Who Am I?

The monkey stole my banana
I’m not sure what’s true. My imagination and my memory have merged, as it turns out
everyone’s does
One of my most formative memories was that of a monkey stealing by banana
I don’t think a monkey actually stole my banana.
Logistically, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I have seen how monkeys steal phones in Bali
I’m not sure that a monkey ever stole my banana,
But I told people that it did.
Why did I tell people that a monkey stole my banana?
Well, I imagined that they might.
The monkeys seemed all capable of stealing bananas, and weren’t afraid of us.
And I suppose it’s a bit funny to imagine a monkey stealing a banana.
I liked to humor people,
Don’t we all?
Reality and fantasy intersect so personally when we are a child.

I credit Charles Hallisey via Paul Ricœur and Paul Armstrong for convincing me that stories are the fundamental unit of the human experience. Except when we are in the deepest states of meditation, or our brains are damaged a la Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight, or we are simply unconscious, we are living in a story. Our most basic story, “I am,” distinguishes humanity from other immanently observable forms of consciousness in this material plane. From there, we build. Some of my stories include “I am a human” and “I am a man.” Most of these stories we learn from beyond ourselves. Other people, including our parents, family, community, and society, tell us who we are, and we tend to believe them until we don’t. One prominent story I learned from childhood is that I am Sinhalese, a part of an ethnic group identified with the modern nation of Sri Lanka, the former British colony of Ceylon. I was told I was Sinhalese, but I did not very much feel it. Harvard proved to be a great place to reflect on this aspect of my identity.

Charles Hallisey is a world-leading non-Sri Lankan scholar of the Sinhala language and Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhism, the religious tradition of my ancestors. Harvard was the academic home of the late and great Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, an anthropologist of Sri Lankan Tamil descent and likely acquaintance of my paternal grandfather, who bravely explored some of the challenging aspects of Sinhala modernity and its ethnic clashes with Tamils and other groups. It is too easy to criticize oneself and one’s background, especially when one’s upbringing felt too hard. While the works of Tambiah along with Ganananth Obeyesekere, who coined the term “Protestant Buddhism” to describe the late nineteenth–century reformulation of Theravada Buddhism to better fit the British aesthetic sensibility led by Henry Steel Olcott and Angarika Dharmapala, revealed that I was not crazy in picking up on contradictions between what my family said and how they acted since childhood. It is Martin Wickrasinghe who helped me empathize with those contradictions and find love and myself in my roots.²

In Wickramasinghe’s Viragaya, set in mid-20th-century British Ceylon, the home of my ancestors, the protagonist grapples with the clash of colonial prerogative and traditional Sinhala Buddhist values. While Buddhism professes a disconnect from material, Aravinda laments his family’s attachment to possessions, especially land: “How we all love property! And yet we’re always being told that we can’t take it with us when we die!”³ I would argue, as does Professor Charles Hallisey, that Aravinda lives the most Buddhist life of anyone in the novel.⁴ Yet, he becomes essentially an outcast. He is as scorned for rejecting marriage as for turning down the more elite profession of becoming a medical doctor to pursue knowledge. Aravinda’s society was caught between traditional values and the demands of British colonialism. His society was an uneasy clash of cultures with obvious dissonance upon reflection, Aravinda’s defining modus operandi. Reading Viragaya, I related almost too deeply with Aravinda’s struggles. My struggles with family from childhood paralleled his with his family and Sinhala society at large.

I never thought I would go to Harvard because, for as long as I can remember, I was told I had to go to Harvard, and I hated doing what I was told. My family was obsessed with academic prestige. My maternal grandfather, whom I grew up blocks away from, did his PhD in Economics at Cambridge. One of my mom’s brothers went to Harvard College, and another went to Swarthmore. My mom went to Yale, albeit just for a one-year master’s degree, comically and ironically like me at Harvard. By age seven or eight, if I had to roughly place it in time, I was sick of hearing about Harvard. I hated Harvard and swore I would never go there. My immediate family, which included my maternal grandparents, placed so much pressure on me while being patently unhealthy, unstable, unloving, and unsupportive; dysfunctional, that I was hell bent on doing anything other than what they wanted me to do. What is funny is that they were right. I love Harvard.

Early in life, I questioned my intelligence. My grandfather told me I had an inferiority complex. I did not know what that meant at the time, but I now see that he was correct, though he was perhaps also most guilty of causing it. But at Harvard, my brain finally felt at home. My grandfather always said that Cambridge, UK was his favorite (favourite?) place. I believe that I fully understand why, now. I am not so different, it turns out, except that for me, it’s Cambridge, MA. Harvard is a place people associate with intelligence, and at Harvard I could not help but let intelligence become a part of my story. But Harvard is just a peak microcosm of the broader human story around intelligence.

As quickly as I realized my intelligence had value, I realize that my intelligence will soon have no value. With superintelligence already here and the growth of its power accelerating, we must grapple together with the story of the uniqueness and superiority of our minds. We may or may not have been created by a force greater than ourselves, but we are certainly creating intelligence greater than our own by any reasonable assessment. If anything, intelligence for me has been isolating and humbling, not a cause for much celebration or a feeling of superiority. I might suggest that humanity could benefit from applying the teachings of the Buddha to let go of attachment to the specialness, especially superiority, of our thinking and reasoning minds.