Where to now with Zen practice? And a side note on tea.

I am actually coming to this topic because I am in the middle of a tea craze. I am spending pretty much every spare waking minute drinking, reading, and watching stuff about puer tea. I am two weeks returned from a trip to Taiwan where, upon being sick at the AirBnB by myself and jealous of my fellow tea-nerd R who found a tea-shop in Hualien, I strangely commenced an internet deep dive into puer. I have never been into puer before. But I have been crazy about tea before.

Seven years ago, before I came to zen, I somehow came across The Book of Tea by Okakura. This book, available in every book store, became both as (1) a catalyst for race-radicalisation (?) in which I discovered something valuable about Asian culture which led to me embracing for the first time my own heritage, and (2) circuitously, via Snow Leopard and Shunryu Suzuki, the reason why I took precepts as a Buddhist.

I’m coming back to tea all these years, but this makes me think about something more important to me – where am I at with my life?

For three years, Zen was probably the most important thing in my life, followed in second place by the growing (and finally eclipsing importance) of my now-wife. I read the entire call number in the Ballieu, I found a community, I found a teacher, senior practitioners, I practiced hard, I went on retreats, I worked on magazines, I went to India, I became full of myself, I hated myself, I was depressed, I doubted everything – and then I just had good practice. But when my faith was strong, and practice was taken for granted, I starting my life – confident I could bring stillness to my activity. I went to sanzenkai less, but I did some postgraduate study, got admitted, proposed – and as I saw real life beginning to start I went to my teacher and asked if: (1) I could take the precepts with him, (2) to go to Bodh Gaya that year and (3) if he would marry me and Y.

We’re 18 months after that point – and I don’t think I’ve had a dokusan since.

My legal practice is going well, marriage is going well – we’re close, there is joy in daily living, and despite not thinking about it too much I love her more than ever – and we’ve just bought a house.

And yet, I have been to sanzenkai only a handful of times in the last year, and sat at home perhaps a dozen or so times. Before my priorities changed from zen practice to getting a real life, I was no longer interested in books and zen culture or stories because I could do something more important – actually practice, and practice hard, with my full heart. Last year, and now, my practice is at a low ebb and even picking up a zen book, this shallow simulcra of actual engagement in practice, is too much effort.

Daishin is my name. Great faith. Is faith all I gained, and retain, from those years as a disciple? How can I use this great faith to resume actual practice?

I ask this question because I have three priorities in life, Y, my legal and zen practice. I say my zen practice is practically extinct, but I won’t abandon it – and if I don’t make some major changes the other two are going to suffer too.

I reflect on what’s happened to zen because I seem to be picking up another passion, albeit a second order one, and what’s the point unless there is deep and persistent follow through? Work on the more important things Vincent, the foundations, before adding adornments.

A bird flies and a fish swims. Swim! Fly! Go on then.

My dog has died

Byron died today, after a short illness, aged 10 – we didn’t know he was in such danger.

I played with him for the last time last night in the cool breeze, he didn’t do well in the 42 degree heat and wasn’t drinking but ate his evening meal with the medications that the vet was confident would save him.

Much loss, pain and tears in the family. I was the one who had the idea to bring him into the family but it was a shared effort this past decade of looking after him. He was well loved and I hope he forgives us our trespasses and that he had some joy in his life with us.

As I pet him last night, he was quiet, settled, sitting on the grass outside – we shared a look that I should have realised was him saying he was going to die, but one I didn’t fully understand.

I regret I wasn’t there with him the moment he died.  I can only say that if I was more present and if I could see it more from his side – perhaps I could have been there more for him and stayed with him and made sure he felt loved at the end. Can he sense that now?

I’m sorry buddy that I wasn’t there with you last night, you won’t feel alone now I’m sure.

A view of Saigon

Saigon is not home, but it’s not just any city to me either.

It’s a city that my parents, both Saigon natives, have talked about all my life—it’s a place so richly painted in the memories and impressions of other people that it’s hard to tell where my Saigon begins and the Saigon of others end.

It is in some ways my alternative reality. If my dad had not left Vietnam on a boat and risked his life on the high seas, and if he survived conscription and didn’t die in Cambodia, then I suppose I would be Vietnamese instead of Australian—and this entire life I have here, and that of my whole extended family in this country, simply would not exist.

