It wasn’t my parents who showed me the importance of our Chinese takeaway — It was Karl Marx.
What did the 19th Century German political philosopher have to do with my contentment as a family worker?
*Forgive my ignorance. I hope, too, that you can be understanding of the cringe that is of reading an amateur in international affairs. But bare with me until I set up the context.
My obsession with Communism started with my reading of Blaine Harden’s stark journalistic opus, Escape From Camp 14.
The book revolves around the life of Shin Dong Hyuk — or, Shin — and his battered, drab and sordid existence in a North Korean concentration camp.
His mother gave birth to him under these austere conditions. As the saying goes “life is a struggle” but for luckier few it starts at a later extent. The first ever breathe Shin took was the heavy odour of political oppression.
Growing up he never knew of a world outside of the fenced prison compound. He was stuck in this tiny little cosmos, governed by insane commandments to snitch on other “comrades” and spew vitriol at the Imperialistic Americans in lieu of calming nursery rhymes.
Another fact scrunched itself up into a fist and proceeded to knock my jaw into a slack state — Shin betrayed his own mother, traded her life for his own selfish extension to breathe lungfuls of totalitarian air and see the next bleak light of day.
Her crime was that she had planned to escape the camp along with her other son, a punishable offence that was death. Shin knew that snitching on them would be rewarded under the guise of “loyalty” to the camp guards.
Morality and principle were warped in his head — or, were maybe non-existent to begin with.
After the camp authorities’ verdict of them being guilty of an attempted flight, the symptom diagnosed was that of seeing the camp as anything but paradise. So, they placed a sack over her head. The firing squad shot her to death.
The amimalism of it all. The indiscriminate murder in a place under Communism.
A Westerner like me, as a child, I had never heard of “Communism” before. The word for me, ever since reading Harden’s work, had been associated with a hermetic country like North Korea. “Communism” was almost synonymous with terror and permanent anxiety and a worthless existence. It is a place where the citizens’ lives are pawn pieces or dispensable props to the state.
I needed to investigate how can this ideology perpetuate these atrocities Shin was involved in.
Like most readers, I tried envisaging that moment of filial betrayal brilliantly told by Harden. Would I have grassed and snitched to the camp guards the sole person who gave me life in this boxed existence? If all I knew then was backwards camp morality then it is highly likely that I would. What would have gone through my head when I heard the guns cocking at the ready, watching my remaining family shot down all because of my doing?
There must be a single thought in your mind now, dear reader: “Anthony, what on earth does this have to do with you working in a Chinese takeaway?”.
I understand your sentiment. I truly do. But please put your faith in me. I will lead you through my intellectual journey that would not end with your disappointment in me.
Anyway…
It is hard to re-programme my mind to think along those foreign totalitarian lines. The Western democratic environment that shaped my mentality is such a powerful influence that keeps it from wondering vicariously into communistic waters.
In asking yourself brain-tensing questions you seem to find difficult to answer, I recall a very simple advice in a letter by Rilke to Kappus: live the questions and then, without noticing, the answer will come to you. However, I don’t think I will ever be able to understand the life under Communism until I lived with these following questions:
Is Totalitarianism an inherent evolutionary stage that, in time, will succeed Communism? Or is it an engulfing socio-political state that is part and parcel with the latter as soon as it is established? Or, more optimistically, can brutality, violence, and intimidation be separated from Communism and be avoided all together?
Communism doesn’t have a single theory that all practitioners abide by to the extent of gospel. There have been contradictions, like many other things in life, between theory and practice. In other words, to use musical terms, the character of Communism is that of ‘theme and variation’, each leader incorporating their own dash of political taste into the theory — Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism.
It wasn’t the fact that there were so many different variants of the same theme that led to it not being clearly defined; even the theorists themselves beset so many logical leaps and gaps and ambiguities in their written works.
