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by Jolly Zhou

Waiting for a friend on the Upper East Side on an unusually fair day, an endearing sight caught my eye. Two adults were carrying a baby in a stroller up the steps of the Met. Besides the parents, there were other adults in the group accompanying the infant like bodyguards to a celebrity. I marveled at this entourage of relative giants huddled around this tiny being, servants lifting the sedan of a little emperor off to view the fruits of his court painters. Without his parents’ care, this frail and helpless creature would essentially perish as fast as he would fall if they suddenly decided to drop his stroller, yet he also had so much power over their lives—power derived not from coercion or election but simply from being born. And even though he was small and weak, they gave their services unconditionally.

Growing up in a power-driven individualistic country such as America, it intrigues me how in many ways, we can never escape being servants in our lives even though we think we live in a culture focused on individual freedom and the power of one. It is amazing that we serve bosses who pay us and also serve small children who offer no material reward.

The parents managed to balance that stroller so easily between the two of them, never letting it tilt, their little sovereign always in constant peaceful motion, but I wondered if it was just as easy for them to balance their services to home and work. I soon realized that this sun-drenched day was only one out of seven. At some point later in the week, his Little Majesty would be handed over to a nanny or daycare center. His parents would then rush off to office buildings many times as spacious as the world’s biggest nursery, and they would answer to supervisors whose one look of disapproval could cause more damage than a whole night of the little boy’s wailing and whining.

Someday, I thought, I would probably have both bosses too, for whom, in different ways, I would work and serve. In order to provide for my family and children, I would have to appease bosses and clients. On a day-to-day basis, it would seem that I was perpetually going from service to service. That made me wonder whether I really have choice and power over my own life, or whether I will merely be a servant to “many masters” as Mary Catherine Bateson suggests in her essay “Multiple Lives.” And if I really do live to serve, how will I render my services fully to satisfy both if I cannot take my husband to my workplace everyday and if I cannot compile company reports while chauffeuring little kings and queens to soccer practice? It is a common concern.

In “Multiple Lives,” Bateson creates a powerful visual metaphor of this torn sentiment. She calls our attention to an Arabic ode that describes a mother distracted during love-making by her baby’s crying: “When he cried from behind her, she turned away to him with a half, and under me half of her was not turned” (119). This mother symbolizes women everywhere who simultaneously endeavor to please their lovers and themselves while still serving as care-givers to their children. In modern days, this would characterize only one side of what she would have to do, for she would have to spread herself amongst her husband, her family, and her professional career. I believe Bateson’s “multiple lives” are really multiple servitudes. The woman in the poem must care for the baby not because he commands her but because she is tied by the bond of maternal love. As a lover, she is directly and even physically responsible for pleasing her partner—as well as herself, but whereas sex or dinner dates occur in limited time periods, she is indentured to being a mother at all times of the day, seven days a week. And if that were not enough, the modern woman must work at a career where there are certain needs for her and expectations of her, fulfilling duties at work as well as at home. Bateson writes that despite the division and challenge that comes with working with a family, this sort of strife is a source of admiration and “fascination” for her (129). She rejects reducing multiple service roles into numerical variables and condensing multiple lives into mathematical formulae. Her view is that “just as the capacity for sex or nursing or exercise is not governed by an arithmetic of addition and subtraction, so the possibility of combining these activities should be looked at in terms of synergy rather than competition” (129). She would regard the working parents of the baby in the stroller as Renaissance men and women “who multiply their spheres of sensitivity and caring,” cultivating their multiple roles into multiple lives (141). Bateson believes professional and domestic life should not counter one another, but should be two sides in this “synergy” leading to a single, fuller, more enriched life.

