"A More Perfect Union" - PART THREE

Charlize and the kids. 

PART 3: MY IDEALISM DIES, BUT I FIND 4 STEPS TO CHANGING THE WORLD

If you haven't read them yet, here are: 
PART 2
PART 1

I accomplished pretty much everything I wanted in South Africa, except meet Charlize Theron. Her charity, the Africa Outreach Project, was funding the NGO for which I was working, and she was slated to come visit just weeks after I left. I had always wanted to meet a megawatt Hollywood star and confirm that we are all, in fact, just normal people (I would have that chance years later with Rachel Weisz, but that’s a story for another time). 

No fear; I did accomplish other things, including writing up my research and submitting it to a medical journal (read it here). Some of the most interesting legal findings were that the South African Constitution, newly enacted after the end of apartheid, guaranteed a swath of human rights, including access to health care services!! There was even a Children’s Act granting children 12 years of age and older health rights, including those related to reproductive health. Wow. As the US considers reducing health coverage and reproductive services for millions, I am not sure who holds moral superiority. Perhaps the end of apartheid allowed the South African people to finally dream big about their new society. In this dream, equality under the law meant equality of access to critical health services, and they boldly wrote it into their governing laws. If only we were so visionary. 

I didn’t realize it then, but beginning with this and other experiences I had as a budding lawyer, my lifelong idealism began to die. It died bit by bit in my experiences with immigration cases, rife with fraud, in the ways community organizing hurt the communities it was trying to help, in discovering how institutions of so-called justice protected rather than punished perpetrators of gender violence. The more I learned, the more I realized how very, very difficult it was to fight institutions of power, self-interest, and oppression. Eventually, my plans to change the world through law fell away, squashed by reality. 

I know, this sounds despondent, but it was not entirely a bad thing. Let me explain. 

The idealism I had up to that point was a reflex borne out of childhood training. For as long as I could remember, my mom conscripted me into service for our immigrant community because I, born in the U.S., was a native English speaker. I grew up writing appeal letters and translating documents, making phone calls and explaining how things worked to Chinese business owners or those caught in legal or health troubles. My mother felt a strong duty to help when she could, and she passed to me an innate compulsion that I couldn't fight. After I left home, I jumped at it all, whether distributing magazines and movies to patients at Mass General Hospital, teaching ESL in Boston’s Chinatown, working pro bono to get veterans medical benefits, researching the foreign investment climate in Mali for a UN report, and many many other projects. Sometimes I even doubted the helpfulness of what I was doing - but I felt compelled to do it anyway.  

One might think that volunteerism is good, no matter the motivation, but something about it bothered me. Once, in college, my dad questioned why I was spending so much time teaching ESL. Here was a man who spent all of his free time serving people, especially new immigrants, through our home church - and even he wasn't sure why I would jeopardize my studies to do so. Disturbingly, I didn’t have a good answer. I just felt like I had to. 

In law school, I saw other versions of me. Often the students who threw themselves into public advocacy work did so at the expense of their health and wellness -- and complained about it constantly. They were also some of the most inconsiderate people, as roommates, friends, and colleagues. It was as if their do-gooding umbrella only sheltered them and their clients (and the latter even up to a point). I had thought that doing good meant that you were a good person, and yet there was often a discrepancy between “doing good” and being a total asshole. 

The only way I could reconcile this was that, often, people “do good” to satisfy their own needs. For instance, some people are so enraged by injustice that they have to do something to assuage the anger. I often fall into this "righteously angry" category, and Elizabeth Warren definitely does. Others need to feel needed, to feel martyred, to feel morally superior, to feel capable, etc. The list goes on. Habitually or professionally helping others does NOT, in fact, mean, that you are a nice person. This is not to say that volunteerism driven by our own needs is bad. Of course not. It serves very real voids in society and can be a good thing to do for one’s spiritual well-being. 

However, what I learned from South Africa is that volunteerism originating primarily from your interests will probably not change the world. This is because, as I saw, in order to change someone else’s reality, you have to understand their reality, and that takes a long, long, time and a lot of heartache and a whole lot of love. And most of us, quite frankly, just aren't up to all that. Our volunteerism culture teaches us to get our pro bono client the outcome they’re seeking, celebrate, and move on.  Sure, that helps in the short run, but that does not usually change the client’s long-term reality. It’s easy to show up for a housing court hearing (and certainly generous of you to do so!) but it’s harder to give someone enough emotional support that they can leave an abusive spouse or break an addiction so that they won't need your services again just a few months down the line. Most of the time it’s just more than we signed up for.  

