Getting them wrong

Recently I watched the film "American Pastoral" during a flight. So engaged in the film that I decided to read the novel by Philip Roth from which the film was adapted. I feel he had a deep insight into human psyche and often dwelt into the bewilderment beneath every placid surface.

One example is his description about how when we interact with people we often get them totally wrong no matter how objective we try to be.

"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance.....take them on with an open mind, and yet you never fail to get them wrong......You get them wrong before you meet them, while you are anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you are with them;and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again..."

Don't we relate to this? So very often we place people in silos based on our own set of ill-perceived criteria. We never consider the uniqueness and complexity behind each character and once an impression is formed we forget that the character evolves and changes with time and circumstances.

As a counsellor it seems imperative to understand a client well, his ego, alto ego, imprints, his shadow, his strength and weakness,  his inner self etc etc, yet for me (partly due to my incompetence) I continue to struggle to go behind the client. Thus I know what Roth was alluding to and when Trump says he can size a person up within 1 minute I am really amazed.

Roth continued with " Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that- well, lucky you"

Don't we however need to exercise some judgement when dealing with people to safeguard our own interest? I think what Roth really meant is to accept the fact that we can never understand a person as well as we think we do, given all the unreal expectations, bias, arrogance and hope within us. Hence we should just "go along for the ride" which I take it to be accepting that sometimes we can be right and sometimes wrong and so be it as long as we do not hold onto our judgement too strongly, ie. neither be too enthralled nor abhorred.

一种米养百种人

There is a Chinese saying 一种米养百种人 (literally the same kind of rice feeds hundred types of people). This phrase just pops into mind when I think of 2 sets of parents that I heard of recently.

Set A parents take great pride in their adult children's achievement. Father, himself a Singapore government scholar, hot housed both son and daughter into entering the gifted program at primary school all the way to choosing and winning the right prestigious government scholarship that will land the best remunerated job. Father was unabashed in comparing children's income with those of acquaintances' children. The last I heard, mother remarked to the daughter's boyfriend she hoped he is drawing at least a 4 figure monthly salary.

Set B parents, professional father (Colombo scholar ) and housewife mother, brought up their children to focus on doing good for mankind and society ie. impart into them altruistic values. Both daughter and son were also in the gifted program. While the daughter is doing well in the corporate world they often frown upon her one-minded ambition to climb the corporate ladder. Though not wealthy they have entirely no qualms to use their savings to support their son all the way through a doctorate degree in his field of interest in the humanities. The parents are nonchalant that his academic career yields poor returns from a financial investment point of view. Of course children of tycoons are also often known to pursue their own interest or work for VWO or are into philanthropy, but they are in a different league altogether from middle income families.

I think about these 2 extreme sets of parents. I wonder why a government scholar still needs his children's success to validate himself? Is it a status succession thing? On the other hand I also wonder what makes the second set of parents so comfortable in their own skin? Are they not the least worried that their son may not enjoy the security and comforts holding a lowly paid academic job?

I also think about where I stand along the line between these 2 extremes. On the one hand I am influenced by the common Asian parent definition of success and conditioned to desire glorification from the children's achievement. On the other hand I am also swayed by the liberal parents approach to allow children to aspire or dream and pursue their life goals even though they differ from ours and deviate from the well trodden paths and markers of conventional success.

At the end of the day if 一种米养百种人 some people have to be the outlying statistics in a normal bell curve, we should let our children be if they so choose.

What is a Life worth living?

In a span of a week 2 celebrities took their own life, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. Whilst I know very little of Kate Spade beyond the colourful handbags on display, I love to watch Antthony Bourdain's program, travelling across the world to understand each country's culture through its cuisines and street food. I enjoyed his honest and humourous remarks often spiced with a tinge of sarcasm. You relate to him when he described places and food which you have visited and tried. I especially feel this connection when he remarked about Singaporeans:  " Remember this is a culture where there's no shame in a big bowl of steamy noodles or laksa first thing in the a.m.".

Coincidentally I just read Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" a week before these suicides. Plath also took her own life and the novel is partially based on her own life. One gets a glimpse of the experience of someone suffering from depression. For the author it was like being trapped in a bell jar smoothered with endless ruminations of self doubt, dejection and suicidal thoughts.

Anthony Bourdain's suicide however came as a shock to me. For me, on the TV at least, this is the guy who knows how to truly appreciate what life has to offer. Of course that is before I googled about him after his passing. Even his mother told the New York Times, "He is absolutely the last person in the world I would have dreamed would do something like this." This is a person who seems so focused in his vocation, so in touch with himself and the world that it is hard to believe that he can even harbour thoughts of giving up on life.

I am now more convinced than ever that sense pleasures as well as all the trappings of wealth, status and relationships are no sure promises of happiness. Instead we have to train our minds to steer away from unwise perceptions and beliefs that only specific conditions when met can constitute a life worth living. Above all we need to have more compassion for ourselves.

"Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touched them with compassion"- Jack Kornfield

Of No Divide

While waiting to board a flight home from Beijing airport I struck a conversation with a Chinese National,  a lady in her late thirties who was returning to Singapore where she has worked for more than a decade. She is not a permanent resident yet and is hesitating whether to become one though she likes working and living in Singapore. She speaks well of Singapore and its efficient and corruption free government. However she points out there is one shortcoming even while I corrected her that there is certainly more than one. From her interaction with her Singaporean colleagues she observed that their main complain seems to be the progressive deferment of getting their CPF money, the inadequacy of the annual payout and the inability to draw out all of the  money which belongs to them. I get the impression she is some sort of supervisor of a team of blue collar workers. She also spoke of ex colleagues who though retired at 65 have to work odd jobs to sustain a livelihood because of the high costs of living. At times she looked at me strangely when I appeared surprised at what she was sharing. I also felt slightly embarrassed learning more about what's happening in my home country from a foreigner.

In an article "Class divide: S'pore in danger of becoming academic aristocracy", Chua Mui Hoong talks about 2 Singapores, one that lives in a 'condo-and-car bubble' and another where life is a constant struggle. How do I really feel being one of those living in the bubble? To be freaking honest, I feel abundantly relieved and grateful, just by the luck of being a bit more academically inclined (even though my IQ score is at the lower borderline of average). As the writer puts it if the society had valued and paid highly for motor skills I would have been the one struggling for a living.

I also agree with Chua Mui Hoong when she thinks a 'compassionate meritocracy' (where those who have the means help out those who are disadvantaged) may give rise to another class divide. In her words "the academic aristocracy, already imbued with a sense of entitlement and privilege, may then feel morally justified to feel like benefactors in the system, bestowing on lesser creatures the largesse of their generous assistance. Any system that pits one group as benefactor and another as recipient remains an unequal one." Even when I give a bigger ang pow during Chinese New Year to the road sweeper in charge of my estate or forgo the money the garang guni man pays me for my newspaper, don't I have a bit of that 'bestowing feeling' which the writer describes?

The only solution as I see it is to cultivate a respect for all jobs and vocations very much like what is happening in Japan, where the pride in each job is its contribution to the collective good. We  also have to raise the minimum salary and close the wage gap between different job types. Above all our young must be taught to appreciate that people are endowed with various skills, all of equal value to society, of no divide.