But there is another master we are encouraged by our culture to obey—the self. Commercials, magazines and talk-shows often call my attention to my own needs and desires, enticing me never to relinquish Oprah’s inner “spirit” or Dr. Phil’s “authentic self,” even when caring for others. In America, I am often told that I should value personal happiness over material goods and anything else—that my life must ultimately serve me. I am to live to be happy. I am taught to study and work at something that I love and that personal relationships are to be valued only when they furnish joy and happiness in my life. Indeed, the self has much importance, and it exerts its role as master even when we serve others. After all, there is by definition, a servant whenever there is a master, a parent whenever there is a child, an employer when there is an employee. But as essayist Andre Aciman would argue, the self can serve itself even without a relationship with another person just by engaging in “mnemonic arbitrage,” the act of storing the present into past memory purely so that in the future, it can produce emotional profit when it is recalled and enjoyed. Poetically, Aciman essentially argues that he is the only master of his experiences and the sole investor in his happiness, building “on air, the way futures traders speculate on margin” and grounding “the present on the past, and the future on the past recaptured” (104). This is especially clear at the end of the essay when he proclaims that “it was not even this moment, or this place [...] that mattered anymore but how I’d woven my desire to live and be happy with each, and that even if nothing were to happen in my life to make me happy, the very act of thinking back on things could” (116). Why else do we spend money on camera and film when vacationing to exotic lands? Why else do we force ourselves to remember the exact time and place when our first kisses occurred? What else is nostalgia? According to Aciman, we remember so that we can reminisce in the future, so that we can employ memory to serve our happiness.

Judging by his essay “Courage and Participation,” Paul Tillich would agree with Aciman on the power of self-servitude, but he would have other thoughts on self-sufficiency. For Tillich, “the power of being the individual self is partly identical with the power of being of his world, and conversely” (246). In fact, even the mere idea of self is dependent on “the continuous encounter with other persons” and having the “courage to affirm [oneself] as a part of the community in which [one] participates” (248). This would go counter to Aciman’s trust in himself as the ultimate creator of his happiness. Tillich would argue that he could not even exist as a being, that he would be “threatened by non-being” if he did not continually incorporate himself in an interdependent community (246).

I find that aspects from both Aciman and Tillich’s philosophies resound and weave together in my own life when I participate in society with the purpose of serving my own interests. In many ways, I am a servant to my professors and school. I have required courses with objectives and expectations that I must fulfill whether I want to or not. Students like me are most familiar with our master, the most redoubtable GPA. Many of my academic decisions revolve around maintaining this tiny two-digit number. This figure has been inculcated in my mind to be the little majesty that I serve with long hours of studying and worrying about its wellbeing. And yet, it is ultimately I who grant it so much importance and power, much as those parents love allowed the baby at the Met to gain so much control over their lives. But why do I serve my academic career? Education will allow me to find a satisfying job. Educated, I can achieve my own goals and desires. This might mean working under bosses and for clients, but there is a personal reward in the form of money as well as a sense of accomplishment. Even in performing voluntary community service, I admit my purpose is not purely to be a good Samaritan; I am like many of us who are perfectly aware of the inescapable gratification and joy that helping other people will grant us. Hence, whether the outcome is for financial or emotional profit, in our day-to-day life, we often serve ourselves even while serving others.

I agree that a symbiotic approach must be taken towards balancing, or rather, mixing my many roles in life, but there is an important question of measurement. If according to Bateson, I should not calculate my efforts for work and for life with any sort of arithmetic, how am I supposed to incorporate all these roles: personal and professional, individual self and community participant, master and servant?

One approach was first introduced to me by (who else but )a TV talk-show host who encouraged frenzied mothers to take time out for themselves so that they could be better, refreshed, and healthier homemakers. Of course I will work hard at the office to provide for my family, but I found this fact very interesting—that in pleasuring ourselves by taking bubble baths and personal vacations, we could be in a better emotional and physical state to serve others than if we labored 14 hours a day in cubicles. And after all, the family—which seems external to the self—is in fact, an extension of the self. When I get engaged, my decision will hardly be based on how in need of a wife my fiancé seems to be, but rather on how much I love him judging from my own perceptions of his personality and the institution of marriage. And if these perceptions are an extension of my own personality, my future children will also be in a sense, an extension of my self. When I have a child, I will not only produce a physical life-form from my body, I will also be giving birth to a person under the influence of my moral values who depends on me to give it basic necessities, love, and a good upbringing. In this relationship, there are elements of both Tillich and Aciman’s views on self. I certainly will have the “courage to take pain upon” myself for the well-being of my family even if it is the “lasting test in the life of most groups,” death (Tillich 250). As for emotional profit, Aciman would point out that perhaps my service to people in family and relationships is not unconditional after all. As morbid as it sounds, we are all emotional mercenaries who are indeed compensated for our preparedness to go so far as to die for loved ones. And although those demanding children do not reward us with six-digit salaries, they provide us with love, sense of purpose, and (if we are so fortunate) appreciation. In this way, my well-being is most dependent on Tillich’s idea of community; that is to say, how I make myself happy is most related to how I act as a servant to others. The many challenges and relationships are not only supplements to a more fulfilling life as Bateson says; they are also indispensable parts of what my life essentially is. Even today, my “section of reality in which...[I]...participate immediately” would be completely meaningless (and not just less interesting) without my family, friends, and teachers (Tillich 250).