As my childhood idealism died, a new one took its place. Instead of skills of doing, I became interested in skills of understanding - listening with empathy, communicating non-violently, and building self-control and patience. On these dimensions, I had a huge amount to learn. I could write an appeal letter, but I often couldn’t help losing my temper or saying nasty things when angry. I could do an intake for a pro bono client, but I couldn’t sense what a friend really needed when she came to me for advice. I had much to learn before I could be a mature agent of change in the world.

Building these skills is a humbling journey, and I expect I’ll be on this path my entire life. In the meantime, I keep four guidelines for my efforts to change the world. They are:

1. Start local. The need may seem greater elsewhere, but so are the barriers. So, start as close as possible to you. This means getting to know your neighbors, your family, your friends, your coworkers, as people. By being a positive influence on the people already in your life, you hone the communication, listening, and empathetic skills you will need to help people even more different from you. Which leads to - 
2. Learn to ask questions and listen. Not just for the answers you want, but especially when they are not what you expect. Action should follow this step, not precede it. 
3. Step outside of your comfort zone. If you feel confident, you might not be learning enough. Confidence can blind. 
4. Love thy neighbor. Burnout is real. Burnout is when the victories stop outweighing the costs. And the sort of victories we need - gender equality, racial equality, income equality, will be a long time coming. If you’re deadset on helping a community, get to know them until you love them. Or start with a community you already love so that you’re in it for the long haul. Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others changed the world by standing up for their own people. 

In my mature idealism, I see now how much we can help each other without understanding - which is to say, not very much at all. To change someone's life is to live among them, to understand them well, and ultimately, to love them as ourselves. it's the hardest thing any of us may ever do, but may be, even here in our first-world bubble, a matter of life and death.
 

"A More Perfect Union" - PART TWO

One of us is pleased. 

PART 2: WHAT I DID THERE

South Africa ended up being the perfect antidote to my wanderlust because it was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Of course, I was keen to see the animals. Turns out there was a small game reserve close to the office! My colleagues gave me directions there as if describing the nearest Walmart. One afternoon, another volunteer and I took my trusty little rental car for a spin in the reserve, where I fell in love with giraffes, decided I hated warthogs, and got chased by an ornery elephant. It was thrilling. 

I also discovered that the east coast of South Africa is a landscape of immense beauty. The coast of the Indian Ocean is a stretch of sandy beach frequented by surprisingly few people, with a jagged coastline that wanders into the distance until it turns into the legendary beaches of Mozambique. Sometimes you could see pods of dolphins jumping in the sparkling ocean. Landward, nature was beautiful too. The highways leading out from Durban wound around gently rolling green hills; I remember the sun staining them with fresh color as I drove in the early mornings. 

Being winter, the water was cold but still spectacular.

In terms of food, there is no single South African cuisine, but there are some signature eats. Chief among these is bunny chow, curry served in a carved-out loaf of white-bread, a dish that originated in Durban’s Indian population. There were only a few restaurants in the rural town where we were based, and Nando’s Chicken, with its delicious peri peri chicken, was our choice for eating out. It is still the only restaurant I associate with that town, so when I came across a Nando's in Baltimore, I knew that Kyrie Irving was right and that the world really is flat. 

Bunny chow!

The most interesting discovery, of course, were the people. The Zulu people were lively and warm, and their culture was both fascinating and paradoxical to me. Here were people who had Rihanna ring tones but observed tribal traditions, prayed Christian prayers but talked seriously about witch doctors and spells. Their language seemed impossible with its clicks, but English was commonly spoken. I saw people wear traditional tribal and modern dress side by side. Some didn’t know how to work a camera, but the cell signal in the game reserve was better than in parts of the Juilliard building. 