As the t-shirts like to say, I (heart) Saigon. The mosquitos, the heat, the rain, the constant noise, the strange smells and the crush of people—these are my first impressions. My lasting impressions are of the warm embrace of family and the joy of just being covered in the grit of millions of lives packed into one tiny city.

In a taxi into town
In a taxi into town
At home in the morning
At home in the morning
Running to Cho Ben Thanh
Running to Cho Ben Thanh

These photos are obviously not how Saigon looks. It’s impossible for me to capture the sense of energy about the place, it’s an always-on city, where shops seem to always be open and people are always working. These photos also can’t capture the sense of inequality there, of normalised poverty and also gross excess. I had a feeling that those who are trying to get ahead there have to adopt nasty personas survive. I felt there was a grubby grasping, a taking by everyone of whatever was within hand. There were lots of people out to cheat you and those interactions left a bad taste. But also, there were people who simply existed in that place—who I felt were quite untouched by the indignities of the modern economy and who gave me all the joys of being there.

In the past I felt a sense that being Viet Kieu, or overseas Vietnamese, was a privilege and also a reason for being envied. I think I secretly believed I was better too. But now I recognise that me being in Australia is simply a matter of luck and chance. You can’t feel entitled or privileged just because of that. And these days, I get a feeling that Vietnamese look within their country for their future, and that’s very positive, there’s no more yearning for the west—it is after all the Asian Century.

This sense of equality that I felt with the Vietnamese people quite relieved me of my foreigner-guilt over my seemingly privileged life and really allowed me to embrace life in Vietnam. I felt that the problems Vietnamese people deal with, and my problems in Melbourne, kind of are the same—starting a career, starting a family, being happy—these thing aren’t ‘first world problems’, they’re universal problems!

There’s a line from a Dogen biopic called (embarrassingly) ‘Zen’ where Dogen asks a passing tenzo (temple cook) while walking along a highway in China if he can assist by carrying the cook’s heavy food-laden backpack. The tenzo replies (and don’t quote me, this is just the youtube subtitle): ‘Thank you for your kind words, but this is my precious task… which Buddha has assigned to me, I cannot assign this work to anyone else.’ I had been thinking about this scene a lot by the time I arrived in Saigon. I was mostly secretly complaining about my own difficulties, you know getting admitted with no next job lined up etc. But then I felt like ‘hey, I have my problems, you guys have your problems—this is the shit we have to deal with, yay!’ For some reason it really took being in a different world, in this case Saigon, for me to have that feeling for the first time—I never looked at the different lives here in Melbourne in the same way.

Anyway, I like these photos because they just hint at the richness of what Saigon has to offer. It’s an intensity, a density of life, that doesn’t exist in Australia and the Vietnamese are all the richer for it.

Edit: 1 December 2017

I have returned to this blog after a year or more’s absence. My photos above aren’t great, but I was happy with the family portraits I took.

Wood Job! (dir. Shinobu Yaguchi, 2014)

Visiting my cousin and her husband last night, we started to watch a Japanese comedy about a high school graduate who fails to get into any universities and takes a 1 year apprenticeship in the forestry industry in Mie-prefecture, Japan.

Arriving in the country.
Arriving in the country.

I found myself loving this film.

First of all, it’s pretty funny.

But more than that, it’s a quiet study of the kind of unbroken connection with nature that rural Japanese people still have (and that I’m sure we still have in Australia). We’ve seen these mystical forests in Ghibli films like Totoro or Mononoke, but here is a story set in the current time.

When our guy (Yuki) goes to a mountain in Mie-prefecture and joins the Nakamura forestry company he joins a village that organises itself around agriculture and forestry, and where people think in generations past and future. In the boss’ house are photos of his grandfather planting pine saplings that are only being harvested now, 105 years later. When a single tree sells for ¥400,000 ($5000 AUD) Yuki remarks to his boss (the guy driving the truck below) that if they cut down the mountain every single one of them would be millionaires. But his mentor and apprentice-master (the guy using the chainsaw below) slaps him on the head (as he does many times throughout the film) and explains that they take only what they need, and tend to the forest, so that 100 years in the future their descendants may still have quality timber to harvest.

