mutable history
I don't have a notable upbringing. Compared to the interesting origins of famed artists and athletes and intellectuals which seem to beg for an explosion of brilliance, my life is the antithesis. I do not have an adventurous or tumultuous past. I was not raised traveling city to city across the globe and I did not have my parents separated from me while taking a boat across the Pacific. I never was forced to struggle through odd jobs to scrape by. I did not have an obsessive fixation with anything. There isn't much about my childhood environment that stands out as unique to me. I'm a part of the kids who were conveniently rotated through the soft undulations of uniform suburbia, then drowned in a culture that values individuality and importance.
The lifestyle I inherited completely contrasts how my parents and grandparents barreled through their time. They went from working on farmland, to running from active conflict, to enlisting in the military, to ultimately landing here at the bottomed-out portion of a western coast of an unfamiliar country, planted into daily four-hour commutes and minimum wage jobs to carve out their own space. It's an impressive display of resilience and good fortune, but also an immigrant narrative that quickly gets washed into a sea of stories you've probably heard one time or another.
I feel completely inadequate in relation to their struggle. Grinding exams and getting to a decent school and interviewing in order to land some white-collar job in tech where I complain about conducting online meetings and spend too much time thinking about purpose at Maslow's peak... just doesn't contain the same gravity behind it. I will admit feeling special is a big part of what holds me together these days, but I've always felt strange juxtaposing my cookie-cutter suburbs against the shadow of my family's cinematic American dream.
I mean, isn't this is what your family wanted? More freedom for their kids?
Yep. Which is why this seems to be such a stupid train of thought to me, especially as I perform mental somersaults overthinking about where I fit in the context of history when I should just sit my ass down and be grateful.
Which I try my best to be, but something inside keeps prodding me. The feeling is caught somewhere between the guilt of starting from a higher baseline, or playing the game without a handicap, or lacking latent burdens weighing down on me, and not doing enough with any of these head starts. I feel like whatever I do with my time will never be notable enough to strike a satisfactory threshold.
After landing in the US my family was fortunate enough to claw through the bamboo ceilings and reach stability by their thirties. I owe the conveniences of my life to this, but in an inexpressible way it bred a type of shame which clouded my vision. I hated admitting to my smooth upbringing. When prompted about where I went to school, what I did growing up, I would choose to omit details because I knew I lacked burdens which were assumed by my family. These life questions often came from impressive friends I've met along the way who have achieved much more while starting with much less, the kinds of lionhearted people shouldering enormous responsibility and making it look effortless.
To remedy this comparative dissonance, I concealed my past, ripping up floorboards and shelving away souvenirs. I was content to take an eraser to anything that happened to me before my twenties and project a version of myself with a narrative I preferred. With my blank slate I could conveniently act into the person I wanted to be.
“I do believe that to a certain degree we all live a certain fiction that we have accepted and articulated and formulated for ourselves,” Herzog said. “We are permanently in some kind of performance.”
My performance usually consisted of playing into the story that I still had something to prove, that my family hadn't done the bulk of the work already. I didn't want to come to terms with the fact I didn't need to help them since they helped themselves. I selfishly deluded myself that I was a player in the ‘immigrant struggle’ genre of students and young professionals. But the truth is, there was minimal struggle for me to bear by the time I opened my eyes into the world.
I suppose part of my rationale was because it can be much less compelling to hear from someone if they came from a nice school, or if they had some coddling background where any opportunity they wanted to pursue could be hunted down with unbridled enthusiasm and without logistical constraint. The invisible bar for what someone accomplishes in their life gets raised higher when you realize they had the resources given to them from the very start. In conversational lapses the silence speaks for itself: Of course you did that much. You should have with what you started with.
Of course I should have.
Even now attempting to explain myself I feel like I'm caught in the mouth of a gap, that I have too much and not done enough and either way I'll end up stranded, cast aside as centennial run-off in the dregs of history. Perhaps my own irrational regrets are something to be mulled over in private, left unmentioned in text.
I've come across people who rest on the laurels of their parents, who make core pieces of their personal introductions revolve around their family's struggle and around constraints that are no longer theirs. I always thought that made no sense, but now I can clearly recall I've been there myself: Yeah, in the Philippines my grandparents worked on a farm. My dad was going to be a fisherman. Somehow they carved out a life in the US with nothing at all. I basked in the trials that I figured by extension applied to myself. I strained to grasp and possess memories that I was not present for, praying to brush up against heavy-fought endeavors in countrysides and cities with names that I cannot pronounce. Through relentlessly consuming classes, books, films, conversations, I fantasized hoping that the essence of my family's history will rub off on me, and perhaps whoever is there will see: he has the same unyielding qualities of those long past.
The truth is those hard-forged endeavors have never been, and will never be mine. I am not my father, or my mother, or my uncles and aunts and grandparents and great-grandparents who crashed and spiraled headfirst into a new world. I may be the byproduct of the immigrant narrative, but I am not an immigrant myself. I did not live then. I'm a part of my own, distinct timeline that begins decades of oceans away from my family's origins.
I feel like a blind mouse navigating a sprawling maze, placating myself with a false reality rather than coming to terms with my own. For years I caved into a convenient narrative that gave meaning for me to try harder. But in the end, I have to face the selfish fiction I devised to feel relevant amongst the other bold identities I encountered. I'm starting to escape the slippery nature of my mutable history by understanding the convoluted, contradictory, irrational relationship I have with my family's origins that I defy and depend upon: the beginnings from where I become something more.