Ethnic pride and ethic

If I weren’t blessed and cursed with this immigrant ethic and spirit of my grandfather, I could’ve been content to be only an artist, in love with beauty. My grandfather, especially towards the end, kept talking about doing something great, something big, and that will always be on my guilty conscience. I live now in the house he built. I repair the parts that are worn and old, and replace them with the work I do. There is a calming sense of continuation when I replace something, like the old mattresses, the dust caked dishes, light switches, the burnt out light-bulbs. Here lies the remains of my ancestor, which I can have no doubt I am truly a descendant. Here are the pictures of my family, in their proudest moments, their accomplishments in a line right above my eye level as I type, to know from which the life that I've been able to lead were built from these moments when I didn't even exist yet.

If I don’t turn to face the actual condition of things and match it, not with a critical eye and writing analysis, but with action, then I feel as if somehow I am betraying this tradition. Therefore these actions must include politics, which in essence is about power, and who gets to wield it. We no longer exist in a world where one could simply escape into some land, find isolation, and make our own way. The world will come knocking, with a gun at some point, and I want to able to return fire, match them bullet for bullet (no I will not be neither martyr nor saint, of any sort), and tell them to get off my property, rather than be a helpless serf, kowtowing to some ignoble politician, or a supercilious, last-namer. I hear the hounds’ echoes with every step I take, demanding, money, time, my youth, my creations, all for them, to keep us all citizens trapped here in our neo-feudal society under their little finger. This rage inside me of having to bend the knee to these idiots keeps me here, keep me running up against the ropes, instead of falling back into an evasive posture. The world itself might not need me, but I need to make the world.

It is the same feeling that bubbles in me when I see a hard-working Chinese man or woman sacrificing for their intended future. It is a concrete-abstract lesson taught to the inheritors. While most children have their imaginary parents telling them when they are doing wrong, imagine having a great line of ancestors from way way back before anyone can even remember looking at you disapprovingly as well. The children that stay bent over their multiplication tables and school work instead of wandering drunk at parties. They're all whispering to me that I'm not doing enough. And perhaps I'm not. So for that I'm hoping to make amends.

I am teaching a fellow college graduate who spends most of his days reading now. He reads until he collapses, and has a schedule for different subjects to read listed every day. His reason: He's never knew how to read before, until the last year of college, and now he's trying to get back all that time for all the things he should have learned. 

There's something about that plain desire and ethic that I just love.

 

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The more I am around them, these people following the ethnic script the more I am tugged back into something dormant but very much alive within myself. Defiant eyes challenging teachers, outsiders beware, and I am ready to match them. Almost treasonous eyes, that you don't expect from kids. That look could enlist hatred, but I understand what is behind it; the understanding of the world, and the order. All those years it took to deprogram myself away from order. I just hope the pressure goes against awareness as well, so that they don't wind up as automatons, but the leaders they want to be.