Chinese Christians

Growing up Chinese has its own lessons. Every mother is a tiger mom. What you did in life was never going to be good enough; your best always fell just short of their expectations. Your every accomplishment was compared against the accomplishments of some unknown scion of one of her many friends who was the perfect son or daughter, who was a doctor/lawyer/billionaire/perfection.

In time, some of us were able to overcome this fiction and survive, but living with psychological scars that would mark us for life. You manage to ignore the criticism, but it is never easy.

Yesterday, my mom told me that one of our family friends had died this week. He was a religious man, someone who was obsequiously disapproving of my atheist belief; someone who is dismissive of my doctorate, saying that it is not quite as impressive as being a real doctor, a medical doctor. While I seethed and fumed, my mother would sing the praises of his two sons, who are both doctors and active member of their church. They went to Stanford, you only went to a state school, blah blah blah.

Over time, as we all got older, these sons got married and thrived in their practices. My mother would regale me with their salaries and the luxuries that their salaries were able to afford them. She didn’t see this as rubbing it in or being provocative or mean spirited, she saw it as a matter of course, the Chinese thing to do, to use other people’s kids to be an inspirational beacon to me, hoping that I can use their example to improve my own lot.

Then the stories started to change. These beloved sons slowly metamorphosed into uncaring and selfish sons. Their parents moved to where the older son lives, some place that was much more expensive than where they were living. Their retirement nest egg is not going as far as they envisioned, and their two sons, the ones with the upper six figure salaries refused to help their parents financially and practically. The oldest son, with his own child now spends his every waking moment with his boy, and rarely, if ever visited his parents. When the parents needed help going to doctors and needed medical advice, he left them to rot. It would have been easy for him to intervene on their behalf, to ease their difficulties in dealing with the medical establishment.

When ailment after ailment struck his parents, the sons seemingly abandoned them to their own devices. All of that fine Christian charity pounded into them having evaporated under the heat of selfish greed and hubris.

When the father died this week, the oldest son, who lived in the same town, refused to come to their house. The father’s body was taken away by the hospice ambulance, and the mother not being able to accompany the body as she had no way of coming back to her home. The body was cremated and no services will be held because the sons are uninterested in it. The second son is flying in next week, as he could not abandon his lucrative practice.

Fine Christian hypocrites.

The sad state of the modern Athletic directors

I suppose that this phenomenon has been going on for a while, but I had been too busy to notice. Unfortunately this happened to a couple of friends of mine and the fury is burning a hole in my brain.

Two young and coming coaches, good coaches, better humans have been fired from small struggling programs. Their sin? They did not compromise their principles by accommodating the squeaky wheel on their team.

At this point, you may be thinking that they must have been holy terrors, junior Bobby Knights. Nope, they were as reasonable as can be, they were on their way to be extraordinary coaches of volleyball.  Usually, when people talk about situations like this, they will either paint the player as victims of a power mad coach who cussed, intimidated, and physically abused the players, or they would paint the coaches as completely innocent bystanders who are victims of an entitled generation of weak and monstrous generation. The truth usually lie somewhere in the middle.  

In the world of sports teams and the relationship between coaches and players, there will be disagreements, differences in philosophy as to the strategy and tactics of the game and the efficacy of the training or even the means of communication between the teacher and the pupil. The foibles and quirks of both sides are often magnified by temper. Since we are talking about competitive people, this effect is magnified by the competitiveness of the parties involved. And the differences are usually resolved through the Solomon like wisdom of the school administration and their ability to persuade, cajole, and broker a compromise, a meeting of the minds. A critical examination of the facts and a firm understanding of the personalities involved will usually reveal the nature of the truth and the appeal of team success and the pursuit of a common goal will usually cause the egos to deflate enough to work together for a common goal.

This assumes of course that the school administration, mainly the AD, is interested in having the best interest of the player, the coach, and his athletic program in mind. Indeed, it takes a Solomon to steer through the Scylla and Charybdis of very competitive and very ego driven people. Many people, teams, and programs have been saved by the wisdom of the administrators. But the recent spate of firings have demonstrated to us that wisdom is now mostly divorced from the skill sets of the modern athletic administrator. They are now mostly glorified bean counters with a business degree who are completely alienated from people and far from willing to work with human beings.

These soulless zombies are more interested in running the sports program as businesses rather than human endeavors. When a difficult situation involving people comes to the fore, their first instinct is for survival , and in the interest of survival, they would rather devastate families and the careers of coaches because it is easier to go that route. It is better to write a small check than to risk the wrath of potential future alums and boosters. The mission of the modern AD is no longer to create a familial ethos under his or her leadership; instead they seek quick resolution rather than seeking the truth. Courage and loyalty are quaint remnants of a bygone era. School presidents have taken to look for their future ADs from under the invertebrates crawling out from beneath the slimiest of rocks.

It is, a sad state of affairs.