“One of your more serious weaknesses is that you are selfish.”
“There’s not much point to it if you live a selfish life.”
I am not sure if these words struck me as strongly as they perhaps should have. I heard them each time after I told my family of my plans to pursue a life in academia.
I’ll admit the odds are stacked against me – having studied on and off for six years for two degrees and only pursuing the field of Classical Chinese after a lone semester abroad. It is no wonder my mother and grandmother are so vehemently opposed to it. Raised in this matriarchal universe, the burden of being practical “實際”, has long crushed anything but the smallest inkling of dreams. Yet when these dreams are stumbled upon, things begin to pale while others surface and punches you in the face.
For most of the practical world, the University is a gate towards the workplace, these are the life steps we need to walk down and walk past it seems. But who knew the six months abroad at Peking University would so violently shake my worldview? The commercial world right now, and this may be hard to swallow, isn’t all that it’s talked up to be.
Job hunting is a skill in itself – the relentless questioning of the things you have done, the difference you made, it forces you to consider yourself for one of those rare moments – and then the self-promotion begins. Maybe it is my age, but writing in applications that this service line or that division interests me for x reasons no longer is the easy roll of the tongue and a few well worded sentences.
Self-loathing cakes up like dirt on used soap; before you know it, it’s nigh impossible to tell where the grime ends and the soap begins.
Which brings me back to where I started – is it selfish to walk the less tread path? Knowing the burden you bring to your family, the family that sacrificed so much and put their faith in you. How should the contradictions between filial duties, those who tell you to follow your heart, and the doubts that pile up along the way, be resolved? Or forgotten? Or ignored?