Tribute to My Remarkable Female Friends

Life is full of coincidences. The other day, I was chatting with a friend online, and she mentioned that she just updated her blog, so I went to take a look (http://yinglauraliu.blogspot.com/). I was just complaining to her about a bad fight that I had with Michael, and how I was feeling really angry . After talking to her, and reading her blog, I felt so much better and wanted to leave a comment, but then I got busy with something else and never got to do it.

Then I received an email from another friend asking me to read this latest op-ed piece by the columnist David Brooks in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/opinion/30brooks.html?src=me&ref=homepage). As chance would have it, yet another friend told me that she’s now writig a blog in Chinese - http://yinikanotebook.blogbus.com/. I went to take a look, and found myself reading the whole thing from beginning to end in one breath, as if it were one of those suspense novels that keep me on the edge of my seat.

Now why are these things related? - To varying degrees, all these writings are about how to live a happy life and what it means to have a happy life, especially for a woman.

Starting with the friend YL who counseled me right after my fight with Michael (http://yinglauraliu.blogspot.com/), which was of course about something trivial in reality but ballooned into something that felt enormous and terrible – reading her blog is like talking to her in a way. Surely she must have had moments of anger in her life, but I find it hard to imagine what she is like when she is angry. From that perspective, she has a very different personality from mine – I have been called bad-tempered or hot-headed by quite a few who know me well. That being said, I always find it extremely easy to understand her and be understood by her. From the self-effacing way she writes about her life and herself, one could not conjure up an image of a strong and capable woman who is at the same time sweet and empathic, which she is. Having received both PhD and an MBA from Ivy League schools, she is working full-time at a big publishing company in New York. She’s the mother of three(!) boys – an older boy of 4 years old and a pair of twins who are almost 2. At home, she manages a household that is in sheer number of people bigger than my company. Outside of work, she is in touch with a lot of friends. It is not without some envy that I see her popular with so many more people (true I am not a teenager any more but can’t help it still). She is the one that chats with me often about movies, as we both seem to be rather fanatical movie fans. She was very candid in speaking to me about how the birth of a child could add stress to relationships. Considering that I have only one son and she has three, and she did not experience this kind of “stress” until the birth of the twins, I must say that it proves that she handles interpersonal relationships much better than I do.

David Brooks’ article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/opinion/30brooks.html?src=me&ref=homepage) started out on the current tabloid news – actress Sandra Bullock won an Oscar (finally), and then the found out that her husband was cheating left and right on her. Presumably someone asked a question, “If you have to pick, would you choose to win the Oscar or have a happy marriage?” The article went on to explain that there is dubious relationship between money/fame and happiness, whereas there is clear correlation between personal relationship and happiness. In other worlds, what is emphasized in our education is not even a major contributor to happiness. Perhaps there shoud be a course in the required curriculum called “interpersonal relationship”, besides english, math, chemistry, biology, economics, etc. David Brooks’ article is not about women, but since Sandra Bullock is a woman, one cannot fail to notice that the successful/famous actors have fared in general much better in private life than their female counterparts. Sure, they might have gone through a divorce or two, but somehow they did not seem to suffer much from those divorces, they were never lonely or alone, and they almost always emerged from these breakups better and happier and eventually they all settled down one way or another. Think Tom Hanks, Warren Beaty, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise. And then think Sandra Bullock, Hillary Swank, Halle Berry, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman. In the Asian cinema, the three extraordinarily beautiful and talented actressses (Gong Li, Maggie Cheung and Michelle Yeoh – now all in their 40s) are all single and childless. So is it because these women paid too much attention to the wrong thing? The friend QH who forwarded the article lives in Scarsdale and works in New York City, like YL. Like YL, she has a PhD and an MBA, and works in a multinational company. She has two kids – a boy and a girl. Like YL, she has had to shoulder majority of the task and responsibility of taking care of the ailing parents’ generation in addition to taking care of the kids. Gone are the carefree days when the only worry was a chemistry exam. In spite of all these roles she has to play, she and her husband have still managed to take vacation trips periodically and keep entertainining friends – one of YL’s blogs is about a Thanksgiving party at her place. I could not help wondering that she forwarded this article to her friends to deliver the message that while career, money and fame are all “nice-to-haves”, ultimately it is the family and personal relationships that do matter most.

