Pick your destiny

(昨晚在脸书上写的)

Call me a crazy dad. Three days into the new year, I already can't stop thinking three months ahead, about probably the most important family event this year: Bugu's "抓周 (zhuā zhōu)" ceremony.

抓周, literally "pick [your destiny] on your first birthday", is a common tradition in most parts of China. On that day, family members, relatives, friends and neighbors gather, putting the kid on the floor, circled by various random objects, each assigned a special meaning. The object the kid picks up indicates her future life path. I picked up a writing brush and a stack of worn books, which, according to the elders, meant I was going to be a "man of letters" - a writer, a scholar, a public intellectual. Bumo chose a toy chameleon five years ago, and we ordained her a zoologist-to-be. Given that I'm now an obscure writer / scholar / public intellectual, and Bumo has been saying since age four that she wants to be an aquarist (which is a special sort of zoologist, I figure?), you might say the predictive power of the Destiny Pick is pretty amazing. - By the way, I also have a cousin who picked an abacus and became a (failed) businessman, as well as another who picked a plastic bag and works in a chemical factory (far stretch, I know!).

But I'm not superstitious, and I think those seemingly successful predictions can be explained away by two factors: confirmation bias, and self-fulfilling prophecy. Confirmation bias is well-known (and boring): successful predictions get passed down, mouth to mouth, becoming family legends, whereas unsuccessful ones are forgotten. While I used to believe that confirmation bias explains it all, upon reflection I realize that at least my own life was probably driven by a self-fulfilling prophecy set in motion by the Pick and faithfully executed by my mom.

When I picked up the writing brush and the books, everyone witnessing the ceremony became conspicuously nervous and upset, I've later been told. At the time the memory of the Cultural Revolution was still fresh and haunting, an era in which conscientious intellectuals were publicly humiliated, exiled, imprisoned, and/or tortured to death. Nobody in my family wanted that for me. Besides, both my parents' families were really poor, and they really wanted me to bring about fortunes. So a few relatives began to try tricks on me, hoping I would trade my picks with a coin or an abacus. Instead I held my stuff tight against the chest, and cried.

My mom was dismayed by the relative's tricks; for she believed those would offend gods and ancestors. "That's it. Gods and ancestors have spoken." she proclaimed, "My son shall become the greatest man of letters in China, and bring endless honor and glory to the family temple."

"Words are cheap, daughter-in-law." said my grandpa, smoking his pipe, "Look around. We are peasants who own nothing. And no one in the village has ever been to college. Good education belongs to rich and well-connected city kids. Even during the Cultural Revolution, those so-called 'worker-peasant-soldier college students' were mostly selected from party officials’ children sent down to the countryside, no? I think gods and ancestors are quite realistic. They only want my grandson to be a reliable man, knowing how to read balance sheets and write legal petitions, so that our family won't be tricked or bullied in the future."

"That's what the abacus means, not the writing brush and the books, father. Yes, the books. The writing brush alone might not be a clear enough sign, but the books said it all!"

"Okay, okay. In any case, how are you gonna do it, bringing up a man of letters?"

"I'll figure it out."

To be fair, I'm not saying my Destiny Pick was the only reason why my mom devoted herself to my education. To begin with, she was already the most educated in the family, having graduated from high school, and she knew firsthand the power of education. Indeed, for this she had been granted an unusual privilege when she was wed into my dad's family: she was allowed to have a seat at the dining table, eating with men, whereas other women in a family, including my grandma and aunties, had to eat in the kitchen, standing or squatting. My mom was shocked. The town where she was from didn't have this kind of overt discrimination. She refused to be seated unless grandma and older aunties were seated too, taking place of younger uncles. The men mumbled and relented, creating a scandal in the eyes of other villagers. But within a year or so neighboring households followed suit one by one, and her battle was won.

Also, before married, she had been a "substitute teacher" in an even poorer village secluded in the mountains. "Substitute" meant low pay, no government recognition, no pension nor other benefits; but in reality, she had been the only teacher in the village for years, tutoring every kid from kindergarten to eighth grade, because not a single "officially registered teacher" wanted to go there. Years later, some of the students she had taught became county officials, one of whom played a key role rescuing my parents from being framed for a crime orchestrated by corrupt police officers - but I will leave that story for another day.

