Determinism

I was talking with a Tibetan girl in Beijing. She is graduating from the Beijing Forestry University, a first-tier university that many Beijingers cannot get into. She is the only Tibetan in the Computer Sci Dept. and among the dozen in the entire university of 10,000+. I cannot help but profess how impressed I was: she is studying at a top national university as a minority in her second language. Being a well-manned youth, she says she is even more impressed with me as I'm a Chinese studying at an internationally famous university in America. I tell her that it is much, much more difficult for a Tibetan Chinese to move from west to east China than for a Han Chinese to move from China's east coast to America. But she has by no means 'made it'. Of all the Tibetans I know, only a half dozen attended university in Beijing, and they are all back in their home province as racist, discriminatory laws limiting rural-urban mobility are strictly enforced in China.

I used to denounce determinism, arguing that perseverance, opportunities, luck play more important roles in where we end up in life. Just look at me, I live a completely different life in the US than I would have in China; and it all began with an unexpected turn of events in Singapore. How can I even entertain the thought of a life pre-determined!

But now I'm not so sure if I'm the poster child for counter-determinism. My cousins who grew up in Beijing now work in Chinese, British, French investment banks. My childhood friends are paving their way towards bright careers. It may be true that my personality, worldview, ideals would have been drastically different had I remained in China, but I would've continued to be educated, urban, middle-class just as my parents and grandparents were.

Traveling in SE Asia now I contemplate how my life would look as a 24 year old female born elsewhere (based on facts, I'm not this imaginative). In Laos, I married at 16 and am chasing my four children while pregnant with my fifth, but I do have time to chase after them as my husband is working in our small field and I don't have much to look after in the house since we don't even have beds. In Cambodia, I witnessed the massacre of my 4 brothers by the Khmer Rouge. And when the killings finally ended, my remaining 10 siblings starved as a human-induced famine swept over the country. In Vietnam, I lost both my parents to the war. Looking at old propaganda posters showing mothers carrying a rifle in one hand and a baby in the other, I wonder whether my mother was affected by those images while carrying me.

Instead, I am a 24 year old born in Beijing, lived in New York, traveled in Paris. I am free of family obligations, unaffected by social stigma, so independent that it worries my parents. My agonies include whether to study a masters or a PhD, to do it at Columbia or Cambridge.

(It's neither guilt nor blessing-counting that is prompting me to write this, which I never find to be productive emotions. Moreover, the stress and depressions we encounter in the West are very real and terrifying things. Like the others, this post is simply my effort to remember what I see and feel.)

Perhaps our lives are more like Indian ragas: each individual is allowed much innovation and flexibility in how she plays the notes, but the scale is fixed.