It’s cold and I walk quickly by him, or so I tell myself. All I take in is a dirty, stained baseball cap struggling to cover a balding and greasy head. A dry, cracked voice trails behind me as I look at the ground and pretend not to have heard.

“Any spare change, miss?”

 

It’s summer and I don’t have the convenience of saying I’m running by to stay warm. I grudgingly look down and feel a pain as I see a man sitting cross-legged with a tattered cloth covering a box and on top—hand made jewelry. Nothing more than wires and stones in simple shapes and I can’t help but think, who would ever buy those?

 

I walk to my friend’s house, following the same path every time and each time, there’s an old man sitting in a coat that is too big, in pants that are too tattered, with a shopping cart that is too full of bags of things that I can’t even imagine. This time, he has an old radio on and is listening to Spanish music. He doesn’t look up as I pass and I try not to look either, practically sprinting by to avoid another encounter with just another homeless person on the streets of my hometown.

 

I hug my jacket to myself as I step out of the house blaring with music, sticky with spilled alcohol, and robust with drunken students. The quiet and cold of the dark night rushes to meet me as I walk down the steps and, all of a sudden, I see a tall shape emerge a couple of steps away from me.

I give him a sidelong glare and take on a defensive posture, hostile and ready to give a cold brush off. All I can think is, I should not be walking around alone at 3am.

He walks up to me, a lanky man too tall to make me feel comfortable. He’s dressed in little more than a thermal long sleeve even though it’s bitter Michigan fall.

He sees me standing like a cat that just saw a dog and stutters to a stop, “Sorry, ma’am. The man of the house said I could pick up the empty bottles around here.” He looks down and doesn’t make eye contact, shuffling his feet and shrugging his shoulders in to make himself look smaller.

I feel my stomach drop to the ground and my face heat up as I mumble something that vaguely sounds like “It’s alright”.

Once again, I walk away as quickly as possible.

 

But this time, I’m so ashamed.

 

I can feel something choking in my chest and I feel so empty. I feel like I’ve been slapped in the face and it’s knocked all my thoughts into an incoherent jumble. “It’s alright” is what I said. It’s all right that he picks up the beer bottles that we throw around, that he has to wait outside in the cold to pick up our mess and make a few dollars off of it? It’s all right that he wanted to be so polite and so friendly and I looked at him and thought danger before he even opened his mouth?

His voice is ringing in my head and the entire walk back all I can hear is “Sorry, ma’am”.

----

 

I sit in class surrounded by the leaders and the best of the business school. We laze about in our seats, thinking we’re all going to be the next CEOs and the next Bill Gates.

Professor Chu stands up in front of us and shows us a picture of a big hole in the ground, right under the street. There’s a little boy looking up at us and he’s sitting on his bed.

“My grandfather used to be a reverend and I would always play soccer against one of my best friends right in the courtyard of the church. Whoever won would always get a little monetary prize and I made it so that I won every time. He was always furious and I always thought it was hilarious.”

He looks back at the screen, at the little boy looking up through broken concrete with big eyes, and then turns slowly back to us, “Then, one day, I went to his house for dinner and that picture you see, that’s where he lived. The road had caved in and there was a hole in the ground under the street and that’s where his family had made their home. Those couple of dollars actually meant something to him and I had always gloated about winning, even if I had cheated.”

He looks down, swallows, and then smiles, “So I decided I wanted to do something about it. I decided to take down the Korean government.”

Everyone relaxes and we all laugh appreciatively as he throws up another picture, a masked man throwing a flaming cocktail.

He leads us through his life, as we stay glued to his words, all the way up till the time class is supposed to end and he’s still talking. “I eventually went into strategy and was a headhunter. We hired and drafted CEOs, I could call anybody in the country and they would be happy to speak with me, I was their top priority. I had my own secretary and that’s where I worked, the tallest building in Korea.”

The power point shows downtown Seoul at night and his building is shining with the lights of officials working behind their desks with doors manned by secretaries.

“This is where the president of Korea lived.”

His laser highlights a little blue house on the side of the mountain near his old office.

“Literally and figuratively, I looked down at them.”

We laugh again and I can see a feel people smirking, that’s going to be me, I could almost see the thoughts running through their head.

“But I’m here now, getting another PhD, teaching students.”

The room is practically screaming, “WHY??”

The power point changes to a picture of his two kids, ages 3 and 6. “What do you think family is for?”

There’s silence and no hands.

Finally, “It’s providing support for them.”

Another, “Providing motivation for us.”

Professor Chu nods, “That’s all true. But is it just that? To give us motivation? To procreate? To show off and fit in?”

He turns to look at the picture of his two children, giggling together in a hammock, and smiles a little to himself. “No. I think families are for sharing love, having fun, and growing together. They are the ENDS not the means.”

Each word gets louder and he’s physically reaching out to us. He is so sincere, so desperate for us to see this and at this moment, his wife and two kids walk in with Washtenaw Dairy donuts.

I smile as they gaze wide eyed at the class of 82 followers and lost.

“Do you guys remember Milgram’s experiment?”

Course concepts, key takeaways, and a black and white video flash through my mind. Volunteer participants in the experiment were requested to shock a man in a room every time he got a memory question wrong with the voltage increasing successively to 400 volts. The man on the other end would scream every time, and once it got to a certain point, would fall silent while the participant was expected to continue administering the shocks. The man was not really getting shocked, but the majority of people believed he was, and continued to shock him through screams and through silence, all the way up to 400 volts.

