I was in Ecuador sitting at Mister Bagel with my sister, who was on vacation and visiting me at the time. We engaged in desultory conversation. The kind that picks up effortlessly on old themes but also wanders to new places, the kind that includes long unsolicited pauses but is also punctuated by random bursts of energy.
My sister mentioned a script that she had recently read, a forgettable, mediocre piece with a single phrase that had caught her attention. Optimal Trajectory. The idea is that for every person, given his/her beginning circumstances and innate ability, there exists an ideal path for that person's life. Divergence from this ideal path could be caused either exogenously or endogenously, but the idea is that the path exists.
An acquaintance of mine from the school I taught at walked into Mister Bagel, said hi to me, ordered a coffee to go and promptly left. I explained to my sister that he worked in the copy room at school, had been educated in Ecuador but spoke very good English. "Take that guy for example," my sister mused, "what do you think his optimal trajectory is?"
I did not respond kindly to the question, or for that matter, to the idea of "optimal trajectory," which so captivated my sister's imagination. The question, in my mind, presumed limitations on the poor guy's life. That the infinite possibilities of his life could be succinctly captured in as crude a concept as optimal trajectory...the whole idea really rubbed me the wrong way. In my mind, I recoiled at the terminology, denounced it as dehumanizing and reductive. I told my sister as much. Surprised at this reaction, she prodded me to further explain.
When I hear the word "optimal," I think of calculus and optimization. When I hear the word "trajectory," I think of projectile motion and mechanical physics. Put together, the phrase "optimal trajectory," borrows from mathematical and physical models to describe human life. Human life! The irreducible beauty, the most precious of all things...human life! Reduced! Abstracted! Poor guy! (Needless to say, I received a liberal arts education.)
---
Thuon, our Vietnamese guide from Hanoi on this family trip of ours, is 26 years old. By my calculation, that puts his birth in the year 1982, only six years after the conclusion of Vietnam's prolonged civil war. Only three years after the brief Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. Thuon is college-educated and therefore among the elite in his country. By his estimate, about ten to twenty percent of all high school graduates continue onto higher education. At University, he studied tourism and English, but his English, while respectable, is rudimentary at best. I have to strain to understand his tour guide explanations, nodding only to be polite.
Occasionally, though, I ask him some questions in hopes of gaining the Vietnamese perspective on things. "What stereotypes do the Vietnamese have of Americans?" "Yaas," he replies. "No, no. I mean...hmm. Do the Vietnamese have bad feelings towards American tourists?" "Yaas."
I give up. Thuon is among the elite in his country, and yet in the frustrations of our communication, it dawns on me just how different my world of opportunities is from his. Here he is, with a university degree, catering to the whims of a Taiwanese family on vacation, making about $300 a month. Even were he transplanted to the United States and given citizenship, he would see such a different country from the one that I have called my own.
---
Optimal trajectory? While I see in the phrase the unforgivable crime of dehumanization, my sister explains to me, she sees the world through the lens of policy, and the idea of optimal trajectory serves as a tool for thinking about policymaking. While the terminology might be imperfect, the unfortunate truth is that there are real limitations on the potential of individual lives.
Traveling over the last few weeks across the development gradient from the United States to Taiwan to Vietnam, I've realized just how unique and privileged my unique world of opportunities is, and I see the historical sacrifices that have been necessary to put me in this position. The feeling, more than ever, is not of guilt but of responsibility.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Outliers
My friend Jonathan once said of Malcolm Gladwell, "He's a moron/genius." I confess that I bought and read Gladwell's most recent book, Outliers, while in transit. And after finishing the book, it was this moron/genius dichotomy that I found best described my feelings towards the book.
It's a page-turner. I don't know how to explain it, but it reads a bit like an adult, non-fiction Harry Potter. No, I take that back. Ew. Harry Potter is genuinely exciting, what I'm trying to say is that Gladwell certainly succeeds in keeping his readers in his thrall.
The book is about success, and its insights are interesting but certainly not world-shaking. For Gladwell, the figure-ground configuration shifts towards an emphasis on ground, and he writes about how our typical storytelling methods fail to convey the importance of ground. The argument is similar in ways to what I blogged about earlier, and, unlike David Brooks, I do read the book as a call to social action.
