When I was a sophomore in high school, I was asked to play for a mostly upperclassman team in the school basketball tournament. It was an all Asian team. I suggested that we be called the “Fighting C—-nks.” The rest of the team loved it and we entered the tournament as such. The principal also found it funny but changed it to “Fighting Men.”
In any case, we are matched up with a team that predictably underestimate us and laughs before the game when they see us warmup. But they weren’t that good and we handle them relatively easily.
During the game, I block their captain’s shot and I say “Get that shit out of here.” You would think all hell exploded. The benches clear but cooler heads prevail. I end up shaking hands with him and we both apologize to each other.
In the second round, we play a team with legitimately good players. We lose but it’s close. I even score. This time, I do not block any shots but I do foul hard. You have to make sure each basket is earned.
The next two years, I would lead teams as underdogs. We always put up a fight. I learned so much from these games. Make the stand. Make it hard for the other team. Even if you know you’ll probably lose, you somehow still hope and believe. Take the shot – open, contested. Take it. You’ll never have the chance again. The games aren’t forever.
1. I used to half-jokingly say at my NYC church that I would take all the angry kids and teach them like Jedi younglimgs. Angry kids have the potential to be the greatest if properly guided. Or they will eventually kill you and plunge the galaxy into darkness.
2. Pastors and ministers really need more real-life training before presuming to preach to others. Many are well meaning but seminary or Bible college alone is like playing a full game after only performing controlled drills.
3. I met many people who were seduced by the pursuit of power, fame, and wealth. Mostly without regard for the effect on others. This will sound heartless, but have all of it. All. Drown in it. Choke on it.
4. At some point for minorities, the teachings of Jesus (at least in their most literal forms), cannot be followed. Because the correct response to having your cheek slapped is “Try again”; being extorted for your cloak is “Come and get it”; and being forced to walk a mile is “Make me.” For too long has Christianity been used to oppress and enable.
5. A student asked his teacher: “How long will it take me to become a master?”
When the teacher answered that it would take ten years, the student countered: “I will work harder so I will achieve that rank quicker. How long will it take then?”
The church I grew up in tended to value the shiny kids – academically elite, athletic, musical, charming, good looking. It really was the ethos and pathos of the institution, heavily influenced by the highly competitive and pressurized DC area culture.
Neither fun nor pleasant. And not isolated only to my church – it’s in many places, you know what I’m talking about.
Although I could hold my own in some of these categories, I wasn’t that.
Far, far from it.
We’re talking tortoise and hare far apart here.
I liked being in my own space and thoughts although few to no one really got it. I observed a lot. Just no place to put it on the most part.
Recently, I told my high school teacher about several of the shiniest kids and what they ended up doing.
Teacher says nothing wrong with those endeavors.
I then replied, true, but look at what I did.
Teacher agreed.
My church was Jekyll and Hyde. Solid teaching, many good people. But the rampant hypocrisy, dissonance between what was preached and practiced, and the worship of so many gods other than the true, real one.
Pastors are human and imperfect but the ones we had at that time somewhat lacked the life experience, lenses, and worse, the humility to guide us properly. Some were actually very decent human beings but I felt they were limited by culture, dogma, politics, and possibly the worst factor of all – fear.
I really don’t want to be harsh but I still can’t escape the conclusion that so many churches, not just mine, don’t represent God all that well. Being a pastor or minister isn’t an easy job and I’ve learned to remember to be careful about walking in another’s shoes before making judgments. God knows, I’ve been on the receiving end of quick, inaccurate assessments one too many times.
A huge responsibility falls on the pastors – it is the role of the leader to push back against unhealthy environments and culture. Instead, what I often observed was not only a lack of resistance but also surrender and even adoption. For my church, it was the unholy trinity of the negative aspects of Chinese, DC Power, and American materialistic culture. There is a higher calling, accountability, and responsibility.
At the end of the day, I think that everyone is responsible for their own faith or lack thereof, but some burden also falls on both institutions of faith and their leaders. The Jesuits get it right by sending new priests to difficult assignments to prepare them.
Yet there is still grace that somehow peeks and sneaks into all that is not good and especially the bad. That is still the mystery and magic of it all.
