Stop saying sorry
Apologies for the lack of updates.
Work - and life in general - has been rather crazy this past week.
Writing really is my coping mechanism, I've realised. It's like what Natalie Portman says in the movie 'Closer', about photography and more generically, art (as far as I vaguely recall): "People in the photographs are sad. But the pictures make them look beautiful. And we feel like it's all ok. The photographer is a liar." Is the writer a liar, as well? Am I such a slave to my own curiously formed sense of beauty and meaning and pathos that I can and will see nothing else?
Oh and I've just realised I've just apologised again, and one of the resolutions I've made this week is - stop apologising for the fact that you went to Cambridge and Harvard. Stop saying "I went to the UK" or "I went to Boston." Just. Stop. Pussyfooting. Stop over-compensating. After I'd played tennis with Sam and Earl that day at NTU, we went out to a kopitiam to have supper, and Sam was wearing a T shirt with HARVARD emblazoned across the chest.
I kind of cringed, and said, 'I can't believe you're wearing that anywhere outside Cambridge. You know it's just not done!'
His retort: "I can't help it that people attach certain values to Harvard. Why shouldn't I be proud of the school I came from? I would just as soon wear a Changkat Changi T shirt if I came from there!" My reply was that - we are supposed to be humble, remember? Not boast about our intelligence (or whatever you call it that the powers-that-be and the establishment choose see as worthy and important).
"But half the time getting into Harvard is about luck! No one even knows what the admissions people are looking for!"
Wrong, Sam. You aren't apologising for the fact that you got 'lucky' (there is that element, but it isn't significant); you aren't apologising for being arbitrarily gifted with a higher-than-average IQ. You are instead apologising for coming from a social class that is more likely to get into Harvard than others.
"Eh! I'm just a Burmese immigrant boy!"
Wrong, Sam. Wasn't your grandfather the Burmese Prime Minister? Isn't your father a doctor at Raffles Hospital? By that argument, though, I shouldn't have to apologise for having gone to the places I've gone to. I didn't grow up desperately poor and disenfranchised. But I was certainly not well-off, and the social capital I now carry even in the way I articulate words is certainly not something that I just naturally came to have from emulating the elegant and modulated tones in which my parents (and all my parents' friends and relatives etc.) speak. I am a misfit. I am a statistical aberration in many ways. I don't doubt that I've been blessed with above-average intelligence and many opportunities and open doors (thank God) but I also think, enough is enough. Stop feeling so guilty that you went overseas. Stop allowing people - like your brother, for example - to guilt-trip you into feeling like you are singularly culpable for all the suffering of the world (or at least Singapore). I do feel a heightened sense of responsibility and awareness because of my privileged positionality in the system. I've been taggged 'anti-establishment' by some, and my response to that is always - I will always be more critical of any organisation I myself am part of, because of the increased personal complicity that involvement necessarily entails. I would be equally critical of the UN or any other NGO I eventually end up working for. I volunteer. I do my best at work. I want to go to a neighbourhood school and do some good. I want to feed my family.
But I will not allow myself to spend the entire day moping because of the sight of one poor one-legged man begging for money along Orchard Road. I will not feel damn lousy and an elitist pile of shit becaust I naturally gravitate towards those who enjoy, for instance, the same abstruse tracts as I do, or who know exactly what I mean when I say that the light in California is different. I know that scholars have to make an extra effort to get to know more people outside our little bubbles because we debate and form opinions among ourselves (as all groups of friends do), but our viewpoints and decisions are invested with more power and consequence than usual. But I will not let that awareness cast an uneasy pallor over the enjoyment, support and connection I derive from such 'elitist' gatherings. I will not feel like I am failing God when I realise that my current cell group really does a not-s0-excellent job of feeding and supporting and holding one another accountable, and I feel like the logical conclusion is for me to seek that spiritual growth elsewhere, like at ARPC aka the Returning Scholars/Overseas Educated/Expatriate Church.
This guilt, it is quite enough.
Work - and life in general - has been rather crazy this past week.
Writing really is my coping mechanism, I've realised. It's like what Natalie Portman says in the movie 'Closer', about photography and more generically, art (as far as I vaguely recall): "People in the photographs are sad. But the pictures make them look beautiful. And we feel like it's all ok. The photographer is a liar." Is the writer a liar, as well? Am I such a slave to my own curiously formed sense of beauty and meaning and pathos that I can and will see nothing else?