So the insight in the first part of the book is about the ubiquity of a favorable ground for the successful figure. The insight in the second part of the book is about cultural legacy. Gladwell draws extensively from a Dutch psychologist, Geert Hofstede, and discusses his cultural psychology in relation to plane crashes. Funny for me, because I read Hofstede while doing summer, Swarthmore-sponsored research. Basically, Gladwell tells us that cultural legacy determines much of our behavior in ways that we typically fail to detect.
This is the problem for me, I suppose. I feel like I have come to the same insights that Gladwell writes about on my own before. Not that my thoughts were particularly original, but I felt ownership over the ideas because I had arrived at them personally. But here Gladwell comes sauntering around the corner, and he packages ideas that were for me hard-earned into these hearty little packages that are just waiting to be consumed by his eager readers.
Unfortunately, I cannot help but feel that the very popularity of Gladwell's books has a cheapening effect on the ideas that he writes about. It is as if the value of knowledge exists in inverse relation to its accessibility. If an idea is made overly accessible, it diminishes in value. Who wants an idea to be whorish in its ways? Is Gladwell a pimp of ideas then, bringing previously exclusive ideas and granting access to a popular audience?
Another thing about the lessons of Outliers. They aren't very sexy. In stories, we often mythologize the successful as figures outstanding simply for who they are. We don't like to think about the circumstances that produced them. Part of what Gladwell does in his book, however, is dymystify successful people. These guys were tremendously lucky and hardworking. I imagine a successor book about love and relationships. What we imagine as a primal force noted for its independence to circumstance, Gladwell will dissect as being no more than the product of forces we'd rather not think about: geography, socioeconomic class, age, culture... Just not very sexy to think about.
It's a page-turner. I don't know how to explain it, but it reads a bit like an adult, non-fiction Harry Potter. No, I take that back. Ew. Harry Potter is genuinely exciting, what I'm trying to say is that Gladwell certainly succeeds in keeping his readers in his thrall.
The book is about success, and its insights are interesting but certainly not world-shaking. For Gladwell, the figure-ground configuration shifts towards an emphasis on ground, and he writes about how our typical storytelling methods fail to convey the importance of ground. The argument is similar in ways to what I blogged about earlier, and, unlike David Brooks, I do read the book as a call to social action.
So the insight in the first part of the book is about the ubiquity of a favorable ground for the successful figure. The insight in the second part of the book is about cultural legacy. Gladwell draws extensively from a Dutch psychologist, Geert Hofstede, and discusses his cultural psychology in relation to plane crashes. Funny for me, because I read Hofstede while doing summer, Swarthmore-sponsored research. Basically, Gladwell tells us that cultural legacy determines much of our behavior in ways that we typically fail to detect.
This is the problem for me, I suppose. I feel like I have come to the same insights that Gladwell writes about on my own before. Not that my thoughts were particularly original, but I felt ownership over the ideas because I had arrived at them personally. But here Gladwell comes sauntering around the corner, and he packages ideas that were for me hard-earned into these hearty little packages that are just waiting to be consumed by his eager readers.
Unfortunately, I cannot help but feel that the very popularity of Gladwell's books has a cheapening effect on the ideas that he writes about. It is as if the value of knowledge exists in inverse relation to its accessibility. If an idea is made overly accessible, it diminishes in value. Who wants an idea to be whorish in its ways? Is Gladwell a pimp of ideas then, bringing previously exclusive ideas and granting access to a popular audience?
Another thing about the lessons of Outliers. They aren't very sexy. In stories, we often mythologize the successful as figures outstanding simply for who they are. We don't like to think about the circumstances that produced them. Part of what Gladwell does in his book, however, is dymystify successful people. These guys were tremendously lucky and hardworking. I imagine a successor book about love and relationships. What we imagine as a primal force noted for its independence to circumstance, Gladwell will dissect as being no more than the product of forces we'd rather not think about: geography, socioeconomic class, age, culture... Just not very sexy to think about.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Bloated Stomach
I write now with a bloated stomach. I really can't help it. The food here is good, but that only begins to explain why I stuff myself so regularly when I am in Taiwan. Another thing is family. As my grandfather is fond of saying, "Food tastes better with more people." That's a crude translation from a much more elegant Chinese saying, but it does the job.
