OneFiveHundred Mission Statement
0: three lines
I consider “Special Registration in MECH 340” a prose poem of sorts, better than most of the poetry I’ve written.
I remember reading the email for the first time on Fizz, (an anonymous posting platform), and bursting out laughing. It’s really a diamond in the rough, as Fizz frequently consists of students bemoaning their classes or commenting irreverently about life events (as they should). But this email, it’s posting at its finest. The incredulous caption. The context and grammatically incorrect subject of the email. The standard response of a professor devolving into the extremely tender “I/have done all I can for Rice University.” All of this combines into an incredible read, something that broke up the monotony of the day I read it and caused me to analyze it for 30 minutes to my friend while eating dinner. But it’s also a bit sad, isn’t it? You ask a professor for a special registration, and not only does he tell you that he can’t help you, but that he has given all he can for this university, and it has not paid him back. What kind of person confesses such a thing? I won’t speculate — this is just an email in a Fizz post, after all — but the last line sticks with me still. The failure of giving all you can, and retiring because of that. Why do I still think of this line? I think about why Gesenhues gave his all in the first place.
i: all I can
Once, my father took me on a community college tour. Not to spur me to attend it, but to prove something to me. You must work harder than this, Joshua, he said to me when we walked back to the car. You must go to a better college, achieve more than everything I’ve done. His family were farmers during the Cultural Revolution in China, where he walked 15 li to his boarding school, eating rotten vegetables on the trek. He burned kerosene lamps to finish his studies, late at night, ruining his sight. He caught fish in between the rice fields and sold it to friends poorer than him. He worked hard to get here, he told me. And now we live in America, the land of dreams.
In a conversation with Cathy Park Hong, the poet Ocean Vuong says, “when I look back at how I got here, a lot of it is through the labor of the people who raised me. Every single one of my aunts and uncles and my mother working in those nail salons, taxing their bodies, working in those factories, putting their heads down all so one writer could put his head up … I owe it to that labor that’s already been done, to do the best I can and go hard from every angle.” Do I not share this condition? What would have happened if my father had not gone to technical school and gotten a job? What would have happened if he had not studied during the Lunar New Year festival, played with the other children, and failed the gaokao once again? Or, as he would say to motivate me, what if he was like one of the children smarter than him, squandering their intelligence on trifling games, ending up as just another poor farmer? Use what you have or you will end up like them, he implied to me.
Do we owe our parents for raising us? Does their suffering for our sake make us indebted? When I was a toddler, I had fallen ill with some sort of stomach issue where I couldn’t eat, my father told me. It was the same one he had when he was a child, and I, living in Beijing, and my parents, holding down stable jobs, were able to afford my treatment. He said that I took some pills that the doctor gave him, and that fixed me to where I am now. He gestured to his height, smaller than mine, and said, I couldn’t afford the same thing.
So, we start here. If my parents have given all they can to bring me here, do I owe them the same thing? If so, then we must begin by living the life they set before you.
ii: for Rice University
So you take on your studies with diligence in high school, which places you into a good college, which leads you to take difficult classes. The ones that bury you under coursework, or weed you out. Then you know you’re steadily earning the currency to pay your parents back, accrued in cram sessions and all-nighters. You’re trying your best. Or are you really?
When I was in elementary school, our gifted program had us design a board game using key terms from a wilderness survival movie, an incredibly vague and monumental task for a 9-year-old. The night before turn-in was approaching, and I had designed the worst board game ever invented: a derivation of Catan with a survival aspect, where people would answer chance card questions surrounding geography to earn food and water, which would fill up a steadily depleting status, and would collect wood and stone to build buildings for victory points, while moving across a board space to collect additional resources.
I had written 3 pages of instructions on how to play, and had a 12×12 inch cardboard panel with board tiles drawn in Silver Sharpie. I was nowhere near done with my magnum opus, and we were to present and play the board game the next day. Who do you think wanted to play my game on that day? This isn’t the question I’m trying to ask. My point is, does this memory of embarrassment count as real suffering? Does its tenacity denote how hard I worked?
My suffering (then and now) isn’t real. It was a third-grade project of nothing, so let us get over it already. This collegiate difficulty is nothing, it’s just a grade, just another stumbling block you must jump over, one more thing, just a thing, nothing more. It is nothing compared to what has happened to those before me.
After all, I am indebted to my parents for giving me this opportunity. I once had a friend in high school who would say: “Instead of saying, ‘I have to do this,’ say, ‘I get to do this.’” And he and I would laugh and redouble our efforts at stacking boxes in the food bank, or cleaning candy wrappers out of a park, or stacking chairs in the church basement. I think of this often when I am struggling. And if that doesn’t work, then, there is always the glory of skill that I learned early on.
In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong writes about the utility of debt and how it silences us: “If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering. The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject. I accept that the burden of history is solely on my shoulders; that it’s up to me to earn back reparations for the losses my parents incurred, and to do so, I must, without complaint, prove myself in the workforce.” I have always wanted to make my parents happy, so I do what I can for them. It is required of me.