The disparity between modern and traditional, between developed and rural, was more striking than anything I’d ever seen. The interstate highways in South Africa, for instance, are really quite good. The Zulu roads, by contrast, are nothing more than battened-down dirt. To get to the rural schools, I literally off-roaded (my poor little rental car): I had to turn off the paved highway at a certain opening in the guardrails. It wasn’t marked; you just had to remember that it was roughly so many minutes after the last junction and opposite a certain field with a certain kind of tree in it. From that point on, there were no signs; there was only your spatial memory and your desire not to hit anything that guided you along the shanty houses, people, and livestock. I miraculously found one school after having been taken there once or twice, hoping the entire drive that my mental map would hold. This was ten years ago. No one used GPS. The first iPhone had just been released to the world. I really don’t know what I would have done if I had gotten horribly lost. 

Found it! Phew! View of the "parking lot." 

The influence of the tribal culture was totally new to me, as an outsider, but I could tell it was vitally important. My first day in the field, I went along to a meeting with the local inkosi, or tribal chief. As far as I could tell, the chief had no official governmental power but was a cultural figurehead, at the level of a religious leader. He seemed to have considerable sway in all matters and was a source of authority I had to consider in my research. A tribal chief! I felt like I was at Epcot Center at Disneyworld, that’s how much I knew about this sort of thing.

When I wasn’t in meetings and activities with the staff, I worked on my research. The legislative and policy research was pretty standard, as was the scientific and medical research on HIV/AIDS. The way more interesting part was when I tried to understand how all of this information impacted rural schools. That meant interviewing teachers, administrators, students, and other constituents to ask them how they felt about this or that. I must have been a sight, an Asian girl with an American accent wearing borrowed clothes (in Zulu culture, women wear long skirts for proper occasions and I didn’t bring any) asking a very conservative group of elders how they felt about condoms in classrooms. I had some people tell me that only I, being such a strange sight, could have gotten away with asking the questions I did. 

One of our "parent" meetings. 

----

When you’re as far out of your comfort zone as I was, you’re bound to learn some life lessons. Here’s one I learned: you cannot hear what someone is saying until you understand their context. As intimidating as it was to ask the questions, listening to the answers was even harder because they changed based on the context of our meetings! For example, in my largest community meetings, the pattern was that mostly men would stand up to mostly denounce AIDS prevention efforts in schools on the grounds of protecting “tradition.” However, as the groups grew smaller, I heard different things - I heard support for anything that could stop the epidemic. I heard openness to measures like more thorough sexual education. I heard teachers' and administrators’ frustration at their daily struggles with the fallout. Above all, I heard (and felt) an exhaustion at the disease’s toll. People were worn out by the deaths of young people and constant funerals. In personal conversations, both men and women said that something had to be done and that new measures, such as the ones we were proposing, had to be considered.

The reason the consensus differed so much from public to private arenas was clear - traditional values made it very, very difficult to have frank discourse about sexual health. Schools did not teach sex education, nor did parents, so any information came from peers, which usually included a host of dangerous myths. Matters of sex were more likely to be ritualized, rather than discussed - For instance, I had read about virginity testing - a ritual where young girls are deemed pure or not by genital inspection in a public ceremony - but assumed it was a figment of the past. A staff member corrected me and affirmed to my shock that it was very much a current practice. Given the cultural symbolism of virginity, it was small wonder that talking about it in schools might be viewed as a threat to traditional values.

To make matters worse, one key constituency, parents of these school-age children, was hard to find. When I scheduled a parents meeting at a rural school, I saw in the packed crowd mostly older women and men, grandmas and grandpas. They were the caretakers of the students now -- the in-between generation was gone. AIDS had left behind the age demographic most rooted in the tribal tradition to handle its aftermath (this is apparently still true).

Although the schoolchildren were wonderfully responsive, the influence of their culture was heavy in everything they said. I gathered that HIV/AIDS had become a taboo word - many raised their hands when we asked who had lost their parents, but when I asked how, they said pneumonia. Not a single one said AIDS or HIV. Since it was likely that many of these kids themselves were infected, it was astounding to me that the greatest influence on their well-being remained an unspoken entity. How do you discuss something that cannot be named aloud?

These conversations taught me another remarkable truth about my fellow man - that people will die before they betray their society’s beliefs. For the most traditional of the Zulu people, not so removed from their tribal history, candid discourse about a sexually transmitted disease could be more difficult than death. I heard stories of adults who had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS who denied the disease and available treatment, though they must have known what was happening. When they got sicker, the things that had already happened to others around them happened to them, and the inevitable came to pass. The knowledge of science and the availability of antiretroviral therapies were powerless in the face of culturally imposed silence.