Oh and I've just realised I've just apologised again, and one of the resolutions I've made this week is - stop apologising for the fact that you went to Cambridge and Harvard. Stop saying "I went to the UK" or "I went to Boston." Just. Stop. Pussyfooting. Stop over-compensating. After I'd played tennis with Sam and Earl that day at NTU, we went out to a kopitiam to have supper, and Sam was wearing a T shirt with HARVARD emblazoned across the chest.
I kind of cringed, and said, 'I can't believe you're wearing that anywhere outside Cambridge. You know it's just not done!'
His retort: "I can't help it that people attach certain values to Harvard. Why shouldn't I be proud of the school I came from? I would just as soon wear a Changkat Changi T shirt if I came from there!" My reply was that - we are supposed to be humble, remember? Not boast about our intelligence (or whatever you call it that the powers-that-be and the establishment choose see as worthy and important).
"But half the time getting into Harvard is about luck! No one even knows what the admissions people are looking for!"
Wrong, Sam. You aren't apologising for the fact that you got 'lucky' (there is that element, but it isn't significant); you aren't apologising for being arbitrarily gifted with a higher-than-average IQ. You are instead apologising for coming from a social class that is more likely to get into Harvard than others.
"Eh! I'm just a Burmese immigrant boy!"
Wrong, Sam. Wasn't your grandfather the Burmese Prime Minister? Isn't your father a doctor at Raffles Hospital? By that argument, though, I shouldn't have to apologise for having gone to the places I've gone to. I didn't grow up desperately poor and disenfranchised. But I was certainly not well-off, and the social capital I now carry even in the way I articulate words is certainly not something that I just naturally came to have from emulating the elegant and modulated tones in which my parents (and all my parents' friends and relatives etc.) speak. I am a misfit. I am a statistical aberration in many ways. I don't doubt that I've been blessed with above-average intelligence and many opportunities and open doors (thank God) but I also think, enough is enough. Stop feeling so guilty that you went overseas. Stop allowing people - like your brother, for example - to guilt-trip you into feeling like you are singularly culpable for all the suffering of the world (or at least Singapore). I do feel a heightened sense of responsibility and awareness because of my privileged positionality in the system. I've been taggged 'anti-establishment' by some, and my response to that is always - I will always be more critical of any organisation I myself am part of, because of the increased personal complicity that involvement necessarily entails. I would be equally critical of the UN or any other NGO I eventually end up working for. I volunteer. I do my best at work. I want to go to a neighbourhood school and do some good. I want to feed my family.
But I will not allow myself to spend the entire day moping because of the sight of one poor one-legged man begging for money along Orchard Road. I will not feel damn lousy and an elitist pile of shit becaust I naturally gravitate towards those who enjoy, for instance, the same abstruse tracts as I do, or who know exactly what I mean when I say that the light in California is different. I know that scholars have to make an extra effort to get to know more people outside our little bubbles because we debate and form opinions among ourselves (as all groups of friends do), but our viewpoints and decisions are invested with more power and consequence than usual. But I will not let that awareness cast an uneasy pallor over the enjoyment, support and connection I derive from such 'elitist' gatherings. I will not feel like I am failing God when I realise that my current cell group really does a not-s0-excellent job of feeding and supporting and holding one another accountable, and I feel like the logical conclusion is for me to seek that spiritual growth elsewhere, like at ARPC aka the Returning Scholars/Overseas Educated/Expatriate Church.
This guilt, it is quite enough.
posted by leah | 12:42 AM
3 Comments:
The curious tragedy of the accomplished...let me know how you deal with it...
i personally don't feel there's anything particularly elitist about being comfortable in the grey, even when the world sees things in black and white.
to the enlightened, it's not an extreme or polarised position despite the unfortunate predisposition to being the target of others' insecurities that desperately seek transference.
so i agree with you.. at least, on this half of the story.
Ahem... For someone who hasn't quite visited ARPC yet -- I'm surprised you're willing to just rely on its reputation as a Overseas Educated / Expatriate / Returning Scholars church. I'll remind you that most if not all the elders in the church are not that highly educated. My Bible Study Group leader is fantastic because he's a man of God and not because he went overseas for education. He doesn't even speak English that well. But he knows the bible and God because it's the relationship that he's decided to pursue. So come and see for yourself -- ARPC is not a good teaching church because it has lots of expatriates (it doesn't), lots of returning scholars (of which it has a fair number but far from the majority) and overseas educated (i think it's not true for more than half of the people there).
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