My original plan in the PhD program was to study something along the lines of Asians in the criminal justice system, crime mapping, or neighborhoods policing. Issues that I was familiar with as a prosecutor. I ended up studying corruption for the next 7 years. In both the government and private sector as well as their intersections. I thought this was an anomaly but it makes sense looking back. It tied up a lot of threads that were coming together even if I didn’t really know or understand it all then.
The dots connect. They somehow do.
And also as more unfolds.
At heart, corruption is the abuse of power and authority. I witnessed so much of this in my life – from the country I was born in, this one, my work, church, so on and so forth. It is really difficult to combat much less prevent. My birth county has one of the best anti-corruption frameworks in the world but it has been misused for political purposes. Many of the anti-corruption initiatives worldwide do not have a lot of teeth. They are often paper tigers that hunt down the small prey.
At the end of 7 years in my program, I was asked to teach a course on the topic. I declined. I didn’t understand it well enough. And I read pretty much every paper and book published on corruption within a significant period of time. I even wrote a published chapter in an international book and also presented another paper at a conference.
One of the main difficulties in fighting it effectively is the lack of will. They often label it as political but it’s way more than that. It is also about courage and unbelievably integrity.
And something that will sound incredibly obsolete – the inherent evil of human nature. I wrote my dissertation on how environments affect effectiveness of leaders and controls. It wasn’t pretty. I saw all this play out in real life as well.
As I realized over the course of studying, observing, and practicing in the field, I think it’s really about right place, right time, right person. We can talk and theorize about legislation, campaigns, institutions but it’s about the person having access to the light switch and ability to turn it off and on that makes a ton of difference.
Or really the indifference.
I will make my way Through one more day in hell
I will hold the candle Till it burns up my arm Oh, I’ll keep takin’ punches Until their will grows tired I’ll swallow poison, until I grow immune I will scream my lungs out till it fills this room
How much difference does it make? How much difference does it make?
And so I was in the hospital – with 3 IVs running through my veins, a catheter, hooked up to oxygen, strapped to a heart monitor, lungs filled with fluid, heart not properly pumping, white blood cell count 2.5X normal, narrowly avoiding surgery, on heavy pain meds.
Other than parents, only my college roommate and my daughter’s godparents visited.
Didn’t matter how many degrees, contacts, experiences I had.
I just lay there.
Trying to survive.
And that was a lesson in how powerless we really are as human beings.
But I was also cracking jokes, laughing when I could, and encouraging the staff. One of them said I had incredibly high pain tolerance as most people would be screaming in pain rather than joking around.
Because we Malaysians are really, really hard to beat or kill.
Initially the staff wanted to give me Tylenol for the excruciating pain. That would have been akin to using a pellet gun on a charging rhinoceros.
Thank God for Oxycodone. And yes, I now understand why it is deadly addictive – it feels like blessed relief when it kicks in, like pure comfort.
Early on though, they would also miss my doses of painkillers, which was not fun. One night, a nurse vainly attempted to draw blood multiple times from what she thought was a vein but was really a tendon. We all laughed in a shared sense of dark humor and misery.
Sometimes, things are so f____ up that’s all you can an should do.
The hospital’s equivalent of Internal Affairs paid me a visit to ask me to narc on the nurses but I knew better than to do that.
Snitches get stitches.
Or in my case – no meds.
They also gave me a walker to use at home after my stay even though I told them I wouldn’t need it. I used it for exactly one day before learning to stumble around. I also didn’t take a single pain med since then, not even over the counter ones.
And since then, which has been over a year.
I guess I could point to that as strength, grit, resilience, or whatever but that’s not the full reality.
The truth is that it took a long time for healing, months after discharge. Slowly but surely, and with setbacks.
A very wise friend made the observation that the healing process can take longer than the actual illness. And that the experience leaves us changed, not better or worse, just changed.
And so it is with all types of injuries and wounds – physical, emotional, spiritual.
…and there are some days where you are so tired and disappointed that the floodgates of memories open and you don’t have the energy to question or fight with God anymore… you just float hoping to either be rescued or waiting to drown…
Regardless of one’s faith tradition, this is what it’s all about. We all stumble and fall but it’s about being true to what you’re called to do, the path you’re asked to travel.
Walk on.
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
I used to perform this exercise with my students from the management course I taught – write out the life of a president from birth to ascendancy to power. Invariably, most classes would chart out a straight line path – good family, prep school, Ivy League education, elite jobs, perfect spouses and kids, etc. I would then ask them whether this jived with reality. And of course, it doesn’t. Most of our lives are twisty-turny and especially those of great people.