People will die before they betray their society’s beliefs. That was what the public health community was up against. I could propose solutions until the cows came home, but unless people felt heard and their values taken into consideration, nothing would work. Ultimately, it was the ideas and recommendations of students and teachers’ that were the most promising, sensitive as they were to the cultural pressures around them.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned was that humans really are the same everywhere on earth. It’s not a far cry from rural KwaZulu-Natal to America today. It’s been often said since the election that certain Americans are acting against their self-interests. I find this completely untrue. In my experience, people always act in their own interests - if you don’t understand how they act, then you don’t understand their reality, period. If you don’t understand their reality, then no meaningful discussion can happen, no matter how well-informed you are. During my time in South Africa, I first thought that my value was to bring legal knowledge. Then I thought I could serve best by asking questions, but I realize now that perhaps my greatest contribution was to come into the room and listen as deeply as I could.

"A More Perfect Union," or, Oprah Sends me to South Africa, Where I did not Meet Charlize Theron - PART ONE

If we've learned anything from this election and subsequent fallout, it is that parts of this country really, really, REALLY, do not understand each other. There is endless talk now of the "two Americas," divided by political party, socioeconomic class, geography, and a host of heart-wrenching social issues. What will it take to the unite these so-called United States back together?

In the darkest moments, it seems pretty impossible. It is at these times that my thoughts sometimes turn, wonderingly, to the country of South Africa - here was a people divided both in law and in practice, who rose above it to form a nation with so much promise, and who still face such challenges in realizing that promise. When I spent time there, the post-apartheid era was not yet 15 years old, and I could sense the raw hope for a better society. What can we learn from their attempts to mend their rifts, so deeply cemented over so many years? I can't pretend to know the whole answer, but during my time there, I did get a sense of what it takes. Fellow citizen, we have a lot of work to do. 

PART 1: OPRAH SENDS ME TO SOUTH AFRICA

I certainly didn’t set out to do HIV/AIDS research in South Africa - it was simply the best option at the time. I was a 2L in law school and determined to go abroad that summer. I had spent the previous summer sitting in a deeply air-conditioned office in Washington DC because I had heard that being a 1L summer associate at a firm was both prestigious and fiscally responsible. However, back at school, I couldn’t help but glow green with envy every time my classmates recounted their inspiring work abroad on human rights or war crimes.

So I started looking for public interest organizations needing eager law students. My best bet was Harvard Law’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics (a real mouthful). The Center was a think tank for research at the intersection of science, medicine, and law. As one of the first student fellows at the Center, we met in small seminars with a multidisciplinary network of faculty (including then-Professor Elizabeth Warren) to discuss current scholarship. The level of discourse was high. When I wrote a law review article about the regulation of genetic tests, my advisor was Professor Peter Barton Hutt, the guy at the FDA who wrote the key regulation. Talk about access! I was a bioethics junkie at the time and talking about this stuff was a huge part of the reason I went to law school.

Through this network, I met a PhD economist who suggested that I contact his organization in South Africa. The NGO, Mpilonhle, works to find innovative solutions to health and other social issues in rural northern Kwa-Zulu Natal. In that region, the HIV/AIDS epidemic had wreaked havoc on every aspect of society, so the mission of the NGO was really to better people’s lives through public health. The NGO’s name, Mpilonhle, even means “A good life” in Zulu. I had never even thought about South Africa, but I was game for anything, so I spoke to the director, the demanding but imminently humanitarian Dr. Bennish, and he wrote a grant to one of Mpilonhle's funders - Oprah’s Angel Network. Oprah's people approved funding for my expenses, and so that was that! I was going to South Africa! Thanks Oprah!

My assignment for the NGO was to figure out what laws and policies governed HIV/AIDS matters in rural schools, ranging from health services to sexual education. It seemed like a tall order, but with characteristic law student confidence, I figured I would sort it all out once I got there.