It’s no surprise that this village which conceives of its future as firmly planted in the ground of Mie, plans not only for the forest but for children too. The apprentice-master’s wife is quite obsessed with conceiving a child, continually feeding her man deer and snake and other aphrodisiacs, and quite movingly there is a fertility-orientated village festival (matsuri) at the end of the film that everyone enthusiastically participates in.

I’m also thinking about how just a few days ago President Obama and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were in Mie-prefecture for the G7 summit. It’s a really strange place to hold a summit being so far away from Tokyo, but as chair of the G7 Abe-san must have had good reasons to invite his head-of-government VIPs to meet at the Ise-shrine, Japan’s most holy Shinto shrine. I’ve heard that Abe-san is trying to weave Japanese nationalism and Shinto-worship back into the national fabric of secular Japan. I don’t know the merits of that, but I did admire the way these farmers and forestry workers seemed both of the times, and yet perfectly in sync with nature and tradition—perhaps that is the vision of the Japanese PM.

A young boy is about to cross the threshold of the forest in pursuit of an interesting insect.
A young boy is about to cross the threshold of the forest in pursuit of an interesting insect.

Anyway. I’ve made GIFs for the first time (after the break). I just wanted to show how the camera quite effectively conveys the different kind of mind-spaces that Yuki is in. In the city, we see shots where the camera is stuck on him, as if the lens was mounted on a selfie-stick—he’s dead centre in the frame, and the world is just a blur. But then when he gets out into the country, the camera settles down, the lenses are totally stopped down and there’s a deep focus to each frame, there are more wide shots, and there’s breathing room and quietude.

Please click through, but here’s a warning, the file sizes for these GIFs are very large, and the first one makes me quite nauseous (the speed) so don’t look at it for too long.

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Late Spring (dir. Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

Noriko and her father holidaying in Kyoto before her wedding.
Noriko and her father holidaying in Kyoto before her wedding.

Noriko has survived WWII, and now four years later aged 27 has recovered some of the joy and body weight she lost during the war. She lives with her widowed academic father in Kamakura and is being pressured by her aunt, and her quiet but concerned father to get married.

I had a chance to see this film last night with a bunch of people, many of whom were native Japanese speakers, and had a wonderful time. It struck me that this is a perfect film, with absolutely no flaws—something I can only really say about Master and Commander for the time being.

Every scene is perfectly framed, there’s some kind of magical balance left to right, foreground to background. The blocking of the scenes is so precise, formulaic perhaps but legible, expressive and creating of opportunities for people to touch objects—placing a cup from the tatami mat onto the table or hanging up a jacket—gestures which breathe life into the film. And what I hadn’t noticed before, there is a lot of humour! It’s easy to forget Ozu was a mass-market film maker, popular in his day, and only now critically revered. These technical aspects come together in this high-Ozu style, which really elevates this simple family drama.

One thing that came up in discussion was how Noriko is completely unaware of her earth-shattering beauty. It’s something that lets her smilingly abuse her father’s colleague about remarrying after being widowed – ‘filthy’, ‘indecent’ and ‘distasteful’ – and have it received with joy. Only a slight shift in tone and that scene could have had an entirely different reading! Everytime she appeared on screen, or flashed a smile, we the audience couldn’t help but exclaim ‘wow’!

Finally, though you could be forgiven for totally ignoring Chishu Ryu, the actor playing Noriko’s dad for most of the film, he has a killer scene at the end:

NORIKO 

Please, father, why can’t we stay just as we are? I know marriage won’t make me any happier.

PROFESSOR SOMIYA

That’s not true. You’ll see. I’m 56 years old. My life is nearing its end. But your life as a couple is just beginning. You’re starting a new life, one that you and Satake must build together. One in which I will play no part. That’s the order of human life and history. Marriage may not mean happiness from the start. To expect such immediately happiness is a mistake. Happiness isn’t something you wait around for. It’s something you create yourself. Getting married isn’t happiness. Happiness lies in the forging of a new life shared together. It may take a year or two, maybe even five or ten. Happiness comes only though effort. Only then can you call yourself man and wife. Your own mother wasn’t happy when we married. For years we had our troubles. Many times I found her weeping in the kitchen. But she put up with me. You must believe in each other and love one another. All the love you’ve shown me must now be given to Satake. Do you see? From this a new happiness will be born. You understand don’t you? You do, don’t you?

NORIKO

Yes. Forgive me for being so selfish.

