and Words
When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily
Oh joyfully, oh playfully watching me
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh responsible, practical
And then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable
Oh clinical, oh intellectual, cynical
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
On an especially vivid childhood memory of my dad, we built Legos. My kid sister, dad, and I sat on the cold tile floor late at night. Some bricks were scattered over the floor, though most remained in a bucket-like bin used for storage. We built tall, colorful, symmetrical structures that resembled nothing in real-life. It was long past our bedtime, and we struggled to stay awake. My dad ran a restaurant; we didn’t get his uninterrupted time until after closing time. These slivers of time oozed with anticipation and magic.
My older sister, four years my senior, did not join us in our brick-building activity. I’m not sure if she felt she outgrew it, or perhaps it just wasn’t her thing. She approached teen hood at the time, and maybe it was time for her to develop her independence. The one observation about my younger sister and I, we both went on to become engineers. We graduated on the same day, years later; she with a mechanical engineering degree and me with a computer engineering degree.
For me, those tiny, brightly-colored bricks started a lifelong fascination with imagination and creativity. Those early sets, merely a collection of bricks, encouraged me to envision these structures and construct them. In this case, each build breathed its own life. It could be captured and described, but each whole was indeed greater than the sum of its parts.
My dad passed away shortly after that memory. It’s one of only a handful of memories that I keep like scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; never seeing a full picture of the whole person.
Even as a child, I disassembled things. I collected or inherited toys, and I would inquisitively observe how they function. We had a toolbox with a flat and Philips screwdriver, they became my friends as I would meticulously take things apart to discover how they worked. On the vast majority of cases, I successfully reassembled them. Occasionally, I’d end up with extra screws or break a delicate plastic part. I don’t know how I didn’t manage to break more things as I continued with this trend, but they were mostly scoped to my toys.
As I grew up listening to the radio, I discovered this song, “The Logical Song”. At first, the music and poetic flow of the lyrics appealed to me. Initially, I was still learning English, so the significance of the words didn’t resonate. It wasn’t until years later, as it continued to accumulate air play, when I realized that it told the story of a person forced to lead a life of logic and reason. Having developed the mind of an engineer and mathematician, I identified with the protagonist. Even as a child, I was the rational and intellectual one; I found kinship.
My life continued as such. I started tinkering with computers when they were little more than play toys. The computer literacy classes in high school only taught how to word-process, on clunky Apple II’s and garish dot-matrix printers. Back then, there were literally only three activities on computers… word-processing, playing games, and programming. I dug into the inches of documents that came with the computer that taught a cryptic computer language called BASIC. And I was good at it, among the best in the state.
As I navigated high school, my skills with mathematics and computer science improved. I attended a couple of summer programs, including one at the University of Miami, where I finally decided to become an engineer. Sporadically, I had fanciful moments with purely creative endeavors. I took a year of band, where I lettered in percussion. Having discovered reading for pleasure, I aspired to become a writer.
Growing up Chinese, I felt a quiet cultural push for higher education, and specifically on a technical field. There was an air of implicitness about it. Those who excelled as such became heroes in our community; we spoke of them in hushed tones the way one might refer to royalty. Truthfully, I never chatted with my mom about what I’d do after high school. Hence, I obediently became an engineer, though it didn’t hurt to have a natural aptitude for it.
For years, this was my existence, a stoic, almost robot-like understanding of the world. No, that’s unfair. I lived in a sheltered, myopic environment. My naïve understanding of the world refused to pierce the bubble I had built. My model minority, Chinese American self could easily integrate into the world of ‘geek’. On most days, I didn’t think about it, nor did I need to.
Though I always struggled with culture, it became simpler to assimilate or at very least keep a low profile. Though slowly, I came to realize that life existed beyond my artificial bubble, and it was substantially different. I suppressed my own life experiences and refused to acknowledge others theirs in order to make my life fit into the box I kept, but it didn’t. And I knew it.
Years later as I listened to this song again one day, the chorus finally struck me like a sledgehammer:
There are times when all the world’s asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
It is with this classic song from the 70’s where I embarked upon this new journey. The human experience is precisely that… human. It is not owned by any one person, or even sect. We all own it collectively, hence the term humanity. It is complicated and messy.
Though unlike the voice of Supertramp, I understand that there’s no simple answer to “who I am”. I understand that it’s not about reaching a particular destination that shoehorns a person into a story that people tell. The destination is not the point; the journey is the point. My only aspiration is to navigate it with empathy and humility, and to leave the world a better place than when I arrived.