Glasses or No Glasses?

 

Manway Liu

 

 

“So, glasses or no glasses?”  I’m trolling the hallway, nabbing every student I can find.  My senior portrait sitting is tomorrow and I can’t decide: Glasses or no glasses?  Maybe other people can give me their opinions.

 

            “Um, I think glasses,” said one of my neighbors, “but then again, Michael, you should know that I like it more when people wear glasses as a general rule.”

 

            “No glasses would be better,” said another.

 

            “Glasses, definitely.  You have small eyes.”

 

            “No, no glasses I think.”

 

            So it went on and on.  And on.  Then finally, an interesting tidbit of advice: “So I think you should wear whatever you feel most comfortable in; whatever best reflects who you are—I mean, do you often wear glasses or not?”

 

            Ah, but there’s the rub.  Sometimes I wear them, sometimes I don’t.  I wear glasses when I read, because contacts dry out my eyes too fast.  I wear glasses when I relax, or when I take a shower.  On the other hand, I wear contacts when I play sports or get a haircut.  So I guess my problem is simply this: I’m both glasses and no glasses.

 

            Now if a friend of mine were here, he would probably roll his eyes and say something along the lines of, “You know, glasses or no glasses doesn’t really matter.  They’re only the superficial part of you.  What’s really you is deep inside, and that part of you is the most important part.  Glasses or no glasses, that part will shine through.”

 

            But see, that’s just the same problem right there, except it’s reworded to sound wiser.  Do glasses not matter at all to the “real” me—to who I am?  What does it mean anyway, when people say, “Look beyond the superficial exterior to the real you”?  Where do I draw the line, please tell me, between Michael: Exterior, and Michael: Interior?

 

**

 

            I guess I’ve always had some trouble figuring out who my real, interior self.  For example, in grade school, I once had an assignment to write a paragraph describing myself.  This is what I wrote:

 

“My name is Michael Manway Liu.  I have black hair and brown eyes.  I like to eat pizza and ice cream.  I wear eyeglasses.  I play chess, tennis, and soccer.  I think it is more important to be good than to be smart.  I think it is more important to be smart than to be strong.  My favorite colors are yellow and white.  My favorite animals are the elephant, the dolphin, and the monkey.  I also like dinosaurs, especially the Brontosaurus.  I speak Cantonese and English.  I don’t have a best friend, because I like all my friends.  I have a pet hamster.  My favorite activity is to paint in watercolor.  My favorite subject in school is reading.  I lived seven years in Hong Kong.  I’m a single child, so a lot of times I get lonely.  But other times I’m glad that I’m the only one since I get all the toys and food.  I used to play the piano and now I play the violin.  I have light, honey-brown skin.”

 

            Was I once the kid who loved pizza and ice cream and who liked all his friends equally?  Or is that too superficial—only the exterior Michael?  Maybe I should think of myself as the kid who used to paint watercolor, play tennis, and read a lot.  But wait…did those activities define the real me or did they only define what I once did but not who I once was?  And gee, come to think of it, if I’ve never lived in Hong Kong, and never experienced all the things that I did, would I have been the same child?  I still have trouble figuring this out.

 

**

 

            My mother works for a guy who suffers from muscular dystrophy.  Until he was twelve, he was an okay, normal kid. 

 

Then one day, his legs felt unusually tired.

A couple of years later, he was forced to stop running and jogging.

Halfway through college, he started using a wheelchair and stopped driving.

Two years after that, his upper arms also gave out.

A year after that, he couldn’t use the bathroom by himself.  He couldn’t dress by himself.  He couldn’t shower by himself.  He couldn’t prepare food by himself.

 

Then his college girlfriend of five years left him for someone else.

 

            By all accounts, this man is what people would call a Decent Guy.  He doesn’t drink.  He doesn’t smoke.  He paints and he writes.  There’s a pragmatic side to him and there’s a sensitive side to him.  He can hold an intellectually stimulating conversation for hours on end.  He’s quite liberal on women’s rights—a regular modern man.  He’s quite handsome to boot.  In fact, his only vice is that he absolutely needs a cup of coffee in the morning.

