Songs of Pain and Hope

The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is a special milestone in my life. When it happened, I was in my first few weeks of law school and unclear, uncertain about the future. Watching the devastation pushed me further into wanting to address evil in all its forms.

I used to have picture of the firefighters hoisting the flag amidst the rubble in my Philadelphia office as well as the little girl waving the flag while sitting on top of her father’s shoulders.  I never once imagined that I would end up in NYC, having the honor and privilege of serving and protecting it in my own small way as a member of the NYPD.

Getting to stand at the sites made infamous by that event. Having colleagues who served on that day.

Always NYPD.

Always heroes.

The Department observes the day annually at the exact times when the attack occurred.

It is solemn and sobering.

It is powerful and humbling.

The country and world has mostly forgotten.

Memories fade and maybe that’s a good thing. And maybe it isn’t.

But for some of us, we remember.

I see you Mary in the garden
In the garden of a thousand sighs
There’s holy pictures of our children
Dancing in a sky filled with light
May I feel your arms around me
May I feel your blood mix with mine
A dream of life comes to me
Like a catfish dancing on the end of my line

Sky of blackness and sorrow
Sky of love, sky of tears
Sky of glory and sadness
Sky of mercy, sky of fear
Sky of memory and shadow
Your burning wind fills my arms tonight
Sky of longing and emptiness
Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life

Come on up for the rising
Come on up lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

Kid soccer in NYC is competitive. Especially with the Wall Street crowd. Hardcore competitive.

My daughter had to tryout for the 7 year old squad. And as she got older, they ranked the kids by talent and skill. There were A, B, and even C teams. Needless to say, parents really got into it. Jockeying for position, playing time, and placement. If you think national politics is brutal, try youth athletics.

I won’t lie.

I wasn’t immune to it.

On some days, I’d wish that there was less Hufflepuff in the daughter and more Cristiano Ronaldo, but we don’t choose our parents and apparently neither our kids as well. At least, however, I wasn’t as bad as this one dad who videotaped his daughter at practice. One time, she got hit in the face by a ball and had to leave the game. When she refused to return due to shock and pain, her dad berates her on the sidelines for being weak, as she is crying. After the practice, she trails behind him as they leave the field, as he refuses to hold her hand.

Most parents were actually quite nice. I couldn’t resist poking fun at the absurdity of the NYC competition by cheering for individual players by their parents’ workplace instead of names – Go Goldman Sachs! Go Shake Shack! Go JP Morgan!

The team actually did quite well. They somehow managed to win their division even though they were matched up against teams with players a year older. They even played all boys teams and held their own.

My daughter rarely scored, but was a good defender. Because of her size and personality, she’d knock quite a few others down and was the best tackler on the team. Once, we discussed how to disrupt an opponent’s decision cycle with defense. Observe – Orient – Decide – Act can be thwarted, obscured, intercepted at every stage.  This works for all types of scenarios – sports, work, relationships.

The real life Law and Order Special Victims Unit commander once told me how he taught his division to disrupt the decision cycles of sex offenders – to swiftly interdict and investigate, preventing them from quickly lawyering up. Bruce Lee’s intercepting fist concept is also applicable here.  An opponent is often most vulnerable when he is striking mode; this is exactly the best time to strike at him.

Private school in the city cost somewhere in the 50K a year vicinity even for kindergarten. No way the daughter would get anywhere near that. But I’d like to think this was her real education or at the least a supplement.

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.

(From the DA years)

So I got my weekly assignment and this time it wasn’t a serious crime (a nice break I suppose).  Turns out someone who made a right turn on a red light when he wasn’t supposed to wants to appeal his ticket (I can’t believe I got assigned this case).  He wrote the appeal himself (always a trip).  His main argument – that he wasn’t “Supperman” (yeah that’s how he spelled it) with “Ex-Ray” vision to see all the signs in the city.  

Cost of paying ticket = $104  

Cost of him filing appeal = About $100 

Commonwealth time (me working on this) = About $200-$300 

Court Time to decide the appeal in our favor = About $200-$300 

Sorry, no priceless punchline.  What a waste of time and resources.  Just pay the damn ticket.

Postscript – So I actually met the defendant at oral argument. He had a crutch and a cast. I couldn’t tell if they were props or for real. I could barely contain my laughter when it was my turn to approach the judge panel. Could not get out the one sentence that basically said I had nothing further to say.

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.

(From the Indiana years)

…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… 

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?

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.

Can’t know what’s high
Til you been down so low

The future’s bright 
Lit up with nowhere to go 

To and fro the pendulum throws

To and fro

To and fro