Wednesday, November 02, 2005
A eulogy for my brother John
On November 17, 1999, my brother John Lee passed away at the age of 47. His life was not simple and in the end many things remained undone and unsaid. I had the privilege of delivering the eulogy at his memorial service. Enough time has passed now and I'm comfortable in sharing these words and thoughts with others again ...
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
Eight years ago, at the reception to my wedding, my brother John was invited to make a speech. In classic John Lee style, without preparation, and impassioned by the spirit of the day, he delivered a speech that melted the hearts of every woman – and even a few men (including myself) in the hall. As part of his speech, he recounted his memories of the day that I was born – June 22, 1963 – he was 10 years old at the time. On that day, the city of Seoul experienced a warm summer rain and John served up the explanation that the rain was the tears of the Gods who wept out of the joy of my birth.
On Tuesday, November 9th, at 11:15 PM Halifax time, John passed peacefully from this world. The weather in Halifax was beautiful all day with mild temperatures and sunshine. Almost to the minute of his departure, however, it began to rain. Strangely, cutting through all of the grief that was overwhelming me, a warm feeling persisted. It was clear to me that Gods were once again weeping for joy … that my brother was on his way to join them.
This final leg concluded a life long journey that took this uniquely gifted, complex, and gentle man from difficult circumstances that would have crushed the best of us to the highest achievements of the human spirit.
John was born Ee Youn-Sun in Seoul, Korea on November 7, 1952. He was the first child in our family. From the very beginning, challenge was his constant companion. He was born into a society that was at the time being ripped apart by war. Unthinkable for most of us here today … unbearable for those who were there. Out of this inhospitable environment, John somehow emerged and was recognized quickly as a highly intelligent and intensely passionate person. Even as a child, he exhibited a great interest and passion for history, world cultures, literature, and the fine arts. At a very early age, John discovered his calling in life … he wanted nothing more than to understand the wonders of our world and to contribute to our body of knowledge. At that time, when most boys wanted to become the President or a powerful general, John professed a singular goal: to become fluent in five languages and to earn five PhD’s. He was very different. Today, in this country, this difference would be celebrated and nurtured. At that time, in that country, this difference presented this extraordinary boy immense challenges.
John struggled to deal with his intellectual potential. He was neither athletic nor boastful and as such did not easily fit in with the other kids. Rather than attempting to become more popular or feigning a different persona, John heeded his calling and began quietly, and diligently building his dreams. By the time he was a teenager, he was well on his way to realizing these dreams.
On December 5, 1970, our family emigrated to Canada. My father had been here for about a year building the foundation for a new life. John, then 18, was charged with the responsibility of guiding a part of our journey to this foreign land. Our trip took us from Seoul to Tokyo then to Vancouver and finally Toronto. For the first leg, my mother, who spoke Japanese, was able to guide us. We landed in Vancouver on an orange Canadian Pacific Airlines DC-9 stretch jet. The meal on that flight was this strange piece of beef coated in an unpalatable, salty brown sauce. It was raining that day. The instant that we landed in British Columbia, John promptly assumed his role as our guide. Having taught himself English as a child, he confidently navigated the bureaucracy of immigration and got us safely and uneventfully to Toronto.
In Canada, John began thriving in this strange society – a society that values individual achievement while providing a social framework that offers access to opportunities that were unthinkable in the country we came from. John entered the high school system into Grade 12 at Downsview Secondary School. Within a year and a half, this ambitious teenager, employing a language that he had only studied through books, managed to gain entrance to the world-renowned University of Toronto. In 1986, he broke new ground by becoming the first Korean-born person in Canada to have attended a Canadian high school and achieve a PhD at a Canadian university. Marriage proposals from Korean parents across the country poured in.
By this time, John achieved his first childhood goal. He was fluent in Korean, English, French, Japanese, and Mandarin. In addition, it was not unusual to see John reading books written in German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, and many other languages. Regarding his second goal, I’m sure that many of his academic colleagues here today would attest to the fact that his dissertation was worthy of five PhDs.
