How to Tell Your Immigrant Parents You Want to be a Creative, Part 2
Or, “Why You Should be a D/L/E…AND a Creative at the Same Time”
Who says you have to be just one thing? You are large. You contain multitudes. You are a complex, multi-faceted human being with desires beyond that which can be contained into one single thing, especially a career.
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes).”
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
In my previous article, I gave suggestions on how to tell your immigrant parents that you want to be a creative. This was for people who were determined to go into the arts as a profession. But perhaps the parental pressure (or internal shame, or both) to become a Doctor/Lawyer/Engineer (“D/L/E”) was too much for you to bear and you begrudgingly caved to make them happy, crushing your dreams of becoming the next Gemma Chan. Or perhaps you actually did have a desire to be a D/L/E and went into it willingly, but your artistic side is ever-present, growing stronger and demanding to be paid attention to.
If your parents (and society) are to be believed, you must choose one over the other. One cannot be a D/L/E and be an artist at the same time. One must dedicate themselves completely to climbing the ladder of success, and any distractions will ruin your chances of achievement. They will have you believe that to split your time is to court your own ruin…Besides, the pressures and demands of such a high-powered career may not leave you any free time (or mental capacity) for other pursuits anyway.
A simple glance around tells us that this is not true — many people do both. There are doctors who sing, lawyers who paint, and engineers who write the occasional novel. Ken Jeong is a doctor and a comedian/actor. Dr. Sanjay Gupta has been on television and written four books. But I’m not just talking about splitting your time so that you can do your art on the side. Doing art on the side means that your creativity always takes a back seat — you will only do it when you have the time, or intentionally carving out the time for it will come at the expense of family time, personal time, chores, cooking, etc. At which point it will become an inconvenience and you may grow to resent it, or even resent yourself for feeling that way about it.
So if separating career and creativity doesn’t work, then what if you combined them? What if I told you that incorporating your art INTO your career could not only keep you happy and fulfilled, but might actually help push your career forward (and maybe even your industry as a whole)?
Creativity is a necessary part of every career/vocation. Being a doctor doesn’t just require memorizing facts and then regurgitating them. As a doctor, you are expected to contribute to the body of knowledge and push medicine forward. Medicine is evolving all the time, being spurred along by the creativity of doctors who dare to try new things. The same is true for every vocation/industry. Your creativity is needed wherever you go…in business, in law, in plumbing…creativity is everywhere. Artists themselves do not have a monopoly on creativity. And here’s what I wish someone had told me decades ago: You do not have to be an artist to be creative.
As an immigrant community, many Asian Americans have a strong culture of studying, but not necessarily one of creativity. Getting good grades on tests is prioritized over experimentation and personal expression. This means that we’ve ended up with an entire generation of talented professionals who got the best grades and went to the best schools and got the best jobs but who may not be the best at pushing the envelope and trying new things. We are excellent test-takers and rule-followers, but we are rarely risk-takers, and even rarer — truly — rebels.
Your artistic side, however, is dying to be. It has been stifled long enough, and it refuses to be put on the sidelines/relegated to whenever you can find an hour here or there between dinner and chores. And though I don’t know you personally, dear reader, I would bet that repressing your artistic side is probably responsible for your semi-regular bursts of hedonism or other coping mechanisms (perhaps expressed by going to EDM festivals and overindulging in substances…Just guessing). Your artistic side needs to be wild and free, and if you try to keep it under wraps, it will eventually force its way out.
If you continue to separate your career and your creativity, neither side will be satisfied. You will end up trying to distract yourself with consumption — food, shopping, television, etc. And every now and then your creative side will explode with repressed ferocity, and you will try to satisfy it with whatever gives you that feeling quickly (but fleetingly) — a vacation, sky-diving, alcohol…an affair…etc.
Synthesis
Easier said than done, I know. So let’s talk strategy. There are two ways in which you can synthesize your creative side with your career: Either by incorporating a raw artistic talent, or by incorporating your cultural traditions.