 

He’s past forty now and still unmarried.  He hasn’t had anyone else since his college girlfriend left him.  If we’re simply defined by who we are on the inside, then this man stands tall and proud as one of the best of the best.  But then…why hasn’t anyone else fallen in love with him? 

 

**

 

            Back when I lived at home, I had a neighbor who was an artist.  I never ceased being amazed by the myriad clutter of paintings and sketches that sprouted, like untended roses, from every conceivable nook and cranny in her apartment.  She hung finished works over her bathroom mirror.  Stacks of charcoal sketches adorned her stovetop alongside an impressive palette of oils and paints.  Her penciled sketches were her wallpaper.  And through this maze of finished and unfinished works, she and her three cats, dog, and parrot managed a peaceful coexistence.  Her name was Judith.  She was born with a neonatal condition that kept her arms and legs baby-size while the rest of her body matured.  She paints holding the brush with her mouth and toes.  She spent most of her adult life in a wheelchair.

 

            As a child, I asked her once when and why she decided to become an artist.  At the time, I myself very much wanted to become an artist, so the question came quite naturally.  I don’t exactly remember what she said, but it was something along the lines of: “I never seriously considered anything else.”  Thinking back to that time from now, I wonder: Had she been born normal, would she have become an artist?  Or for that matter, would she have been my next-door neighbor?  How much of her path in life was charted, predetermined, as a result of her condition.  How much of herself, her personality, and her viewpoint on life, was likewise determined?  If she could have run freely, jump rope, dance, and swim like other normal children as a child, would she even have had the time to become interested in painting?

 

**

 

            As a teenager, I wasn’t exactly the biggest, strongest guy around.  I played sports as well as the next guy, if not better, but I always did fall a little short in the height department.  I also had one of the most baby-looking faces I knew.  So, lean muscles notwithstanding, I looked pretty much like a young kid.

 

            In other settings, that might have been a virtue, but back then, it was much more of a liability.  See, I didn’t exactly attend the World’s Safest High School.  In my time, getting mugged or beaten up during freshman year was half-seriously considered an initiation rite.  Crimes were so commonplace that most of us didn’t even bother to report it.  As a case in point, here’s a dialogue that an acquaintance of mine once had with some others:

 

“Hey people,” said my acquaintance who was conspicuously missing his backpack and had a suspicious looking bruised front lip.

 

“Hello.  Hiya.  Hey.”   Several students looked up from their lunches.

 

“I got mugged by some damn guy in the H building.  He took my backpack and punched me in the lip for no damn reason!”

 

“Ooh, yeah.  The H building’s a bad place to be alone.  No lights; dim place.”

 

At which point, everyone went back to our lunches, except my acquaintance, who of course, had neither lunch nor money left for buying lunch.

 

Given my little-boy look, I definitely received my fair share of muggings during my four-year tenure at school.  The great irony, though, is, something good actually came from all of it.  For starters, I learned to depend on myself rather than on others; to take care of myself and to watch my own back.  Secondly, I learned not to sweat the little things in life—in the context of having someone threaten you with a gun, pretty much everything else seems petty and trivial.  So I’m not really the sort to go into conniptions simply because of a bad traffic jam, a burnt dinner, or other similar issues of everyday life.  On the whole, I think this makes me a relatively happy person.

 

            If I had been big and strong, with a weathered, tough-as-leather face, I would probably have never been mugged at all in high school.  But isn’t it funny?  I kind of like how I turned out.

 

**

 

            And now, I find myself back in my dorm room, looking at myself in the mirror.  I put my glasses on: 

 

I look the way I usually do when I’m reading a book.  I look the way I used to look as kid.  A memory surfaces, of my first day wearing prescription glasses and seeing how the world suddenly grew sharper and more focused, without any of the dim fuzziness that I was used to.  I take my glasses off: 

 

I look the way I usually do when I play sports or when I visit the barber.  I look older.  I remember driving down Highway 880 in California, the sunlight shining annoyingly in my eyes, and slipping on a pair of sunglasses, thankful that I wasn’t wearing glasses that day.

 

Glasses.  No glasses.  I still can’t decide.