It's my birthday
Today I turned sixty. Old age is staring me straight in the face.
On a day like this, it's all but imperative to look back over the life I've lived.
My life has had its moments, I freely grant. I've done a lot of traveling, in and out of the US, and made some great friends. Overall, though, particularly since I was stupid enough to come back from China, it's been a bitter disappointment.
Around my last year of college, things went to shit, and I've never been able to recover. It was a perfect storm of things going wrong. Some of them, I will take blame for---I should have been much more assertive, although I was going up against people I'd been trained to obey and trust all my life. Other things, like not being on campus my senior year, I can plead considerable innocence on---I didn't know it was important, and my mother had had a bonnet-bee in her head ever since I was diagnosed as "gifted" (Gifted, my codlings! I'd call it a curse and a burden!) that getting me through school faster than everybody else would make me attractive in the job market. It didn't.
Some of the things that went wrong were the fault of no individual, particularly the hard times that hit my part of the world in the early 1980s. I was trapped in my poky small home town, a long way from metro areas, and (unlike my college classmates, who were largely drawn from the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area) I didn't have relatives or family friends who could or would take me in who lived in such a place. Job hunting at a distance was immeasurably difficult; having a difficult-to-sell-to-most-employers major didn't help; the ignorance of metro-born-and-raised would-be employers about just what I was up against didn't help. I never got so much as a goddamn nibble after sending out about a thousand letters and resumes. (This was just before the internet came in).
My family troubles also contributed very heavily. Mom had fallen down our cellar stairs the summer before my last year of college, and when I got back from China, she was erratic and hypomanic, and dealing with her and not having his family around had driven my alcoholic father back to drink after ten years dry. One reason I didn't leave and head back to Northfield for the spring of what would have been my senior year (other than my own ignorance of the fact that this would have been well-advised) was because SOMEONE had to be on deck at home to deal with the craziness so my brother could start his college career.
All in all, it was a "perfect storm" sort of situation, but it ruined my life. I haven't been able to get so much as a sniff at a career-track job (being white and male, in a time when employers were under heavy pressure to hire women and politically-favored minority members, didn't help) and I've never been able to get married, have children of my own, or even escape my home town.
If I had known what I was getting into, I'd have killed myself before letting them put me on that plane for home, back in Hong Kong.