PROFESSOR SOMIYA

I’m glad you understand. I didn’t want you marrying the way you did.

Professor Somiya

I thought this was a beautiful scene. I recently became affianced, so conversations like these have been common—though none so eloquent. My fiance is Japanese and so I asked her if she’s had a conversation like this with her dad, apparently it went just like this: ‘Dad, I want to marry this man, Vincent’ to which he replied ‘Oh, sure, go ahead’. Haha. I think he’ll have more to say later.

Oh one more thing. I bought the Criterion Blu-Ray, and it is not such a great transfer. I don’t know if there exists a better transfer, but there were odd cuts in the middle of scenes, flickering, and instability in general. I also have the Criterion DVD on which I first saw the film. I can’t say the Blu-Ray is a worthy upgrade.

Consulting the I Ching (Book of Changes)

The way I remember it, a friend of mine at university once sent me a list of questions and answers about her consultation with an oracle. I had always thought of oracles as either that lady in The Matrix, or a priestess standing amongst crumbling Greek ruins, but this one was an online implementation of the I Ching a classic Chinese text where you ask a question, typed into a text field, and out comes two hexagrams, one indicating a situation and another showing what it is changing into. Make of the consultation what you will.

I’ve secretly kept a bookmark of an online version of the I Ching in my web browser, and it might be embarrassing to admit how many times I’ve hastily clicked through the ‘throw coins’ button in the intervening years. My favoured website in linked here—I think it has a very practical translation of the text, and doesn’t have intrusive ads—indeed, I have sent this guy money given how many times I’ve used his website.

The thing is though, I think after years of interacting with the oracle I understand how it works. Like all divination, the oracle has no power except what you give to it. In the early days I used the oracle as comfort, when I felt good I impatiently clicked through the throw coins button to have the hexagram spit out something that I interpreted as supportive of my cause, and when I was depressed I read the results as the universe’s approval of my decision to give up. Sometimes the consults would feel so right though, as if the random number generator built into the website code actually did somehow convene with my deepest self and gave a reading that felt right: sometimes it would tell me that yes, that job application I just submitted is the end of this search for a place to practice, sometimes it would tell me that yes this joy I felt meant I had found an inexhaustible well of power. But to be honest, none of the predictions, meaning, or ‘support’ I derived from the oracle has had any staying power. Things always changed.

I think the act of consulting the oracle is about asking for validation for how you currently feel. And because I lack wisdom, obviously the thing I am asking to be confirmed is never real enough to be present in me months or years later.

These days, I click through when I’m bored and just see the hexagrams as puzzles—how can I fit whatever I am thinking about onto the changing hexes. The theory is that the sixty-four hexes, and the change between one and another, describes in verse, every possible situation of the human condition. I believe that to be the case because of the poetic/non-dual nature of the hexes and their commentaries. Something I’ve learned from zen is that you can’t approach the truth with language, or at least this language, because you are always collapsing the myriad meanings into one inadequate meaning—and depending on your skill level, what you end up writing might not even be close to the meaning you favour most. The I Ching then becomes just a tool to check how well you can read your current situation, questions almost, provocations to face unacknowledged truths.

Now that I think about it, the oracle is only worth consulting as a kind of exercise to step back from yourself. It’s not that good at it though. But I’ve been thinking about its purpose because I had a weird experience the other night while re-watching Thin Red Line, the Malick film I’ve written about here previously, when a shot of light filtering through the Solomon Island canopy kind of induced a concentrated dose of joy or whatever and I felt myself yanked away and observing ‘Vincent’: this guy who was with his mates watching a war movie on Boxing Day, connected to a girl who he was expecting to message him, and kind of bogged down by all these problems that seemed like the attributes of some fictional character. Suddenly, I felt that observing consciousness, was more real than the small-Vincent sitting on that couch absorbed in a film. I mean, it did help that Malick was literally asking me to feel that way in the final scene:

(Voice-over) Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with? The brother. The friend. Darkness, light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face? Oh, my soul. Let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining.

Anyway, it kind of brings things back to my last post here—even if I am looking in on this guy, even if I am him currently typing out this post, I don’t really know how to help him change his circumstances, I don’t know how to give him that little push to leap into the emptiness with courage. I do know that things change, whether you want them to or not, but I don’t want to just rely on the world changing and me with it—I want to feel some kind of agency, something I’ve been obsessed with for years now. Who bloody knows!

