Another Encounter at the Gym from Hell / On Creation as Inherently Good

Note: numbers in parentheses correspond to endnotes.

It was a quiet weekday afternoon in March. The few people at the climbing walls were mostly techies that were taking a break, as they do, while working remotely at the long tables. I was losing myself in my learn-by-doing approach to climbing, keenly aware of my highly unlikely circumstances for being there at that time of day in the grand scheme of things. I was, as I do, pondering about the set of responsibilities that I carry as a consequence. (1)

Then I met a guy.

He was a lean white guy with overgrown hair, who had climbed for a while, who worked in tech, a transplant from someplace else that lived the height of his young, virile, and independent years in New York City. I suspected that he was politically in that neoliberal safe zone: progressive enough to fit in and get laid, but not progressive enough to risk challenging the status quo in any meaningful way that threatened his comfort. In other words, he probably had never had to know what it is to have the fiery fuel of a rocket ship on one’s ass for having been directly impacted by the law or othered based on one’s appearance.

He was a guy in many respects like most other white guys at that gym.

But this one was particularly memorable due to a combination of facts about him. The commitments that he had chosen through the life projects he had taken on, enveloped in a general complacent attitude, were so emblematic to me about a certain slice of this grand American city that has made of itself the greatest legend that exists of a city today.

The guy worked as a developer at Roblox, but what he was more excited to share about himself was his ambo conversion project. He had bought an ambulance truck and, in his spare time, he was completely rebuilding its inside with his own bare hands. We exchanged Instagram accounts and, sure enough, I noticed on his many photos of the project the sleek hardwood panels and fittings that converted the space into a prime space for leisure and entertainment –cool lights, a keyboard, sound speakers, hidden storage, plenty of outlets. He was proud to share that he uses it to host events with artists. (2)

It was quickly dawning on me that he was well onto achieving the tripartite dream that I’ve come to realize these white guys at the gym seem to aim for. Financial self-sufficiency far beyond stability and independence --perhaps on track to retirement at young age-- check. Cool connections in a lonely city –ready to be formed at will with his one-of-a-kind event space—check. A claim to his own craftiness and creativity –you can even be a witness to his developing might as you see it happen on his Instagram!—check. (3)

I suppose there are many potential forces at work that can have led this to have become a patterned dream to the point of predictability for a certain group of men in New York. Is it about securing enough as a white man to be attractive to women in a competitive heterosexual space? Is it about living up to the Great Man theory? Is it about reacting to the loneliness that capitalism creates –particularly for those most deeply within it-- as best as one can? Maybe if I had been under more similar circumstances, with the right mixture of being able enough, bored enough, free enough, and feeling helpless enough due to a lack of likeable role models in the world, I would have done the same. And yet, I suppose that’s what it’s all about – “the circumstances.” (4)

After I’d seen the photos and given appropriate acknowledgement to the skillfulness that is surely involved, we were continuing to make casual conversation when he dropped the word “generative.” I sensed in the context that it was too specific a word to have not been considered to some extent. I made a transparent smile of skepticism around it, and made some remark that it sounds like it belongs to the world of corporate marketing. He then defended the word, saying he likes it, because it is about creation and movement, rather than not creating, or something like that. I confess, the reason I cannot recall with greater specificity is that I was feeling too self-conscious for even so slightly pushing back on a white man to be fully listening. (5)

This was the exact moment that something dawned on me. I realized that he vocalized a belief that seems to be held by many a white person that I have met thus far in New York City. It is that creation is inherently a good thing; the more creation of any sort, the better off that we all are.

It is not held by all white people –there are also those who see the need to reach for far more in a world burning in flames. It is not limited to white people, either, though it is difficult to separate from whiteness given its dominance and power to define and set the rules in the world of art and creation. These are important to note if we believe in the potential for change, and in the fallibility of character in each of us that has the potential to set us back.

Having this belief does not mean, either, that one is a bad person. I believe that many good people have it. But it is a foundation that explains something I observed with a sinking feeling whenever I visited the grandest venues for exhibiting one’s art in this city –the Met, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim. It is that white people have historically and continue presently to take the freedom and challenge to simply express the experience of living as a human being. Meanwhile, it felt as an enthusiast and aspiring artist of color, that people of color must resort to responding as “others,” to prove ourselves and our values as such, to ask for a chance to be noticed as such. We are faced with having to choose to avow our social limitations that cannot allow us to float to higher dimensions or risk the feeling of betraying our kind. Of course, this cannot be the case alone; certainly, there are white people in management who are making structural decisions that lead to an experience such as this for someone like me.

Still –this assertion of what I think is a dominant belief among the privileged in New York prompts in me the desire to share an alternative perspective.

If I were to apply the Asian American set of moral standards to this guy, I might ask how he could be so selfish to freely pursue what others cannot. How could he betray his own brethren in suffering while he pursues his own individual pleasure? (6) But he is a white man, and it is incumbent upon me to know better than ask him this. As any person of color, each tied to their own collective, comes to painful awareness when exploring or growing up in the west, white people’s culture is different. To us, they have been so vastly and unimaginably wealthy so as to normalize that each of them should casually think, speak, and act for their own individual selves as a unit –their own desires, comforts, and ends. And oh –how much energy and time they spend in declaring their individual identities! How much they live for this! No, my Asian-American argument would be useless – if not also embarrassing, uncultured, and déclassé-- against him.

