Day 311, January 20, 2021

Inauguration Day

Today's soundtrack: Joe Pass live at A&E Music, 1985

From where do we emerge as activist educators? 

I think you could just as easily ask, from where do we emerge as individuals?

We like to think that there is something innate, biological that has gifted us with the ability to draw swords from stones or possess supernatural qualities of one thing or another. But clearly, that is not the case.

There is an idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at a thing (1993), and that gives rise to the intensity of practice that my father engaged in as a classical violinist, and what I see my son engaging in as a graduate student in classical piano.

I, unfortunately, never had the fortitude or aptitude to practice an instrument with such dedication. But when I think back on what I might have practiced to such a degree, I think the closest thing I can think of is reading. 

When I was growing up, the English language was always a challenging thing for my parents. I came to fluency with an ease that confounded them, and I think created distance when I did not adjust to learning Korean as easily as they imagined. 

My mother loved beautiful picture books, so at an early age I had access to a wonderful collection of beautiful picture books. My father subscribed to National Geographic, and so I always remember those magazines, especially the maps, and paper thin plastic records that came with some issues. He also bought me large hardcover books about dinosaurs and the evolution of the Earth from the publishers of National Geographic. 

Once I moved beyond picture books, I think my parents were at a loss of how to stimulate or fulfill my desire for more. My mom was always going to flea markets and tag sales, and echoing her selection of picture books, she picked out some interesting children's stories with interesting vintage covers. I read whatever I could get my hands on.

Like most kids, I went through my fascination with killer bees, monsters, dinosaurs, and the like. The Scholastic Book days at school were tortuous as I tried to stretch my budget over as many books as I could. Encyclopedia Brown, Tom Swift...

My father is a musician with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and every summer we moved out to the Berkshires and rented a house for the season. Often, I was at the whim and fancy of whomever owned the house and what books they left behind. One particular summer, I recall an entire wall of Nancy Drew books and I read them all. Eventually, my parents took to dropping my brother and I off at the Lee town library for the entire work day. I am certain the librarians must have gossiped about us. We were the only kids using the library as our summer daycare center. 

I think about books because they were my window into bigger ideas, bigger issues, the world that existed beyond my narrow confines. Somewhere in there, I became a voracious reader, the kind that could sit around an entire day reading until my mom would express worry and try to get me to do go outside and do something else. I would read until I was so tired I could no longer hold up the book. 

In sixth grade, we hosted the son of a family friend. He was from California and his family moved back to Korea just before his senior year in high school, so he came to live with us so he could finish his education in the United States. He seemed worldly and introduced me to things like the B-52s. He was also terrible about returning his high school English books, and I inherited those. Of particular note was a copy of Huckleberry Finn and a book of modern poetry. 

Both of those books marked the opening for me to literature, the capacity that writing had beyond the "age appropriate" books that one could check out of the school library. There was something more happening here.  

I was a defiant student. I was once forced to redo an entire hand drawn calendar of the entire year because I started each week with Monday instead of Sunday. I rebelled against memorizing my multiplication tables, using the metric system, almost anything that needed a precise straight line, and I was an atrocious speller (my mother once bought me a bad speller's dictionary so I could look up words the way I would spell them and find the correct spelling). But, despite that, I read Mark Twain and found myself thinking deeper about race and life and meaning, and in 6th grade, because of Mark Twain, I played hooky for the first time. Instead of carousing around town and getting in trouble, I climbed a tree in the backyard and spent my entire day reading books. When I saw the school bus pass by in the afternoon, I waited an appropriate amount of time and walked back into the house and dropped my backpack by the door like I had just returned from a hard day of schooling. 

So who influenced my evolution in those early years? There was a kind of ethics, a way of being that emerged out of the books I was reading, London, Hinton, Twain, Steinbeck, they created a vision of a protagonist who was non-conformist, who made his (almost entirely male focused... except for the Nancy Drew books) own code of how to live one's life, and against impossible odds, even with the threat of death, maintained those ideals. I read Woody Guthrie's autobiography, fell in love with Jim Morrison and John Updike. From this unlikely cadre of writers I shaped my sexuality, my sense of morals, my sense of masculinity, and in the case of Steinbeck, discovered my first Asian American character in literature. I had never known I could exist in the books I read until I discovered Lee in East of Eden. Lee isn't perfect, but he was perfect for me because he defied expectation, and growing up with the stereotyped images of Asians (because we had not yet been hyphenated) in the 1970s and 1980s, it seemed there was no Asian identity to cling to in mass media besides Bruce Lee, and even Bruce at that time became a farce and the basis of countless playground and bus stop taunts. 

Using the books I read as models, I set out to reshape myself from my preternatural ability to be a lanky geeky kid who cried too easily, to a cigarette smoking, leather jacket wearing, collar flipped up, thinking he was cool, kid. Learning from Jim Morrison, I conducted behavioral tests on my high school English teachers to see what would happen if I wore sunglasses and pretended to sleep. Or stood up and left class in an ethical protest of movie we watched (which was itself a test on how long volunteers would electrocute actors when told to do so by a researcher). I remade myself multiple times in high school. And more than musicians, movie stars, or athletes, my heroes were characters in books. They were the ones I wanted to emulate, to experience.

That's a first start...

To be continued....

Take care and be well,

Leo