The Price of a Growing Man

People still sometimes discuss the question of how you could tell that you were talking to some form of artificial intelligence rather than an actual human being. One of the more persuasive suggested answers is: “Ask them how they feel about dying.”

— Rowan Williams

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Dear Kate,

I am going to talk about something no Chinese should talk about, especially when it is Chinese New Year, yet it was what we talked about when I and my parents went for dimsum yesterday.

Of course I gave it away already in the quote above—but maybe not fully.

Yes, the topic is death, but more specifically, our own dying.

Of course too we Chinese don't claim exclusivity on being reticent and evasive about the topic: look at our own social media posts, those of ours and our friends, and it's apparent the topic is as cold as...you know.  You can take a selfie and capture with it yourself fully alive; no one takes a selfie when she is dead.

And I don't mean she couldn't otherwise take it.

Dying doesn't always point to the eventual cessation of bodily motion.  Sometimes in our living there are things worse than death.  We might come up with an oblique word to speak about, say, our anxiety and depression, agony and despondence, but soon too that word will die with everything else, the color of our melancholy self-portrait fades against the lively exuberance on display around us, and we are left with no word to speak about nothing at all.

If you are in your youth you wouldn't make it so far to this paragraph, but the problem wouldn't exist in the first place either: though I was a teenager given to morbid thoughts (Ingmar Bergman my favorite filmmaker), I wouldn't have written then what I just wrote now.  Steve Jobs once said, "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent."  But that's when he was still alive, both as in moving about and being inventive.

When you are dying, you are no longer inventive.  Your creation of youthful past ceases to be regenerative.  To recount anything at all is to count your loss.  What you see is what you get, and you are seeing not much and getting even less by the night.

I don't know exactly how my parents feel about their own dying, but from where I sat yesterday I could see they are dying well.  Very presumptuous of me, I know, but you must excuse me.  I've seen many a confident, even powerful man, with enough money to live three times better thrice over, dying like animal.  When he eats he eats like a dog, my dog, always as if some other dogs are going after his bowl, a fearful pipe dream from birth that he dreams to the end.  A man's dying can be the best argument against human dignity.

For that, it could also be the most convincing display for it: flourishing not despite all, but because of all.  "The price of a humanity that actually grows and changes is death," so claims Rowan Williams.

Do we want to grow?  Do we yearn for change?  We can't see ourselves when we devour like a dog.  By the time we are done eating, our reflection in the bottom of the bowl would be too obscured by our own saliva, careless eating, thoughtless living, reckless denial of dying.

Yours, Alex

PS. Above is an ordinary park I went to during my even more ordinary teenage years.