I want to eat my own desire. I say to myself, I have never worked hard in my entire life. No matter how much I do, I must work harder, because it is all that matters. Desire is just a thing that hampers your drive, I think sometimes. This squirming thing, the incessant need to have “fun” on holidays, to party at publics and spoil your time with friends, to spend thirty minutes more than you should on YouTube, on insta, on Twitter, on Tumblr, on these indulgences you have never even bought. When desire is separated from work and work is all that matters, anything you desire is negligible. If you do what you love, you are not working. So find something else.
iii: next person’s job
No man can do everything. Gesenhues understands this (we are talking about the fizz post, correct?). “Its the next persons job to solve/the capacity issue,” he says, and do we think that Gesenhues is resentful in this email? Sometimes, I want him to be. I can make him angry if I read it the right way. “‘Person’s’ is lowercase and misspelled to denote his disdain for others who will arrive after him,” I might say. “He spells it wrong to say to us that they lack the skills to do what he has done, what he has been broken by.” But this is cruel. It is me speaking for the author. Is it even right to resent others in this way?
If you value skill and hard work above all else, you become a god of comparison. You organize the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ into microfilm in your head, tiny lists of imperfections that you incise at every given moment. You judge things with perfect accuracy. You measure LinkedIn profiles of your friends and the misplaced resumes of your enemies, each bullet point something to measure yourself against. Not my tempo, you say to your lab partner when he brings the wrong chemical to you. Then, you throw the beaker at his face.
You work hard to pay off your debt, and you fail by virtue of being, so you curse it. Your talents begin to sour here: here’s the acquaintance you flubbed with a sour line, there’s the test you never double-checked, see how you’ll ruin this interview. You have always compared others (to you), so the blade twists: look at what internship they’ve landed, see how their poem says far more than yours ever will, look at how well they organize their time while you spend eight hours a day sleeping in your too-comfortable bed. It’s tempting to give yourself a metric and assign yourself a role based on those standards. I’m at a Top 20 University, you say. However, I’m mediocre at my class, you add. Then, extrapolate. This mediocrity means that when I die, my life is and will become a failure. Nothing but sordid trash drifting across my headstone stone as cars drive past the roadside graveyard. It could be the smallest things that set you off. A three-line Fizz post could somehow be better than everything you’ve ever written, and you would need to work harder, be better.
iv: I’m retiring.
What does Gesenhues imply when he writes, “I/have done all I can for Rice University?” He can do no further. This is where I think about the beginning of the email, right there on the first line, the main idea, “I’m retiring.” But despite this ending, the email continues. Think of this email then as a litany against the eternal grind, the faithful work of drowning, the sacrifice and suffering that proves you into existence, makes you holy.
To sacrifice ourselves in service for something is a hefty thing, a solid thing in your hand that you can carry in your pocket. It’s an old story, continuously told: Stephen in Acts, Hamlet in Hamlet, Tris Prior in Divergent. It gives you the coal to continue burning yourself. “Thank you for sacrificing your life for me! In return, I will sacrifice my life for you!” so says Hong in Minor Feelings. But sacrificing yourself upon the altar of diligence cannot set you free. It never does. The more you give to it, the less you are of yourself. It matters not if you are good at it, if there is a reason or responsibility for you to work harder than you have ever before. The fact of the matter is, it eats away at you until you are nothing.
I would be lying if I said that I think about Gesenhues’ email every day. It’s just a Fizz post, a three line email, not even a haiku in its poetic form. But there’s something there that sticks in my mind; the retirement, the exhaustion, the dedication to Rice. It’s pretty funny. I’ve said the line, “I have done all I can” a multitude of times to myself when I come up short, when I fail a test, when I can’t show up. It makes me laugh at the failure, a ward against my incessant need to pay things back. It’s something you drown in, obligation. Even if I can fail, I cannot. I have to live up to my ability. I will berate myself for my failure, every little thing I’ve done wrong, endless angles of self-hatred that keep me awake at night. I will hate myself for hating myself, time better spent working. Why was it me who inherited this self-doubt? Why couldn’t my brain work correctly? Why was I never the perfect child who never did anything wrong?
But this issue is its own problem. If I am to break out of this cycle, I must respect myself. I must take into account the dimensions of myself, every little thing that matters nothing; this mistake I made in high school, that mental misstep I made in a conversation. It is what will bring you back to life, what will free you from the debt that I place myself under. I think of Gesenhues’ email now. Sometimes it’s the next person’s job to solve the capacity issue. God knows how much you’ve done. Sometimes you do need to give up when you’ve given your all, maybe to Rice University, maybe somewhere else. It doesn’t matter, you’ve done enough and the debt is now paid in full. So stop paying. Sometimes, when someone emails you to special register for a class, you might even need to retire in response to it.
OneFiveHundred is a series by Wild Grain Editor Hongtao Hu, all thoughts are his own and not necessarily representative of The Wild Grain or the Rice University English Department.