Professional Life

This piece was written by a dear friend – Brianna Lee. I met her while we both worked at a non-profit independent publisher for children’s multicultural literature in San Francisco. Enjoy!

“I like to think, sometimes, that I come from a fairly unique background. I’m part of a 5% ethnic minority population here in the States, a 2.5 generation girl with an American-born Chinese father and a Hong Kong immigrant mother, bred into weekends at Jade Villa dim sum and shit-talking Cantonese aunties. I spent seven out of my first 11 years sweetly indoctrinated by evangelical Christians, in classrooms mixed with both pastors-in-training and quasi-Chinatown gangsters.

A one-of-a-kind story in some circles; in California and here in New York, it would probably elicit a shrug at best. What’s more extraordinary about my circumstances, though (I think at least) is the particular culture of the people that have come to surround me in this little life I lead.

You can say you’re born into a family through no conscious will of your own. You can say the friends you call your best just came to you by chance. This is probably the case with me, too. Like a sort of gravitational field pulling in dust and debris, gradually settling together into asteroids and moons in a calm and steady orbit, I guess people have settled into my life this way too. But what’s common among most of them, something that has inevitably pervaded my worldview and life decisions, is this urge to help, well, the world.

Okay, everybody wants to help the world, kind of.  Everybody wants to reduce carbon emissions, eat less meat, give aid to starving kids in Africa — that’s all fine. But the people I grew up with, they’ve adopted the principle of helping others full-on. It’s more than reading about a natural disaster and donating $50 before returning to your coffee (not that there is anything wrong with that — provided the organization you’re donating to is legit and doesn’t have massive overheads). It’s a life dedication – for some, in occupation; for others, in just plain everyday life. I’ve probably never really told any of them how proud I am of them — my father, who was a civil rights lawyer for thirteen years and uses his social justice principles in all the work he does now running a city government; my mother, always bringing in kids from China to have a chance to study in the U.S. and personally taking care of all the visa requirements; my social worker roommate who squares off with troubled kids on a daily basis; my sister, a former student organizer and feminist/queer rights advocate who once told me her one goal was simply to “help women”; my boyfriend who has a searing distaste for white collar crime and is working his ass off through law school to make sure companies stay in line; all the students in my graduate program who have worked with child soldiers, given up two years of their lives for the Peace Corps, volunteered for refugee assistance, and campaigned for changes in development policy; my group of friends back home who are all focused on benefiting society in some way through medicine, biology, law, policy, and technology. It’s really not so much the profession or the action – anybody can have a job or do something and say that it helps society in some way or another – but it’s the attitude taken, and the way that responsibility is weighted against other things.

Four years ago, when I was alone in Burma, a monk I had met at a famous pagoda in the then-capital city turned and asked me, “When you graduate from school, what are you going to do to help people?” And he proceeded to tell me stories about monks who had gone into the woods in order to teach children, risking and often suffering from malaria in the process.

I don’t remember what I answered, or if I even had an answer.  I’m still not entirely sure. I care about a lot of things – rising inequality and unemployment, free speech, journalist protection, violence against women, education, warfare, international development. I’ve studied all these things. But what am I going to do? is the $16,000 question. And I can’t tell you how many times my dad has hammered this question into me growing up — In what way is this privileged existence I’ve afforded going to somehow dedicate itself to helping someone else?

Still figuring it out.  But with a social circle like this, there probably is no better environment to figure it out in.”