Sunday, November 6, 2011

You need a wife!

The other day, a friend from my Boston years called. We had not been in touch for many years, but once in a while we would talk on the phone. After she graduated from music school in Boston, she auditioned around and got a position at Syracuse Orchestra.

At Harvard, I had the impression that almost everyone except for me had studied a musical instrument. The famous Yo Yo Ma lived in my dorm when he was a student there. Many fellow students had a real passion and appreciation for music, and for the instrument they learned to play. When asked why they were pursuing the more generic career paths instead of music, I was told that it was extremely difficult to make a living as a musician. That was when I realized that instead of feeling sorry for the orchestra members who seemed to have the thankless job of supporting a soloist such as Sarah Chang or Midori, I ought to feel really happy for them, for they went through auditions where they were picked out of hundreds!

Therefore, I knew that my friend was a very good violist - in fact she was an exceptional violist. She grew up in a musical family, where her parents taught at Shenyang Conservatory of Music, where the piano prodigy Lang Lang was trained. She said that she truly loved music, and she was most happy when she was playing. In Syracuse, she met a Chinese scientist working for a pharmaceutical company and got married. They had a son. That was the last I heard from her.

This time, she had moved to Indiana, as her husband got a new job at another company. Syracuse Orchestra closed its doors soon after she left, mostly due to lack of financial support in this economy. She has been auditioning around, but has not found a permanent position yet. She feels frustrated for lack of a professional circle where she could express herself. She has a part-time position at the local orchestra and is also teaching at the university nearby. But that is not enough for her. She talked about how she thought that after turning thirty years old, life would be easy and straight-forward. Instead it has turned out to be more stressful. She has had frequent fights with her husband, all over trivial things. After all, what other things would there be to fight about between a couple?

While we were talking, we felt that we could almost finish each other's sentence. Despite our age difference (she's 7 years younger), personality difference (she's much more outgoing), and professional difference (I am as musically illiterate as she is scientifically illiterate), we share something in common. We are not contented in just making a living and raising kids. That lack of satisfaction makes us more irritable than perhaps other women, and in general reduces the level of happiness. She has truly found her calling in music, and I thought that I had truly found my calling in my entrepreneurial creativity. We love what we have chosen to do, but the odds are stacked against us to do them. She said that many orchestras closed shop this past year due to lack of donations and lower attendance, understandably due to the poor economy. In my case, pessimistic investors have made it hard to start new things in the biotech world, especially since it's much more capital intensive than their IT counterparts.

I recall another conversation I had over email with another friend, who comes from an old academic family in China. Her grandfather co-wrote the standard organic chemistry textbook for university students together with my great aunt. She went to Stuyvesant, Barnard and then Stanford Medical School. Then she decided that she did not want to practice medicine any more, so she went to Harvard Business School and joined the business world. Now she's a venture capitalist, who just moved back to Shanghai. She just got married, and we had the sweetest conversation over email. She said that many of her friends felt that they were raising their kids alone, and that somehow "having it all" was perceived as nearly impossible. She still was determined to have it all, but she acknowledged that after all these conversations, perhaps it was not possible to do everything at the same time. My own personal experience of having Winston at the time when my first company was in a critical stage while Michael was launching a very stressful tenure track career as a faculty member proved that it was perhaps possible to have it all, but at enormous cost.

I sometimes get a bit upset when I read about the bios of my peers in the industry. Often after they describe their professional achievement, they would write something like "married to a great woman with 3 amazing kids". I can't write something like that myself, because I don't have a stay-home husband. Neither can Michael, because he does not have a stay-home wife. And one kid has already stretched us thin, while others seem to blithely juggle three - because there is always a stay-home spouse. We have all come to acknowledge that one cannot outsource "raising a child" to nannies and housekeepers or even grandparents, as the results have turned out to be disastrous or even heart-breaking. A friend once told me, "what you need is not a nanny. You need a wife."

So there - for the professional women who possess talent for something they love, or at least think that they possess the talent - what they need is something they will never get - a wife, who is a true mother to the kids, a real champion of her career, a supportive partner to her in life, staying in a shadow. Those of us who are not lesbians will never get that. So we should just have a glass of wine, laugh about it, and move on.

I promised that I would give my violist friend another call, as Winston interrupted our phone conversation. That type of interruption never occurred in our lives before kids. Somehow I found that rather symbolic.