Ever since I was a kid, having a "healthy appetite" has been touted as a great virtue. On my way to getting a second bowl of rice, I'd have people complement me for being a "big eater." After my vertical growth stalled and took on horizontal dimensions, people could no longer call me a "growing boy," but the ethos of "big-eating" is hard to shake.
I chalk it up to my ancestors, who were Hakka farmers in the highlands of central Taiwan. I am only a couple of generations removed from a genuinely farming generation. As I am told, food could be hard to come by in those days. Thus "Have you eaten yet?" is the common greeting even today, taking the place of "Hello," or "How are you?"
Well, hell yeah, I've eaten today!
In the Taiwanese movie, "Eat Drink Man Woman," almost all of the important scenes are filmed around the dinner table. That is much the way that my family in Taiwan operates; social time is structured around meals. Lunch at 12:30; Dinner at 6:00. En punto. Eating is a family event, not something that you do hunched before a television set or over paperwork sitting on your desk at work. And to not eat your unreasonably large fill would be unappreciative. So, when I come back to Taiwan, I guess I eat to catch up on all of the meals I have missed with my relatives.
---
After disembarking flight BR017, I claimed my baggage, hopped a bus to the High-Speed Rail, took the two-hour train ride to Kaohsiung, then took the KMRT to the central train station, before finally walking ten minutes to arrive at my grandfather's house. Both the High-Speed Rail and the Mass Rapit Transit systems are new additions in the last couple of years. When I first started coming to Taiwan with my parents, one of my uncles would drive the four-and-a-half hours from Kaohsiung to the international airport in Taoyuan to pick us up. Obviously, some things have changed.
Upon arriving at my grandpa's place, I was greeted with an empty living room, where my grandpa spends most of his time. After looking around a bit, I found him in the backyard with a grizzled beard tending to a bonsai tree. Some things haven't changed. Not yet.
Ever since I was a kid, having a "healthy appetite" has been touted as a great virtue. On my way to getting a second bowl of rice, I'd have people complement me for being a "big eater." After my vertical growth stalled and took on horizontal dimensions, people could no longer call me a "growing boy," but the ethos of "big-eating" is hard to shake.
I chalk it up to my ancestors, who were Hakka farmers in the highlands of central Taiwan. I am only a couple of generations removed from a genuinely farming generation. As I am told, food could be hard to come by in those days. Thus "Have you eaten yet?" is the common greeting even today, taking the place of "Hello," or "How are you?"
Well, hell yeah, I've eaten today!
In the Taiwanese movie, "Eat Drink Man Woman," almost all of the important scenes are filmed around the dinner table. That is much the way that my family in Taiwan operates; social time is structured around meals. Lunch at 12:30; Dinner at 6:00. En punto. Eating is a family event, not something that you do hunched before a television set or over paperwork sitting on your desk at work. And to not eat your unreasonably large fill would be unappreciative. So, when I come back to Taiwan, I guess I eat to catch up on all of the meals I have missed with my relatives.
---
After disembarking flight BR017, I claimed my baggage, hopped a bus to the High-Speed Rail, took the two-hour train ride to Kaohsiung, then took the KMRT to the central train station, before finally walking ten minutes to arrive at my grandfather's house. Both the High-Speed Rail and the Mass Rapit Transit systems are new additions in the last couple of years. When I first started coming to Taiwan with my parents, one of my uncles would drive the four-and-a-half hours from Kaohsiung to the international airport in Taoyuan to pick us up. Obviously, some things have changed.
Upon arriving at my grandpa's place, I was greeted with an empty living room, where my grandpa spends most of his time. After looking around a bit, I found him in the backyard with a grizzled beard tending to a bonsai tree. Some things haven't changed. Not yet.