There are those of us in the western world who express because we feel invisible, misunderstood, vilified, humiliated, and utterly powerless. We feel it over and over again through ourselves, then our families, and then our peers and friends. We come to expression as a political act because we have already come to know much too late what happens when others express for us, to determine our fates, to set laws and turn people against us. We come to the fundamental mode of expression, wounded, as a last resort in the battle for our will to live with dignity. We who come to it this way are still vastly in the margins. Our battle cries have been reduced to slight pathetic few words that have come to stand for everything and nothing at once –“representation,” “diversity,” “globalization.” For us, creation is a necessity to remind us why we fight and why we live.

When the white guy expressed his admiration for “generative,” I knew definitively that we are not and cannot be the same. I knew that I am one who has repeatedly had to violate her own self-conception as a good person in order to attain the opportunity to express and create, to assert her existence in the world, given her unbreakable ties to so many suffering injustice. And I knew that he is one who has never had to question his own goodness for the same opportunity once, that he has been established as a good person no matter what he pleases to do, and that creation has always been an option for him.

While I believe that the act of creation is, indeed, inherently good and even necessary for each of us to heal and grow in a bad world on an individual level, I do not believe we can afford to simply aim for creation for the sake of creation alone as a society. And I believe that those who do have the privilege to create and express publicly should do so with awareness of our responsibility to society.

What added poignancy to this guy is that he earned his living by working at Roblox, which I would come to learn is a technological corporation that has been highly criticized for its exploitation of children’s creative labor. His employer, wildly generative in and for earnings, commodifies the act of creation from children through a new form of exploitation in the digital age.

I have come to the global center of culture and had glimpses of how people create –and what sorts of people create--, what then becomes culture, the identity of humanity itself. There is an incredible amount of wasted opportunity for real inspiration and meaning as a result of who gets to create here and the motivations that those people have. But for so long as I am watching, I will not celebrate or support the advancement of creation –either as an idea or an act—whose sole function is to point back at itself. There is too much at stake.

Endnotes

(1) Between August of 2021 and June of 2022, we went to Vital Climbing Gym, located between Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn, NY. It was our first entry into climbing, the only thing that could get me to the gym, and by far most conveniently located for us. But by the time we left we were so done with the people there.

(2) He invited me then for the next time that he had an event. For any struggling New York artist craving for connection, it seemed like an enticing prospect. But I rather did not feel like being an accessory to make a white man feel cooler about himself.

(3) At least, given the dominance of the converting ambo on his Instagram, he didn’t also seem to make climbing, and proximity to the wonders of nature through climbing, his identity, as many others seem to do.

(4) The difference in judgment between the right commitments and the wrong ones can easily feel like a hair’s breadth, particularly when we do not set out with a conscious set of standards. And yet, many great people of all walks and backgrounds devote their careers to admirable causes at a great cost to their personal interests.

(5) I am only able to publish this blog post thanks to the invaluable role that Erik played for me in providing me his perspective as a white man. I felt, as a Korean-descendent and immigrant woman, that I am punching too hard. I would think how this man might feel after reading this, and I would feel sorry –even ashamed-- to be so harsh. But Erik opined that I am not punching hard enough. This encouraged my more American instinct to speak my mind.

(6) A clarification for Asian-Americans is due here, lest they think that I may be making a statement of my own moral righteousness. (I am not.)

In the American realm, when I make an observation of social standards like this, it can be merely on observation without any sort of implication as to my stance or relationship to it. In the Korean realm, a self-respecting adult would not point out the existence of a social standard like this without the confidence and pride afforded in knowing that one ascribes to it faithfully. One's position (입장) would not be taken to be removed from making a social observation. To acknowledge the existing social standard thus, with implied full ownership of one's part in it, is an admirable way of owning up to one's responsibility as part of the greater collective. It is a way of showing commitment to an existing moral social contract.

I am taking the liberty to point this out in the American way. That is, I am making no claims as to how faithfully I am living out this social expectation, because it is irrelevant to my intention. (Though if I had to say anything of it, I would say that I can think of many Korean/Korean-American peers and friends that have lived up to it far better than I have, within various collectives that they are part of --not the least of which is the immigrant rights movement in the US--, sacrificing much because they are consistently good in this way that is sorely overlooked by Americans.) I have no intention in making any Asian-American feel better or worse about themselves by making any claims on how well I am abiding by this social standard; it is difficult enough to carry the weight of being Asian-American.

However well I or anyone abides by it, I am merely pointing out that it is a strongly shared social standard by which we are taught to measure ourselves. Given how strongly this standard determines our moral identity as Asians or Asian-Americans, I believe it has strong emotional effects on driving our actions, and is therefore worth recognizing--if not also appreciating for itself.

As Asian-Americans, I believe that we have the capacity to think independently about shared social mores with the advantage of a wide variety of perspectives, without using any force of collective expectation or judgment against one another, so as to consider and live within different sets of standards between at least two (given the plurality of "Asian-Americans") vastly incongruent worlds.