Finding courage

 

Today in Victoria, 50 thousand or so students doing the VCE received their ATAR scores—a number, from 0 to 99.95 that indicates their performance relative to the rest of the student population in that year. We have a very mature educational system with pockets of excellence and privilege, so it’s actually very competitive to get a high score. Since most Australians go to public universities where fees are capped and places are funded by the government, a high score is a ticket for an underprivileged or country kid to get into a good university and have a crack at following their dreams.

I read the coverage today with a bit of nostalgia, because it’s been ten years now since I received my ENTER (as it then was) score—by SMS on an interstate train from Sydney to Melbourne. I had gone on a post-VCE trip to Sydney with some mates and our friends from MacRob, I was sweet on one of the girls but nothing happened between us on the trip and it is with some sadness that I realise how much more important getting a good score was to me than getting the girl. In between reception blackout zones I got a text with my result of 99.00, and I remember only feeling glad I hadn’t let down my parents too much, nor my school. I don’t remember when getting 99+ became a goal for me, I had no need for the mark because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, but it became a dangerous obsession which started to ruin my enjoyment of school toward the end. My dad was temporarily placated, but nothing could comfort my mother who had wanted me to study medicine and my score was too low to have any chance at that. There was no enjoyment that day, and I’m afraid that sense of disappointment has lingered in the years that followed.

I went on to study science and law at university, enjoyed the privilege of learning and my time of freedom, but never found the confidence to be determined at making a career out of any of it—something I’ve been struggling with so very savagely in these three years in limbo after undergrad. Right now, in the summer of 2015, with a year of formal study done I am a small step to being admitted as a lawyer—which would have been a decent achievement had it happened three years ago, but given the delay we’re now getting into what-a-relief territory. My professional life beyond that is uncertain. I have tried in a moderate way to get into a proper firm—which I define as a practice that’s not just going through the motions, drowning with work, uncaring of junior lawyers, and without a clear plan for growth—but to be honest I have not tried my hardest and I am not satisfied (and thus not despairing, yet) with my efforts.

Where to next? I am at a crossroads.

Silence, Pt Augusta, SA.
Wave Rock, WA.
Perth to Melbourne road trip, this was in WA.
Emptiness near Pt Augusta, SA.
Nullarbor Roadhouse, SA.

 

I suspect that I cannot proceed because I lack courage and purpose right now.

I just watched Gravity again tonight, alone, on the projector with the sound on loud. I think what I missed when I saw it last time is its ability to be read as an allegory for overcoming human challenges. Dr Ryan Stone (the Sandra Bullock character) basically gives up on her life at one point after she’s stranded in a Soyuz capsule, but in the following conversation with Matt Kowalski, the George Clooney character, something inside her changes and she decides to come back to life.

MATT: I get it, it’s nice up here. You can just shut down all the systems, turn out all the lights… and just close your eyes and tune out everybody. There’s nobody up here that can hurt you. It’s safe. I mean, what’s the point of going on? What’s the point of living? Your kid died. Doesn’t get any rougher than that. But still, it’s a matter of what you do now. If you decide to go, then you gotta just get on with it. Sit back, enjoy the ride. You gotta plant both your feet on the ground and start livin’ life.

RYAN: How did you get here?

MATT: I’m telling you, it’s a hell of a story. Hey, Ryan?

RYAN: What?

MATT: It’s time to go home.

Heaven, just not yet, as Dante would say.

I keep using the world privilege these days, to describe everything I am not, almost as an excuse for why I am not making the most of my life. Honestly, no class warrior could undo the shackles that bind me—they only exist inside. Because even as I am, I believe that a lack of privilege can be overcome by courage—and really the only difference between people who move through this life of ours with freedom, if not success, and those who simply grit their teeth, is just courage.

I know this because at key moments in the past, I had it—when I decided I wanted to go to Edinburgh for a year, when I fought for a place on Jessup, those interviews I killed, the day I met my current girlfriend, when I’m fighting for my life on a go board, and a thousand other moments besides. And yet, this power I wish was always available, seems rather unreliable in me.

