A Common Story

Albert Ai , 12th Grade
Santa Clara CA
Adrian C. Wilcox High School

In attempting to pinpoint the unifying source of poetry’s value, Perrine found that worth stemmed not from an imposition of the beautiful or distasteful, strange or common, joyful or poignant, but from the simple communication of human experience. Perhaps that is why my Asian American heritage can so powerfully color my outlook on life, but through no single identifiable path. Thinking about what my culture means to me conjures both the thrill of cultural celebration and the gravity of filial piety, both the bitterness of competition and the camaraderie of social harmony. Being a first generation Asian American raised at the center of Silicon Valley bridges me between the plenty of America’s most prosperous and the poverty of my parents’ rural origins.

But thinking about my heritage also brings forward the realization that my understanding of our family’s past is meager at best, simply because it was decided at some point that this story was too commonplace to be heard. I unavoidably pieced together a few details over the years: that my father had come to the United States without any assets or family to turn to, or even a strong grasp of English; that after earning two graduate degrees, he had first worked as a door to door salesman, selling copies of the Bible; that after his troupe had run out of gas, funds, and places to solicit, he had found work as an assistant chef making a dish called “cashew chicken” at a small restaurant in Missouri. How he had gotten there from Ohio, where he had earned his second degree, he never bothered to say. Only after moderate success at the restaurant was he able to save enough to come to California, buying an economical watch as a souvenir before he left.

After it was decided that this story, in completion, was too commonplace to be heard, I made the critical mistake of never protesting the decision until silence had become so firmly established that it became unlikely the complete story would ever be told. When I finally grew mature enough to understand why this was regrettable, I began to ask around, to hear the stories of others. To my surprise, their grasp of their own stories was as fragmented as mine: broken, vague, and distant. I listened as their voices dropped and they too admitted their meager knowledge about who and what preceded them. I then realized that my story, about the story that had never been told, was in fact an ordinary one. It was just one of thousands, belonging to thousands of other families respectively, whose unique stories had also been decided too commonplace to tell.

If I could change one thing to make the world a better place, I would have it that the stories of our past be heard. My father’s reticence has implicitly shown me that the wealth of unspoken meaning can only be discovered on our own, by our own desire. The necessity of such self-discovery may temporarily delay progress, but it is also by such discovery that whatever meaning we find becomes most deeply engrained into how we view the past, present, and future.

A few years ago, digging through an old drawer of odds and ends, I found that watch – the one my father had bought before leaving Missouri. It was missing its band, and had a crack over the third hour. Seeing this, he urged me to throw it away, but I didn’t. As a watch, I realized that it was worthless, and at best sentimental. But as a remnant of the past, it serves as a reminder of one struggle to overcome barriers of language and isolation, of poverty and opportunity; a relic of human experience, too valuable to be forgotten.