<p>I know as an HS senior I shouldn’t be making a thread here, but I just really wanted adults’ perspectives on things. </p>
<p>It has struck me how a lot of unfortunate things related to the education process has sometimes led to good results. For example, if the Russian Revolution had not occurred and millions of people had not been killed, then probably Sputnik would never have been launched and American science and engineering education would not have received its much-needed revival and possibly the American education system would still be languishing. </p>
<p>Now, having recently read Voltaire’s Candide, I’m really wary of saying that such misfortune occurred for the best, but sometimes it does seem that Providence has intentionally put me on the rougher path for a better life. </p>
<p>I wasn’t born into a low-income family. But it strikes me that if my parents’ divorce had not occurred and if our house hadn’t been taken away, I wouldn’t have returned to my birth country to receive a new jolt in my education or have been exposed to the cultural wealth that I did; I would remain a shallow perfectly assimilated child with little idea about the current system’s failings in dealing with multiculturalism. I would have probably become a whitewashed snob.</p>
<p>My parents were initially poor too, but they built their way up; my father’s family farmed ducks in Malaysia, and it happened that one day he happened to become interested in electric circuits, and from there, UNIX. My mother actually came from a formerly fairly-prosperous family. At one point my maternal grandmother was a shrewd investor who had accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in shares; she owned a bungalow near the city centre (having your own yard is a big thing in Singapore, since land is super expensive). But it strikes me that if my mother’s family hadn’t hit upon misfortune, at this point my family would probably have been landed brats with a tradition of sending children to top local schools, with no appreciation of our fortunes. My family wouldn’t have migrated to America, and I too, would have remained culturally shallow and ignorant.</p>
<p>Both my maternal grandparents too, started out poor. My grandfather came to Singapore as a coolie from southern China because of the Chinese Civil War. He worked his way up and became a gourmet chef at the Raffles Hotel, schooled in the French tradition, and then later becoming a multilingual police chief. </p>
<p>There is a proverb in Chinese, “No family fortune lasts three generations.” This is more a trend than a hard and fast rule. The basic idea is that a lot of family fortunes in Chinese history start out with a poor man who works his way up and becomes prosperous; his son who grew up poor with his father knows the meaning of money and manages the finances shrewdly. The grandson is spoiled and wastes it all away. The cycle begin anew. This really doesn’t apply so much to my family’s situation, but it reminds me a lot about the idea of social mobility.</p>
<p>This rather long rantish thought began with thinking about the demographics of college students, and I’m just really curious about the bigger family stories of privilege (or lack thereof) among CC’ers, especially now that many here, regardless of their family’s income background, are receiving great opportunities? When you reflect on past misfortunes, would you wish they had happened any other way?</p>