Following his studies at U of T, John was invited to continue his research at the prestigious Kyoto University in Japan. Subsequently, he accepted a faculty position in the History Department at St. Mary’s University in Halifax where he spent the next 14 years toiling with the Herculean task of building an institutional competence in East Asian studies at this modest liberal arts college in a place as far away from the far east as one can get. At the time of his passing he held the rank of Associate Professor. He also held the position of Honourary Adjunct Professor at Dalhousie University.
The foregoing is an unsatisfyingly brief account of John’s remarkable life. His achievements notwithstanding, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to let this day pass without sharing with you the impact that he’s had on people.
It has been nothing short of overwhelming on the expressions of support and grief that my family has received over the past few days from John’s closest friends. John was always a very private person and we in the family were often not privy to many of his most personal thoughts, hopes, and fears. I was very heartened discover that he had found confidence and comfort among his friends.
The constant theme among of the communications that I’ve had with his friends and colleagues is that of his struggle to reconcile his immense intellectual potential and idealism with an imperfect world. On very good days, his idealism shined brightly and inspired us all. Although there are countless stories that one could tell of such days, the ones that are most vivid in my mind centre around casual drawings that he would create on the TV guide at home. Among the many talents that he had, John had the gift of being able to draw. Using a fountain pen, he would create magical images of people in romantic, often near-regal vestments affixed in proud confident poses. The level of detail and precision was breathtaking in each image. Their faces were highly stylized and perfected. They looked neither Asian, nor Caucasian, nor any other race … they were simply perfect. When you saw these images you couldn’t help but to escape to another place … a perfect world where such people lived and lived out their dreams. Today I look at my own children and often I see my brother’s creations in their young, hopeful faces.
In many ways, I am learning that he has had similar impact on those who had the privilege knowing him. Several of his friends have commented on singular moments when his brilliance was almost blinding with clarity or stinging with insight. These moments have been etched into these fortunate lives and I believe they are all better scholars and people through their interactions.
In many ways, John’s life was about reconciliation. In his personal life, he struggled to strike balance between his unique offerings and a world that was, very often unreceptive, or worse, indifferent to the treasures of his spirit. In his studies, he strove to teach us about the complexities and subtleties inherent in the interaction among the great schools of thought: East vs. West, capitalist vs. socialist, technology vs. the arts, philosophical vs. historical, systemic vs. individual, man vs. woman. Since his passing, I’ve had a chance to get a taste of his academic work as we tried to collect his personal affects and papers. Based on his work, and the written comments of his peers, it was clear that John was uniquely blessed to take on such intellectual challenge. Through his linguistic talents alone, he brought clarity into many areas that had been muddied by intellectual imperialism and pretentious scholarship. His published reviews of the work of his peers embodied all of the best elements of the great Western tradition of academic research. They were articulate, purposeful, apolitical and honest assessments of the contribution of a peer’s work to the body of knowledge.
Until this week, I never realized how much influence my brother’s life has had on my own. Although we were not outwardly close, I was deeply impacted by his example. As with many families, he, as the eldest child, establish the standards for the rest of us to follow. Unlike most families, however, John’s standards were never about grades, or money, or titles, or any other convenient metric. It was about passion. It was about dignity and integrity. It was about achieving the ultimate forms of knowledge.
I took the easy path. I took an academic route that guaranteed material comfort and instant recognition. I pursued degrees at the breeding ground for modern Canadian technocrats in Waterloo and though, in following the footsteps of my brother, I went the distance, I don’t believe I was ever completely faithful to or appreciative of the significance and privilege of the doctoral degree. My current life as a corporate citizen obliges me to further stray from the ideals.
