Smart? Probably. Dumb? Definitely.
With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow - I have still joy in the midst of these things. Riches and honors acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a floating cloud.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC), The Confucian Analects
So here I am at 1:45 am reading the New York Times Technology Section and I find this article on how one of China's favorite young sons has been shown to be a fake. Chen Jin had it all; a PhD from U Texas @ Austin; a great gig as head muckety muck director of a brainos' admitted only dept. at the same school that former Chinese President Jiang Zemin went to; and a partner in many micro ventures that would all lead to many macro dollars, or yuan's, or renminbis, or fortune cookies.
What happened?
As it turned out, he didn't quite invent China's first homegrown microprocessor as he and greater China had so proudly announced to the world only recently. He took the gazillions of fortune cookies given to him for research from the Chinese government and set up a business where, honest hard working Chinese laborers basically scratched off Motorola from imported American Saltines and stamped Hanxin on them, thereby making them China's Chips.
A few weeks ago a similar riches to rags story happened here when a smart, young, Indian student at Harvard was found to have plagiarized (oops, sorry internalized) - leave it to a Harvard girl to come up with a new term for lifting, copying, cheating, plagiarizing - 40 passages from another writers teenage romance novel in an effort to make her somewhat intelligent and original story more run of the mill, and thereby, more marketable. The internalizing worked so well that Kaavya Vishwanathan soon had America cheering for Opal Mehta and her quest to lighten up to get into Harvard. It worked so well that she even got a movie deal.
There is already a lot written on the pressures that Asian young people feel to study, succeed, and make a name for their families, their people, their nation. I am not really interested in driving down that well worn road. Nothing stops them from thinking independently and coming up with their own definitions of a successful life; possibly one that is different than that arrived at by family and community.
We learn from Ruth Marcus' insightful editorial that Kaavya's grandfather had already expressed his expectation for her to be a doctor when she was only six years old. She was more interested in managing peoples money rather then their well being. Investment Banking is a very lucrative career these days. Although I hate making assumptions, I am sure her pops would have been very proud of his young Doctor of Wealth. His desire for her to be a doctor was probably more a reflection of his desire for her to be affluent and therefore well taken care of than it was in doing something as altruistic as doing a stint with medecins sans frontieres.
I truly wish no ill towards either one of these obviously intelligent young people. Chen Jin's doctoral adviser spoke to his brilliance as noted by David Barboza in his NY Times article. And I hope that Kaavya gets to tell the story she intended to tell. What I find disappointing is these young peoples need for validation being so great that they sold so cheaply their brilliance to fickle societies that value the polished, artificially cut diamond over the possibilities that lay within the random and imperfect rock that we are all cut from. Often these modernizing societies are forgetting to pass along the riches of their own thousands of years old civilizations to their children in an effort to catch up to so called advanced societies. They forget that the way these societies became advanced was through the courage of individuals to explore new frontiers in science and thought, conduct patient research, and persevere through cycles of failures and successes, thereby laying block by block the foundations of their modern prosperity.
And Asian civilizations are no strangers to these concepts. The Great Wall and the Taj Mahal; the wisdom of Confucius and the austere beauty of Vedantic philosophy; the discipline of martial arts and the scientific and spiritual benefits of yoga are only a few of the contributions of these great peoples. Material wealth is not a goal to be ashamed of; but material wealth and the short term admiration of a fast moving world are not the foundation on which to build our futures. Lets teach our kids the basics, but then also expose them to the arts, music, sport, or whatever, nurture their imaginations, and then set them free to be as rich and famous as they will be on their own merits.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC), The Confucian Analects
So here I am at 1:45 am reading the New York Times Technology Section and I find this article on how one of China's favorite young sons has been shown to be a fake. Chen Jin had it all; a PhD from U Texas @ Austin; a great gig as head muckety muck director of a brainos' admitted only dept. at the same school that former Chinese President Jiang Zemin went to; and a partner in many micro ventures that would all lead to many macro dollars, or yuan's, or renminbis, or fortune cookies.
What happened?
As it turned out, he didn't quite invent China's first homegrown microprocessor as he and greater China had so proudly announced to the world only recently. He took the gazillions of fortune cookies given to him for research from the Chinese government and set up a business where, honest hard working Chinese laborers basically scratched off Motorola from imported American Saltines and stamped Hanxin on them, thereby making them China's Chips.
A few weeks ago a similar riches to rags story happened here when a smart, young, Indian student at Harvard was found to have plagiarized (oops, sorry internalized) - leave it to a Harvard girl to come up with a new term for lifting, copying, cheating, plagiarizing - 40 passages from another writers teenage romance novel in an effort to make her somewhat intelligent and original story more run of the mill, and thereby, more marketable. The internalizing worked so well that Kaavya Vishwanathan soon had America cheering for Opal Mehta and her quest to lighten up to get into Harvard. It worked so well that she even got a movie deal.
There is already a lot written on the pressures that Asian young people feel to study, succeed, and make a name for their families, their people, their nation. I am not really interested in driving down that well worn road. Nothing stops them from thinking independently and coming up with their own definitions of a successful life; possibly one that is different than that arrived at by family and community.
We learn from Ruth Marcus' insightful editorial that Kaavya's grandfather had already expressed his expectation for her to be a doctor when she was only six years old. She was more interested in managing peoples money rather then their well being. Investment Banking is a very lucrative career these days. Although I hate making assumptions, I am sure her pops would have been very proud of his young Doctor of Wealth. His desire for her to be a doctor was probably more a reflection of his desire for her to be affluent and therefore well taken care of than it was in doing something as altruistic as doing a stint with medecins sans frontieres.
I truly wish no ill towards either one of these obviously intelligent young people. Chen Jin's doctoral adviser spoke to his brilliance as noted by David Barboza in his NY Times article. And I hope that Kaavya gets to tell the story she intended to tell. What I find disappointing is these young peoples need for validation being so great that they sold so cheaply their brilliance to fickle societies that value the polished, artificially cut diamond over the possibilities that lay within the random and imperfect rock that we are all cut from. Often these modernizing societies are forgetting to pass along the riches of their own thousands of years old civilizations to their children in an effort to catch up to so called advanced societies. They forget that the way these societies became advanced was through the courage of individuals to explore new frontiers in science and thought, conduct patient research, and persevere through cycles of failures and successes, thereby laying block by block the foundations of their modern prosperity.
And Asian civilizations are no strangers to these concepts. The Great Wall and the Taj Mahal; the wisdom of Confucius and the austere beauty of Vedantic philosophy; the discipline of martial arts and the scientific and spiritual benefits of yoga are only a few of the contributions of these great peoples. Material wealth is not a goal to be ashamed of; but material wealth and the short term admiration of a fast moving world are not the foundation on which to build our futures. Lets teach our kids the basics, but then also expose them to the arts, music, sport, or whatever, nurture their imaginations, and then set them free to be as rich and famous as they will be on their own merits.
posted by MyView at 1:35 AM
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