Walking in our Parents' Shadow

I am writing this on Father’s Day. I confess that I have been thinking a lot about parental impact and the outcomes of childhood events over the past few weeks – mainly due to some excellent plays and live performances that I have seen over the last month. I’m off to see Alice’s Adventures Underground this afternoon – the story of a little girl on an adventure without parental supervision (a bit like adulthood for me – my world is full of wonder and unexpected encounters). 

A joy of living in London is the easy access to the Arts. Last Saturday I saw one of the world’s best troupes of Tango dancers – offering slick flicking, sensuous holds and slides that seduced the audience into roaring and stamping their approval. The Belgian choreographer, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, had managed to instil different forms of human relationships into the dance, ranging from mourners offering condolence at a funeral to the joys and intimacy of first love. There was one disturbing sequence that clearly demonstrated emotional and physical abuse – the impact of one person on another was obvious and thought provoking. 

In addition to the tango, I have enjoyed two excellent plays (more about them below); the farewell performance of one of the world’s prima ballerinas, Sylvie Guillem; and a live concert by a man commonly hailed as the world’s best guitar player. The latter was Eric Clapton playing at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate his 70th birthday (it was 50 years since his first performance at the iconic London venue) – he is a brilliant guitarist – he clearly loves what he does and does it often; despite the size of the venue, it felt like sitting with friends jamming in their front room (perhaps that was enhanced for my eldest son and me as we were actually sitting on the stage and were able to exchange grins with Nathan East) – the home-like impact was reinforced by the fact that Clapton had his own small carpet, brought onto the stage before the start, and he sat on it, on a stool, while he strummed. 

Clapton's carpet:

His voice is still strong and compelling. It was a brilliant and memorable evening.

The following Saturday I saw the RSC’s production of Oppenheimerstarring John Heffernan in the title role (I am also enjoying watching him as Lascelles in the BBC’s stunning serialisation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norris, which is screening on Sunday evenings and is worth catching on iPlayer, even if only for the impressive CGI. Three of us went to see Oppenheimer – my youngest son, and also my friend Michael and me. Michael’s being with us was a real treat and a privilege as, despite being in his early 40’s, it was the first time he had been to the theatre. Theatre has been part of my life since childhood – family trips to the pantomime, acting in local dramatic productions, flipping a coin between a career on the stage or studying Law. The impact of seeing a play for the very first time when you already have a wealth of knowledge, an adult perspective and other events against which to gauge the occurrence, must be extraordinary. Michael is very well read and a film and music aficionado. I was actually quite jealous of his ability to have the experience, as well as nervous at the responsibility of being his introducer.

Thank goodness the play was good – superbly acted and full of depth. I hope that one day he will blog about his impressions, as he had an artistic encounter that most of us reading this will never be able to undergo. 

A connecting thread for all the productions I have seen was the impact of childhood incidents on the future lives of individuals. The RSC  production of Death of a Salesman was stunning and a core theme is the impact of parents on their children. However I will cover it in my next post. Eric Clapton was born to a single mother – his father was a soldier stationed in England during World War II, who returned to his wife in Canada, leaving a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl to cope alone. Her parents stepped in as surrogate parents to the infant Eric and raised him – indeed he believed for many years that his mother was his sister. The discovery of the truth, when he was aged nine, had a profound impact on Eric, plunging him into a period of self-distancing and rebellion, this resulted in his failing at school. He fell in love with the guitar, spending all his time listening to the blues in his early teenage years, this lead to his being expelled from Kingston College of Art, as he had done no work. He had always felt “different” from others and dropped out to become a musician, commencing as a busker in Richmond and Kingston (to the west of London,) whilst supporting himself by working as a labourer on building sites alongside his grandfather. He played pubs in the evenings and soon became the most talked about R&B player on the circuit. His local notoriety lead to him being offered a place with a band, the Yardbirds – where he gained his nickname, “Slowhand”, and this saw the start of his musical fame. 

Guillem and Nureyev - Giselle, 1988

Sylvie Guillem is another artist who has always felt herself to be different and, despite her talent and immense global success, she has remained removed from mainstream classical ballet. She was Rudolf Nureyev’s protégé at the Paris Opéra Ballet, which she joined aged 16, becoming the youngest person to become an “etoile” at the age of 19. Like Nureyev, she was happy to stand apart from the crowd, gaining the nickname “Mademoiselle Non” and she left the Royal Ballet in London when she feared that a change of management would compromise its approach towards productions. Guillem, like Clapton, was impacted by her childhood and to this day remains shy, rebellious and socially awkward, until the moment she steps on the stage. She has humble roots - she grew up in the suburbs of Paris, her father a car mechanic and her mother a gym teacher. There was no music in her home and she was devoted to her family. Her aspirations as a child were to become an Olympic gymnast. She loved the free-expression available to her in gymnastics and found the authoritarian approach and discipline of ballet training tortuous – mainly due to the teachers’ lack of open-mindedness and vision.

