how should a person be?

Fear and Love
I wish I could make the argument that a river
and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego
are enough. But whatever comes next must include
tents in the parking lot, that homeless camp
on the way to the airport,
and the hole in your cheek
from the cancer removed yesterday.
I said last night,
in the few seconds before I fell asleep,
You do realize, don’t you, everything
is falling apart? You said, OK,
I’ll try to keep that in mind. And now it is
starting to be late again, just like every other night
for the last seventy-five years. Fear and love,
a friend said in an impromptu speech
at his surprise birthday party,
we all live caught between fear and love.
He tried to smile as he spoke, then sat down.
Yesterday you saw the moon
from the operating table
where they were about to cut you.
Look! you demanded, and the surgeon bent and turned
to see it from your angle,
knife in hand.
Jim Moore

I haven’t been writing lately, because I’ve been embroiled in a death match with our daycare. It’s amusing how, in our minds, stories about the empire live in lands far away, in other centuries, in other lives. In Moral Ambition, Rutger Bregman asks us to consider what we would have done during the Holocaust, during the Civil War, and reminds us that we're doing it right now. History is unfolding and we are inside of it, whether we're paying attention or not.

We forget, I think, of the every day oscillations between fear and love, the every day decisions we make that might seem, in the moment, mundane and small, but in aggregate, add up to what a person is. We have the chance, all the time, to be on the right side of something.

I think a lot about the question, how should a person be?

I know that I am what my ancestors dreamed of, in their suffering, in their fear, and most of all, in their love. When my great-grandparents fled to Taiwan with their two sons after their land was seized by the Chinese Communist Party, they left behind three daughters, scattered across the country. The children didn’t meet again until after they’d become grandparents. Whole lives lived apart.

忍—to endure—is a concept core to Chinese philosophy. The character is a knife blade over a heart. To endure in the embrace of a tremulous hope. An act of will. A form of love sustained despite fear. Could my great-grandparents have imagined this life? This becoming?

And yet. It’s not enough to be happy, to live a good life, is it?

Complacency in the comfort of my home has been something I’ve always despised about myself. No matter how placid my own life—how good and rich and full—the suffering remains. It is the background static of every moment of joy, every dance party we have in the nursery, every dinner of laughter and too-loud acoustics and too-spicy Thai food, every gust of wind turning the ocean into a cascade of sequins.

You do realize, don’t you, everything is falling apart?

And here we are, dancing. Here we are, looking at the moon and wondering how it rises. Here we are, impossible and ordinary, our existence a small and petty protest.

And what do we do in response? Who are we, next to all of it?

The truth is, I want to know and I want to deny my own complicity. Bregman would call me a noble loser—an idealist who cares deeply about moral causes but has not created meaningful change. My only experience with meaningful change comes from fairytales: of my friend’s sister living in a shipping container on a diplomatic trip or a neighbor’s husband’s research on contagious diseases in Vietnam. I met the first on FaceTime, the second over wine and gnocchi. Then they were gone and I was still here, in the Los Angeles sunshine—in this life that continues, unrelentingly, to be good.

Despite the tender moments of vulnerability or loneliness or mortality; despite parking tickets and lost sunglasses and, yes, retaliatory daycare administrations, I am lucky and privileged to live this life. And chances are, you are lucky and privileged to live yours.

I know that to live well, in this world, is to be complicit. Our joy, our luck, our dreams, are made possible by unjust systems, sustained by the labor and suffering of others.

I volunteered with the homeless, washing down mobile showers and toilets, listening to and writing their stories. For years, I grocery shopped for neighbors during the pandemic. I organized voter education dinners, ran a makeshift food bank, marched and protested against authoritarian governments and unjust enforcements. Small acts of great hope, cosplaying in the margins of my real life.

I work at an AI startup. I still shop on Amazon occasionally. I take way more flights than I “need” to. I ruminate about personal indignations at night. I know what these things cost—who pays, who loses, what is at risk—and still.

I want to dedicate my life to something greater. I do. I tell myself, someday. Not right now. Because right now, there is the Los Angeles sunshine and the redwoods in the Bay Area. There is the nightly dance party and my son’s little hands in mine as we nap in the languid afternoons. There is crying at the wedding of a friend who is like a brother. There is this delicious, unreplicable life—and I can’t quite imagine giving it up yet. Not even in an act of nobility. Not yet.

It is all happening at once. Joy and suffering. Fear and love. This life of ordinary grace and ordinary complicity. Our parents are getting weaker; our children are getting stronger. The baby in my belly. The surgeon holding the knife.

Look.

It’s easy and convenient to forget the fragility of what it means to be a person—our closeness to loss and being lost. We are all more close to dying than we’d like to be.

And somewhere in this impossible, ordinary life, it’s getting late, and we are still deciding how a person should be.