I think this one is about stories and who writes ours.
Everyone has a story and it’s not anyone place to fully judge which is better or worse. But it would be also be untrue to say that some are more interesting than others.
This is also about allowing God to write the story. His and ours. It can be scary because it’s giving the pen away and He can be an unpredictable story writer.
But at the end of it all, it still comes down to trust and surrender.
Do we believe that He is a good writer?
Stories don’t have to be complex to have impact and power. But the truly great ones – on the par of Hugo, Dostoevsky, Marquez, Tolstoy, etc. often are. Maybe that’s the hallmark of an epic.
I also often think of the quote from the Gladiator movie – What we do in life echoes in eternity. Don’t ever delude yourself, this is truth. And this may not just involve our deeds in this realm but maybe our stories stretch beyond our earthly experience. But this is just conjecture and cold comfort to the present.
But life is a journey. Not a destination. In the words of poet Steven Tyler. Thinking of it as otherwise – a game, ladder, battle, etc. will drive you crazy and you’ll always feel like you can’t win.
My daughter and I used to watch a lot of Octonauts. A great series to learn about marine biology, exploration but also leadership, crisis management, and surprisingly being human. Captain Barnacles is a model leader – decisive, introspective, adaptable, resilient, understanding of his crew (especially the failings of First Mate Kwazii and self-doubt of Medic Peso).
And kudos to the possible Asian crewmember Albachoy (half albacore, half bokchoy.
My last command’s insignia looked a lot like that of the Octonauts. Uncannily, very similar mission and mandate. Reality bites.
I often thought about which Octonaut I was – and it was probably the octopus who liked to read. He did have a special suit that made him super formidable due to his tentacles – like Dr. Octopus from the Spider-Man universe.
But back to the Captain. Isn’t it funny that some of the models for leadership come from cartoons. Optimus Prime, Professor X, Duke.
And to be honest, the bad guys aren’t all that horrible either – maybe just a little misguided. Megatron, Magneto, Serpentor but not Cobra Commander. At the least, they had some intelligence and even a sort of code.
Malaysians punch above their weight. It it not a Napoleon complex or chip on your shoulder mentality. It is who we are. We are survivors. We are overcomers. We are fighters. Come at us. You’ll learn what we really are underneath our very real tolerances and kindness.
Like pretty much every nation in the world, we are a soccer mad country. The national team hasn’t been good in recent years but under the coaching of a Korean manager – a culture very similar to ours – they have improved tremendously. Recently, they shocked powerhouse South Korea by playing them to a 3-3 tie at the Asian Football Championship. South Korea is one of the world’s best and can hold their own against any team, not just Asian ones.
In the 1980’s, however, the team was one of the best in Asia. No small feat for semi-professional players. They could beat pretty much any of the continent’s teams. And even hang tough against elite European ones. They wouldn’t win but they’d keep the game close – even against England and West Germany.
Their best ever player was Mokhtar Dahari – one of the all time leading scorers in world history. He was so good that English First Division teams scouted him, an honor for someone from an obscure Third World country. However, the backbone of those teams was a defender named Soh Chin Aun. He was nicknamed Taukey which is translated as Boss. When they played West Germany, he led the defense in a smart, controlled way to stymie the vaunted German attack. That team was so good they qualified for the 1980 Olympics but didn’t participate because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
We are also arguably the only country in the world to wage a successful counterinsurgency against the Chinese funded Communists. While force was involved, the campaign relied more on the principle of winning hearts and minds – the role of the moral and mental over physical components of conflict. The human will and spirit is still formidable and can beat out any machine per Terminator or Battlestar Galactica – at least for now.
I played on my agency’s softball team. My legs at that point were wobbly but I did make a diving catch in centerfield that made my colleagues think twice about stereotyping me any further than they already did. I wore a shirt honoring our national team under my jersey. It was yellow and black with a tiger on it – our national animal and with some of the words of our anthem “Tanah Tumpahnya Darahku” which means the earth is soaked with our blood.
And just for kicks and giggles, there is a Malaysian domestic league team that has done well regionally. They are like the Barcelona of their league. They even made a music video with Snoop Dogg – you can YouTube it by searching for Johor Darul Tazim Champions.
Songs of Pain and Hope 