The Colliding Worlds of Lau Guan Kim and Joe Ching
Lau Guan Kim and I come from different sides of
history. He's inside and I'm outside. He believes history
is on his side, but I believe I am the one to give history its
side. Our meeting is not an isolated incident. Just about
everybody
and his friends and relatives are meeting these days at the same
junction. Breaking the logjam may call for an abomb. Or,
could some simple words of hope do the trick?
When first arrived in San Francisco, being the only Chinese kid in the
gym
class, I simply had to be the first to arrive at the finish line in any
race around the track. So in the ensuing football game, the kids
always insisted that I do the quarterbacking. But I never played
football before and was so exhausted from the race that I could hardly
hold the ball. This since has been the story of my life.
Expectationion of me has always kept one step ahead of my ability.
For the past 22 years, I have stopped everything and tried to catch up
with this expectation thing by hiding in the Berkeley Hill. Now,
I
am wondering if I had read too many Chinese kungfu novels. I
first prepared a software
automation package that theoretically could leapfrog a developing
country into developed status. Then I tried to develope something
for the body. This is in the form of bringing back the old
Chinese kungfu tradition. I finally settled for kungfu strokes
for ping pong players. In another two years I will be able to
tell whether this
new
sport, called pongfu, is a figment of my imagination, or not. So,
this is the two years I have to
catch up with the expectation thing. However, by life's never
ending twist, more than what is to be expected
of me is really what I will be expecting from the world.
This brought me to explore history through google and on
forums. And this was how I ran
into Lau Guan Kim.
Kim and I are in good agreement when it comes to historical facts, even
down
to the possible overestimation of the number of victims in the Nanking
Massacre. But we start to differ in the interpretation of these
facts. And we are heading for a collision
when it comes to what the future holds.
Kim's base of the future is the present state of the world. My
base of the future is the future state, or whatever we could make it,
of
the world. So the two
schools of thoughts are one of the status quo and another of history's
rewriting and, thus, a new future. Kim is in a peculiarly odd
situation. He's holding on tight to his
status
quo belief, but
complaining the gloom and doom that it would bring. In my
opinion, he really belongs in my school, since in his school most
people
are happily indulging in and fighting for more of the same status
quo, way into the future. Translating all these egghead
discussions into real world terms, America has the claim on the present
status quo,
and China, the future new status quo. So, all Chinese, include
Kim,
should come onto the Chinese side.