Ping Chong Delivers Convocation Address

Acclaimed theater artist Ping Chong delivered the main address today at the Convocation opening Lafayette’s 175th academic year.

Konnichiwa, Buenas Dias, Salaam malikum, Nee How, Bonjour, Namaste, Shalom, Bulu, magandang hapon, Good moheer, Dobree yeni, Guten Tag, Gûn Iden. President Weiss, distinguished faculty and members of the Lafayette College community, parents, incoming students, good afternoon.

As I stand here today approximately 336 languages are being spoken or signed across these United States. Before the first European arrived on these fair shores–and for the record he may have spoken Basque or Old Norse but certainly not English – there were hundreds of languages spoken here by the people indigenous to North America –the people the Europeans erroneously called Indians. Yes, before the Age of Exploration, the continent now known as North America was a boisterous, multi-cultural, multi-lingual environment. This is our heritage. The successive waves of immigration that followed only contributed to the proliferation of tongues spoken here.

And it continues today. In the Borough of Queens in my hometown of New York City 138 languages are spoken. That I am told is more than in any other area of the US. Here in Easton there are 17 languages spoken by students here in the public schools. What is surprising to me is that there are a few places in the United States where English is actually the only language spoken. And that for a “Nation of Immigrants” as we surely are, it is surprising that we Americans remain suspicious and fearful of outsiders coming or even visiting our Country. Because aren’t we all “outsiders” after all, with the exception of the Native Americans?

The people that speak these 133 languages are American citizens, or American citizens to be, or people who wish they could become American citizens, or people who are ambivalent about being or becoming American citizens. A fair number are people who just found themselves here through some accident of fate, others were forced to come here. Some have been living here for generations. Others are fresh off the boat, greenhorns as they once were called, struggling to learn this maddening, idiomatic, hodge-podge we call English. “Your goose will be cooked if you don’t learn English!”

And the United States is not alone in this. Around the world other nations are confronting unexpected waves of immigration that are challenging long-held national identities. For example, I was told by a Belgian colleague that Mohamhed is now the most common name for a male child born in Brussels. What is the reason for the dispersal of languages and cultures across the globe? In part it is simply that more people are alive today than in any time in human history. But the major factor in the expansion of people around the world is political. More people were displaced by war, civil unrest, and environmental upheaval in the 20th Century than in any previous time in human history.

In the summer of 1992 I taught a 10-day intensive workshop in Amsterdam, where my students included young people from all over the world. In the evenings, we would sit in one of the many charming “brown” or “white” bars in Amsterdam and talk about everything from food to politics to sex. During one of these evenings it suddenly struck me that I had all along been hearing all these different languages and English flying back and forth across the table, and I thought: Here we are, a group of people from all over the world, from different cultures and experiences, engaged in a constructive and collective endeavor – the exploration of artistic expression. We were not shouting at each other nor killing each other. We were not at war with each other. Instead we were learning about each other. I wondered that night in the bar in Amsterdam whether it was possible to make a work using multiple languages, testifying to the history of lives lived and the phenomena of culture itself.

So I set to work on what would become the first of a series of performances entitlrd Undesirable Elements. My approach wasn’t scientific. I asked friends to introduce me to bi-lingual people and one person led to another and so on. The process is deceptively simple. I interview people within a community who come from different cultures –South African, Pole, Mexican, Serbian, Vietnamese, etc. I ask them about where they are from, the history of their cultures, their experiences living in the community where we are making the performance. From these interviews I create a text that the individuals perform as an ensemble. Since 1992 I have created over 35 Undesirable Elements productions in large and small communities around the US, Asia, and Europe with people from all over the world. The next performance will be here in November in the Williams Center and a visual arts version is being presented right now in the Williams Center gallery. So check it out.

I might add that the term I continue to use with these explorations is couched in irony: “Undesirable Elements” celebrates lives, experiences, and world views which lie apart from the “majority” American culture.

