November 9, 2005

Dear Colleague,

         "Virologist Kuan-Theh Jeung always thought it strange that his employer, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would celebrate Asian Heritage Week each year with a cultural fair. 'We are not known for being great cooks or dancers. We're known for being great scientists.'"

         The white establishment and its colored hangers-on are keen on keeping ethnics in their place--and their place is cooking and dancing rather than searching for truth (science). As cooks and dancers, they provide entertainment for the whites and are never a threat to them, as they might be if they turned into high-powered virologists and physicists.         

So guess what Chinese scientists at NIH decided to do? They decided to rebel. Last year, the Chinese American Association of NIH launched a new tradition. Rather than cooking up a storm of Kung Pao Chicken or wriggling their hips, as their bosses at NIH expected, they invited a distinguished Asian researcher to give a scientific lecture. Take that! And that! (Science, vol. 310, 28 October, 2005).

         What if the other ethnics follow suite? What if, on African-American Heritage Month, a whole series of distinguished African-American scholars and scientists come to our campus to give lectures on Egyptian hieroglyphics, Yoruba astronomy, DNA, or the String Theory? Won't that upset our liberal establishment who, in anticipation of Heritage Month, so elaborately planned the "fun things" for ethnics to do?

         Heritage is not something one can celebrate. It is almost oxymoronic to put the two words "heritage" and "celebration" side by side. Why? Because "celebration" is in its nature a conscious activity, whereas "heritage" is in its nature subconscious, something so deeply ingrained in our being that we are hardly aware of its existence. What constitutes true heritage? The food we eat in childhood, the way we carry ourselves and move (stances and gestures that lie at the basis of dance), what we wear when we go to bed, the spittoon by our rocking chair, the umbrella we use against the bright sunlight, and so on. We don't think about these things, no more than we think about breathing. When we do think about them, and even celebrate (that is, make a fuss) about them, we can be sure that they are no longer vivifying daily presences, but are just performances or political statements.

         In the late 1960s, I saw in Science magazine a line-up of men and women in front of what looked like a factory. They held up their arms and some of them had clinched fists. They appeared to be shouting. A protest against low pay and long hours? No. It turned out that they were celebrating--they were shouting "Eureka!" because they had just achieved a scientific breakthrough. Now, that's real celebration. Real celebration is directed toward the now, or the recent past, as, for example, when we celebrate another year added to our chronological age, or at the time of college graduation. As for the scientists featured in Science magazine, I can just see them transforming that lining up, that raising of the arms, into a Heritage-Day performance when their inspiration dries up.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu