I'm two weeks into a ten week trip away from my normal full time residence at the moment. Ten weeks living out of a suitcase could become terribly inconvenient and alienating if loving faces and familiar surroundings were not interpersed in between. I'm sitting "home" in the surburbs of tri-state America. It hasn't been home to me for nearly ten years now. Even when I lived here for those five years, I only found the residence to be temporary, a halfway house almost to the next phase of my life which at the time, I prayed nightly would start sooner than real time suggested I had to wait.
Upon 24 hours home, I wrote a quick note to a friend to reflect on my awkward and undeniably torn sensibilities about returning to this suburb for an extended duration after ten years. Within the first day of the home journey, I experienced
a) a dim sum meal at the local Cantonese restaurant that seemed to fill over the confines of the fire code limit more Chinese people than full mid size cities in China
b) a 3 hour hike with my mom and dad that ended with being completely directionally disoriented and hitchiking to the parking lot in order to pick up the car
c) a visit to my best friend from high school who now runs a Chinese takeout restaurant with her husband and has two children age three and one
"Yes, where did my life go wrong..."
In the Financial Times arts and life section this weekend, Adam Haslett, the acclaimed short story writer and now novelist, wrote an amazingly insightful and eloquent piece about embedded societal class structure in the U.S. vs. England. His observed that perhaps as America declines in global influence, the divergence in income and also power increases within the U.S. The land of opportunity my father aspired to and shed his first adult life for has evidently become a society where only the powerful and privelaged can breed richness expotentially exclusively within its own ranks. While Americans and immigrants to America often naively and complacently believe other wise, especially as Haslett points out, dream stories of Clinton and Obama continue to permeat the public imagination, my illusions of such opportunity had vanished within the first few years of joining the adult worknig life.
Continuing the weekend almost retrograding to my teenage years, I spent considerable time examining exactly how much class barriers exist in the U.S. society today, albeit from my own encounters. After reading my casual albeit morose email, the always challenging friend suggested that I should read my own observations again in the context of the Haslett's essay. The dichotomy in my own feelings became even more evident upon the review - has the glass ceiling of America already become so reinforced that even in this very upper-middle class suburbs 28 miles outside of New York city, backgrounds more than any other character forever confine people to acheiving a very limited set of their aspirations?
The writer of Billy Elliot, Lee Hall has a new play that premiered last week in New York. I ordered tickets to see Pitmen Painters to see the issue of class analyzed by an artist who has been preoocupied with it for more than two decades. Can a coal miner's child appreciate classic ballet? Can paintings evoke emotional and intellectual responses within coal miners the same way it does in highly educated professionals? Is Art only accessible and discerned by the privaged elite and therefore withheld from the underworld? Art and aspirations, how much is available or lost just due the access to it given to us based on the time, place and people we are born to?
I know these are not revolutionary questions I'm asking and have been examined by countless others. Thinking about it continuosly over the last 72 hours, I have counted off fingers and toes of tales of anger in the last ten years when I refuse to accept ambivalence as the answer to structural class ceilings. In many ways, it's everything in me to become more American, to attain the dream landscape. Except in my own obtuse ways, while I have been able to articulate these feelings for a good five years, I had never as clearly connected the dots until the recent series of events.
An old lover has been in touch lately. With no explaination, I sent him Haslett's article over the weekend. He simply, pleasantly responded that he had also read the same article. My not subtle gesture to this Englishman was not about the article but about how I feel about the divide in our potential relationship. Even without time and distance that dodged us, I singularly have placed one thought behind his behavior, the embarrassed feelings he would have of introducing an unknown element in his well defined British society life. I who am Chinese American, and not so sure which nationality should come first, would not be accepted into a class with boarding school bred kids who went to Edinburgh as the safe, party school and took jobs without ever thinking about the necessary income to support their lifestyles. The indignity rises inside of me even as I'm writing this as to why it seems necessary to apologize for aspirations or worse, for being born in a third world country. He once said "Britain thinks ambition is an ugly world."