“I said that this was an example of Agentic Shift. That we cease to become decision makers and principals, becoming instead, purely agents of someone else’s will. We essentially lose the ability to make our own decisions.” He pauses and looks at us. We look accepting, like we’re all saying, “Yes, we know this, we studied for it on the test and wrote it all down”.

“Don’t you guys think this is a cop out?”

The final minutes of the Milgram video play on the screen, a part that we hadn’t seen before. A grizzly, old voice speaks through the years to ears that he hopes are listening.

“The scientist who prompted the participant to continue administering the shocks had different levels of answers to push the participant to continue. Each successive level became more direct and less like a suggestion and more like a command until we reached ‘It is imperative that you continue’. The remarkable thing is that the minute this level was reached, where a direct command was given, most of the participants blatantly refused to continue. Once it turned into a command, we had immediate disobedience.”

I crinkle my brow and wonder what new idea he’s going to throw in our direction.

Professor Chu smiles and says, “So you see, you do have a choice, you cannot make an excuse and say you were simply suffering from becoming an agent. The one thing this experiment shows is peoples’ ability to disobey.”

The next slide is titled, “A Meaningful Life”.

“You have a choice. Nobody can force you into doing anything you don’t want to. Even if results aren’t heroic, you can be. And what a great world it would be if we all competed to outdo each other on being human.”

I look around and I see the hunger for success and ambition in our eyes suddenly dulled by the thought of a balanced life. We look at him standing there with his family and we all stand up to shake his hand at the end of class. There is a deafening sound in my ears as the silence and the walls of the business school press down and I think about its purpose, to produce the next leaders of the business world. But what’s my purpose?

His lecture for that day was titled “Words Never Spoken”.

----

Three months ago I sat in an auditorium, counting down the seconds until I could get out of orientation and forget everything that I had just learned. The group of 500 newly admitted business students around me were ready to go. The only thing standing in our way was a keynote speaker.

Thin and lean, he stood before us confidently and spoke quickly. Within a minute, we were fixated on what he was saying and our shoulders were stiff from keeping absolutely still.

“You know, I was at the best point of my life. I was young and moving faster than ever, climbing the corporate later, doing deals with Martha Stewart and yachts. At my age, I was at the top of the world and when I told my bosses that I wanted to go back to school and work with students, to advise them on their careers, he said I was crazy—and so did everyone around me. But what made it for me was that I was on top of the world—and miserable. All that money, power, position, and my family life was in shambles.”

A student raises her hand: “Was there one moment that really determined your change of mind?”

He looks down, clears his throat, walks to the end of the stage and back, and then looks up into the audience steadily.

 “Yeah, when my wife walked out on me.”

----

I can see myself heading for that cliff and everyone else is running right with me. What happened to our compassion, our empathy? We second-guess each other’s motives and always think that someone is out there to backstab us. We see homeless people who have nothing and deny them anything from us. We look out for Number One and no one else. Do we have friends? Or do we have business partners? Do we give up our families for our careers?

 

I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to pull back from this riptide. I’m in the middle of the current and all I see is open, endless ocean ahead of me and I can’t find my way back to shore. And just as I’m wondering how in the world I’m going to navigate this expanse when I’m already exhausted, I see the faintest glimpse of a floatable ring glinting in the sunlight, and I hope with all my might that it is not a mirage.

“I don’t ever worry about you not working hard enough. The only thing I worry about is that you will work too hard. Sometimes, you need to just take a break, like everyone else.” My dad and I are taking our nightly summer walk after dinner.

“Beixi, remember that your career is important but your personal life is just as important. You don’t need to have the most money, because if that’s your goal then you will never have enough. All we want for you is a comfortable life, and that means having that balance.” My mom is on her hundredth life conversation with me but this time, instead of laughing it off, I listen.

 

It’s okay if I can’t reach the floatable ring just yet, as long as I know I need to get to it, that’s enough for now. Let me struggle a little bit, swim a little of the ocean, but let me be always moving towards that ring.

 

Hopefully, one day, I can walk by a lonely person sitting on a cracked sidewalk and buy a piece of jewelry made by hands wrapped up in gloves with holes.

Hopefully, one day, I can remember Professor Chu and think of his last lecture and say “I have tried to outdo others on being human”.

Hopefully, one day, I can stand in front of a class of determined, ambitious students and tell them that I have a great family and a great career. That I am there for those I care about in my life and that my computer is not my only solace and companion.

Hopefully, one day, I can sit across from my kids at dinner or take walks with them during the summer and say, “Remember, career is important, but your personal life is just as important”.

I want to say it because I’ve done it. I don’t want to give life lessons built on my mistakes. I want to give lessons built on my successes.

 

----

“It is imperative that you continue.”

“I’m sorry, I am not willing to do what you are asking of me.”

The power point goes blank and the class has run past its scheduled time. The seconds tick by and Professor Chu motions for us to get up as we all sit, locked into our seats.

There is a shuffling as everyone jerks out of their thoughts, shrugs on their coats and smiles at the PhD student who had taught students for the very first time that semester.

 

End of class.