She trained with ballerinas because her gymnastic coach felt it might enhance her performance, but it soon became clear that she possessed exceptional talent as a dancer. She hated having to board a ballet school and, deeply homesick, nearly threw her future away, until her mother challenged her to stop crying and apply herself or leave. With steely determination, for which she is famed, Guillem made a conscious decision to change and progress – from then onwards she started drifting away from her roots, but became a star. 

Sylvie Guillem by Erick Labbé, 2011

Sometimes a hard start in life makes you more determined and resilient.Oppenheimer, (the central character of the play that Michael came to see with my son and me), also made a conscious decision to change and become removed and resilient, following a disturbing incident when he was 14. Robert Oppenheimer was the American theoretical physicist selected to head the US’s Army’s secret weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, during World War II, which developed the atomic bomb. He is claimed to have quoted from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita (XI, 32): 

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

when he watched the first nuclear explosion test in the US dessert, although his brother Frank (also a physicist) claims that what he actually said at the time was “it worked”. Oppenheimer was apparently deeply disturbed by an event that occurred in his early teens that, like Guillem, encouraged him to become detached and personally driven.  

He was an academic child, encouraged to be so by his father and grandfather. Being a bit of a know-all, he was not a popular child at school. One summer, during his early adolescence, his parents sent him away to summer camp – to boat, do sport and play in the countryside with other boys. It appears that Oppenheimer commenced making friends and enjoyed the camaraderie and smutty discussions in the dorm at night. However, he wrote and told his father, who was shocked, drove to the camp and demanded that such behaviour had to stop. The boys were summoned, publicly dressed-down and ordered to desist. It comes as no surprise that this made Oppenheimer very unpopular. Shortly after the boys turned on him, stripped him naked, trussed him up, painted his genitals and buttocks green and left him locked overnight in an icehouse until found by an attendant. Instead of demanding to be allowed to go him, Oppenheimer stuck it out until the end of the camp, enduring daily taunts. This experience had a profound impact and from then onwards Oppenheimer deliberately detached himself from those around him, at times being deliberately obnoxious and at times offensive in his intellectually arrogant (such as the time when a university student that he finished reading a paper by his professor and handed it back to him saying “I couldn’t find any mistake – did you really do this all alone?”). We are moulded by the way our parents impact our lives.  

On Wednesday it was announced that Philip Larkin, who died in 1985, is to be commemorated with a memorial stone set in the floor at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. To my mind there is no doubt that he is one of the exceptional English language poets of the 20th Century, although I suspect many only know one of his poems (or can at least quote its first line). I wonder if Larkin was aware of the influence his own mum and dad had had on him when he wrote this: 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

  This Be The Verse, by Philip Larkin, 1971

The first four lines were recited by a British Court of Appeal judge as part of his judgement of a particularly acrimonious divorce case involving the future custody arrangements of a nine-year-old child. Lord Justice Wall referred to the emotional damage caused to the child, saying: "These four lines seem to me to give a clear warning to parents who, post-separation, continue to fight the battles of the past, and show each other no respect.”

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged pieces beyond repair.” - Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven.

I do fret about how I have impacted and continue to influence my sons – I can see and feel the marks and smudges of my parents’ impact on myself and my siblings. So many of my friends have suffered as a result of their parents: interpersonally crippled by unduly authoritarian and aggressive fathers; emotionally damaged by hypercritical, obsessive and destructive mothers; beaten and assaulted by adults to the extent that they had to run away or take legal action to rescue younger siblings. What is interesting is that many of those who had the toughest times are now the ones that stand out as successful, but they are frequently also the ones most aloof from the crowd. More of that to follow…

(This is the first of two posts that look at the influence parents have on their offspring. I trust you enjoyed it.)

Sinking Feeling

When my family moved to live in Hong Kong in the late 1970’s the issue of the Vietnamese Boatpeople was global headline news. By way of a reminder: In September 1978 1,200 Vietnamese had been unloaded onto an uninhabited island belonging to Indonesia and a month later another ship tried to dump 2,500 refugees on Malaysia – Malaysia denied them entry and the boat sat offshore until third counties offered them homes. Over the following years many boats made the voyage away from Vietnam; a significant number of these were attacked by pirates or sank. People spent exorbitant sums of money to secure “safe” passage on inappropriate, overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels with no guarantee of a warm welcome on a foreign shore. Thousands of people died. Current events in the Far East and the Mediterranean feel like déjà vu.