The father of Communism, Karl Marx, came into my radar. If anyone was to give me hope to unveil the principles that prompted the atrocities of such a country that heralded violence in all circumstances, it would be the leading thinker himself.
Marx, in his own view of the world, followed one of two camps that philosophers do — Idealism or Materialism. The first is the principle of the ‘idea’ where the surrounding world is nothing but concepts; ideas are what make-up our reality rather than their physical manifestations. Marx took up the mental scope of being a Materialist — the physical objects around us is our fundamental reality. And, further, each of our relationships with the material world will be disparate between one individual with another (the pre-curser of post-modernism?).
To illustrate what this individual perception of material would be, then, a simple comparison would do: the word ‘city’ might appeal to different imaginary ideas of its constitution to a 15th Century Greek in Athens than to a 21st Century New Yorker.
The world of Materialism was ground that was unshakeable for me. It was philosophical trail rope with which I wouldn’t lose my grip.
As someone who was addicted to seeing patterns, I soon adapted the materialistic view to the Chinese Takeaway.
Customers saw the place as a weekend treat for themselves and their families. It was a breakaway from their weekday home cooked meals of strict carbs and fat. The scorching aluminium food containers and grease proof bags symbolised that their work during the week was done and forgotten for two days.
The takeaway, for many outside of the British Chinesen ethinc enclave, was a symbol of relaxation.
But to look at it in the materialistic scope, the family business symbolised a lost childhood. Intimidation and fear were the only things I knew on weekends from my parents. Objection to kitchen labour was met with bruising repercussions.
But with this Marx’s materialistic thought at hand for deconstruction, I had the information to analyse the business from this enlightened perspective.
The business, in order to earn profit from sales, needs to have means of production— these would be the woks, the fryers, the telephone, the computer to receive orders, the hands of the labourers. In the absence of these means food cannot be produced to sell on to willing customers that are fighting for reciepts to have a space on our order rack.
I truly mused that what if, in another universe, the family business had fell through, sunken with immovable debt, and forced into bankruptcy, what would happen materialistically in our family?
I wouldn’t have been able to go to University and receievd two degree cerificates with the occasional financial care package from parents I would get along the way to make life just a little bit more comfortable; I wouldn’t have been able to go to the classical music concerts to hear sublime music from artists all over the world; I wouldn't have been able to travel to countries in the East for work and leisure; and, with some circuity and irony, I wouldn’t have been able to buy the books that would have eventually enlightened me enough to write this now.
The labour of the family working with the materialistic productive means was responsible for what I am capable to do. It opened doors to many possible career outcomes. I could develop skills that my parents never had. It is our main source of income, our vital organ that must retain the flow of human blood, striving for profit health and longevity.
The family business, though, has a strange existence.
With the profits, the children working are paid and supported in their own interests that stray far from cuisine. Simultaneously, however, the business needs their hands and minds to survive for long enough to give them the next rung of the ladder on which to stand.
The takeaway is subjected to paradox: it needs to stay alive long enough to commit suicide.
This vital organ pumps in order for it to lay to rest indefinitely.
Unlike Shin, there wasn’t any filial betrayal of that magnitude in the family. Although my mother was harsh in enforcing me to work from the age of 13–14 and refusing to hire outside workers, I see so clearly what her motive was: it was to bring about the early death of the takeaway. Making enough money to give us children that first step onto the professional ladder was her absolute priority. I can see it all now.
I often find it very amusing when we analyse our own histories with honesty, with the aim of understanding why we tend to think the way we do.
Sometimes it is the ostensibly remote ideas in life that can have sudden outbursts, giving us the most meaningful connections. Ideas can be like two strong magnets. They pass each other at a close enough distance. At the right distance, they snap together and unify.
I see the takeaway as a vital organ in the propelling of myself to a better life. The contentment in familial labour finally came around after a decade of immature bitterness of having a different life to my peers.
But the difference, in all its ugliness and uniquness, in socio-economy is what makes my life interesting.
I now work without a word of complaint.