At the end of the film, Ryan (Dr Stone), falls out of the sky with a smile on her face—completely in the moment, totally okay with either coming back to earth of burning up in the atmosphere. (Trust me, the way she looked is a long way from the tortured self-portrait done last month below.) I loved this moment. Seriously, I don’t ask to be successful, I just ask for freedom. Freedom from my self, freedom to be present. Nothing in the last ten years has been wrong, I don’t regret it, but I do compare it to the glistening careers of my friends and contemporaries. I don’t look at that and feel sad because I judge myself lesser, I look at all that and say ‘my friends seem so free’ and question why it feels like I am forgetting how to make my own courage. Just when I need it the most.

 

Self portrait

Self Portrait (3 of 6)

I saw an opportunity to take this photo because of the Castella (pictured) that Y brought back from Japan, a cake which makes an appearance in Tatami Galaxy and has some personal meaning to me. In that anime series, Watashi would always return to his room after certain defeat and make a life changing decision upon demolishing a giant Castella (mine is just normal size) and draining a cup of black coffee. I don’t like that I am unsmiling, and altogether too severe (was I acting for the camera, what was so serious?)  but I like this photo (there were others) for capturing an honest, if deliberately posed, version of myself.

 

 

Does photography matter?

In Why Photography Matters, Jerry L Thompson (MIT Press, 2013) the author makes an argument for why his art form matters. The argument is that by its very nature, photography is about making images of reality. The assumptions are (1) that the fantasies and fiction of the photographer cannot be expressed in this medium, and so there is truth to a photograph, and (2) photos show the true mind of the photographer, they reveal the obsessions, limitations and vision of the person that took them.

I am attracted to the second assumption, that photographs show the true mind of the photographer. I think you can see lots of things in people’s photos—some unflattering, like their carelessness towards the world, or the narrowness—material and beauty obsessed—of hipster instagram feeds; some admirable, like the quiet, gratitude filled openness of some landscapes, or the flattering attention of photographers towards people they love or admire.

But just thinking about it, I don’t have any of this high minded art-creation attitude towards making photographic images. I don’t really think my photographs matter, but I do know that I have enjoyed taking them and that I find some of the images I’ve created very valuable. Sometimes the things that are captured in an image are so beautiful that I am forced to conclude that my actual experience of that moment was deficient in some way. Or that I am so limited that I can only enjoy the world when it has been frozen in time, cut down to the size, and then subjected to the full powers of digital manipulation.

The reason for this recent inquiry, what is the value of taking photos, is that I’m interested in buying a camera lens. There are lots of competing demands for my limited funds, so I am not sure if private enjoyment and the creation of images which are only of value to a handful of people, can really justify the purchase. This book didn’t help me make a decision.

Along the Maribyrnong

It’s important to have a sense of place.

My girlfriend is currently away in her family home, a country town in Hiroshima prefecture. My dad mentioned one of his recent clients came from the small fishing village in the south of Vietnam where my grandma grew up, and where my great grandparents are buried—upon meeting a fellow ‘local’ this client offered to catch up for a traditional Vietnamese meal and a drink.

I sometimes feel poorer for having comparatively shallow roots in this country—my family has been here just shy of 40 years—but slowly, I feel like I too am planted in this ground.

 

If I had to point to one major feature of my local area, it would be the Maribyrnong River. We don’t live near a beach, or a mountain, but the river connects all the major places of Melbourne’s West—it runs past the racecourse, past Footscray, the docks, the Quang Minh Temple and runs around my place, in Maidstone.

On Sunday when I went down for a walk and a cup of tea, the sun was out, flies thick in the air, wind making the plant life alive with motion. I stopped by a river bend and took these photos, with my friend and fellow tea lover and camera aficionado R. To me, it is a really normal, even boring, place—and yet if you think about it for a little bit, it’s actually an incredible place pulsating with life. It is ignored, for the most part, by everyone who lives here—who prefer Highpoint Shopping Centre a massive temple to consumption sited along the riverbank. Here follows some photos:

Maribyrnong I
Maribyrnong II
Maribyrnong III
The camera advisor.
Tea caddy.

And a totally different version of the same event, photos by R, published here by permission:

If you’re wondering how they can be so different, R used a ND filter to limit the light coming into his camera which let him take photos that had more depth to them. I like them a lot, they kind of depict a mysterious microcosm, one separated from the reality.