The Hub of My Travels
At some point during my fourteen-hour flight earlier today, I started thinking about the number of times I have flown to Taiwan. It's hard to count, but my guess is about twenty times in all. Movie selections were poor (House Bunny being the only title I can remember), so I had my TV screen set to the interactive map option that gives you all the flight info you could ever want.
I started imagining superimposing my life's travels onto the map. I've lived in a bunch of different places--Englewood, CO; Kaohsiung and Taipei, Taiwan; Swarthmore, PA; Quito, Ecuador; San Francisco, CA--and I've obviously visited even more places. If I drew a line to represent every single flight I've ever taken in my life, I think an interesting pattern would emerge. And the most interesting part of the pattern that I never truy realized: the Taoyuan International Airport in Taiwan would certainly look like the central hub in my network of flights. I've only ever lived in Taiwan for six years, and I don't even have citizenship in the country. But I suppose it is, as the hub of my travels, more than any other place my home.
It's a strange thing for me to say. Because after flying in and out of the island for over twenty years, I cannot say that I have grown up with the place. Every time I return is a Proustian encounter: accumulated years of aging and change, as in the wrinkles of Marcel's grandmother, reveal themselves abruptly suddenly and render the familiar thing momentarily unrecognizable.
I started imagining superimposing my life's travels onto the map. I've lived in a bunch of different places--Englewood, CO; Kaohsiung and Taipei, Taiwan; Swarthmore, PA; Quito, Ecuador; San Francisco, CA--and I've obviously visited even more places. If I drew a line to represent every single flight I've ever taken in my life, I think an interesting pattern would emerge. And the most interesting part of the pattern that I never truy realized: the Taoyuan International Airport in Taiwan would certainly look like the central hub in my network of flights. I've only ever lived in Taiwan for six years, and I don't even have citizenship in the country. But I suppose it is, as the hub of my travels, more than any other place my home.
It's a strange thing for me to say. Because after flying in and out of the island for over twenty years, I cannot say that I have grown up with the place. Every time I return is a Proustian encounter: accumulated years of aging and change, as in the wrinkles of Marcel's grandmother, reveal themselves abruptly suddenly and render the familiar thing momentarily unrecognizable.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Spot On
This op-ed is definitely on target with its analysis of dating and hooking up on college campuses today. It's pretty funny to think that there are serious professors studying the "hooking up" phenomenon today and thinking about it in terms of gender issues and larger social trends. I suppose it shows the possibilities of academic relevance, which is pretty cool, I guess.
Articles about today's young generation, written by those of an older generation, are so often tinged with nostalgia. This one is no different. Its author basically boils today's pseudo-dating formula down to three steps:
1) Hang out in a group with members of the opposite sex.
2) Pump alcohol into the system on occasion.
3) Hope shit happens.
Romance doesn't seem to be too much a part of the equation. In my mind, there is definitely something romantic about mustering the courage to ask a girl out on a date, like in all those old movies where some intrepid guy ventures out to the girl's dormitory and has the receptionist phone his darling. But what's the good of romance when hooking up is so easy?
Can older people really judge though? Does their nostalgia not simply represent a conservative unwillingness to change, or have we the younger people simply entered a degraded age?
Hmm... As with most if not all things, we'll save that question for another day.
Articles about today's young generation, written by those of an older generation, are so often tinged with nostalgia. This one is no different. Its author basically boils today's pseudo-dating formula down to three steps:
1) Hang out in a group with members of the opposite sex.
2) Pump alcohol into the system on occasion.
3) Hope shit happens.
Romance doesn't seem to be too much a part of the equation. In my mind, there is definitely something romantic about mustering the courage to ask a girl out on a date, like in all those old movies where some intrepid guy ventures out to the girl's dormitory and has the receptionist phone his darling. But what's the good of romance when hooking up is so easy?
Can older people really judge though? Does their nostalgia not simply represent a conservative unwillingness to change, or have we the younger people simply entered a degraded age?
Hmm... As with most if not all things, we'll save that question for another day.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Naruto Marathon
I am all caught up now, I am emotionally drained, but it was worth it, and one thing is clear to me: I must train harder.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Equal Opportunity Employers
I watched a snippet (snippet! isn't that a great word? it sounds dangerous, doesn't it?) of the public hearings in Washington, DC with the Big Three automakers today. Senators and CEOs: damn, that's a lot of old white guys in one room.
