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I see my sister in a story of my eight-year old father, checking the moon-cake fish for the bigger fish eye; I see my father in my eight-year old sister, checking every new toy for a black mark. I see the past looped into the present, looped back into the past.

My father has been emailing us stories of his childhood. For the first time I envision getting to know my father as a child, innocent and unmarked, instead of a man made wise by years of disappointment. It presents a framework that somehow allows me to see the growth of a child into a man linearly forward, instead of retrospectively; it is as if I am somehow watching my father grow up in these stories instead of learning retroactively, how he grew up. It is my belief that our formative years are from 1-12, or even 1-10 years of age, and even though our "rebellious" teen years are "supposed" to be our period of finding self-identity and forging our own independent selves, I believe that by then it is already somewhat too late: that we are already actually indelibly marked and irrevocably shaped, despite our fervent self-denials to the contrary.

I was thinking about the debate of nature v. nurture. In the context that your biological parents are the ones who take care of you till adolescence and adulthood, I think the two are actually quite indistinguishable, because the genetics that make up your parents and the environments that molded them bleed infinitely into every little thing they do to you and for you. Part of their inherited and accumulated psyche infiltrates their every action and every thought and every belief, which in turn infiltrates you. Children are fragile, sensitive creatures, able to filter through acts and pretenses and sense very subtly underlying currents of social dynamics, even if they are unaware of such a sensitivity. They absorb like greedy sponges every little bit of knowledge generated around them, AND the undercurrents of these interactions. Perhaps a child has more of a proclivity toward violence genetically, BUT depending on whether this tendency is being encouraged (even tacitly) or discouraged as a child is what is going to "free" this "genotype" to become expressed as a phenotype or not.

We can do the most change (and damage) to a child, and after he becomes an adult we still can change things no doubt, but it will be like going against a river current rather than sailing down with it. That's why, I believe that if we can get to the core of a person and understand what has happened to him, we can predict with significant accuracy what will happen to him in terms of how he will react and act. We are not as random and 'mysterious' as some of us like to claim; we are more the sum of many many ever-changing equations, the axioms (immutable laws) of which probably began at our infancy and early childhood, and are different for every person. Habits take on average 30 days to alter, and can be altered, even the most debilitating of addictions can be shirked with enough effort; but unless a gargantuan life-altering experience or realization occurs, as of now I don't believe it is easy to fully escape our inner psyches formed through childhood, in any significant way.

I wish more people would understand the absolutely critical function of being a good parent to a child. It is perhaps the most basic way in which we can change the future, and bring hope to it -- by raising a good and worthy individual, who will then likely raise a chain of good, worthy individuals.