Mental As

An article came out on the weekend in Fairfax Sunday papers with the mainstreamed headline of ‘Mental health system’s focus on ‘white middle-class Australia’ costs lives‘. No doubt the editors thought no one would want to read a story about an Asian kid who killed himself after not being able to find work after graduating from university. This kid, and as the article by Jill Stark acknowledged, didn’t actually need any ethnically tailored mental health care services—he just needed to actually get some mental health care. Anyway, this story hit particularly close to home because (1) I am an Asian kid brought up in Australia, and just like Martin Vo, an Australian-Vietnamese who is son to refugees; (2) he and I both went to Melbourne High School, a place where I found a lot of friends where I felt like I fit in; and (3) he was obviously struggling to find a job he actually trained for after graduating from university, something I am currently experiencing.

I spoke to a few of my guy friends, all from MHS, in our Whatsapp group-chat yesterday about this article and found out one of them, Lineker, actually went to university with Martin and as the article said, saw a seemingly happy and popular guy who showed no signs of depression. He also said that the work and joblessness issue was a big part of the struggle of all of the students graduating that year. I found myself quite upset by all of this. Martin didn’t get the support he needed because the mental health system is so underfunded and still there’s a stigma, lesser in mainstream Australia but still extreme in Asian communities, surrounding mental health—which means that he probably told his girlfriend about how he was feeling too late for her and his family to do anything to help him.

Nevertheless, I don’t buy into the ‘ethnic people need tailored mental health care solutions’ line. I want to concentrate on the larger issue that affects all of us Australians. That issue is the insufficient emphasis on human value outside of our culture’s dominant measures of self-worth: work, wealth and status . Since I am in the same situation of trying to get into the profession I trained for, perhaps this is all very self-serving, like I am defending marginalised people because I belong to that group. But I actually think that the messaging we get from mainstream society does not include the very basic of concept that people of all kinds, and at whatever stage in their life, belong to and are equally valuable members of the community. It’s not just joblessness, it’s old age, disability, LGBTI, religious identity and the whole myriad of human experience.

When I was at MHS, we were told that the great victory of public schooling in Victoria, was its guaranteed secular status. Not once did the words God or Jesus come out of the mouths of our principal or any of my teachers at MHS. The stained glass windows canonised civic leaders like the Victorian education minister around 1905 who established MHS and our honourable war-dead. I think that’s fine, and we students happily intermingled without anything to divide us. But the secular rationale of public schooling in Victoria is predicated on religion or philosophy, or universal human ethics whatever you want to call it, being too important for school—and that it would be tended to by parents and the local community in which a student was embedded. But really, I don’t think anyone cares about values education anymore—religious, or otherwise. My dad is quite proud of his education (and his religion, I might add) and thinks this makes him better than people who are ‘uneducated’—but really his education amounts to supporting me to get educated myself so that I can find a comfortable professional job—all else is supposed to follow from that. I don’t say that maliciously, it’s common. Yes work is imperative to living a full and productive life, but when it’s all about being a lifter and not a leaner, the scope of human life just becomes unbearably narrow. I think all people hunger for more than that.

I’m not saying that school or university is the right way to teach these things. I see value in the process of finding out things for yourself. But I think people who have some experience of life, who have some experience of goodness—however defined—should share it more loudly and not mistake our material wealth for personal and spiritual health. I’m just saying that the way we are taught to think is that if you’re failing—and not doing okay in the mainstream pursuit of success, wealth, status etc—you should feel bad about yourself. This is wrong. If you are failing, things can change, and you may not succeed, but life goes on. I don’t know if this would have made a difference to Martin’s life, his depression and suicide might have been so overwhelming that a small kernel of hope such as ‘life goes on’ might not have made any difference. But speaking from someone with comparable experiences, just hearing something small and positive like ‘life goes on’ can really save a life. If we have any influence on people, we should make sure that they at least know that basic fact.

Anyway. Mental As week on the ABC having just passed, I wanted to share the radio piece that affected me the most: ‘The legal community’s struggle with mental health‘ (ABC RN, The Law Report). A suicide widow’s message to us is that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. It is the not the answer. The idea that you are making everyone else’s life better by killing yourself is wrong—no matter how hell-like your subjective reality is, you should trust this fact as an article of faith. It’s an affecting piece and I highly recommend it, whether you are in the legal profession or not.