The Case For Nature (vs Nurture)

When I was young, my dad had a fight with his broth­er over open­ing a con­ve­nience store next to a phar­ma­cy (my uncle is a phar­ma­cist) in a plaza that my grand­moth­er owned. Both types of stores have lots of com­pet­ing prod­ucts, so the argu­ment was about who would be the one to open their store. I guess my dad won, because he bought the con­ve­nience store and ran it for quite a few years.

After that, I did­n’t see my uncle or his fam­i­ly at all. For so long that I com­plete­ly for­got that I had a cousin, Crystal.

When my grand­moth­er came from Hong Kong to vis­it one year, she reunit­ed the fam­i­lies again, and I saw them for the first time in a long while1.

At that time, the pop­u­lar thing to do was play cards. I had the rep­u­ta­tion as being the fastest, most dex­ter­ous deal­er out of all the kids. But when I went over to my uncle’s house one day and we were play­ing Asshole, I noticed Crystal deal­ing exact­ly the same way I did, except faster, with­out even pay­ing atten­tion.

It was at that point that I real­ized, “This per­son is my fam­i­ly”.

The only oth­er time I had such a stark real­iza­tion was dur­ing my trip to Hong Kong ear­li­er this year. At an inter­na­tion­al buf­fet, we grabbed some dessert from the cart and ordered some tea. My uncle, aunt (both sib­lings of my dad), and I were sit­ting at the table, with deli­cious pas­tries in front of us, but none of us were touch­ing them. When some­one asked my uncle why he was­n’t eat­ing his dessert yet, he said that he has to have tea with his sweets. And it turns out that was the exact same rea­son me and my aunt were wait­ing too. One of these lit­tle quirks that one nev­er expects some­one else to have, and some­times we’re even ridiculed for it, and yet here we were, three peo­ple doing the exact same thing for the exact same rea­son.

I gen­er­al­ly believe that humans are more like­ly a prod­uct of their expe­ri­ences, with a touch of inher­it­ed qual­i­ties too. After all, I’m almost noth­ing like either of my par­ents. It was only these two expe­ri­ences that made me admit that there’s a lit­tle more of us that’s inher­it­ed, that we’re a prod­uct of our genes, than I would have believed.

  1. I even dis­cov­ered that I had a new cousin, Darren, who was Crystal’s broth­er. []

2 comments

  1. That’s so neat, espe­cial­ly the tea. Wish I had more con­tact with any fam­i­ly to dis­cov­er more of that kind of innate thing… but all so far away.

    There is one genet­ic trait I seem to have land­ed; my moth­er used to com­plain that my dad could build just about any­thing, but it was nev­er a finesse job; always just func­tion­al & a bit clunky. (But they were done quick­ly!) She could­n’t con­vey to him the dif­fer­ence, and upon see­ing his fin­ished things she was always stuck between being grate­ful and hold­ing her tongue about the rest.

    In the­ater, my skills in the­ater were a blend of them. If del­i­cate up-close work was nec­es­sary, I always had to catch myself and be super care­ful, it did­n’t come easy, but I heard my Mom in my head. The objects I did best on were Dad-like: dra­mat­ic, big, and safe view­ing at 20 paces (about the­ater prosce­ni­um dis­tance).

    • It’s actu­al­ly the fact that I don’t have con­tact with this fam­i­ly often that made the real­iza­tion of our sim­i­lar­i­ties all the most stark. Otherwise, I think I would have grown accus­tomed to them.

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