i don’t have a lot of regrets, but one that i have is that i opted out of taking a chinese philosophy class in college. it was my freshmen year and all of the engineering courses for my (inevitably doomed) computer science major were taken. maybe it says a lot about who i was, but instead i took regular philosophy aka western philosophy. you know, red barn and all that. ultimately i feel that i’ve been approaching wisdom at a reasonable pace in my life, though maybe all of us at times think that we’re slightly ahead or behind where our age group should be in our understanding of the universe. tbh maybe a chinese philosophy class taught at uc davis and probably not taught by a chinese person would’ve been the wrong way to go anyway.
now that i’m in my mid thirties, it seems less ahead of the curve that i’m coming around to learning things such as chinese herbal medicine (by learning, i mean i’ve registered for a mooc i haven’t actually logged into yet). it has been a decade since i’ve been into tai chi, a practice that the elders at hester park told me i’d probably slip away from since i was so young at the time. i never followed up on the martial arts that i began in middle school. i guess there are some things that aren’t meant to be at the times we’d like to romanticize ourselves into appreciating.
this year a few projects are bringing me back around to my cultural roots, in particular research on how chinese and asian cultural practices have persevered in american settings. it makes me think about the early chinese settlers whose lifestyles were considered dirty, ugly, abhorrent in this new country – yet, they shouldered past it because it was their way of life. it’s a much different story for me, an ABC who grimaced whenever my parents insisted on speaking canto at home, and was much more interested in microwaving a hot pocket than learning how to boil herbs. but what non-psycho kid in the 90’s wouldn’t have been the same? at times i reckon that the wisest thing i can do is not beat myself down too much for being immature throughout my youth, and for accepting ignorance as a condition that you never really grow out of.