Still, the word “servant” is possibly troubling for some because it connotes inferiority and complacency. Indeed, I am a master of my own parents as well as myself in the sense that I serve my self and am capable of “mnemonic arbitrage” (Aciman 104). But I am sure my idea of servitude may sound complacent or even anachronistic to many. Perhaps this idea has a basis in my ethnic roots. In China, it is accepted that group mentality rules and that devotion to elders is not an extra-personal quality but an act of (filial) piety. In the modern American society, the individual’s power and volition are valued in all aspects of our culture. The idea of voluntarily “serving many masters” could seem negative and un-American. But in reality, everyone serves others consciously or unconsciously. Even the most feminist career woman must acquiesce to the wishes of some superior. Now suppose this woman wishes to have a close-knit family without sacrificing her goal of reaching the top position in her firm. If her plan is to work equally long and hard as if she were without a family, her goal would be almost impossible to attain. She must compromise at least a portion of her career-minded philosophy to her desire to be an around-the-clock mother—that is, she must divide her time to serve two masters even if they are both contained within herself. But for me, it is a reality that I cherish as much as Bateson welcomes the conflict between work and life. I see it as a challenge and means to a richer life. I welcome my different servant roles not because I feel inferior or disposed to be subservient; I do it partly because I am, as I have said, compensated. For example, I try to fulfill my parents’ wishes and desires for me to make the most out of my life, and I oblige their moral guidance even when I sometimes do not agree, because as an 18-year-old, I still trust their wisdom and love for me. In the future, when I am employed in a company or firm, I can only hope to take the ethics and morals they have taught me to the office.

And although I have the courage to uphold a degree of filial piety, and still feel at ease with my self-esteem, I do it for more than emotional rewards. In being a servant of parents, friends, professors, grades, my own ideals and dreams, I have more than simply enriched my life as Bateson would say; I have more than arrived at being my whole self by being a societal participant as Tillich would insist, and my services go beyond serving my future happiness with past experiences as Aciman would advise. There is a truer and more powerful drive than enrichment, sense of self, or happiness that propels service to many. It is the force of necessity—sometimes called love, sometimes instinct, or morality. Whatever it is termed, this is what keeps parents at home with their children while their office phone rings, and it is what keeps children listening to their parents while their peers and hormones give a different opinion. I must keep on excelling in college, caring about others, improving myself, constantly obtaining, abstaining, sacrificing, cherishing—not because I have committed mutiny against the individualistic forces that drive the American psyche (in fact, acquiescing to only one cultural ideal be it however egotistical is an act of servitude in itself), but because I have to figure out who I am. It is beautifully ironic that by way of these services to multiple masters, I can still serve myself and be happy with my life. Indeed, this idea of servitude is hardly a consequence of weakness or debasement; it is born of necessity out of the deepest needs of the self .

Works Cited

Aciman, Andre. “Arbitrage.” The Advanced College Essay: Business and Its Publics. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Denice Martone. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002. 99-116.

Bateson, Mary Catherine. “Multiple Lives.” The Advanced College Essay: Business and Its Publics. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Denice Martone. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002. 117-142.

Tillich, Paul. “Courage and Participation?” The Advanced College Essay: Business and Its Publics. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Denice Martone. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002. 243-250.

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