Somehow though, in spite of the strong pressures from our modern world to conform and converge, I discovered that I had an unusual capacity to enjoy the challenge of intellectual debate and the company of other strongly opinionated people. Although my specialization does not lend itself to the liveliest of debate, I do fondly remember many hours in smoky bars passionately defending points of views not typical of us neo-conservatives with my work colleagues, while the other suits looked on with a look of something between curiosity and disbelief. We would, within the much more modest limits of our intellectual capacity, attempt to reconcile the fundamental extremes of Rand vs. Rousseau, Plato vs. Aristole, right of centre vs. a bit further right of centre, Oakville vs. Burlington.
I am profoundly humbled when I compare my own feeble attempts at scholarship with what John strove to achieve. One of his closest friends informed me that he used to frequently describe himself as a “marginal man, belonging to a marginal race, working in a marginal field, in a marginal university, in a marginal country”. To this unfortunate comment, I can only say, John, the mainstream is not what it’s cracked up to be. The line between margin and frontier is a fine one. It takes courage to get there and more importantly to stay there while others disrespectfully look on. The mainstream provides society the bulk … it is the margin that offers shape. The mainstream attacks … the margin defends. John came into this world in the midst of a great political war, was quickly conscripted to fight a greater spiritual and intellectual war, a war he fought valiantly, and sometimes alone, all of his life.
It is ironic that I composed this eulogy on Remembrance Day. The weather is a bit colder today and there is a hint of snow outside.
I don’t believe that we should remember John as a casualty of his war who through heroic efforts somehow brought a greater level of piece, intellectual or otherwise, to us. On the contrary, I believe that his work has greatly escalated the war and has pushed resolution even further out of reach. But this war is the only truly “just” war. The more conflict we generate, the better we become as a world. Increasing the number of troops we conscript to fight the great battles results in better understanding and tolerance. I am very heartened and comforted by the fact that so many of John’s friends have a deep understanding of this war and have committed their lives to its service.
Often in services such as this, people speak of love for the deceased and love for each other. Love, in the way that most of us speak of it today, whether it’s fraternal love, filial love, love of a partner, or religious love, has always seemed to me, very much a product of Western tradition. I have the sense that John’s highly developed mind struggled to adopt this deeply emotional concept. For me, as well, this single compact word is an oversimplification the universe of positive emotions that one can feel for another person … that we feel for John. In fact, I don’t believe that any of the world’s languages offer any suitable alternative. Our poets, who have the greatest reach into emotion through words can only move us to appreciation. They cannot explain. It is precisely this paradox that John dedicated his life to resolving. He more than anyone else, possibly in the entire world, understood the difficulty of expressing complex human emotions and thoughts within the choking confines of our languages. He toiled relentlessly to build the necessary linguistic bridges … to help us understand and celebrate the commonalities and differences among great ideas and thoughts. For this, we express our gratitude, respect, admiration, envy, and love.
I want to conclude by reciting the lyrics to a song that I learned in the choir in high school. For some reason the song, Le Temps de Vivre (the time to live) by Georges Moustaki, has followed me throughout my life. Over the past few years it has become increasingly significant for me. I think John would have been very happy to know that it is this song that has found a permanent place in my heart rather than Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. I think he would also be quite amused that I would attempt to recite French verses in public. I’m certain he would be completely indignant at my feeble attempt to interpret and translate the verses into English.
Nous prendrons le temps de vivre
D'être libres, mon amour
Sans projets et sans habitudes
Nous pourrons rêver notre vie
Viens, je suis là, je n'attends que toi
Tout est possible, tout est permis
Viens, écoute ces mots qui vibrent
Sur les murs du mois de mai
Ils nous disent la certitude
Que tout peut changer un jour
Viens, je suis là, je n'attends que toi
Tout est possible, tout est permis
Nous prendrons le temps de vivre
D'être libres, mon amour
Sans projets et sans habitudes
Nous pourrons rêver notre vie
Georges Moustaki
We will take the time to live
To be free, my love
Without purpose, without prejudice
We will dream out our life
Come … I am there
I will not wait
Everything is possible, everything is allowed
Come, listen to these words that live
In the heart of May
They teach us with passion
That all can change one day
Come … I am there
I will not wait
Everything is possible, everything is allowed
We will take the time to live
To be free, my love
Without purpose, without prejudice
We will dream out our lives
Sleep well John.