Before I could go, however, I did the responsible thing and summered at the whitest-shoe, most prestigious law firm I could find. The two worlds I inhabited that summer could not have been any more different. As a BigLaw summer associate, I did a fair amount of work but also ate at the finest restaurants in New York (with a generous budget cap) and attended endless social events featuring alcohol (no cap). Only after this revelry in the lap of first-world luxury did I pack up my things and lug myself to JFK airport, carrying two suitcases and several new rolls of fat from rich eating. I boarded my South African Airways flight, ready for an adventure and not really sure what I'd find. 

Rolling sugar cane fields of Kwa-Zulu Natal

It turns out that no amount of preparation can fully illuminate a way of life that is so different from your own - you just have to go and live it. There were many such differences, but perhaps the single greatest difference I experienced was in the general level of civil safety. I'm talking about South Africa's reputation for violent, often deadly, crime. Having grown up in the U.S., I had no way of comprehending how widespread violent crime could be a part of normal life. Yet, in South Africa, it was. I slowly gleaned this situation from well-meaning people who did not want to scare me but also wanted me to be safe. As a result, they would often deliver alarming advice with seeming nonchalance. For example:

1. Here is a keychain with a button on it. Keep this by your bed and if anything happens in the middle of the night, push this and someone will come. But not the police. They stay away until the trouble is over. That man walking by your window is the guard who spends the night pacing around the house and checking in to a sensor every so often so we know he is still there.

2. If your car breaks down, do not get out of your car. Lock your door and windows and contact us. We are listed under ICE (in case of emergency) in your mobile.

3. If you need to lock up the house when we’re out, here are the keys for the gate to the living room, the gate at the bottom of the stairs, and the gate at the top of the stairs. Keep the gates on your windows locked; this room has been broken into before.

4. Try not to walk on that side of the street where the bank is. When the armored van shows up with the money, sometimes robbers and the armored van get into a gunfight and it's best not to be around.

5. Make sure to leave the office and get home before it gets dark. Do not drive in the dark.

I took note of these warnings like a dutiful child, but it took me a while to understand the whys. For instance, my checked luggage had gone missing when I transferred through Jo'burg, and when I got it back a week later, it had been meticulously picked through, documents taken out of folders, computer parts stolen and the packaging carefully replaced. It dawned on me, as object permanence might dawn on an infant, that this was a standard op - baggage handlers could remove a piece of luggage for a week, take their time with it, and face no ramifications.

In my naivete, I sometimes resisted the advisories. One day, I was working alone in the NGO office, keeping an eye on the time but really wanting to finish my task. I got an urgent call from the directors back at the house, asking where I was. I wondered why they seemed so pissed. "I'm just finishing something up at the office - I'll be on my way soon," I told them. The sun was still out. It was not yet 5pm. "Don't go anywhere. We're sending people for you," they told me. Minutes later, a pickup truck with a group of armed men standing in the back showed up at the office and escorted my car home. I followed them on the country roads through beautiful, endless acres of tall crops waving in the setting sun.

Looking back, I was hesitant to accept the warnings because I didn't want to believe what I was hearing: that just about everyone in South Africa had a personal story about violent crime; that the incidence of reported rape was among the highest in the world, and that sexual violence was the norm for many; that lethal force was used with callous frequency in carjackings and robberies (see the US State Department's take on all this here). I didn't want that to be anyone's reality. But over my time there, I accepted the precautions, and by implication, the dangers motivating them. As a woman, I was particularly vulnerable (though not any more or less so than any other woman there). Nor was I immune as a foreigner or one of very few Asians - the violence famously permeates all social barriers, including class, race, and geography. 

As my knowledge grew, I expanded my view of "normal" life and stayed calm. At least, I thought I was calm. However, when my return flight landed at JFK airport, something unexpected happened - the second the wheels hit the tarmac, something in me let go and I exhaled deeply. At that moment, I realized that, for weeks and weeks, I had been holding my breath - driving with my body tensed, sleeping with ears perked, and waking with eyes opened wider and wider. The instant I returned to American soil, I felt a wave of relief like I’d never felt before. I had made it home, intact, with an indelible appreciation for the rule of law and newfound shame at how much I took for granted.

Becoming Genghis - An Ode to Officemates

I ain't afraid of no lawyers. 

The officemate relationship is the arranged marriage of the workplace. As a junior associate at a big New York law firm, you will probably share an office with someone preordained for you by HR.  Because they sit literally an arms-length away from you and because you will both sit there for most of your waking hours, you will see this person more than any other person in your life. Like all arranged marriages, sometimes it goes smashingly and you have a best friend for life; other times, it makes your life that much worse every single day. 

