Myth-Making
When we think of myth-making, we often think of Valhalla or Hermes’s weird winged sandals–which, I have to say, have not really held up well in the physics department, god or no. But myth-making is a normal and daily human activity that does not require fuddy-duddy stories that have long since been disproven.
As I grow older and older, I am continually surprised by how much the adult world is not what I think. For instance, most adults, in fact, do not have it “together.” We are constantly confronted with myths that were a reality for each of us, for decades, until they aren’t. We are constantly repeating our assumptions that each adult we respect has got it under control, even if we have been proven wrong again and again in the past. But this is being human. We are always at war with ourselves.
And perhaps it is our seasoned span of life that makes it hard to remember how serious myth-making is for a decade old human or even a teenager, when knowledge and imagination held a more balanced sway upon reality.
The Myth of the Political Parties
It was a presidential election year, and people were chanting a name I did not know on my elementary school bus. At the time, the bus was not a good place for me. I was incessantly bullied on it. I had, and still have, large ears, though they stick out less than they used to. On the bus, I was called “Dumbo.” Perhaps that this nickname brought me to tears so frequently will tell you how young I was or at least how much confidence I had. And though my mother offered plastic surgery that would pin them back, I was savvy enough to know that this would only freshen the bullying. So that day, my huge ears were zoned in on what my schoolmates were chanting, thankful I wasn’t the focus. Perhaps that made me even more curious as to what would make people so united as to repeat a name in such unison and such bawdy staccato.
Throughout my day at school, I kept hearing snippets of conversation about the election. And then I heard two words I had never heard before: “Republican” and “Democrat.”
In the evening, I asked my dad what the difference was between the two political parties–more like sports teams to my nascent mind–vying for the presidency. There were probably guests over, for my father sat me on his lap and said, “Republicans are like angels and Democrats like devils.” I remember him laughing, but it didn’t register that his laugh meant I should interpret this as a joke. Maybe I thought that of course my question was so obvious that it was funny? Children are probably used to that–being laughed at for the little gaffs of knowledge they prove to be constantly exhibiting. Regardless, I don’t have access to that part of this memory. I just know that after telling me this myth about two political parties that I would remember far longer than intended, my dad looked up to make eye contact with some people who are blurs in my head. I’m not even sure if they laughed. In fact, remembering it, I see it now in third person, which makes the memory dubious.
Anyhow, I internalized this description of these two political parties so much that weeks or months or maybe years later, on a trip to Los Angeles to visit my mom’s brother and his family, I made it known how much I believed it.
We were all in a van, and the adults were arguing over politics, though I’m not sure if “arguing” is the right word. My aunt was the only Democrat in the van. Per my father’s description of Democrats, it didn’t cross my mind that there would even be a Democrat accepted into our family’s circle of acquaintances. But it was revealed in the argument that my aunt was not of the same political persuasion as the rest of the adults. I don’t know what revealed it because I sure didn’t know the platforms of either party. Perhaps it was my uncle’s favorite joke, one that in later years I would realize exhibited my aunt and uncle’s whip cracking senses of humor and the charm of a couple making light of their differences. For the uninitiated, you must know my aunt is Australian. Here is the joke: “She’s my favorite Democrat: she can’t vote.”
When the laughter and ensuing banter subsided, I made my declaration: “Poor Aunt Allison. She’s a Democrat.” The van erupted back into laughter.
The Myth of the Ditch Diggers
Another strong myth of my youth is from another comment my father made. This one stuck with me far longer than the myth I held about the political parties. For this one I don’t remember the first time my father said it. It was a comment on repeat whenever context provided. It was thus: “Do well in school because you don’t want to end up as a ditch digger.”
Though it was often repeated, it was a throwaway comment for the simple reason that my father doesn’t recall ever saying it. I’ve looked up the phrase, even using AI’s vast web-crawling, but the only references I can find to a warning about ending up as a ditch digger come from a version of the song, “You’re in the Army Now.” Later, a buddy of mine mentioned that ditch diggers are mentioned in Caddyshack. I suspect it’s the latter that gave my dad the idea. And if I’d have known, perhaps I would have dismissed Judge Elihu Smails remark that “the world needs ditch diggers too” as ignorant elitism. But I was not even 8 years-old. I had no idea what ignorance was, let alone elitism.
