My Father and His Orchids

When I was a boy, my father had a phase where he was intensely interested in importing and taking care of orchids. I’m not sure where this sudden interest sprung from, but I tend to fall in love hard with hobbies so I understand where I get it from.

The moment the orchids arrived at our house, he informed me that they were notoriously hard to take care of. I asked, “Dad, then why do it?”

He smiled his broad smile and spoke in Mandarin, “Son. Sometimes things are hard. You might fail over and over. You will think to yourself, is it worth it? But over a lifetime, you will learn it’s not you taking care of the plant. The plant is taking care of you.”

Never Forget Your Beginner’s Spirit

I’ve never been an open book, but I thought I’d share a chapter today.
It was both awkward and accurate to say that we didn’t have very much money when my family came to America. My father spent most of it buying a very used Oldsmobile and he worked double shifts until he made enough to send for my mother and I.

We ate a lot of rice porridge and vienna sausages. Sunday was the only day we ate meat unless it was payday.

If you were to look up my hometown, you’d realize that the median income for a household in the city was $26,704 (versus $48,259 for the rest of Texas), and the median income for a family was $34,543. It’s easy to write off Wharton, Texas as another Trump breeding ground, but as with most things it’s never just black or white.

The per capita income for Wharton is $13,993. About 17.3% of families and 22.2% of the population are below the poverty line, including 22.3% of those under age 18 and 21.7% of those age 65 or over. A quarter of the city is living UNDER the poverty line! The funny thing is, we didn’t know we were poor. At least I didn’t. To me being poor didn’t mean a life of misery, it just meant we didn’t have any money. Just like everyone else we knew.

Homelessness is an issue politicians love to tackle because almost anyone from any background can participate; you’ve got moral high ground because hey, at least you have a roof over your head. But poverty? Poverty carries a deep sense of shame and it has many shades. No one acknowledged they were poor, even when the Census Bureau is telling you otherwise.

Even as I type this, with a successful business that I built with my co-founder Andrew and a small but close-knit set of friends by my side, I still feel the fear of falling back in all the time. I live in San Francisco now, a city with one of the highest incomes and displays of wealth in the entire world and it doesn’t make me feel any more secure. I used to buy clothes to try and tell the world but mostly myself that it’s ok. “You’re in the clear.” But I don’t feel like I’ve made it. To me, having things and having my needs met just meant they could be lost if I stopped being careful.

There’s an origin story about the famous Russian fighter Fedor Emelianenko which I consciously adopted as a mindset during my teenage years.

Emelianenko has stated his driving force for winning fights was: “Years ago we hardly had anything to eat. Now I earn more money and I see every opponent as a man that tries to put me back to that poorer period. That man has to be eliminated.” and about his state of mind before a fight: “When I walk into a fight, I’m trying not to think about anything; collect myself and concentrate. And going into a fight, I don’t feel any emotions, neither anger nor compassion. I don’t emotionalize. I’m going into a fight with a clear mind… During the fight, my senses dim and basically I don’t feel any pain.”

Making it wasn’t about being famous, it was about survival. It steeled me against the blows of corporate America and this tenaciousness has been the fuel I’ve survived off for a very long time. But this armor has gotten too heavy over the years.

The thing about small towns is that everything outside of it is an abstraction. This election year has bubbled it all to the surface. Suddenly the poor have a voice. Powerless yet still proud. That’s been the theme across many towns like mine and has been for generations.

The only way I even found out we were poor was when I was a young boy near Christmas time, I was in Eckerd’s pharmacy store and I asked my father if I could have these knockoff G.I. Joe action figures for Christmas. I thought I was doing him a favor by not going with the name brand stuff, and he softly said that he couldn’t afford it. I was so confused, I’d gotten gifts during past Christmases, surely this was trivial. Wiping bratty tears away, I let it go but the memory has always stayed with me.

Around the time we arrived in Texas, a group of retired teachers volunteered and were assigned immigrant families like ours to teach the basics of the English language. This made all the difference in my life and taught me the value of generosity. I remember when my father left to work in Taiwan for a few years, I had to sign the checks for the utility bills because my mother could not.

Eventually I’d go to college. When I graduated, I left Texas and moved out west with little money and almost no possessions. I smile when I think about how similar my beginnings were to my father’s. One of the few possessions I owned was a very small square photograph of my grandfather as a boy with his family that I kept pinned on a bare wall. It’s unclear how they afforded it, but I keep it to remind me where I came from.