A desk

They say you can tell a lot about a person based on how they organize their desk. Some people are very concerned with keeping the surfaces of their desk clean and tidy, preferring to push the messes into the drawers, hidden away from sight. Some are just the opposite, fastidiously trying to keep everything tucked into its right place inside drawers and cubbies, but are somehow fine with leaving piles of papers and miscellaneous crap on top. And of course there are also those who leave everything a mess and those who strive to be neat inside and out.

Can you guess which one I am? I think the answer is pretty easy — I am type number two. I can organize and file the hell out of important (as well as useless) documents and items and easily access them whenever a need arises. But the top of my desk… whoo! Right now I have a stack of mail from yesterday and today sitting on my desk, a dvd drive box, an elephant figurine I picked up in India as a gift to one of my friends here, stacks of cds, loose pens and post it notes, a box of salon pas, a bottle of eye makeup remover and more piles of… random stuff. It really does drive me crazy, but i’m not about to put anything on my desk into the wrong place inside it. In the meantime, it looks like crap. I mean, it looks really bad.

I wonder if that’s what my life looks like to the outside person. I can’t lie and pretend that what people think really doesn’t matter to me — I’m still a good Chinese girl at heart and my mama did succeed in instilling some measure of decorum in me, despite my emphatic resistance. I know she’s concerned about the decisions I make, how they must look to her traditional/conservative Chinese friends. I know she has a hard time explaining my actions to them, and I feel bad putting her in that situation. It’s not her fault that I didn’t turn out to be the proper, good Chinese girl like she was when she was growing up; the circumstances of my upbringing were beyond her comprehension and control. I grew up in a different time, with a whole host of influences affecting who I ended up becoming. A different village raised me. In a way, I am not really her child…

What a profoundly strange situation my parents were in in immigrating here with me! I mean, just imagine what it must have been like: You are living in a new country, living in a transplanted version of a community from the home country, still carrying the same values, and yet despite the presence of a community of likeminded people from your home country, you still have limited means in trying to perpetuate those values to the next generation compared to what you would have had ‘back home.’ There is media and advertising and different social norms and completely oppositional ideas on how to achieve success. And not to mention the ultimate challenge: how do you teach your children to succeed in a society you’re still figuring out how to succeed in yourself?

I know I was a challenging daughter to raise, and to this day I know I still give them grief. I’m not proud of the headaches I’ve caused my parents (I’m still Asian enough to feel quite guilty, thank you very much). But at the same time, I’m eager to continue being who I am. I want to tell my parents, look ma, I’m that second desk, and I promise, in the end it will all be worth it. I want to keep hoping, keep believing for myself that it really is true. I need to believe for myself that it’s possible, that I’m much more than that messy exterior seems to say, that one day I’ll have it all together.

Mom and Dad, I love you, you’re wonderful, I’m sorry, but one day I’ll make you proud. I promise.