The Exports of Grandma's House

In a previous blog post I mentioned my discovery of Chinese science fiction and how it has become a manifestation of a new cultural soft power.  As part of that discovery, I stumbled a few months ago on a delightful short story titled, "Summer at Grandma's House" (" 祖母家的夏天"), written by Hao Jingfang (郝景芳).  (See this also to get a fuller picture of Ms. Hao.)  The story is ostensibly about the process by which a young college student's struggle to identify his future direction in life is resolved during the student's summer stay with his grandmother.  The grandmother is not the central figure in the story.  However, she does play a major role, and thus we get a rather full glimpse of what sort of person she is and what she does with her life.  It is that glimpse which attracted my attention to the point that the young man's story became almost secondary to me.  For it is the picture of Grandma that illustrates some of the themes which my blog has addressed over the last four or five years, and especially during the last two years.  So let's go to Grandma's house together, shall we?

First, although it's only incidental to the story, let's take a look at the house itself.  The story describes the house as a "little two-story bungalow...at the foot of the mountain, its red roof hidden in the dense treetops."  As I tried to visualize the scene, the word "bungalow" caught my attention, as this was a word which I had heard in conversation from time to time over the years, yet whose definition had never been explained to me.  (To add a bit of confusion, it appears from Google's translation algorithm that the original Chinese phrase could also be translated "villa."  But in my mind, that translation ruins the picture somewhat.  What do computers know anyway?)  So I looked up "bungalow"... and discovered that the word has more than one definition.  The definition I liked best (which also matches the description of the house in the story) is "a small house or cottage that is either single-storey or has a second storey built into a sloping roof (usually with dormer windows), and may be surrounded by wide verandas." - Wikipedia.  Think of something like this, except that the roof color is wrong:

A rather ordinary house, no?  But let's consider the things Grandma did in that house.  For Grandma was a biologist/biochemist who had been a college professor before her retirement and who now had a lab on the second floor of her house.  In other words, although the house looked quite ordinary, there were extraordinary things going on inside it.  The manifestation of hidden extraordinariness extended even to the furnishings of the house, whose front door opened by pushing on the side closest to the hinges and farthest from the doorknob, where the oven looked like a refrigerator, where what looked like a table lamp was actually a mousetrap, ...

The extraordinariness of Grandma is seen most strongly in her lab and the experiments she does with things such as transposons and photosynthesizing bacteria.  Her research has implications and consequences which I won't get into now, in order not to ruin the story for anyone who wants to read it.  But there are high-level conclusions which we can take from Grandma's work.  Here is a woman who has devoted herself to learning to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, as Titus 3:14 says.  Moreover, the work she does requires the possession of rare and valuable skills.  As Cal Newport has pointed out in his books So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work, it is the possession of rare and valuable skills that meet genuine needs that gives the possessor a certain social, cultural, and economic power.  (Disclaimer: although I have enjoyed Cal Newport's early work and writings, I think he has begun to go off the rails a bit during the last few years.  Being friends with people like Joe Rogan is morally sketchy in my opinion, to say the least.)

Therefore we see that the cultivation of rare and valuable skills in the pursuit of beautifully good work is the means by which people build their own internal power, and it is the means by which communities and peoples - especially those peoples who have been historically oppressed - build their own collective power.  And this power can be built in small spaces and ordinary settings like the second floor of an elder woman's small bungalow.  In fact, it can be built in spaces even tinier and more prosaic than this.  (Want examples?  See this and this.  That second link is from a Filipina accountant and describes her home business space.)

The cultivation of this kind of power is a big step toward individual and collective self-sufficiency.  But when we think of self-sufficiency, we must shed a bit of cultural baggage that has been introduced into the societies of the developed world over the last decade or so.  I no longer believe that self-sufficiency is achievable by going entirely off-grid, due to the fact that we must all live in societies whose members must each pay some of the collective cost of maintaining those societies.  Thus, I am not really impressed by the late Jules Dervaes and his family, nor am I impressed with their "Path to Freedom" house and the rather extravagant claims they have made about their lifestyle - a lifestyle which they attempted to support by trademarking the English phrase "urban homestead" in order to force people to pay royalties to them.  Moreover, I have never really believed in the claims of people like Tim Ferriss who boast of being able to achieve retirement before 40 by building passive income streams.  The promise of "passive income" seems immoral to me, as does the type of character who chases after such a promise.  Such characters frequently get taken to the cleaners during their quest.  (See this for a humorous take on the subject.  And don't quit your day job!)  Sooner or later, both people and societies come to realize that those who have actual power are the people who produce valuable things that people actually need.  This, for instance, is why nations dominated by "service economies" are potentially weaker than nations that are dominated by manufacturing economies, unless the services offered support the production of beautifully good and necessary work.

Therefore, those of us who want the power we need to live unmolested in a hostile world must give ourselves to learning, and to self-education when other avenues of education are denied us.  As the Good Book says, "And let our people also learn to engage in beautifully good work..."  We may have to give up a number of evenings and weekends in our pursuit.  And we must learn to protect the fruits of our labors in order to make sure that those fruits are not stolen from us.  For we live in an age of dishonesty.  Therefore we must learn to be strategic.