28th
Foolish Old Man Moves Mountain
When I was little, my dad used to tell me the story of the Foolish Old Man Who Moves Mountains (愚公移山).
In ancient times, there was an old man in front of whose house were two high mountains, making it very inconvenient for him to come and go. He gathered his family and started to level the mountains. His neighbor scoffed, “You are foolish. You are too old and weak to level a small hill, let along two big mountains.” But the old man said, “I have sons, and my sons have sons. I will have endless progeny, but the mountains won’t grow any higher.” The spirit of the “Foolish Old Man” moved the Heavens, and it sent two immortals to move the mountains away.
“If you have your heart set on something,” my dad would say, “you should have the spirit of the foolish old man.”
My best friend and I are both the progeny of first generation immigrants from Asia. Growing up, we’ve heard the stories for our fathers and mothers, each one worthy of a Gabriele Muccino epic.
Take my father for example, when he was in middle school, he was thrusted in to the position of leadership in a youth communist revolution. The movement turn on him and he was sent to labor camps all over China to be reeducated. Before he was 20, he had been a fireman, a laborer at a steel mill, a shipyard dockhand, and a machinist. In his late twenties, he began undergraduate studies at one of the best universities in China, having passed entrance exams with only a middle school education. He didn’t really start his life until he was well in to this mid-forties. Yet in that time, he’s managed to obtain two graduate degrees and a top position at a multinational conglomerate.
My best friend’s father was the youngest child in a family of 10 in a poor South East Asian country. Every child in the family managed to obtain advanced graduate degrees in engineering or science in an top American University on a full scholarship.
He, a med student, and I, a law student, would often sip coffee in some appropriately bourgeois coffee house and complain about how difficult our lives are. We’d threaten (albiet mockingly) to quit our professional pursuits to chase childhood dreams of indie rockstar-dom (or in my case race car driver.) The hilarity of it all is, although we have challenges in our lives, neither one of us experienced the kind of trial and tribulation that our parents underwent.
And perhaps that’s for the best… because in order pursuit his graduate scholarship in engineering, my father was separated from my mother at the age of 40. He studied during the day and worked at a Korean laundromat at night. His first few weeks in America, he was beaten and robbed by hoodlums in Detroit and somehow he managed to soldier on with a cheerful conviction that befuddle me and graduate at the top of his class. Although, by comparison, my cafe gripes seem more like mole hills than mountains, I always try to remind myself to carry on with the with that cheerful can-do attitude of the foolish old man.
Incidentally, Foolish Old Man Moves Mountain or Yu Gong Yi Shan (愚公移山), is the name of a fantastic club in Beijing. It’s located on 1A Gongti Beilu, Chaoyang District. If you’re visiting China and happen to be in Beijing, you have to do yourself a favor and patron this bar at least once (unless it’s shutdown by the government, which happens from time to time).
