I failed. My students who had helped me prepare for my audition were incensed.
“You should have gotten the part,” one student said. “No,” I replied, “the director chose the best person for the part.” “But you have a cold. He should have considered that.” “I could get a cold before the performance. Based on my audition, he made the right decision.” “But you worked so hard,” other students said. “And so did others,” I countered. “Hard work does not mean I deserve the part.” When I first asked my students to be a test audience for me, I thought I was modeling for them how to prepare for an audition or interview. I allowed them to see my nerves, my rough early audition, and later my polished audition. They saw the difference in my stages of preparation. They saw mediocre transform into quality. When they asked me the day after my audition if I had gotten the part, they did not doubt my answer would be yes. And that’s when I realized a lesson that they had never learned. The entertainment industry tells story after story of how hard work pays off: Rudy struggles with grades, tuition, and physical limits, but still has his moment in the end; in Save the Last Dance, Julia Stiles’s character struggles with a new school and the loss of a parent, working hard to be accepted into Julliard, and, in the end, she succeeds; even in the comedy She’s the Man, Amanda Bynes’s character works hard and is allowed to play soccer on the guys’ team. We tell our students that their hard work is what matters, but we don’t tell stories of people who work hard and don’t achieve their goals. These stories teach that hard work ensures success. Hard work has become a reason for giving a higher grade than was earned, an excuse for giving a position to an unqualified candidate, and a mitigating circumstance for any situation. Recently, I started watching Mayim Bialik’s YouTube channel. I wish I could share one of her videos with all my students and, more importantly, the influential adults in their lives. Mayim shares about a humiliating experience in which she failed. Not sure what take-away she was going to close with, I was surprised and relieved at what she said: instead of numbing the feeling and hiding from it, she thought over the experience and learned from it. As I listened to my students excuse away my failure, assigning blame to circumstances (my cold) and the director (he wasn’t “understanding”) and downplaying the others who auditioned (“You were better.”), I realized that my failure was perhaps the first time my students were seeing a story in which hard work did not equal success. Of course they were crying “foul!” They had never learned that sometimes hard work isn’t enough. Suddenly, the lesson I thought I was teaching was dwarfed by the opportunity to show how to fail. I had worked hard, I was thoroughly prepared, but someone was better. I had no regrets or complaints because my audition was the best I had to offer. And when my students came to our performance, I was glad that they could see the higher quality performance of the lady who got the part I had auditioned for. I can continue to work hard and continue to audition. And if I ever do get the part I audition for, my students and I will know it will not be because the director took pity on my hard work; it will be because I was the best choice for the part.
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On vacation, I toured one of the historic sites I have been looking forward to visiting for nearly three years: the Terracotta Warriors. Conflicting thoughts filled my mind as I followed the hostel’s tour guide through the excavation pits to see the remains of a long-dead emperor’s dream of immortality. Two-thousand-year-old clay warriors fill the pits to protect the emperor’s burial grounds—a monument to his greatness and, according to the guide, his insanity. We joked and laughed at the cultural disconnect as our very Chinese tour guide treated our hodgepodge group of Western adults as though we were children and would be forever lost if we strayed from her for even a moment. But even while I laughed, I felt frustrated because I felt Thoughts hanging over me, but I wasn’t allowed to reflect quietly and take in the somberness of this monument to what? Hubris? Cruelty?
The guide told us that each statue’s face was unique, matching the artists’ faces rather than the historical figures they represented. She presented the idea as though seeing those hundreds of unique faces immortalized in statues honored those artists, even though she told us that they were slaughtered later to protect the secrets of the burial chambers. I struggled with the feeling hovering around me, refusing to coalesce into words, as I obediently followed the tour guide around the ancient site that continues to draw tourists and impresses them with its ancient magnificence. Days later, returning home on the train, I was reading a book about a Holocaust survivor, and epiphany struck. Looking at the Terracotta Warriors, I felt as though I were visiting a Holocaust Museum except that everyone else was pretending that it wasn’t. What is the difference between a pile of left-behind shoes and eyeglasses in a Holocaust museum and a pile of broken clay faces in a history museum? Each pile represents lives spent because of unbridled pride and power. Because one site is ancient, we admire the “human accomplishment” of a “less advanced” society. Will future (more advanced) generations, untouched by the horror of the Holocaust, visit a museum and express admiration for “human accomplishment” at the medical discoveries Dr. Mengele made from his experiments on prisoners in the concentration camps? Perhaps plaques will name the many twins in his famous studies in a show of immortalizing the victims while still celebrating the Angel of Death’s accomplishments. I couldn’t escape the feeling that while the Terracotta Warriors began showcasing one amazing absolute authority that now it is showcasing how amazing another absolute authority is trying to be. It is a source of cultural pride. As part-German, I cannot view the Holocaust as a credit to my heritage. We in the West would be appalled at the inhumanity of celebrating a tragedy. Yet, as one of my friends explained, Eastern cultures are more honest. They celebrate these monuments, not viewing them as symbols of man’s failure to be human, but rather as proof of the power and greatness of their civilization. They excuse the countless deaths because of the ruler’s “madness,” but they laud the result of that madness. Perhaps the West is becoming more honestly depraved, too. Someone shared on social media an article about a missionary killed by the tribe he was trying to reach. The poster added a single-word caption: “good.” His post had received likes and laughs. How could someone applaud a young missionary’s death? Hours after seeing that post, I was watching tv. After several episodes of the smug villain tormenting Chuck with impunity, one of the good guys abruptly kills the villain. And the word “good” escaped my lips as my heart added, “Someone needed to do that.” Why do we admire an emperor commissioning a monument to his greatness at great human cost, but condemn Dr. Mengele’s achieving scientific discoveries at greater human cost? Why am I appalled at seeing a social media post approving a death and then have the same thought myself hours later? Whether East or West, ancient or advanced, we are human with hearts of darkness that only the True Light can save. |
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