In a nutshell, she had already been a believer in education before I was born. What gods and ancestors did, then, was to empower and embolden her to act, to deprive her any excuse for trying less hard than humanly possible, to dictate her to push the ideal of education to the extreme, on me. After we moved back from my dad's village to my mom's town, she looked everywhere for discarded scratch papers and tin foils, cut them into small pieces, copied all the characters and words down from dictionary, and started to teach me and quiz me (a one year old!). To this day she keeps bragging that under her auspice I had memorized more than a thousand Chinese characters by the age of three. (I don't believe her, though. I bet she exaggerates by an order of magnitude, or maybe two. But hey, you wouldn't ruin your mom's fondly reconstructed memory of her greatest achievement, would you?)

She also taught me algebra and other stuff, and from time to time she'd bring me to the crowded market, greeted her friends there, brought up the topic of early education as casually as possible, and showed off her product. "Quiz him. He can do very difficult math." "Alright. What's 112+324?" "It's 436, Auntie Wang." "That's fast! Oh, here comes another question: I was born in 1956. What is my Chinese Zodiac animal?" "It depends. If you were born before the Chinese New Year, then it's the goat. Otherwise it's the monkey." "Unbelievable! How old are you, again?" "I'm three." - Filial piety points scored for dutifully making my mom the proudest parent in town!

But that was only Step One. Step Two: She decided to give me weekly bus trips to "城关", the county seat, for the sake of "opening" my eyes. Small towns like ours bred barren minds, she said; and the most prosperous place in the world she knew of at the time was our county seat, with a population of 50,000, and two hours of bus ride away from our town, across the mountains. Every Sunday, after we had had lunch at home, she and I would board the 1pm bus, arrive at the county seat around 3pm, wander around the streets for an hour, board the 4pm return bus, and arrive home at around 6pm for dinner. We both had motion sickness (mine was gone after adulthood) and we both vomited on every single bus. She believed this showed our sincerity and determination to watchful gods and ancestors and was the right tribute to pay.

When I was five, she managed to enroll me in a county seat primary school. This was certainly against the rules: I was supposed to be enrolled in some school in the town, because we didn’t have “hukou”, or officially sanctioned residency, in the county seat; and I was too young to get into the first grade anyway. She probably borrowed a lot of money to bribe education officials and school headmasters. “If you stay in a township school, you will end up just like everyone else around you, never going to college, never being able to get out of this town or this county, never becoming a man of letters.” So I went to the county seat school, standing in the back of the classroom for the first semester because there was no spare desk and bench for me, a “peasant kid”, until my teachers realized that their bonuses were doubled as I won every schoolwide writing, math, or science competition for my class. In the meantime, I lived by myself in a rented room for the first year or so, visited by my parents only in weekends, until they were granted job transfers from township branches to county seat branches.

Starting school earlier than usual was more troublesome for me, though. One or two years younger than my classmates, I had always been the tinniest among peers, and frequently bullied until I had a growth spurt in the ninth grade. But my mom was somehow convinced that early enrollment gave me an advantage, and it was impossible to argue with her. Nonetheless, when, by the end of the first grade, the headmaster and teachers visited us and asked if I would like to skip over the second and third grades, starting the new semester as a fourth grader, the offer was firmly rejected by my mom. The reason? “One or two years younger than his classmates is the perfect balance, but three or four years younger? That’s too much. My son is destined to be a man of letters. He is not going to marry a random woman in the county when he grows up. He will go to college, and meet his future wife there, probably among his college classmates. But if he goes to college too young, he won’t be mature enough by the time, and no girl wants to date a little child.” … Well, what can I say?

The story could go on, but I will end here (I have to admit that writing this post is the byproduct of my procrastination; I should have been writing something else more serious instead). Although my mom and I have had a tense relationship for many years (as you can see by now, she is definitely a – what’s the word? – control freak), I know how lucky I am to have this crazy lady as my mom, and am truly grateful.