I can’t thank you all enough for taking the time to enter my HP/Microsoft Back-to-school contest. I was overwhelmed by the number of responses and picking a winner was much harder than I expected. There were a lot of comments and posts that I had to cull through and try to find the one that best embodied the “better together” concept.
The winner, Mr. Wu Ming Wang did just that with his comment about becoming a better father in multiple way in order to provide a better life for his son. It’s a long read but one that really touched my heart and ultimately won him two laptops from HP & Microsoft.
Here is his story:
My life was forever changed the day I welcomed my baby boy to this world. Financially, my wife and I were not ready to take on the task of raising a kid. We had just finished paying off the medical bills that my dad incurred for his back treatment. My wife and I both worked in restaurant, so our wages back then were quite low. We just couldn’t afford for one of us to stay home full time to take care of the baby. Our plan was to wait several years when we were more financially stable. However every time we saw other kids playing with their parents, our desire became increasingly strong. Fortunately, my parents volunteered to move in with us and take care of the baby while we worked. With that taken care, everything was in place as we anxiously awaited the arrival of our love gem. However, just few months after my baby boy was born, my dad’s back started to act up again. The American treatment was obviously not working.
My dad needed to go back to China as my relatives suggested that a combined treatment of acupuncture, Chinese herbs, and martial arts can fully cure his back. My mom had to go back as well to take care of him. We were so devastated when we heard this. Due to our poor economic status, hiring a full time babysitter was a bit too expensive. We had no choice but to send our baby boy to China to be raised by my wife’s parents. Our plan was that once we were more financially stable, we would take him back. It was so heart-wrenching to have the love-of-our-life leaving us at only three months old, to know that we won’t be there to hear him utter his first word, to see him take his first steps, to rock him in the cradle of our arms, to hear him laugh and cry. I have never shed more tears on any other occasion than the day I had to say good-bye to my baby boy.
That separation had taught me something valuable, shone a new light on my life, and changed my perspectives about giving back to the communities. I no longer saw others just as my fellow human beings; they are also the cherished sons and daughters of others regardless of how old they are. From that time on, I no longer tossed aside donation letters citing my poor economic condition as an excuse. I started to take interest in helping those growing without the love of their parents in any way I can. I might not have much money to give, but I gladly donate myself to charity works. I have continued that habit to this day.
Motivational Force
Shortly after my baby boy left, I began to think about my future. Working in the restaurant paid very little. However, there weren’t many jobs outside of Chinese community for someone with limited English. My wife hardly knew any English at all, so she had no choice but to confine her to the slave labor that is restaurant. On the other hand, I had other options. I had some college under my belt. I dropped out because of my family’s dire financial condition, especially not possible after my dad’s back pain started to manifest. To give my child a better future, to allow him soar as high as possible, I needed to get a better-paying job. I needed to go back to school to get an accounting degree. And my wife was very supportive of my decision.
I was able to find a night shift at one restaurant. So during the day, I would go to a community college and at night, work. I knew that getting through was going to be a daunting task, but the rewards would be lifelong. During the three years of working and going to school full-time, I had no more than six hours of sleep everyday, excluding Sunday which I had the day off to catch up some sleep and piling schoolwork. To help me staying awake and alert, I had to drink one kind of ridiculously bitter tea that made my face scowl every time I drank it ( Drinking coffee gives me weird sensation). Every morning, I literally had to drag myself up and sometimes with my wife’s help. I don’t know how many times I thought about quitting. What kept me going was my baby boy. He was the greatest motivational force I could ever have at that time.
Even to this day, he is still the source of my motivation. Due to the current poor economy, my restaurant has floundered a bit. To help keeping the restaurant afloat and paying for my kid’s college education, I have to take on a second job. In a typically week, I work a little bit over 100 hours. I am not complaining…well just a little bit. My kid has made me into a strong-willed person, who can take on whatever life throws at me.
Fast forward five years, I had solidified my position at a fair-sized accounting firm in Manhattan, and my wife, through years of hard work and countless hours at learning English, had become a restaurant manager. This time, everything REALLY was in place to welcome our boy to America. Fortunately, all those expensive international phone calls and stacks of photos on the day of reunion as he readily jumped into our arms and proceeded to call us, papa and mama, until our ears turned sore. Back home, my relatives had always told me how much my kid resembled me, that he was a mirror of me in many different way.
Typically, when a parent hears this, he or she would take pride in that and grin from ear to ear. To me, that’s not the case. Being a mirror of me was actually a bad thing because I had at that time so many character flaws that were ill-fitted to our current society. Those would put him at a huge disadvantage compared to other kids. My life at that time was a living proof. Fearing the worst, I knew I needed to find one way or another to nurture him into a better man. And in the process preparing him for the future, I have come to a better understanding of my personal shortcomings and learnt to straighten them out as well.
Joy Oh Joy
As many parents have mentioned before, having kids really brings great joy to their life, sometimes sprouting flowers in a once desolate garden that had long forgotten what flowers look like. That’s the magic my boy brings to me. Growing up, I was sadder than glad most of the time due to my family’s dismal financial conditions. How can you be happy when you, at the age of ten, have to get up at six o’ clock in the morning not to go to school but to work in the field; when you are constantly hungry because the rice pudding you eat has more water than rice; when you can only jealously watch other people playing their toys because your family is too darn poor to spend on those things: when you have to walk on scorching roads bare-footed because you have to save the only pair of shoes you have for winter; when the only time you ever get one new piece of clothes is on New Year’s day.