Read more
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
Eight years ago, at the reception to my wedding, my brother John was invited to make a speech. In classic John Lee style, without preparation, and impassioned by the spirit of the day, he delivered a speech that melted the hearts of every woman – and even a few men (including myself) in the hall. As part of his speech, he recounted his memories of the day that I was born – June 22, 1963 – he was 10 years old at the time. On that day, the city of Seoul experienced a warm summer rain and John served up the explanation that the rain was the tears of the Gods who wept out of the joy of my birth.
On Tuesday, November 9th, at 11:15 PM Halifax time, John passed peacefully from this world. The weather in Halifax was beautiful all day with mild temperatures and sunshine. Almost to the minute of his departure, however, it began to rain. Strangely, cutting through all of the grief that was overwhelming me, a warm feeling persisted. It was clear to me that Gods were once again weeping for joy … that my brother was on his way to join them.
This final leg concluded a life long journey that took this uniquely gifted, complex, and gentle man from difficult circumstances that would have crushed the best of us to the highest achievements of the human spirit.
John was born Ee Youn-Sun in Seoul, Korea on November 7, 1952. He was the first child in our family. From the very beginning, challenge was his constant companion. He was born into a society that was at the time being ripped apart by war. Unthinkable for most of us here today … unbearable for those who were there. Out of this inhospitable environment, John somehow emerged and was recognized quickly as a highly intelligent and intensely passionate person. Even as a child, he exhibited a great interest and passion for history, world cultures, literature, and the fine arts. At a very early age, John discovered his calling in life … he wanted nothing more than to understand the wonders of our world and to contribute to our body of knowledge. At that time, when most boys wanted to become the President or a powerful general, John professed a singular goal: to become fluent in five languages and to earn five PhD’s. He was very different. Today, in this country, this difference would be celebrated and nurtured. At that time, in that country, this difference presented this extraordinary boy immense challenges.
John struggled to deal with his intellectual potential. He was neither athletic nor boastful and as such did not easily fit in with the other kids. Rather than attempting to become more popular or feigning a different persona, John heeded his calling and began quietly, and diligently building his dreams. By the time he was a teenager, he was well on his way to realizing these dreams.
On December 5, 1970, our family emigrated to Canada. My father had been here for about a year building the foundation for a new life. John, then 18, was charged with the responsibility of guiding a part of our journey to this foreign land. Our trip took us from Seoul to Tokyo then to Vancouver and finally Toronto. For the first leg, my mother, who spoke Japanese, was able to guide us. We landed in Vancouver on an orange Canadian Pacific Airlines DC-9 stretch jet. The meal on that flight was this strange piece of beef coated in an unpalatable, salty brown sauce. It was raining that day. The instant that we landed in British Columbia, John promptly assumed his role as our guide. Having taught himself English as a child, he confidently navigated the bureaucracy of immigration and got us safely and uneventfully to Toronto.
In Canada, John began thriving in this strange society – a society that values individual achievement while providing a social framework that offers access to opportunities that were unthinkable in the country we came from. John entered the high school system into Grade 12 at Downsview Secondary School. Within a year and a half, this ambitious teenager, employing a language that he had only studied through books, managed to gain entrance to the world-renowned University of Toronto. In 1986, he broke new ground by becoming the first Korean-born person in Canada to have attended a Canadian high school and achieve a PhD at a Canadian university. Marriage proposals from Korean parents across the country poured in.
By this time, John achieved his first childhood goal. He was fluent in Korean, English, French, Japanese, and Mandarin. In addition, it was not unusual to see John reading books written in German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, and many other languages. Regarding his second goal, I’m sure that many of his academic colleagues here today would attest to the fact that his dissertation was worthy of five PhDs.