My first officemate was pretty good, as they go. We worked together on my first deal, so he taught me how to do my time-sheets, utilize legal assistants, navigate first-year M&A tasks, and, most importantly, after an entire Sunday of frantic deal-closing work, how to order food from Seamless. In good times, when work was slow, he'd look over and say, "HAN. Entertain me. What you got?" We visited zombocom and watched viral internet videos. We called up other associates to banter. In bad times, we covered for each other. When I had worked a few nights in a row and just HAD to take a nap before my body shut down, I'd give him a heads up, "Hey, if anyone comes looking for me, I'm in a meeting." Then I'd curl up under my desk, set my blackberry to vibrate, drape my suit jacket over my head, and try to catch a few winks.

So in this way we rolled with the ups and downs, sometimes literally. In 2011 when an earthquake hit NYC, my officemate and I appeared to moonbounce around our 46th floor office. It was only a few seconds, but it felt like forever. Afterwards, we stared at each other mouths agape and asked at the same time, "What the hell was that???"

Because of the close proximity, you'd know things about your officemate that no one else did. You would know what they eat for lunch and dinner, how often they go to the bathroom, how often their girlfriend calls and whether she was usually in a good or bad mood, how they talk to difficult clients on the phone, and how they deal with work and life generally. Once a friend was walking by his officemate's desk and happened to see her googling "unexpected pregnancy." She took a leave of absence shortly thereafter.

My officemate certainly had dirt on me. Just prior to starting the job, my 5-year long relationship ended, a demise which included a broken engagement. After the breakup, I moved into a dark, noisy, tunnel of an apartment, started an all-consuming job, and decided that I wanted to be a musician after all but it was probably too late. It was one of the darkest, loneliest times in my life. If you've ever moved by yourself and then, surrounded by your worldly possessions in beat-up cardboard boxes, had to rebuild an IKEA bed frame before you can sleep, you know that every misaligned pre-drilled hole feels like a cruel joke by the universe. In those days, I would sometimes cry quietly at my desk. When it became noticeable, my officemate would ask gingerly, "Yo.... You okay over there?" and I'd answer, "Yeah," and clear my throat. "I'm fine," I'd say, leaning closer to my computer to see whether that was indeed an errant comma or a figment of my tear-blurred eyes. 

The code of officemate-dom was that you stayed out of each other's lives, but could gossip about it if it was remotely entertaining. I had a subsequent officemate who was dating a very pretty legal assistant, and I made a mental note of whether she was still stopping by for no good reason, just in case anyone asked. Another thing about this officemate was that he usually talked in a normal voice but once he got a phone call would switch to bellowing, whether on speakerphone or not. The moment he answered his calls, my secretary (who didn't even sit right outside our office) would instant message me, "OMG. How are you not deaf??"

Idiosyncrasies aside, conflicts between officemates were usually kept under control, because you really did have to get along. But there were some tense times. Once, I had just printed out a document of maybe 200-300 pages - one common junior associate task was to do a final review of a massive document in a short period of time before it was sent out, say to another team of lawyers or submitted to the SEC. As a corporate lawyer, you live or die by your organizational skills, and since I am also somewhat OCD, I started banging the stack of papers on all sides against my desk to neaten it into a pile. Bang bang bang! on one side of the stack. Bang bang bang! on another. I did all four sides and then went through it again just to make sure it was all aligned. Finally my officemate, who was trying to concentrate, looked over and howled, "Enough with the violence! Geez. Enough, Genghis! Genghis Han!!" 

And a nickname was born.

A nickname is, ultimately, a souvenir from a period of your life, is it not? Whether it's a pet name from your parents that sticks even after you have kids of your own, or a college name that indicates some grand victory or magnificent stupidity in your past, names represent an era in our lives and recall the people who gave them to us. 

I've kept the Genghis moniker because it represents many things: a ruthless efficiency, a will to triumph over the seemingly impossible, and an office culture where one of the best things about the job was the people around you. We have since all moved on to different endeavors, but every time someone calls me Genghis, I think back fondly to my officemates and those years that helped make me who I am today. 