‘Synthesis’ is the combining of elements of two separate ideas into a new, unified, third idea. For example, the study of physics has been around for over 500 years, while writing as an art form has been around even longer. They are often thought of as two separate vocations that have nothing to do with each other. But put them together and you have not only a widely interesting field of writing, but a way for science to be communicated to the masses. Dr. Michio Kaku has spent his entire career studying theoretical physics, which would have remained esoteric were it not for his passion for writing and speaking. Instead of remaining in the lab, he fashions himself a “science communicator”, using writing and speaking to share his knowledge with the world in an entertaining and creative manner, writing best-selling books and going on numerous TV shows. He is now recognized as having helped popularized science for an entire generation, thanks to the synthesis of his career and his creative nature.
If you’re a doctor and you like to draw, consider medical illustrations for scientific journals. If you are a lawyer and you like to act, you could think about giving legal advice in a video format, like TikTok (there are a handful of professionals already doing this). Bringing your creative talents into your profession can open up new avenues for you. And even if it doesn’t, it will, at the very least, combine your interests and allow you to exercise the creative part of your brain on a regular basis.
Look Back to Look Ahead
Perhaps you’re thinking: What if I don’t have a specific artistic talent that I’m great at? What if I just have a general desire to be creative in my career but I’m not sure where to draw inspiration from? For that, the answer can be found by mining your own heritage.
For example, I have a friend in Seattle who comes from a long line of Chinese doctors. When I spoke to him about bringing creativity into his profession, he realized that he could take the traditional knowledge of Chinese medicine passed down to him from his own family and integrate it into his practice. And by doing so, he would not only be participating in the creation of a new style of hybrid medicine (one that is already quickly gaining popularity), but that it would be a style of medicine that would truly represent all sides of himself. He could express himself fully through both the western medicine of his home country and the eastern medicine of his ancestry. He wouldn’t have to stifle any part of his identity in order to do his work, and it would involve creativity on his part to synthesize the two styles of medicine.
We see this being done in smaller ways with things like food. Boba tea, a Taiwanese invention, has been thoroughly Americanized by adding tons of sugar, American flavors, and sometimes even alcohol, creating a style of drink — and an entire industry — that can only be found in America (albeit an incredibly unhealthy one). In Hawaii, they took “Musubi” — the Japanese tradition of wrapping rice and other things in seaweed — and incorporated American Spam, and created “Spam Musubi”, a Hawaiian original beloved by many (especially me). The hot new thing where I live is Mochi Donuts. These are donuts made from mochi flour and infused with Asian flavors like ube and matcha (SO hot right now).
This cultural synthesis is not relegated to food. It can be done in any profession. In fact, we should be doing it in every profession. And the sooner the better, because there is no copyright on culture, and other people are already trying to “Columbus” these ideas. This year alone saw three White women trying to sell a repackaged “edgy” version of MahJong, followed by a White woman in Oregon trying to “improve” congee rice porridge. Both were met with swift criticism, but the real tragedy is that we weren’t the ones tinkering with the formula.
As Asian Americans, we sit atop thousands of years of culture and civilization — entire systems of medicine, law, and engineering that go back for millenia. This means you have infinite ideas to draw from. Reach back into time, take an idea from the past, and synthesize it with your career. By doing so, you will be allowing your ancestral culture to enter the 21st century and evolve. You will breathe new life into it and create something the world has never seen before. It is said that, “there is nothing new under the sun,” but what they mean is that it is incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to come up with a truly original idea out of nothing. New ideas only come about through the combination of existing ones. Therefore synthesis is the very essence of innovation, and innovation gets you ahead and pushes entire industries forward.
Not only have we Asian Americans hidden our culture away because of assimilation, but we’ve also hidden our creativity away out of the need to succeed. This results in us feeling disconnected from our culture, uncreative in our careers, and often overlooked for promotions in industries where innovation is rewarded. It might even leave you feeling empty inside, like there’s something missing from your life. Because to silence your culture and your creativity is to silence what makes you who you are — to slowly kill that part of you that makes you unique. So why hide them away for no one to see? Let them shine. It’s not just a good idea for your career, it’s a matter of life and death for your spirit.
(It’s also a matter of liberation, as you will see my upcoming Part 3 of this article series: “Creativity is Resistance”)