Following his studies at U of T, John was invited to continue his research at the prestigious Kyoto University in Japan. Subsequently, he accepted a faculty position in the History Department at St. Mary’s University in Halifax where he spent the next 14 years toiling with the Herculean task of building an institutional competence in East Asian studies at this modest liberal arts college in a place as far away from the far east as one can get. At the time of his passing he held the rank of Associate Professor. He also held the position of Honourary Adjunct Professor at Dalhousie University.
The foregoing is an unsatisfyingly brief account of John’s remarkable life. His achievements notwithstanding, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to let this day pass without sharing with you the impact that he’s had on people.
It has been nothing short of overwhelming on the expressions of support and grief that my family has received over the past few days from John’s closest friends. John was always a very private person and we in the family were often not privy to many of his most personal thoughts, hopes, and fears. I was very heartened discover that he had found confidence and comfort among his friends.
The constant theme among of the communications that I’ve had with his friends and colleagues is that of his struggle to reconcile his immense intellectual potential and idealism with an imperfect world. On very good days, his idealism shined brightly and inspired us all. Although there are countless stories that one could tell of such days, the ones that are most vivid in my mind centre around casual drawings that he would create on the TV guide at home. Among the many talents that he had, John had the gift of being able to draw. Using a fountain pen, he would create magical images of people in romantic, often near-regal vestments affixed in proud confident poses. The level of detail and precision was breathtaking in each image. Their faces were highly stylized and perfected. They looked neither Asian, nor Caucasian, nor any other race … they were simply perfect. When you saw these images you couldn’t help but to escape to another place … a perfect world where such people lived and lived out their dreams. Today I look at my own children and often I see my brother’s creations in their young, hopeful faces.
In many ways, I am learning that he has had similar impact on those who had the privilege knowing him. Several of his friends have commented on singular moments when his brilliance was almost blinding with clarity or stinging with insight. These moments have been etched into these fortunate lives and I believe they are all better scholars and people through their interactions.
In many ways, John’s life was about reconciliation. In his personal life, he struggled to strike balance between his unique offerings and a world that was, very often unreceptive, or worse, indifferent to the treasures of his spirit. In his studies, he strove to teach us about the complexities and subtleties inherent in the interaction among the great schools of thought: East vs. West, capitalist vs. socialist, technology vs. the arts, philosophical vs. historical, systemic vs. individual, man vs. woman. Since his passing, I’ve had a chance to get a taste of his academic work as we tried to collect his personal affects and papers. Based on his work, and the written comments of his peers, it was clear that John was uniquely blessed to take on such intellectual challenge. Through his linguistic talents alone, he brought clarity into many areas that had been muddied by intellectual imperialism and pretentious scholarship. His published reviews of the work of his peers embodied all of the best elements of the great Western tradition of academic research. They were articulate, purposeful, apolitical and honest assessments of the contribution of a peer’s work to the body of knowledge.
Until this week, I never realized how much influence my brother’s life has had on my own. Although we were not outwardly close, I was deeply impacted by his example. As with many families, he, as the eldest child, establish the standards for the rest of us to follow. Unlike most families, however, John’s standards were never about grades, or money, or titles, or any other convenient metric. It was about passion. It was about dignity and integrity. It was about achieving the ultimate forms of knowledge.
I took the easy path. I took an academic route that guaranteed material comfort and instant recognition. I pursued degrees at the breeding ground for modern Canadian technocrats in Waterloo and though, in following the footsteps of my brother, I went the distance, I don’t believe I was ever completely faithful to or appreciative of the significance and privilege of the doctoral degree. My current life as a corporate citizen obliges me to further stray from the ideals.
Somehow though, in spite of the strong pressures from our modern world to conform and converge, I discovered that I had an unusual capacity to enjoy the challenge of intellectual debate and the company of other strongly opinionated people. Although my specialization does not lend itself to the liveliest of debate, I do fondly remember many hours in smoky bars passionately defending points of views not typical of us neo-conservatives with my work colleagues, while the other suits looked on with a look of something between curiosity and disbelief. We would, within the much more modest limits of our intellectual capacity, attempt to reconcile the fundamental extremes of Rand vs. Rousseau, Plato vs. Aristole, right of centre vs. a bit further right of centre, Oakville vs. Burlington.