Betsy DeVos, and why I quit piano for ten years

Wha...

I threw in the towel at 17. I remember worrying when I was 13 that my piano career was behind - I didn't have a major recording contract, full calendar of performances with major orchestras, or a Grammy. I thought to myself grimly that I had better ramp it up before I became obsolete! Age 16 was that deadline, and, guess what? By 16 I still didn't have any of those things. Furthermore, I wasn't cleaning up at every competition I entered, especially at the international level. To my teenage self, that meant that I wasn't good enough and never would be. Time was up. And so I told my piano teacher that I was not auditioning for conservatory and would be going to college. 

The idea that my performance *at that moment* in a competitive arena was an accurate measure of my abilities dictated how I thought about myself in all areas of my life. In high school, when my brother got a better score on the national qualifier AHSME math exam, even though he was two grades below, I thought resignedly, well, guess I'm terrible at math! 

Luckily, college helped changed that mindset, partially because it was a fresh start - I no longer had to be a good pianist because no one knew I was a pianist. I could study anything, so I picked biochemistry because it was a broad major and I'd always loved learning about the world and how it works. But it turned out in the premed-eat-premed major I'd chosen that I was, in fact, way behind. In my first semester, perhaps for the first time in my life, I saw what a difference preparation could make. For example, I failed my first physics exam. It tested material typically covered in a high school AP class, which most of the class had taken but I had not (it was not offered at my school). The average test score was around a 94%. My score was in the 30's. The professor put up a histogram of the scores on the projector for the hundreds of us to see, circled the three worst scores at the low tail end of the curve, and stated ominously, "If this is you ... come see me."

I went to her office, stunned. Wasn't I good at science?? The professor, a wry woman who was clearly brilliant but also clearly annoyed at having to teach this class, asked me how I prepared for the exam. I said that I read all the chapters covering the material and went to all the classes. "And how many practice problems in the problems book did you do?" she asked. I stared blankly at her. Practice problems? She saw my hesitation and asked, "Do you ... even have the practice problem book?" No. I had done no practice problems. She rolled her eyes. In one of many moments where people change my life but have no idea that they're doing so, she said, "Get the book. Do the problems. That's how you learn science." 

Thoroughly humiliated, I bought the book and did just about every single problem in it. Despite my first exam, I ended up with an A in the class. More importantly, I was empowered. I was NOT bad at physics. I was just not good at it yet, and I could change that with some elbow (brain? brain elbow?) grease.

For the first time in my life, I had the confidence to keep going at a tough challenge. When the all-male study group told me I didn't get the right answer because I was a girl and girls are bad at science (they were serious, by the way, and this was in the early 2000's), I got mad because I knew they were wrong. Some of them had taken the course before (I knew one girl who sat in the lectures for all of next year's classes to get a head start) and others had been doing research in the field (at local universities, etc.). And so I studied more, and I beamed inside when I beat their exam scores. Once I got a 99% on a tough test and a friend happened to see my score. For the next four years, anytime I relapsed into "poor me I can't do this" mode, he'd say, "Whatever, 99." I entered college a failed music prodigy, according to me. But I left college knowing that I could improve at just about anything. 

A few decades later, I'm watching Betsy DeVos's confirmation hearing and it is a disaster. I don't think I would have been hired as a babysitter with her answers, let alone hired to oversee American education. That aside, an interesting moment for me was when Senator Al Franken asked her about her views on proficiency versus growth. DeVos's answer was as incoherent, uninformative and unprepared as her others, but the question was a critical one - should educational success be measured by individual students' growth or by whether they meet a set of standards? A light bulb went off. I was living proof that a growth mentality enhances learning more than a proficiency one. I went from being someone who judged her abilities by some impossible standard, who met challenges with the fear of failure, to someone who believes she can do just about anything with enough courage and effort, and who seeks out challenges. Senator Franken reminded me how important mindset is to the ability to learn. 

For this reason, it's a good thing I quit piano while I did. I needed time to realize my own potential, to have the confidence to tackle harder challenges. And building a performance career is the most challenging thing I've ever undertaken. It grows my mind, body and spirit every single day. I now play piano better than I ever thought I could, and I know I will continue to improve the longer I work at it. We all have real limitations, but over the years I've realized that my attitude doesn't have to be one of them.