plain to her that I was a person with great reserves of feeling and insight. She did not ask my forgiveness for this brutal misjudgment. Instead, what she wanted to know was—why had I kept that person she had glimpsed in my essay so well hidden? She confessed something of her own hidden sorrow: She had never been beautiful and had decided, early on, that it therefore fell to her to “love the world twice as hard.” Why hadn’t I done that?

Here was a drunk white lady speaking what so many others over the years must have been insufficiently drunk to tell me. It was the key to many things that had, and had not, happened. I understood this encounter better after learning about LEAP, and visiting Asian Playboy’s boot camp. If you are a woman who isn’t beautiful, it is a social reality that you will have to work twice as hard to hold anyone’s attention. You can either linger on the unfairness of this or you can get with the program. If you are an Asian person who holds himself proudly aloof, nobody will respect that, or find it intriguing, or wonder if that challenging façade hides someone worth getting to know. They will simply write you off as someone not worth the trouble of talking to.

Perhaps I would have never made it as a writer. I don't know, I never really gave it a chance. I won a few awards, got paid for my words, but when it came time to take a real risk, to commit to it, I heard my parents. I don't think I was ever cognizant of this, it just happened. So I decided to go into teaching. I thought it was a way to continue asserting my independence from the pull of my parents. It was. But it was also much safer than pursuing a passion that I was terrified of.

Now that I'm in law school, there is a part of me that wants to believe that I am blazing a trail. When I go home, and I go to the Asian potlucks my parents go to, I see the children: doctors, engineers, bankers, scientists. I am the only one who pursued law. Yet things have come full circle. In the four years prior to law school, I loved teaching those students. I still maintain that it was the best thing I have ever done. Yet every Christmas break, when I would go back, one thing stood out: I was the child that was afforded curiosity, but not respect, because what self respecting Asian child would take all of the sacrifices his parents made and throw it back in their faces by being a public school teacher? This Christmas, when I went home, those same people seemed genuinely interested in my life, and instead of curiosity, those Asian parents talked to me like they have never talked to me before. I now wonder if that is the reason why I came to law school.

Furthermore, I know I hold myself proudly aloof. I don't like letting people know how I feel. A month ago, I was infatuated with somebody. We hung out on multiple occasions; I always had a wonderful time. But I would come home, not allowing myself to believe in the potentiality knocking at the door. At some point, I convinced myself it was not worth pursuing. There was no way that someone like her would be interested. Perhaps I was correct, but perhaps I was written off as someone not worth the trouble. Upon reflection, she was probably right to do that.