During the last public hearing, there was a lot of uproar about the use of corporate jets by the CEOs: Do you mean to say that you couldn't downgrade to a first-class commercial seat to get here from Detroit? As this uproar indicates, we are pretty clearly dealing with symbols here, as corporate jets, more than their cost, simply just don't jive well with the operative symbology of Main Street. Progress these days certainly seems to be measured in symbolic terms--the election of the first African-American to the Oval Office being Exhibit A. Sure, Obama's victory was a huge breakthrough in the fight for racial equality, but it is more than anything a symbolic victory. Hopefully, the symbolic resonance of Obama's victory does not mask the underlying reality of racism that persists despite the anomalous accomplishment that receives all the fanfare. Real work still needs to be done. A digression.
In any case, because symbols appear to be the currency of the day, I say that the face of corporate America needs to be changed. Enough with old white guys running the show.
Earlier today, I was listening to an NPR interview with a journalist about organized crime and its relationship with terrorism. According to the journalist, a key distinction between organized crime and terrorist groups is that crime organizations are typically driven by the profit motive whereas terrorist cells are more bent on ideology. As such, crime organizations practice equal opportunity employment almost to a fault, much more than even their law-abiding, legitimate business counterparts. Apparently, the Yakuza in Japan are one of the biggest employers of ethnic Koreans and Chinese in Japan. I don't really know how this is related to the Big Three automakers, but I think it's a nice contrast.
Maybe with all of the federal protection and union protection that the auto industry has received over the past several decades, the simple profit motive has been obscured, and auto workers have been able to hide a little bit too comfortably behind their awesome lobbying power in Washington, DC. Maybe stodgy old white guys need to be pushed aside; maybe the dog-eat-dog logic of capitalistic competition needs to be pumped into the sclerotic arteries of Detroit such that we can put a new face onto that symbol of American Industrialism, the auto industry. After all, we are dealing in symbols here. And Detroit could usher in a new face to represent Equal Opportunity Employment. Let's hire some Japanese people.
During the last public hearing, there was a lot of uproar about the use of corporate jets by the CEOs: Do you mean to say that you couldn't downgrade to a first-class commercial seat to get here from Detroit? As this uproar indicates, we are pretty clearly dealing with symbols here, as corporate jets, more than their cost, simply just don't jive well with the operative symbology of Main Street. Progress these days certainly seems to be measured in symbolic terms--the election of the first African-American to the Oval Office being Exhibit A. Sure, Obama's victory was a huge breakthrough in the fight for racial equality, but it is more than anything a symbolic victory. Hopefully, the symbolic resonance of Obama's victory does not mask the underlying reality of racism that persists despite the anomalous accomplishment that receives all the fanfare. Real work still needs to be done. A digression.
In any case, because symbols appear to be the currency of the day, I say that the face of corporate America needs to be changed. Enough with old white guys running the show.
Earlier today, I was listening to an NPR interview with a journalist about organized crime and its relationship with terrorism. According to the journalist, a key distinction between organized crime and terrorist groups is that crime organizations are typically driven by the profit motive whereas terrorist cells are more bent on ideology. As such, crime organizations practice equal opportunity employment almost to a fault, much more than even their law-abiding, legitimate business counterparts. Apparently, the Yakuza in Japan are one of the biggest employers of ethnic Koreans and Chinese in Japan. I don't really know how this is related to the Big Three automakers, but I think it's a nice contrast.
Maybe with all of the federal protection and union protection that the auto industry has received over the past several decades, the simple profit motive has been obscured, and auto workers have been able to hide a little bit too comfortably behind their awesome lobbying power in Washington, DC. Maybe stodgy old white guys need to be pushed aside; maybe the dog-eat-dog logic of capitalistic competition needs to be pumped into the sclerotic arteries of Detroit such that we can put a new face onto that symbol of American Industrialism, the auto industry. After all, we are dealing in symbols here. And Detroit could usher in a new face to represent Equal Opportunity Employment. Let's hire some Japanese people.
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