This picture, taken on May 14 2015, shows Rohingya migrants 

on a boat drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman Sea

“What have the Boatpeople’s plight got to do with the world of work?” you might ask. Although, clearly not so desperate – work is seldom a matter of life or death – the situations present an extreme example of how humans behave, particularly when under pressure. Unscrupulous people should be avoided in any environment. If an organisation is unpleasant to work in, or management are toxic in the way they interact with employees, or there is concern over the financial stability of the business, then good employees, who are able to do, will leave. It is possible to turn the tide on a flood of valued individuals leaving a business, provided that you are honest about the issues and take action to address the problems? I was working in Professional Services when the global economic crisis hit and the firm I was with was severely impacted - it had traditionally acted as a top advisor to leading banks and financial institutions and, although our areas of expertise fell outside the area of products and approaches that people now say triggered the collapse, our clients were under severe pressure. Many customers indefinitely delayed or even ceased paying our bills, usually without prior warning. (So much for mutual respect and collaboration.)

We had to reduce headcount and restructure. We could have simply made people redundant and focused our efforts on the remaining business, but we knew that not only was that morally wrong (and in addition would cast us in a poor light in front of our clients, competitors, the media and other third parties) but also that by doing so we would damage our reputation as an employer with the people we wanted to attract and retain in the future – employees (and prospective employees) were unnerved and they needed to know that we cared and wanted to support them. We went out of our way to find opportunities to redeploy skills: internally we encouraged people to cross into new practice areas; we flew representatives from Australian and New Zealand firms (both areas where the global economic crisis had minimal impact) to London to meet with our best Antipodean-originated employees. Many of our Australian and New Zealand colleagues had stated, on joining, that they intended to return to their homelands when commencing families or to care for aging parents when the time was right. We provided them with an opportunity to return home, with a good job and security, thereby reducing the pressure on those employees who wished to remain. We supported all leavers in finding new roles, sometimes in collaboration with other businesses. I myself was subsequently provided with a fascinating employment opportunity through a colleague whom I had helped to relocate to Egypt. As a firm, we did the right things and I am proud of it. My former employer has continued to flourish (it has just opened yet another influential office in Asia) and is respected as a leader in its field. True leaders lead by example.

But, back to the Boatpeople… The reasons for migration are complex and emotionally charged – usually there are economic, social or religious causes at their roots. Some reasons for the 2015 Boatpeople are economic - farmers are committing suicide in India and Bangladesh due to crop losses caused by persistent bad weather. (Indian cotton producers have tough times ahead – last year’s harvest was abundant resulting in a slump in prices, this year’s yield will be poor, so farmers will only have a small amount to sell with deflated prices.) The thought of watching your family starve is enough to drive people to desperate acts. Oppressive governments force people to flee – all of the 900 Boatpeople who died trying to reach Europe last month were Eritrean - Eritrea is one of the world’s most repressive regimes. In Asia, the Rohingya Boatpeople from Myanmar are Moslems who face persecution and potential annihilation in their villages and hence choose to risk losing their lives in order to escape.  

Myanmar migrants crammed into the hull of a fishing boat,
as seen by Myanmar police on 23 May 2015
Photo - Myanmar Information Ministry

Governments are beginning to respond to this humanitarian crisis. About 7,000 migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh have spent weeks at sea, but finally Malaysia and Indonesia have offered to provide temporary shelter (to those who manage to land on their soil) and Myanmar rescued two boats of migrants on Friday. However, I remain concerned, the root causes and some of the worst evils are being ignored. European leaders’ proposed solution to the problem in the Mediterranean is to capture and destroy the traffickers’ vessels – by sending warships into Libya’s territorial waters. To me this feels like a reaction rather than a solution – people flee countries to seek a better life elsewhere. The reason for the Boatpeople is not the availability of boats, it is the conditions they have to endure in their home countries that compel them to leave. Surely a better solution would be to tackle the root causes and hence remove the need to flee? Morally it seems wrong to trap would-be migrants in what we know are appalling conditions of persecution or hardship with no safe alternative routes to escape. If we can help these people to enjoy positive, productive existences and feel safe in their home countries, by resolving the problems there, than the need to trust their lives to unprincipled extortionists and con men and embark in unsafe boats will cease.