The third glass of wine is kicking in now. The crystalization of my thoughts this weekend owes much credit to my friend's comment and the essay in FT. More than anything, it makes me feel less alone than before. This isn't a pagoda that only I have been climbing. Rather than looking to make peace with the ceiling, I should rather recognize that the struggle even on a singular basis against accepting the ceiling is the more befitting action for me.
Upon 24 hours home, I wrote a quick note to a friend to reflect on my awkward and undeniably torn sensibilities about returning to this suburb for an extended duration after ten years. Within the first day of the home journey, I experienced
a) a dim sum meal at the local Cantonese restaurant that seemed to fill over the confines of the fire code limit more Chinese people than full mid size cities in China
b) a 3 hour hike with my mom and dad that ended with being completely directionally disoriented and hitchiking to the parking lot in order to pick up the car
c) a visit to my best friend from high school who now runs a Chinese takeout restaurant with her husband and has two children age three and one
"Yes, where did my life go wrong..."
In the Financial Times arts and life section this weekend, Adam Haslett, the acclaimed short story writer and now novelist, wrote an amazingly insightful and eloquent piece about embedded societal class structure in the U.S. vs. England. His observed that perhaps as America declines in global influence, the divergence in income and also power increases within the U.S. The land of opportunity my father aspired to and shed his first adult life for has evidently become a society where only the powerful and privelaged can breed richness expotentially exclusively within its own ranks. While Americans and immigrants to America often naively and complacently believe other wise, especially as Haslett points out, dream stories of Clinton and Obama continue to permeat the public imagination, my illusions of such opportunity had vanished within the first few years of joining the adult worknig life.
Continuing the weekend almost retrograding to my teenage years, I spent considerable time examining exactly how much class barriers exist in the U.S. society today, albeit from my own encounters. After reading my casual albeit morose email, the always challenging friend suggested that I should read my own observations again in the context of the Haslett's essay. The dichotomy in my own feelings became even more evident upon the review - has the glass ceiling of America already become so reinforced that even in this very upper-middle class suburbs 28 miles outside of New York city, backgrounds more than any other character forever confine people to acheiving a very limited set of their aspirations?
The writer of Billy Elliot, Lee Hall has a new play that premiered last week in New York. I ordered tickets to see Pitmen Painters to see the issue of class analyzed by an artist who has been preoocupied with it for more than two decades. Can a coal miner's child appreciate classic ballet? Can paintings evoke emotional and intellectual responses within coal miners the same way it does in highly educated professionals? Is Art only accessible and discerned by the privaged elite and therefore withheld from the underworld? Art and aspirations, how much is available or lost just due the access to it given to us based on the time, place and people we are born to?
I know these are not revolutionary questions I'm asking and have been examined by countless others. Thinking about it continuosly over the last 72 hours, I have counted off fingers and toes of tales of anger in the last ten years when I refuse to accept ambivalence as the answer to structural class ceilings. In many ways, it's everything in me to become more American, to attain the dream landscape. Except in my own obtuse ways, while I have been able to articulate these feelings for a good five years, I had never as clearly connected the dots until the recent series of events.
An old lover has been in touch lately. With no explaination, I sent him Haslett's article over the weekend. He simply, pleasantly responded that he had also read the same article. My not subtle gesture to this Englishman was not about the article but about how I feel about the divide in our potential relationship. Even without time and distance that dodged us, I singularly have placed one thought behind his behavior, the embarrassed feelings he would have of introducing an unknown element in his well defined British society life. I who am Chinese American, and not so sure which nationality should come first, would not be accepted into a class with boarding school bred kids who went to Edinburgh as the safe, party school and took jobs without ever thinking about the necessary income to support their lifestyles. The indignity rises inside of me even as I'm writing this as to why it seems necessary to apologize for aspirations or worse, for being born in a third world country. He once said "Britain thinks ambition is an ugly world."
The third glass of wine is kicking in now. The crystalization of my thoughts this weekend owes much credit to my friend's comment and the essay in FT. More than anything, it makes me feel less alone than before. This isn't a pagoda that only I have been climbing. Rather than looking to make peace with the ceiling, I should rather recognize that the struggle even on a singular basis against accepting the ceiling is the more befitting action for me.
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