Jimmy Ng

For a long time, I've searched for my Holy Grail. Despite my Asian ancestry and family poking me like an electric prod, I've never done well in school. Throughout my school years I was told that a C would follow me for the rest of my life. So straight A's became my Holy Grail. Needless to say I got several C's. Worse, I've even earned a couple of D's. Total dishonor came to my family and the thousand Chinese Gods shook the heavens when an F bestowed itself on my seventh grade report card. And in what subject you may ask? Pre-algebra! That's before algebra, before math gets hard. Aren't Asians supposed to be geniuses in math?

So I questioned my ethnicity. Am I really Chinese? First off, I was born in South America. My nationality back then was Latin. That's how I pick up women. I tell them I'm a Latin lover. It doesn't work, for me anyway. But everybody thinks I'm Filipino. Even Filipinos come up and start talking to me in Tagalog. I'll respond by saying, "Que? Como?"

All my life I've always loved the arts. Not that I studied art history, but that artistic creation held great meaning. So what was my first major in college? Business administration. Once you read the articles on this site you'll realize I would have failed out of college and gotten staked to the cross if I stayed with that.

I found martial arts and fell in love with teaching. I taught hundreds upon hundreds of kids. Taught adults who were body builders, prominent doctors, gourmet cooks. At that point, I thought I had found my Holy Grail. I realized in a mere five years that what we were dishing out as self-defense was crap. I should've taught to throw crap, which would've been a better form of self-defense. So my friend and I developed simple and easy real life techniques of defending ourselves from bad guys. We were going to start a modern martial art school. I switched my major to Kinesiology. We were going to change the world!

The school never happened. Devastated and lost in life, I walked the deserts of limbo like David Carradine in Kung Fu.

My best friend had begun studying acting. The school he went to in San Francisco offered the first class for free. Why not check it out? After what I had seen, I signed up. In fact, I continued to study acting for the next three years. And I must say I loved it. It was life changing. Can I act? Let's just say an academy award for best actor is not in my sights. Many lifetimes may need to pass before that happens. But what acting did, and what all art does if you give in to it, was open myself up to me. You want to see your own soul? You want to see if you have a soul? Give yourself over to any artistic endeavor. I'm talking let yourself be possessed like that little green-eyed girl who spun her head in that cult movie. And I guarantee you'll feel and see things that you never thought existed in you before.

After deciding acting wasn't for me, I pondered why I loved it. Before I go on, I believe recurrences happen throughout everyone's life like a child tugging at your pant leg. Listen to that child. One thing I did almost everyday of my life was daydream. I pretended to be Superman with slanty eyes and straight black hair. Couldn't get the curlicue thing to happen on my forehead. Many cans of hairspray died in that attempt. I fantasized about going on great adventures, or fighting impossible to beat monsters. What I loved about acting was the story telling. But I wasn't telling the stories I wanted to tell. So I tried my hand at writing a book. Several attempts later I couldn't finish a book. It was good experience though. It wasn't until I started writing the story I've fantasized for over twenty years did I know possession. This surpassed my passion for teaching, for martial arts, for acting, even for life's ultimate passion.

From all of this I've come to know one truth. If you're open to your creative soul, you'll become infinitely wise in the deepest sense. For the Holy Grail is the sense of who you are, your truth. I look behind and all I see is my stalker. What I don't see are the C's, D's, or that horrid F. Nor do I see the A's and B's. However, they are on my keyboard.