Even when I came to America at the age of 13, my life wasn’t so much better off. At school, I often got teased and bullied because I didn’t speak English. In a sick twist of event, when my baby boy was born, he cried much more frequently than other babies at this age. Later to ensure that he will be glad more than sad, we would do anything to elicit laughter from him, that includes tickle him in the stomach and feet as often as possible, watch comedies, telling jokes, doing fun activities together, etc.
Laughter is indeed contagious. In the process of making him laugh more, he had provided me with lots of happy moments that slowly set the happy tone for my future. As he grew older, he would often bring home jokes that made me laugh really hard that my stomach hurt. Of course, people around me have noticed that I have become a happier person, much easy going than before. My perspectives on life have also changed. I no longer see a cup as half empty but rather half full.
Shyness
I have to admit that growing up, I was a very shy person. I heard from my parents that most of my relatives were the same growing up, with some obvious exception. As time passed, some of them stayed the same, some improved a little bit, and some made a 360 degree turn-about. I was in that second group. Sadly to say, my boy also inherited that trait. He’s very reluctant, or shall I say scared, at meeting new people. Oftentimes, I would take my boy with me on errands. And along the way, if I saw any of my friends and relatives, I would stop and talk to them for a while. Of course, I would try to introduce my boy. Apparently, he wanted no piece of that. He would actually hide behind my legs and cover up his face with my pants. Then he would tug my pants to signal that it’s time to go.
Occasionally, he would tug too hard and pull down one side of my pants. I knew I had to do something to help my kid shed that barrier wall in order to live a more full-filling life. However since I was a shy person to begin with, that task proved to be a bit challenging. Fortunately, I managed to enlist a smart outgoing girl to help me out. In the meantime, I would bury myself in self-helping guide, and watch videos to analyze the behaviors of outgoing individuals. Of course, I had to test whatever tricks I learned on myself to see if they work or not. In fact, I was learning WITH him.
During that time, I had to do a lot of things that I could never do if it were not for the motivational force that was my little boy. Of course, he had to do them too. Needless to say, it was a very slow process. We didn’t make a 360 degree turnabout, but what we accomplished was good enough for both of us that we no longer felt uneasy talking with strangers. Well, just a little bit. As a result of this training, I became more proactive, rather than reactive when it comes to making acquaintances.
Communication Arts
Typically, communication skills go hand in hand with shyness. People who are shy, more often than not, are not really good at communicating with others. They might be a decent writer or reader, however speaking, not so much. Because they talk less, they miss out the practice of making them fluent speakers. And because they are not fluent speaker, they talk even less. A vicious cycle is thus born. That really hit the nail on my head. I could only sputter a string of short sentence together. Ask me to tell a story, I would stutter after few sentences and then things would become confusing. So I avoided telling stories like a plague.
This lack of communication skills, in retrospect, had caused me to miss out on lots of opportunities whether it is making new friends, advancing my career in early part of my life. Obviously, I didn’t want that same thing to happen to my son. Same with overcoming shyness, I needed to better myself first then I can pass down the knowledge to him. To articulate my speech, I would tune to a random English show and repeat whatever they said. And throughout the years, one activity we did often was debate about controversial and current events. We would literally talk till our face turned red (which happened very quickly in the beginning), and our mouth became dry in order to push our communicating boundaries. All these efforts really paid off for both of us.
At the beginning of my job at the accounting firm, I worked in the back office, doing all the drudging work that nobody wanted to do. As I became a better communicator, I managed to persuade my boss to let me work in the front office, such as meeting new clients, contact lawyers about tax codes, etc. As later when I opened my own restaurant, I found those communication skills quite useful at negotiating contracts with landlords and suppliers, and maintaining good relationship with customers.
Patience
The one thing that is central to all these father-son activities is patience. I thought I was a fairly patient guy until my son showed me the limit of my endurance. The initial stages of all the activities I mentioned above were really difficult to implement. It took an awful lot of time in the beginning just to get my son to smile and say his name when meeting someone new. Because of his young age, he didn’t really understand the importance of those activities. So his progress was very slow.
Later I found out through the hard way the harder I pushed him, the more defiant or reluctant he became. Eventually, I learnt to more much more accommodating through altering my mind set, such as putting myself in my boy’s shoes, allowing extra time to do certain things, meditating, etc. Quite frankly, I should thank my son for testing the limit of my patience as he grew up. Without him, I would still be that guy who naively thinks he’s a patient person. As such, my friends and relatives have been quite amazed of my patience that they nicknamed me as a monk.
At the restaurant that I currently work (not the one I own, a night shift job to complement the little money we get from our restaurant), we just hired a new guy couple days ago. Of course as a rule, the old guys were supposed to show him the rope. However the problem is he does things very awkwardly and is very slow to catch on. I am the only one teaching him right now; everybody else has already given up.
I could continue to detail all the things that I have learnt, such as being a better team player by working together with my wife to raise my kid, and changes I have made, such as in the process of helping my kid lose weight, I have become a healthier person and being in much better shape than when I was young. If I were to chronicle all those, my entry will be much too long. So, I will just stop here and take the moment to reflect the whole experience.
Thanks to my son, I have become a much better person through the journey that we embarked long time ago. He has made more impacts, at least made me realize the needs to change myself, than I could ever imagined prior to being a dad. In the process of helping my boy climb the ladder of childhood, learn attitudes and skills to overcome the challenges he found each step of the way, I have discovered much about myself and I have strive to be all I can be.
Again, a big thanks goes out to HP, Microsoft and the folks from Ivy Worldwide for putting all this together. I also want to thank everyone who entered and be sure to sign up for email updates or grab my free RSS feed so you won’t miss out on any upcoming articles.
