Self-identity, as a continuum: Drawing parallels between the parable of the widow’s offering and the movie “Disobedience”.

“Disobedience” setup: *movie spoiler alert*

Imagine being the only child to the most respected Rabbi in your town. As you’re a girl, your father had to groom another boy in the community to take over his legacy when he passes. You’re best friends with this boy. Your father had grand plans of having you “betrothed” to this boy. As you come of age, you fell in love. There is one problem, you fell for another girl. You want to be accepted by your father and community, but not at the expense of the authenticity that you feel so deeply in your soul. Yet, you’re a “senseless” teenager, trying to “prove” yourself to adults. You know you have to make a decision. Not wanting to hurt anyone, you leave town – you leave your only family, your best friend, your lover – alone.

You survive in New York city as a photographer – a vocation that brings out the best in you and those you work with, and still make a decent living. One day, you received a phone call telling you that your father had died. You return home to face your past, where almost everybody at home thinks that your attraction to debauchery had led you astray. You learn that the only reason you received the news was because the girl you fell in love with, now married to your “betrothed”, convinced her husband, to reach out to you…

This is not a story of being gay. This is a story of being vulnerable to let go of resentment in order to empower, in order to be… to be you.

Parable: The Widow’s Offering

Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few cents. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything – all she had to live on.” (Mark 12:41-44)

Identity as a continuum

I saw the movie last night, and it didn’t take me long to relate to my Christian past. I shed a few tears. As I reflected on the movie and my life, a parable came to mind. As I’ve left Christianity for almost 20 years, I only remembered it to be of a woman giving <0.01% of what the rich folks gave as offering, yet Jesus made sure to remind his disciples that her contribution is more significant than the wealthy folks. When I googled the parable, the woman in the parable turned out to be a widow.

Mind blown.

I started drawing parallels between my widowhood and the widow in the parable. In her world at that time, she must have had to depend on her husband in every way to survive. I live in world where I’m lucky to be able to carve out an independent woman’s life, despite some challenges. Gary and I were partners where we empowered each other. He lived a life of a perfectionist artist, like Reynolds Woodcock in the “Phantom Thread”, who empowered and brought out the beauty of selected women in his life, through his be-ing and his work.

The lead actor in “Disobedience” had to make a choice at the most important moment in his career, at the stake of his reputation, to stand up for what he was taught throughout his life – of freedom and choice – because otherwise, the lead actress could have never been able to gain her reputation within the community as the late-Rabbi’s daughter.

Likewise, the story that I tell of my marriage have such a deep, yet different realities to people, than if he were to have told it. We each have to tell our versions, in order for our story to be complete.

We also gave each other a safe space to be vulnerable, and to turn that vulnerability into empowerment.

Now it’s up to me to tell our story. It’s my responsibility.

The journey of self-discovery can be as broad and as deep as you want it to be. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t want mine to have taken me this far from home, and this long to travel (run, fly, crawl, skip, walk, dance, swim, drown).

Yet, I would not exchange my life for another’s.

Using music to explain converging heritages harmoniously

Each and everyone of us wear different hats and play different roles at different times to different people.

We don’t get to choose our lineage, our physical appearance, the country we were born in, how we are taught to think as we were growing up.

Yet at some point of our lives, we have to make choices that would eventually define us for the rest of our lives. The hope is that as we are given that responsibility to choose, we don’t make irrevocable mistakes, where we don’t get to learn from those mistakes as we move on in our lives.

This is an interpretation of my Asian and American heritage. Depending on how embedded you’re in either of these cultures, you will experience the piece differently.

I chose these two songs because they are evergreen pop classics in each culture that describes our journey of continuously working on the innate human connections that we call friendship.

Could you tell that there are two songs going on?

Do you know the lyrics to each song?

Do you have a Chinese or East Asian or American friend who grew up with either song where you can share the significance of the song and it’s meaning with?

What do you think of the harmony?

What about the timing of how they start and end together?

To me, the harmony of the 2 songs blends so well that it made me wonder what could go so wrong in any two seemingly polarizing opinions that it could never be resolved.

Surely, there are moments in the song where dissonance and tension linger. But by giving the dissonance and tension time, and allow myself be comfortable with the uncomfortable, it births a new appreciation to the converging songs, thus giving color to the song, so that when the dissonance gets resolved, the harmony brings peace to the soul.

How does this relate to your current self and your past self? What about your relationship with your family? Your relationship with your friends? Your relationship with your government? Your relationship with your enemies?

As I relate more to my American heritage these days, I recorded Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” first and used it as a baseline to my playing of Emil Chou’s “Peng You” (which is translated to Friend in English).