You might ask why is this guy up there talking to me about this nonsense? What’s it got to do with me starting my 1st year in college? What gives? I will tell you. 2010. You will graduate in 2010. You will be the first graduating class at the end of the 1st decade of the new millennium, of the 21st Century. The world in which you live is becoming smaller and more culturally diverse. Here at Lafayette College you will meet students and faculty from many different cultures and traditions. The people on campus and in the community beyond are an opportunity for you to learn about the world in which you will live. When you leave these hollowed halls, when you have shucked your cap and gown, collected your diploma and set forth to make your mark in the world, to find work you feel passionate about, perhaps to start a family—all those things we humans typically do. When that day comes you are likely to find yourself buying a car from, living next to, doing business with or working with a person who may have a very different world view and culture than you have. This person may look and dress differently than you, but, yes Virginia does speak English and learned it from the same place you did, who perhaps might have a heavy accent, who might not speak English as well as you do, but then again who might have a PHD in English literature and happens, just happens to be a first generation Afghani immigrant from Kabul. I’m not kidding. I’ve met this person.

In other words when you have shed the chrysalis of college and you are ready to flap your brand new wings, when you have become a full fledged, tax paying American citizen how will you negotiate difference, the otherness all around you in our society, and by extension, in the world? Are you prepared to work and live side by side with people different than yourself without making assumptions about that person based on the way they dress, wear their hair or speak? Will you treat the people you encounter as equals with an open spirit born of curiosity and acceptance? Are you prepared to be a citizen who is willing to support and fight, if necessary, for an America, where justice and freedom is the norm for all regardless of cultural, racial, religious and class differences? To be an American who seeks to shrink the gap between rich and poor rather than widening it as is the case today? Or will you reinforce the bigotry, bias, ignorance, suspicion, selfishness, class privilege, yes class privilege that continues to plague American society beneath the polite surface and the lip service about equality and justice for all?

Will you be like the bank manager in Falls Church, Virginia who wouldn’t hire a qualified Somalian American because she was Moslem and wore a head covering? Or will you be able to look beyond this superficial difference and see the person within. Will you be like the doctor in Lawrence Kansas who assumed that his Native American patient was the janitor at the school he worked at rather than the principal? Or will you be able to look at the person before you without projecting the prejudices of our society? Will you be like some of the Chinese people in the community I grew up in who say to each other, “you can’t trust white people or black people or whomever,” not realizing that this is prejudice too and that bigotry comes in all colors.

What you will be like when you graduate depends entirely on how you use the experience at Lafayette College. Will you be prepared to engage the world as it is? It is your choice. Several years ago when I was artist-in-residence at a prominent New England college, not unlike Lafayette. I recall talking to the Dean of Students, who told me that a former student had called her in a total panic. The reason? He had accepted a job in Minneapolis in which he would have to work with African Americans. African Americans, not immigrants from a faraway, exotic country, not an encounter of the 3rd kind, not one of those “go back to where you came from people,” but native born citizens of African descent whose ancestors very likely have been in America far longer than his. He was in a tizzy because the job required him to engage with people from different backgrounds then his own. And what do you think the Dean of Students said to him? “You mean you spent 4 years at this college and never took an interest in a person who was different from you? You never had the curiosity to learn about people from another culture, others who might enlarge and enrich your world view and frame of reference, who might challenge your stereotypes, your prejudices? You mean you never bothered to cross that bridge?” It is a pathetic story, isn’t it? Sadly, its true.

Your college years are an opportunity. Be open. Be curious. Be respectful of others’ privacy and difference but seek to expand your cultural horizons. Be willing to share of yourself and to learn from the experiences of others. “Only connect” as E.M. Forester famously wrote. By connecting you will dissipate fear and fear is the one commodity that there is far too much of today’s world.

I’m not saying it’s easy and I’m not saying it doesn’t take effort, and I’m not saying it isn’t a two way street. But what do you know that is worthwhile learning that doesn’t take effort? Make the effort to reach out to your classmates and engage the wider community.