Migrant boat in distress in the Mediterranean
Photo: TORM A/S

People trafficking is a trade that has gone on via Thailand for years. But now, it isn’t just buying and selling bonded labour, it is a ransom trade with huge sums of money being made by evil people. Entire Thai communities are now getting involved – bought off by traffickers to prevent the hostages escaping. Holding camps exist in the bush for trafficked migrants  - originally exploited Rohindras from Myanmar were the victims, but it is now expanding with people being held from Bangladesh.  Impoverished families back in home countries are extorted into paying large sums (thousands of pounds) to release relatives. It requires political will to make this practice cease.

Rescue workers in southern Thailand inspecting a mass grave.
There are many deaths in trafficker camps in the Thai jungle.

Another aspect of the current situation that worries me is the on going issue of resettlement. Both Indonesia and Malaysia have stipulated that they will help Boatpeople, on condition that there is resettlement of these migrants into other countries within one year. This feels reminiscent of the situation I experienced in Hong Kong over two decades ago.

Between 1975 and 1995, despite the tiny size of the territory, it is only 426 square miles, Hong Kong took in more than 200,000 Vietnamese Boatpeople and the government established 40 refugee camps at different times to deal with the crisis. The last camp, Pillar Point, was closed in 2000.  The fall of Saigon (and hence the shift from capitalism to communism) was the trigger that commenced the exodus from Vietnam. In mid-1975 circa 50,000 Vietnamese (mainly former US employees and ex-government officials) left by air or sea. From late 1975 to 1977 a monthly average of 1,500 people fled, mainly in small fishing boats, these numbers rose significantly in 1978 – when syndicates from Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, with links in southern Vietnam, accepted money from people wishing to escape (would be refugees paid on average ten taels of gold for each adult and five taels for each child, to be transported in abandoned freighters. A tael is 50g of gold (circa £1,251 in today’s money) and would have been significantly more than the average annual salary of a Vietnamese citizen at the time.

Vietnamese refugees scramble from a sinking boat which they beached at Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia December 1978, file photo  

From January 1979 Malaysia and Thailand stopped accepting Boatpeople, this example was swiftly followed by Indonesia and the Philippines. The situation was declared an international crisis and a conference was held in Geneva, in July 1979, to determine what to do. Unlike other locations, during this time Hong Kong did not turn people away. In the late 1970’s, when I lived in Hong Kong, my mother and I assisted as volunteers in a camp established for Boatpeople. The migrants in Hong Kong were referred to as “I.I.s” – short for ”Illegal immigrants” and were a cause of local as well as international concern. The discrepancy between local poverty and those in the camps provided with food, shelter and comfort was a problem in itself. International aid was offered – I remember a consignment of highchairs, with sturdy wooden seats and legs, being delivered. I also remember these going missing and then seeing odd-shaped chopping boards suddenly appearing in the local market (with four distinctive holes, where chair legs had once been, and other indentations for struts and backrest). Local people begrudged the money and support being given to the I.I.s when they themselves were living close to the breadline.

My comments are not intended as a criticism of Hong Kong and its people, despite the financial and social pressure, every migrant was granted temporary first asylum. No boat was ever refused. However, part of the agreement made in Geneva was that resettlement host countries were allowed to select whom they would take – this caused significant issues as many found it hard to gain opportunities overseas and those that did were usually offered menial jobs, such as civic cleaning despite their qualifications and experience. 

Demonstration against boat people in UK, 1979

Their plight was harsh, but so too was that of the many left waiting in camps in unhappy and unfulfilling existences. This latter issue is one that many of us have ignored. I was very struck by the comments in a book, The Invisible Citizens of Hong Kong by Sophia Law Suk-mun, published late last year. It is a compilation of memories of Vietnamese Boatpeople who migrated to Hong Kong and includes art and poetry. I was moved by the words of Le Huynh, an inmate in Hong Kong, who described their refugee camp as 

“This bestial prison … a thousand miles long, With its head in Vietnam and its tail in Hong Kong.” 

Vietnamese refugees in Kai Tak East camp, Hong Kong

 And I would like to leave you with words from a poem: 

Freedom… Freedom!

Those simple sweet words

For us, poor people escaping the homeland

Sailing across oceans

Trying to find happiness

That’s all we need 

…

People of the world, we looking to you

Please help us to be free

Please let the children

No longer cry

For their forgotten fates

Please, the free world

Open your arms

To rescue us

Poor people without a country.

Please Do Not Abandon Us, by Kieu Mong Thu, a former Vietnamese Boat Person who was in a camp in Hong Kong (published in Aug 1991). 

We need to break what seems to be becoming a shameful repetitive cycle.

Cartoon from Melbourne Herald, 1979