My #5 speech…
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“Thank you thank you coach Calisto!!! We finally won!!! A 49-year dream at last came true!!!!” … The excitement was palpable in that very first sentence of my friends’ blog entries this past December. Intrigued, I kept reading to see what was going on. Turned out Vietnam had just won the AFF Championship – first time in 49 years. Wow, impressive, but what on earth is the AFF Championship, you might ask. AFF stands for Asean Football Federation, and in case you’re wondering, football means soccer everywhere else but the US :-o!!! This federation is comprised of (brace yourself for this) 6 nations in Southeast Asia back when I was still in VN, and now has grown to have 11 members: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor Leste, and Vietnam. Hah! I’m sure you have seen these countries’ names listed on the World Cup roster, right? (confused look on faces)…. As bad as you think the United States is with soccer, at least we’ve made it to the World Cup. The countries I mentioned earlier have never been able to make it past the Asian eliminations!!! But yet the tiny bitty AFF Championship is the BIGGEST national sport event of Vietnam. I still vividly remember watching Vietnam play against the same 3 neighbors year after year, knowing exactly who was going to win, but yet wholeheartedly excited every single time. Why? Because we had virtually nothing else more extravagant in sports to look forward to. In a country where putting food on the table every night is a struggle, having a national soccer team is all that it can afford, even though the team is so poorly equipped it rarely beats anybody else but the more bankrupt neighbors of Laos and Cambodia. These blog entries made me think of how people in such poorer countries can be so genuinely excited about the few little things that they have while those in richer circumstances may not necessarily be able to fully enjoy all of the abundance around them.
All of you probably have heard these phrases at least once “Less is More” or “The Power of Less” etc. And I’m here to say I totally believe in it. When I grew up, we were so poor. I remember saving all of my breakfast allowances to buy a new ink bottle, a pencil, a notebook, or that Monday edition of my favorite magazine. And when I pulled all of my savings out of my purse and handed them to the cashier for the items I wanted, nothing could convince me that life couldn’t be any better. I was literally on drugs. I didn’t want anything else. Well, partially because there wasn’t much else around me nor could I afford them. And then, I came here and started to see how much other “stuff” that I had never seen before. I figured if I could buy them, the joy I feel would be 10 fold. So I worked hard to make money and started to “collect” stuff. Years passed and I ended up with a 3000-square-foot house full of junk that I would probably need an inventory program to track. Don’t get me wrong; yes I was very happy at first. But gradually the excitement wore off. I didn’t dive into that Monday edition of my favorite magazine with both feet because unconsciously I knew that I could also read the Glamour that would arrive the next day. And oh even if I decided to read it, I couldn’t totally enjoy it because there was this early bird sale going on at Macy’s and I needed to get there by noon!! I wasn’t prepared or plan for any of these emotional changes, but slowly I realized they were taking place in me. The more the quantity, the less the quality of each seemed to be.
The other day my friend asked me what I thought about kids nowadays being less interested in academics, especially with drier subjects like math and science. It made me think back about why I was so in love with going to school and mesmerized by mathematical riddles. Yes, maybe it’s part of my DNA. But honestly perhaps it was because there weren’t too many other cooler activities for me to choose from. The only thing my mom could afford for me to take was Tae Kwon Do on Saturday nights. We didn’t have a movie theater in our town, so “going to the movies” was just something I would only see in movie, if I could actually go to see one :-). How about piano lessons? I didn’t know what a piano in fact looked like except what I saw in the foreign films I watched on my black and white television set. Therefore, I couldn’t wait to see my friends, do homework together, or participate in the school activities that didn’t cost us any extra money. The school-sponsored academic contests, camps, and field trips were my only fun outlet, and I embraced them with my whole heart and mind. So, even though I didn’t get to go to Disney Land, play video games, have toys and fancy computers, or ballet lessons, I didn’t know what I was missing out either because they didn’t exist in my reality. In fact, the scarcity of those extra things helped me focus on what turned out to be more important in my adult life – a good academic track record to build a successful life in this new country.
Am I suggesting that we should throw away everything, abnegate ourselves of all luxuries, and resort to an abstemious lifestyle? No. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with striving for and having more with our lives, be it material or non-material acquisitions. Heck, with my tone-deaf ears, any music lesson would have helped tremendously ;-). However, there’s a difference between working for more and thinking that having more would make us happier. Sometimes, and more often than not, being content with the simple things we have and enjoying them as if we’ve never had them before and there’s nothing else to pick from would be the most fulfilling gift we could give ourselves. So there my friends, please join me in celebrating the abundant lives we’re having now, even if they appear to have scarcity in some areas.