Some of the articles on my friend YQ’s Chinese blog ( http://yinikanotebook.blogbus.com/) happen to be on the same topic as well – happiness. She talked candidly about how she learned some wrong lessons in her childhood, in that she focused perhaps too much on “doing the right thing”, “being the good student”, “getting the best grades”, “winning the competitions”, etc. Among people I know, I cannot think of one that matches my impression of an “intellectual and idealistic woman” better than YQ. She is from Shanghai originally, but while she’s got the physique and looks of a Shanghai gal, she has none of the materialism of a stereotypical Shanghainese. We met on the plane from Shanghai to San Francisco, when we were both starting at Harvard, her as a freshman and me as a transfer student. From the start, she demonstrated a sensitivity and sensibility that were way beyond her years. What is striking is not that she possessed a feel for the intangibles at such a young age. It is that she was completely conscious of it, and insisted on keeping it even at a young age. In her blog, she wrote about starting out in math in college, not out of interest but out of competence. Most people at her age in her situation would have gone on to Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan or McKinsey and then back to Harvard Business School for a final touch before going back to the original firm to make partner. She, on the other hand, had the supreme confidence to not pursue that route, while possessing the tentative uncertainty to question her choice. Thus in a paradoxical way, she's more confident and less arrogant at the same time. Now she’s working towards a PhD degree at Harvard and building a career in teaching, writing and documentary film-making. She wrote one piece on happiness, and I found myself reading it over and over again - http://yinikanotebook.blogbus.com/logs/59678630.html. It feels much more poignant to me than David Brooks’ article – of course it should, since she and I are very much alike in many ways. Again, it is her that noticed a similarity between the two of us first, even when we were both in college. I could not see it, but politely did not object at the time. It has then taken me over a decade to figure out something that she grasped in a few encounters when she was just 18 years old – yes, indeed we are very much alike. The life she is living now is one that I thought that I would live, or at least imagined that I might be able to live – an intellectually stimulating and inspiring life that is largely devoid of materialism, but I did not have the confidence nor the ability to follow through. Instead I followed a much more conventional pathway. The childhood she depicted reminds me of mine – when I was also a model student and teachers’ favorite. We have both come to the conclusion that what matters most in life is not fame, or money, or status. It is happiness that matters. But we both are introspective types that have spent much time pondering what makes us personally happy. Even when it comes to small things, like how she describes her hair as hair being hard as wires, I found myself thinking, “I have finally found another girl whose hair texture is the same as mine!”

These three female friends of mine brought to mind my other remarkable female friends, in whose shadow I stand in awe. One is so intuitively understanding of human relationships that what I have struggled to understand in years can be explained in one or two sentences by her. Like what YQ wrote in one of her blogs (http://yinikanotebook.blogbus.com/logs/60024593.html), she knows clearly what she wants, and therefore does not spare effort in getting what she wants, and does not whine about the cost it takes to get it. She understands that we have to get what we truly want to be happy, but often having something is at the cost of not having something else. One friend is so talented in more ways than one - her bi-lingual blog is one place to demonstrate the wide variety of her interests, skills and abilities - http://liebestraum.blogspot.com/. Another friend has managed to prove the rest of the cynical world wrong. Yes, in her life, “love does conquer all”. She’s happily married with one son, living and working in the Netherlands now. Due to her husband’s kidney disease, she donated a kidney to him, and therefore had to take care of her husband while recuperating herself for a few months. And she’s perhaps one of the happiest and most positive people I have ever known. She said to me, “I could never have imagined when I was younger how happy I would be today.” And there are more of them... While I don’t see or talk to them often (they are all busy!) I have the impression that I am surrounded by these beautiful, talented, strong, mature and utterly sweet women.

Therefore, this blog is dedicated to these remarkable female friends of mine, without whom the world would have been so much duller, and my life so much less interesting for sure! It is in a way my humble tribute to them.