For me Fortunate Son is my father’s anthem. He had no silver spoon in hand. He was conscripted by the Kuomintang Army as canon fodder in the last days of the Chinese Civil War. He didn’t identify as poor. He was poor. And he rode the elevator of social mobility higher than he could have imagined. Watch the video. It is about America. He would be afraid of those people in the Creedence Clearwater Revival video because he would have sensed something of his own place in the world that he wanted so desperately to escape. He was not a kind man, he was a gifted child and person, but he was driven by demons too great for money and a suburban life to tame.
One thing I have noticed about older, successful members of my professional who hail from bourgeois or Professional Managerial Class backgrounds, they are deeply comfortable talking about everything but class and class analysis. They will tell you right away that an orthodox Marxist approach to culture is too reductive. Even the best of the Marxist academics like Fredric Jameson sought out other paradigms with which to appraise late capitalism.
People who are comfortable in my profession love whimsical forays into discussions of anything that doesn’t touch on the historical political and economic and social conditions that a successful work of art, a film or a photograph or a painting formalizes. This practice of radical decontextualization makes what we as critics and scholars have to say about art, history, historical processes and their textual, aesthetic qualities and capacities more amenable to professional performances of political competency and ‘relevance’ to grant making organizations like the Mellon Foundation.
What began as curiosity about a research topic turns into professional performance of political engagement —and the right to pursue interests out of curiosity is turned into dust.
It’s not that I like ‘curiosity’ as an intellectual position, but curiosity in historical terms is a wonderful quality, and one that is beaten out of us academics in our pursuit of certification. Cabinets of curiosity were kept by Enlightenment dandies, men of science and philosophy would collected weird stuff.
There was a time when academics modeled themselves after such gentlemen. That time is gone. I wish curiosity could be revived and socialized as a public good. I try to honor it in my classroom, but more and more I’m driven by a sense of anger and outrage that I tried to quell in earlier years, thinking I would become more comfortable with professional life.
I have inherited an anger from my parents that tracks me into the seminar room and the lecture hall. It is an anger that comes from the ones who were not born with a silver spoon in hand: it is an anger that comes out of resentment of the material freedom and psychological comfort of people who have had more, more, more and just assume their comforts and their anxieties are more important than the desperation of the underground people. The way my parents clung to things betrayed their experiences of having things ripped away from them. I had things ripped away from me.
To experience the sadness of deprivation you have to get to the sweetness of satisfaction. My parents were magpies who built a world of cheap but glittering possessions, all of which have been dissolved now into the hands of others.
I inherited nothing material from them but the things I gathered from their remaining belongings that my siblings didn’t want.
They didn’t like what I did for a living because I never made enough money. I felt ashamed of my relative poverty and I cut myself off from them because of it. The ostensible reason was that they had done such and such to me, but the real reason I didn’t see them for years was that I felt so poor and ashamed of it. How could a daughter who went to Yale be such a loser? I was trapped in the box of my own shame, but I burned with rage that this was the kind of value they put on life. Like many immigrants who grew up poor, they wanted money as a talismanic medium through which security and safety could be guaranteed.
They didn’t see why I wouldn’t comply. My non-compliance was beyond me. I was possessed by non-compliance and shame. I see that in other Chinese and Chinese American kids. It is a demon that possesses you: you protect yourself from ancestral obligations. I wish I could have exorcised the rage and the shame, but I could not.
I wanted to be in the world in a different way: I didn’t go into this profession to actualize my identity or rationalize “intergenerational trauma.” I was driven by a mad rage and a sense of curiosity and wonder at the world of art, film and literature.
I wanted to argue with people, hash out ideas, build on the general intellect. I have found these arguments and conversations outside of the institutionalized academic settings of my apprenticeship.
On the platforms, like this one. Flawed as they are. Still you sustain me.
As an Iranian-American, all of this 🙌🏽 Thank you Catherine.
Re the “professional performance of political engagement” - I am reminded of a story a friend told me just earlier this week. At a certain London PhD program involving some 50 candidates in decolonial studies an e-mail was circulated suggesting they all gather for a BDS meeting later in the week. Just one person accepted the invitation. Just what exactly are the rest of these students doing? A professional performance of political engagement it would seem.