I Dreamed a Dream

Some fragmented thoughts on the limits of my own imagination, planting the seeds of a dream, and the gift of helping to grow a new generation

Jul 30, 2021

Friday, July 30
Leelanau County, Michigan

Hello, friendly reader.

Last month, I got a text from Jacqui Gifford, the editor-in-chief of Travel+Leisure. I’ve been writing for her for several years now, and even as my life has taken some unconventional turns for a working journalist, she has been a steadfast editor and a faithful friend. We were just catching up about this and that when she asked me an unexpected question: What’s your dream trip? She told me she’d support any trip I really, really wanted to take, any journey I really, really wanted to write about.

It was such a stunning invitation—and I didn’t know what to say. “Have you had a few drinks?” I replied.

“Just dream,” she wrote. “We all need to!”

The question that’s been gnawing at me ever since: Do we? Do we all need to dream?

I’m more idealistic, more of a dreamer, than I care to admit. But I also have to acknowledge that I’m afraid to dream. I tell myself that dreams set us up for disappointment. And dreaming has become foreign to me, a muscle that has largely atrophied, except in very precise and achievable situations, like having a microwave that doesn’t feel like it’s powered by a tired hamster or successfully growing a single snapdragon or someday having adequate storage for the sheet pans that currently reside on my kitchen floor. (Side note: When I finally got on the phone with my story editor, Lila Battis, to talk about the ideas generated by Jacqui’s prompt, one proposal was a stay at a monastery. Dream big, I guess?)

Gratuitous picture of clouds, taken on my last airplane trip.

Dreaming isn’t something I was taught to do as a kid. I remember frequently hearing my classmates’ parents say things to them like: “You can be anything you want to be.” I never heard anything like this from my parents, and I desperately wanted such affirmation. So one day—I was probably fourteen or fifteen—I asked my mom why she never told me I could be anything I wanted to be. I hoped she might say something like: Because I thought you just knew.

Instead, she said: “Because it’s not true. Why would I lie to you?”

I had no good response to her blunt honesty, and she seemed to read my silence as an invitation for evidence.

“You can’t be the wide receiver for the 49ers,” she said, alluding to my deep admiration of Jerry Rice. “You’re not that fast.”

“You can’t be a supermodel,” she continued, unnecessarily. “You’re not that good-looking.”

I don’t share this story to shame my mom—not at all. I appreciate her desire to keep me grounded and her attempts to instill common sense. I also find my mother’s commentary frequently, if unintentionally, hilarious.

In this case, my mother’s instruction was grounded in a conviction that I was being reared not primarily as an individual or for my individual flourishing but rather as a member of a family and a community and for that family and that community’s benefit. Any success I enjoyed was not mine alone but a credit to all who had a part in my upbringing. As is customary in traditional Chinese families, I was reared by extended family—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, family friends whom we always call “auntie” and “uncle.” Whatever we did, whoever we became, reflected on that community. And whatever good that was within us and that we put out into the world testified of the God who has always watched over us. Practicality, efficiency, modesty, pragmatism, utility, faithfulness—these were the values and virtues my elders instilled in me as useful for the good of the collective. Dreaming, on the other hand, was selfish and indulgent.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was at Disneyland with my nephews and my parents, I found myself thinking a lot about dreaming. As the great philosopher Cinderella once sang, “A dream is a wish your heart makes.” But when you’ve been reared in an evangelical church culture that frequently reminds you of the words of Jeremiah—“the heart is deceitful above all things”—even the most innocent childhood dreams can morph into talismans of the enemy, things to be questioned and rejected and scorned, not fostered and explored and embraced.

In the cultures of my childhood, practicality, pragmatism, and faithfulness were set up in opposition to dreaming. The former were key building blocks to the better, more stable life we coveted. The latter was a luxury, especially when, as I was frequently reminded, we had to work twice as hard to get just as far. We were people indelibly marked by a hardscrabble past. We were scarred by war and poverty. Blessed as we have been, I was taught, we are called to prudence, hence the twenty-dollar bills buried at the bottom of my grandma’s yarn box and the butter-cookie tin that I just can’t seem to throw away.

My sister and me with our paternal grandparents. After my grandma died, we found bundles of $20 bills at the bottom of her yarn box, as well as milk jugs full of coins under the bathroom sink. They were refugees during World War II, an experience that marked them for life. Also, look at those fabrics on their couch!

That butter-cookie tin, with all its accompanying nostalgia as well as its tight lid, could be a good receptacle for my dreams—and my ability to dream. I imagine them stored in my personal attic; maybe once in a while, you indulge yourself a peek, but what’s in it does not belong on display. That’s the story I’ve been told. That’s the story I’ve told myself.

The irony is that my trip to Disneyland with my nephews was actually about helping them to dream—and it represented a dream forestalled. I take my (largely self-imposed) responsibilities as an uncle seriously. When my two eldest nephews were little, I began telling them that, when they turned 13, they could pick anywhere in the world to go and we’d take a trip. My hope was to cultivate in them a broader sense of the world, an ability to imagine beyond the context in which they’ve been brought up, and a desire to explore—maybe even to dream.

The plan I made with Ryan, who turned 13 a couple of years ago, was to go to the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. We’d already got tickets to men’s basketball, women’s basketball, and volleyball, and I had my eye on a couple of other events. But then COVID-19 happened, the Olympics got postponed and then closed to spectators. Until we could figure out a new plan, Disneyland would serve as a placeholder.

This whole “one trip to anywhere in the world” scheme was inspired by my own Auntie Kitty and Uncle Jason, who lived in London. When I was in middle school, they told me that if I could save up the money for the airfare to England, they’d take care of everything once I got there. I scrimped and counted and worked—birthday money, Chinese New Year income, earnings from odd jobs—and when I was 13, I flew across the Atlantic for my Christmas break.

