American Disbelief

I remember driving around Minneapolis a few weeks after returning and asking myself, was it real? Was I really just in Vietnam? Had I actually been back to Asia for the first time in 27 years?

Already the memories of it all were fading. I was putting together a CD of pictures from all the other students on the trip and the photos helped rekindle the memories, but I could feel the experience slip away every day.

It made me even more depressed than I already was, but I’ve gotten over that now. That’s all part of Buddhism; letting go. You only suffer further agonizing over the “could haves” and “what ifs.” That’s not to say the experience isn’t worth remembering, obviously. But, I do find myself struggling to maintain focus on what seemed all-important just three months ago.

My wondering about the reality of it all was just one instance of a recurring theme. The experience was larger than life. It was large enough to be easily dismissed as just an emotionally charged event significant only in my mind’s eye. That’s a cynical view I fight every day to keep from accepting.

The event really was as big in my life as I thought. It wasn’t larger than life, though, it was just life. Amazing things really do happen, no matter how much I or anyone else tries to fool themselves into believing otherwise.

I wrote very angrily before about American cynicism but there’s another, more sad side to it. Maybe that’s more correctly termed as American disbelief. It takes a lot to suspend American disbelief. You usually need a lot of expensive special effects to do so. Even then many people are entertained by pointing to the faults in the effects. They’re little clues that say two things: it’s not real and I’m clever enough to see it.

Some things seem too amazing to be real, though, but so many only fool themselves into disbelieving. Perhaps it’s just a leftover habit from spending so much time looking for tiny, giveaway clues like a shadow on an actor’s face not being at quite the right angle compared to the backdrop.

Life really is amazing, though, not to beleaguer the point. You don’t hear that stated often enough and then it’s usually in the form of thoughtless cliché. It’s far easier to seem smart by disbelieving the amazing. To believe the amazing you have to take a chance that you’re wrong. Indeed, that’s what makes you truly wise: when you take a chance at something you know full well could be totally false.

In Taiwan amazing things happened all the time. Of course, maybe that’s also because I was a child and therefore more open to amazing things. Or, is saying that just my own American disbelief trying to throw me off the scent?

No matter, I’ll plod right on: amazing things happened all the time in Taiwan. Amazing things also happened all the time the two weeks I was in Vietnam, the month I was in Spain and the ten days Reese and I were in London. Yes, even these 30 years I’ve lived in America I’ve seen amazing things.

My most vividly amazing memories, though, are from Taiwan. Speaking Taiwanese, Mandarin and English is one amazing thing, and that’s as common to the human experience as birth and death. We speak. That’s one of the many things all humans have in common. That we speak so many different languages is of little consequence. We speak, and that’s all that matters.

That I learned Vietnamese in only two weeks was also at once amazing and totally normal. Perhaps that’s the real point that needs made: the amazing and the every day are one and the same. It’s only disbelief or cynicism that doesn’t allow us to see how amazing our daily lives really are.

In particular, one amazing thing in Taiwan stands out in my mind. I was walking back to the old medical services building in Hai Ou where my mom was that day. For some reason, on the way I was formulating a clever plan in my child brain about how to show her what a good boy I was. I was walking along the side of the road as she’d told me to do often and not down the middle of the road.

I was being good and safe by doing that, and she needed to know. But how would I tell her? I needed something to illustrate the point. So, I made up a story about seeing this other boy from the village walking down the middle of the street. I’d tell her he got hit by a car but I was fine because I was a good boy and walking on the side of the street.

Mom didn’t care at all about how good her little boy was, though. She was very insistent on which boy it was that got hit by a car. I told her the name of one of the boys in the village and she took me immediately to his family’s house.

She made me tell these two older women what I told her. They were confused because the boy I named was out of town that day. I couldn’t have seen him get hit by anything. I kept pointing to a picture of him, though, and saying I saw him get hit.

A week later he was killed in a traffic accident.

People die every day; nothing amazing about that. The family felt ashamed that they didn’t listen to me, though. They said their ancestors were speaking through me to warn them their child was in danger as they often do through children. They didn’t heed the warning and their boy was killed just as I told them.

It wasn’t my fault, either. I was just trying to prove to my mom how good I was by comparison. She gave me a lecture on telling lies that same day I told her the tale I thought I’d made up. I felt pretty guilty about making those women worry about their boy. I don’t know how I felt after the news came out about him being killed. I know even less how I feel about it today.

It’s amazing that ancestors would speak to their living descendants through little, blonde American boys. The guilt the family felt over not listening to their ancestors’ warnings was normal, though. So, how can such posthumous communication be amazing when it’s such an obvious part of normal life?

Are you smarter for passing this off as just coincidence? Does that make all our lives better if we refuse to believe anything was going on in this situation other than some brat of a boy trying to show off to his mother?

I believed at the time that’s all it was: me being a pain in the ass and upsetting everyone for no good reason. That may well have been, but I’m going to be the smarter one here and assert that it may not have been the whole story.

I believed in the supernatural as a kid. All kids do. That’s why we ask our parents to look for monsters under our beds. As you get older you become “wiser” because you no longer believe in that childish crap. You know there aren’t any monsters under any beds and you know there’s no such thing as ancestors speaking through children to warn their families of danger.

When you get older, you also lose the ability to learn languages as well.

What’s the difference, then, between growing out of something and being set in your old ways?