Yazhou Zhoukan, Hong Kong
By Leo Lee Ou Fan
Translated By Alan Kwok
07 November 2008
Edited by Louis Standish
Hong Kong - Yazhou Zhoukan - Original Article (Chinese)
Obama won the election. Well, it doesn’t matter whether he won or not. In fact, I have long been a fan of his.
It all started in June. I was back in the states for a vacation and that was the time when I read “The Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams from my Father," two books by Obama. The latter will have its Chinese translation published in November by China Times, Taiwan.
I was honored enough to be invited to write a small preface for the latter (adapted from the English version composed for Hong Kong’s English magazine 'Muse'), explaining from my own perspective why this book has touched me that much. Instead of politics, Bildungsroman was my topic.
Obama is extremely frank in the book, telling his lifetime story and how his self-determination has evolved from everyday experience and then led him to his road as a statesman. Such style reminds people of “The Foundation of Henry Adams,” the classic writing in America’s political history. As one of the political superstars, the grandson of former U.S. president John Quincy Adams, Henry Adams lived and had his education in the 19th century America and only there. Obama, however, differs in a sense that he has an African father and an Indonesian stepfather. The experiences with these two different ethnicities are the key to Obama’s self-determination.
Although Obama was only with his biological father for no more than two months at the time his parents were already separated, he had been a great influence on him. What do you think the “dream” comes from in his book? It is his father, quite obviously.
Obama has portrayed his father as an ideal cosmopolitan who was studying overseas when he was younger and met this white lady of lofty ideals while at the University of Hawaii. They married each other, but the marriage didn’t last long. He went to Harvard to study economics and returned to Kenya after graduation.
He was in fact already married back in Kenya. Later, he got married to another white woman. She raised a boy for him and came all the way to Kenya to be with him. She then lived a life considered to be upper-class and white. When Obama visited his father’s hometown in Kenya, he didn’t get along well with the family of his white stepmother. It was his father’s first African wife and her children that Obama felt most at home. Who knows if this was a gesture to claim “political rightness.”
Race is not a focus in the book. Obama didn’t have too much context for how noble African people are and how white people have exploited them. Obama has been rather sympathetic to his father’s big African family, especially to his father. The man isn’t nearly as accomplished, except having married thrice and raised a lot of children.
At the time when he kneeled down in front of his father’s grave, a teary Obama recited a verse from the bottom of his heart. It was such a touching moment that, from a literary perspective, is in the same league as any great African-American writer, from Du Bois to Toni Morrison. This is why I mentioned in my last two articles that, even if Obama doesn’t sit in the office, he is good enough to become an author. Other than J.F. Kennedy, Obama has definitely been the president who writes the best since the 20th century. Compared to Obama, Bush only earns a C for how he speaks and how he writes. It doesn’t matter that he is in every way reinforced. An old Chinese saying says, “One’s writing speaks for oneself”. I say Obama fits in perfectly.
Obama’s skills are one way or the other far more than the above mentioned. One sees him debating with John McCain live on TV or in any public forum and his attainment to humanity can not be contained. His books have shown me a lot about it. He does not worship racism; he is sophisticated in what he identifies with because he grew up with his mother and grandparents, a white family. He sees himself as an African-American instead of as mixed race. This comes from his childhood experiences when his mother brought him to Indonesia for his father.
His Indonesia stepfather is not racist in any sense and raised Obama as his own child. He taught Obama the meaning of life, played with him and taught him how to box. This part reminds me of the great and recently deceased Indonesia writer Pramoedya Amantha Toer of The Earth of Mankind, the first book of his great Buru Quartet. The protagonist went to school during the Dutch colonial period, spoke Dutch and wrote Dutch. Only until later did he realize how own Indonesian culture and tradition. In the next three books, he became a newspaper editor and an enlightening hero like Liang Qichao, the one of China.
Obama’s father would not allow him to read such a long-prohibited novel. What Obama revealed in the first (and second) chapter, however, is such a self-enlightening process alike.
One day, Obama found a copy of 'Life' magazine (the best-selling popular magazine in the U.S.) at the U.S. embassy where his mother worked. There were many photographs in the magazine and Obama became suspicious of one of them. It was about an African person deliberately whitening his face and Obama didn’t understand why. The young Obama began to feel an identity crisis.
His mother’s side has never been racist. It was from this one encounter with the photograph that Obama began to understand his African identity. The words touched me while I was reading. Yes, there is nothing about “Asian Policies” or Indonesia’s nationalism in this chapter. This might disappoint Asian readers as Obama is not identifying himself with neither Asia nor Africa but the U.S.. The U.S. for him has long been a multi-cultural society and is no longer about the confrontation between white and black.
I cannot help thinking about Taiwan and the former president Chen Shuibian. Why wouldn’t Chen learn anything from Obama? The reason is simple: the former is a greedy politician while the latter is a humane statesman.
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