I am profoundly humbled when I compare my own feeble attempts at scholarship with what John strove to achieve. One of his closest friends informed me that he used to frequently describe himself as a “marginal man, belonging to a marginal race, working in a marginal field, in a marginal university, in a marginal country”. To this unfortunate comment, I can only say, John, the mainstream is not what it’s cracked up to be. The line between margin and frontier is a fine one. It takes courage to get there and more importantly to stay there while others disrespectfully look on. The mainstream provides society the bulk … it is the margin that offers shape. The mainstream attacks … the margin defends. John came into this world in the midst of a great political war, was quickly conscripted to fight a greater spiritual and intellectual war, a war he fought valiantly, and sometimes alone, all of his life.
It is ironic that I composed this eulogy on Remembrance Day. The weather is a bit colder today and there is a hint of snow outside.
I don’t believe that we should remember John as a casualty of his war who through heroic efforts somehow brought a greater level of piece, intellectual or otherwise, to us. On the contrary, I believe that his work has greatly escalated the war and has pushed resolution even further out of reach. But this war is the only truly “just” war. The more conflict we generate, the better we become as a world. Increasing the number of troops we conscript to fight the great battles results in better understanding and tolerance. I am very heartened and comforted by the fact that so many of John’s friends have a deep understanding of this war and have committed their lives to its service.
Often in services such as this, people speak of love for the deceased and love for each other. Love, in the way that most of us speak of it today, whether it’s fraternal love, filial love, love of a partner, or religious love, has always seemed to me, very much a product of Western tradition. I have the sense that John’s highly developed mind struggled to adopt this deeply emotional concept. For me, as well, this single compact word is an oversimplification the universe of positive emotions that one can feel for another person … that we feel for John. In fact, I don’t believe that any of the world’s languages offer any suitable alternative. Our poets, who have the greatest reach into emotion through words can only move us to appreciation. They cannot explain. It is precisely this paradox that John dedicated his life to resolving. He more than anyone else, possibly in the entire world, understood the difficulty of expressing complex human emotions and thoughts within the choking confines of our languages. He toiled relentlessly to build the necessary linguistic bridges … to help us understand and celebrate the commonalities and differences among great ideas and thoughts. For this, we express our gratitude, respect, admiration, envy, and love.
I want to conclude by reciting the lyrics to a song that I learned in the choir in high school. For some reason the song, Le Temps de Vivre (the time to live) by Georges Moustaki, has followed me throughout my life. Over the past few years it has become increasingly significant for me. I think John would have been very happy to know that it is this song that has found a permanent place in my heart rather than Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. I think he would also be quite amused that I would attempt to recite French verses in public. I’m certain he would be completely indignant at my feeble attempt to interpret and translate the verses into English.
Nous prendrons le temps de vivre
D'être libres, mon amour
Sans projets et sans habitudes
Nous pourrons rêver notre vie
Viens, je suis là, je n'attends que toi
Tout est possible, tout est permis
Viens, écoute ces mots qui vibrent
Sur les murs du mois de mai
Ils nous disent la certitude
Que tout peut changer un jour
Viens, je suis là, je n'attends que toi
Tout est possible, tout est permis
Nous prendrons le temps de vivre
D'être libres, mon amour
Sans projets et sans habitudes
Nous pourrons rêver notre vie
Georges Moustaki
We will take the time to live
To be free, my love
Without purpose, without prejudice
We will dream out our life
Come … I am there
I will not wait
Everything is possible, everything is allowed
Come, listen to these words that live
In the heart of May
They teach us with passion
That all can change one day
Come … I am there
I will not wait
Everything is possible, everything is allowed
We will take the time to live
To be free, my love
Without purpose, without prejudice
We will dream out our lives
Sleep well John.
Read more
