My Life, My Work, My Job
The notion of a “career” is a delusion. In fact, the word “career” comes from the Latin word for “road.” Instead of worrying so much about the pathway, we should care more about the destination.
Our market-driven world places a premium on work that brings in money and devalues work that does not. According to this warped view of things, the bigger the income, the more important the work. Women have always worked, yet we are taught that caring for the next generation, arguably the most important work of all, is a devalued form of work: housework. Men do it at peril to their “manhood.”
Worse yet, our economic system supports this craziness. A woman serving burgers at a fast food restaurant is doing work that shows up in our Gross National Product. A woman nurturing her child and teaching him values and skills does not.
One of the funniest lines in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey is when the protagonist finally realizes that as the nightly newscasters check on the “Dow” each evening, they are referring to the stock market, not the more spiritual concept of “Tao.” Yet one need not be an immigrant to feel foreign in this land of career-obsession. Economists have come up with other ways to chart society’s progress, such as the “Net Economic Welfare,” but we never seem to hear about them. With N.E.W., instead of worrying about maximizing profits, we could start worrying about profits as well as levels of unemployment, homelessness, and environmental quality.
For Asian Americans, our “careers” were too often limited by external variables. “Labor segregation” is the polite term for the way we historically were shunted into manual labor jobs with paltry returns.
We are not genetically predisposed to cooking and ironing shirts, yet 19th century Chinese American immigrants flocked to the restaurant and laundry trades, partly because someone had to do this “woman’s work” in frontier towns, and partly because they were unfairly limited in their ability to mine for gold by California’s Foreign Miner’s Tax. Sikhs from India were typecast as lumberjacks and farmers in the early 1900s, yet the descendants of these same immigrants are typecast as computer geeks today.
Sometimes our ancestors started laundries or other businesses to maintain their autonomy from the racism and brutality of the factory floor, and many might have been happy with their choices. But the fact remains that the “free market” so heralded in this society today, is and has always been a fiction for those without wealth, connections or both.
If a career is equated with professional status, Asian Americans were excluded from that status until just recently. We could not get the training to practice certain professions, and could not get licenses to practice others. For example, Washington State recently granted a posthumous bar admission to Takuji Yamshita, a brilliant scholar and a 1902 graduate of the University of Washington Law School. At age 27, Yamashita argued before the Washington State Supreme Court that denying citizenship based on race was unworthy of a nation “founded on the fundamental principles of freedom and equality.”
State Attorney General W.D. Stratton argued that Yamashita could never be a citizen because “in no classification of the human race is a native of Japan treated as belonging to any branch of the white or whitish race.” Yamashita lost his appeal because of the many precedents excluding Asians from citizenship which, according to the Court, “express a settled national will.” (See AsianWeek’s March 2 issue.)
When I was in law school from 1979 to 1982, some progress had been made, but not as much as you might think. Only a few hundred Asian Americans were graduating from all of the law schools in the country each year, and restrictions on the right of legal permanent residents to become members of the bar had just been lifted. Almost no Asian Americans were partners in law firms or members of the judiciary, and we continue to be underrepresented in most positions of power and authority.
After law school, I thought about having a “career” as a lawyer, but there were too many other things to do. The Japanese American redress movement was underway. The Asian American Movement was growing, both on campus and off. And there were artistic, family, and spiritual things that demanded my attention. Instead of defining my life by my job, I decided to have my jobs put food on the table, while I pursued my life’s work.
While I have given up the chance to retire at age 65 with an engraved gold pocket watch, I don’t feel like I’ve missed much. As a minority and as someone whose family suffered injustice, I have been cautioned by some in the community to play it safe, keep my head low, and not make waves. This is a very strong message, especially for immigrants: don’t rock the boat; just get a career.
Given the amount of injustice in the world, however, I don’t feel that I have a right to play it safe while others suffer. My solace would be won through another’s sorrow. The false satisfaction of a “career” would lose its luster when held up to what could have been if I had only focused on my work instead of my job. |