My father’s comment gave me something to look for. I was constantly looking for these unfortunate ditch diggers. I encountered ditches everywhere in my commute to school and around the neighborhood. Such a ubiquitous thing had to require a whole cadre of workers that were ever elusive to me. Perhaps my myth-believing brain assumed I was just unlucky to not see them or that ditch diggers were so low on the totem pole that they ashamedly worked at night.
The ditch digging myth lived on though it waned as I grew older and began my journey into a more mature confidence. Surely I could muster enough capability, barring some terrible mistake on my part, to dodge a job as a ditch digger.
Then I saw them.
At the beginning of 10th grade, I moved to Shanghai, China. I spent several weeks in the summer trying to make friends before the school year began, keen on being able to at least walk with someone in the hallway or sit with someone at a lunch table. On my first day of school, I found myself looking out the window of a small bus that took our neighborhood’s kids to school. I remember my eyes hardly interested in the other students, even though these were the people I had the most time to get to know in order to not be all alone all day. But, by then, perhaps busses were undesirable intermediaries. Instead of making an attempt to socialize, I took in the city that I had caught glimpses of in the last couple weeks.
And that’s when I spotted them in the highway median, spades in hand, shoveling out a ditch with pure human power. No aid from large equipment like an excavator, bulldozer, or backhoe.
They had been waiting for me all this time in a land whose poverty was far more noticeable than any other place I’d lived. And there they were, digging out a culvert on the side of a new highway.
One thing I didn’t expect was for them to be in Western sports jackets and slacks. As if they needed to dress up for the job.
Several weeks into my time in Shanghai, I already knew that Chinese social classes were far different than what I was used to. Now, looking back, there had to be some reason for the business casual ditch diggers. Although I would see this type of clothing worn on other blue-collar workers, I would see more who wore company uniforms or complimentary clothes for the job. Whatever the answer was, I never found out. I suspect it is probably my ignorance. Regardless, on that bus, on my first commute, I didn’t think any of this. I was just transported back to that childhood myth of what would happen if I didn’t do well in school.
The Internships
Despite excelling in extracurriculars, sports and music, school hadn’t been my strong suit since 5th grade when I ended my lifelong streak of earning only A’s on my report cards. And in Shanghai, well into high school, I figured that living internationally was doing a lot for my education. I often found myself doing a lot of my own reading and research in books or on the internet. I also had a firm rebellious streak in terms of the status quo. The status quo needed to prove itself to me at all times.
But, sure enough, when senior year rolled round, and I was confronted with being accepted, not just enrolled, in a college, I began to regret my stance on academia. I’m not alone in this mistake. I’ve seen such rationale in many students since I began my career.
Thankfully, Purdue took me in. Approaching the end of high school, I felt like I at least made it. I vowed to figure all this academic and future job stuff out in college. But my father wanted me to help my resume and remind me of something he didn’t want me to forget.
The year before, during the summer, I did a six-week internship at Delphi (a departed financial wing of GM) with a friend. We finished most of our tasks the first two days and then ran into 3.5 weeks of boredom. So we rigged our aged-out laptops with old games and took two-hour lunches at a local arcade, sporting our dress slacks and shirts. Putting that experience on a resume was cringe-worthy.
The next year, in the summer between high school and college, I worked at the plant my father worked at. In the first of four weeks, he put me on the assembly line. I was the only person on my crew without a college degree and obviously the only boss’s son there too. I need not say how much I stuck out.
It is a bittersweet memory. On the one hand, my own journey to full-fledged privileged kid was complete. Nepotism had granted me an experience that becomes more complex the more I think on it. For instance, every Chinese worker at that plant had to have a college degree so as to promote upward mobility. They were also paid $150 a month. One of the men I worked with tried very hard, in a very obvious way, to ingratiate himself to me in order for me to somehow convince my father he deserved upward advancement. Meanwhile, I fumbled at the job; Stopped the line more than once; and tried to make conversation in a mix of Mandarin and English as we got through a 9-hour work day.
