HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT - Essay Assignment: "Autobiography & History" - Student Response

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California Dreamin’: Autobiography as History
By William Gow

To place oneself within history is not an easy thing. Already in my 24 short years of life, there have been enough happenings to fill a short book. I have lived on two coasts and in two countries. I have worked and played, failed and succeeded, loved and hated. And yet to think that my history is only my own would be fool hearted. My story is also the story of my family, and any one of the stories that I could tell you about them, would be my story as well. I could tell you how my great-grand father was one of the few Chinese to enter the United States after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 because he was classified as a merchant. I could tell you how after their parents’ sudden death, my grandfather and his older brother and younger sisters worked—and eventually failed—to keep their family store open during the Depression. I could tell you how my father was a student at San Francisco State during the late 1960s and how he didn’t join the Third World Liberation Front. I could tell you all of these things, and they would be my history because all of them have shaped my life in some way. But they aren’t the story I want to tell. Instead, I will focus on the more recent past and how my own history has been linked to broader events here in California.

There is a tendency in autobiography to make one’s life or one’s family’s life follow a neat narrative arc: the Horatio Alger story, my family worked hard, look how we struggled and succeeded: God Bless America. This will not be one of those essays. I am here where I am today not only because my parents and my grandparents worked hard—for I am sure they did—but also because I have been afforded certain privileges that others were not so lucky to have. This essay will explore the intersection of my own life with history and explore how forces larger than my own have shaped my own personal decisions, actions, and accomplishments.

I am a fourth-generation Chinese American of mixed descent. I was born in San Francisco, the oldest of three brothers. My dad, Bruce Gow, is a Chinese American, who grew up living behind his parents’ passport photo shop in the city’s Richmond District. My mother, Ola Jane Gow, is white and grew up in a small-town on the Florida panhandle. My parents are well educated. Both of them have Master’s Degrees and both of them held down professional positions throughout my childhood: my father as a high school administrator and my mother as a trade magazine editor.

The first major decision to affect my life was made before my birth. This was my parents’ decision to raise their family in San Francisco. This decision was made partly because my father was born there, but also because they thought it would be a more hospitable place to raise a biracial family. One month after I was born, the decision to stay in California would begin to haunt them.

On June 6th 1978, California voters passed a law that would have a tremendous affect on my then future education. This law was Proposition 13. Proposition 13 slashed the state property taxes and in doing so undermined the main source of funding for the state’s public schools. As a result, per pupil spending in California plummeted. While my parents couldn’t have know it at the time, this proposition would be only the first of many attacking the state’s public school students. Taken all together the effect of these propositions on my life would be both terrible and magnificent.

I remember the day that I decided what it was I wanted to be when I grew up. It was a rainy day some time in my junior year in high school. I sat in Ms. Canepa’s third period Shakespeare class. Our class met out in the "Ts," that is one of the "temporary" classrooms that had been erected in the school’s parking lot sometime back in the 1970s. It was raining hard that day, and we had rearranged our desks in order to avoid the leak in the middle of the room. Ms. Canepa had put one of those small brown metal garbage cans that seem to be in every classroom in San Francisco on the floor to catch the falling water. As I sat there, cold because there was no heating in the room, with a tattered copy of Macbeth in my hands, I had an epiphany of sorts. Looking around the room, I realized that neither the city of San Francisco nor the state of California nor the government in Washington gave a damn about me or any other student in any other public school classroom anywhere in the state. It was at that moment that I decided to become a schoolteacher.

Part of my desire to teach social studies — be it history, civics, or economics — stems from my own personal interest in understanding the society which I grew up in. As a student attending San Francisco’s public school system, the raw inequalities were palatable. With each passing act, with each tattered textbook I was assigned, I grew angrier and angrier, but at the time, I didn’t have an adequate understanding of politics or history to correctly direct that anger. Like so many other high school students who graduate angry but uniformed, my social studies education had failed me.

One should not underestimate the detrimental affects that Proposition 13 had on a whole generation of California children. Growing up watching the educational infrastructure crumble around me, I was angered. But placing myself within the larger confines of history has helped me to understand what it is that I want to do with my life. That day I realized that I wanted to be a high school teacher, I did so because the inequality I saw around me was so visible. And while it would take me many years after I graduated to truly understand all of the political, social, and historical events that placed me in that classroom that rainy day my junior year, the impetus for my decision to teach lay in that act that passed the year I was born.

Today, I am in my last year in the Master’s program in Asian American Studies at UCLA. Upon graduation I hope to be able to realize my life long dream of school teaching. But why have I been successful where so many others like me have failed? Why am I at UCLA when some of my classmates didn’t even make it to high school? Some might have you believe that I worked harder or studied more than those who didn’t succeed. Others might say it was some subconscious cultural transmission of long forgotten Confucian values, or possibly even some overarching luck. But in reality, it was none of these things. I was able to avoid the worst effects of the laws and regulations that followed on the heels of proposition 13 because I was given certain opportunities that other’s never had. As a Chinese American of mixed descent, I did not see the same doors shut for me by the ending of affirmative action that my black and brown classmates did. Because neither my parents nor I are immigrants, I was largely unaffected by the rollback in the states bilingual education programs. Because both my parents were working professionals, I was not affected in the same way by the decrease in funding at the UC and State systems. Indeed the money my parents were able to save, combined with the scholarships and loans I was given, allowed me to attend a private university on the East Coast. Few others had these opportunities.

That I succeeded where others failed is not because I worked harder or was more talented than many of my friends and classmates. Rather, it is a testament to the incredibly detrimental affects that decreased funding, ending bilingual education, and revoking affirmative action have had on our public school system. A certain specific alignment of political, social, and historical factors have given me the chance to obtain first a bachelor’s degree and soon, hopefully, a Masters degree while others just as talented as me were held back.

Because of these privileges, I feel the obligation to share my experiences and knowledge with others like me who haven’t had the same opportunities. I see teaching as my way of reaching back to reform the system that educated me. Like so many people of color, California’s educational system was for me, a failure, but it need not be this way. As I look toward the future, I am scared but hopeful both for the Asian American community and the world.

As our government plans a preemptive war for peace—an impossibility if ever there were one — our communities here in America are being singled out as targets of racist violence. South Asians along with Arab Americans have suffered the violent repercussions of the government’s propaganda machine. Others in our communities have found themselves imprisoned or deported. And yet through this all, one must not loose faith in the possibility of liberation and democracy. Education has always been one of the benchmarks of non-violent change, and while I hold no delusions of grandeur of what I alone can accomplish, I see teaching as my small contribution in shaping a new history for future generations of Asian Americans. I am a product of my parents and their parents. I am a product of my community and of my country. I am a product of my friends and my ‘ friends, my neighbors and my parent’s neighbors, my schools and parent’s schools.

Growing up as a student in San Francisco’s public schools I witnessed first hand the crowded classrooms, tattered text books, and broken lockers that came to symbolize post-Proposition 13 California.

And yet in some odd way this crumbling infrastructure inspired me.