What exactly do you do with an English major?
Random Person: I hear you're an English major. Sooooo you want to be a teacher?
Me: No, actually I have no intention or desire to teach. Ever.
RP: So what are you planning on doing with that degree?
Me: Well, there are a lot of things that you can do with an English degree. Like...
RP (rudely interrupting): You know the humanities are dead and you wasted thousands of dollars for two useless degrees right?
Me: *sigh*
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| A day in the life of this English major |
The above conversation can easily describe my entire academic career as well as post-undergraduate and now post-graduate life. I've never been able to understand the mindset of locking someone who chooses to be an English major into only one career path like it's a life sentence or some sort of incurable venereal disease. The point of no return. This is what you chose, so guess what, now you're screwed and you can only ever be stuck in a classroom with students who don't really give two shits about the literature and the words and the ideas that you're so desperately in love with. Yeah no. I'm good never putting myself through that.
Last time I checked, an English degree didn't come with a clear career path the way it does with Accounting or Nursing or Pre-Law. In fact, along with the folks in the Communication department (who I'm pretty sure will agree with me), the English major is possibly one of the most versatile majors I could have chosen. Due to the humanities being "dead," most people I've encountered in the business world can't write to save their life and are desperate to hire people who are capable of writing and making them not look like idiots when drafting a company-wide memo. But I'm not here to give career advice...
Safe escape
As anyone who has read my blog knows, my childhood was far from rosy. I was quiet, shy, and and pretty much scared of my own shadow. From an early age I remember loving books. The elaborate (or not so elaborate) colored pictures of characters with lives more exciting than mine, the words that seemed to just jump off the page when they were read or read to me. It was a world I was safe in. The princess always ended up with the prince and everyone lived happily ever after. Stupid lying children's stories. If only things were that clean and straightforward in real life. But I digress.
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| Snapshot of my last year of grad school |
At nine years old I was the first kid I knew and the first one in the neighborhood to get glasses. Add homeschooling to that mix and my parents may as well have put a target on my back. I was the butt of every joke at church, in my ballet class, hell, I got made fun of when I was sitting in the tree in my backyard and the kids came and found me simply to tease little old "Asian four-eyes." I think my favorite insult was probably the one where I was told that maybe if my eyes weren't so slanty I wouldn't need glasses. If my formative years were more in the age of social media, I would have been on someone's watch list for bullying.
In my books and my journals I found a safe haven. An escape where I wasn't getting teased for the giant glasses I had to wear to be able to see across the room or for being "adopted" because obviously I had to be if I didn't look like either of my parents (I'm not. I checked. And despite my theories, my parents also didn't have a shotgun wedding because someone got preggers with me. It really would have explained a lot growing up...). I read about places I wanted to go and people I wanted to be. Fiction, history, politics, memoir...no matter the genre, I would read it. Over the years I've easily had a hundred journals full of stories, real and imagined, in my evolving childish handwriting all giving me an outlet in a world that seemed to hate me.
Melissa the Spy*
*Contains some movie spoilers.
Anyone whose childhood spanned the late '80s and early '90s is (or should be) familiar with the movie Harriet the Spy. Michelle Trachtenberg plays the part of Harriet M. Welsch, a precocious 11 year old tomboy in New York City who wants nothing more than to be a writer. Constantly in her possession is one of those black and white notebooks with the work "PRIVATE" scrawled across the front cover. In it she writes down her thoughts, observations, and commentary on everything she sees throughout her daily life: "I want to learn everything I can, and I write down everything I see...if I want to be a writer someday, I better start now, and that is why I am a spy."
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| 1996 |
Being the person that I am, I read the book first, so when the movie was released in 1996, I donned my yellow raincoat and sneakers in honor of my idol. While the whole having a nanny named Golly and living in New York's Upper East Side was a lifestyle I was hardly familiar with, Harriet's keen sense of observation about those closest with her as well as about complete strangers resounded very closely with my life. Being as quiet as I was, I was able to learn things about people and their quirks and nuances that I probably wouldn't have otherwise. And, like Harriet, I tended to write all of these down in whatever journal or on whatever napkin lay closest.
