One of the benefits of being in convalescence after a serious disease and having your driver license taken away by the government for the same reason is that you have all the time on your hands to read the books you never could before and, when your eyes are sore from paper reading, you can passively watch all the movies on Netflix. For my non-American friends, Netflix is a movie rental company from which you could stream movies over the internet or have them send you DVDs through the postal service.

By chance I rented a movie called Twist of Fate starring Toni Braxton and David Julian Hirsh. It was a picture made for TV and presumably done with a fairly low budget. In spite of that, it was very good and I personally would give it 4 stars out of 5. It’s about a young Orthodox Jewish father who witnessed the horrific murder of his wife and his three young children on a bus by a stranger-lunatic.

He was so shocked and distraught afterward that he left home without telling his mother or siblings and wandered around the country until he ended up sleeping a night on the lawn next to a Christian church in a black  neighborhood. A black boy, out of his pure heart that had not been polluted by unnecessary social stigmas, took pity on the man and gave him a sandwich to eat. The boy’s single mother did not approve of the child’s behavior for fear that the homeless man might harm the child. The boy’s grand-uncle, who was affiliated with the church, however, offered the white stranger an unused room in the church as temporary shelter.

The white man’s name was Jacob. Back home he was a carpenter and a cantor for his church choir. After he moved into this new church, he started doing repairs for it voluntarily. Since he was so good at it the pastor let him stay on. One night Jacob went into the church and played on the piano a new song he just wrote in memory of his family. The boy’s mother, Nina, who lived next door, was moved by it and started to sing along with him.

I don’t want to spoil the story for you, but you could probably guess the fuzzy chemistry brewing between Nina and Jacob.

This otherwise fairly straight forward but sweet love story was unique in one way – i.e., it was about some black people taking care of a white man. And the common thread among the people involved was the love of their deity and humanity – even if they were of different skin pigmentation and religions per se.

The title of today’s article is not my creation. I plagiarized it from a man with the name of Rodney King. King was a common place criminal who robbed a 7-11-type store in Los Angeles in 1991. He was chased down on the street by a group of policemen who repeatedly hit him with their batons, fists and kicks. The whole beating was videotaped by a concerned citizen and the footage later sent to news stations. The video itself and the subsequent acquittal of the police officers by a state court led to huge riots, during which over 50 people were killed. (Some of the officers were later convicted of excessive force by a federal court and incarcerated.)

This case would have been a non-event but for the fact that it led to a racial uprising with deadly results. What was more surprising was the forgiving attitude of King himself. Although of questionable moral character and low education, he never got back with angry epithets at the L.A. police department, which was mostly white. Instead he kept muttering in front of TV cameras these words: Can we get along? when he talked about how the white cops tortured him. King was black.

This writer is not black or white. I am of Chinese descent. But it doesn’t make me immune from being racially biased. Throughout the last forty-some years in this adopted country, I had to, and still do, continuously remind myself not to fall into the dirty rut of racial avoidance or worse, racial hatred. My own experience teaches me that people are different individually but the same as a group. Over the years I have worked under two black Americans. They were both kind and excellent men. I also had a few black co-workers – out of many — whom I didn’t care to make friends with. I have worked with many white people. Some were nice; some were not. I’ve worked with some Chinese. Some were decent; some were not. I have worked with other ethnicities. The statistics were similar: some were pleasant while some others were not.

That is the reason I recommended this little gem of a movie to you. Let’s watch it and let’s learn to get along better with each other.

*** The End ***

(The dissemination of this writing is for non-commercial enjoyment only. The author reserves the copyright for himself)

Note: Click here to continue browsing other writings and works of Camillus Chan within this site