2 Questions Every Girl is Asking Herself

PART II Chapter 48

Lately in the Chinese newspapers, there's a lot of buzz of a musical on a whirlwind tour across Asia. And it's making a stop in Vancouver. Mom got our whole family tickets for it. Mom, in her history of motherhood, never gets us tickets to musicals. The musical didn't sound particularly exciting by the name of it - Pawn, (I prefer profound movies with titles like Fast & Furious, or 2 Fast 2 Furious), so I I didn't even bother figuring out what it's about, but was thrilled privately by the idea of all of us doing something artistic together.

The musical was written by a Chinese-Canadian girl, called Karmia Chan Cao, a creative writing senior at Stanford. I don't think Mom had a clear idea of what the musical is about either when she bought the tickets. But I don't think she cared. She liked the idea of a Chinese girl writing stories and sharing it with the world. I think secretly, she believes I'll be just like Karmia one day.

The theatre was packed with mostly Chinese-Canadians, brimming with anticipation. Unlike the usual anticipation that precedes the classics like Beauty and the Beast, or Mary Poppins, tonight there was a little something extra - a subdued pride that "one of their own" has made it this far. A Taiwanese journalist sat next to me, who kept on taking photos throughout the show. He was on assignment to write a report on it later in the newspaper.

The musical told a story of a young Chinese Canadian soldier, Abraham, stationed in Afghanistan, who joined the armed forces in bitter response to his elder brother's death at the World Trade Center on 9/11. The night before Abraham's scheduled return to Canada, he is caught in the middle of a bombing raid and must make the biggest decision of his life: saving his own life or the lives of Afghan children. When the last thumps of the drums subsided, the lights came on and the actors took their bow, my face was drenched in tears. I cried for the whole entire two and half hours. Every one of us in the audience was moved to a standing ovation.

Then Karmia herself went on stage and delivered a stirring speech about humanity and peace, how the play "addresses and dresses the wounds of 9/11, reexamining terrorism and the last decade at war", and how "we're all connected". The MC didn't really know what to say after that. We were all too awed and too humbled to speak.

I returned home feeling drained from all the crying. I marveled/shell-shocked at how she's a poet, a playwright, a singer-songwriter, composer of 19 original songs, director of a 29-person musical, and toured Asia, while still a student, at 21 years old!

"Don't you just hate people like that?!" said my friend Deepthi.

"Yeah!"

I felt so small. I didn't even come close. The distance between Karmia and me, it's like Earth to Jupiter. She cares about the world, war and humanity, and all I can think about is finding a boyfriend.

If I wanted to see Talent in the flesh, now THERE'S talent.

I sat at my desk all night trying not to feel defeated. I try to find reasons for me to justify becoming a writer. In business, we have models for everything: financial models, issue-based problem solving pyramids, quadrants, decision trees to help make sense of an otherwise overwhelming amount of information. To reassure ourselves we're doing the right thing. I thought it best for me to pull out one of these sturdy models to steady myself during this dark night of the soul. That's it! I'm going to do a SWOT analysis!

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. We use it to assess if a business is pursuing market opportunities while playing to its strengths. Objectively speaking, compared to Calculus, my strength is in words. Compared to Karmia, my strength is in Calculus. But I have a feeling she'll even beat me at math. Next to her literary biceps, my arms are looking awfully feeble. If the market is rampant with Threats like Karmia, what kind of Opportunities does that leave me?