by
Philip Chen
I am, by nature
and experience, a very serious man. Just
look at the things that I have done and you will see no flights of fancy, no
falling off the beaten path, and certainly no aspirations of the literary kind.
As the immigrant
son of strict Chinese parents, there was no opportunity to indulge in anything
but adhere to rules. Life from an early
age was rigorous: obedience to parents, and constant studying. If you were found doing anything that was not
“educational”, you could expect to be punished and not by being given time
outs, either. Comic books were frowned
upon and I remember that any Mad Magazine
found in my room was torn up and thrown away.
My purchase of an Ann-Margret album was smashed. All this was evil stuff that diverted you
from your essential purpose: study and then study some more.
At an
intellectual level, even at a young age, I understood why my parents were so
strict. Growing up in the United States
in the 1950s and 1960s as an Asian was not easy. We lived in Washington, D.C., which at that
time was at the intersection of southern institutionalized racism and northern
false hope. Opportunities for Chinese in
America, during the time of the Chinese Exclusion laws, were few and far
between. As a young child, I was
resigned to the fact that I would be channeled into some technical field. Any aspiration of going into architecture,
art, or other creative pursuit was, simply put, a non-starter.
There were no
laws that said Chinese could not pursue these avenues, but society, reinforced
by my parents, said that any attempt to do anything but pursuing a technical
education was doomed to failure.
So I
became a serious man.
