A Failed Research Proposal to Study Confucianism

CURRICULUM VITAE
Kaoru Tozaki
China- Business/Management

Wednesday, March 25th, 1983 was a day of immense physical pain for my family. My mother was on her 3rd day in labor, my grandfather was getting his knee stiched up after having fell running to the hospital and I, though I didn't know it at the time, was in the process of being born into a major dilemma. My father being a first generation Japanese American and my mother being a first generation Chinese American I would sucumb a fate of a second generation American, first generation cultural guinea pig. It’s been difficult growing up in an environment where my “breed” is rare. But over the years I have come to embrace it, even cherish the idiosyncrasies that come with being unclassifiable. How I found sanity in the chaos of dueling cultural morals is simply one of my inspirations for the project I am proposing.

I am fortunate to have grown up in Manhattan; a cosmopolitan melting pot where normality is viewed as the avant-garde. I didn’t realize the oddity until I moved to Tokyo- another quirky city in its own right. I remember my first day in school a classmate asked, “How did you ever survive a New York City public school with the street gangs and the drive by shootings?” Obviously they had a skewed image of life in the Big Apple.

When I returned to the US, my parents enrolled me into a New England boarding school in Kent, CT. I transitioned well as a “preppy” and was ironically embraced by the Chinese community. My friends in high school never spoke in English outside of class and were clear in their annoyance of the “ABCs” (American Born Chinese). Yet in theory, I was an ABC. My Chinese was terrible. I only understood Chinese from the two summers I lived in Taiwan with my grandparents. So I spared myself the humiliation by saying nothing and listening intently to everything. Curiously my Chinese drastically improved in Connecticut. After high school I went to college and spent my senior year intensively studying Chinese at Taiwan University. Immersed in yet another culture I found myself questioning why I felt a need to be a worldly, conscious person. I have become this exemplary world citizen of the postmodern world with no recollection of how it happened.

I have yet to experience China the way my grandparents have described it to me. My parents haven’t been there and my one week trip to China in 99’ was a superficial experience as a fleeting tourist. I would be misleading if I stated my only motivation in attaining a grant is to research the economy in Beijing. My aspiration originated from a deep wanting of understanding family and self. I was educated in America where individualistic ideology parade over the cumulative whole and was raised by family who were distrustful of it. Because of my ethnicity I have always felt pulled in different directions- half Japanese, half Chinese, full American yet never being regarded as one. But what I gained is an admiration in the Japanese for their almost aesthetic obsession towards selflessness, an understanding of the American belief in the importance of individual liberties, and veneration for the Chinese belief in family. For that I am eternally grateful.

My project is an examination of the past to find reasons for the present. I find each fragment of my past as endowments for my future, a divine dichotomy towards a sacred synthesis. I will like to conclude with a promise to use my very first dilemma of being a cultural guinea pig as an advantage. I will view everything through three different cultural lenses and have Confucius as my personal guide through the process.