Work ethic

Eight years back in Canada, and most of the reverse culture shock has faded. So have the memories — or at least the complicated ones. What remains is mostly romanticized: fruit stands on every corner, the food, more food, the general modernity of life in Taiwan and China.But twenty years shapes you in ways that don't fade as quickly. Lately I've been thinking about work — specifically about how I assumed leaving would help me escape a toxic relationship with it. Everyone worked there. School kids ground themselves (and their pencils) down just like their parents. Not everyone, of course, but the people around me pushed themselves to a kind of principled exhaustion. There was always something to prove, money to make, BMW to buy. One of Sheryl's former students is visiting us this fall — she just finished her second Master's, this one at Yale. It might have been her, or her sister, who studied for an entire year just to raise her grade point average by one point, enough to qualify for a…