A part of me despised who I was and another part accepted it as my reality. This was how it was for me in Shanghai, to glory in the fruits of the lucky life I was born into and remind myself of the reality of those who occupied a far more extreme strata of social classes than I have witnessed in America–both rich and poor.
My father intended to show me a possible life without college, though I had already been accepted at Purdue. Even though he doesn’t remember the ditch digging comment, this internship was his reality-based version of it.
I often complain about the infinite tasks that a teaching job entails, but a job on an auto line is the opposite. Working on an assembly line means a finite amount of tasks in a finite amount of time in a seemingly infinite day. Every job has repetition. How else could we develop skill? But some jobs repeat tasks so much that it feels as if you have burrowed into a life trap.
After a week of scrambling around with my patient crew, who tried to teach me only one station of an assembly line, I was given an industrial engineering job that consisted of timing assembly processes. I stumbled through that just as awkwardly.
What I was to learn from that experience was what place and capitalism had on people. I knew more what I didn’t want than what I actually wanted. And this made me more uncertain about where to go in my life, cementing my decision of a major that I had already made: “Undecided.”
The Myths That Make Us
It seems that most of the time we look at education as a means to a certain livelihood we attempt to stake a claim on–though I wish that livelihood also included how to live with others, whether past, present, or future. But just like we implore ourselves not to judge a book by its cover–though we can’t help but do this with a sincerity that makes the saying incredible that it’s so often repeated–we also view education as a preventative measure to a future we wish to eschew. These things most likely come from our deepest fears–the seemingly uncontrollable future, undesired markers of identity, paths we are familiar with and wish not to be.
As anyone knows, fear is a strong driving force. We are constantly trying to finagle ways to teach ourselves and each other to focus on hope rather than fear, but we are a species that has survived hundreds of thousands of years propagating the world by dint of either hope for a new future or fear of an old one.
And these fears, they often live in this unreality indelible to adults but that exist in a grander schema in pre-adults. It is a testament to this that my childhood myths remain strongly in my memory and not in the adults who made them.
On the whole, as a student, I knew what I wanted to avoid but didn’t know what I wanted. I could not see fulfillment in anything I did until I realized that I just really loved being in a classroom. How is it that after fourteen years of heavy classroom experience, constantly thinking of leaving it–nay, being primed for leaving it–that I realized I didn’t want to leave after all?
I realize now that my gaze to the future was limiting. I was avoiding rather than chasing something that was a tangible future. It seems ridiculous now, what fear and naivety did to me, but this is what it means to be living in a transitory state between childhood fantasy and oncoming adult reality. It’s also what it means to live as an adult, constantly uncovering all the myths that will keep on keeping on.
But avoidance has got to be some sort of base root of our primal natures. I think of the experiment where humans would shock themselves to avoid boredom or shock others to avoid being yelled at by someone in an authority position.
When we think about our education system, are we providing students with hope and tantalizing goals or are we creating systems that instill learning through avoidance? Often times, I feel like our culture instinctively prizes waving negative consequences in front of striving young people.
Recently, I read a “What Happens after AI Destroys College Writing” by Hua Hsu. I read the article to read about how the newest and most consequential avoidance tool of our age was affecting the classroom of a famous author and professor. And then I read this:
Until we’re eighteen, we go to school because we have to, studying the Second World War and reducing fractions while undergoing a process of socialization. We’re essentially learning how to follow rules. College, however, is a choice, and it has always involved the tacit agreement that students will fulfill a set of tasks, sometimes pertaining to subjects they find pointless or impractical, and then receive some kind of credential.
I agree with the college bit, but the high school bit? How much of high school has become, in the grand cosmic cultural understanding of America, a place to avoid the consequences of not following the rules? And what does that mean in a world of AI, let alone in a world where we want to spend serious money on our future citizens, voters, employees, billionaires, and politicians?
It seems we are still figuring out how to describe the future for our young people, perhaps because it is hard to describe ourselves.