I’ve been meaning to tell this story for a few years now, but I never really got the chance. Given that today is the twenty-year anniversary of the Tienanmen Square protests/massacre it seems like today is a good time for me to tell the story of how my father became an inspiration to a revolutionary.

In case you haven’t heard, twenty years ago a bunch of scholarly, intellectual folks in China told the communist government that it sucked. The government, much to quite a lot of people’s surprise, called their bluff and killed, maimed, or imprisoned every single protester that it could gets its hands on in front of the whole world. In retrospect it may not have been the smartest thing to do, but this story is not about whether it was right or wrong or whether the protesters’ sacrifices were in vain. This is a story about one of the men who escaped the wrath of the communist hate machine.

Shortly after June 4th, 1989, one of the leaders of the protests—who shall remain nameless, both for his safety and as a demonstration of my inability to remember names—left China and sought asylum in France. This graduate of an elite institution and inspiration to many was taken in by the French government and spent a while in France. While in exile, he continued to write and preach against the atrocities of the Chinese government.

At some point in the mid/late-nineties, he decided to move to America. He would continue to write and work against the oppressive communist party while in the land of the free and under the skirts of liberty. That’s great. Except there’s one problem: in America, he needed a car. In order to get a car, he had to learn how to drive one; he could not get a car in China if he had wanted to and he did not need a car to navigate urban Paris, so he never learned how to drive.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve never told anyone much about my father, so here’s a quick summary:

As a young teenager he left his home village for the cities of Macau and Hong Kong to become an apprentice mechanic. Later, as industry moved towards China in the 70s and 80s he would rise up from poverty by building and maintaining giant mechanical looms for textile mills. Unlike many of his contemporaries he never became rich because he never wanted to become an asshole—a friend of his from that era once told me that he paid a million dollars in bribes every year so he could dump toxic waste into a local river, but the money he saved from not having to pay for proper disposal more than made up for it; I wanted to stab him in the face, but I didn’t, because my father taught me not to be an asshole. Eventually, after he moved to New York, he had a radical career change and became a driving instructor.

Somehow, he’s really good at it. Folks referred to him only as Master Mui, the best driving instructor in Chinatown, and the only man whose students have an almost 100% passing rate. Seriously. I’m not kidding here. Among this very small circle he was considered epic at the time. He would still get calls years after he retired from that business from folks who want to learn from him.

You see how these two threads are coming together, yes?

So here we are, in the late nineties, in the outskirts of New York’s famous Chinatown (because nobody involved in this story could afford the rent in the middle of New York’s famous Chinatown). As you may recall, we have a pretty well-known revolutionary who needed to learn how to drive on the mean old streets of America. He heard through the grapevine rumors of a man who can get him a driver’s license and out into the wilds of freedom in record time. It was only logical that these two men would meet inside a red, 1992, Toyota Corolla one summer day.

After ten or so hours of intensive training and half as much time waiting in line at the DMV, our young (actually he’s in his thirties at this point now, so not too young) revolutionary obtained not only political, social, but now geographic freedom. Only in America, people. As thanks, he gave my father a model of the Eiffel Tower he bought in Paris—which, to this day, still sits next to a blessed statue of Buddha my parents bought in Thailand during their honeymoon, mostly because that’s the best place to put it—and then left for the rest of America. After making a few quips about the absurdity of my father teaching a famous revolutionary how to operate an automobile we forgot about him and went about our daily business.

Actually, the real story starts here; just look at the last sentence of the last paragraph. The real story always starts after a sentence like that.

A while later, the almost-middle-aged revolutionary called up my father, thanked him once again for the amazing lessons, and informed him that he wrote an article about his experience learning how to drive and will be publishing it soon in some scholarly political magazine that normal people don’t really read. Just as I would be wary of a student who wrote nothing but “this is the best math class ever!” on his course evaluation form (was it great because you learned a lot, or because you goofed off and I didn’t catch you?) my father didn’t know how to take this. My mother, in the meantime, called up her family in Hong Kong and told them to watch out for the next issue of this magazine that they all knew existed but would have never bought if one of their in-laws wasn’t featured in its pages.

We got the article a couple weeks later.

According to the article, my father was a wise, saintly man who dripped wisdom from his mouth every time he uttered a syllable. Every single vibration of his vocal cords bring about a koan of knowledge that further inspired our young revolutionary to continue his work against the evil, oppressive communist threat. All that my father taught him were metaphors for how he should proceed to dismantle the darkness that is the Chinese empire. Not only did he learn an essential life skill, he has learned the very wisdom that he needs to lead his fellow scholars and writers to victory and my father has given him the will and strength to move on as he travels through this new world and preaching the words of freedom and brotherhood by writing articles in publications that nobody really reads.

It was, in retrospect, the first time I’ve seen master class humanities major bullshit—I believe proper gentlemen call it the art of rhetoric—in action. Seriously, it was top of the line liberal arts crap. There were lines talking about how every time my father helped him turn the steering wheel it was like the hands of destiny helping him steer towards victory and that the turning of the wheel symbolized the progress of the revolution. I mean, I graduated from Amherst College with a degree in “making crap up and pretending that the crap I made up is totally legit” and I can’t bullshit like this.

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure how I could have described this article without the language we have now. When I think back to my reaction, the only words I have for it are “WTF?!” and “lolwut?”, both nonexistent in the late nineties. The absurdity of the article and this whole event is an apt metaphor for the absurdity of the whole Tienanmen Square protest and the government response itself. My father is not in any way a political revolutionary—he revolutionized some aspects of driver’s ed, like telling his students that the whole “place your hands at two/ten o’clock on the steering wheel” thing is bullshit, but that’s about it—nor does he particularly care about the political situation in China at this point, but when you’re completely focused on something even a casual “remember to come to a full stop at that stop sign” can become something completely different.

In the end, we never heard from the revolutionary personally again. He has gone on to write more scathing articles against Red China—I didn’t read them because they’re all published in things that nobody reads, so I unfortunately cannot critique his future use of rhetoric. Meanwhile, the Chinese government continues to torture its citizens, deny religious and social freedoms to its people and censor this blog; and of course nobody really gives a damn because they’re all too fat and not-miserable compared to twenty years ago to care.

I suppose my father’s sagely advice really didn’t do him much good on the revolutionary front. But, you know, I haven’t heard of any Tienanmen exiles causing major traffic accidents or dying from getting t-boned during a left turn. He’s taken all the most important lessons to heart. Really, as a teacher, we don’t actually care too much whether our students go out and accomplish great things; sometimes it’s enough that they use what they learned to make sure that they don’t die a pointless, fiery death.

Wing :: Jun.04.2009 :: Posts :: 3 Comments »