As I said earlier, you will graduate at the end of the first decade of the new millennium. Well the new millennium is not off to a very auspicious start. When we look around the world we see peoples tearing peoples’ lives apart, the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Tamil and the Buddhists in Sri Lanka, civil wars in Somalia and the Sudan, Chechnya, and the macabre spectacle being played out amongst our troops, the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq. The list goes on and on and on. Hatred and violence tend to erupt seemingly at will, anytime, anywhere. And we are not exempt here in the United States. How do we as a species overcome the need to dominate and learn instead to cooperate? What can we do? What can we do in our own small, patient way to chip away at this base instinct that keeps us all from truly being civilized human beings?

Let me tell you a story

In the late 19th Century, the most precious commodity was not oil, but rubber. I know rubber sounds so quaint today but it was crucial as insulation for the new wonder called electricity which was transforming the world. At that time, the place with the most available rubber was the Congo and the Congo was in effect a private corporation belonging to King Leopold of Belgium. It is estimated that over 5 million Congolese people died as slaves collecting Leopold’s blood rubber, as well as gold and ivory. This genocidal exploitation of the people of the Congo went on for decades until a lowly shipping clerk, named E. D. Morel noticed that riches beyond imagining were returning from the Congo to Europe, but that only weapons, daily domestic supplies and wine were going back to the Congo. He concluded correctly that something terrible was going on in the Congo.

E. D. Morel with a wife and baby decided he must act. He risked everything by leaving his job at the shipping company to found one of the first international human rights movements to combat King Leopold.

Let me tell you another story also true which is continuing as we speak. At the height of the AIDS epidemic in Thailand, in the 1990s, Dr. Krisana Kraisintu, director of research and development in the Thai government pharmaceutical laboratories decided to create an affordable, generic medication for AIDS patients. At the time, the formula in the West which included upwards of 20 pills a day was too expensive and the international pharmaceutical companies did nothing to make medicines available at a lower price for the rest of the world. Dr. Kraisintu was a chemist by training and she developed a 2 pill a day, generic drug that was affordable and that worked. The American pharmaceutical company holding the patent on this drug went after her. They sued Dr. Kraisintu. But she won the case. Dr. Kraisintu is now in Africa helping every country that wants her help in training lab technicians and setting up laboratories for the creation of local, generic AIDS medication of international standard and quality. I have had the honor of meeting and interviewing Dr. Kraisintu for a play that I am writing about her.

Why do I bring these 2 individuals up separated by more than a hundred years on two different continents? I bring them up because they are true to life heroes worth emulating. They are not movie, hip hop, pop, or sports stars, but true heroes who influenced and inspired the world and continue to influence and inspire the world. Why did E.D. Morel see the African as a human being while the rest of 19th century Europe saw the African as a savage? Why was he willing to risk everything for them, for people he would never meet, without promise of financial gain or any other recognition? Why did Krisana Kraisintu, against the wishes of her superior and her own staff, move forward with her lonely efforts to develop a generic AIDS medication for a stigmatized population? Why did she give up her position as director of research and development to go to Africa, first, incidentally, to the Congo to help the Congolese? The answer is compassion. The answer is empathy. The ability to connect. The ability to feel for others beyond oneself, the simple conviction that all men are brothers regardless of what god or gods we worship. The conviction that one human being should help and support another should help and support be needed.

Class of 2010, it will soon be your turn to act. You are the hope of the future. It will be your turn to make a world, which is in deep discord, a better and more peaceful place for future generations. This is your challenge. Do you have what it takes to do so? Are there any true, future heroes among you? And while you are here at Lafayette College study what you love, what you are passionate about, what gives you joy, learn from those who are different from you, and by all means play hard, play really hard but remember to be responsible, be respectful, be ethical, be compassionate, and empathetic because the most sustaining, the most important, and most nourishing things in life cannot be bought but only lived. I wish you all much success and a fruitful time here at Lafayette College. Thank you for listening.