However, like Harriet, being observant and honest can have its pitfalls. Not everyone likes when someone can see their true colors and even fewer people like being called out on it. About halfway through the movie, Harriet's notebook is dropped, discovered, and read by the school bully. All of her most private thoughts and observations are read aloud to her entire class, much to her horror and chagrin, and her best friends Sport and Janie turn against her when they learn what she's written about them. Harriet's world slowly crumbles and then collapses when her parents decide to take away her notebook and even go so far as to have her teacher to a "notebook check" in school each day.
Anyone who has ever lost something they love can understand the devastation Harriet felt when she was told she couldn't write. But as a writer, I can tell you that the feeling of being forbidden to ever put pen to paper again is like having your right arm cut off (or left, if you're a lefty). You can't function, and when you do it's slow and robotic. For a writer, it's like refusing them air. It'd be more humane to just kill them than to slowly suffocate them. Harriet's parents eventually realize the huge mistake they've made and allow their daughter to write again. When Harriet asks her mother why, she admits that "even though you're telling me, and even thought I'm listening, I still don't understand it." For most of my life I've tried to explain and make people understand how crucial it is for a writer to write. Often it's the way that person relates to the world, and how they express themselves, and if you take away pen and paper, you remove their voice.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty
In trying to console Harriet, Golly quotes John Keats: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know." As I've said before, writing allowed me to silently observe the truth and beauty as well as the lies and the ugly of the people around me. One of my favorite professors in grad school told me that he loved my writing for the "fearlessness," "ballsy-ness," and "brutal honesty" of it. I've always written this way and I wouldn't know any other way to write. I write the truth about the world around me, and most of the time, I don't give a shit whether anyone's feelings are hurt. Now, maybe this doesn't win me any friends or build up any sort of fan club, but a writer isn't always loved or even liked for that matter. One of my favorite short stories I wrote for class was about being wronged by an ex-boyfriend (the crowning moment when he dumped me over the phone while I was sitting in Reagan National on a layover) and how I scaled a back porch to leave his things outside his door in the rain. I think I earned the MacGyver nickname for a while from that one. The best part about that story was that I wrote it for a fiction class, and because the majority of my life is so outrageous, most people never buy it as being true. I raked that boy over the coals with my words, and those who knew both of us praised the truth in which he was painted as well as my entire experience.
I write, therefore I am
I didn't exactly win brownie points with my parents for choosing a path in the humanities. English major + theatre minor = "You know you were supposed to be a doctor right? Or a lawyer?" Way to get stereotypically Asian there, guys. I lost even more brownie points after college when I told them I was going back for yet another English degree. "Isn't one enough? What the hell are you planning on doing with two if you don't plan to teach? You're wasting your life."
Feeling the love? Yeah, me too.
I'll argue, however, that my thesis on the recreation and transformation of Asian American identity, while it may not pay the bills, was just an extension and more refined set of my own observations about life and humanity as a whole. What people fail to realize is that writing and English, and most of the humanities, links insanely closely with sociological and anthropological studies. It's impossible to study literature without studying human nature. In all of my research, I learned more about my Chinese heritage and why certain things in my life have transpired the way they have than I have through any conversations with family members (the relation between my Chinese and Caucasian selves will probably be the topic of a future post as it's too long to tack on here and you're probably bored at this point).
Writing defines me. I am, therefore I write and I write, therefore I am and I think therefore I write (thank you, Descartes). Despite having my nose constantly buried in books and journals for the majority of my life, I feel more connected to and more understanding of human nature than if I had never picked up a pen or novel. And as these observations and revelations can happen at any time, there's always a pen and notebook in my purse (don't believe me? there's currently at least one novel, one notebook, and three pens in there). I'm a scary good judge of people's actions and personalities from simple observations.
So when I'm asked: "What can you do with your English degrees?" It's easy enough for me to recognize the narrow, closed-minded view of the asker and to respond:
"The question isn't what can I do, but what can't I do?"
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