My aunt and uncle kept their promise. They packed those 10 days. We saw “The Phantom of the Opera” (I fell asleep). We wandered the British Museum (I fell asleep while I was walking). We went into every single bookshop lining the Charing Cross Road and to the post office to get stamps for my stamp collection and to the Doc Martens store to get me a pair of Doc Martens because this was the Nineties. We went on day trips to Oxford and Cambridge. We took afternoon tea at the Savoy Hotel, and I still think about the warm scones and the strawberry jam and the clotted cream on my virgin palate, which had never experienced the ecstasy of a warm scone with strawberry jam and clotted cream, and I still think too about how pillowy and decadently crustless the sandwiches were. It was dreamy.

Then, the day after Christmas, it got even better: They surprised me with tickets to Paris, where we saw all the sights you have to see when you’re in Paris for the first time. But what I really remember was the food: the flakiest, butteriest croissants I’d ever had (I was used to frozen Sara Lee ones); profiteroles; duck breast, with a gloriously crispy skin. At this point in my life, I had not taken a day of French class, and I just stumbled around in a blissed-out state, whispering, “Oui!” and “Merci!” Those three days were beyond my dreams.

That trip kindled my imagination as nothing before had, opening me up to architectures and cultures, tastes and smells, ways of being and ways of exploring. I’m pretty sure I would not have become a journalist were it not for formative childhood journeys like these. Traveling has taught me and shaped me, widened my lens and reminded me to look at things from different angles, humbled me and pointed me to the wonder and the beauty of this incredibly diverse world. I’ll always be grateful to my aunt and uncle for helping to kindle such love and such curiosity—and I want to give the same gift to my nephews.

There might be something selfish about my desire to give this gift, because, while I’m trying to teach my nephews to dream, I think I’m reminding myself that I can do it too. We need to be able to dream. We need moments in our lives when we’re compelled to play, to break out of our normal routines, to see and experience and taste something new. We need to know how to imagine, both individually and collectively. How do we co-create a better world if we can’t think beyond what is and if we can’t imagine what could be? We have to be able to construct a picture of what we’re for, so that we’re not just stuck in outrage toward what we’re against.

Of course this is not always easy to do, especially for those of us raised in traditions and cultures that questioned the value and validity of dreams. To dream is to risk, and to risk is to make yourself vulnerable to being disappointed. But not dreaming doesn’t inoculate you from disappointment—not at all.

Perhaps practicality and dreaming might actually be good friends and mutually beneficial companions. Could we imagine them as helpful collaborators? I wonder whether the skills I was taught from early childhood—to puzzle out the sensible next steps, to foresee and then sidestep the obvious pitfalls, to make steady and incremental progress—might be useful means of moving toward a dream rather than reasons to end one before it even takes shape.

Perhaps, too, there’s something to be said for reimagining what it means to dream. I realize as I write these words to you that I associate the word “dream” with otherworldly fantasy, even with escapism. While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with those things, maybe that’s too limiting a vision and maybe that doesn’t do the word or the concept justice. When I think about dreams, I’m thinking about holy imagination—holy in the sense of an understanding of our blessedness, holy in terms of its pursuit of wholeness, holy in the context of generating what’s good. That kind of dream has to be rooted in a candid and clear-eyed understanding of what is so that we can envision what needs to be transformed and what could become. And that kind of dream is what I want to cultivate, not just for myself but also for the sake of the world.

What I’m Growing and What I’m Eating: I’m writing to you from the beautiful Leelanau Peninsula in northern Michigan, which we’ve been visiting with our two goddaughters and their parents. Which also means I have no idea how my garden is doing. The girls, Fozzie, and I did go pick some beans last weekend, but since then, I’ve just pretended that the weeds aren’t flourishing. Instead, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a good godfather. I don’t really know. We haven’t done this before. I’m sure we’re making mistakes—sometimes doing and saying what we shouldn’t, sometimes not doing and not saying what we should. But it continues to be such an honor to help grow these two youngsters in the knowledge of themselves and in their love of God and the world.

One of our favorite restaurants in Michigan is in Leelanau County, just a few miles outside Traverse City. It’s called Farm Club, and we ate there on Tuesday evening. They grow as much of their own produce onsite as possible, and Farm Club’s stunning beans in broth—Mayocoba beans simmered slowly in water, augmented with just a little bit of olive oil, garlic, and thyme—testify to how simple, careful cooking can make an ingredient shine. I’m looking forward to trying my own version of the dish when my beans are ready in the fall. I also got to take a mid-meal stroll in the gardens with the girls. I showed them what rhubarb looks like when it’s a plant, before it becomes the cooked-down filling of a pie, and we admired the cosmos, the zinnia, and the snapdragons.

The girls and me in one of the gardens at Farm Club

Sorry I’m a day late this week. In addition to the traveling, I’ve probably spent a little too much time watching the Olympics. It’s the one time, every four years, when I actually care a lot about the sportsball. I’ve been cheering on the athletes from my beloved Hong Kong, which desperately needs some good news; so far, we’ve won a gold and two silvers—the first time Hong Kong has earned more than a single medal at any Olympics. I also love when countries win their first-ever medals—congratulations to San Marino, which, in its 15th Summer Olympics, finally got a bronze.

My questions for you this week: If you’ve been watching the Olympics, what has inspired you and what have you been intrigued by? What do you think about dreaming? How have you experienced it, and what helps you to broaden your own imagination? And what would your dream trip be—and why?

Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer

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